The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  89 Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore, second dialogue, pt 1.

  90 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, bk 1, pp. 8ff; Michelangelo, quoted in Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 37.

  91 The discussion of ‘the prose of the world’ in Foucault, Order of Things, ch. 2, has become a classic. For a more thorough analysis, see Céard, Nature et les prodiges.

  92 Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, pp. 145, 166–7; Burke, ‘History as allegory’.

  93 Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance.

  94 On the coexistence of organic and mechanical modes of thought in Leonardo, Dijksterhuis, Mechanization of the World Picture, pp. 253–64.

  95 Delumeau, ‘Réinterprétation de la Renaissance’, stresses progress in the capacity for abstraction.

  96 Borkenau, Übergang.

  9

  THE SOCIAL FRAMEWORK

  This chapter continues the process of moving outward from the art and literature of the Renaissance, the milieux in which they were produced and the worldviews they expressed. It is concerned essentially with organizations, formal and informal, and their relationship to Renaissance culture. It deals in the first place with an institution which existed to propagate a worldview, the Church; next with political institutions; then with the social structure; and, finally, at the very base of society, with the economy.

  RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION

  If modern Christians could visit Renaissance Italy, they would probably be very much surprised, not to say shocked, by what they would find going on in church, and even an Italian Catholic might raise an eyebrow.1 The Venetian cardinal Gasparo Contarini described men walking through a church ‘talking among themselves about trade, about wars, and very often even about love’. Walking through churches, especially during Mass, was frequently forbidden (at Modena in 1463, for example, and at Milan in 1530), frequently enough for us to conclude that it must have happened all the time. One might expect to find beggars in church, or horses, or gamblers, or a schoolmaster giving lessons, or a political meeting in progress. The parishioners ate, drank and danced in the church to celebrate major festivals such as that of the patron saint. Churches might be used as storehouses for grain or wood. A visitation of the diocese of Mantua in 1535 reported on a church in which ‘the chaplain has a kitchen, beds and other things which are not very appropriate for a holy place; but … he may be excused because his dwelling is very small.’2 Valuables might be kept in the sacristy; there were, after all, few other safe places.

  The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s remark that, in the Middle Ages, people were inclined ‘to treat the sacred with a familiarity that did not exclude respect’ remains true for the Renaissance, with the proviso that their familiarity did not necessarily include respect either.3 The distinction between the sacred and profane was not drawn in quite the same place and it was not drawn as sharply as it would be in the later sixteenth century after the Council of Trent. Nor was it drawn by everyone. As late as 1580, Montaigne, who was visiting Verona, was surprised to see men standing and talking during Mass, their hats on their heads and their backs to the altar.4

  There was a similar lack of sharp distinction between clergy and laity. The Roman census of 1526 records a friar working as a mason (il frate muratore). The clergy lacked a special kind of education until seminaries were set up after the Council of Trent. ‘How many’, asked a participant in the Lateran Council of 1514, ‘do not wear clothes laid down by the sacred canons, keep concubines, are simoniacal and ambitious? How many carry weapons like soldiers? How many go to the altar with their own children around them? How many hunt and shoot with crossbows and guns?’5 It does not seem possible to answer his rhetorical questions, or even to say how many clergy there were – a question complicated by the existence of marginal cases, men in minor orders, including such famous names as Poliziano and Ariosto. All that the evidence allows is an estimate of their number in particular cities in particular years. In Florence in 1427, for example, a city of some 38,000 people, there were about 300 secular priests but over 1,100 monks, friars and nuns.6 By 1550 the total population had risen to nearly 60,000, but the proportion of clergy had climbed still more steeply, to just over 5,000, or nearly 9 per cent. In Venice in 1581, a city of about 135,000 people, there were nearly 600 secular priests, but the friars and nuns brought the clerical total to more than 4,000.7

  The clergy were very far from being a homogeneous body, either culturally or socially. It is necessary to distinguish at least three groups: the bishops, the rank-and-file secular clergy and the members of religious orders.

