A social group, large or small, tends to share certain attitudes – views of God and the cosmos, of nature and human nature, of life and death, space and time, the good and the beautiful. These attitudes may be conscious or unconscious. In a period of controversy people may be extremely conscious of their attitudes to religion or the state, while remaining virtually unaware that they hold a particular conception of space or time, reason or necessity.
It is not easy to write the history of these attitudes. Historians have stalked their quarry from different directions. One group, the Marxists, have concerned themselves with ‘ideologies’. Aware of the need to explain as well as to describe ideas, they have sometimes ended by reducing them to weapons in the class struggle.1 Another group, the French historians of ‘collective mentalities’, study assumptions and feelings as well as conscious thoughts, but find it difficult to decide where one mentality ends and another begins.2 In this chapter I shall employ the somewhat more neutral term of ‘worldview’, while attempting to include what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ and to avoid the risk inherent in this third approach of providing description without analysis, or remaining at the level of consciously formulated opinions.3
In this chapter an attempt is made to move from the immediate environment of the art and literature of the Renaissance to the study of the surrounding society. The assumption behind it is that the relation between art and society is not direct but mediated through worldviews. More precisely, there are two assumptions behind the chapter, two hypotheses which need to be tested: in the first place, that worldviews exist – in other words, that particular attitudes are associated with particular times, places and social groups, so that it is not misleading to refer, for example, to ‘Renaissance attitudes’, ‘Florentine attitudes’ or ‘clerical attitudes’; in the second place, that these worldviews find their most elaborate expression in art and literature.
These hypotheses are not easy to verify. The sources, which are predominantly literary, are richer for the sixteenth century than for the fifteenth, much richer for Tuscany than for other regions, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the views they express are those of males of what we would call the upper or upper-middle class (the social structure of the period will be discussed in chapter 9 below). As in the case of the study of aesthetic taste, it pays to look not only at relatively formal literary works but also at documents produced in the course of daily life, such as official reports and private letters. To uncover unconscious attitudes the historian has to attempt to read between the lines, using changes in the frequency of certain keywords as evidence of a shift in values.4
This account will begin with a summary of some typical views of the cosmos, society, and human nature (needless to say, it will be extremely selective). It will end with an attempt to examine general features of the belief system and signs of change. The quotations will usually come from well-known writers of the period, but the passages have been chosen to illustrate attitudes they shared with their contemporaries.
Views of time and space are particularly revealing of the dominant attitudes of a particular culture, precisely because they are rarely conscious and because they are expressed in practice more often than in texts. In his famous study of the religion of Rabelais, the French historian Lucien Febvre emphasized the vague, task-orientated conceptions of time and space in sixteenth-century France, such as the habit of counting in ‘Aves’ – in other words, the amount of time it takes to say a ‘Hail Mary’. Febvre made the French appear, in these respects at least, almost as exotic as the Nuer of the Sudan, whose attitudes to space and time were described at much the same time in an equally classic work by the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.5
Whatever may have been the assumptions of the Italian peasants of this period, the evidence from the towns suggests that much more precise attitudes to time were widespread, like the mechanical clocks which both expressed and encouraged these new attitudes. From the late fourteenth century, mechanical clocks came into use; a famous one was constructed at Padua to the design of Giovanni Dondi, a physician–astronomer who was a friend of Petrarch, and completed in 1364. About 1450, a clock was made for the town hall at Bologna; in 1478, one for the Castello Sforzesco in Milan; in 1499, one for Piazza San Marco in Venice; and so on. By the late fifteenth century, portable clocks were coming in. In Filarete’s utopia, the schools for boys and girls had an alarm clock (sveg-liatoio) in each dormitory. This idea at least was not purely utopian, for in Milan in 1463 the astrologer Giacomo da Piacenza had an alarm clock by his bed.6
There is an obvious parallel between the new conception of time and the new conception of space; both came to be seen as precisely measurable. Mechanical clocks and pictorial perspective were developed in the same culture, and Brunelleschi was interested in both. The paintings of Uccello and Piero della Francesca (who wrote a treatise on mathematics) are the creations of men interested in precise measurement working for a public with similar interests. Fifteenth-century narrative paintings are located in a more precise space and time than their medieval analogues.7
Changing views of time and space seem to have coexisted with a traditional view of the cosmos. This view, memorably expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was shared in essentials by his sixteenth-century commentators, who drew on the same classical tradition, especially the writings of two Greeks, the astronomer–geographer Ptolemy and the philosopher Aristotle. According to this tradition, the fundamental distinction was that between Heaven and Earth.
