The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  However, the broad-mindedness of the church was a feature of its absolute unity and supremacy. When these disappeared or were challenged, a different spirit began to emerge on both sides of the religious divide. The origins of the Reformation, which began to have an impact on events in the 1520s, were complex, but the Renaissance clearly played its part. Among the humanists, the spirit of criticism was the most marked characteristic. In their search for the recovery of an ideal past, they looked hard at everything in the present. They not only identified faulty texts and spurious documents, they also turned a critical eye on institutions and practices. And from the point of view of the intellectuals, the most important institution by far was the church and its controlling machinery in Rome. On Rome and what it permitted, they focused more and more. Just as they delighted to strip an ancient text of its medieval accretions, so they sought to reduce the proliferating practices of the church, which had become nauseous to many educated people, to find the primitive, apostolic and pentecostal church beneath. So the reform movement in the church was broadly similar to the Renaissance itself in its aims and methods, and it is in this sense that Erasmus, greatest of the humanists, was later said to have “laid the egg of the Reformation.”

  Since the Reformation was about the removal of medieval accretions to the integrity of primitive Christianity, which included of course the power of the papacy, it was inevitable that the aims of the humanists and those of the Reformers should become confused. The humanists were concerned not only about the way Latin was written, aiming to replace the medieval demotic by classic purity, but about its pronunciation. They were particularly anxious to show how Greek should be promoted, dismissing the clerical usage as barbarous. By the 1530s in England, for instance, Reformers, or “Heretics,” were often identified in the minds of suspicious conservative churchmen by the “newfangled” way they spoke Greek. Music became another source of cultural-religious contention. There had long been grumbles within the church about the way in which polyphony and other proliferating musical devices were obscuring the meaning of the words sung in masses and other sacred music. In 1324 the Avignon pope John XXII issued a bad-tempered decree condemning “certain disciples of the new school” for “preferring to devise ways of their own rather than to continue singing in the old manner.” He complained that “the divine office is now performed with semibreves and minims, and with these notes of small value every composition is pestered. Moreover, they truncate the melodies with hockets, they deprave them with discantus” and so on, in an exasperated tone—ending lamely, however, that disobedience would be punished by “suspension from office of eight days.”

  Little notice was taken of this warning or of others, and sacred music continued to become more complicated and, to the layman, incomprehensible. This, it should be said, was typical Gothic multiplication of complexity, the exact counterpart of the fantastically ornate architecture—late Perpendicular, Plateresque, and so on—that was prevalent in the second half of the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. It had nothing to do with Renaissance antiquarianism. It is not clear whether there was such a phenomenon as Renaissance music, as opposed to music during the Renaissance. The “new art,” as it was called, of musical notation had been introduced around 1316 by a Frenchman, Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361). This made notation far more flexible and allowed composers to express their wishes with clarity and to introduce far more varieties of rhythm. Certainly Italian musicians played only a minor part in musical development in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. Changes came from France, the Low Countries and England. It is notable that whereas in the visual arts Italy exported innovators and masters, in music it imported them. The most celebrated musical composer and organizer of the entire period, Adriaan Willaert (c. 1490–1562), came from Bruges. After holding various posts in Italy he was appointed in 1527 maestro di capella at St. Mark’s, Venice, at a salary that eventually rose to the enormous sum of 200 ducats a year. Apart from composing nine masses and innumerable other works, sacred and secular, he made the music at St. Mark’s the best in Europe, rivaled only by companies run by the emperor, the kings of England and France, the pope and the courts of Mantua and Ferrara.

