by Michael Haag
CHAPTER FIVE
Humanism: the Rediscovery of a Better World
When Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks travel east from Italy to Istanbul, it’s not just the route of the Black Death that they’re tracing in reverse. Despite all the horror and devastation caused by the infected rats who came from the East, the learning and ideas that the Byzantine Greeks brought to Florence from Constantinople – as Istanbul was known before it fell to the Turks in 1453 – were of far more importance to mankind.
REFUGEES FROM THE EAST
The transfer of knowledge from East to West had been going on for some time even before the Turkish conquest. Scholars, artists, philosophers and intellectuals from the mortally wounded Byzantine Empire made their way to Italy, bringing the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans that had been preserved in Constantinople, but lost with the barbarian invasions in the West. To the extent that medieval thinkers had been interested in antiquity until then, it was to discern a divine plan that vindicated the teachings of the Church.
Now however, and in Florence especially, the realisation grew that the Greeks and Romans had inhabited a superior civilisation, and that they had lived the good life without the aid of divine revelation and supernatural sanctions, and without a faith that set the origin and destiny of man apart from the natural world.
Dante, though seemingly embracing the doctrines of Christian faith, had already begun to assert something of this new outlook. No one before him in the Middle Ages would have declared himself the equal of Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil, nor obliquely protested their confinement to Limbo.
HUMANISM AND TRANSHUMANISM
The knowledge that came from Constantinople was called humanism. It was the realisation that the proper study for man was man himself, and his place in nature; it was a quest for self-awareness and fulfilment. Humanism was the idea that lay at the heart of the Renaissance.
The irony of the journey made by Langdon and Sienna to Istanbul is that they are drawn there by the actions of a man who declares himself to be a kind of humanist, a Transhumanist as he calls himself, wanting to use advances in knowledge to improve mankind by genetic engineering – to create posthumans. In Dan Brown’s Inferno, Bertrand Zobrist is one of those Transhumanists who thinks he knows what’s good for the world. Without regard for any opinion other than his own, he implements his solution to world ‘overpopulation’ by launching a modern-day Black Death of sorts, albeit without the death or pain. It’s merely the denial of personal responsibility and human fulfilment – the exact opposite of what humanism means.
Giotto’s tower and Brunelleschi’s dome, the twin treasures of Florence’s Duomo.
BRUNELLESCHI’S JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
The Florentine journey towards humanism can be illustrated in the life of Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), who’s most famous for constructing the great dome that crowns the cathedral of the city, Santa Maria del Fiore, known simply as the Duomo. Until the development of new structural materials in the modern era, Brunelleschi’s dome was the largest in the world. It remains the largest masonry dome ever built.
But before he could build his great cathedral dome, Brunelleschi had to undertake a journey of discovery, a journey into the past that would show him the way to the future. A journey that was part of the making of the Renaissance.
Brunelleschi was born and raised in Florence, in the Piazza degli Agli just a short walk west of the half-built Duomo, where construction had been going on since Dante’s time. From an early age, the boy was fascinated by the nearby building works, by the hoists and cranes used to raise marble and sandstone blocks to the heights of the basilica, and showed a remarkable talent for solving mechanical problems. His early education was directed towards mathematics, and when he reached the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. In those days goldsmiths were supreme among artisans, their training and their talents placing them well above the rest.
As an apprentice goldsmith, Brunelleschi learned a variety of skills, technical and artistic, from melting and casting metals to engraving silver, decorating with gold leaf, setting precious stones and inventing new designs. Within a few years, however, his talents were overspilling the bounds of the goldsmith’s art, and he extended his activities to the decorative inlay of statues, to creating works in low relief, and then to making clocks. He then added sculpture to his repertoire, guided by his close friend and fellow apprentice goldsmith, the sculptor Donatello, with whom he became inseparable for much of his youth. In 1398, at the age of twenty-one, Brunelleschi completed his apprenticeship and was accepted as a master goldsmith.
THE GATES OF PARADISE
Three years later, Brunelleschi became famous throughout Florence owing to his part in a competition whose purpose was to avert the plague. Every ten years or so, the Black Death would revisit the city, most recently in the summer of 1400 when it killed as many as twelve thousand people – about a fifth of the population. The cause not being understood, people sought what remedies they could in the face of the unknown. Most practically, those with means abandoned their homes for the purer air on the heights of Fiesole, or elsewhere in the surrounding countryside. The majority who could only stay in the city resorted to such preventatives as burning strongly scented herbs and other substances, shattering the air with the blasts of firearms or the violent clanging of church bells, or parading a portrait of the Virgin Mary, supposedly painted by St Luke, through the streets.
