Ideas

by Peter Watson

  While all this explains why Florence was so full of new wealth, it does not tell us why such wealth brought about such a great cultural explosion. Peter Hall, an expert on cities, puts it down to the fact that (as was true of classical Athens, and was also to be true of nineteenth-century Vienna) ‘the wealth-makers and the intellectual figures came from the same families’. Thus the aristocracy were not only patrons of art and learning, but were intimately involved. ‘Nearly every prominent family included a lawyer and cleric, many a humanist scholar…Cosimo de’ Medici was a banker, statesman, scholar, a friend and patron of humanists (Bruni, Niccoli, Marsuppini, Poggio), of artists (Donatello, Brunelleschi, Michelozzo) and learned clerics (Ambrogio Traversari, Pope Nicholas V).’ It was this which caused the pattern of artistic patronage to change and widen. Out of two thousand or so dated paintings from Italy produced between 1420 and 1539, Peter Burke has shown that 87 per cent are religious in subject matter, about half of which are of the Virgin Mary and one-quarter show Christ (the rest show saints). At the same time change was in the air. The first sign was that commissions for ecclesiastical works of art came less from the church authorities themselves and instead either from the great guilds or spiritual fraternities, or from private patrons.26 It was the newly-rich citizens, and not the clerics, who now chose the leading artists and discussed with them the details of the plans for, say, a dome or an entire church.

  The second change came when secular patronage turned from the ecclesiastical to the public buildings of the cities as sites for commissions. For example, several important figures of fourteenth-century art–Giotto, Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti–spent the bulk of their careers in government service. Associated with this change was a move to introduce new secular themes, in particular the principal innovation of trecento art, which was the establishment of narrative.27

  A third change came in the status of art and the artist. To begin with, in the early Renaissance, art was still a craft, as it had been in Athens. A painting was a utilitarian object, commissioned for a particular altar, a sculpture for a specific niche. But the more intense demand which existed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy suggested to the artisan craftsmen that they develop new ideas and, above all, demonstrate their familiarity with new knowledge–perspective, anatomy, optics, classical art, even theory. ‘There was now and henceforth a market for art, first for church and convent complexes, then, about the middle of the fourteenth century, for one’s own house.’28 Artists might in effect tout for commissions, but the patron could have considerable impact on the finished work. Contracts became in every sense business documents–they specified materials, price, delivery, size, the work of assistants and the details to be included (cherubs and lapis lazuli cost extra). A contract might specify that the master himself should execute the work; one, of 1485 between Giovanni d’Agnolo dei’ Bardi and Botticelli for an altarpiece, specifies so much for colours and so much for his brush (‘pel suo pennello’). Another, of 1445, for Piero della Francesca’s Madonna della Misericordia, specifies in italics that ‘no painter may put his hand to the brush other than Piero himself’.29 Giotto was perhaps the first example: very successful in his business life, he seems to have combined the highest artistic skills with an acute commercial brain–by 1314 he had as many as six notaries looking after his interests.30

  In line with this, artists began to put their own stamp on their works. Donor’s families began to appear in paintings, and so too the artist, as Benozzo Gozzoli did, in his Procession of the Magi (1459), and Botticelli in his Adoration of the Magi (c. 1472–1475). ‘By the fifteenth century a marked change in the social position of the artist was evident; Ghiberti and Brunelleschi both held important administrative posts in Florence, the latter even being a member of the Signoria.’ Public respect for artists had increased immeasurably; by the sixteenth century, when the adjective ‘divine’ was applied to Michelangelo, it could amount almost to adulation. For art historian Arnold Hauser, ‘The fundamentally new element in the renaissance conception of art is the discovery of the concept of genius; it was a concept unknown and indeed inconceivable in the medieval world-view, which recognised no value in intellectual originality and spontaneity, recommended imitation, considered plagiarism quite permissible, and disregarded intellectual competition. The idea of the genius was of course the logical result of the new cult of the individual, triumphing in free competition in a free market.’31

  Associated with this shift in sensibility went architectural change. Some time after 1450 architects began to elaborate the façades of individual residences to mark their difference from each other and from the medieval buildings nearby. Residences began to acquire ever more impressive principal entrances. Shops were removed, so that the rest of the world could see just how big a residence was. From about 1450 too, interiors followed suit and it became the fashion to buy objects for their artistic qualities, not just because they were useful, and this included art works of earlier times. Such collecting implied, of course, knowledge about art, and the history of art. ‘Gentilezza, or refinement, became a constant theme, expressed in the goods Italians bought–tableware, musical instruments, works of art.’32

  And so the rise of the haute bourgeoisie and the rise of the artist went hand-in-hand. The church and the monarchy were no longer the sole–or even the main–sources of patronage for the arts. Art collecting was still confined to a minority but it was a vastly wider activity than it had been before. Towards the end of the fifteenth century prices began to rise for art works and after 1480, when artists began to be given titles of nobility, painters and sculptors could aspire to affluence, like Raphael and Baldassare Peruzzi.33

