The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  Why did these changes take place? It would be presumptuous even to attempt to explain them down to the last detail, but it would also be absurd to ignore obvious connections with social changes that were taking place both in the milieu of the arts and in Italy as a whole.

  There was, for example, a gradual rise in the social status of artists and also in their social origin. Such leading artists of the early fifteenth century as Fra Angelico, Jacopo Bellini (son of a tinsmith), Andrea Castagno (son of a peasant), Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Masolino and Michelozzo all had humble social origins. On the other hand, a number of leading artists born in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century were of relatively high status: Paris Bordone, for example (whose mother was noble), Angelo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Leone Leoni (who was knighted) and Pirro Ligorio (a nobleman). Most cases of ennobled painters are later than 1480 or thereabouts, as are most cases of painters with a splendid style of life, such as Raphael (whom some expected to be made a cardinal) and Baldassare Peruzzi, who was taken for a nobleman when he was captured during the sack of Rome. In his life of Dello Delli, Vasari noted that, in the fifteenth century, unlike ‘today’, artists were not ashamed to paint and gild furniture. The obvious reason for this increase in shame is a rise in social status. Another sign of the separation of artists from the main body of craftsmen was the foundation of academies, such as the Accademia di Disegno in Florence (founded in the 1560s) and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (founded in the 1590s); the models for these institutions were the literary academies, which were clubs of noble amateurs. In 1400, the social status of art was low, and so were the social origins of artists; each factor helps explain the other. By 1600, however, the status of art and the origins of artists had risen together.

  There were also significant changes in patronage during the period. By the sixteenth century, it is possible to find a significant number of collectors who, like the well-documented Isabella d’Este or the Venetian patrons of Giorgione, bought works of art for their own sake, were interested in the style and the iconographic details, and were concerned to acquire a Raphael or a Titian rather than a Madonna or a St Sebastian. Artistic individualism was now profitable, and, although artists are rarely named in inventories before 1600, there is other evidence of a shift in certain circles from ‘cult images’ in the religious sense to the ‘cult of images’ for their own sake.29 There was also a shift in the balance of power between the patron and the artist. Their rising status perhaps improved the bargaining position of artists. Michelangelo, who stood up to patrons in a manner which most of his colleagues could not emulate, was the son not of a craftsman but of a Florentine magistrate. On the other hand, the increasing independence of artists, who were becoming more like poets and less like carpenters, doubtless enhanced their status. The roles of artist and patron were mutually dependent and they changed together. They were also part of a much larger network of social roles and were affected by changes in the social structure.

  These changes in the social structure may be summed up in two words, standing for two conflicting trends: ‘commercialization’ and ‘refeudalization’.

  A certain amount of evidence for commercialization has been offered in earlier chapters. Towns were growing in the fifteenth and still more rapidly in the sixteenth century. The population of Florence, for example, grew from about 40,000 in 1427 to about 70,000 in the early to mid-sixteenth century. Naples contained about 40,000 people in 1450 but more than 200,000 a century later. The growth of these and other towns involved the commercialization of agriculture. Share-cropping spread in Tuscany, for example, a system which implies that landlords were increasingly inclined to think like businessmen about profits rather than a steady income from a fixed rent. At the same time, the book market was becoming important, thanks to the invention of printing. So, as we have seen, was the market in works of art, ancient and modern, originals and reproductions alike.

  Yet this trend was to some degree offset by another, which historians describe as ‘refeudalization’ (in the wide, Marxist sense of the term ‘feudal’) or, as Braudel does, as the ‘treason of the bourgeoisie’.30 A number of wealthy merchants (how many in any given decade it is unfortunately impossible to say) shifted their investments from trade to land. The trend is most noticeable in the two cities that have concerned us most in this study, Florence and Venice, where the patricians, poised for a long time between bourgeoisie and nobility, opted by their changing style of life for the latter. In Florence, the movement was gradual, almost imperceptible in any one generation, though obvious enough if one compares the patriciate of 1600 with its equivalent in 1400 or the better-documented year 1427. In Venice, the movement was more sudden. It was after the year 1570 or thereabouts that the patricians began to switch their investments from trade to landed estates on the mainland, from neighbouring Padua to distant Friuli.31 They changed from being entrepreneurs to rentiers; from having a dominant interest in profit to a dominant interest in consumption. The elegant gestures in Florentine portraits by Bronzino and others reflect the attitudes of the sitters, who were no longer prepared to get their hands dirty as their fathers and grandfathers had done (good merchants, as Giovanni Rucellai had observed in the later fifteenth century, always have inky fingers).32 The most splendid Venetian villas, starting with Villa Maser, built by Palladio and decorated by Veronese in the early 1560s for the Barbaro family, belong to this period of the return to the land.

