The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  Leonardo Bruni, chancellor of Florence, presented the war between Florence and Milan as a struggle between liberty and tyranny. He identified Florence with the Roman Republic under which the city was supposed to have been founded; this is the point of his remark (quoted above, p. 32) that the brilliant minds of Rome vanished under the tyranny of the emperors. In his oration on the death of the patrician Nanni Strozzi, Bruni also identified Florence with classical Athens and the values expressed in the funeral speech of Pericles, which he took as his model.

  In the early fifteenth century, there came a relatively sudden change of style in the visual arts in Florence, a move towards the art of ancient Rome. The artists responsible had generally been at an impressionable age when the threat from Giangaleazzo Visconti was removed from their city. Brunelleschi, for example, was twenty-five in 1402; Ghiberti was twenty-four; Masolino was nineteen; Donatello was sixteen or thereabouts.

  The ‘Baron thesis’ provides an elegantly economical explanation for a wide variety of phenomena. It is relevant to the humanism of Bruni and his circle and also to the visual arts. In the arts, it is relevant to form, to the creation of a more ‘antique’ style, as well as to iconography; as we have seen (above, p. 181), the representations of David and St George had political overtones. The thesis applies to both patrons and artists. Brunelleschi and Donatello were stimulated by civic patronage, and civic patronage was stimulated by the crisis.

  Yet this interpretation of the relation between politics and culture is a little more ambiguous than it may look. It is possible to argue either that the events of the year 1402 were decisive in forming the new generation or that this formation was the work of a longer period, extending from the 1390s to the 1420s. To argue, as Baron himself has tended to do, that one year was crucial, involves controversial questions such as the dating of certain works by Bruni and also the omission of figures as important as Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who expressed similar ideas too early, and Masaccio (1401–c.1428), who was born too late.7

  It seems more plausible to argue that the whole struggle with Milan, and possibly the earlier War of the Eight Saints between Florence and the papacy (1375–8) as well, were the decisive events; but that, of course, spreads the events too thinly for the creation of a generation. It must also be admitted that we know very little of the political attitudes of leading artists such as Brunelleschi and Donatello, or even whether Bruni’s stress on liberty was a heartfelt conviction or the expression of an official attitude required by his administrative position. In any case, the argument applies only to Florence. The Florentines were the leaders in innovation, but there were other important humanists, such as Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona, and other important painters, from Pisanello to Jacopo Bellini. The two humanists did not show any distaste for princes: Vittorino was employed at the court of Mantua, Guarino at that of Ferrara.

  Another political event which was supposed to have had a profound impact on culture took place in 1453: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.8 Long embedded in textbooks as the explanation of the Renaissance, this thesis goes back to the period itself, to the Lombard humanist Pier Candido Decembrio. The fall of the city, so the argument goes, forced Greek scholars to migrate to Italy, bringing with them their knowledge of the Greek language and literature and so stimulating the revival of ancient learning. The obvious objection to this thesis is that Greek scholars were working in Italy before 1453. Gemistos Plethon and Bessarion attended the Council of Florence in 1439, and Bessarion remained in Italy. Demetrios Chalcondylas and Theodore Gaza arrived in Italy in the 1440s. As in the case of the year 1402, however, it is perhaps a mistake to focus attention too narrowly on a particular date. The crucial political event was the westward advance of the Turks, which was clear enough before 1453. Indeed, it was the Turkish threat which underlay the rapprochement between Latin and Greek Christians at the Council of Florence. The humanist Theodore Gaza went to Italy after his native city of Salonika had been taken by the Turks in 1430. After the fall of Constantinople, more Greek scholars, such as Janos Argyropoulos and Janos Lascaris, arrived in Italy.

  These immigrants had an important effect on the Italian world of learning, not unlike that of scholars from Central Europe – including specialists on the Renaissance – on the English-speaking world after 1933. They stimulated Greek studies. However, their importance was that they satisfied a demand which already existed. The fall of Constantinople shocked the Christian world, but it does not seem to have bound together a generation. Indeed, the artists and writers born between 1420 and 1450 (Ficino, for example, or Ghirlandaio) seem a much less politically minded group than their predecessors, whether because they reacted against them or because the age in which they were in their prime was an age of relative peace in the peninsula, the age of the balance of power within Italy.

