by Peter Burke
In many ways, economic organization remained traditional. The small workshop and the family business were the most common forms of industry and trade. Many peasants paid their rent in kind. However, the new forms of organization were unusually well developed in Italy, particularly in large cities such as Florence, Rome and Venice, where so much of what we call the Renaissance was taking place. It is natural to look for links between the state of economy and the state of the culture, more particularly the material culture, the visual arts.
These links are not difficult to find, but they are not easy to describe without falling into a narrow precision or its opposite, a grandiose vagueness. To begin with the detail, we may observe that art and ideas often followed the trade routes.90 Books followed the route from Venice to Vienna, for example. Venice imported decorative motifs as well as spices from Damascus and Aleppo, and exported art and artists as well as spices to Central Europe. Titian and Paris Bordone went to Augsburg and Jacopo de’Barbari to Nuremberg (just as Dürer arrived in Venice from Nuremberg). Sebastiano del Piombo left Venice for Rome at the invitation of the banker Agostino Chigi; thanks to his business connections, Chigi had come to be well acquainted with the Venetian artistic scene. Tuscan artists also followed the trade routes – Rosso and Leonardo to France and Torrigiani to England (in his case, it is known that Florentine merchants with English contacts arranged this visit). Pictures travelled in both directions. Florentine paintings were shipped to France for the collection of Francis I, but the famous Portinari altarpiece now in the Uffizi was brought to Florence by the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank.
Precise information of this kind has its interest, but it does not take us very far towards a historical explanation of the Renaissance – why the movement took place in this particular society at this time. Was wealth the key factor? Did Italy have a Renaissance because she could afford it? The problem here is that the dates do not fit. An economic recession followed the devastating plague of 1348–9, and recovery was slow. As we have seen, the economic historian Roberto Lopez has argued that this recession was just what was needed for the Renaissance, that merchants spent their money on the arts at times when there were fewer profitable ways of placing their money than usual – ‘hard times and investment in culture’.91 However, the study of patronage (above, pp. 133ff.) suggests that merchants did not think in terms of investment when they commissioned works of art but rather of piety, pride or pleasure.
A social factor, style of life, has to be inserted between trends in the economy and trends in culture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florentines and Venetians were coming to value conspicuous consumption more than before. It may be that this change in lifestyle can itself be explained in economic terms, that the shift from entrepreneurs to rentiers was an adaptation to economic recession – a case of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’, a kind of sour grapes effect. It has also been suggested that the Italian economic structure was unusually favourable to the development of a luxury market, thanks not only to the accumulation of wealth but also to its wide distribution among a constantly changing group of urban consumers.92
In these circumstances, competition for status thrived so that building magnificently became a strategy for distinguishing some families from others.93 It would be unhistorical to treat Renaissance art as no more than a set of status symbols, forgetting the piety that underlay the patronage of sacred images or the pleasures of a private collection. Yet it would be equally unhistorical to treat the art of this period as if it had no connections with conspicuous consumption at all. The strength of the connections was subject to change over time. To examine the links between cultural and social change is the purpose of the following chapter.
1 A general survey in Hay, Church in Italy. Cf. Prodi and Johanek, Strutture ecclesiastiche.
2 Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù, pp. 179ff.; Putelli, Vita, storia ed arte, p. 16.
3 Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, ch. 12.
4 Montaigne, Journal, p. 64.
5 Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù, p. 36.
6 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Toscans et leurs familles, table 10.
7 Battara, Popolazione di Firenze, pp. 79–80; Beltrami, Storia della popolazione di Venezia, p. 79.
8 Alberigo, Vescovi italiani; Posperi, ‘Figura del vescovo’. Cf. Hay, Church in Italy, pp. 18–20.
9 Hay, Church in Italy, pp. 49–57.
10 Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars, ch. 1.
11 Hay, Church in Italy, pp. 58–61; Zarri, ‘Aspetti dello sviluppo degli ordini religiosi’; Francastel, ‘Valeurs socio-psychologiques de l’espace–temps’, pp. 305–15; Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage, pp. 26–35.
12 Origo, World of San Bernardino; Bronzini, ‘Pubblico e predicazione popolare’.
13 Rusconi, ‘Predicatori e predicazione’; Nigro, Brache di San Griffone.
14 Pius II, Commentaries, bk 8.
15 Muir, Civic Ritual, pp. 223–30.
16 Harff, Pilgrimage, p. 40.
17 Peyer, Stadt und Stadtaton; Fiue, Santo patrono.
18 Guasti, Feste; Trexler, Public Life, pp. 240ff., 326ff, 46f, 450ff .
19 Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood; Eisenbichler, Crossing th Boundaries. On St Martin, Trexler, ‘Charity and the defence of urban elites’; Hughes-Johnson, ‘Early Medici patronage’. On St John, Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment.