‘Heaven’ should really be in the plural. In the centre of the universe was the Earth, surrounded by seven ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’, in each of which moved a planet: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were each moved by an ‘intelligence’, a celestial driver often equated with the appropriate classical god or goddess. This fusion of planets and deities had permitted the survival of the pagan gods into the Middle Ages.8
The importance of the planets resided in their ‘influences’. As they sang in a Carnival song by Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘from us come all good and evil things’. Different professions, psychological types, parts of the body and even days of the week were influenced by different planets (Sunday by the Sun, Monday by the Moon, and so on). Vasari offered an astrological explanation of artistic creativity in his life of Leonardo, remarking that ‘The greatest gifts may be seen raining on human bodies from celestial influences.’ To explain the past or discover what the future has in store, it was normal to consult specialists who calculated the configuration of the heavens at a particular time. The humanist physician Girolamo Fracastoro gave an account of the outbreak of syphilis in Europe in terms of a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Cancer. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino believed that the ‘spirit’ of each planet could be captured by means of appropriate music or voices (‘martial’ voices for Mars, and so on) and by making an appropriate ‘talisman’ (an image engraved on a precious stone under a favourable constellation).9
These beliefs had considerable ‘influence’ on the arts. Aby Warburg’s iconographical analysis of frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara showed that they represented the signs of the zodiac and their divisions into 36 ‘decans’.10 The Florentine patrician Filippo Strozzi consulted ‘a man learned in astrology’, just as the treatises of Alberti and Filarete recommended, to ensure a good constellation before having the foundations of the Palazzo Strozzi laid on 6 August 1489.11 When a Florentine committee was discussing where to place Michelangelo’s David, one speaker suggested that it should replace Donatello’s Judith, which was ‘erected under an evil star’.12 Raphael’s patron, the papal banker Agostino Chigi, was interested in astrology, and some of the paintings he commissioned refer to his horoscope.13
Astrology was permitted by the Church; it was not considered incompatible with Christianity. As Lorenzo de’Medici put it, ‘Jupiter is a planet which moves only its own sphere, but there is a higher power which moves Jupiter.’14 The twelve signs of the zodiac were associated with the twelve apostles. A number of popes took an interest in the stars. Paul III, for example, summoned to Rome the astrologer who had predicted his election (Luca Gaurico, whose brother Pomponio’s treatise on sculpture has already been quoted) and gave him a bishopric. Yet there was a sense in which theology and astrology formed two systems which in practice competed with each other. The saints presided over certain days; so did the planets. People might take their problems to a priest or to an astrologer. It was largely on religious grounds that some leading figures of the period rejected astrology, notably Pico della Mirandola (who declared that ‘astrology offers no help in discovering what a man should do and what avoid’) and Fra Girolamo Savonarola.15
Above the seven heavens and beyond the sphere of the ‘fixed stars’, God was to be found. In the writing of the period, God was indeed almost everywhere. Even commercial documents might begin with the monogram YHS, standing for ‘Jesus the Saviour of Mankind’ (Jesus Hominum Salvator). When disaster struck, it was commonly interpreted as a sign of God’s anger. ‘It pleased God to chastise us’ is how the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci comments on the plague. When the French invasion of 1494 left Florence virtually unharmed, Landucci wrote that ‘God never removed His hand from off our head.’ The name of God constantly recurs in private letters, such as those of the Florentine lady Alessandra Macinghi degli Strozzi: ‘Please God free everything from this plague … it is necessary to accept with patience whatever God wants … God give them a safe journey’, and so on. Even Machiavelli ends a letter to his family ‘Christ keep you all.’16 Of all the ways in which Christians have imagined God, two seem particularly characteristic of the period. The emphasis on the sweetness of God and the ‘pathetic tenderness’ of attitudes to Christ, which the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted in France and the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, can be found in Italy as well.17 Savonarola, for example, addresses Christ with endearments such as ‘my dear Lord’ (signor mio caro), or even ‘sweet spouse’ (dolce sposo). Christocentric devotion seems to have been spread by the friars, not only the Dominican Savonarola but the Franciscans Bernardino da Siena, who encouraged the cult of the name of Jesus, and Bernardino da Feltre, who was responsible for the foundation of a number of fraternities dedicated to Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. The Meditations on the Passion attributed to the Franciscan saint Bonaventura was something of a best-seller in fifteenth-century Italy, with at least twenty-six editions, as was the Imitation of Christ, a devotional text from the fourteenth-century Netherlands, with nine editions.18
This image of a sweet and human Saviour coexisted with a more detached view of God as the creator of the universe, its ‘most beautiful architect’ (bellissimo architetto), as Lorenzo de’Medici once called him.19 He was also imagined, in this trade-oriented urban society, as the head of the firm. Leonardo da Vinci addressed God as you who ‘sell us every good thing for the price of labour’. Giannozzo Manetti, a Florentine merchant and scholar, liked to compare God to ‘the master of a business who gives money to his treasurer and requires him to render an account as to how it may have been spent’.20 He transposed the Gospel parable of the talents from its original setting, that of a landlord and his steward, to a more commercial environment. Thus Renaissance Italians projected their own concerns on to the supernatural world.
The lower, ‘sublunary’ world on which man lived was believed to be composed of four elements – earth, water, air and fire – as illustrated in Vasari’s Room of the Elements in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The elements were themselves composed of the four ‘contraries’ – hot, cold, moist and dry.
There were also four levels of earthly existence – human, animal, vegetable and mineral. This is what has been called the ‘great chain of being’.21 The ‘ladder’ of being might be a better term because it makes the underlying hierarchy more evident. Stones were at the bottom of the ladder because they lacked souls. Then came plants, which had what Aristotle called ‘vegetative souls’, animals, which had ‘sensitive souls’ (that is, the capacity to receive sensations) and, at the top, humans, with ‘intellectual souls’ (in other words, the power of understanding). Animals, vegetables and minerals were arranged in hierarchies; the precious stones were higher than the semi-precious ones, the lion was regarded as the king of beasts, and so on.
More difficult to place on the ladder are the nymphs who wander or flee through the poems of the period; or the wood spirits who lived in lonely places and would eat boys (as the grandmother of the poet Poliziano used to tell him when he was small); or the ‘demons’ who lived midway between the Earth and the Moon and could be contacted by magical means (Ficino was one of those who tried). The philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi doubted whether demons existed at all.22 It seems, however, that he was expressing a minority view. When reading the poems of the period or looking at Botticelli’s Primavera, it is worth bearing in mind that the supernatural figures represented in them were viewed as part of the population of the universe and not as mere figments of the artist’s imagination.
The status of another earthly power is even more doubtful: Fortune.23 Two common images of Fortune associated it, or rather her, with the winds and with a wheel. The wind image seems to be distinctively Italian. The phrase ‘fortune of the sea’ (fortuna di mare) meant a tempest, a vivid example of a change in affairs which is both sudden and uncontrollable. The Rucellai family, Florentine patricians, used the device of a sail, still to be seen on the façade of their church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence; here the wind represents fortune and the sail the power of the individual to adapt to circumstances and to manage them.24
The second image of fortune was the well-known classical one of the goddess with a forelock which must be seized quickly, because she is bald behind. In the twenty-fifth chapter of his Prince, Machiavelli recommended impetuosity on the grounds that fortune is a woman, ‘and to keep her under it is necessary to strike her and beat her’ (è necessario volendola tenere sotto, batterla e urtarla), while his friend the historian Francesco Guicciardini suggested that it is dangerous to try to make conspiracies foolproof because ‘Fortune, who plays such a large part in all matters, becomes angry with those who try to limit her dominion.’ It is difficult for a modern reader to tell in these instances whether the goddess has been introduced simply to make more memorable conclusions arrived at by other means, or whether she has taken over the argument; whether she is a literary device, or a serious (or at any rate a half-serious) way of describing whatever lies outside human control.25
To understand and manipulate the world of earth, several techniques were available, including alchemy, magic and witchcraft. Their intellectual presuppositions need to be discussed.
