The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  The first northerner to apply himself seriously to what was going on in the arts in Italy was Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the painter son of a Nuremberg goldsmith. An engraver himself, he caught glimpses of Italian ideas through prints, and in 1494, aged twenty-three, he went to Venice himself. He progressed slowly south on foot, punctuating his journey by a series of delightful watercolors, recording his amazement at the light and color of the south, the olive groves and the strange architecture (his view of Arco, painted on his return journey, is the first European landscape masterpiece done in water-color). He learned a great deal in Italy, and he returned again in 1505–7 to learn more. Later in life he set down his impressions in theoretical writings, especially his Treatise on Measurement. Germany, he said, was full of budding painters, “able boys” who were simply dumped on a master and told to copy him. “They were taught without any rational principle and solely according to the old usage. And thus they grew up in ignorance, like a wild and unpruned tree.” In Italy, he said, he learned the importance of mathematics in art: the need to measure every part of the human body to get accuracy, the need to apply oneself to perspective scientifically, so that properly drawn bodies could be placed realistically in space. Dürer added that he learned from the writings of Pliny that the masters of the antique age—Apelles, Protogenes, Phidias, Praxiteles and others—had studied the crafts of painting and sculpture systematically and with science, and had even written books about their skills. But these had been lost, and so had what he called “the rational foundations of art.” Hence “art was extinct until it came to light again [in Italy] one century and a half ago.” Dürer, a modest but determined man, said he aimed to show people outside Italy how art ought to be conducted, however limited his own skills and knowledge, and he invited critics to point out “the errors of my present work” so that “even so, I shall have been the cause of the truth coming to light.” We see in Dürer a man who had acquired the true Renaissance perspective: the rejection of medieval art as false; the need to examine the work of antiquity both in practice, by studying its survivals, and in theory, by reading the texts; the concentration on the human form and its exact representation by scientific study; and the mastering of perspective.

  It is important to emphasize what Dürer actually said about the influence of Italian standards on northern art, for recent historical scholarship has tended to suggest that artistic interaction north and south of the Alps constituted a two-way process, rather than a simple acquisition of Italian ideas by still-medieval northerners. This was the message of the important Lorenzo Lotto exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, in 1997, the display of Renaissance art in the Netherlands at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 1998, and the exhibition “Renaissance Venice and the North” held at the Palazzo Grassi in 1999–2000. The weighty catalogs that accompanied these exhibitions presented the evidence of a northern contribution to Italian Renaissance art in considerable detail. But Dürer was a practicing artist, alive and traveling on both sides of the Alps at the time, not an academic writing half a millennium later, and he was quite clear about the relationship between north and south in art. For him, a German painter, a visit to Italy was an artistic revelation, what we would call a culture shock.

  Dürer was unusually thoughtful and articulate for a painter, and in effect tells us how the Italian Renaissance changed him; we can trace the consequences in his work. But in this as in other respects, he was unique. His contemporary Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528) gives us no hint of the way in which the new perspective ideas, and the rendering of the human form “by science,” influenced his Isenheim altarpiece (1515), as they clearly did. Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) made splendid and highly individualistic use of the Italian revival of classical mythology, but was silent about his aims. But sometimes a work of art itself speaks. In 1506, while Dürer was on his second visit to Italy, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) was painting an altar triptych, The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, using oils on limewood, which is now in Dresden. Catherine, one of the most popular saints among medieval artists, was a highborn lady of fourth-century Alexandria. She declined a marriage proposal from the emperor Maxentius, successfully disputed with fifty pagan philosophers on the merits of Christianity and was condemned to be broken on the wheel. But it was the wheel that was broken by a divine thunderbolt, and many of the pagans were roasted with it. In the end they had to behead the brave lady.