The notion that Florence was suffering for its sins prompted the Guild of Cloth Merchants to make an offering to whatever outraged divine forces were at work. In 1401, it decided to commission a set of bronze doors for the north side of the Baptistery, the ancient octagonal church of San Giovanni in whose font every Florentine child was brought to salvation in Christ. The twenty-eight panels on the doors were to be filled with scenes from the life of Jesus. Each candidate for the job, however, was asked to submit a trial panel on the theme of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, immediately relevant to plague-fearing Florence with its tale of delivery from imminent death. Seven candidates were selected by the guild, all of them goldsmiths and sculptors, and all of them Tuscans. One was Donatello, another Brunelleschi, a third Lorenzo Ghiberti, all of whom were still in their early twenties.
The Jacob and Esau panel on the Gates of Paradise.
According to Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, when their proposals were compared ‘all were most beautiful and different from one another’, but the best was that of Ghiberti. Not that the judges were prepared to let Brunelleschi walk away; they considered his submission so fine that they asked him to share the commission to work on the bronze doors with Ghiberti. Brunelleschi refused, preferring to be first in his own art than equal or a second in a shared work.
For the next twenty-two years Ghiberti worked on the north doors of the Baptistery. There was no question when he finished but that he should also do the east doors, the ones facing the entrance to the Duomo, which took a further twenty-seven years. When Michelangelo saw the east doors a century later he declared them ‘fit to be the Gates of Paradise’ – the same ‘Gates of Paradise’ that appear as a clue in Dan Brown’s Inferno, and though which Langdon and Sienna Brooks pass to enter the Baptistery to decode the message inside Dante’s death mask.
BRUNELLESCHI REDISCOVERS ROME
Of far greater importance to the development of European architecture and art, however, was what became of Brunelleschi during the next decade or so. After losing the competition he vowed never to sculpt anything again, and went off to Rome with Donatello. There his imagination was captured by the Pantheon, a great rotunda that was originally built to honour all the gods during the reign of Augustus in the first century BC, and rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian in about AD 125. In continuous use since its inception, first as a pagan temple and then from the seventh century as the Roman Catholic church of St Mary and the Martyrs, it was the largest domed structure ever built.
Brunell
eschi’s interest in the city, and curiosity about the past, was something new for those times. He and Donatello spent so many hours exploring the ancient ruins, and unearthing fallen masonry and broken statues, that they gained a nefarious reputation as treasure hunters or worse – practitioners of geomancy, one of magic’s seven forbidden arts – in an age when it was still considered an ill omen to uncover pagan remains. They were rediscovering a civilisation greater than their own, however, and their intellectual appetites were keen.
Brunelleschi schooled himself in classical architecture, measuring the columns, capitals and entablatures of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, and determining the precise ratios of column height to diameter and the proportions between parts that governed their structural strength and their aesthetic effect. He drew every sort of building – basilicas, aqueducts, baths, colosseums, amphitheatres and temples of every shape, round, square and octagonal – and noted how they were held together by vaults, rings and ties. ‘So zealous was his study’, wrote Vasari, that ‘his intellect became very well able to see Rome, in imagination, as she was when she was not in ruins.’
A NEW VISION
Brunelleschi returned permanently to Florence in 1417, and moved into his family home near the Duomo. By now, he had become renowned for his experiments in linear perspective. If knowledge of perspective existed in the classical world, it had long since vanished from Western art; most likely Brunelleschi developed his grasp of the concept through his carefully measured drawings of ancient remains. Around 1413, during one of his visits to Florence from Rome, he demonstrated the technique of conveying three-dimensional perspective in two-dimensional form. His famous experiment involved a mirror and a painting he made of the Baptistery of San Giovanni from just inside the central portal of the cathedral – the view being of those ‘Gates of Paradise’ again.
Brunelleschi repeated the experiment by painting the Palazzo Vecchio from the northwest, taking in the Loggia and much of the Piazza della Signoria. By analysing the paintings and demonstrating their geometrical principles, Brunelleschi showed how anyone could render painted objects in three-dimensional perspective. Very quickly the technique was learned, and the concept took hold, spreading throughout Europe. A new visual reality was born.
BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME
All this while, however, during the years he spent studying classical architecture in Rome, developing his knowledge of perspective, applying himself to practical building activities, and poring over books and engaging in conversations with learned figures in the city to advance his mathematical and geometrical knowledge, Brunelleschi was preparing himself for the great task for which he had been waiting his whole life. The task he had come to believe that he alone was capable of accomplishing – to crown the unfinished cathedral of Florence that stood near his home.
The foundation stone of the cathedral had been laid in 1296, at just about the time that Dante had been completing his Vita Nuova. Now, well over a century later, in 1418, the Guild of Wool Merchants, the richest in the city, who had made themselves responsible for the construction of the cathedral, at last took the decision to start work on the dome. A model of the cathedral bearing a dome, created by an earlier architect, had stood in an aisle of the church since 1367, and a drum to support the dome had been in place for the last five years. No one, however, actually knew how to span such a vast space; to meet these optimistic specifications would require the highest and widest dome ever constructed anywhere in the world.
