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History 119, European Cultural History 1500-1815 - Summary
Lecture #2 - The Italian Renaissance - 44:02 min (mp3)
(Save As or file will load and play in the page, load time depends on connection speed)Even before the rise of the nation state in the West to which we now come, Italy had held a peculiar position in Europe. Unlike the rest of Europe, it included a modern rather than medieval aspect: power was centered in the cities and towns; unlike the rest of Europe, they never drastically or completely declined. The town dominated the countryside rather than vice versa. The towns had a great measure of political independence by playing the Holy Roman Emperor against the pope and thus they became independent by 1500 in central and northern Italy. Also, these “city states” came to play a central economic role: the Italian communes were the bankers of Europe, and invented many of the mechanisms of modern capitalist finance. These cities developed rather rapidly; Rome doubled its population to 110,000, Florence, to 17,000 people. This urbanism is the setting for the Renaissance. To understand it we must look at the internal development in these city states: from republicanism in the Middle Ages to despotism in the Renaissance, represented by the Medici in Florence, or the Visconti in Milan. Sometimes, they were ruled by outright despotism, sometimes by an economic oligarchy.
In these towns, nearly half of the population lived below the poverty line, and as a result, city politics tended to be explosive; bread riots became almost respectable and were tinged with religious fanaticism. These riots gave the despots their chance: many allied themselves with the masses and were thus swept to power; others used the riots to call in foreign troops, like the Milan Visconti family. In these two ways, they managed to establish themselves all over Italy.
By 1500 there was scarcely a commune left in Italy. Internal dissension was bound to weaken the structure of the city; the first thing the despots did was offer bread and peace, and second, they destroyed all independent organizations of the city, like the commercial guilds. The despots developed within a vacuum of political tradition. They furthered art and literature for their own glory, and sponsored public spectacles, for example by Leonardo da Vinci. The result was a decline of the civic spirit. The great political issue was how to renew civil society. For the intellectuals this seemed typical of degeneration. They blamed the despotism very largely on traditional Christianity. Despots made an alliance with the masses, disenfranchising intellectuals. Mercenaries, loyal to the despot, not the city, took the part of the citizen army.
A general quest for renewal resulted: a renewal of politics, morals, of everything. It is under these circumstances that the intellectuals in Italy began the “rebirth.” This was not a real rebirth, but a new political and moral attitude toward culture in general. Communal and intellectual classes were disarmed; their idea of renewal became centered upon art and literature. Patriotism in the city state centered on art and literature: guilds and intellectuals were excluded from politics. Thus, Petrarch was crowned poet laureate, with poets taking part in competitions in art. These were competitors towards a renewal of society in the one terrain in which they could still have some influence. This renewal would make for a new kind of political participation.
Intellectuals looked for new morals in classical sources, above all the Roman republic, a republic which had not yet declined and still produced great literature and art (not of course the Roman Empire). They not only wanted to imitate the classics, but they used them for inspiration. They were the first to develop the concept of “historical distance” (and also perspective in art). They developed a critical attitude towards their own institutions on the basis of ancient Roman documents. Lorenzo Valla discovered on the basis of those documents that the “Donation of Constantine” the claim of the church to Italian land rested on a forgery. Out of this idea of renewal and of taking the classics as a model came an attitude that was more modern than medieval and this moved Europe ahead. First, there was a renewed stress on the beauty of nature and on the importance of man as the handiwork of God. They were not rationalists and certainly not secularist, but they did reject Christian ideology; instead, they favored the idea of “pantheism,” of a ubiquitous God who did not need an intermediary. To realize this would lead to a renewal of society. God was not typified in theology but in a renewed sense of beauty and purpose. They were still concerned with the immortality of the soul, but they went to Plato as their source of inspiration, and from him developed an idea of beauty.
Renaissance painters still used Christian motifs and motives, but with something else in view: a new concentration on the beauty of man and nature. The Renaissance idea of beauty came from the classics: beauty was proportion. In order to find the proportions of beauty, they studied nature. The beauty of man was a direct reflection of God. Dante, Petrarch, and others made a game of assembling ideally proportioned women in their cities, accompanied by public discussions of love: Platonic love. This was love not based on sexual attraction, but on a theory of beauty, proportion, and a reflection of God that would lead to moral and social renewal. Sculpture and painting, writing in the vernacular tongue, were seen as means of national regeneration. Dante’s defense of writing in Italian was part of this. (Herbert Marcuse today does much the same thing).
These pioneering intellectuals were called “the humanists.” Who were they? They were intellectuals concerned with a revival of classical values, a revival of moral values that would lead to a revival of political ethics that had gone wrong under Christianity. Petrarch coined the term “Dark Ages”, the last outcome of which was the despot. They wanted to renew the classical virtues to outshine the Christian piety that had failed. Devotion to parents, country and the civil spirit were important, as was action, not contemplation. The concept of chivalry was no longer important, but illustrious deeds to fulfill the individual were essential. This could go and did go to excess, but it was an important new idea. In addition, the purity of the Latin style, not the bible, would lead to renewal.
The importance of these artists and intellectuals was that they started the first secularly oriented movement in Europe and put man at the center. Virtue was no longer the Christian virtue, but derived from man acting on the classical examples. They shared an acceptance of the present situation with the belief that with moral regeneration you could overcome despotism. The humanists were optimists, because they believed in the basic goodness of man and rejected the Christian idea of original sin. Another great belief was in education, centered on cultural activity, on the classics, in order to reform man and society. The humanists founded schools all over Europe. All the figures with whom we will deal were educated in these schools, with one exception: Luther.
A famous book, “The Courtier” by Baldassare Castiglione put forth the idea of the new “perfect man”. But his was a doctrine for intellectuals; it equated perfection and learning; it equated its optimism with cultural elitism. The vast majority of the population did not take part. But at times, the universes of the humanists and the vast masses with their millenarianism came together, most famously in the episode connected with Savonarola (1494-1498). Florence was besieged by the French king. The Florentines received the following prophecy from Savonarola: because Florence is directly under Christ, Charles VIII will bypass Florence and not sack it. Savonarola, through his prophecy, became the dominant force in Florentine life. It typified the kind of prophecy that appealed to the population at that time, seeing evil as an inevitability that would come before good. The Church cleansed by Charles VIII would bring about the Second Coming. The humanists supported Savonarola, but eventually he failed, and was burned at the stake by his enemies in Florence and Rome. Yet his ideas and example would not vanish; Savonarola’s Florence was an experiment to build a “New Jerusalem” on Earth to which Christ would come back. Another example of this took place in 1534, in Muenster in Westphalia. In England, a hymn that dates from this period desires “To build Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant strand.” All of this shows a great millenarian urge to get out of misery not by humanist optimism but by apocalypse.
To return to Savonarola’s Florence: millenarianism stood side by side with humanist activity. The answers came from both sides, but one was constructed by the elite, the other came out of popular culture. These were the respective backgrounds of Luther and Calvin. The Renaissance came out of a real political atmosphere, but it pushed thought in a new direction, away from traditional Christianity. The Humanists wanted a revival of society through a return to the classics and education. Yet, many contradictions existed, which you can see in the Savonarola episode: humanists also shared the perceptions of popular culture. The contribution of humanism is clear: man is educable, but who was to educate the people? The monopoly of the despots and the Church on education had to be broken. There was no pervasive rationalism, no secularism, and no market economy until the 19th century. But in the sixteenth century, a new way of looking at man, and a new view of politics was created, which was important because it became the new politics. The man with whom it is linked is Machiavelli. He wrote when Florence was under despotism and invasion. Because he was a humanist, he tried to apply humanism to politics.
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