Alchemy depended on the idea that there is a hierarchy of metals, with gold as the noblest, and also that the ‘social mobility’ of metals is possible. It was related to astrology because each of the seven metals was associated with one of the planets: gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, mercury with Mercury, iron with Mars, lead with Saturn, tin with Jupiter, and copper with Venus. It was also related to medicine because the ‘philosopher’s stone’ which the alchemists were looking for was also the cure for all illnesses, the ‘universal panacea’.
Jacob Burckhardt believed that alchemy ‘played only a very subordinate part’ in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.26 It is dangerous to make general assertions about the popularity of such a deliberately esoteric subject as alchemy, but the odds are that he was wrong. The Venetian Council of Ten took it more seriously when they issued a decree against it in 1488. Several Italian treatises on the subject from the later part of our period have survived. The most famous is a Latin poem, Giovanni Augurello’s Chrysopoeia, published in 1515 and dedicated to Leo X; there is a story that the pope rewarded the poet with an empty purse. A certain ‘J. A. Pantheus’, priest of Venice, also dedicated an alchemical work to Leo before inventing a new subject, ‘cabala of metals’, which he carefully distinguished from alchemy, perhaps because the Council of Ten were still hostile. On the other hand, some people treated the claims of the alchemists with scepticism. St Antonino, the fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, held that the transmutation of metals was beyond human power, while the Sienese metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio suggested that it was ‘a vain wish and fanciful dream’ and that the adepts of alchemy, ‘more inflamed than the very coals in their furnaces’ with the desire to create gold, ought to go mining instead, as he did.27
There are only a few tantalizing indications of the possible relation between alchemy and art and literature. Alchemy had its own symbolic system, possibly adopted as a kind of code, in which, for example, a fountain stood for the purification of metals, Christ for the philosopher’s stone, marriage for the union of sulphur and mercury, a dragon for fire. To complicate matters, some writers used alchemical imagery as symbols of something else (religious truths, for example). The Dream of Polyphilus, an anonymous esoteric romance published in Venice in 1499, makes use of a number of these symbols, and it is possible that this love story has an alchemical level of meaning. Vasari tells us that Parmigianino gave up painting for the study of alchemy, and it has been suggested that his paintings make use of alchemical symbolism.28 Unfortunately, the fact that alchemists used a number of common symbols (while giving them uncommon interpretations) makes the suggestion impossible to verify.
Magic was discussed more openly than alchemy, at least in its white form; for, as Pico della Mirandola put it:
Magic has two forms, one of which depends entirely on the work and authority of demons, a thing to be abhorred, so help me the god of truth, and a monstrous thing. The other, when it is rightly pursued, is nothing else than the utter perfection of natural philosophy … as the former makes man the bound slave of wicked powers, so does the latter make him their ruler and lord.29
It should be noted that Pico believed in the efficacy of the black magic he condemns.
From a comparative point of view it might be useful to define magic, cross-culturally, as the attempt to produce material changes in the world as the result of performing certain rituals and writing or uttering certain verbal formulas (‘spells’, ‘charms’ or ‘incantations’) requesting or demanding that these changes take place. It would follow from this definition that the most influential group of magicians in Renaissance Italy were the Catholic clergy, since they claimed in this period that their rituals, images and prayers could cure the sick, avert storms, and so on.30
From the point of view of contemporaries, however, the distinction between religion and magic was an important one. The Church – or, to be more sociologically exact, the more highly educated clergy – generally regarded magic with suspicion. Books of spells were burned in public by San Bernardino of Siena and also by Savonarola. It would be too cynical to explain this opposition to magic (and in some cases, as we have seen, to astrology) merely in terms of rivalry and competition. There were other grounds for clerical suspicion.
Magic could be black for two reasons. In the first place, it could be destructive as well as productive or protective. Secondly, the magician might employ the services of evil spirits. Thus Giovanni Fontana, a fifteenth-century Venetian who made a number of mechanical devices for use in dramatic spectacles, gained the reputation of a necromancer who received assistance from spirits from hell, just as John Dee gained a sinister reputation in sixteenth-century Cambridge as a result of the too successful ‘special effects’ that he contrived for a performance of Aristophanes. No doubt many of their contemporaries viewed Brunelleschi and Leonardo in a similar light. At a more learned level, the philosopher Agostino Nifo argued that the marvels of magic showed that – contrary to Aristotle’s belief – demons really existed.
The literature of the period is steeped in magic. Romances of chivalry, for example, are full of sorcerers and of objects with magical powers. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the magician Merlino and the enchantress Alcina play an important part. Angelica has a magic ring, Astolfo is turned into a tree, Atlante’s castle is the home of enchantment, and so on. We should imagine the book’s first readers as people who, if they did not always take magic too seriously, did not take it too lightly either. They believed in its possibility. In the same milieu as Ariosto, at the court of Ferrara, Dosso Dossi painted a picture of Circe, the enchantress of the Odyssey, who attracted much interest in Renaissance Italy (Plate 8.1).
One reason for this interest in Circe is that she was taken to be a witch, notably by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (the nephew of Giovanni Pico), who published a dialogue on witchcraft in 1523 in which he made considerable use of the testimony of ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil.31 Witchcraft was the poor man’s magic, or rather the poor woman’s – that is, a considerable proportion of the elite of educated men distinguished magic from witchcraft and associated the latter with poor women, who were supposed to have made a pact with the devil, to have been given the power to do harm by supernatural means but without study, to fly through the air and to attend nocturnal orgies called ‘sabbaths’.32 Particularly vulnerable to these accusations were those villagers, male and female, who were called in by their neighbours to find lost objects by supernatural means or to heal sick people and animals. ‘Who knows how to cure illness knows how to cause it’ (Qui scit sanare scit destruere) went a proverb current at the time.33 It is more difficult to say whether the neighbours thought that these powers were or were not diabolical, and hardest of all to reconstruct what the accused thought she or he was doing. In Rome in 1427, two women confessed that they turned into cats, murdered children and sucked their blood; but the record does not tell us, in this case as in the majority of trials, what pressure had been brought to bear on the accused beforehand.