Everyone understood that the outward thrust of such a dome, unless contained, would cause it, quite literally, to explode. Buttresses like those that supported the great vaults of gothic cathedrals were ruled out as being barbarous German and French inventions, not in harmony with Italian traditions. And then there was the fear that the weight of so vast a dome would cause it to come crashing down. Even if the completed dome could support itself, in the same way that an arch is self-supporting once its keystone is in place, how would it be supported while it was still incomplete? While an unfinished arch can be supported by a frame until the keystone is put in place, there was not enough wood in the whole of Tuscany to construct the massive scaffolding that would be needed to prevent the ever-higher and inwardly inclining structure from collapsing.
A cross-section of Brunelleschi’s dome.
With better luck than he had had in the competition to make the Baptistery doors, Brunelleschi was chosen in 1418 to build the cathedral dome. Quite simply, no one else could do it, and the selection committee of the Guild of Wool Merchants decided that if it could be done at all, they would have to take a chance on Brunelleschi.
Brunelleschi worked on site almost every day until his dome was completed in 1436. He knew the details of masonry construction, and he held his workmen to the most exacting standards; the success of the dome depended on the often extremely complicated geometry of seemingly simple tasks.
To build better and faster, he invented new devices such as multispeed hoists with ratcheting failsafes to prevent falling loads; a hundred years later, Leonardo da Vinci found inspiration in the fertility of Brunelleschi’s imagination.
Even modern engineers with the help of computer modelling find it difficult to understand the complex physics that went into Brunelleschi’s dome. The man carried a wealth of personal experience and a universe of mathematical and geometrical concepts in his head, and his memory was said to be prodigious.
SUMMER EVENING CONVERSATIONS
Even as he was building the dome, Brunelleschi’s mind continued to venture far and wide. Around 1425, when in his late forties, he came to know Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482), a brilliant young Florentine mathematician who was then about twenty-eight years old.
In the warm summer evenings, Toscanelli would invite his friends to join him for dinner in his garden. There Brunelleschi would listen to conversations on subjects ranging from astronomy to geometry and philosophy, and himself contribute with his knowledge of Dante, quoting from the poet extensively, remarking on his use of measure and proportion in the Divine Comedy, and applying his own architectural instincts to calculate the precise dimensions of Dante’s Paradise.
Brunelleschi’s fascination with Dante may have had much to do with a shared interest in geometry, and especially the metaphysical symbolism of circles and domes.
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GREEKS
Brunelleschi received much of his advanced knowledge in Euclidean geometry courtesy of Toscanelli. Toscanelli in turn felt rewarded by their friendship, which he later called the greatest in his life – a remarkable tribute from a man who knew just about everybody in the cultural and intellectual world of Renaissance Florence. Their shared passions included an interest in Greek geographical and mathematical works, which they tracked down and studied.
When the Greek philosopher Gemistus Plethon was attending the Council of Florence in 1439, Toscanelli made a point of paying especial attention to what he had to say about the travels, cartography and writings of the first century BC/AD Greek geographer Strabo, who until then was unknown in Italy. Toscanelli himself was keen to advance the cause of exploration, and made maps of his own whose accuracy he refined by his readings of the sun and the stars.
THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
It was thanks to Brunelleschi that Toscanelli made his greatest contribution to the age of exploration, which began in the fifteenth century with the great Portuguese voyages down the coast of Africa and out into the Atlantic, reaching the Azores in 1456. A spur to these explorations was the strangulation by the advancing Turks of the overland trade routes that Europeans had long used to reach the Far East. With the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the overland trade was choked off altogether. Toscanelli had the novel idea that in order to reach the East, Europeans could sail west.
Brunelleschi died in 1446, but by 1436 he had accomplished his great dome. As an old man, in 1475, Toscanelli climbed to the top of his friend’s marvellous constructi
on. Inspired by its height and stability, he turned it into a gigantic astronomical device, fixing a bronze plate in the opening at the top so that the sun’s rays would pass through an aperture in the plate and fall upon a gauge set into the floor three hundred feet below.
A MAP FOR CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Ostensibly, Toscanelli’s giant sundial served an ecclesiastical purpose, in providing a more accurate calculation of Easter and other holy dates. But it served a greater cause than that.
With his more precise measurements of the motion of the sun, Toscanelli was able to draw up extremely accurate tables that enabled sailors venturing into the Atlantic to determine their exact latitude, and thus maintain a course across the trackless sea. Based also on his readings, and on interviews with Portuguese sailors who had gone round Africa to India, Toscanelli drew up a map of the world that placed Asia within reach of a ship sailing westwards across the Atlantic. In 1481, he even sent a letter and his map to an ambitious Genoese sea captain called Christopher Columbus. That was enough to encourage Columbus to take the chance, and thus discover that along the way to China, an entire New World lay in wait.