This chapter continues the process of moving outward from the art and literature of the Renaissance, the milieux in which they were produced and the worldviews they expressed. It is concerned essentially with organizations, formal and informal, and their relationship to Renaissance culture. It deals in the first place with an institution which existed to propagate a worldview, the Church; next with political institutions; then with the social structure; and, finally, at the very base of society, with the economy.
If modern Christians could visit Renaissance Italy, they would probably be very much surprised, not to say shocked, by what they would find going on in church, and even an Italian Catholic might raise an eyebrow.1 The Venetian cardinal Gasparo Contarini described men walking through a church ‘talking among themselves about trade, about wars, and very often even about love’. Walking through churches, especially during Mass, was frequently forbidden (at Modena in 1463, for example, and at Milan in 1530), frequently enough for us to conclude that it must have happened all the time. One might expect to find beggars in church, or horses, or gamblers, or a schoolmaster giving lessons, or a political meeting in progress. The parishioners ate, drank and danced in the church to celebrate major festivals such as that of the patron saint. Churches might be used as storehouses for grain or wood. A visitation of the diocese of Mantua in 1535 reported on a church in which ‘the chaplain has a kitchen, beds and other things which are not very appropriate for a holy place; but … he may be excused because his dwelling is very small.’2 Valuables might be kept in the sacristy; there were, after all, few other safe places.
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s remark that, in the Middle Ages, people were inclined ‘to treat the sacred with a familiarity that did not exclude respect’ remains true for the Renaissance, with the proviso that their familiarity did not necessarily include respect either.3 The distinction between the sacred and profane was not drawn in quite the same place and it was not drawn as sharply as it would be in the later sixteenth century after the Council of Trent. Nor was it drawn by everyone. As late as 1580, Montaigne, who was visiting Verona, was surprised to see men standing and talking during Mass, their hats on their heads and their backs to the altar.4
There was a similar lack of sharp distinction between clergy and laity. The Roman census of 1526 records a friar working as a mason (il frate muratore). The clergy lacked a special kind of education until seminaries were set up after the Council of Trent. ‘How many’, asked a participant in the Lateran Council of 1514, ‘do not wear clothes laid down by the sacred canons, keep concubines, are simoniacal and ambitious? How many carry weapons like soldiers? How many go to the altar with their own children around them? How many hunt and shoot with crossbows and guns?’5 It does not seem possible to answer his rhetorical questions, or even to say how many clergy there were – a question complicated by the existence of marginal cases, men in minor orders, including such famous names as Poliziano and Ariosto. All that the evidence allows is an estimate of their number in particular cities in particular years. In Florence in 1427, for example, a city of some 38,000 people, there were about 300 secular priests but over 1,100 monks, friars and nuns.6 By 1550 the total population had risen to nearly 60,000, but the proportion of clergy had climbed still more steeply, to just over 5,000, or nearly 9 per cent. In Venice in 1581, a city of about 135,000 people, there were nearly 600 secular priests, but the friars and nuns brought the clerical total to more than 4,000.7
The clergy were very far from being a homogeneous body, either culturally or socially. It is necessary to distinguish at least three groups: the bishops, the rank-and-file secular clergy and the members of religious orders.
