by Peter Burke
With this emphasis on reason, thrift (masserizia) and calculation went the regular use of such words as ‘prudent’ (prudente), ‘carefully’ (pensatamente) and ‘to foresee’ (antevedere). The reasonable is often identified with the useful, and a utilitarian approach is characteristic of a number of writers in this period. In Valla’s dialogue On Pleasure, for example, one of the speakers, the humanist Panormita, defends an ethic of utility (utilitas). All action – writes this fifteenth-century Jeremy Bentham – is based on calculations of pain and pleasure. Panormita may not represent the author’s point of view. What is relevant here, however, is what was thinkable in the period rather than who exactly thought it. This emphasis on the useful can be found again and again in texts of the period, from Alberti’s book on the family to Machiavelli’s Prince, with its references to the ‘utility of the subjects’ (utilità de’sudditi), and the need to make ‘good use’ of liberality, compassion and even cruelty. Again, Filarete created in his ideal city of Sforzinda a utilitarian utopia that Bentham would have appreciated, in which the death penalty has been abolished because criminals are more useful to the community if they do hard labour for life, in conditions exactly harsh enough for this punishment to act as an adequate deterrent.84
Calculation affected human relationships. The account-book view of man is particularly clear in the reflections of Guicciardini. He advised his family:
Be careful not to do anyone the sort of favour that cannot be done without at the same time displeasing others. For injured men do not forget offences; in fact, they exaggerate them. Whereas the favoured party will either forget or will deem the favour smaller than it was. Therefore, other things being equal, you lose a great deal more than you gain.85
Italians (adult males of the upper classes, at any rate) admitted a concern (unusual for other parts of Europe in the period, whatever may be true of the ‘age of capitalism’) with controlling themselves and manipulating others. In Alberti’s dialogue on the family, the humanist Lionardo suggests that it is good ‘to rule and control the passions of the soul’, while Guicciardini declared that there is greater pleasure in controlling one’s desires (tenersi le voglie oneste) than in satisfying them. If self-control is civilization, as the sociologist Norbert Elias suggests in his famous book The Civilizing Process, then even without their art and literature the Italians of the Renaissance would still have a good claim to be described as the most civilized people in Europe.86
TOWARDS THE MECHANIZATION OF THE WORLD PICTURE
It is time to end this necessarily incomplete catalogue of the beliefs of Renaissance Italians and to try to see their worldview as a whole. One striking feature of this view is the coexistence of many traditional attitudes with others which would seem to be incompatible with them, a point that was famously made by Aby Warburg in his discussion of the last will and testament of the Florentine merchant Francesco Sassetti.87
Generally speaking, Renaissance Italians, including the elites who dominate this book, lived in a mental universe which, like that of their medieval ancestors, was animate rather than mechanical, moralized rather than neutral, and organized in terms of correspondences rather than causes.
A common phrase of the period was that the world is ‘an animal’. Leonardo developed this idea in a traditional way when he wrote: ‘We can say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the land, its bones are the structure of the rocks … its blood is the pools of water … its breathing and its pulses are the ebb and flow of the sea.’88 The operations of the universe were personified. Dante’s phrase about ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ was still taken literally. Magnetism was described in similar terms. In the Dialogues on Love (1535) by the Jewish physician Leone Ebreo, a work in the neo-Platonic tradition of Ficino, one speaker explains that ‘the magnet is loved so greatly by the iron, that notwithstanding the size and weight of the iron, it moves and goes to find it.’89 The discussions of the ‘body politic’ (above, p. 000) fit into this general picture. ‘Every republic is like a natural body’, as the Florentine theorist Donato Giannotti put it. Writers on architecture draw similar analogies between buildings and animate beings, analogies that are now generally misread as mere metaphors. Alberti wrote that a building is ‘like an animal’, and Filarete that ‘A building … wants to be nourished and looked after, and through lack of this it sickens and dies like a man.’ Michelangelo went so far as to say that whoever ‘is not a good master of the figure and likewise of anatomy’ cannot understand anything of architecture because the different parts of a building ‘derive from human members’.90 Not even Frank Lloyd Wright in the twentieth century could match this organic theory of architecture.
The universe was ‘moralized’ in the sense that its different characteristics were not treated as neutral in the manner of modern scientists. Warmth, for example, was considered to be better in itself than cold, because the warm is ‘active and productive’. It was better to be unchangeable (like the heavens) than mutable (like the earth); better to be at rest than to move; better to be a tree than a stone. Another way of making some of these points is to say that the universe was seen to be organized in a hierarchical manner, thus resembling (and also justifying or ‘legitimating’) the social structure. Filarete compared three social groups – the nobles, the citizens and the peasants – to three kinds of stone – precious, semi-precious and common. In this hierarchical universe it is hardly surprising to find that genres of writing and painting were also graded, with epics and ‘histories’ at the top and comedies and landscapes towards the bottom. However, more than hierarchy was involved on occasion. ‘Prodigies’ or ‘monsters’ – in other words, extraordinary phenomena – from the birth of deformed children to the appearance of comets in the sky, were interpreted as ‘portents’, as signs of coming disaster.91
The different parts of the universe were related to one another not so much causally, as in the modern world picture, as symbolically, according to what were called ‘correspondences’. The most famous of these correspondences was between the ‘macrocosm’, the universe in general, and the ‘microcosm’, the little world of man. Astrological medicine depended on these correspondences, between the right eye and the Sun, the left eye and the Moon, and so on. Numerology played a great part here. The fact that there were seven planets, seven metals and seven days of the week was taken to prove correspondences between them. This elaborate system of correspondences had great advantages for artists and writers. It meant that images and symbols were not ‘mere’ images and symbols but expressions of the language of the universe and of God its creator.
