by Peter Burke
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
For Maria Lúcia
PETER BURKE
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Culture and Society in Italy
Third Edition
polity
Copyright © Peter Burke 1986, 1999, 2014
First edition 1972 by Batsford, UK. Scribner, US. Paperback edition published by Collins Fontana 1974. Revised edition first published 1987 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reprinted in 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994
Revised second edition first published 1999.
Reprinted in 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010.
This revised third edition first published 2014.
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ISBN 978-0-7456-7967-9
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Image nos. 1–5, 8, 11–12, 16–22, 24–6, 29–32, 34–6 Wikimedia Commons; 6–7 by permission of Cambridge University Library; 9, Musei Vaticani; 10, Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano; 13, Photgraph by James Austin; 14, St Bernard preaching, by Francesco di Giorgio e di Lorenzo known as the Elder (Vecchietta) (ca 1412–1480), Detail / De Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library; 15, Galleria Estense, Modena; 23, Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Paris (Photographie Bulloz); 27, Two studies of a man suspended by his left leg (red chalk on cream paper), Sarto, Andrea del (1486–1530) / Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK / © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth / Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / The Bridgeman Art Library; 28 & 33, Getty Images.
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CONTENTS
Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
The Theme
The Approach
A Revised Edition
PART I THE PROBLEM
1 THE ARTS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
2 THE HISTORIANS: THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
PART II THE ARTS IN THEIR MILIEU
3 ARTISTS AND WRITERS
Recruitment
Training
The Organization of the Arts
The Status of the Arts
Artists as Social Deviants
4 PATRONS AND CLIENTS
Who are the Patrons?
Patrons v. Artists
Architecture, Music and Literature
The Rise of the Market
5 THE USES OF WORKS OF ART
Magic and Religion
Politics
The Private Sphere
Art for Pleasure
6 TASTE
The Visual Arts
Music
Literature
Varieties of Taste
7 ICONOGRAPHY
PART III THE WIDER SOCIETY
8 WORLDVIEWS: SOME DOMINANT TRAITS
Views of the Cosmos
Views of Society
Views of Man
Towards the Mechanization of the World Picture
9 THE SOCIAL FRAMEWORK
Religious Organization
Political Organization
The Social Structure
The Economy
10 CULTURAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Generations
Structural Changes
11 COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS
The Netherlands
Japan
APPENDIX: THE CREATIVE ELITE
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Illustrations
1.1 Carlo Crivelli: The Annunciation with Saint Emidius, 1486
1.2 Domenico Ghirlandaio: Adoration of the Shepherds, Santa Trinità, Florence
1.3 The Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo
2.1 Gentile da Fabriano: Adoration of the Shepherds (detail), Galleria Uffizi, Florence
3.1 A bust of Filippo Brunelleschi, Florence Cathedral
3.2 The training of a humanist at university, from C. Landino: Formulario di lettere e di orationi volgari con la preposta, Florence
3.3 Woodcut of Adriaan Willaert, from Musica Nova, 1559
3.4 Agostino Veneziano’s engraving of Baccio Bandinelli’s ‘Academy’ in Rome
3.5 Giovanni de Udine: Stucco relief showing Raphael’s workshop (detail), in the Vatican Loggia
3.6 The architect Filarete leading his apprentices, from the doors of St Peter’s, Rome
3.7 Titian: Portrait of Giulio Romano
3.8 Palma Vecchio: Portrait of a Poet
3.9 Giulio Romano: The Palazzo del Te, Mantua, detail of a frieze with slipped triglyphs
4.1 Lorenzo Vecchietta: San Bernadino da Siena (detail)
4.2 Battista Dossi: Madonna with Saints and the Confraternity
4.3 Andrea del Castagno: The Youthful David, tempera on leather mounted on wood, c.1450
4.4 Leonardo da Vinci: Isabella d’Este
4.5 Agnolo Bronzino: Ugolino Martelli
4.6 Pietro Perugino: Battle of Love and Chastity
4.7 Raphael: Leo X
4.8 Titian: Pietro Aretino
5.1 Sandro Botticelli: The Punishment of Korah, Dathan and Abiron, Sistine Chapel, Vatican
5.2 School of Piero della Francesca: Portrait of Alfonso of Aragon
5.3 Donatello: Judith and Holofernes
5.4 Benvenuto Cellini: Cosimo I de’Medici
5.5 Massaccio: The Tribute Money (detail)
5.6 Andrea del Sarto: Two Men Suspended by their Feet (detail), red chalk on cream paper
5.7 Vittore Carpaccio: The Reception of the English Ambassadors and St Ursula Talking to her Father
6.1 Interior of the Pazzi Chapel in Florence
6.2 Raphael: Marriage of the Virgin
6.3 The interior of San Francesco della Vigna, Venice
7.1 Leonardo da Vinci: The Virgin, Child and Saint Anne
7.2 Giorgio Vasari: Portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici
8.1 Dosso Dossi: Circe
8.2 Pinturicchio: Self-Portrait (detail from The Annunciation)
INTRODUCTION
THE THEME
