Over the centuries, there have been three obvious and unquestionable ages of greatness in Italy: first, Roman antiquity; then the period from the early twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth, the first, or according to Armando Sapori the true Renaissance; and lastly the second Renaissance, in the usual, broad sense of the word, running from the mid-fifteenth century to the early or possibly the middle years of the seventeenth. Perhaps the last two should, in fact, be seen as a single continuous movement, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century.
Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was to come that important but obscure phenomenon, somehow concealed behind the distracting hubbub of political history, that great drain on Italy’s human resources: emigration overseas, with effects not greatly beneficial to the peninsula itself. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Italian emigration replenished the human resources of the various Americas—Spanish, Portuguese, and English-speaking—and helped them launch their modern careers. On a world scale, this was no mean contribution. Was it merely the beginning of something? The question remains open. I am one of those who are impressed by the vitality of present-day Italy, by the lively upsurge in Italian art and literature and by the marvellous Italian cinema. But it is too soon to pass long-term judgment. And we should in any case always remember that greatness is a very particular kind of measurement, not really applicable either to the Italy or the France of today. A united Europe might perhaps lay claim to it, for greatness can be founded only on influence and supremacy in relation to others. There is an obvious and necessary relativity to be observed.
All the same, there can be no doubt that a study of Italy’s greatness between 1450 and 1650 would be illumined by serious comparison with those other experiences encountered in the course of a many-centuried history, however different or distant in time they may be. What we would be judging, taking Italy as an example, would be “greatness” in itself, that many-sided and diverse phenomenon, which is so much more mysterious and complicated than it seems at first sight, although we have many modern examples before us: the greatness of sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century Holland, eighteenth-century France and Britain, not to mention more recent cases of which we will all be aware. In such examples of greatness, strength has joined forces with intelligence, power with culture, in combinations that are never quite the same, either in their causes or their effects, while they nevertheless remain comparable to each other. The vitality of a society, an economy, a civilization, or a state is at once concentrated and exhausted in such episodes. For although the time span may vary, the end of the story is always “decline,”a word as complex as it is convenient. It seems to set the final seal on the episode—yet we know that the wheel of history keeps on turning. Who would these days dare to echo Gobineau when he said, “All human societies have their decline and fall, all, I tell you.”1 True perhaps but a Renaissance is always possible.
The Dialectic of Internal and External
We can now move on from these broad considerations. It is enough to have evoked them in order to shed a clearer light on our particular area of concern, the period 1450–1650. From the outset—and this is important—we shall at least have registered that this age of greatness was not a unique episode.
Our period, like that of Roman antiquity, was an age of vigorous expansion, an age of active exploitation of the Mediterranean, the Mare Internum, by shipping, by regular traffic, by a form of capitalism already versatile and far-reaching, with strings of solidly established trading posts. There was even a Genoese empire on the Phoenician model,2 and a Venetian empire too—the latter destined to last (since Cyprus did not fall until 1571 or Candia until 1669), the former being toppled earlier, since Kaffa (a second Constantinople as some dared call it) was lost in 1475, and Chios in 1566. The cities and merchants of Italy even managed to establish their long-lasting supremacy vis-à-vis Byzantium and Islam, and more clearly still vis-à-vis western Europe.
At the same time, there was a steady flow of emigration from Italy. But with certain exceptions—and here I am thinking of the Italian soldiers who fought so often abroad, at Mühlberg for instance, under the banner of the Duke of Alba in 1547; at Lepanto, under the command of Don John of Austria in 1571; the soldiers who formed the nucleus of Alessandro Farnese’s army in the Netherlands; and who continued to fight so frequently during the seventeenth century in the service of the King of Spain, a ruler well known for his readiness to draw on Italian manpower, supplies, and credit and to exploit Sicily, Naples, and the Milanese quite shamelessly—with exceptions then, such emigration was not of massive proportions. It amounted to a few boatloads of people, almost all persons of note: engineers, skilled craftsmen, carrying with them the secrets of specialized technology; merchants (in large numbers); churchmen, and, even at this early date, political “technocrats” from Concini to Mazarin or Alberoni; humanists (some professors and some not), and lastly artists: musicians, architects, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, theater companies, directors, dancing-masters, and astrologers. This stream of emigrants—the export of the luxury trades one might call it—is itself proof, if any is needed, of Italy’s long-lasting supremacy.