  Cranach treats this fantastic story with a mesmeric mélange of realism and extravagance. The scene is set under a threatening German sky, lit by lightning. Wittenberg, shown in brilliant detail, is in the top left-hand corner of the central panel, and Cranach portrays the elite of the city, professors, theologians and nobility, among the crowd surrounding Catherine, who are being converted by her pious eloquence. The great humanist Schwarzenberg falls from his horse. Frederick the Wise looks puzzled. Friends and patrons, lovingly depicted, are swept into the catastrophe, their souls saved, their bodies about to be destroyed. The colors are light, fresh, dazzling. Flowers, trees, ferns and exotic grasses abound. In the midst of it all, Catherine, beautiful and undismayed, kneels serenely, awaiting her death and sanctification with confidence. She is dressed in her best clothes, as a bride of Christ: a superb gown of scarlet velvet with heavy gold trimmings, exquisite Brussels lace on her wrists, rubies and pearls hanging on her breast, with a gold collar around her shoulders. Her red hair is carefully curled. Her executioner, in the act of drawing his sword, is just as elegant. His handsome blond face is that of Pfeffinger, the king’s counselor. He is tall, slim, riotously dressed in the latest fashion, with striped hose in black, red and white, gold silk ribbons tied just below the knees, and a slashed gold silk jacket embroidered with flowers. His page is equally chic, and in one of the side panels, an enchanting boy, modeled on John Frederick, the king’s son, distributes flowers to three beautiful saints, St. Dorothy, St. Agnes and St. Kunigund, having already decorated himself with a coronet of blossoms. Three equally luscious ladies, St. Barbara, St. Ursula and St. Margaret, stand in the other side panel, accompanied by a domesticated dragon and under the protection of Coburg Castle. This wonderful work, Cranach’s masterpiece, breathes joy and godliness, despite its sensational subject. It is an incongruous but somehow deeply satisfying mixture of medieval, northern values with the thrilling new spirit from the south, a hymn of happiness to the German discovery of the Renaissance. But, produced as it was at the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome, it would have had Italian sophisticates roaring with laughter. It was the kind of painting that Michelangelo dismissed as “external accuracy [but] done without reason or true art, without symmetry or proportion,” a view that was reflected a generation or so later in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.

  And if the northerners, Dürer excepted, were largely silent about the spread of the Renaissance, so also were those Italians who carried it north of the Alps. Pietro Torrigiano (c. 1472–1528), the Florentine sculptor, went to England to create, for Henry VIII, the tomb images of his father and mother in Westminster Abbey in 1511–18, but left no record of his visit. We know (from Vasari) that he broke Michelangelo’s nose in a brawl, but not how he took Renaissance sculpture to London. Leonardo’s life in France is fairly well documented, but he did not describe how he carried the Renaissance with him, nor did Rosso Fiorentino or Francesco Primaticcio when they decorated the great gallery at Fontainebleau for François I.

  Printing and gunpowder did the work, in all probability, more effectively than anything else. We have already noted the extraordinarily rapid spread of printing in Europe. And printing brought with it comparatively cheap engravings, which disseminated Italian notions of the human form and perspective, and the delights of classical mythology, throughout European society, and especially to the workshops of craftsmen and artists. From the early years of the sixteenth century, Renaissance visual techniques and patterns are to be found in pottery and silverware, in elaborate goldsmiths’ work, in tapes
try, silks, rich cloths, even in furniture, all over Europe.

  Gunpowder encouraged campaigning over long distances, and in the wake of armies came curious princes eager to collect. The French were in Italy from the mid-1490s, ravaging and looting, but also learning and acquiring. They were followed by the imperial Germans, who marched up and down the peninsula, knocking over duchies and principalities, but also keeping their eyes open for the new. States were growing more powerful, with access to more money to spend on selfglorification, so architecture, as the most visible of the arts to all, led the way in using Italian Renaissance forms and decorative features to enhance the splendor of foreign princes. Between the 1490s and the 1550s, the French crown grew rapidly in strength and flexed its muscles not only in war but in building. François I was one of the most extravagant builders of all time, and along the banks of the Loire he imported Renaissance ideas in profusion and transformed them into French castle-palaces of great size and elaboration. Chambord in particular became one of the most remarkable buildings in Europe. These palaces had to be adorned and filled with beauty. So in the wake of the builders came the decorators and painters, the furniture makers and tapissiers.