  Why did this change take place? It looks like an example of the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves cycle, the third-generation syndrome which the American economist W. W. Rostow called ‘the pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics’, after the Lübeck family described in a famous novel by Thomas Mann.33 As in Mann’s novel, so in Renaissance Italy one can point to examples (most obviously that of the Medici) of families ruined for trade by a humanist education; Lorenzo the Magnificent composed poems while the family bank went into decline. However, the significant change is the one that affected not only some families but a whole social group. Families had withdrawn from trade before; what was new, in Florence, Venice and elsewhere, was the lack of new families to replace them.

  Why? The fundamental explanation was probably an economic one. As a result of the discovery of America, the centre of gravity of European trade was shifting away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic. The Italians were losing their traditional role as middlemen in international trade, which was being taken over by the Portuguese, the English and, above all, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch. We have returned to the theme of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’ (above, p. 239). At the same time food prices were rising, so that, to wealthy urban Italians, land appeared an increasingly attractive investment.

  This change in the style of life of the patriciate was good for the arts in the short term but not so beneficial in the long run. The ruling class was more inclined to patronize the arts because this was part of their new aristocratic lifestyle, but in the long term the wealth which permitted them to build palaces and buy works of art dried up. The change in values – especially the emphasis on birth and the contempt for manual labour – worked against the newly risen status of the artist. There was a kind of ‘brain drain’ (brains being what an artist mixes his colours with) thanks to the diffusion of Renaissance ideals abroad and the consequent demand for Italian artists in Hungary, France, Spain, England and elsewhere. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italy, a country of merchant republics, had been as distinctive socially as she was culturally. As she came to resemble other European societies, Italy lost her cultural lead. There was also a shift of creativity from the visual arts into music, which has been explained by the decline of the city-state as well as increasing ecclesiastical control of the media.34 All the same, Italian art remained the envy of Europe until the death of Bernini in 1680.

  1 Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World.

  2 Friedländer, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism, p. 56. Cf. Pinder, Problem der Gene
ration; Peyre, Générations littéraires.

  3 Herlihy, ‘Generation in medieval history’.

  4 Mannheim, Essays, pp. 276–320, commenting on Pinder.

  5 Ramsden, 1898 Movement.

  6 Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Cf. Fubini, ‘Renaissance historian’; Hankins, ‘Baron thesis’; Molho, ‘Hans Baron’s crisis’.

  7 Critiques of Baron in Seigel, ‘Civic humanism’; Larner, Culture and Society, pp. 244ff.

  8 Burke, ‘Myth of 1453’.

  9 Bec, Italie 1500–1550, extends the notion of crisis to the whole period 1500–50.

  10 Gilbert, ‘Bernardo Rucellai’; Bec, Italie 1500–1550.

  11 Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, pp. 159–61.

  12 Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, pp. 194ff., and Savonarola: Renaissance Prophet; Fontes et al., Savonarole.

  13 Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

  14 Gilbert, ‘Venice in the crisis’.

  15 Weinstein, ‘Myth of Florence’, p. 15; cf. Ettlinger and Ettlinger, Botticelli, pp. 96ff.

  16 Valeriano, De litteratorum infelicitate; Chastel, Sack of Rome, pp. 123ff.

  17 Niccoli, Prophecy and People.

  18 Rochon, Le pouvoir et la plume.

  19 Hauser, Mannerism, called alienation ‘the key’ to that style.

  20 Chastel, Sack of Rome, pp. 169ff.

  21 Fifty members of the creative elite were born between 1360 and 1399 – 23 in Tuscany, 14 in the Veneto, only 13 from the rest of Italy. But 176 members of the elite were born between 1480 and 1519: 50 in Tuscany, 49 in the Veneto, 77 from other parts of Italy.

  22 Borsellino, Anticlassicisti; Battisti, L’antirinascimento; Grendler, Critics of the Italian World.

  23 Castelnuovo and Ginzburg, ‘Centre and periphery’; Schofield, ‘Avoiding Rome’; Humfrey, Venice and the Veneto; Michalsky, ‘Local eye’.

  24 Binni and Sapegno, Storia letteraria.

  25 Taking dated paintings as a sample, we find 5 per cent of secular paintings 1480–9; 9 per cent 1490–9; 10 per cent 1500–9; 11 per cent 1510–19; 13 per cent 1520–9; and 22 per cent 1530–9.

  26 Weise, L’ideale eroico del Rinascimento.

  27 Wölfflin, Classic Art, pp. 213ff.

  28 Burke, Popular Culture, pp. 366–81.

  29 Ferino Pagden, ‘From cult images to the cult of images’. Cf. Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 149–54.

  30 Romano, Tra due crisi. Cf. Braudel, Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, pt 2, ch. 5, section 2.

  31 Woolf, ‘Venice and the terraferma’.

  32 Rucellai, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, p. 6.

  33 Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth.

  34 Koenigsberger, ‘Decadence or shift?’.

  11

  COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS

  The explanations offered by historians – whether they admit this or not – depend on implicit comparisons, contrasts and even generalizations. The explanations advanced in this study are no exception, and it may be useful to make a few of these implied comparisons and contrasts more explicit.