20 Hatfield, ‘Compagnia de’Magi’.
21 Monti, Un laudario umbra and Confraternite medievali.
22 Kristeller, ‘Lay religious traditions’.
23 Waley, Italian City-Republics, p. 11.
24 Gaeta, ‘Alcuni considerazioni sul mito’; Logan, Culture and Society, ch. 1; Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, ch. 1.
25 Davis, Decline of the Venetian Nobility, ch. 3; Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, ch. 2.
26 Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 6.
27 Segarizzi, Relazioni, p. 39.
28 Finlay, ‘Venetian republic as a gerontocracy’; Chojnacki, ‘Political adulthood’.
29 Molho, ‘Politics and the ruling class’; Kent, ‘Florentine Reggimento’ and Rise of the Medici; Rubinstein, Government of Florence; Brucker, Civic World; Stephens, Fall of the Florentine Republic; and Butters, Governors and Government, ch. 1.
30 Elias, Court Society; cf. Quondam, Corti farnesiane; Ossola, Corte e il cortegiano; Prosperi, Corte e il cortegiano; Fantoni, Corte del granduca; Rosenberg, Court Cities.
31 Contrast Pottinger, Court of the Medici.
32 Malaguzzi-Valeri, Corte di Lodovico il Moro, vol. 1, ch. 3.
33 Ryder, Kingdom of Naples.
34 Guidi, ‘Jeu de cour’.
35 Chabod, ‘Was there a Renaissance state?’. Cf. Gamberini, Italian Renaissance State.
36 Weber, Economy and Society, pt 2, chs 10–14.
37 Alberti, I libri della famiglia, p. 221.
38 Prodi, Papal Prince, pp. 50ff.
39 Kraus, ‘Secretarius und Sekretariat’; Partner, Pope’s Men.
40 Santoro, Uffici del domino sforzesco.
41 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy.
42 Quoted in Senatore, Mundo de carta, p. 25.
43 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Toscans et leurs familles.
44 Prodi, Papal Prince, p. 117.
45 Partner, ‘Papal financial policy’.
46 Pius II, De curialium miseriis, p. 35.
47 Partner, Renaissance Rome, pp. 60ff.; D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 27ff.
48 Chabod, ‘Usi ed abusi’.
49 Witt, Hercules at the Cross-Roads, pp. 112ff.
50 Kent, Rise of the Medici, pp. 83ff. Cf. Weissman, ‘Taking patronage seriously’; Cavalcanti, Istorie fiorentine, bk 2, ch. 1.
51 Elias, Civilizing Process; Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage, pp. 209–16.
52 Warnke, Court Artist; Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 153–8.
53 Pius II, De curialium miseriis, p. 39.
54 Qu
oted in Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, p. 139.
55 Dundes and Falassi, Terra in piazza.
56 Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood; Eckstein, District of the Green Dragon and ‘Neighbourhood as microcosm’.
57 Hook, Siena, pp. 96ff.
58 Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, pp. 454–63; Klein and Zerner, Italian Art, pp. 39–44.
59 Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries.
60 Different currencies (florins, ducats, etc.) have been converted into lire because this was the standard ‘money of account’ of the period. The annual figures are sometimes conversions of daily rates, multiplied by 250 rather than 365. No allowance is made for changes in prices because Italy was struck by serious inflation only in the mid-sixteenth century. The sources used are Fossati, ‘Lavoro e lavoratori’; Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders; Barbieri, Economia e politica; Sardella, Nouvelles et spéculations; Chabod, L’epoca di Carlo V; Roover, Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank. On workers’ wages, cf. Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, appendix 3.
61 Brown, Bartolommeo Scala.
62 Lipset and Bendix, Social Mobility.
63 Delumeau, ‘Mobilité sociale’; Herlihy, ‘Three patterns’.
64 Cavalcanti, Istorie fiorentine, bk 3, ch. 2. Cf. Kent, ‘Florentine Reggimento’; Brucker, Civic World, pp. 256ff., 472ff.
65 Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo, ch. 2; Lane, Venice, pp. 111ff., 151ff., 252ff.
66 Jones, ‘Economia e societa’.
67 Beloch, Bevölkerungsgeschichte, pp. 327ff.
68 Cohn, Laboring Classes.
69 Kent, ‘Be rather loved than feared’.
70 Letter to Vettori, 9 April 1513. Hence it is likely that the Niccolò Machiavelli who worked in a bank was a different man, despite Maffei, Giovane Machiavelli banchiere.
71 Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, and Kent, Household and Lineage, offer impor-tant and to some extent contradictory studies of Florentine patrician families. On loggias and ancestors, Kent, Household and Lineage, ch. 5. On society and individuals, Connell, Society and Individual.
72 For the Mediterranean context, Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, pts 1 and 2.
73 Zanetti, Problemi alimentari.
74 Cohn, Creating the Florentine State.
75 Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, p. 298.