  Italy, then, at least had the credit of maintaining four out of the seven best musical ensembles in Europe. It also played a role in the technology of music, including the development of the lute, the violin, the viol, the trumpet and woodwinds, and such keyboard instruments as the harpsichord and the virginal. By the late sixteenth century, compositions required instruments with four octaves and the whole chromatic range. Venice was the first printing center to start reproducing scores (1501), and these sixteenth-century print runs were often extensive, five hundred to two thousand copies. Moreover, in music as well as the other arts, Italy led the way in resuscitating antiquity, publishing Isadore of Seville (1470) as well as the musical writings of Plato and Aristotle. During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, translations of the treatises on music by Ptolemy and Baccheus were in print, and by 1562 so was the first translation of Aristoxenus’ Harmonics. In 1581 Vincenzo Galilei, in his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, actually reproduced three ancient Greek hymns by Mesomedes, which had come down through Byzantium.4

  There is evidence that, in the sixteenth century, knowledge of music was spreading in the towns of Europe, and that a bourgeois market was opening to supplement the princely one. But the Reformers insisted that religion had to be popular, which meant it should be presented in the vernacular—itself a Renaissance notion—and that meant all the old settings in Latin had to be discarded. Moreover, the more rigorous Reformers insisted, rather on the lines of John XXII, that complexity of setting was inadmissible, and in particular that no more than one note should be sung on each syllable, or even each word, so that congregations could follow the text. Rejecting the mass, with its complex settings, they favored church music that was simple and biblical, such as psalmody, producing straightforward metrical settings of the psalms that could be roared out by vast congregations (e.g., at the services held at the cross outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London). The Reformers, led by Luther himself, also wrote vernacular hymns, with a strong biblical content, set to nonpolyphonic music.

  Such developments, as well as the general use of the vernacular in church services, proved popular, especially in the towns, where more and more citizens were becoming literate and read the Bible for themselves. By the 1540s, the Catholic Church was not only losing northern Germany, much of France, England, Scotland and Scandinavia, but was finding itself on the cultural defensive everywhere. It reacted in a number of different ways, which were often inconsistent. First, it increased the activities of the Inquisition, especially in Spain (where it was run essentially by the state) and in Italy (where it was run by the papacy). Second, it created new orders, such as the Jesuits, whose chief thrust was in education at all levels. Third, it became more puritanical. The papacy in particular ceased to patronize artists who favored mythology and the nude, and covered up the private parts of male statues. Fourth, it began to reform itself. This took many forms, but the most important were the proper training of priests, the creation of seminaries and colleges, and the activities of key members of the episcopate, such as the great St. Charles Borromeo, the cardinal-archbishop of Milan. Reform took on an institutional aspect when the Council of Trent was summoned in 1545. It sat for most of two decades, with intermissions, and only in its concluding stages did it turn directly to cultural matters.

  By this point, the Catholic Church had been identified with the “old” music, that is, any music with Latin texts and polyphonic content. Most professional musicians, even in predominantly Protestant societies, were Catholics; their livelihood was at stake. Queen Elizabeth of England, though Protestant, had an all-Catholic Chapel Royal, which was the target of attack by the advanced Reformers, particularly those with Puritan leanings. By protecting the Catholic performers and composers, she saved English music. But polyphony,
and everything associated with it, was under attack within the Catholic Church, even in Rome itself. In 1549, one Italian bishop, Cirillo Franco, said of polyphonic masses: “When one voice says Sanctus, another says Sabbaoth, so that they sound more like cats in January than flowers in May.” Ten years before, Giovanni Morone, bishop of Modena, had actually abolished polyphony in his own cathedral in favor of plainchant, and he was one of the papal legates supervising the discussion of church music when the Council of Trent finally got around to it in 1562–63. There is a famous story, or legend, that the master of music at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the composer Giovanni Palestrina (1525–94), produced his Missa Papae Marcelli, for a special performance, to show that polyphony could be combined with intelligibility, and that this had the desired effect. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Trent ended without any destructive ruling on music.

  It was a different matter with painting. Here the council in its final session ruled that stories about sacred personages that were not to be found in the canonical texts, and saintly miracles that the church had not certified as probable, were not to figure in works of art to be placed in churches or other religious buildings. It was not, strictly speaking, an act of iconoclasm, since it was prospective, not retrospective. Few existing images were removed, as had already been done in countless buildings controlled by Protestant zealots. But it put a stop to any future work of that kind and thus robbed religious artists of one of their chief sources of subject matter. It was the end of the Middle Ages, abolishing at a stroke the swarming inventiveness and labyrinthine imagination that had produced so much delightful art, both in the Gothic mode and indeed in Renaissance works, where Christian and pagan mythology intertwined. It affected not only the great masters working in the big cities but also—and perhaps more—the humble artist-craftsmen of the smaller towns and villages, whose wall paintings, bench ends and shrine figures had been encyclopedias of Christian folklore, now all forbidden.