This book is a history of the culture of the Italian Renaissance in a period (roughly 1400–1550) in which contemporaries claimed that art and literature was ‘reborn’. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Renaissance movement was a systematic attempt to go forward by going back – in other words, to break with medieval tradition by following an older model, that of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Hundreds if not thousands of studies have been devoted to this topic. The most famous of them remains The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Writing over a hundred and fifty years ago, Burckhardt viewed the Renaissance as a modern culture created by a modern society. Today, it looks rather more archaic. This shift in attitude is due in part to scholarly research on continuities between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but even more to changes in conceptions of the ‘modern’. Since 1860 the classical tradition has withered away, the tradition of represen
tational art has been broken, and rural societies have become urban and industrial (if not post-industrial) on a scale that dwarfs fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cities and their handicrafts. Renaissance Italy now looks ‘underdeveloped’, in the sense that the majority of the population worked on the land, while many were illiterate and all of them were dependent on animate sources of power, especially horses and oxen. This perspective makes the many cultural innovations of the period even more remarkable than they seemed in Burckhardt’s time. To understand and explain these innovations, which came in the course of time to constitute a new tradition, is the aim of this book.
The perspective
The aim of the present study is to write not only a cultural history but also a social history of the Renaissance movement, and in particular to examine the relation between culture and society.1 Neither of the key terms is easy to define. By ‘culture’ I mean essentially attitudes and values and their expressions and embodiments in artefacts (including texts) and practices (including performances). Culture is the realm of the imaginary and the symbolic, not distinct from everyday life but underlying it. As for ‘society’, the term is shorthand for economic, social and political structures, all of which reveal themselves in the social relationships characteristic of a particular place and time.
The central argument of this book is that we cannot understand the culture of the Italians in this period if we look only at the conscious intentions of the individuals who produced the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and philosophy that we continue to admire today. Understanding these individual intentions, so far as this remains possible after five hundred years – hampered as we now are not only by gaps in the evidence but also by the differences between our categories, assumptions and values and theirs – is certainly necessary, but it is not sufficient for the understanding of the movement in which these individuals participated.
There are several different reasons why this approach is not sufficient in itself. In the first place, the power of the patron limited the freedom of artists and writers. Although Botticelli, for instance, expressed his individuality so clearly in paint that it is not difficult to recognize certain works five hundred years later as by his hand, he was not an entirely free agent. As we shall see (p. 117), it is likely that the conception or ‘programme’ for the Primavera, for example, was not the work of the artist himself. In the case of architects in particular, the constraints of space and money as well as the wishes of the patron were (and remain) apparent. Renaissance artists generally did more or less what they were told. The constraints on them are part of their history.
Yet it would be as much a caricature to portray a Botticelli forced to produce the Primavera against his will as it would be to describe the idea of its coming quite spontaneously into his head one morning. Romantic notions of the spontaneous expression of individuality were not available to him. The role of painter that he played was the one defined by (or, at any rate, in) his own culture. Even outstanding individuals such as Leonardo and Michelangelo were submerged in their culture and shared, for the most part at least, the assumptions or mentalities or worldviews current in their environment (a topic discussed in detail in chapter 8). Even when individuals succeeded, as did Machiavelli and Michelangelo for example, in modifying the political or the artistic language of their time, their success was due not only to their own gifts but also to the needs of their contemporaries, who accepted innovations only when they felt them to be appropriate. As the French historian Lucien Febvre used to say, it is not possible to think all thoughts at all times.
Febvre’s colleague Fernand Braudel went even further and asserted that we are all ‘imprisoned’ by our mentalities. However, there are societies, and Renaissance Italy was one of them, where alternative definitions of the artist’s role – and of much else – are available. This pluralism may well have been a precondition for the other achievements of the period. In any case, Braudel’s metaphor of a prison is misleading. Without social experiences and cultural traditions (most obviously, languages) it would be impossible to think or imagine anything at all.