  The culture of the Italian Renaissance described and analysed here has many features in common with the culture of other societies, near and remote. For example, artistic achievement and innovation was linked to civic patronage and civic pride in sixteenth-century Nuremberg as in Florence and Venice. Albrecht Dürer was asked to paint murals in the Town Hall of Nuremberg in 1521, and the post of city painter was created ten years later. The idea that a ‘crisis of liberty’ successfully surmounted is a stimulus to the arts can be illustrated not only from Florence in the early fifteenth century but from ancient Greece in the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and from England in the age of Shakespeare. As Florence beat off the threat posed by Milan, so the English defeated the superior forces of Spain and the Greeks the Persian Empire. Although Vasari was the first European to devote a book to the lives of artists (Pliny’s anecdotes about Greek artists being part of his enormous Natural History), Chang Yen-Yuan had preceded him in China with biographies of 370 painters. On the other hand, the apparent lack of concern with individual creativity shown in the organization of workshops and in some large-scale projects in Renaissance Italy has parallels with some tribal societies, such as the Tiv of Nigeria, where different people may take turns carving the same object.1

  The danger of isolating cultural traits lies in exaggerating apparent similarities and in ignoring the context in which their meaning resides. It is more illuminating, although obviously more difficult, to compare entire cultural configurations or systems. Joseph Alsop, for example, argued that the rise of the art market and of art history have occurred together in several cultures, including ancient Rome and traditional China as well as Renaissance Italy.2 The great French historian Marc Bloch made a useful distinction between two kinds of comparative history: comparisons between societies which are fundamentally alike (such as medieval France and England) and comparisons between the fundamentally unlike (such as France and Japan).3 Each is instructive, but in different ways. In the pages which follow I shall sketch two comparisons with Renaissance Italy, one of each kind: with the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and with Japan in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (or, rather less Eurocentrically, in the Genroku period of the Tokugawa era).

  THE NETHERLANDS

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Netherlands was a centre of cultural innovation which (so far as Europe was concerned) was equalled or surpassed only by Italy. As in Italy, there was a whole cluster of outstanding painters, among them Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David, Hans Memlinc, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden and Pieter Brueghel the elder. As in Italy, there was conscious innovation, a nouvelle pratique as it was called. One of the chief aims of painters was verisimilitude, and one of their chief means to this end was the employment of perspective. Again, as in Italy, the subject matter of painting was becoming more secular, and a differentiation of genres was taking place. These genres included the portrait, even more popular than in Italy; the still-life, a sixteenth-century development; the landscape, from the miniatures in fifteenth-century manuscripts to the work of Joachim Patenir of Antwerp, described by Dürer as a ‘good landscape painter’; and scenes from everyday life, such as the card-players and chess-players of Lucas van Leyden or the markets painted by Pieter Aertsen.

  In other respects, however, Italian and ‘Flemish’ culture, as it is convenient to call it (although Flanders was technically only a part of the Netherlands), were rather dissimilar. As the art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out, a comparison of cultural innovation in the two regions reveals a ‘chiastic pattern’. In Italy, innovation was greatest in architecture; then came sculpture, then painting and, finally, music. In the Netherlands, by contrast, innovation was greatest of all in music in the age of Dufay, Binchois, Busnois, Ockeghem and Josquin des Près. In the second place came painting. Sculpture was a long way behind; no major figure succeeded Claus Sluter, who died in 1406 (the rivals of the Italian sculptors came from southern Germany and worked in wood). Architecture was relatively traditional in manner; a typical example is the Town Hall at Louvain, built in 1448 in ornate Gothic style.4

  To focus more sharply on painting is to reveal other differences between the two regions. Frescoes were less important in the Netherlands (where large windows left little wall space in churches) and miniatures in manuscripts more important. The most famous contrast between the painters of Italy and the Netherlands was made at the time, by Michelangelo:

  They paint in Flanders only to deceive the outward eye [vista exterior] … Their painting is of textiles, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting, and finally without any substance
or nerve.5

  The criticism is unfair but revealing – in its very unfairness – of the values of Michelangelo and of Florentine visual culture, in which idealization and the heroic were central, while the illusion of solidity mattered more than the illusion of space. The contrast did not prevent Italians of the period from admiring and buying works by painters such as Hans Memlinc, Hugo van der Goes or Rogier van der Weyden.6

  There were economic and social as well as cultural parallels between Italy and the Netherlands. As a fifteenth-century Spanish traveller put it, ‘two cities compete with each other for commercial supremacy, Bruges in Flanders in the West and Venice in the East.’ These cities were set in the most highly urbanized parts of Europe. Around the year 1500, in the provinces of Flanders and Brabant, as much as two-thirds of the population lived in towns. As in Italy, the commercialization of agriculture consequent on the growth of towns led to the disappearance of serfdom earlier than elsewhere. As in Italy, the textile industry was of great importance for export-led growth, and within the industry there was a shift towards production for the luxury market, as in the case of the tapestries made in Arras, Lille and Tournai. In the Netherlands, too, the peak period for the visual arts coincided with the peak in the development of the luxury industries.7