The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  With the benefit of hindsight it seems strange that the church did not see what was coming and take steps to prepare for or even resist it. In German-speaking central Europe the cultural war was clearly stirring by the second half of the fifteenth century, with books pouring from the presses in ever-growing number and quantity. In the half century up to 1500, nearly 25,000 works were printed in Germany, and given the average edition size as 250, that means 6 million printed books were circulating in Germany alone. Most of the German humanists were men grown critical of the church. The archetypal one, Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), a poet awarded the laureate by the emperor Maximilian, attacked, among other things, the old-style teaching at Cologne University (he had attended no fewer than seven universities himself, including Bologna, where he learned Greek), the sale of indulgences, the useless life of monks, corruption in Rome and the trade in relics. Significantly, he brought out a new edition of Valla’s book on the Donation of Constantine. Hutten wrote a fluent new kind of German, witty, pithy and full of popular expressions, and with it went a new kind of nationalism, which, north of the Alps, was one of the products of the Renaissance turmoil. Indeed, he was a Renaissance man through and through—even his death was the doing of the new Renaissance scourge, syphilis. He pronounced Latin in the new, scholarly way, denouncing the church for its “barbarous” usage, and he took pride in his “correct” pronunciation of classical Greek, another point on which the church fell short. Indeed, pronunciation of Latin and Greek was an infallible test of which side you were on in the culture war. Like other humanists, Hutten sought protection from the secular power when the church authorities moved against him, and got it. This was a growing pattern as the Renaissance progressed.

  Even in Spain, land of the last great crusader people, which finally “purified” itself in the 1490s by expelling Moslems and Jews, the church seemed unaware of the danger to itself that the new progressive forces of Renaissance scholarship embodied. Spain was emerging as a major Mediterranean power, indeed an Italian power too, absorbing the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples, even before the accession of Charles I of Spain in 1516 and his election as Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519 created the largest agglomeration of power in Europe and the world. Throughout the fifteenth century, Spanish contacts with the Italy of the Renaissance grew, and not only the courts and chanceries but the archbishops’ palaces (as in Saragossa) became centers of humanist learning, where the classics of antiquity were translated and, from the 1470s, printed. It is significant that the troublesome Lorenzo Valla wrote the life of the father of Alfonso V (“The Magnanimous”), king of Aragon, who spent much of his reign, 1416–58, absorbing the new culture in his Italian territories. When Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile united the crowns, they gave their joint support to the propagation of humanist scholarship throughout Spain. It was with the personal encouragement of Isabella that the most vigorous of the Italian-trained Spanish humanists, Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522), waged fire and sword against the old teaching at Salamanca, Spain’s oldest and finest university. He called himself a conquistada and his enemy “barbarism.” He replaced the old-style Latin manuals used at Salamanca and elsewhere with his new book Introductions to Latin (1481), dedicated to Isabella and translated and circulated all over Europe.

  The “Catholic monarchs,” as Ferdinand and Isabella were known, were impelled in a humanist direction not only by their own tastes but by the advice of their great primate, the cardinal-archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517). It was he who in 1509 founded at Alcalá de Henares the Complutensian University (using the Latin place name of Alcalá) for the study of Hebrew, Greek and Latin and the training of priests in the new humanist methods. This in turn gave birth to the great Complutensian Polyglot Bible, first printed in 1514–17. He was a patron of Erasmus and anxious that he should come to Spain to teach. The Low Countries connection was strengthened after 1516, when Charles’s Habsburg territories there were united with the Spanish crown. The Spanish humanists delighted in Erasmian satire, their favorite being his The Praise of Folly, a book that had a profound influence on Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Spain’s first great writer of world stature, whose novel Don Quixote is both the last word on the vanished world of medieval chivalry and the first to tackle the pathos of modern life.