  Even more influential were the more positive doctrines of the Counter-Reformation, which the final session of Trent formalized. In response to the Protestant cult of the vernacular—of simplicity, austerity and puritanism—the Catholic Church, after its earlier defensive and guilt-ridden response, decided to embark on a much bolder policy of emphasizing the spectacular. With the Jesuits in the vanguard, churches and other religious buildings were to be ablaze with light, clouded with incense, draped in lace, smothered in gilt, with huge altars, splendid vestments, sonorous organs and vast choirs, and a liturgy purged of medieval nonsense but essentially triumphalist in its content and amplitude. The artists— painters, sculptors, architects, makers of church furniture and windows—were to fall into line, scrapping the folklore and mythology indeed, but portraying the story of Christianity, the history of the church, the faith of its martyrs and the destruction of its enemies with all the power and realism they could command. Thus Rome defied the Protestants and bade the Puritans do their worst. Catholicism would reply to simplicity and primitive austerity with all the riches and color and swirling lines and glitter in its repertoire, adding new ones as artists could create them.

  Whatever the spiritual merits of this policy, it was undoubtedly popular in southern Europe at least, and in the closing decades of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to regain some lost ground. However, the Counter-Reformation approach to art was a formula for what would later be called the Baroque. It was music in the ears of ambitious young painters like Caravaggio. But it tolled a requiem for the Renaissance, or rather the attitudes it stood for. The movement was already a spent force anyway, and by the 1560s and 1570s it was dead, as dead as Michelangelo and Titian, its last great masters. But Renaissance forms lingered on. They had become part of the basic repertoire of European arts, subsumed in the Baroque and in Rococo, ready to spring to life again in the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. They are with us still. In many ways the ideals of those times are part of our permanent cultural heritage, as are the matchless works of art and the enduring monuments those rich and fruitful times produced.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The literature on every aspect of the Renaissance is endless, and I confine myself here to books in my own library that I have consulted for this work. First and foremost the Grove Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (thirty-four vols., London, 1996), especially for dates, spelling of proper names and whereabouts of paintings and sculptures. It is particularly valuable for its bibliographies. I have also used the New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie (twenty vols., London, 1995) for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music. Older general books include J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in Germany in 1860), and Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1953). The works of Kenneth Clark are also still valuable, especially his essays collected in The Art of Humanism (London, 1983), his Leonardo da Vinci (revised ed., London, 1989), and his Leonardo Drawings at Windsor Castle (two vols., Cambridge, 1935). E. H. Gombrich’s essays are collected in Gombrich on the Renaissance (three vols., London, 1993). I also used C. F. Black et al., Cultural Atlas of the Renaissance (New York, 1993); the Einaudi History of Italian Art (two vols., trans., Cambridge, 1994); Denis Hay, The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background (Cambridge, 1979); John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (New Haven, Conn., 1993); J. Shearman, Early Italian Pictures in the Royal Collection (Cambridge, 1983); M. Levey, Later Italian Pictures in the Royal Collection (Cambridge, 1991); E. Welch, Art and Society in Italy, 1350–1500 (Oxford, 1997); M. Davies and D. Gordon, The Early Italian Schools Before 1400 (London, 1998); S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500–1600 (London, 1993); N. Huse and W. Wolten, Art of Renaissance Venice (New York, 1993); A. Chastel, History of French Art: The Renaissance (two vols., trans., London, 1973); J. Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (London, 1991); various writings by John Pope-Hennessy, including Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (ed., London, 1996), Essays on Italian Sculpture (London, 1968), Italian Gothic Sculpture (London, 1955) and The Portrait in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1966). Also important is E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renaissances in Western Art (two vols., Stockholm, 1960).