  Bishops, of whom there were nearly three hundred in Italy, were generally nobles. Some sees were virtually hereditary in particular families, the dynasty being perpetuated by the practice of uncles resigning in favour of their nephews. The other main avenue to a bishopric was the patron– client system. A young doctor of canon law would enter the household of a cardinal, serve him as secretary or in some other capacity, and obtain a bishopric through his influence. In Italy as elsewhere in Europe, bishops generally knew their law – better, in fact, than their theology.8

  Parish priests also depended on patronage, since the right to appoint to a particular benefice often belonged to a particular family. Some rectors or holders of benefices did not do the work themselves but hired a deputy or ‘vicar’ to do it for them, often for a small proportion of the income. In the early sixteenth century, some chaplains in the diocese of Milan had an income of only 40 lire a year, less than that of an unskilled labourer. Some priests were active as horse or cattle dealers as a way of making ends meet. Whether rectors or vicars, parish priests had little formal training. They learned what they had to do by what has been called ‘apprenticeship’ – in other words, by helping and watching. Stories of their ignorance were common and may well have been exaggerated for effect, but diocesan visitations regularly revealed priests who lacked breviaries, or who could be described in laconic but devastating terms such as ‘he knows nothing’ or ‘he is illiterate’.9

  Finally, there were the religious orders. There were monks, notably the Benedictines, among them the poet Teofilo Folengo, and the particularly strict Order of Camaldoli, one of whose members was the fifteenthcentury humanist Ambrogio Traversari, a friend of Niccolò de Niccoli and Cosimo de’Medici and translator of some of the Greek Fathers of the Church.10 There were five mendicant orders. The Servites, devoted to the Blessed Virgin, had been founded at Florence. The Augustinians included Luigi Marsigli, a friend of Niccoli and the humanist Coluccio Salutati. Among the Carmelites, devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, were Fra Lippo Lippi and the Latin poet Giovanni Battista Spagnolo, better known as ‘the Mantuan’. The Dominicans included the painter Fra Angelico and the preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola. The Franciscans had several leading preachers, among them San Bernardino of Siena. If they did not produce a major artist, they certainly had a great influence on the arts from the thirteenth century onwards.11

  It was the friars who made sermons important in Italian religious life, in the towns at least, at a time when many of the parish clergy seem to have been ‘dumb dogs that will not bark’, as reformers liked to describe their English equivalents. San Bernardino even told his congregation that, if they had a choice between Mass and a sermon, they should choose the sermon. Enthusiasts took his sermons down in shorthand, and legal proceedings were sometimes postponed so that everyone could go and listen.12 Some preachers had little to learn from actors. One is said to have read to his congregation a letter from Christ, while another, Fra Roberto da Lecce, entered the pulpit to preach a crusade wearing a full suit of armour. If sermons receive no more than a brief mention in this study, it is not because they were unimportant in the cultural life of the time, but because they belong to late medieval tradition rather than to Renaissance innovation, and because the printed collections which survive are a highly abbreviated and incomplete record and no firm basis for the reconstruction of actual performances.13

  Religious festivals
were another kind of performance which it is hard to reconstruct but which meant a great deal to Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The feast of Corpus Christi, for example, was growing in importance in the fifteenth century. It was celebrated with special magnificence at Viterbo in 1462 by Pius II and his cardinals, as the pope records in his memoirs; the decorations included a fountain which ran with water and wine and ‘a youth impersonating the Saviour, who sweated blood, and filled a cup with a healing stream from a wound in his side’.14 A famous painting by Gentile Bellini represents the Corpus Christi procession in Venice as it went through Piazza San Marco. In the sixteenth century, tableaux vivants became an important element of Venetian Corpus Christi processions.15 Religious plays were another important element in these festivals – performances within the performance. Corpus Christi was one great occasion for plays; another, in Florence at least, was the feast of the Epiphany, when the plays represented the three wise men, or kings, Jasper, Baltasar and Melchior, bringing their gifts to the infant Christ. In Rome, a Passion play was performed every year at the Colosseum. As a fifteenth-century German visitor recorded, ‘This was acted by living people, even the scourging, the crucifixion, and how Judas hanged himself. They were all the children of wealthy people, and it was therefore done orderly and richly.’16