  If Erasmus was the hero of the Spanish humanists, his own hero, insofar as he had one, was Valla. He wrote: “In me you see the avenger of Valla’s wrongs. I have undertaken to defend his scholarship, the most distinguished I know. Never shall I allow that scholarship to be attacked or destroyed with impunity because of anyone’s insolence.” He particularly championed Valla’s Elegantiarum latinae linguae, a manual for writers in Latin that set new standards of excellence. More than fifty manuscripts of this work and 150 early printed editions survive, which indicates its wide circulation and popularity. In 1489 Erasmus, while still a student, wrote a shortened version of it, and he produced another digest for publication in 1498; this went into at least fifty editions. It is notable that both Valla and Erasmus referred to their opponents as “barbarians,” and it is a melancholy fact that, as humanism spread, especially in northern Europe, its language became more vituperative, provoking in turn harsh language from those thus classified, who held the leading positions in the church. Thus the cultural war intensified and became more vicious. We have dealt so far with its open, literary expression in manuscripts and printed books. It is now time to turn to its mute but visible images in bronze and stone, paint and plaster, bricks and mortar.

  PART 3

  THE ANATOMY OF RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE

  Rarely in human history have the visual arts enjoyed such an intense and prolonged period of splendor as during the Renaissance. The riches are almost infinite indeed, and describing them presents special problems. A purely chronological approach is tedious and often unenlightening. On the other hand, to treat them by categories—sculpture, painting, architecture—overrides the fact that individual artists often crossed these boundaries, and most of them emerged from studios that practiced many of the arts. However, provided we bear this in mind, the categorical treatment is clearer, and it is right to begin with sculpture, for the Renaissance was concerned with the presentation of human reality, and sculpture with its three-dimensional evocation of human figures is the most direct in achieving this end.

  The story of Renaissance sculpture begins with Nicola Pisano, who lived approximately between 1220 and 1284. He came from Apulia in the heel of Italy, but most of his working life was spent in Pisa, Bologna, Siena, Perugia and other central Italian towns. He was a product of the brilliant if precarious court culture created by Emperor Frederick II, known as stupor mundi, or the Wonder of the World. Frederick built palatial castles in southern Italy, patronized artists and craftsmen of all kinds, imported ideas and technology from the eastern Mediterranean and the Orient and, not least, sought to revive classical forms. Pisano was clearly trained in one of the emperor’s south Italian workshops, and he brought to Tuscany something new: the classical anxiety to represent the human body accurately, to show emotions not symbolically but as they are actually seen on human faces, to distinguish with infinite gradations between youth and age and to render men and women as living, breathing, individual creatures.

  Nicola Pisano was, by any chronological criterion, a medieval artist. His first recorded work, the pulpit in the Pisa baptistry (1260), was carved two years after the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was complete and work was just beginning on Cologne Cathedral and the cloister of Westminster Abbey. But his spirit was already postmedieval. The marble reliefs in the Pisan pulpit show real human beings with faces full of care and anxiety. Pisano incorporates in his work the achievements of French Gothic sculpture, but his figures, fresh with life, are a whole epoch away from the elongated saints and angels on the west front of Chartres Cathedral, beautiful though they are, which remain symbolic and inanimate by comparison. Pisano’s Last Jud
gment, in marble relief from his pulpit in Siena Cathedral, from the late 1260s, is a medieval scene in conception, with ferocious devils torturing the damned. But the execution carries faint echoes of classical Greece: the embodied souls, whether saved or damned, emerge as individuals, not types; they have faces you would see in the Sienese streets, and bodies you can imagine walking or running—real, working bodies. Nicola’s son Giovanni Pisano (c. 1250–1320) pushed this humanizing process further: he has, for instance, three marble figures in the Arena Chapel in Padua (about 1305) that might almost have sprung from the Acropolis in Athens.

  Already by this date, Italians with a scholarly and antiquarian taste were poking about among the ruins of ancient Rome and other cities, which were much more extensive in medieval times than they are now, studying inscriptions, collecting medals and coins with low-relief heads and handling bits of broken sculpture to be found in the debris. Artists were often among those foraging parties, looking not just for the forms of antiquity but the technology that produced them. From this time there was a revival of casting in bronze for artistic purposes. The technique had not been lost but it had been used, in the Dark and Middle Ages, mainly by bell foundries. When Andrea Pisano (c. 1295–1348), not related to Nicola and his son, created a series of bronze reliefs for the doors of the south portal of the Baptistry at Florence in 1330, he merely modeled them in wax. They then had to be cast by the Venetian bell founder Leonardo Avanzi and his team. Thereafter, however, the success of bronze low reliefs led artistic workshops to set up their own foundries.