  The rise of the Habsburgs was also a prime factor in the spread of the Renaissance. Charles V, ruler of Austria and the Netherlands, emperor of Germany and king of Spain and its dependencies, was something approaching a world ruler and an art patron on a magnificent scale. To him, art had no frontiers, Europe was a cultural unity, and artists of all kinds were recruited wherever they lived, and sped at his bidding. In the heart of the old Moorish palace of Granada, acquired by Spain in 1492 when the Moors were expelled, he set the stamp of the Italian Renaissance by erecting an incongruous classical building, a columned circle within a square, to show he was master. And, later, in the Palace of the Escorial outside Madrid, he created an enormous complex in which ideas imported from Renaissance Italy were transmuted into dramatic Spanish forms.

  Italian ideas penetrated central and eastern Europe, in some cases well before the sixteenth century. It was in Hungary, for instance, that buildings in the style of the Renaissance made their first appearance outside Italy. King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (reigned 1458–90) was a warrior and conqueror and an enthusiast for the antique. He looked back to the Roman Empire for inspiration and to Italians to serve him in re-creating some of its aspects. In 1467 he imported Rodolfo Fioravanti, known as “Aristotle,” who had worked on the Vatican obelisk with Alberti and was “skilled in moving heavy objects.” He was an engineer and military architect, and he built a bridge in Buda, the Hungarian capital. Corvinus got Pollaiuolo to design the drapes for his throne room, Caradosso to produce gold altarpieces for the cathedral at Esztergom, and Filippo Lippi to supply two beautiful panels, according to Vasari. Many Italian artist-craftsmen were active in Hungary in the years after Corvinus’s death. Thus the Bakócz Chapel at Esztergom Cathedral (built from 1506) is one of the most dazzling examples of High Renaissance architecture outside Italy.

  The expatriate Italian artists, who were immensely adaptable, proved able to work successfully in alien vernaculars, adapting them to Renaissance models. Thus Fioravanti went on from Buda to Russia in 1474, and began work on the Dormition Cathedral inside the Kremlin. Earlier efforts by local craftsmen to erect this building had failed. Fioravanti produced a mason’s level, a compass and drawing tools, and by superior science, as well as art—he used brick and cement instead of sand and gravel for wall filling, as well as modern stonecutting techniques and hoisting machines—he had completed the building by 1479. A generation later, another Italian, Alessio Novi, built the church of St. Michael the Archangel, also within the Kremlin walls (1505–9). The Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland likewise imported Italians, and had local artists trained in the Renaissance manner. Thus in the cathedral of Wawel Castle in Kraków, the splendid Renaissance tomb of Jan Olbracht (1502–5) is the joint work of Francesco Fiorentino and Stanislas Stoss, and the grand courtyard of the castle, built a little later, is also by Francesco working with a local “Master Benedikt.” These are only some of many examples of the early penetration by the Renaissance of eastern central Europe collected in a recent study.1

  By the end of the 1520s, of course, Renaissance ideas and forms of art were being re-created or adapted in most parts of Europe and even in the New World. Titian, coming to the height of his powers, was not just an Italian but a European artist. As we have seen, by 1500 literary humanism was a pan-European movement, and where humanist books penetrated, Renaissance art was sure to follow soon. However, by this date in history, the Renaissance was being affected not only by its own internal modulations but by external events. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italy had not exactly been tranquil—on the contrary, there had been periodic and often highly destructive fighting between the leading cities for local and regional hegemony—but there had been comparatively little interference from abroad. It was during this period of Italian independence that urban life flourished and prospered and the Renaissance took hold. However, in September 1494, Charles VIII of France, at the invitation of the duke of Milan, entered Italy with an army to conquer the Kingdom of Naples, and brought Italy’s political isolation to an end. Thereafter, Italy was rent by two ravenous foreign dogs, Valois France and Habsburg Germany, until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559. The fighting was periodic rather than continuous and it did not affect the whole of Italy. But it was on a scale the country had never known before, involving massive use of cannon and the consequent need to build expensive walls and forts round the towns.