76 Gambi and Bollati, Storia d’Italia, offer a well-illustrated introduction to the historical geography of Italy.
77 Lopez, ‘Quattrocento genovese’.
78 Lane, Venice.
79 Doren, Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie.
80 Barbieri, Economia e politica.
81 Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius and Nicholas Jenson; Zeidberg and Superbi, Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture; Nuovo, Commercio librario.
82 Roover, Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank; Gilbert, Pope, his Banker, and Venice, ch. 4.
83 Sereni, Storia del paesaggio and ‘Agricoltura e mondo rurale’; Jones, ‘Agrarian development’ and ‘Italy’.
84 Dowd, ‘Economic expansion of Lombardy’.
85 Klapisch-Zuber and Day, ‘Villages désertés en Italie’.
86 Gras, ‘Capitalism, concepts and history’. Cf. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, ch. 3.
87 Doren, Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie, criticized by Hermes, ‘Kapitalismus’, and Roover, ‘Florentine firm’. On the silk industry at Lucca, Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 66ff.
88 Kirshner and Molho, ‘Dowry fund’.
89 Tenenti, Naufrages.
90 Examples in Bologna, Napoli e le rotte mediterranee; Nuovo, Commercio librario, p. 48.
91 Lopez, ‘Hard times and investment’. Cf. Esch, ‘Sul rapporto fra arte ed economia’.
92 Goldthwaite, ‘Renaissance economy’, ‘Empire of things’, Wealth and the Demand for Art and Economy of Renaissance Florence.
93 Bourdieu, Distinction. On Italy, Burke, Historical Anthropology, pp. 132–49.
10
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE
The natural changes in worldly affairs make poverty succeed riches … the man who first acquires a fortune takes a greater care of it, having known how to make his money, he also knows how to keep it … his heirs are less attached to a fortune they have made no effort to acquire. They have been brought up to riches and have never learned the art of earning them. Is it any wonder that they let it slip through their fingers?
Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, no. 33
The focus of this book has been the description and analysis of social and cultural ‘structures’ – that is, factors which remain fairly constant over a century or two. They were not static, but it makes for clarity to treat them as if they were. Artistic, ideological, political and economic factors have so far been treated in relative isolation. Such a procedure has its advantages if the aim is to analyse as well as describe. It is obvious, however, that what contemporaries experienced was the combination or conjuncture of all these factors, and that this conjuncture was constantly changing. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to draw together the themes of different sections and to concentrate on the historian’s traditional business – the study of change over time.
It is in practice useful to distinguish different kinds of change, as Braudel did in his famous study of the Mediterranean.1 There is short-term change, the time of events, of which contemporaries are well aware, and there is long-term change, almost impossible to notice at the time but visible to historical hindsight. There are times when it is useful to distinguish the long term from the very long term, as Braudel does, but not in the case of a study concerned, as this one is, with a mere two centuries.
GENERATIONS
In the study of short-term changes, a useful and attractive concept is that of ‘generation’. The concept is attractive because it seems to grow out of experience, that of identifying oneself with one group and distancing oneself from others. It helps in finding links between the history of events and the history of structures, the area where Braudel’s study is at its weakest. The concept of generation would seem to be particularly useful in the case of a group as self-conscious as the artists and writers of the Renaissance. It was in fact when discussing Mannerism that the art historian Walter Friedländer formulated his ‘grandfather law’, arguing that ‘A generation with deliberate disregard for the views and feelings of the generation of its fathers and direct teachers skips back to the preceding period and takes up the very tendencies against which its fathers had so zealously struggled, albeit in a new sense.’2
It is often said that a generation lasts about thirty years, the period between maturity and retirement. However, the average length of adult life varies over time, and so does the age distance between parents and children.3 In any case, generations are not objective facts; they are cultural constructs. As in the case of social classes, the consciousness of belonging to a generation is a crucial part of the experience. Characteristic of generations as of social classes is what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called ‘a common location in the social and historical process’, which encourages certain kinds of behaviour and inhibits others.4
If generation-consciousness is created by the historical process itself, generations will not be equally long or divided equally sharply from their predecessors. Momentous events are likely to bind the members of an age-group together more closely than is normal. The Spanish writers known as the ‘generation of 1898’, for example, from Miguel de Unamuno to José Ortega y Gasset, were bound together by the realization, following the loss of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, that Spain was no longer a great power.5 It may well be that such acute generation-consciousness is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon (the result of accelerating political, social and cultural change after 1789), a phenomenon that we must beware of projecting onto an earlier past. It is, however, at least worth attempting to see whether major events in Renaissance Italy made certain age-groups aware of their common locat
ion in history, and whether this awareness affected the arts.
The importance of political events in the early fifteenth century in creating a generation has been emphasized by a number of scholars, notably Hans Baron (above, p. 41), in his study of what he calls the ‘crisis of the early Italian Renaissance’.6 Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan from 1395 to 1402, built up an empire by seizing Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and then Pisa, Perugia, Siena and Bologna. The Florentines, virtually encircled, might well have thought that their turn was next. However, they were able to defend themselves until the duke was carried off by the plague.