  After two essentially Florentine generations came one which was genuinely Italian. Of the eighty-five members of the creative elite born between 1460 and 1479, only twenty-one were Tuscans. In any case, political events made the generation of 1460–90 (which includes Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Ariosto and Bembo, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael) aware of their common destiny as Italians. Their formative years were marked by the French invasion of 1494 and the long wars which followed, a struggle for mastery between the French (Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I) and the forces of Spain (under Ferdinand the Catholic) and the Empire (under Maximilian and Charles V). Many Italians were killed, whether fighting with or against the invaders. Many cities were captured and some were sacked. ‘Crisis’ is a term which is overworked by historians. Indeed, it ought to be obligatory on anyone who uses the term about a particular period to show that it was preceded and followed by years of non-crisis.9 All the same, it is clear that Italy was passing through a ‘time of troubles’.

  The year 1494 has been taken as a turning point in the history of Italy – indeed, of Europe – from that day to this. Francesco Guicciardini and Leopold von Ranke are only two of the distinguished historians who began their narratives with that year. So, still closer to 1494, did Bernardo Rucellai.10 It cannot be assumed that 1494 marks a break in the history of Italian culture, but it is not difficult to find evidence which supports this suggestion.

  The dispersal of artists and writers in this time of troubles is relatively easy to chart. In Florence, for example, the musician Heinrich Isaac left in 1494, when the Medici, his patrons, were driven out. In Naples, plans for improving the city were brought to an end by the French invasion, and the architect Fra Giocondo went back to France with Charles VIII. In Milan, the black year was 1499, when Ludovico Sforza fled from the French and the artists at his court were dispersed. The architect Bramante, the sculptor Cristoforo Solari, and the musician Gaspar van Weerbecke all went to Rome, while the historian Bernardino Corio retired to his country villa. In 1509, it was the turn of Venice to be attacked. Although the city was not captured, its mainland possessions were overrun. The University of Padua closed for some years, while the printer Aldo Manuzio left Venice for three years, whether for economic or political reasons.11

  Two very different conscious responses to the time of troubles were given by Machiavelli and Savonarola. For Savonarola, the French invasion was the fulfilment of his prophecy of a new flood. He described Charles VIII as God’s instrument to reform the Church, who had been able to invade Italy because of her sins. Some humanists, such as Giovanni Nesi, joined Savonarola in expecting an immediate ‘new age’.12 For Machiavelli, too, Charles VIII’s easy conquest of Italy was a lesson, but what he learned from it was something rather different from Savonarola. Machiavelli learned that men are ‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers’, and that force, not reason, was decisive in politics. His work, like Guicciardini’s, reflects what has been called a ‘crisis of assumptions’.13 Events had called into question the conventional wisdom, the ideas of the perfectibility of man and the place of reason in politics held by fifteenth-century humanists. Like the Spa
nish generation of 1898, the Italian generation of 1494, from Machiavelli to Savonarola, however diverse their responses, seems to have been driven by the same need to explain the disaster which had struck them. The Venetians were spared this crisis, only to encounter one of their own in 1509, when the League of Cambrai was formed against them and the independence of the city-state was threatened.14

  It is more difficult to say how far this disaster affected styles of art as well as styles of thought. The example of Botticelli suggests that it did. Although Botticelli was in his late forties when the invasion occurred, his style changed dramatically after 1494. The security of his earlier paintings was replaced by the much more unquiet quality of his Lamentation, for example, or his Mystic Nativity. The inscription on the latter painting is an unusually direct piece of evidence of a painter’s reaction to the time of troubles, which Botticelli, like Savonarola, interpreted in millenarian terms:

  I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy in the half time after the time according to the eleventh chapter of St John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be chained in the twelfth chapter and we will see him trodden down as in this picture.15

  Generally speaking, however, the evidence does not allow us to establish close connections between political events and pictorial style in this period. One Florentine painter, Baccio della Porta, an ardent supporter of Savonarola, became a Dominican in 1500, known as Fra Bartolommeo, but his style did not change. Leonardo’s drawings of the destruction of the world date from the early sixteenth century, when the destruction of Italy was taking place around him, but his notebooks do not suggest any connection. Leonardo’s style did not change at this time. He did not even leave Milan when the French invaded.