  The other significant change in the Renaissance, according to Hans Baron, and this was over and above the concept of genius, was the abandonment of the medieval notion of renunciation. ‘The monk no longer monopolised virtue.’ Now the ideal was Aristotle, a man who concluded that he needed ‘la casa, la possessione, et la bottega’. The Florentines, like the Greeks before them, believed in achievement and saw life as a race. It was no longer the case, as Thomas Aquinas had argued, that everyone ‘had a fixed station in life’.34 ‘The habit of calculation was central to Italian urban life’; numeracy was widespread; time was precious and had to be ‘spent’ carefully, through rational planning; thrift and calculation were the rule. ‘The whole trend of humanist speculation in Florence in the early fifteenth century was toward accommodation with the here-below, and a rejection, implied and sometimes explicit, of the abnegation hitherto officially associated with religion.’35 The result was many different views of the world, which may well have stimulated intellectual innovation.

  The new humanism, which we shall come to presently, essentially provided an alternative to the divine order, setting up in its stead a rational order based upon practical experience. ‘It was as if the world were one great mathematical entity with abstract, interchangeable, measurable and above all impersonal quantities.’36 Virtue was therefore personal, obtained through individual endeavour and unrelated to the advantages of birth or estate, still less to supernatural powers. It was classical antiquity that provided the grounding for this approach and outside the church scholasticism was largely abandoned.37 This retreat by the church was in large measure replaced by the state. Jacob Burckhardt in his famous study noted that ‘in the Italian city, for the first time, we see the emergence of the state as a calculated, conscious creation, the state as a work of art’.38

  In her study Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, the New York scholar Janet Abu-Lughod argues that, in the thirteenth century, ‘a variety of protocapitalist systems coexisted in various parts of the world, none with sufficient power to outstrip the others.’39 She goes on to say that the advent of bubonic plague, in the fourteenth century, was one of the factors which affected adversely the Far Eastern trading networks disproportionately more than the European ones, and helped account for the rise of the West (these arguments we
re introduced in Chapter 15). Plague may well have played its part, and a vital part at that, but this purely economic analysis neglects the role of psychological and intellectual changes which also began in Italy, in Florence, in the fourteenth century. This was the rise of humanism and the acceleration of individualism.

  The first figure in Renaissance humanism is Petrarch (1304–1374). It was Petrarch’s achievement to be the first person to recognise the ‘dark ages’, that the thousand years more or less before he lived had been a period of decline, since the grandeur of ancient Rome and, before that, classical Greece. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio Africanus, in looking back, also forecast a turning point in history.

  Poterunt discussis forte tenebris

  Ad puram priscumque iubar remeare nepotes

  Tunc Elicona noua reuitentem stripe iudebis

  Tunc lauros frondere sacras; tunc alta resurgent

  Ingenia atque animi dociles, quibus ardour honesti

  Pyeridum studii ueterem geminabit amorem.

  ‘Then perhaps, with the darkness dispersed, our descendants will be able to return to the pure and ancient light. Then you will see Helicon green again with new growth, then the sacred laurel will flourish; then great talents will rise again, and receptive spirits whose ardour for the honest study of the Muses will duplicate the ancient love.’40

  Petrarch was himself fortunate, of course, in living at a time when the efforts of the medieval schoolmen had borne fruit, in that, over the immediately preceding centuries, the ancient classics had gradually been recovered and translated. But Petrarch looked on these classics with a totally new eye. The scholars of the High Middle Ages, culminating in Thomas Aquinas, had concentrated, as we have seen, on the works of Aristotle and had attempted to integrate them with the Christian message. Petrarch’s innovation was two-fold. Instead of being concerned with Aristotle’s science and logic, and with the Christian implications of the new learning, he responded to ancient poetry, history, philosophy and the rest on their own terms, as the ‘radiant examples’ of an earlier civilisation, which should be understood in that way. Europe, he felt, had simply forgotten this earlier period of greatness and he set about trying to understand its imaginative powers on its own terms. ‘Thus,’ says Richard Tarnas, ‘Petrarch began the re-education of Europe.’41

  In the world in which he lived, even Petrarch believed that Christianity was the divine fulfilment of all thought. But he added the idea that life and thought were not uni-dimensional, that the classical world was worth studying because it was the highest form of life available before Christ appeared on earth. In encouraging his fellow men to look back, Petrarch thus stimulated a further renewed search for the lost texts of antiquity. Here the West was fortunate in that this coincided with a period of change in Constantinople. Because of the threat of Turkish invasion (the city was to fall in 1453), many scholars started to leave and head for the West, Italy in particular, bringing with them, among many other things, the Greek Dialogues of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus and other texts in the Platonic tradition. And this was Petrarch’s second contribution, to stimulate a Platonic revival reminiscent of the Aristotelian revival in the twelfth century. In fact, although Petrarch was always fascinated by Plato, at the time he lived in the fourteenth century the new manuscripts had not yet arrived in the West. It was not until the early part of the fifteenth century that the original Greek works actually appeared (very few people in the West knew Greek before 1450). It was then left to other humanists–men such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola–to build on Petrarch and introduce these ideas to their contemporaries.

