The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  The attempt to discover which works of art and literature would have been intelligible to which groups, and the habits of mind with which they were interpreted, leads on to a wider question, that of the worldviews of Renaissance Italians. It will be investigated in the next chapter.

  1 For the debate, see Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, ch. 1; Gilbert, ‘On subject and not-subject’; Gombrich, Symbolic Images, pp. 1–25; Settis, ‘Iconography of Italian art’; Hope, ‘Artists, patrons and advisers’; and Bryson, Word and Image, ch. 1.

  2 Errera, Répertoire des peintures datées.

  3 Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, p. 116.

  4 The evidence may be summarized in the following table (the figures are percentages):

  Mary Christ Saints

  1420 79 52 18 30

  1480 1539 53 26 20

  On thirteenth-century France, Mâle, L’art religieux du 13e siècle.

  5 Burke, Historical Anthropology, ch. 5.

  6 Rice, St Jerome.

  7 According to the sample in Errera, Répertoire des peintures datées, the proportion of secular paintings rose from 5 per cent in the 1480s to 22 per cent in the 1530s.

  8 Bottari, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, vol. 3, p. 1360. Cf. Castelnuovo, ‘Il significato del ritratto pittorico’; Burke, Historical Anthropology, ch. 11; Burke, ‘The Renaissance, individualism and the portrait’.

  9 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 33–67.

  10 Williamson, Anonimo.

  11 Quoted in Gilbert, ‘On subject and not-subject’, p. 204.

  12 Gombrich, Norm and Form, pp. 107–21; Turner, Vision of Landscape.

  13 Caplan, ‘Four senses’; Auerbach, ‘Figura’.

  14 Trinkaus, In our Image, pp. 689–721.

  15 Landino’s commentary on Horace’s Art of Poetry, quoted in Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, p. 80.

  16 Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, vol. 1, p. 319; Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 86.

  17 Vasari, Literarische Nachlass, pp. 17ff.

  18 Gombrich, Symbolic Images, pp. 31–81; cf. Dempsey, ‘Mercurius Ver’ and Portrayal of Love.

  19 Ettlinger and Ettlinger, Botticelli, pp. 130ff.; cf. Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 20–5.

  20 On Medici symbolism in art, Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny. A cautionary note was sounded in some reviews of this monograph.

  21 D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni, esp. p. 257.

  22 Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, p. 145.

  23 Ginzburg, Enigma of Piero, ch. 2.

  24 Harprath, Papst Paul III

  25 Jones and Penny, Raphael, pp. 117ff., 150ff.; cf. Harprath, Papst Paul III.

  26 Shearman, ‘Collections of the younger branch of the Medici’; Smith, ‘On the original location’. Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest.

  Part III

  THE WIDER SOCIETY

  8

  WORLDVIEWS:

  SOME DOMINANT TRAITS

  A social group, large or small, tends to share certain attitudes – views of God and the cosmos, of nature and human nature, of life and death, space and time, the good and the beautiful. These attitudes may be conscious or unconscious. In a period of controversy people may be extremely conscious of their attitudes to religion or the state, while remaining virtually unaware that they hold a particular conception of space or time, reason or necessity.

  It is not easy to write the history of these attitudes. Historians have stalked their quarry from different directions. One group, the Marxists, have concerned themselves with ‘ideologies’. Aware of the need to explain as well as to describe ideas, they have sometimes ended by reducing them to weapons in the class struggle.1 Another group, the French historians of ‘collective mentalities’, study assumptions and feelings as well as conscious thoughts, but find it difficult to decide where one mentality ends and another begins.2 In this chapter I shall employ the somewhat more neutral term of ‘worldview’, while attempting to include what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ and to avoid the risk inherent in this third approach of providing description without analysis, or remaining at the level of consciously formulated opinions.3

  In this chapter an attempt is made to move from the immediate environment of the art and literature of the Renaissance to the study of the surrounding society. The assumption behind it is that the relation between art and society is not direct but mediated through worldviews. More precisely, there are two assumptions behind the chapter, two hypotheses which need to be tested: in the first place, that worldviews exist – in other words, that particular attitudes are associated with particular times, places and social groups, so that it is not misleading to refer, for example, to ‘Renaissance attitudes’, ‘Florentine attitudes’ or ‘clerical attitudes’; in the second place, that these worldviews find their most elaborate expression in art and literature.

  These hypotheses are not easy to verify. The sources, which are predominantly literary, are richer for the sixteenth century than for the fifteenth, much richer for Tuscany than for other regions, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the views they express are those of males of what we would call the upper or upper-middle class (the social structure of the period will be discussed in chapter 9 below). As in the case of the study of aesthetic taste, it pays to look not only at relatively formal literary works but also at documents produced in the course of daily life, such as official reports and private letters. To uncover unconscious attitudes the historian has to attempt to read between the lines, using changes in the frequency of certain keywords as evidence of a shift in values.4

  This account will begin with a summary of some typical views of the cosmos, society, and human nature (needless to say, it will be extremely selective). It will end with an attempt to examine general features of the belief system and signs of change. The quotations will usually come from well-known writers of the period, but the passages have been chosen to illustrate attitudes they shared with their contemporaries.