The problem for us in the twenty-first century is that the Renaissance has become, almost as much as the Middle Ages, an alien or, at the least, a ‘half-alien’ culture.2 The artists and writers studied in this book are becoming increasingly remote from us – or we from them. The Renaissance used to be studied as part of a ‘grand narrative’ of the rise of modern Western civilization, a triumphalist and elitist story that implicitly denigrated the achievements of other social groups and other cultures.3 Now that this narrative is largely rejected, along with the courses on ‘Western Civilization’ that were once customary in North American universities, the importance of studying the Renaissance has been called into question. On the other hand, Italian high culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has lost little if any of its appeal. Indeed, that appeal now extends well beyond Europe and the Americas. The Birth of Venus, the Mona Lisa and the frescoes by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel have never been so well known or so widely admired as they are in our age of global tourism and of the proliferation of images on television and the Internet.
What do these changes imply? The conclusion that virtually suggests itself at this point is that the Italian Renaissance should be studied from a perspective somewhat different from Burckhardt’s. It should be reframed – in other words, detached from the idea of modernity – and studied in a ‘decentred’ fashion.4 The rise of new forms of culture need not be presented in terms of progress, as if building in the ancient Roman style, for example, was obviously superior to building in the Gothic or in the traditional Chinese manner. Such assumptions are unnecessary to the understanding of the movement or the appreciation of individual or group achievements in the period.
Another way of decentring the Renaissance might be to note that the movement coexisted and interacted with other movements and other cultures in a process of unending exchange (below, p. 00).
THE APPROACH
The focus of this book is on a movement rather than the individuals who took part in it, although some of them, Michelangelo for example, never let us forget their individuality. Its concern will be not only with what linguists call the ‘message’, a particular act of communication (a poem, a building, a painting or a madrigal) but also with the ‘code’, the conventions or cultural rules that limit what can be said – but without which no message is possible. The central theme of this study is the break with one code, described at the time as ‘barbaric’, as ‘Gothic’ or as part of the ‘Middle Ages’ (a phrase coined by Renaissance humanists), and its replacement by another code, modelled more closely on ancient Greece and Rome but containing many new elements as well. The Florentines in particular developed in this period what may be called, with an element of paradox, a tradition of innovation.
The history of the arts at this time forms part of the general history of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the history not only of changing attitudes and values but also, as we shall see, of economic booms and slumps, of political crises and changes in the balance of power, as well as the less dramatic and more gradual transformations of the social structure that will be discussed in detail in chapter 9 below. That the arts are related to the history of their time is obvious enough. The problem lies in specifying that relationship. My aim in this book is to avoid the weaknesses of two earlier approaches to the Renaissance, discussed in more detail in chapter 2. The first is Geistesgeschichte and the second is historical materialism, otherwise known as Marxism.
Geistesgeschichte, literally the ‘history of spirit’, was an approach to history that identified a ‘spirit of the age’ (Zeitgeist) that expressed itself in every form of activity, including the arts and above all philosophy. Historians of this persuasion, among them Jacob Burckhardt, still the greatest historian of the Renaissance, and the Dutchman Johan Huizinga, begin with ideas rather than with everyday life, stress consensus at the exp
ense of cultural and social conflict, and assume rather vague connections between different activities. Historical materialists, on the other hand, begin with their feet on the ground of everyday life, stress conflict at the expense of consensus, and tend to assume that culture, an expression of what they call ‘ideology’, is determined, directly or indirectly, by the economic and social ‘base’.
Despite my admiration on one side for Burckhardt and Huizinga and on the other for certain Marxist scholars, from Walter Benjamin to Raymond Williams (whose Culture and Society inspired the original title of this study), this book attempts a third approach. It takes a middle position between Marxism and Geistesgeschichte in the sense that it is concerned with social influences on the arts, while viewing culture as much more than the expression of economic and social trends. This middle position is not unlike that of members of the French ‘Annales School’, notably Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. My concern with the history of mentalities, in chapter 8, and with comparative history, in chapter 11, owes a good deal to their example. The discussion of the Netherlands, for instance, is an example of what Bloch called comparisons between neighbours, while that of culture and society in Japan illustrates his idea of distant comparisons.