  Thirty-three years after 1494 came another black year which has sometimes been taken to mark the end of a period: 1527, when Rome was sacked by the troops of the emperor Charles V. This was doubtless the greatest disaster to happen to the city since its sack by Alaric and the Visigoths over 1,100 years earlier. It was viewed by contemporaries as a cataclysm, and it can be shown, like the invasion of 1494, to have had tangible if limited effects upon the arts.

  In the years immediately before 1527, Rome had been an especially magnificent centre of patronage. Artists and writers had flocked to this ‘centre of the world’ (caput mundi), making their dispersal all the more spectacular. Aretino, Sebastiano del Piombo and Jacopo Sansovino all went to Venice, and Michele Sammicheli entered Venetian service in the following year. Parmigianino (who had been captured by German soldiers) and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi went to Bologna. Cellini, after the exploits he boasts about in his memoirs, went back to Florence. The painter Giovanni da Udine, a pupil of Raphael’s, returned to Udine, while his colleagues Perino del Vaga and Polidoro da Caravaggio went to Genoa and Naples respectively. Those who stayed on suffered unpleasant experiences. The painter–architect Baldassare Peruzzi, for example, was imprisoned until he paid a ransom. The humanist Jacopo Sadoleto lost his library, while another humanist, Angelo Colocci, lost both his manuscripts and his statues. It is no wonder that Colocci’s friend Pierio Valeriano was moved to write a book on the miseries of the litterati, ‘especially at this time’ – ‘Some killed by pestilence, others driven into exile and oppressed with want; these butchered by the sword, those assailed with daily torments.’16

  The sack put an end to the cultural predominance of Rome. Whether it created a generation, or stimulated changes in style, is more difficult to decide. As in the case of the years 1402 and 1494, it would be a mistake to concentrate on 1527 to the exclusion of the years immediately before and after. The 1520s were terrible years for Italians – years of famine, years of plague, years of the siege and sack of cities such as Genoa, Milan, Naples and Florence as well as Rome. The 1520s were also years of spiritual crisis or, if that sounds too vague, of severe criticisms of the Church, leading to the foundation of new, strict religious orders (such as the Theatines and the Capuchins) and also to an interest in the ideas of Luther. The diffusion of prophecies in chapbook form suggests that ordinary townspeople were involved in this movement of crisis, criticism and the expectation of renewal.17 The ecclesiastical reaction to the crisis was to lead to the establishment of the Holy Office, a centralized inquisition, in 1542, and of the Index of Prohibited Books a few years later. The increasing effectiveness of ecclesiastical censorship was a crucial factor in the development of the arts in Italy after 1550.18

  The 1520s were also the time when the style art historians now call ‘Mannerism’ emerged, breaking with the rules of perspective, proportion, the combination of architectural motifs, and so on. A famous example of rule-breaking is to be found in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, designed by Giulio Romano (1527–34), with its frieze in which every third triglyph is out of place and seems to be coming loose (above, p. 92: Plate 3.9). This was a kind of architectural joke, but it is worth asking whether the rejection of rules and reason, whether joking or serious, may not be a response to this time of troubles, which helped create a new generation, including the writers Aretino, Berni and Folengo and the artists Pontormo, Rosso, Giulio Romano, Cellini, Parmigianino and Vasari (all born between 1492 and 1511). The mood of this generation was an unstable one, veering between a violent rejection of the world and a cynical acceptance of it. A possible account of the movement would describe the changes in style as expressing changes in worldview and the changes in worldview as responses to changes in the world. Some writers would go so far as to talk of this as an ‘alienated’ generation.19

