The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  The third element in Dante’s education was the influence and encouragement of his friend and near contemporary Guido Cavalcanti, another classical scholar but a man whose passion was the promotion of Italian. It was he who persuaded Dante to write in the Tuscan or Florentine version of the Italian tongue. In due course, Dante provided in his Convivio, written in Italian, and in his De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, the first great Renaissance defense of the vernacular as a suitable language for works of beauty and weight. The De vulgari contains a sentence that prophesies of Italian: “This shall be the new light, the new sun, which rises when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow and darkness because of the old sun, which did not enlighten them”—a shrewd recognition, on his part, that the masses would never acquire a significant grasp of Latin but could be taught to read their own spoken tongue. More important than his arguments, however, was the example he provided in The Divine Comedy, written throughout in Italian, that the common Tuscan tongue could be used to write the most exquisite poetry and to deal with matter of the highest significance. Before Dante, Tuscan was one of many Italian dialects and there was no Italianate written language that was accepted throughout the peninsula. After Dante, however, written Italian (in the Tuscan mode) was a fact. Indeed, Italians of the twenty-first century, and foreigners who have some grasp of Italian, can read most of The Divine Comedy without difficulty. No other writer has ever had such a decisive impact on a modern language.

  Dante’s Divine Comedy, describing his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven and what he saw therein, is a Christian epic about vice and virtue, rewards and punishments. It has an enormous cast of characters, many of them Dante’s contemporaries. In 1294 he became involved in politics in Florence, a city that was itself highly political, deeply committed to the Guelf or papal cause. Florence was split into two parties, as were most Italian cities, and the party to which Dante belonged, having opposed the ultratriumphalist Pope Boniface VIII, lost the game, and he was exiled in 1302, a sentence renewed in 1315. These Italian city faction fights were vicious and deadly. Dante’s property was confiscated, and he was condemned to be burned at the stake if he returned to the city. He spent much of his life, therefore, in exile, chiefly in Ravenna, where he died, and he laments in pitiful verse the pain of “eating another man’s bread and using another man’s stair to go to bed.”

  Yet there is little bitterness in his great Commedia. Dante was a man of exceptional magnanimity, of all-encompassing love for mankind as well as individuals, and he understood, too, the nature of divine love, which suffuses the universe and gives it meaning. His poem is moralistic and didactic, as plainly so in many ways as a great altarpiece in a medieval cathedral. He takes the Christian faith with awesome seriousness and does not seek to discount the miseries of the damned or the pains of Purgatory. In this sense he was a medieval man, built to be sure on a gigantic scale, but untouched by doubt about the mechanics of the universe as described by the church. But he was also a storyteller of immense resources and a poet of genius. The narrative moves forward at a great pace and is full of delightful, striking and terrifying incidents, lit by flashes of vivid verbal color and what can only be called inspiration.

  Moreover, Dante was not just a medieval man; he was a Renaissance man too. He was highly critical of the church, like so many scholars who followed him. Although a Guelf, he was impressed by the German emperor Henry VII, who came to Italy in 1310 and converted Dante to the idea of a universal monarchy, expressed in a Latin treatise, De monarchia, condemned as heretical after the poet’s death. Dante had great faith. He grasped the point of medieval Christendom, that the only way to personal peace was submission to the divine will, however hard it was at times to bear. But he had the critical spirit of the new times that were coming. He saw into the heart of things with a piercing gaze. All men (and women), rich and poor, well or badly educated, could find something in him, and read or listened to his verse with wonder. His fame came soon after his death, and continued to grow steadily. Soon, Florence, which had expelled him, was fighting with Ravenna for custody of his honorable, and now highly valuable, bones. Dante not only launched the Italian language as a vehicle for high art; in a sense he launched the Renaissance itself, as a new era of creative endeavor by individuals of unprecedented gifts. He became a model, a beacon, a mentor, as Virgil was to him, an energizing, vivifying source for talents of a lesser order and a towering giant against whom the most ambitious could measure themselves. After Dante, nothing seemed beyond human reach.

  That was the view of another Tuscan, Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, when Dante still had some time to live, and destined by his merchant father for a life of business. For this purpose he was sent to Naples, but there he found, like Dante, his lifelong love, Fiammetta, who emerges in all his work, like a palimpsest. He was Dante’s heir, in his ability to handle the newly mature language and in his surpassing ability to tell a tale. His mother was French, and he subsumed in his work the legacy of the French medieval romances. He took the ottava rima of the minstrels and gave it literary status, made it indeed the most dynamic verse form in Italian literature. His Decameron, second only to The Divine Comedy as a source of delight for Renaissance Europe, is a product of the Black Death of 1348. The author has seven young women and three young men flee from Florence to escape infection. They remain in the countryside a fortnight, ten days of which are spent storytelling, making one hundred tales in all. Each story ends with a canzione, or song. It is thus a compendium of stories and verse, which less inventive spirits would ransack for inspiration over the next two centuries. The church and the stiffer element of society did not like it, for it represents the more liberal approach to lifestyles and opinion of the younger generation, contrasted to the formalities and stuffiness of the past. The rest liked it for precisely this reason. It is thus a “progressive” book, the harbinger of a growing Renaissance trend.