In short, we have here a complex form of influence, compounded of adventurism, of every aspect of culture, and of every kind of financial expertise. Italy during these two centuries of the early modern era was not unlike France in a later period or the United States today.
The glory born of material wealth was the long-effective secret of the power of Florence, or indeed of Venice, Milan, and Genoa—the last being perhaps the most extraordinary. The belated but fantastic financial mastery of the Genoese, starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, is beginning to be realized, at least by specialist historians. Between roughly 1550 and 1650, there was an “age of the Genoese bankers” as striking as the “age of the Fuggers.” The Genoese succeeded, for a long moment, in imposing their rule on the wealth of Europe, and by extension on that of the rest of the world.
The glory of the intellect may appeal to us more than the glory of wealth. For century after century, Italy provided a living example, a spectacle of intellectual prowess, agility, and originality, a series of contradictory cultural revolutions, as freedom was followed by order, progress by interruption, radiance by obscurity. On this great stage, the light was always shifting, the colors were always changing: the Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque—here was one of the most dazzling sequences of displays of intelligence since the world began.
The inventive spark leapt in fact from one city to another. Each had its hour of glory, beginning with Florence’s “balancing act” of supremacy. The movement then flourished briefly in Rome, under Julius II and Leo X. Much later came the days of Venice and Bologna. Then the balance shifted decisively back to Rome which, like a tyrannical and demanding heart, attracted the lifeblood of Italy and the attention of the whole world. After the Council of Trent, Rome’s agenda consisted of the reconstruction of traditional civilization in the name of the Church triumphant, making it once more competitive and predominant, with a transformation of its style and modes of expression. And in a very short time that civilization spread to cover almost all of Europe, the Catholic and indirectly the Protestant as well: curious evidence of the unity of a world divided—perhaps falsely—against itself. In terms of civilization, the Italy with which we shall be dealing runs from the beginning of the Renaissance to the triumph of the Baroque. It covers a twofold or even threefold pattern of influence, but perhaps a single experience of superiority.
Whatever the images or words in which our arguments are expressed for want of better ones (influence, cultural diffusion, model, example, enlightenment) they all relate to a single problem. This may seem obvious but once one starts to analyze the problem, it immediately becomes more complex. There are too many landmarks, all of them uncertain: and too few firm, clear, and incontrovertible conclusions. Every fact, every event, has been minutely studied by generations of devoted historians, but none has illuminated more than a corner of the stage, of the huge system within which Italy’s exceptional destiny has been inscribed and elaborated.
That destiny was in fact the prisoner of a kind of external structure, one that was slow to change, although in the long run it was to be radically transformed. One has constantly to be aware of both the detail and the overall picture—or more precisely to challenge the dialectic of internal and external factors, and seek a single unifying truth. Indeed, that wider stage on to which Italian life was projected makes sense only if it is constantly related to and set alongside what was happening inside Italy on home ground, at the heart of the system. It is sometimes said that light shed from the margin is the best, that a complex whole may best be apprehended from its outer limits. That may well be so, but we nevertheless have to deal with two separate geometries, two realities: core and periphery. Their contrasts and coincidences, and even more their failure to coincide, are the raison d’être of the debate we shall be following. But what a bundle of difficulties and dilemmas is contained within the enormous mass of history to be subjected to this double analysis. Relations between Italy and the countries and coastlines of Islam and Byzantium were by no means simple. And as for the privileged zone of western Europe, in which Italy played an essential role, that was a jigsaw puzzle, fragmented and torn apart by the rise of the territorial state. It was a world full of vigor and contrasts, with instances of powerful originality, which even today allow nationalist historians to champion the rights of their respective homelands against the more generally recognized superiority of Italy. Louis Courajod (1841–1896), an admirable art historian, claimed that the true origins of the Renaissance lay in France, no less!3 Fortunately this war of words between historians is becoming a thing of the past.