  Such an account is too simple because it ignores the possibility of changes in style being – in part at least – reactions to art rather than to the world outside it. In any case, corroborative evidence is lacking yet again about the inner lives of most artists and their responses to the world around them. The one exception, Michelangelo, comes from an earlier generation (he was born in 1475). He was involved in the religious movements of his time, sympathetic to Savonarola in his youth and to Ignatius Loyola in his old age. His letters and poems do communicate a sense of spiritual anguish. However, the little we know about the lives and personalities of such artists as Giulio Romano and Parmigianino suggests that they were very different from Michelangelo. The most that could be safely said would be that the Mannerists responded in different ways to similar experiences, of which the sack of 1527 was the most important.20

  STRUCTURAL CHANGES

  At the same time as these dramatic events, other cultural and social changes were taking place in Italy, which were no less significant for passing virtually unnoticed at the time. If we compare the situation in the later sixteenth century with that in 1400, certain major differences will become apparent. In 1400, for example, what we now call the Renaissance was a movement restricted to a small group of Florentines, who made important innovations in the arts and criticized some traditional assumptions and values. They were surrounded, even in Florence, by colleagues with traditional attitudes, patrons who made the usual demands, and craftsmen who went on working in the customary manner. The new ideas and the new style gradually spread from Florence to the rest of Tuscany and from Tuscany to the rest of Italy.21

  The invention of printing helped spread the ideals of the movement more quickly than had ever been possible before. Grammars and anthologies of poems and letters familiarized literate men and women all over Italy with Tuscan usage. The illustrated architectural treatises of Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio made the classical language of architecture equally familiar. The new art gradually created a market for itself. Patrons became aware that it was possible to commission statuettes or scenes from classical mythology, while the knowledge of the differences between the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders became part of a gentleman’s education.

  The growth of a public interested in the new ideals was itself a force for change, encouraging the development of a more allusive art and lite
rature. Aretino and Berni were among the writers who parodied the love lyrics of Petrarch. To enjoy their poems the reader needs to have some familiarity with Petrarch and his fifteenth-century imitators, a familiarity which breeds boredom if not exactly contempt.22 In a similar way the deliberate mistakes or solecisms in Giulio Romano’s frieze at Mantua imply spectators who are educated enough to know the rules, to entertain certain visual expectations, to receive a shock when those expectations are falsified, and finally to enjoy being shocked because familiarity with the rules has made them rather blasé.

  Another unintended consequence of the spread of the new ideals was the gradual diminution of regional diversities, which had been enormously important in earlier centuries and remained visible even in the sixteenth century in Lombardy, in Naples and especially in Venice.23 Domenico Beccafumi, for example, was not as distinctively Sienese a painter as (say) Neroccio de’ Landi had been. From Milan to Naples, literature composed in dialect was giving way to literature composed in Tuscan.24

  Other cultural changes have been discussed more than once in this study. Individual style in art and literature was becoming more noticeable, and was indeed attracting more notice in the sixteenth century than before (above, pp. 230ff.). There was a slow but steady secularization of the arts – for example a rise in the proportion of paintings with secular subjects.25 There was an increasing concern with gravity, elegance, grace, grandeur and majesty in art and literature alike.26 As a result, many words had to be eliminated from literature (dialect terms, technical terms, ‘vulgar’ terms, and so on) and many gestures had to be eliminated from art. Wölfflin’s example is a striking one: ‘St Peter, in Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper of 1480, gestures with his thumb towards Christ, a gesture of the people, which High Art forthwith rejected as inadmissible.’27 In the course of the sixteenth century, the upper classes gradually withdrew from participation in popular festivals. They did not give up Carnival, but they created a Carnival of their own, parallel to popular festivities rather than a part of it. In short, the cultural differences between regions were replaced by cultural differences between classes. As the gap between Lombard culture and Tuscan culture narrowed, the gap between high culture and low culture widened.28