An illuminating and well-documented case is that of a certain Chiara Signorini, a peasant woman from the Modena area, accused of witchcraft in 1520. She and her husband had been expelled from their holding, whereupon the lady who owned the land had fallen ill. Chiara offered to cure her on condition that the couple was allowed to return. A witness claimed to have seen Chiara place at the door of the victim’s house ‘fragments of an olive-tree in the form of a cross … a fragment of the bone of a dead man … and an alb of silk, believed to have been dipped in chrism’. When Chiara was interrogated, she described visions of the Blessed Virgin, which her interrogator attempted to interpret as a diabolical figure. After torture, Chiara agreed that the devil had appeared to her, but she would not admit to having attended a ‘sabbath’. The use of the cross and the holy oil, like the vision of the Blessed Virgin, may well be significant. After all, the period 1450 to 1536 was the high point of recorded visions of the Virgin in Italy.34 Some of the ‘spells’ which inquisitors confiscated took the form of prayers. What one group views as witchcraft, another may take to be religion. In this conflict of interpretations, it was the interrogator, backed by his instruments of torture, who had the last word.35
PLATE 8.1 DOSSO DOSSI: CIRCE
Nevertheless, a few writers did express scepticism about the efficacy of magic and witchcraft. The humanist lawyer Andrea Alciati, for example, suggested (as Montaigne was to do) that so-called witches suffered from hallucinations of night flight, and so on, and deserved medicine rather than punishment.36 The physician Girolamo Cardano pointed out that the accused confessed to whatever the interrogators suggested to them, simply in order to bring their tortures to an end.37 Pietro Pomponazzi, who taught the philosophy of Aristotle at the University of Padua, argued in his book On Incantations that the common people simply attributed to demons actions which they did not understand. He offered naturalistic explanations of apparently supernatural phenomena such as the extraction of arrows by means of incantations and the cure of the skin disease called ‘the king’s evil’ by virtue of the royal touch. Pomponazzi held similar views about some of the miracles recorded in the Bible and about cures by means of relics, arguing that the cures may have been due to the faith of the patients, and that dogs’ bones would have done just as well as the bones of the saints. It is not surprising to find that this book, which undermined the Church’s distinction between religion and magic, was not published in the philosopher’s lifetime.38
The first thing to say about ‘society’ in Renaissance Italy is that the concept did not yet exist. It was not until the later seventeenth century that a general term began to be used (in Italian as in English, French and German) to describe the whole social system. A good deal was said and written, however, about various forms of government and social groups, and about the differences between the present and the past.39
In Italy as in other parts of Europe, a recurrent image, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, was that of the ‘body politic’ (corpo politico). It was more than a metaphor. The analogy between the human body and the political body was taken seriously by many people, and it underlay many more specific arguments. Thus a character in Castiglione’s Courtier could defend monarchy as a ‘more natural form of government’ because, ‘in our body, all the members obey the rule of the heart’.40 The ruler was often described as the ‘physician’ of this body politic, a commonplace which sometimes makes its appearance even in a writer as original and as deliberately shocking as Machiavelli, who wrote in the third chapter of The Prince that political disorders begin by being difficult to diagnose but easy to cure and end up easy to diagnose and difficult to cure.
However, in Italy this ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ language of politics was less dominant than elsewhere. A rival concept to the ‘body politic’, that of ‘the state’ (lo stato), was developing, with a range of reference which included public welfare, the constitution and the power structure. One character in Alberti’s dialogue on the family declares: ‘I do not want to consider the state as if it were my own property, to think of it as my shop’ (ascrivermi lo stato quasi per mia ricchezza, riputarlo mia bottega).41 ‘If l let a mere subject marry my daughter’, says the emperor Constantine in a play written by Lorenzo de’Medici, Saints John and Paul, ‘I will put the state into great danger’ (in gran pericolo metto / Lo stato). Machiavelli uses the term 115 times in his The Prince (and only in five cases in the traditional sense of the ‘state of affairs’).42
The existence within the peninsula of both republics and principalities made Italians unusually aware that the political system (governo, reggimento) was not God-given but man-made and that it could be changed. In a famous passage of his History of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini reports the discussions which took place in Florence after the flight of the Medici in 1494 about the relative merits of oligarchy (governo ristretto), democracy (governo universale) or a compromise between the two.43 This awareness of the malleability of institutions is central to the contemporary literature on the ideal city-state. The treatises on architecture by Alberti and Filarete sketch social as well as architectural utopias. Leonardo’s designs for an imaginary city express the same awareness that it is possible for social life to be planned.44 Machiavelli offers a quite explicit discussion of political innovation (innovazione). In Florence between 1494 and 1530 the many reports and discussions of political problems which have survived show that the new language of politics, and the awareness of alternatives it implied, was not confined to Machiavelli and Guicciardini but was much more widespread. It was this awareness which Jacob Burckhardt emphasized and discussed in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in his chapter on ‘The State as a Work of Art’ (Der Staat als Kunstwerk).45
Awareness of differences in social status seems also to have been unusually acute in Italy; at least, the vocabulary for describing these differences was unusually elaborate. The medieval view of society as consisting of three groups – those who pray, those who fight and those who work the soil – was not one which appealed to the inhabitants of Italian cities, most of whom performed none of these functions.46 Their model of society was differentiated not by functions but by grades (generazioni), and it probably developed out of the classification of citizens for tax purposes into rich, middling and poor. The phrases ‘fat people’ (popolo grasso) and ‘little people’ (popolo minuto) were commonly used, especially in Florence, and it is not difficult to find instances of a term such as ‘middle class’ (mediocri).47
However, contemporaries did not think exclusively in terms of income groups. They differentiated families and individuals according to whether they were or were not noble (nobili, gentilhuomini); whether or not they were citizens (cittadini), in possession of political rights; and whether they were members of the greater or lesser guilds. One of the most important but also one of the most elusive items in their social vocabulary was popolare, because it varied in significance according to the speaker. If he came from the upper levels of society, he was likely to use it as a pejorative term to denote all ordinary people. At the middle level, on the other hand, a greater effort was made to distinguish the popolo, who enjoyed political rights, from the plebe, who did not. The point of view of this ‘plebs’ has gone unrecorded.48
This awareness of the structure of society and of potentially different structures is also revealed in discussions of the definition of nobility, whether based on birth or individual worth, which are relatively frequent in the period, from the treatise of the Florentine jurist Lapo da Castiglionchio (written before 1381) and Poggio Bracciolini’s dialogue On True Nobility to the debate in Castiglione’s Courtier (1528). This discussion needs to be placed in the context of political and social conflict in Florence and elsewhere, but it is also related to contemporary concern with the value of the individual (below, p. 203).