  More detailed studies include: A. J. Lemaître and E. Lessing, Florence and the Renaissance: The Quattrocento (Paris, 1993); G. Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age (Berkeley, 1998); P. L. Rubin and A. Wright, Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (London, 1999); A. Paolucci, The Origins of Renaissance Art: The Baptistry Doors, Florence (trans., New York, 1996); D. Norman (ed.), Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280–1400 (two vols., London, 1995); A. M. Romanini et al., Assisi: The Frescoes in the Basilica of St. Francis (trans., New York, 1999); John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London, 1967); S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (two vols., rev. ed., New York, 1989); and Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages (trans., Princeton, 1986).

  Studies of individuals and specific works of art include: B. A. Bennett and D. G. Wilkins, Donatello (Oxford, 1984); James Beck, Jacopo della Quercia (two vols., New York, 1991); John Pope-Hennessy, Cellini (New York, 1985); C. Avery and D. Finn, Giambologna (Oxford, 1987); Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi: The Buildings (London, 1993); D. Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (London, 1987); G. Kreytenberg, Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Or San Michele, Florence (New York, 1994); Colin Eisler, Jacopo Bellini: Complete Paintings and Drawings (New York, 1989); S. Fermor, Piero di Cosimo (London, 1993); M. Levey and G. Mandel, Complete Paintings of Botticelli (London, 1985); R. Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (New York, 1992); F. and S. Borsi, Paolo Uccello (trans., London, 1994); R. Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, Conn., 1989); V. Sgarbi, Carpaccio (trans., New York, 1995); J. Martineau (ed.), Andrea Mantegna (London, 1992); M. Cardaro (ed.), Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi (Milan, 1993); C. Acidini Luchinat (e
d.), Gozzoli’s Chapel of the Magi (London, 1993); J. A. Becherer (ed.), Pietro Perugino (New York, 1997); C. Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo (Rotterdam, 1992); M. Clayton, Raphael and His Studio (London, 1999); C. Pedretti, Raphael: His Life and Work (Florence, 1989); A. E. Oppé, Raphael (London, 1970); L. D. and H. S. Ettlinger, Raphael (Oxford, 1987); J. Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael in Florence (London, 1996); Michelangelo the Sculptor (exhibition catalog, Montreal, 1992); M. Hirst and J. Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo (London, 1994); V. Manici, Michelangelo the Painter (New York, 1985); L. H. Collins and A. Ricketts, Michelangelo (London, 1991); Ludwig Goldscheider, Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect (rev. ed., Oxford, 1986); D. A. Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (London, 1998), Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect (exhibition catalog, Montreal, 1987) and Leonardo and Venice (Milan, 1992); A. E. Popham (ed.), Notebooks of Leonardo (rev. ed., Oxford, 1994); Charles Hope, Titian (London, 1980); Hans Tietze, Titian (London, 1950); R. Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, 1994); S. S. Nigro, Pontormo: Drawings (New York, 1991) and Pontormo: Paintings and Frescoes (New York, 1993); David Ekserdjian, Correggio (London, 1997); Cecil Gould, Parmigianino (London, 1995); Ludwig Goldscheider, Ghiberti (London, 1949); Peter Streider, Dürer (London, 1982); and R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe (Edinburgh, 1990).

  For drawings, so important for the study of Renaissance art, I have used especially the following collections: M. Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings (four vols., London, 1994); F. Gibbons, Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton (two vols., Princeton, N.J., 1977); J. Byam Shaw, Italian Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection (three vols., Paris, 1983) and Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford (two vols., Oxford, 1976); J. Bean, (ed.), Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings (New York, 1982); Renaissance Drawings from the Uffizi (exhibition catalog, New South Wales, 1995); N. Turner, Florentine Drawings of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1986); and J. Wilde, Michelangelo and his Studio (London, 1975). For the spread of the Renaissance in eastern and central Europe, I found illuminating Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (London, 1995).