  Boccaccio exhibits a characteristic Renaissance ability to do a great many different things, all with skill and panache. He served as a municipal counselor and as an ambassador on numerous occasions, to the pope and in Germany; he was a man of the world and courtier, but also a scholar as well as a writer. His energy was prodigious and his output vast. For nearly forty years a team of Italian scholars has been producing a massive collective edition of it, with a full critical apparatus, revealing perhaps for the first time the scale and range of his work. His first novel, Filocolo, once dismissed as a minor work, is actually more than six hundred printed pages and was read all over Europe. He wrote nine other considerable works of fiction in Italian. He produced in homage a life of Dante, which circulated widely in various editions and abridgments. But he drove himself far more deeply than the master into the emerging corpus of antique literature. Between 1360 and 1362, he gave lodgings to Leonzio Pilato, and got him made reader in Greek at the Studio, the old name for the University of Florence. He saw to it that Pilato made a rough translation into Latin of Homer, the means whereby he and many others (including Petrarch) began their journey into the Greek literary classics. He helped the process of recovering authentic texts of Martial, Apuleius, Varro, Seneca, Ovid and Tacitus. Indeed, the rediscovery of Tacitus was mainly his doing. He translated Livy into Italian. He produced a number of reference works, including two massive classical encyclopedias. One is a topography of the ancient world, listing all the places such as woods, springs, lakes and seas mentioned in Greek and Latin literature, arranged alphabetically. To do this he used the elder Pliny, various Roman geographers like Pomponius Mela and Vibius Sequester, and the classical texts, descanting rapturously for example on Virgil’s birthplace at Petola.

  More important still was his great compilation The Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, which sorted out all the confusing deities referred to in the classics of antiquity. Sometimes he misread or misunderstood texts, thus producing pure inventions, like Demogorgon, who went on to pursue a vigorous life of his own. But mo
st people eager to understand the literature of the past found these volumes godsends. They became mines of information and inspiration not just for scholars and writers but, perhaps even more so, for artists looking for subjects. By writing at such length about the pagan deities, Boccaccio risked falling foul of the church, and defended himself by saying that the men and women whom the pagans worshiped were not gods at all but merely exceptional humans whose exploits had been immortalized by endless recounting. They thus posed no threat to Christian theology. In fact, like so much else of the material supplied by the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, Boccaccio’s work constituted a real challenge to the Christian monopoly of the incidents that artists portrayed. Up to the second half of the fourteenth century, their subject matter was almost entirely Christian. They continued, of course, to use episodes in the life of Christ and the saints and scenes from the Old Testament until the end of the seventeenth century and beyond. But they now had an alternative, and in some ways a more attractive one, because classical mythology provided many more opportunities for the display of beauty—particularly female flesh—and of joie de vivre than the endless Christian stress on piety and the sufferings of the martyrs. This was one way in which the church’s iron grip on the visual arts, and so on the minds of simple men and women who could not read, was gradually pried loose.

  That was not Boccaccio’s intention, far from it. His frivolous youth, during which his best fiction was produced, was succeeded by an increasingly thoughtful and even pious maturity and old age. It is a fact we have to recognize that these masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even later, waxed and waned in the intensity of their religious passions. Behind an increasingly this-worldly Renaissance veneer, there was a medieval substructure, which emerged powerfully when the veneer wore thin, as it tended to do with age. From Dante onward, these great men had one foot in the exciting Renaissance present and the other firmly in the medieval past, with its superstitions and credal certitudes.

  The split personality, the Janus face, the rival tugging of past, present and future were epitomized in Boccaccio’s lifelong comrade, Francesco Petrarca (1304–74). He was older than his friend, better educated, pursued an intermittent career in the service of the papacy, then in exile in Avignon, and was a far more dedicated and gifted poet. He too had a muse, Laura (and also, while holding a canonry, sired a daughter). But while Dante was essentially an epic poet, Petrarch was a lyricist. His fourteen-line sonnet still survives as a form, and he invented others. He could compose and arrange short lyrics in sequence and gather them together in a coherent anthology. Thus he aspired to revive the cult of poetry as the highest art form, after what he saw as a gap of an entire millennium. The world recognized his efforts, and in 1341 he was publicly crowned poet on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, like his antique predecessors, though he was careful to deposit the laurel wreath on the tomb of St. Peter in the ancient basilica bearing his name.