  Andrea Pisano began his professional life as a goldsmith, as did most of the early sculptors in bronze. By the end of the fourteenth century, an artist-craftsman in a busy workshop— especially in Florence, already emerging as the richest and most art-conscious of the Italian towns—expected to work on almost every kind of stone, from limestone and Carrara marble to semiprecious and precious stones, and to deal with heated metals, ranging from gold to copper and copper alloys such as bronze, which had a mixture of tin. Goldsmiths played a much more central role in Renaissance art than is generally realized. Their skills were absorbed by the sculptors and their designs by the painters. The rich in Florence and other commercial cities liked to flaunt their wealth. They probably spent more on jewelry than on art, and one of the functions of the painters was to record in exact and realistic detail the jewels worn by their sitters, male and female—the brilliant depiction of jewelry was a skill that any Renaissance portrait painter had to possess. Bronze doors, with superb panels depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments, were the outstanding way in which the art of the jeweler could be transferred to the adorning of a new cathedral in hard-edged and permanent form. The frames and surrounds in which the illustrative panels are placed are essentially jewel settings.

  Hence the importance that the Florentines, and the artists who served them, attached to the bronze doors of their cathedral and Baptistry: these increasingly elaborate artifacts were the jewels of God’s house, set in it for eternity. Immense care and years of work were devoted to them. This had important consequences. Even in the thirteenth century, commercially minded towns commissioning artists to do elaborate work insisted on detailed and binding contracts. Nicola Pisano, in order to get the commission to make the pulpit in Siena Cathedral, had to sign a contract, which survives, dated 29 September 1265, setting down what he had promised to do in a meticulous manner, what materials he had to use and how much time he had to spend on the site. These contracts had the effect of identifying the artist in a way that had hitherto been very rare—it plucked him forth from the mass of anonymous craftsmen and made him famous, or conscious of fame. Sculptors and painters began to sign their work. Thus the reliefs on the Florence Baptistry doors are signed Andreas Ugolino Nini de Pisis Me Fecit. The emergence of the artist as an individual coincided with the emergence of the individual in his works—both processes reinforced each other.

  It was another consequence of Italian urban commercialism that patrons, conscious that their increased expenditure on art was drawing more and more gifted young men into the business, began to spur them on by holding public competitions for major contracts. At the end of the fourteenth century, Florence was enjoying a period of peace, prosperity and civic pride, and its elders decided to commission a second Baptistry door. Andrea Pisano’s doors were the standard of excellence against which the new generation of sculptors was to be judged. The ensuing competition of 1401 has often been treated as the single event that marked the real onset of the Florentine Renaissance. It was certainly a remarkable occasion. There were thirty-four judges, drawn not just from the cathedral authorities but from the city guilds and from surrounding towns. They advertised the contest all over Italy, and masters or would-be masters arrived from the entire peninsula. The field was narrowed down to seven, including three of the greatest artists of the entire period: Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Jacopo della Quercia (1374–1438) and Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455). Each of those short-listed was given four sheets of bronze and told to conceive a design to illustrate “The Sacrifice of Isaac.”

  Only two of the designs, by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, have survived, and the judges had a hard task deciding between them. In fact, they took two years to make up their minds, conscious of the size of the project and the enormity of the expense. (The eventual cost was 22,000 florins, equal to the entire defense budget of the city of Florence.) Ghiberti got the contract, probably because the judges thought he was the man most likely to carry through the job to a triumphant conclusion. And they were right. As Ghiberti boasts in his Autobiography, he put art before “the chase after lucre.” He was astonishingly conscientious and an obsessional perfectionist. He appears to us a very slow worker, but one has to bear in mind that the standards of craftsmanship demanded and provided in late medieval, early Renaissance times were of a quality inconceivable to the modern age, and speed of execution was not possible. Ghiberti would spend years on a single piece of jewelry or a tombstone, months on hand chasing a piece of bronze. Three years was normal for him in creating a large marble statue.