Renaissance Italy was also remarkable for a view of the past taken by some artists and humanists, a view which was possibly more widespread. With the idea of the malleability of institutions, already discussed, went an awareness of change over time, a sense of anachronism or historical distance.49 The term ‘anachronism’ is literally speaking an anachronism itself because the word did not yet exist, but, in his famous critique of the authenticity of the document known as the Donation of Constantine, the humanist Lorenzo Valla did point out that the text contained expressions from a later period. He was well aware that ‘modes of speech’ (stilus loquendi) were subject to change, that language had a history.50 Another fifteenth-century humanist, Flavio Biondo, argued that Italian and other romance languages had developed out of Latin. Biondo also wrote a book called Rome Restored, in which he tried to reconstruct classical Rome on the basis of literary evidence as well as the surviving remains. In another book he discussed the private life of the Romans, the clothes they wore and the way in which they brought up their children.51
By the later fifteenth century, this antiquarian sensibility had become fashionable. The humanist condottiere Federigo da Montefeltro once asked the humanist pope Pius II, who recorded the question in his memoirs, whether the generals of antiquity wore the same kind of armour as he did (an prisci duces aeque ac nostri temporis armati fuissent). In the Dream of Polyphilus, the Venetian romance already mentioned, the lover searches for his beloved in a landscape of temples, tombs and obelisks, and even the language is a consciously archaic Latinate Italian.52 Among the artists whose work illustrates the growing interest in antiquarianism are Mantegna and Giulio Romano. Like his master and father-in-law Jacopo Bellini, Mantegna was extremely interested in copying ancient coins and inscriptions. He was a friend of humanists such as Felice Feliciano of Verona. His reconstructions of ancient Rome in the Triumphs of Caesar or the painting of Scipio introducing the cult of the Cybele are the pictorial equivalents of Biondo’s patient work of historical reconstruction, even if they contain some ‘fantastic’ elements.53 As for Giulio Romano, his painting of Constantine in battle draws heavily on the evidence of Trajan’s Column, as Vasari pointed out in his life of the artist, ‘for the costumes of the soldiers, the armour, ensigns, bastions, stockades, battering rams and all the other instruments of war’.
Vasari himself shared this sense of the past. His Lives are organized around the idea of development in time, from Cimabue to Michelangelo. He believed in progress in the arts, at least up to a point, but he also believed that individual artists ought to be judged by the standards of their own day, and he explained: ‘my intention has always been to praise not absolutely but, as the saying goes, relatively [non semplicemente ma, come s’usa dire, secondo ché], having regard to place, time, and other similar circumstances.’54
Another material sign of the awareness of the past is the fake antique, which seems to have been a fifteenth-century innovation. The young Michelangelo made a faun, a Cupid and a Bacchus in the classical style. He was essentially competing with antiquity rather than trying to deceive, but by the early sixteenth century the faking of classical sculptures and Roman coins was a flourishing industry in Venice and Padua in particular, so much so that the Italian engraver Enea Vico, in his Discourses on Ancient Medals (1555), told his readers how to distinguish genuine from faked artefacts. This response to two new trends, the fashion for ancient Rome and the rise of the art market, depended – like the detecting of the fakes – on a sense of period style. Texts too might be faked. Some humanists showed their skill by producing texts that they passed off as the work of Cicero and other classical writers, while others demonstrated the same kind of ability by identifying the fakes.55
This new sense of the past is one of the most distinctive but also one of the most paradoxical features of the period. Classical antiquity was studied in order to imitate it more faithfully, but the closer it was studied, the less imitation seemed either possible or desirable. ‘How mistaken are those’, wrote Francesco Guicciardini, ‘who quote the Romans at every step. One would have to have a city with exactly the same conditions as theirs and then act according to their example. That model is as unsuitable for those lacking the right qualities as it would be useless to expect an ass to run like a horse.’56 However, many people did quote the Romans at every step; Guicciardini’s friend Machiavelli was one of them.
Another paradox was that, at a time when Italian culture was strongly marked by the propensity to innovate, innovation was generally considered a bad thing. In political debates in Florence, it was taken for granted that ‘new ways’ (modi nuovi) were undesirable, and that ‘every change takes reputation from the city’.57 In Guicciardini’s History of Italy, the term ‘change’ (mutazione) seems to be used in a pejorative sense, and when a man is described, as is Pope Julius II, as ‘desirous of new things’ (desideroso di cose nuove), the overtones of disapproval are distinctly audible. Innovation in the arts was doubtless less dangerous, but it was rarely admitted to be innovation. It was generally perceived as a return to the past. When Filarete praises Renaissance architecture and condemns the Gothic, it is the latter which he calls ‘modern’ (moderno). It is only at the end of the period that one can find someone (Vasari, for example) cheerfully admitting to being moderno himself (above p. 19).
Classical views of the physical constitution of man, and the distinction between four personality types (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy), were taken seriously by writers in this period, which was an important one in the history of medicine.58 These views are not without relevance to the arts. Ficino, for example, joined the suggestion (which comes from a text attributed to Aristotle) that all great men are melancholies to Plato’s concept of inspiration as divine frenzy, and argued that creative people (ingeniosi) were melancholic and even ‘frantic’ (furiosi). He was thinking of poets in particular, but Vasari applied his doctrine to artists and so helped create the modern myth of the bohemian (above, pp. 88–90).59
However, the major theme of this section is inevitably one which contemporaries did not discuss in treatises but was discovered (or, as some critics would say, invented) by Jacob Burckhardt: Renaissance individualism. ‘In the Middle Ages’, wrote Burckhardt, in one of the most frequently quoted passages of his essay, ‘… Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation, only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air … man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.’60 He went on to discuss the passion for fame and its corrective, the new sense of ridicule, all under the general rubric of ‘the development of the individual’. For the use of this ‘blanket term’ he has been severely criticized.61 Burckhardt himself came to be rather sceptical about the interpretation he had launched, and towards the end of his life he confessed to an acquaintance: ‘You know, so far as individualism is concerned, I hardly believe in it anymore, but I don’t say so; it gives people so much pleasure.’62
The objections are difficult to gainsay, since urban Italians of this period were very much conscious of themselves as members of families or corporations.63 And yet we need the idea of individualism, or something like it. The idea of the self, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out more than half a century ago, is not natural. It is a social construct, and it has a social history.64 Indeed, the concept of person that is current (indeed, taken for granted) in a particular culture needs to be understood if we are to comprehend that culture, and, as another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, has suggested, it is a direct path into that culture for an outsider.65
If we ask about the concept of person current – among elites, at least – in Renaissance Italy, we may find it useful to distinguish the self-consciousness with which Burckhardt was particularly concerned from self-assertiveness, and to distinguish both from the idea of the unique individual.66
The idea of the uniqueness of the individual goes with that of a personal style in painting or writing, an idea which has been discussed already (above, p. 28). At the court of Urbino, the poet Bernardo Accolti went by the nickname ‘L’unico Aretino’. The poet Vittoria Colonna described Michelangelo as unico. An anonymous Milanese poem declares that, just as there is only one God in Heaven, so there is only one ‘Moro’ (Ludovico Sforza) on earth. In his biographies, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci often refers to men as ‘singular’ (singolare).