  Among the most important festivals were those of the patron saints of cities: St Ambrose in Milan, St Mark in Venice, St John the Baptist in Florence, and so on.17 Such feasts were events on which civic prestige depended and on which communal values were solemnly reaffirmed. In Florence, for example, the feast of St John was celebrated with races, jousts and bull-fights. The subject towns of the Florentine empire sent deputations to the capital, there was a banquet for the Signoria (the town council), and there were the usual floats, races, cavalcades, hunts, jugglers, tight-rope walkers and giants (impersonated by men on stilts).18

  Central to the organization of these plays and festivals were religious fraternities (compagnie, scuole). These voluntary associations of the laity were widespread in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when at least 420 of them were found in north and central Italy alone. Their main role may be described as the imitation of Christ: this underlay their frequent practice of flagellation, their banquets (a ritual of solidarity modelled on the Last Supper), their washing of the feet of the poor on special occasions, and their concern with what were known as the seven works of temporal mercy: visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, helping prisoners, burying the dead and giving lodging to pilgrims. Some specialized in a particular function. The fraternity of St Martin (Buonomini di San Martino) was founded in Florence in 1442 to aid the poor, especially the genteel poor, and named after the saint who had divided his cloak with a beggar. Others comforted condemned criminals, like the Roman fraternity of St John Beheaded (San Giovanni Decollato), of which Michelangelo was a member.19

  The significance of the fraternities as the patrons of art has already been discussed (above, p. 96). They played an important part in religious festivals, walking in procession and performing in pageants and plays. It was, for example, the Fraternity of the Magi in Florence which performed the pageant of the three kings.20 The Fraternity of St John, also in Florence, performed Lorenzo de’Medici’s play Saints John and Paul. The Fraternity of the Gonfalon in Rome staged the regular Good Friday Passion play at the Colosseum (the painter Antoniazzo Romano was a member and he painted the scenery). Fraternities often sang hymns in praise of the Virgin and the saints, in their processions and in church, and these hymns (laude) were sometimes distinguished examples of religious poetry and might be set to music by leading composers such as Guillaume Dufay.21 Fraternities also listened to special sermons, which might be delivered by laymen. It is curious to think of Machiavelli in the pulpit, but it is still possible to read the ‘exhortation to penitence’ he delivered to the Florentine Fraternity of Piety. It has been argued that the Platonic Academy of Florence owes as much to these fraternities as to Plato’s original Academy.22

  POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

  A distinctive feature of the political organization of Renaissance Italy was the importance of city-states and in particular of republics. Around the year 1200, ‘some two or three hundred units existed which deserve to be described as city-states.’23 By the fifteenth century, most of them had lost their independence, but not the Renaissance cities par excellence, Florence and Venice. Their constitutions make a study in contrasts.

  If ever there were a state apparently well suited to the functional analysis which dominated sociology and social anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, it is surely Venice. The Venetian constitution was celebrated for its stability and balance, thanks to the mixture of elements from the three main types of government, with the doge representing monarchy, the Senate aristocracy, and the Great Council democracy. In practice the monarchical element was a weak one. Despite the outward honours paid to the doge, whose head appeared on coins, he had little real power. The Venetians had already developed the distinction, best known from Walter Bagehot’s famous description of the British constitution in the nineteenth century, between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system. The Great Council, by contrast, did participate in decision-making, but this council of nobles was not exactly democratic. As for conflicts, they were not absent but hidden behind the fiction of consensus.

  Like the idea of the mixed constitution, Venetian stability or ‘harmony’ was not a neutral descriptive term. It was part of an ideology, part of the ‘myth of Venice’, as historians call it today – in other words, the idealized view of Venice held by Venetians from the ruling class, such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, whose Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1543) did much to propagate it.24 Relatively speaking, however, there was a kernel of truth in the idea of Venetian stability. The political system did not change very much during the period. If Venice was ruled by the few, the few were unusually numerous. All adult patricians were members of the Great Council (Maggior Consiglio) – over 2,500 of them in the early sixteenth century25 – hence the size of the Hall of the Great Council and the need for large paintings to fill it.