Historical events or individuals might also correspond to one another, since the historical process was often believed to move in cycles rather than to ‘progress’ steadily in one direction. Charles VIII of France was viewed by Savonarola as a ‘Second Charlemagne’ and as a ‘New Cyrus’ – more than the equivalent, almost the reincarnation, of the great ruler of Persia.92 The emperor Charles V was also hailed as the ‘Second Charlemagne’. The Florentine poets who wrote of the return of the golden age under Medici rule may well have been doing something more than turn a decoratively flattering or flatteringly decorative phrase. The idea of the Renaissance itself depends on the assumption that history moves in cycles and employs the organic language of ‘birth’.
This ‘organic mentality’, as we may call it, so pervasive was it, met a direct challenge only in the seventeenth century from Descartes, Galileo, Newton and other ‘natural philosophers’. The organic model of the cosmos remained dominant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All the same, a few individuals, at least on occasion, did make use of an alternative model – the mechanical one – which is hardly surprising in a culture which produced engineers such as Mariano Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and, of course, Leonardo.93 Giovanni Fontana, who wrote on water-clocks, among other subjects, once referred to the universe as this ‘noble clock’, an image that was to become commonplace in the s
eventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Again, Leonardo da Vinci, whose comparison of the microscosm and the macrocosm has already been quoted, makes regular use of the mechanical model. He described the tendons of the human body as ‘mechanical instruments’ and the heart too as a ‘marvellous instrument’. He also wrote that ‘the bird is an instrument operating by mathematical law’, a principle underlying his attempts to construct flying-machines.94 Machiavelli and Guicciardini saw politics in terms of the balance of power. In the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli refers to the time when Italy was ‘in a way in equilibrium’ (in un certo modo bilanciata), while Guicciardini makes the same point at the beginning of his History of Italy, observing that, at the death of Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘Italian affairs were in a sort of equilibrium’ (le cose d’Italia in modo bilanciate si mantenessino). The widespread concern with the precise measurement of time and space, discussed earlier in this chapter, fits in better with this mechanical worldview than with the traditional organic one. The mechanization of the world picture was really the work of the seventeenth century, but in Italy, at least, the process had begun.95
There would seem to be a case for talking about the pluralism of worldviews in Renaissance Italy, a pluralism which may well have been a stimulus to intellectual innovation. Such a coexistence of competing views naturally raises the question of their association with different social groups. The mechanical world picture has sometimes been described as ‘bourgeois’.96 Was it in fact associated with the bourgeoisie? It will be easier to answer this question after discussing both what the bourgeoisie were and the general shape of the social structure in Renaissance Italy. This is the task of the following chapter.
1 Famous examples that avoid reductionism include Borkenau, Übergang, and Mannheim, Essays.
2 Burke, ‘Strengths and weaknesses’. Gilbert, ‘Florentine political assumptions’, is close to the French style.
3 Williams, Long Revolution, pp. 64–88. The original models for this chapter were Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, and Lewis, Discarded Image, modified so as to allow analysis of the kind practised by historians of mentalities and ideologies. Cf. O’Kelly, Renaissance Image of Man.
4 A pioneer in the study of what he called ‘fashion words’ (Modewörter) was Weise (‘Maniera und Pellegrino’ and L’ideale eroico del Rinascimento). Cf. Williams, Keywords.
5 Febvre, Problem of Unbelief; Evans-Pritchard, Nuer, ch. 3. The studies were independent, but both men owed a considerable debt to the ideas of Emile Durkheim.
6 Cipolla, Clocks and Culture; Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur, pp. 151ff.; Landes, Revolution in Time, pp. 53ff.
7 On Piero and the gauging of barrels, Baxandall, Painting and Experience, pp. 86ff. On space–time in narrative painting, see Francastel, ‘Valeurs socio-psychologiques de l’espace–temps’.
8 Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods.
9 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, p. 17.
10 Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 563–92.
11 Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, pp. 84–5.
12 Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, p. 456; Klein and Zerner, Italian Art, p. 41.
13 Saxl, Fede astrologica.
14 D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni, p. 264.
15 Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance.
16 Strozzi, Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina; Machiavelli, letter of 11 April 1527.
17 Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, ch. 14.
18 Schutte, ‘Printing, piety and the people in Italy’, pp. 18–19.
19 D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni, p. 267.
20 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, p. 375.
21 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being.