Bishops, of whom there were nearly three hundred in Italy, were generally nobles. Some sees were virtually hereditary in particular families, the dynasty being perpetuated by the practice of uncles resigning in favour of their nephews. The other main avenue to a bishopric was the patron– client system. A young doctor of canon law would enter the household of a cardinal, serve him as secretary or in some other capacity, and obtain a bishopric through his influence. In Italy as elsewhere in Europe, bishops generally knew their law – better, in fact, than their theology.8
Parish priests also depended on patronage, since the right to appoint to a particular benefice often belonged to a particular family. Some rectors or holders of benefices did not do the work themselves but hired a deputy or ‘vicar’ to do it for them, often for a small proportion of the income. In the early sixteenth century, some chaplains in the diocese of Milan had an income of only 40 lire a year, less than that of an unskilled labourer. Some priests were active as horse or cattle dealers as a way of making ends meet. Whether rectors or vicars, parish priests had little formal training. They learned what they had to do by what has been called ‘apprenticeship’ – in other words, by helping and watching. Stories of their ignorance were common and may well have been exaggerated for effect, but diocesan visitations regularly revealed priests who lacked breviaries, or who could be described in laconic but devastating terms such as ‘he knows nothing’ or ‘he is illiterate’.9
Finally, there were the religious orders. There were monks, notably the Benedictines, among them the poet Teofilo Folengo, and the particularly strict Order of Camaldoli, one of whose members was the fifteenthcentury humanist Ambrogio Traversari, a friend of Niccolò de Niccoli and Cosimo de’Medici and translator of some of the Greek Fathers of the Church.10 There were five mendicant orders. The Servites, devoted to the Blessed Virgin, had been founded at Florence. The Augustinians included Luigi Marsigli, a friend of Niccoli and the humanist Coluccio Salutati. Among the Carmelites, devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, were Fra Lippo Lippi and the Latin poet Giovanni Battista Spagnolo, better known as ‘the Mantuan’. The Dominicans included the painter Fra Angelico and the preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola. The Franciscans had several leading preachers, among them San Bernardino of Siena. If they did not produce a major artist, they certainly had a great influence on the arts from the thirteenth century onwards.11
It was the friars who made sermons important in Italian religious life, in the towns at least, at a time when many of the parish clergy seem to have been ‘dumb dogs that will not bark’, as reformers liked to describe their English equivalents. San Bernardino even told his congregation that, if they had a choice between Mass and a sermon, they should choose the sermon. Enthusiasts took his sermons down in shorthand, and legal proceedings were sometimes postponed so that everyone could go and listen.12 Some preachers had little to learn from actors. One is said to have read to his congregation a letter from Christ, while another, Fra Roberto da Lecce, entered the pulpit to preach a crusade wearing a full suit of armour. If sermons receive no more than a brief mention in this study, it is not because they were unimportant in the cultural life of the time, but because they belong to late medieval tradition rather than to Renaissance innovation, and because the printed collections which survive are a highly abbreviated and incomplete record and no firm basis for the reconstruction of actual performances.13
Religious festivals were another kind of performance which it is hard to reconstruct but which meant a great deal to Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The feast of Corpus Christi, for example, was growing in importance in the fifteenth century. It was celebrated with special magnificence at Viterbo in 1462 by Pius II and his cardinals, as the pope records in his memoirs; the decorations included a fountain which ran with water and wine and ‘a youth impersonating the Saviour, who sweated blood, and filled a cup with a healing stream from a wound in his side’.14 A famous painting by Gentile Bellini represents the Corpus Christi procession in Venice as it went through Piazza San Marco. In the sixteenth century, tableaux vivants became an important element of Venetian Corpus Christi processions.15 Religious plays were another important element in these festivals – performances within the performance. Corpus Christi was one great occasion for plays; another, in Florence at least, was the feast of the Epiphany, when the plays represented the three wise men, or kings, Jasper, Baltasar and Melchior, bringing their gifts to the infant Christ. In Rome, a Passion play was performed every year at the Colosseum. As a fifteenth-century German visitor recorded, ‘This was acted by living people, even the scourging, the crucifixion, and how Judas hanged himself. They were all the children of wealthy people, and it was therefore done orderly and richly.’16
Among the most important festivals were those of the patron saints of cities: St Ambrose in Milan, St Mark in Venice, St John the Baptist in Florence, and so on.17 Such feasts were events on which civic prestige depended and on which communal values were solemnly reaffirmed. In Florence, for example, the feast of St John was celebrated with races, jousts and bull-fights. The subject towns of the Florentine empire sent deputations to the capital, there was a banquet for the Signoria (the town council), and there were the usual floats, races, cavalcades, hunts, jugglers, tight-rope walkers and giants (impersonated by men on stilts).18