  Petrarch was directly concerned with the rebirth of classical culture by hunting down manuscripts of lost classics in old monastic libraries. It is often said that the Renaissance was fueled by the arrival of manuscripts from Byzantium. So it was. But most of classic literature had been there all the time, in crumbling scrolls and ancient codices covered with dust, preserved—if barely—by pious but ignorant monks who knew not what treasures they guarded. Petrarch was much more widely traveled than either Dante or Boccaccio. In 1333 he voyaged through the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant and France, meeting scholars and ransacking libraries. In Liège, for instance, he discovered copies of two lost speeches by Cicero. At Verona in 1345 he stumbled on a far more dramatic find, Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Brutus and Quintus—texts that brought the great orator to life for the first time. This discovery persuaded Petrarch to take more trouble with his own letters, and he thus became responsible for the revival of another art form. His own letters were preserved, collected and edited, then in due course published. Petrarch liked scholarly seclusion as well as furious activity and gregariousness. He had a country retreat in the Vaucluse, and later at Arquà in the hills near Venice, where his delightful house, beloved of Byron, Shelley and other Romantic poets, conjures up his spirit to modern visitors who trouble to go there—it is the Renaissance itself, in brick and plaster and stone, though not without a whispering of the Middle Ages too.

  Even more evocative, however, and more suggestive of what the early Renaissance was all about, are the manuscripts that survive in Petrarch’s own hand. He was not only a great poet but a calligrapher—an artist indeed—of professional skill. Three manuscripts in particular, all in the Vatican Library, testify to his passion for the act of writing. In 1357 he transcribed his Bucolicum carmen in a superb Gothic minuscule. The writing is in black, with some capitals in blue, and a sentence at the end, in red, testifies that the hand is his. In 1370 he used an even finer Gothic book minuscule to transcribe the whole of his codex De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, noting his work (“scripsi his iterum manu mea”) on the verso of its thirty-eighth folio. Even more spectacular is the original manuscript of his collection of verses, the Canzoniere, or songbook. This is also in a Gothic book minuscule, but not all of the writing is Petrarch’s, a professional scriptor being responsible for some of it. On the other hand, the recto of the first folio has a first initial decorated with multicolored branches and leaves, in Petrarch’s hand, and he continued to correct and embellish the manuscript until his death. The whole of the early Renaissance lives on in this noble page from the poet’s mind and nimble fingers.

  Petrarch may be called the first humanist, and he was certainly the first author to put into words the notion that the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been an age of darkness. In the medieval university, the seven “humanities” had been the least-regarded subjects of study. Petrarch placed them first, and he laid them out as follows. First came grammar, based upon study of the languages of antiquity as the ancients had used them (including the correct pronunciation). This involved the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors. Once the language was mastered grammatically, it could be used to attain the second stage, eloquence or rhetoric. This art of persuasion was not art for its own sake, but the acquisition of the capacity to persuade others—all men and women—to lead the good life. As Petrarch put it, “It is better to will the good than to know the truth.” Rhetoric thus led to, and embraced, philosophy. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1369–1444), the outstanding scholar of the new generation, insisted that it was Petrarch who “opened the way for us to show how to acquire learning,” but it was in Bruni’s time that the word umanista first came into use, and its subjects of study were listed as five: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy and history.

  It is important to grasp that at no time before the Reformation did the humanists acquire a dominant position at the established universities, which continued to be organized around the study of theology, “the queen of the sciences,” and whose teaching methods were shaped accordingly. The humanists disliked, and reacted against, not only the curriculum of the universities but their reliance on the highly formalized academic technique of public debate and questions and answers to impart knowledge. They rightly saw it as inefficient, time-wasting and so entailing long courses, seven years or more, that a theology student could not normally hope to get his doctorate until at least thirty-five, at a time when the average life span was forty years or less. The method also made it difficult for master and pupil to establish a close relationship—and the notion of friendship in study was at the heart of the humanist love of letters.

  Hence the humanists were outsiders, and to some extent nonacademics. They associated universities with the kind of closed-shop trade unionism also found in the craft guilds. Universities, in their view, stamped on individualism and innovation. Humanist scholars tended to wander from one center of learning to another, picking their choice fruits, then moving on. They set up their own little academies. In 1423, Vittorino da Fe
ltre founded a school in Mantua that taught the new humanist curriculum. Six years later Guarino da Verona did the same in Ferrara. Humanists penetrated universities as a kind of subversive, protesting element. But they also attached themselves to noble and princely households, which could make their own rules and were often eager to embrace cultural novelty. One of the ablest of the humanists, Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), who wrote under the professional humanist name of Politian, became tutor to the Medici children, though he was also professor at the Florence Studio.

  Politian belonged to a mid-fifteenth-century generation that took it for granted that a humanist scholar had some knowledge of Greek. Dante and Boccaccio knew no Greek. Petrarch knew a little, just enough to fill him with anguish that he did not know more and to allow him to perceive that, in Greek literature of antiquity, there was a treasure-house surpassing anything in Latin. In the later Middle Ages, Greek was quite unlike Latin in one important respect: it was still a living language, albeit in debased form, in the Byzantine Empire. That too, was debased and shrunken. The Italians, or Latins as the Byzantines called them, saw Constantinople, the capital, as a repository of marvels from antiquity, rather than a living cultural center. Contemporary Byzantine art was a static, moribund tradition, from which Italian artists in the Middle Ages had to struggle to free themselves. The Venetians exploited the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the thirteenth century to occupy Constantinople, which they saw as a trading rival, and pillage it, stealing the four great bronze antique horses they found there and placing them triumphantly over the arcade of their cathedral, St. Mark’s.