Beyond the Anecdotal
This great mass of knowledge and scholarship in the end becomes a burden. Too much detail has accumulated and we need to move beyond it, to adjust its true weight and restore its meaning if it has any. Too much detail: by which I mean too many events and happenings, however important, too many biographies, however exemplary. For this is the familiar harvest gathered, in no particular order, by the splintered world of scholarship. Each detail restores, but only for a moment, a fragment of space and time which we need to perceive with accuracy and precision.
Suppose for instance that we wanted to find out about the first Italian merchants to settle in Languedoc: we would have to go back to the beginning of the Crusades. To note the presence of Petrarch in Avignon on his first visit in 1326—Petrarch who converses with Cicero and Virgil as if they were flesh and blood sitting before him—is to register the beginning of an influence from which French humanism would eventually emerge, not transformed perhaps but strengthened. If we count the Italians whom Charles VIII brought back with him from his rapid expedition to Naples, that takes us to 1495—but there were probably more marble-cutters from Carrara and Genoese shopkeepers among them than genuine artists, sculptors or architects. Perhaps too the marvels of the “Italian Campaign” have been a little exaggerated. Take another detail: when the Venetian Jacopo dei Barbari met Albrecht Dürer, the year was probably 1490; on April 8, 1500, he was appointed painter to the Imperial Court by Maximilian; later he entered the service of the Duke of Saxony, Elector of Brandenburg, traveled to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, and eventually left for the Netherlands with Margaret of Austria in 1510:4 it seems like a satisfying illustration of the way one branch of the Italian Renaissance eventually met up with the other pole of Europe, the Netherlands, in which Charles of Ghent (the future Charles V) was growing up. When Leonardo da Vinci accepted the invitation of François I to take up residence in the Château of Cloux, bringing with him the Mona Lisa, St. John the Baptist and the Virgin and St. Anne, that takes us to 1516, and France is about to undergo a wave of Italian influence.
This much is clear, well known and documented. But how easy would it be to situate in time and space the powerful influence of Machiavelli and his Discorsi?5 From the l 540s, when his work was taken up and widely diffused (he had died in 1527) there would hardly be a moment when his writings were not being read, reread, and reinterpreted by a variety of commentators and followers. What this disturbing Florentine was providing for all of them was a tool kit, a vade mecum of political manœuvre, a certain “virtù,” that strength which leads to power of all kinds. The Spaniard Ginés de Sepúlveda defined virtù as “the force or faculty enabling one to achieve any goal one has set oneself” (Vis enim seu facultas insita ad finem qualemcumque propositum perveniendi virtus solet appellari).6 We would call this way of behaving, as if nothing else mattered but the interests of the Prince, raison d’état. This expression, which had such a successful career, was in fact invented not by Machiavelli but by another Italian, Giovanni della Casa, in an address to the Emperor Charles V in 1547.7 But in any case, only Italy, with its diverse and highly developed political forms, with the wealth of events and lessons to be drawn from its history, could possibly have aspired to this degree of political sophistication, at the threshold of modern times. And it must surely be this political maturity that explains the steady success of so many famous Italians in the political sphere. How else are we to understand how they climbed the ladder of power on so many occasions, in other countries? Consider, however briefly, the short-lived career of Concini, Maréchal d’Ancre, a less successful version of Mazarin: it takes us to April 24, 1617, the date of his assassination. Similarly, the dates of the dazzling, improbable, indeed scandalous success of Mazarin himself are landmarks not to be overlooked. His death in 1661 tolled the knell for the colonies of Italian merchants—it was the end of “Tuscany in France.”8 But before long, in another country, an equally amazing career began, that of Alberoni (1664–1752), the humble gardener’s son from Parma, who was to govern Spain under Philip V and the restless and disquieting Elisabeth Farnese—proof, if it were needed, that the Iberian peninsula in the early eighteenth century was, in spite of appearances, open to influence and adventurers from Italy.