Central to the organization of these plays and festivals were religious fraternities (compagnie, scuole). These voluntary associations of the laity were widespread in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when at least 420 of them were found in north and central Italy alone. Their main role may be described as the imitation of Christ: this underlay their frequent practice of flagellation, their banquets (a ritual of solidarity modelled on the Last Supper), their washing of the feet of the poor on special occasions, and their concern with what were known as the seven works of temporal mercy: visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, helping prisoners, burying the dead and giving lodging to pilgrims. Some specialized in a particular function. The fraternity of St Martin (Buonomini di San Martino) was founded in Florence in 1442 to aid the poor, especially the genteel poor, and named after the saint who had divided his cloak with a beggar. Others comforted condemned criminals, like the Roman fraternity of St John Beheaded (San Giovanni Decollato), of which Michelangelo was a member.19
The significance of the fraternities as the patrons of art has already been discussed (above, p. 96). They played an important part in religious festivals, walking in procession and performing in pageants and plays. It was, for example, the Fraternity of the Magi in Florence which performed the pageant of the three kings.20 The Fraternity of St John, also in Florence, performed Lorenzo de’Medici’s play Saints John and Paul. The Fraternity of the Gonfalon in Rome staged the regular Good Friday Passion play at the Colosseum (the painter Antoniazzo Romano was a member and he painted the scenery). Fraternities often sang hymns in praise of the Virgin and the saints, in their processions and in church, and these hymns (laude) were sometimes distinguished examples of religious poetry and might be set to music by leading composers such as Guillaume Dufay.21 Fraternities also listened to special sermons, which might be delivered by laymen. It is curious to think of Machiavelli in the pulpit, but it is still possible to read the ‘exhortation to penitence’ he delivered to the Florentine Fraternity of Piety. It has been argued that the Platonic Academy of Florence owes as much to these fraternities as to Plato’s original Academy.22
A distinctive feature of the political organization of Renaissance Italy was the importance of city-states and in particular of republics. Around the year 1200, ‘some two or three hundred units existed which deserve to be described as city-states.’23 By the fifteenth century, most of them had lost their independence, but not the Renaissance cities par excellence, Florence and Venice. Their constitutions make a study in contrasts.
If ever there were a state apparently well suited to the functional analysis which dominated sociology and social anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, it is surely Venice. The Venetian constitution was celebrated for its stability and balance, thanks to the mixture of elements from the three main types of government, with the doge representing monarchy, the Senate aristocracy, and the Great Council democracy. In practice the monarchical element was a weak one. Despite the outward honours paid to the doge, whose head appeared on coins, he had little real power. The Venetians had already developed the distinction, best known from Walter Bagehot’s famous description of the British constitution in the nineteenth century, between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system. The Great Council, by contrast, did participate in decision-making, but this council of nobles was not exactly democratic. As for conflicts, they were not absent but hidden behind the fiction of consensus.
Like the idea of the mixed constitution, Venetian stability or ‘harmony’ was not a neutral descriptive term. It was part of an ideology, part of the ‘myth of Venice’, as historians call it today – in other words, the idealized view of Venice held by Venetians from the ruling class, such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, whose Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1543) did much to propagate it.24 Relatively speaking, however, there was a kernel of truth in the idea of Venetian stability. The political system did not change very much during the period. If Venice was ruled by the few, the few were unusually numerous. All adult patricians were members of the Great Council (Maggior Consiglio) – over 2,500 of them in the early sixteenth century25 – hence the size of the Hall of the Great Council and the need for large paintings to fill it.
Florence, by contrast, had an unstable political system, compared by Dante in his Divine Comedy – which exile gave him the leisure to write – to a sick woman twisting and turning in bed, uncomfortable in every position (Vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma / Che non può trovar pose in su le piume / Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma).26 As a sixteenth-century Venetian observer put it, ‘They have never been content with their constitution, they are never quiet, and it seems that this city always desires a change of constitution, so that no particular form of government has ever lasted more than fifteen years.’ He commented, rather smugly, that this was God’s punishment for the sins of the Florentines.27 It may have had rather more to do with the fact that Florentines enjoyed political rights at the age of fourteen, while Venetians were not considered politically adult till they were twenty-five and had to be old men before their ideas were taken seriously. The average age of a doge of Venice on his election was seventy-two.28