  VIEWS OF THE COSMOS

  Views of time and space are particularly revealing of the dominant attitudes of a particular culture, precisely because they are rarely conscious and because they are expressed in practice more often than in texts. In his famous study of the religion of Rabelais, the French historian Lucien Febvre emphasized the vague, task-orientated conceptions of time and space in sixteenth-century France, such as the habit of counting in ‘Aves’ – in other words, the amount of time it takes to say a ‘Hail Mary’. Febvre made the French appear, in these respects at least, almost as exotic as the Nuer of the Sudan, whose attitudes to space and time were described at much the same time in an equally classic work by the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.5

  Whatever may have been the assumptions of the Italian peasants of this period, the evidence from the towns suggests that much more precise attitudes to time were widespread, like the mechanical clocks which both expressed and encouraged these new attitudes. From the late fourteenth century, mechanical clocks came into use; a famous one was constructed at Padua to the design of Giovanni Dondi, a physician–astronomer who was a friend of Petrarch, and completed in 1364. About 1450, a clock was made for the town hall at Bologna; in 1478, one for the Castello Sforzesco in Milan; in 1499, one for Piazza San Marco in Venice; and so on. By the late fifteenth century, portable clocks were coming in. In Filarete’s utopia, the schools for boys and girls had an alarm clock (sveg-liatoio) in each dormitory. This idea at least was not purely utopian, for in Milan in 1463 the astrologer Giacomo da Piacenza had an alarm clock by his bed.6

  There is an obvious parallel between the new conception of time and the new conception of space; both came to be seen as precisely measurable. Mechanical clocks and pictorial perspective were developed in the same culture, and Brunelleschi was interested in both. The paintings of Uccello and Piero della Francesca (who wrote a treatise on mathematics) are the creations of men interested in precise measurement working for a public with similar interests. F
ifteenth-century narrative paintings are located in a more precise space and time than their medieval analogues.7

  Changing views of time and space seem to have coexisted with a traditional view of the cosmos. This view, memorably expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was shared in essentials by his sixteenth-century commentators, who drew on the same classical tradition, especially the writings of two Greeks, the astronomer–geographer Ptolemy and the philosopher Aristotle. According to this tradition, the fundamental distinction was that between Heaven and Earth.

  ‘Heaven’ should really be in the plural. In the centre of the universe was the Earth, surrounded by seven ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’, in each of which moved a planet: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were each moved by an ‘intelligence’, a celestial driver often equated with the appropriate classical god or goddess. This fusion of planets and deities had permitted the survival of the pagan gods into the Middle Ages.8

  The importance of the planets resided in their ‘influences’. As they sang in a Carnival song by Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘from us come all good and evil things’. Different professions, psychological types, parts of the body and even days of the week were influenced by different planets (Sunday by the Sun, Monday by the Moon, and so on). Vasari offered an astrological explanation of artistic creativity in his life of Leonardo, remarking that ‘The greatest gifts may be seen raining on human bodies from celestial influences.’ To explain the past or discover what the future has in store, it was normal to consult specialists who calculated the configuration of the heavens at a particular time. The humanist physician Girolamo Fracastoro gave an account of the outbreak of syphilis in Europe in terms of a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Cancer. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino believed that the ‘spirit’ of each planet could be captured by means of appropriate music or voices (‘martial’ voices for Mars, and so on) and by making an appropriate ‘talisman’ (an image engraved on a precious stone under a favourable constellation).9

  These beliefs had considerable ‘influence’ on the arts. Aby Warburg’s iconographical analysis of frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara showed that they represented the signs of the zodiac and their divisions into 36 ‘decans’.10 The Florentine patrician Filippo Strozzi consulted ‘a man learned in astrology’, just as the treatises of Alberti and Filarete recommended, to ensure a good constellation before having the foundations of the Palazzo Strozzi laid on 6 August 1489.11 When a Florentine committee was discussing where to place Michelangelo’s David, one speaker suggested that it should replace Donatello’s Judith, which was ‘erected under an evil star’.12 Raphael’s patron, the papal banker Agostino Chigi, was interested in astrology, and some of the paintings he commissioned refer to his horoscope.13

  Astrology was permitted by the Church; it was not considered incompatible with Christianity. As Lorenzo de’Medici put it, ‘Jupiter is a planet which moves only its own sphere, but there is a higher power which moves Jupiter.’14 The twelve signs of the zodiac were associated with the twelve apostles. A number of popes took an interest in the stars. Paul III, for example, summoned to Rome the astrologer who had predicted his election (Luca Gaurico, whose brother Pomponio’s treatise on sculpture has already been quoted) and gave him a bishopric. Yet there was a sense in which theology and astrology formed two systems which in practice competed with each other. The saints presided over certain days; so did the planets. People might take their problems to a priest or to an astrologer. It was largely on religious grounds that some leading figures of the period rejected astrology, notably Pico della Mirandola (who declared that ‘astrology offers no help in discovering what a man should do and what avoid’) and Fra Girolamo Savonarola.15