22 On demons, Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, pp. 45ff., and Clark, Thinking with Demons.
23 Doren, Fortuna; González García, Diosa fortuna.
24 Gilbert, ‘Bernardo Rucellai’.
25 Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, no. 20. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, has devoted an entire monograph to Machiavelli’s phrase.
26 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 334.
27 Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, pp. 35ff. Cf. Thorndike, History of Magic, vol. 4.
28 Fagioli Dell’Arco, Parmigianino.
29 Cassirer et al., Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 246ff.
30 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, ch. 1, develops this argument in the case of England. On the magical use of images, see above, pp. 133–4.
31 Burke, ‘Gianfrancesco Pico’.
32 Fifteenth-century Italian treatises on witchcraft are conveniently collected in Hansen, Quellen, pp. 17ff. Bonomo, Caccia alle streghe, although outdated in some respects, remains a useful survey of witch-hunting in Italy.
33 So said a woman at a trial at Modena in 1499, quoted in Ginzburg, Night Battles, ch. 3. The Latin is of course that of the court, not the speaker.
34 Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, p. 116.
35 Ginzburg, ‘Stregoneria e pietà popolare’.
36 Hansen, Quellen, pp. 310ff.
37 Cardano, De rerum varietate, p. 567.
38 Pomponazzi, De incantationibus.
39 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, and Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1.
40 Castiglione, Cortegiano, bk 4, ch. 19. Cf. Archambault, ‘Analogy of the body’.
41 Alberti, I libri della famiglia, bk 3, p. 221.
42 D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni, p. 244. Cf. Hexter, Vision of Politics, ch. 3; Rubinstein, ‘Notes on the word stato’; Skinner, ‘Vocabulary of Renaissance republicanism’.
43 Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, bk 1, pp. 122–31.
44 Garin, ‘Cité idéale’; Bauer, Kunst und Utopie.
45 This point emerges clearly from the major and somewhat neglected study by Albertini, Das florentinisch Staatsbewusstsein.
46 Duby, Three Orders; Niccoli, Sacerdoti.
47 Difficulties in the interpretation of the term popolo minuto and its synonyms are discussed by Cohn, Laboring Classes, p. 69n.
48 Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 19ff.; cf. Cohn, Laboring Classes, ch. 3.
49 Burke, Renaissance Sense of the Past and ‘Sense of anachronism’.
50 Gaeta, Lorenzo Valla; Kelley, Foundations, ch. 1.
51 Weiss, Renaissance Discovery.
52 Mitchell, ‘Archaeology and romance’; Brown, Venice and Antiquity.
53 Saxl, Lectures, pp. 150–60; Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting, pp. 59–85.
54 Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 169–225.
55 Kurz, Fakes; Grafton, Forgers and Critics.
56 Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, no. 110.
57 Gilbert, ‘Florentine political assumptions’.
58 Park, Doctors and Medicine; Siraisi, Clock and the Mirror.
59 Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy.
60 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 81.
61 Nelson, ‘Individualism as a criterion’.
62 Burckhardt’s Swiss German, not often recorded, is worth repeating: ‘Ach wisse Si, mit dem Individualismus, i glaub ganz nimmi dra, aber i sag nit; si han gar a Fraid’ (Walser, Gesammelte Studien, xxxvii).
63 Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance sociology’; Burke, ‘Anthropology of the Renaissance’.
64 Mauss’s lecture of 1938 is reprinted with a valuable commentary in Carrithers et al., Category of the Person, chs. 1–2.
65 Geertz, Local Knowledge, pp. 59–70.
66 Nelson, ‘Individualism as a criterion’, distinguishes five elements. Cf. Batkin, L’idea di individualità; Burke, ‘The Renaissance, individualism and the portrait’.
67 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ch. 2; Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, ch. 4.
68 Gilbert, ‘On Machiavelli’s idea of virtù’.
69 Rotunda, Motif-Index.
70 Bruni, Epistolae populi Florentini, vol. 1, p. 1
37; Alberti, I libri della famiglia, p. 139.
71 Pius II, De curialium miseriis, p. 32.
72 Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, p. 307.
73 Goffen, Renaissance Rivals.
74 Bec, Marchands écrivains; Brucker, Two Memoirs; Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura; Anselmi et al., ‘Memoria’ dei mercatores. Cf. Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family.
75 Rucellai, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone.
76 Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi, pp. 357ff.
77 McLean, Art of the Network, p. 228.
78 Cassirer et al., Renaissance Philosophy, p. 225.
79 Trinkaus, In our Image; Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
80 Weise, L’ideale eroico del Rinascimento, pp. 79–119.
81 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, pp. 86–108; Murray, Reason and Society, pp. 182ff.
82 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Toscans et leurs familles.
83 Rucellai, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, p. 8.
84 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, bk 20, pp. 282ff.
85 Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, no. 25.
86 Elias, Civilizing Process, a book that does not place enough emphasis on the role of the Italians in the process of change he describes and analyses so well. Cf. Burke, ‘Civilization, sex and violence’.
87 Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 247–9.
88 Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, no. 1000.