There is rather more to say about self-assertion. Burckhardt argued that the craving for fame was a new phenomenon in the Renaissance. The Dutch historian Huizinga retorted that, on the contrary, it was ‘essentially the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times’.67 The romances of chivalry do indeed suggest that the desire for fame was one of the leading motives of medieval knights, so what Burckhardt noticed may have been no more than the demilitarization of glory. However, it is remarkable quite how often self-assertion words occur in the Italian literature of this period. Among them we find ‘competition’ (concertazione, concorrenza), ‘emulation’ (emulazione), ‘glory’ (gloria), ‘envy’ (invidia), ‘honour’ (onore), ‘shame’ (vergogna), ‘valour’ (valore) and, hardest of all to translate, virtù, a concept of great importance in the period referring to personal worth, which we have already met when discussing its complementary opposite, fortune.68 Psychologists would say that, if words of this kind occur with unusual frequency in a particular text, as they do, for example, in the dialogue on the family by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti, then its author is likely to have had an above-average achievement drive, which in Alberti’s case his career does nothing to refute. That the Florentines in general were unusually concerned with achievement is suggested by the novelle of the period, which often deal with the humiliation of a rival.69 The suggestion is confirmed by the institutionalization of competitions between artists; by the sharp tongues and the envy in the artistic community, as recorded by Vasari, notably in his life of Castagno; and, not least, by the remarkable creative record of that city.
At any rate self-assertion was an important part of the Italian, and especially the Florentine, image of man. The humanists Bruni and Alberti both described life as a race. Bruni wrote that some ‘do not run in the race, or when they start, become tired and give up half way’; Alberti, that life was a regatta in which there were only a few prizes: ‘Thus in the race and competition for honour and glory in the life of man it seems to me very useful to provide oneself with a good ship and to give an opportunity to one’s powers and ability (alle forze e ingegno tuo), and with this to sweat to be the first.’70 For a hostile account of the same kind of struggle, we may turn to the Sienese pope Pius II (who was not exactly backward in the race to the top), and his complaint that ‘In the courts of princes the greatest effort is devoted to pushing others down and climbing up oneself.’71 Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists to draw in company because ‘a sound envy’ would act as a stimulus to do better.72 Rivalry between artists was not confined to Tuscans such as Leonardo and Michelangelo but involved Raphael and Titian as well, to mention only the most famous names.73
It is not unreasonable to suggest that competition encourages self-consciousness, and interesting to discover that the Tuscan evidence for this kind of individualism is once again richer than anything to be found elsewhere. The classic phrase of the Delphic oracle, ‘know thyself’, quoted by Marsilio Ficino among others, was taken seriously in the period, although it was sometimes given a more worldly interpretation than was originally intended.
The most direct evidence of self-awareness is that of autobiographies or, more exactly (since the modern term ‘autobiography’ encourages an anachronistic view of the genre), of diaries and journals written in the first person, of which there are about a hundred surviving from Florence alone.74 The local name for this kind of literature was ricordanze, which might be translated ‘memoranda’, a suitably vague word for a genre which had something of the account book and something of the city chronicle in it, and was focused on the family, but none the less reveals something about the individual who wrote it – the apothecary Luca Landucci, for example, who has been quoted more than once in these pages, or Machiavelli’s father Bernardo, or the Florentine patrician Giovanni Rucellai, who left a notebook dealing with a variety of subjects, a ‘mixed salad’ as he called it.75 Even if these memoranda were not intended to express self-awareness, they may have helped to create it. Rather more personal in style are the autobiographies of Pope Pius II (written, like Caesar’s, in the third person, but none the less self-assertive for that), Guicciardini (a brief but revealing memoir), the physician Girolamo Cardano (a Lombard, for once, not a Florentine) and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.
Autobiographies are not the only evidence for the self-consciousness of Renaissance Italians. There are also paintings. Portraits were often hung in family groups and commissioned for family reasons, but self-portraits are another matter. Most of them are not pictures in their own right but representations of the artist in the corner of a painting devoted to something else, such as the figure of Benozzo Gozzoli in his fresco of the procession of the Magi, Pinturicchio in the background to his Annunciation (Plate 8.2) or Raphael in his School of Athens. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, we find self-portraits in the strict sense by Parmigianino, for example, and Vasari, and more than one by Titian. They remind us of the importance of the mirrors manufactured in this period, in Venice in particular. Mirrors may well have encouraged self-awareness. As the Florentine writer Giambattista Gelli put it in a Carnival song he wrote for the mirror-makers of Florence, ‘A mirror allows one to see one’s own defects, which are not as easy to see as those of others.’76 Even letters from clients to patrons have been analysed as evidence of the gradual emergence of a new sense of self as ‘an autonomous, discreet and elusive agent’.77
Evidence of self-awareness is also provided by the conduct books, of which the most famous are Castiglione’s Courtier (1528), Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) and the Civil Conversation of Stefano Guazzo (1574). All three are manuals for the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’, as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it – instructions in the art of playing one’s social role gracefully in public. They inculcate conformity to a code of good manners rather than the expression of a personal style of behaviour, but they are nothing if not self-conscious themselves, and they encourage self-consciousness in the reader. Castiglione recommends a certain ‘negligence’ (sprezzatura), to show that ‘whatever is said or done has been done without pains and virtually without thought’, but he admits that this kind of spontaneity has to be rehearsed. It is the art which conceals art, and he goes on to compare the courtier to a painter. The ‘grace’ (grazia) with which he was so much concerned was, as we have seen, a central concept in the art criticism of his time. It is hard to decide whether to call Castiglione a painter among courtiers or his friend Raphael a courtier among painters, but the connections between their two domains are clear enough. The parallel was clear to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which he has God say to man that, ‘as though the maker or moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.’78
The dignity of man was a favourite topic for writers on the ‘human condition’ (the phrase is theirs: humana conditio). It is tempting to take Pico’s treatise on the dignity of man to symbolize the Renaissance, and to contrast it with Pope Innocent III’s treatise on the misery of man as a symbol of the Middle Ages. However, both the dignity and the misery of man were recognized by writers in both Middle Ages and Renaissance. Many of the arguments for the dignity of man (the beauty of the human body, its upright posture, and so on) are commonplaces of the medieval as well as the classical and Renaissance traditions. The themes of dignity and misery were considered as complementary rather than contradictory.79