  Above the seven heavens and beyond the sphere of the ‘fixed stars’, God was to be found. In the writing of the period, God was indeed almost everywhere. Even commercial documents might begin with the monogram YHS, standing for ‘Jesus the Saviour of Mankind’ (Jesus Hominum Salvator). When disaster struck, it was commonly interpreted as a sign of God’s anger. ‘It pleased God to chastise us’ is how the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci comments on the plague. When the French invasion of 1494 left Florence virtually unharmed, Landucci wrote that ‘God never removed His hand from off our head.’ The name of God constantly recurs in private letters, such as those of the Florentine lady Alessandra Macinghi degli Strozzi: ‘Please God free everything from this plague … it is necessary to accept with patience whatever God wants … God give them a safe journey’, and so on. Even Machiavelli ends a letter to his family ‘Christ keep you all.’16 Of all the ways in which Christians have imagined God, two seem particularly characteristic of the period. The emphasis on the sweetness of God and the ‘pathetic tenderness’ of attitudes to Christ, which the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted in France and the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, can be found in Italy as well.17 Savonarola, for example, addresses Christ with endearments such as ‘my dear Lord’ (signor mio caro), or even ‘sweet spouse’ (dolce sposo). Christocentric devotion seems to have been spread by the friars, not only the Dominican Savonarola but the Franciscans Bernardino da Siena, who encouraged the cult of the name of Jesus, and Bernardino da Feltre, who was responsible for the foundation of a number of fraternities dedicated to Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. The Meditations on the Passion attributed to the Franciscan saint Bonaventura was something of a best-seller in fifteenth-century Italy, with at least twenty-six editions, as was the Imitation of Christ, a devotional text from the fourteenth-century Netherlands, with nine editions.18

  This image of a sweet and human Saviour coexisted with a more detached view of God as the creator of the universe, its ‘most beautiful architect’ (bellissimo architetto), as Lorenzo de’Medici once called him.19 He was also imagined, in this trade-oriented urban society, as the head of the firm. Leonardo da Vinci addressed God as you who ‘sell us every good thing for the price of labour’. Giannozzo Manetti, a Florentine merchant and scholar, liked to compare God to ‘the master of a business who gives money to his treasurer and requires him to render an account as to how it may have been spent’.20 He transposed the Gospel parable of the talents from its original setting, that of a landlord and his steward, to a more commercial environment. Thus Renaissance Italians projected their own concerns on to the supernatural world.

  The lower, ‘sublunary’ world on which man lived was believed to be composed of four elements – earth, water, air and fire – as illustrated in Vasari’s Room of the Elements in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The elements were themselves composed of the four ‘contraries’ – hot, cold, moist and dry.

  There were also four levels of earthly existence – human, animal, vegetable and mineral. This is what has been called the ‘great chain of being’.21 The ‘ladder’ of being might be a better term because it makes the underlying hierarchy more evident. Stones were at the bottom of the ladder because they lacked souls. Then came plants, which had what Aristotle called ‘vegetative souls’, animals, which had ‘sensitive souls’ (that is, the capacity to receive sensations) and, at the top, humans, with ‘intellectual souls’ (in other words, the power of understanding). Animals, vegetables and minerals were arranged in hierarchies; the precious stones were higher than the semi-precious ones, the lion was regarded as the king of beasts, and so on.

  More difficult to place on the ladder are the nymphs who wander or flee through the poems of the period; or the wood spirits who lived in lonely places and would eat boys (as the grandmother of the poet Poliziano used to tell him when he was small); or the ‘demons’ who lived midway between the Earth and the Moon and could be contacted by magical means (Ficino was one of those who tried). The philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi doubted whether demons existed at all.22 It seems, however, that he was expressing a minority view. When reading the poems of the period or looking at Botticelli’s Primavera, it is worth bearing in mind that the supernatural figures represente
d in them were viewed as part of the population of the universe and not as mere figments of the artist’s imagination.

  The status of another earthly power is even more doubtful: Fortune.23 Two common images of Fortune associated it, or rather her, with the winds and with a wheel. The wind image seems to be distinctively Italian. The phrase ‘fortune of the sea’ (fortuna di mare) meant a tempest, a vivid example of a change in affairs which is both sudden and uncontrollable. The Rucellai family, Florentine patricians, used the device of a sail, still to be seen on the façade of their church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence; here the wind represents fortune and the sail the power of the individual to adapt to circumstances and to manage them.24

  The second image of fortune was the well-known classical one of the goddess with a forelock which must be seized quickly, because she is bald behind. In the twenty-fifth chapter of his Prince, Machiavelli recommended impetuosity on the grounds that fortune is a woman, ‘and to keep her under it is necessary to strike her and beat her’ (è necessario volendola tenere sotto, batterla e urtarla), while his friend the historian Francesco Guicciardini suggested that it is dangerous to try to make conspiracies foolproof because ‘Fortune, who plays such a large part in all matters, becomes angry with those who try to limit her dominion.’ It is difficult for a modern reader to tell in these instances whether the goddess has been introduced simply to make more memorable conclusions arrived at by other means, or whether she has taken over the argument; whether she is a literary device, or a serious (or at any rate a half-serious) way of describing whatever lies outside human control.25