  Charles VIII’s expedition had an immediate effect on Florence, for it led to the flight of the Medici, the “liberation” of Pisa from Florence by Charles and his triumphant entry into Florence itself. He did not stay long, hurrying on to Naples and failure, but his inruption introduced a period of turmoil that produced the iconoclastic mission of Savonarola and his unseemly trial and incineration. Florence continued to produce great art and artists, but it was “never glad confident morning again.” From the perspective of history, we can now see that the Florentine Renaissance came to a climax in the quarter century before the French invasion, when it truly was a city made for artists.2

  The center of artistic activity then shifted to Rome under a series of munificent popes, and especially Julius II and his Medici successor, Leo X. This was the great Roman age of Raphael and Michelangelo. But the French kings continued their forays into Italy, and rising Spanish-German power found a champion in the young emperor Charles V. François I was decisively defeated and taken prisoner at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, making the Germans masters of Italy, and two years later Charles’s army of mercenaries, somewhat against his wishes, entered and sacked Rome. That, it could be said, ended the High Renaissance, and the Roman cultural climate was not the same again for half a century. Wars, rumors of wars and even occupations of cities did not necessarily bring artistic activity to an end. Indeed, it is remarkable how often artists were able to carry on, discharging important commissions, during periods of turmoil. But the loss of Italian self-respect that the constant foreign invasions produced, and the periodic impoverishment of large parts of the countryside, had their inevitable consequences. It is not surprising, therefore, that after the sack of Rome artistic leadership in Italy tended to go to Venice, which though involved in the various coalitions that invasion forced the cities to put together was itself spared direct attack. But the truth is, by midcentury, the absolute predominance that Italy had once exercised in the arts was passing, as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and even England began to acquire cultural self-confidence. Thus at the time when the ideas of the Italian Renaissance were spreading with increasing speed all over Europe, the source itself was burning low.

  There was the growing religious factor too. Medieval Europe was in some ways a totalitarian society, in that the Catholic Church permitted no competitors in giving intellectual and spiritual guidance, employing the civic power to su
ppress heresy by force. In theory it sought to control every aspect of cultural activity. In practice it was often surprisingly liberal or comatose, and artists went on with their own visual and decorative schemes unsupervised. Nudity was not on the whole permitted by public opinion, but an enormous spread of Christian mythology and miraculous happenings, much of it mere folklore without a biblical sanction at all, grew from its roots in popular credulity to provide artists with wondrous subject matter. Toward the close of the Middle Ages, these fantastic and magical tales were intertwined with symbolism and allegory to produce strange visions, as in the works of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), though it is well to realize that Bosch’s appeal to his contemporaries was not the same as to us: Henry III of Nassau bought his Garden of Earthly Delights not so much because he thought it edifying but because he and his guests found it “curious” and funny.3

  The painters of the Renaissance benefited greatly from this freedom or laxity. They were of course subject to the detailed directions or whims of their ecclesiastical patrons, who were often persnickety, as many surviving contracts testify. But there was no central control telling artists what to do or what not to do. The popes themselves were sometimes humanists, as witness Pius II (pope 1458–64), or were generally sympathetic to the aims of the Renaissance. That was true of all the popes from Sixtus IV, elected in 1471, to Clement VII, elected in 1523. Bearing in mind that the Renaissance was in one important respect a celebration of the artistic and intellectual virtues of pagan antiquity and their application to modern civilized life, the degree of tolerance was remarkable. That the head of the Roman Catholic Church should not only permit, but commission and pay for, scenes of pagan mythology was taken for granted as a rule, and only a few hardy spirits, like Savonarola, questioned it. His fate can therefore be seen as a victory for Renaissance values, though it is doubtful if Botticelli saw it that way.