  Whereas Aristotelianism had been conducive to the scholastic mind, Platonism provided the humanists with a way of looking at the world that suited the change they were trying to bring about. The essential idea of Platonism was that the human mind is the image and likeness of God, the ‘deiformity of knowledge’, in William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden’s clever phrase. More important still was ‘Thenotion that beauty was an essential component in the search for the ultimate reality, that imagination and vision were more significant in that quest than logic and dogma, that man could attain a direct knowledge of things divine–such ideas held much attraction for the new sensibility growing in Europe.’42 On top of everything, Plato’s fluid style was far more attractive than Aristotle’s mere notes, on which the twelfth-century revival had been based, and this too helped fashion the new sensibility. Many people believed that Aristotle’s account of Plato was highly inaccurate. Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Niccoli both believed that Plato was superior to Aristotle, that Socrates’ eloquence was the ideal to be sought after, while Leonardo Bruni’s books celebrating humanism and the stylistic splendours of Socrates, Plato and Cicero became a best-seller: 250 vellum copies of his manuscript survive today.43 Hans Baron called Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum the ‘birth-certificate of a new period’.44

  It was also the case that, by now, getting on for two hundred years after Aquinas, scholasticism was ossifying, becoming stultified and rigid in the universities, as scholars fought over the minutiae of what he and the other medieval masters had really meant. It was no accident therefore that when a Platonic academy was founded just outside Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century, it met not in the university but under the private patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, and was led by Marsilio Ficino, the son of a physician. It was here, in a very informal setting, that the traditional view of learning was transformed. Great banquets were given on Plato’s birthday and a lit candle always illuminated his bust.45 Ficino eventually translated the entire Platonic corpus into Latin.46

  In Platonism, or Neoplatonism, the humanists recognised an ancient spiritual stream just as old as, and in many ways not dissimilar to, Christianity itself. In turn this threw a new light on the faith. Christianity might still be the final form of God’s purpose for the world, but the very existence of Platonism implied that it was not the only expression of this deeper truth. In this vein, the humanists did not stop at Greek literature. The academy in Florence (actually at Careggi, outside the city) promoted the study of all intellectual, spiritual and imaginative writing, wherever it was found–in Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, in Zoroastrianism, in the Hebrew Kabbalah. The point was, under Neoplatonism, which included the ideas of Plotinus as well as Plato, the whole world was permeated by divinity, everything was touched by a ‘numinous’ quality, nature was in effect enchanted and God’s purpose could, with care, be deciphered, his message being revealed through number, geometry, form–above all, through beauty. Platonism taught an aesthetic understanding of the world, which helps explain both the efflorescence of art in the Renaissance and the improved status of artists. Marsilio Ficino wrote a book entitled Platonic Theology in which he argued that man was of ‘almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens’.47

  And because Platonism valued aesthetics above most things, imagination now came to be exalted above the Aristotelian virtues of close observation and, as we would say, research. Metaphysical truth, revealed by God to men of genius–through number, geometry, intuition–was assumed to offer greater access to ultimate knowledge. As part of this, astrology returned, along with horoscopes and the zodiac–and their mystical numerology. The old Graeco-Roman gods did not quite have the dignity of the Judaeo-Christian God, but classical mythology had a new lease of life and respect, understood sympathetically as the religious truth of those who had lived before the Incarnation. People even looked forward to a new golden age in which the religion of the future would be a mix of Christianity and Plato.48

  Behind this, the importance of the accumulation of wealth should not be underestimated. In the words of one historian, ‘The man of the renaissance lived, as it were, between two worlds…He was suspended between faith and knowledge. As the grip of medieval supernaturalism began to loosen, secular and human interests became more prominent. The facts of individual experience here on earth became more interesting than the shadowy after
life. Reliance on God and faith weakened. The present world became an end in itself instead of a preparation for a world to come.’49 The accumulation of wealth clearly assisted this change, a change which the same historian also highlights as one of the three great changes in sensibility in history, ‘the other two being the arrival of ethical monotheism, around 600 BC…and the change wrought by Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century’. On this reading, the Renaissance is understood as three interlinked developments which together comprise this new sensibility. These three elements are humanism, capitalism and the aesthetic movement, the cult of beauty which led to the greatest proliferation of the arts the world has yet seen. Capitalism, now understood as a form of self-expression no less than of economics, could not have matured without the humanists’ ideas about the primacy of ‘this world’, and the proliferation of the arts would not have been possible without the great fortunes amassed by the early capitalists.