For whatever reason, change was the norm in Florence. In 1434, Cosimo de’Medici returned from exile and took over the state. In 1458, a Council of Two Hundred was set up. In 1480, this was replaced by a Council of Seventy. In 1494, the Medici were driven out, and a Great Council was set up on the Venetian model. In 1502, a kind of doge was created, the ‘gonfaloniere for life’. In 1512, the Medici returned in the baggage of a foreign army. In 1527, they were driven out again, and in 1530 returned once more. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that there is some link, however difficult it may be to specify it, between the political culture and the artistic culture of the Florentines and the propensity to innovate in these two spheres. By contrast, the less unstable Venetians were slower to welcome the Renaissance. Apart from this tendency to structural change, Florence differed from Venice in that offices rotated more rapidly; the chief magistrates, or Signoria, were in office for only two months at a time. The minority of Florentines involved in politics was much larger than that in Venice, with more than 6,000 citizens (craftsmen and shopkeepers as well as patricians) eligible for the chief magistracies alone.29
The other three major powers in Italy were effectively monarchies, two hereditary (Milan and Naples) and one elective (the Papal States). Here, as in smaller states such as Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, the key institution was the court. So many major works of Renaissance art and literature, from Mantegna’s Camera degli sposi to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, were produced in this milieu that it is important to understand what kind of place it was. This task has become easier thanks to a number of specialized studies produced in the wake of Norbert Elias’s pioneering sociology (or anthropology) of court society.30
Courts numbered hundreds of people. In 1527 the papal court, for example, was about seven hundred strong. From this point of view, the small circle surrounding Lorenzo de’Medici, the first citizen of a republic, does not qualify for the title of ‘court’ at all.31 This court population was extremely heterogeneous and ran from great nobles, holding offices such as constable, chamberlain, steward or master of the horse, through lesser courtiers such as gentlemen of the bedchamber, secretaries and pages, down to servants such as trumpeters, falconers, cooks, barbers and stable boys. Harder to place in the hierarchy (indeed, professional outsiders), but commonly in attendance to entertain the prince, were his fools and midgets. The position of his poets and musicians may not have been so very different.
A crucial feature of the court was that it served two functions which were becoming more and more divergent: the private and the public; the household of the prince and the administration of the state. The prince generally ate with his courtiers. When he moved, most of the court moved with him, despite the logistic problems of transporting, feeding and accommodating a group equivalent to the population of a small town. When Duke Ludovico Sforza decided to go from Milan to his favourite country residence, Vigevano, or to his other castles and hunting lodges, it took five hundred horses and mules to transport the court and its belongings.32 Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, was similarly mobile much of the time, visiting different parts of an empire which included Catalonia, Sicily and Sardinia. His officials were forced to follow his example, indeed to follow him in a quite literal sense. In December 1451, for instance, Alfonso summoned his council to Capua, where he happened to be hunting, in order to decide his dispute with the city of Barcelona.33
The cultural importance of the court as an institution was that it brought together a number of gentlemen – and ladies – of leisure. It was crucial to what Elias calls ‘the civilizing process’. Like elegant manners, an interest in art and literature helped show the difference between the nobility and ordinary people. As in the salons of seventeenth-century Paris, the presence of ladies stimulated conversation, music and poetry. We must, of course, beware of idealizing the Renaissance court. Castiglione’s famous Courtier must not be taken too literally. It was planned as a courtly equivalent of Plato’s treatise on the ideal republic, and it should also be regarded (as the history of the revisions to the text demonstrates) as an exercise in public relations, from the defence of the threatened duchy of Urbino in the first draft to the censorship of anticlerical remarks in the final version, when the author was launching himself on a second, ecclesiastical career.34 It is likely that courtiers often found time hanging heavily on their hands. Even in the pages of Castiglione we find them turning to practical jokes as well as to parlour games in order to alleviate boredom. One of the speakers in the dialogue describes courts where the nobles throw food at one another or make bets about eating the most revolting things: so much for ‘civilization’.
A good corrective to the generally idealized portrait painted by Castiglione is the little book produced by the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini in 1444, fourteen years before he became pope as Pius II. The Miseries of Courtiers, as it is called, is doubtless something of a caricature, and it draws on a tradition of literary and moral commonplaces, but it adds a few sharp personal observations. If a man seeks pleasure at court, writes Enea, he will be disappointed. There is music at court, it is true, but it is when the prince wants it, not when you want it, and perhaps just when you had been hoping to sleep. In any case you cannot sleep comfortably because the bedclothes are dirty, there are several other people in the same bed (which was normal in the fifteenth century), your neighbour coughs all night and pulls the bedclothes off you, or perhaps you have to sleep in the stables. The servants never bring the food on time, and they whisk the plates away before you have finished. You never know when the court is going to move; you make ready to leave, only to find that the prince has changed his mind. Solitude and quiet are impossible. Whether the prince stands or sits, the courtier always has to be on his feet. These do not sound like the conditions most likely to stimulate creativity, but they are the conditions in which poets such as Ariosto, to take only the most famous example, must have worked.