  Ghiberti was a young man in 1403 when he started on the bronze doors, completing the original contract twenty years later. He was then given a further commission to decorate a third set of doors, later known as the Gate of Paradise by Michelangelo. Ghiberti finished them in 1452, three years before his death. So he spent virtually his entire working life, more than half a century, on these Florentine doors. He had many gifted assistants, including Donatello (1386–1466), Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1420–97), Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), and Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431–98) and perhaps Luca Della Robbia (c. 1399–1482), so that his workshop was one of the great creative furnaces of the Renaissance. But he himself was the artist-creator down to the last micromillimeter. As Ghiberti himself claimed, this cumulatively huge work (his first door alone carried twenty-eight panels, which with borders weighed thirty-four thousand pounds), was executed “with much care and industry . . . understanding and artifice.” The state of the art was such that some castings failed and had to be done again, and even the successful casts required finishing, which in some cases took years. Ghiberti’s doors, re-creating the scriptures in dramatic life, were the cynosure of artists and collectors from all over Italy, who came to admire and learn. They summed up everything the Renaissance had accomplished so far, and marked the way ahead for younger artists.

  The sculptor who absorbed Ghiberti’s lessons most productively, and built on his work most confidently, was Donatello. His life and work tell us a great deal about the Renaissance, what it was and what it was not. The ideas behind the Renaissance, particularly the overwhelming desire, in letters, to get at the truth and, in art, to present the truth as we see it, were a force that pushed writers and artists to the highest levels. But the Renaissance was not determinative. Artists, in particular, were not forced to conform to its aims by its compulsive spirit. Rather, it gave artists much greater opportunities than in medie
val times to be themselves and develop their capacities to the full. Hence it unleashed the geniuses. And there was no man who possessed genius so obviously and persistently as Donato di Niccolò Betto di Bardi, who was born in Florence in 1386 and died there eighty years later. Donatello was one of the greatest artists who ever lived and in some ways the central figure of the Renaissance. Before him, artists were aware of definite limits to what could or ought to be done in art. Donatello was so consistently and shockingly original that, after him, all the limits seemed to have disappeared, so that an artist was constrained only by his powers.

  He was the son of a humble wood-carver and remained, all his life, a man who worked with his hands. Unlike many successful Renaissance artists, such as Ghiberti, to whom he was apprenticed between 1404 and 1407, Donatello had no social pretensions, no aesthetic pride, no swagger. He spoke and lived in a rough way, like the craftsman he was. He never made much money, and in his old age, he lived on a pension from Cosimo de’ Medici, who worshiped him. He does not seem to have accepted the fact that artists could now move in the best society and were becoming highly prized individuals, famous men. He was not interested. To that extent, one of the central facts of the Renaissance, the emergence of the artist celebrity, left him unimpressed.

  On the other hand, Donatello possessed artistic integrity to an unusual degree. He was unbiddable. His sense of honor, as a craftsman-artist, was overwhelming. He would do what he thought right, at his own pace, in his own way. Princes and cardinals did not impress him. Plebeian he was, but he spoke to them on artistic matters as an equal, indeed as a master. Like Ghiberti he was a perfectionist, and would sometimes take years to get something absolutely right. He was not to be hurried, and if bullied would down tools. His name figures in hundreds of documents and many stories circulated about his rude sayings, rough humor, obduracy and unwillingness to take orders. His patrons, to their credit, respected him. One reason why the Renaissance produced so many marvelous works of art is that a high proportion of great and rich men were willing to respect artists who knew their minds and their worth. Here, Donatello led the way in educating the elite to a true spirit of cooperation with artists, so that by a paradox he, the obstinate plebeian, played a historic role in raising the social status of the producer of beauty from craftsman to artist. After Donatello, there was no turning back: in Florence first, soon in all Italy, the artist was a man who commanded not only respect but attention, reverence, admiration and honor.