Another essential task is to trace and map the spread of the Italian language, that constant presence in all European culture. But who would have the patience to fit together all those tiny pieces of evidence, those fleeting but significant images? On a spring day in 1536, the French King François I, greeting the Venetian ambassadors, quite naturally spoke Italian when he told them he was glad to see them and expressed his anxiety and perpetual resentment against “Caesar,” Henri III of France must also have understood Italian, since as a lover of literary disquisitions and anxious for some respite from political debate at his table, towards the end of what he considered the peaceful year of 1576, he gladly gave the floor to the Queen Mother’s Italian doctor, Filippo Cavriana, a man of great learning, who “said his piece” in his native tongue.9 Even more significantly, the audiences who went to watch the commedia dell’arte performed and improvised by Italian companies, in Vienna, London, or Paris, must have been able to understand the actors’ words. It was only after 1668 that a few scenes in French began to be inserted into the Italian performances. At the end of the century, performances still combined the two languages.10 The roles were of course always the same, the characters were stock, and mime helped people to follow the story, but they must also have been able to pick up a few words here and there. One last detail: Mme de Sévigné, traveling to Grignan and stopping overnight at Auxerre on July 16, 1672, passed the time by reading the Aeneid in the Italian verse translation by Annibale Caro.11
If one were to undertake a systematic search for the Italian merchant abroad (a most worthwhile project) one would have to mobilize all the scholars and historians in the world to do it properly. For in one’s reading or in the archives, one is always coming across this remarkable, determined, and intelligent character, often hated, always suspect, but indispensable. After all, his shop had the finest goods the world had to offer. And he had mysterious means at his disposal. With just a pen and a sheet of paper, he could dispatch money abroad, and equally miraculously could receive it back himself, or deliver it to those who paid a fair price for his services.12 He was indeed an astonishing figure, and one who remained privileged by his technology well beyond the sixteenth century. Even after 1650, his reign was not over, his superiority remaining intact in eastern and central Europe. He was still to be found in Poland, for example, actively busying himself, attending the fairs, selling endless quantities of fabric from Lucca, Florence, Milan, or even Venice13—evidence that industry continued to thrive in these famous cities and that Italian trade was still flourishing in the backward zones of central and eastern Europe. Note too that the spread of trade was accompanied by that of the arts, and that Italian artists, architects, and writers thronged to eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Metastasio (1698–1782), who was summoned to the Viennese court in 1730, would be its official poet until his death. For Italians, the north-northwest sector of the compass long remained a worthwhile direction for travel. And yet by this late date, according to the history books, Italy had ceased to exist or at any rate to have any external presence!
How is one to set down a coherent account of all these thousands of details, of all these sound waves bouncing back and forth, jostling and interfering with each other? Above all, how is one to hazard an overall diagnosis on such a foundation? How is one to extract a meaningful history from this succession of short-lived pictures, some of them mere mirror images?
Proceeding by Cross Sections towards a General Analysis
Possibly the best way to try to grasp the extent, the nature, the force, and the duration of Italian influence abroad is to proceed by taking a series of cross sections over time, at different dates between 1450 and 1650. When juxtaposed, these successive maps of Italy’s foreign presence should combine to create a history of Italy outside Italy, covering an area far greater than the peninsula itself. The greatness of Italy was one of the dimensions of the world, as it is important to point out—and to keep pointing out.
We shall then have to analyze and dissect these successive stages of greatness. Did they obey some inner destiny? Do they form a logical sequence? We shall see that power and culture do not always mingle in equal proportions, nor necessarily go hand in hand, and that Italy’s foreign influence is not from start to finish a simple matter of the diffusion of precious goods. And this finding bears witness both to the singular destiny of Italy during these centuries of the early modern period, and to other examples where greatness of a similar order can be recognized.