  Florence, by contrast, had an unstable political system, compared by Dante in his Divine Comedy – which exile gave him the leisure to write – to a sick woman twisting and turning in bed, uncomfortable in every position (Vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma / Che non può trovar pose in su le piume / Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma).26 As a sixteenth-century Venetian observer put it, ‘They have never been content with their constitution, they are never quiet, and it seems that this city always desires a change of constitution, so that no particular form of government has ever lasted more than fifteen years.’ He commented, rather smugly, that this was God’s punishment for the sins of the Florentines.27 It may have had rather more to do with the fact that Florentines enjoyed political rights at the age of fourteen, while Venetians were not considered politically adult till they were twenty-five and had to be old men before their ideas were taken seriously. The average age of a doge of Venice on his election was seventy-two.28

  For whatever reason, change was the norm in Florence. In 1434, Cosimo de’Medici returned from exile and took over the state. In 1458, a Council of Two Hundred was set up. In 1480, this was replaced by a Council of Seventy. In 1494, the Medici were driven out, and a Great Council was set up on the Venetian model. In 1502, a kind of doge was created, the ‘gonfaloniere for life’. In 1512, the Medici returned in the baggage of a foreign army. In 1527, they were driven out again, and in 1530 returned once more. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that there is some link, however difficult it may be to specify it, between the political culture and the artistic culture of the Florentines and the propensity to innovate in these two spheres. By contrast, the less unstable Venetians were slower to welcome the Renaissance. Apart from this tendency to structural change, Florence differed from Veni
ce in that offices rotated more rapidly; the chief magistrates, or Signoria, were in office for only two months at a time. The minority of Florentines involved in politics was much larger than that in Venice, with more than 6,000 citizens (craftsmen and shopkeepers as well as patricians) eligible for the chief magistracies alone.29

  The other three major powers in Italy were effectively monarchies, two hereditary (Milan and Naples) and one elective (the Papal States). Here, as in smaller states such as Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, the key institution was the court. So many major works of Renaissance art and literature, from Mantegna’s Camera degli sposi to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, were produced in this milieu that it is important to understand what kind of place it was. This task has become easier thanks to a number of specialized studies produced in the wake of Norbert Elias’s pioneering sociology (or anthropology) of court society.30

  Courts numbered hundreds of people. In 1527 the papal court, for example, was about seven hundred strong. From this point of view, the small circle surrounding Lorenzo de’Medici, the first citizen of a republic, does not qualify for the title of ‘court’ at all.31 This court population was extremely heterogeneous and ran from great nobles, holding offices such as constable, chamberlain, steward or master of the horse, through lesser courtiers such as gentlemen of the bedchamber, secretaries and pages, down to servants such as trumpeters, falconers, cooks, barbers and stable boys. Harder to place in the hierarchy (indeed, professional outsiders), but commonly in attendance to entertain the prince, were his fools and midgets. The position of his poets and musicians may not have been so very different.

  A crucial feature of the court was that it served two functions which were becoming more and more divergent: the private and the public; the household of the prince and the administration of the state. The prince generally ate with his courtiers. When he moved, most of the court moved with him, despite the logistic problems of transporting, feeding and accommodating a group equivalent to the population of a small town. When Duke Ludovico Sforza decided to go from Milan to his favourite country residence, Vigevano, or to his other castles and hunting lodges, it took five hundred horses and mules to transport the court and its belongings.32 Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, was similarly mobile much of the time, visiting different parts of an empire which included Catalonia, Sicily and Sardinia. His officials were forced to follow his example, indeed to follow him in a quite literal sense. In December 1451, for instance, Alfonso summoned his council to Capua, where he happened to be hunting, in order to decide his dispute with the city of Barcelona.33