All the same, there does appear to have been a change of emphasis revealing an increasing confidence in man in intellectual circles in the period. Lorenzo Valla, with characteristic boldness, called the soul the ‘man-God’ (homo Deus) and wrote of the soul’s ascent to heaven in the language of a Roman triumph. Pietro Pomponazzi declared that those (few) men who had managed to achieve almost complete rationality deserved to be numbered among the gods. Adjectives such as ‘divine’ and ‘heroic’ were increasingly used to describe painters, princes and other mortals. Alberti had called the ancients ‘divine’ and Poliziano had coupled Lorenzo de’Medici with Giovanni Pico as ‘heroes rather than men’, but it is only in the sixteenth century that this heroic language became commonplace. Vasari, for example, described Raphael as a ‘mortal god’ and wrote of the ‘heroes’ of the house of Medici. Matteo Bandello referred to the ‘heroic house of Gonzaga’ and to the ‘glorious heroine’ Isabella d’Este. Aretino, typically, called himself ‘divine’. The famous references to the ‘divine Michelangelo’ were in danger of devaluation by this inflation of the language of praise.80
These ideas of the dignity (indeed divinity) of man had their effect on the arts. Where Pope Innocent III, for example, found the human body disgusting, Renaissance writers admired it, and the humanist Agostino Nifo went so far as to defend the proposition that ‘nothing ought to be called beautiful except man’. By ‘man’ he meant woman, and in particular Jeanne of Aragon. One might have expected paintings of the idealized human body in a society where such views were expressed. The derivation of architectural proportions from the human body (again, idealized) also depended on the assumption of human dignity. Again, at the same time that the term ‘heroic’ was being overworked in literature, we find the so-called grand manner dominant in art. If we wish to explain changes in artistic taste, we need to look at wider changes in worldviews.
Another image of man, common in the literature of the time, is that of a rational, calculating, prudent animal. ‘Reason’ (ragione) and ‘reasonable’ (ragionevole) are terms which recur, usually with overtones of approval. They are terms with a wide variety of meanings, but the idea of rationality is central. The verb ragionare meant ‘to talk’, but then speech was a sign of rationality which showed man’s superiority to animals. One meaning of ragione was ‘accounts’: merchants called their account books libri della ragione. Another meaning was ‘justice’: the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua was not so much a ‘Palace of Reason’ as a court of law. Justice involved calculation, as the classical and Renaissance image of the scales should remind us. Ragione also meant ‘proportion’ or ‘ratio’. A famous early definition of perspective, in the life of Brunelleschi attributed to Manetti, called it the science which sets down the differences of size in objects near and far con ragione, a phrase which can be (and has been) translated as either ‘rationally’ or ‘in proportion’.
The habit of calculation was central to Italian urban life. Numeracy was relatively widespread, taught at special ‘abacus schools’ in Florence and elsewhere. A fascination with precise figures is revealed in some thirteenth-century texts, notably the chronicle of Fra Salimbene of Parma and Bonvesino della Riva’s treatise on ‘The Big Things of Milan’, which lists the city’s fountains, shops and shrines and calculates the number of tons of corn the inhabitants of Milan demolished every day.81 The evidence for this numerate mentality is even richer in the fourteenth century, as the statistics in Giovanni Villani’s chronicle of Florence bear eloquent witness, and richer still in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In Florence and Venice in particular, an interest was taken in statistics of imports and exports, population and prices. Double-entry book-keeping was widespread. The great catasto of 1427, a household-to-household survey of a quarter of a million Tuscans who were then living under Florentine rule, both expressed and encouraged the rise of the numerate mentality.82 Time was seen as something ‘precious’, which must be ‘spent’ carefully and not ‘wasted’; all these terms come from the third book of Alberti’s dialogue on the family. In similar fashion, Giovanni Rucellai advised his family to ‘be thrifty with time, for it is the most precious thing we have’.83 Time could be the object of rational planning. The humanist schoolmaster Vittorino da Feltre drew up a timetable for the students. The sculptor Pomponio Gaurico boasted that since he was a boy he had planned his life so as not to waste it in idleness.
With this emphasis on reason, thrift (masserizia) and calculation went the regular use of such words as ‘prudent’ (prudente), ‘carefully’ (pensatamente) and ‘to foresee’ (antevedere). The reasonable is often identified with the useful, and a utilitarian approach is characteristic of a number of writers in this period. In Valla’s dialogue On Pleasure, for example, one of the speakers, the humanist Panormita, defends an ethic of utility (utilitas). All action – writes this fifteenth-century Jeremy Bentham – is based on calculations of pain and pleasure. Panormita may not represent the author’s point of view. What is relevant here, however, is what was thinkable in the period rather than who exactly thought it. This emphasis on the useful can be found again and again in texts of the period, from Alberti’s book on the family to Machiavelli’s Prince, with its references to the ‘utility of the subjects’ (utilità de’sudditi), and the need to make ‘good use’ of liberality, compassion and even cruelty. Again, Filarete created in his ideal city of Sforzinda a utilitarian utopia that Bentham would have appreciated, in which the death penalty has been abolished because criminals are more useful to the community if they do hard labour for life, in conditions exactly harsh enough for this punishment to act as an adequate deterrent.84
Calculation affected human relationships. The account-book view of man is particularly clear in the reflections of Guicciardini. He advised his family:
Be careful not to do anyone the sort of favour that cannot be done without at the same time displeasing others. For injured men do not forget offences; in fact, they exaggerate them. Whereas the favoured party will either forget or will deem the favour smaller than it was. Therefore, other things being equal, you lose a great deal more than you gain.85
Italians (adult males of the upper classes, at any rate) admitted a concern (unusual for other parts of Europe in the period, whatever may be true of the ‘age of capitalism’) with controlling themselves and manipulating others. In Alberti’s dialogue on the family, the humanist Lionardo suggests that it is good ‘to rule and control the passions of the soul’, while Guicciardini declared that there is greater pleasure in controlling one’s desires (tenersi le voglie oneste) than in satisfying them. If self-control is civilization, as the sociologist Norbert Elias suggests in his famous book The Civilizing Process, then even without their art and literature the Italians of the Renaissance would still have a good claim to be described as the most civilized people in Europe.86
It is time to end this necessarily incomplete catalogue of the beliefs of Renaissance Italians and to try to see their worldview as a whole. One striking feature of this view is the coexistence of many traditional attitudes with others which would seem to be incompatible with them, a point that was famously made by Aby Warburg in his discussion of the last will and testament of the Florentine merchant Francesco Sassetti.87
Generally speaking, Renaissance Italians, including the elites who dominate this book, lived in a mental universe which, like that of their medieval ancestors, was animate rather than mechanical, moralized rather than neutral, and organized in terms of correspondences rather than causes.
A common phrase of the period was that the world is ‘an animal’. Leonardo developed this idea in a traditional way when he wrote: ‘We can say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the land, its bones are the structure of the rocks … its blood is the pools of water … its breathing and its pulses are the ebb and flow of the sea.’88 The operations of the universe were personified. Dante’s phrase about ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ was still taken literally. Magnetism was described in similar terms. In the Dialogues on Love (1535) by the Jewish physician Leone Ebreo, a work in the neo-Platonic tradition of Ficino, one speaker explains that ‘the magnet is loved so greatly by the iron, that notwithstanding the size and weight of the iron, it moves and goes to find it.’89 The discussions of the ‘body politic’ (above, p. 000) fit into this general picture. ‘Every republic is like a natural body’, as the Florentine theorist Donato Giannotti put it. Writers on architecture draw similar analogies between buildings and animate beings, analogies that are now generally misread as mere metaphors. Alberti wrote that a building is ‘like an animal’, and Filarete that ‘A building … wants to be nourished and looked after, and through lack of this it sickens and dies like a man.’ Michelangelo went so far as to say that whoever ‘is not a good master of the figure and likewise of anatomy’ cannot understand anything of architecture because the different parts of a building ‘derive from human members’.90 Not even Frank Lloyd Wright in the twentieth century could match this organic theory of architecture.
The universe was ‘moralized’ in the sense that its different characteristics were not treated as neutral in the manner of modern scientists. Warmth, for example, was considered to be better in itself than cold, because the warm is ‘active and productive’. It was better to be unchangeable (like the heavens) than mutable (like the earth); better to be at rest than to move; better to be a tree than a stone. Another way of making some of these points is to say that the universe was seen to be organized in a hierarchical manner, thus resembling (and also justifying or ‘legitimating’) the social structure. Filarete compared three social groups – the nobles, the citizens and the peasants – to three kinds of stone – precious, semi-precious and common. In this hierarchical universe it is hardly surprising to find that genres of writing and painting were also graded, with epics and ‘histories’ at the top and comedies and landscapes towards the bottom. However, more than hierarchy was involved on occasion. ‘Prodigies’ or ‘monsters’ – in other words, extraordinary phenomena – from the birth of deformed children to the appearance of comets in the sky, were interpreted as ‘portents’, as signs of coming disaster.91
The different parts of the universe were related to one another not so much causally, as in the modern world picture, as symbolically, according to what were called ‘correspondences’. The most famous of these correspondences was between the ‘macrocosm’, the universe in general, and the ‘microcosm’, the little world of man. Astrological medicine depended on these correspondences, between the right eye and the Sun, the left eye and the Moon, and so on. Numerology played a great part here. The fact that there were seven planets, seven metals and seven days of the week was taken to prove correspondences between them. This elaborate system of correspondences had great advantages for artists and writers. It meant that images and symbols were not ‘mere’ images and symbols but expressions of the language of the universe and of God its creator.
Historical events or individuals might also correspond to one another, since the historical process was often believed to move in cycles rather than to ‘progress’ steadily in one direction. Charles VIII of France was viewed by Savonarola as a ‘Second Charlemagne’ and as a ‘New Cyrus’ – more than the equivalent, almost the reincarnation, of the great ruler of Persia.92 The emperor Charles V was also hailed as the ‘Second Charlemagne’. The Florentine poets who wrote of the return of the golden age under Medici rule may well have been doing something more than turn a decoratively flattering or flatteringly decorative phrase. The idea of the Renaissance itself depends on the assumption that history moves in cycles and employs the organic language of ‘birth’.
This ‘organic mentality’, as we may call it, so pervasive was it, met a direct challenge only in the seventeenth century from Descartes, Galileo, Newton and other ‘natural philosophers’. The organic model of the cosmos remained dominant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All the same, a few individuals, at least on occasion, did make use of an alternative model – the mechanical one – which is hardly surprising in a culture which produced engineers such as Mariano Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and, of course, Leonardo.93 Giovanni Fontana, who wrote on water-clocks, among other subjects, once referred to the universe as this ‘noble clock’, an image that was to become commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Again, Leonardo da Vinci, whose comparison of the microscosm and the macrocosm has already been quoted, makes regular use of the mechanical model. He described the tendons of the human body as ‘mechanical instruments’ and the heart too as a ‘marvellous instrument’. He also wrote that ‘the bird is an instrument operating by mathematical law’, a principle underlying his attempts to construct flying-machines.94 Machiavelli and Guicciardini saw politics in terms of the balance of power. In the twentieth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli refers to the time when Italy was ‘in a way in equilibrium’ (in un certo modo bilanciata), while Guicciardini makes the same point at the beginning of his History of Italy, observing that, at the death of Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘Italian affairs were in a sort of equilibrium’ (le cose d’Italia in modo bilanciate si mantenessino). The widespread concern with the precise measurement of time and space, discussed earlier in this chapter, fits in better with this mechanical worldview than with the traditional organic one. The mechanization of the world picture was really the work of the seventeenth century, but in Italy, at least, the process had begun.95
There would seem to be a case for talking about the pluralism of worldviews in Renaissance Italy, a pluralism which may well have been a stimulus to intellectual innovation. Such a coexistence of competing views naturally raises the question of their association with different social groups. The mechanical world picture has sometimes been described as ‘bourgeois’.96 Was it in fact associated with the bourgeoisie? It will be easier to answer this question after discussing both what the bourgeoisie were and the general shape of the social structure in Renaissance Italy. This is the task of the following chapter.