Courts existed all over Europe, and there were city-states, in practice if not always in strict political theory, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland and in Germany. It is worth asking whether Italian forms of political organization were distinctive in this period and, if so, whether this distinctiveness encouraged the cultural movement we call the Renaissance. As the Italian historian Federico Chabod asked, ‘Was there a Renaissance state?’
Chabod’s answer was a qualified ‘yes’, not so much on the grounds of the political consciousness of which Jacob Burckhardt made so much as of the rise of bureaucracy.35 ‘Bureaucracy’ is a term with many meanings. It will make for clarity if we follow the precise definitions of the German sociologist Max Weber and distinguish two political systems, the patrimonial and the bureaucratic, on six criteria in particular.
Patrimonial government is essentially personal, but bureaucratic government is impersonal (the public sphere is separated from the private, and it is the holder of the office rather than the individual whom one obeys). Patrimonial government is carried out by amateurs, bureaucratic government by professionals, trained for the job, with appointment by merit rather than favour, a fixed salary, and an ethos of their own. Patrimonial government is informal, while bureaucrats put everything on record in writing. Patrimonial government is unspecialized, but in the bureaucratic system the officials practise an elaborate division of labour and are careful to define the frontiers of their political territories. Patrimonial government appeals to tradition, bureaucratic government to reason and to the law.36
There is certainly a case for arguing that some at least of the states of Renaissance Italy were precociously bureaucratic, thanks to Italian urbanization and the consequent spread of literacy and numeracy, discussed above; thanks to the existence of republics, where loyalty was focused not on the ruler but the impersonal state; and thanks to the existence in Italy of the capital of a huge international organization, the Catholic Church. The distinction between public and private was certainly drawn quite explicitly by some contemporaries, such as the speaker in Alberti’s dialogue on the family who rejected the idea of treating the former in any way as if it were the latter (ch’io in modo alcuno facessi del publico privato).37 There was an institutional means of preventing officials confusing public and private to their own advantage: the sindacato. When an official’s term of office expired in Florence, Milan and Naples, he had to remain behind until his activities had been investigated by special commissioners or ‘syndics’. The pope’s dual role as head of the Church and ruler of the Papal States also encouraged awareness of the distinction between an individual and his office.38
Again, full-time officials were relatively numerous, especially in Rome, and a doctorate in law was something of a professional training for them. Some had tenure and developed a corporate ethos. Fixed money salaries were not uncommon, and some of them were relatively high. In Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century, secretaries in the chancery averaged 125 ducats a year, about the salary of branch managers of the Medici Bank. Attempts were made to ensure appointment by merit rather than by purchase, favour or neighbourhood. In Rome, too, the role of secretaries increased in importance in the period.39
In the greater Italian states, there was considerable demarcation of function between officials. In Milan under Ludovico Sforza, for example, there was a secretary for ecclesiastical affairs, a secretary for justice and a secretary for foreign affairs, who was in turn served by subordinates who specialized in the affairs of different states.40 In Florence and Venice specialist committees were set up, concerned with trade, naval affairs, defence, and so on. In Rome in the later sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V set up ‘congregations’ or standing committees of cardinals with specialized functions ranging from ritual to the navy. It was in Renaissance Italy that diplomacy first became specialized and professionalized.41
The importance of written records in administration was increasing. In the fifteenth century, a bishop of Modena was already declaring that he did not want to be a chancellor or ambassador and live in ‘a world of paper’ (un mundo de carta).42 The most striking examples of the collection of information come from the censuses, notably the Florentine catasto of 1427, dealing with every individual under the rule of the Florentine Signoria.43 It was, of course, less difficult to undertake a census of a small state like Florence than of a large one like France. As for the filing and retrieval of information, some sixteenth-century rulers such as Cosimo de’Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, and popes Sixtus V and Gregory XIII, took a particular interest in the setting up of archives.44 There was also increasing awareness, in Rome in particular, of the need for budgeting – in other words, for calculating income and expenditure in advance.45
One is left with an impression of Italian self-consciousness and innovation in the political field as in that of the arts. In so far as a bureaucratic mode of domination had developed, it is useful to speak of a ‘Renaissance state’. All the same, the extent and speed of change must not be exaggerated. Italy had no lack of courts, and at court, as we have seen, public administration was not separated from the private household of the ruler; loyalty was focused on a man, not an institution, and the ruler by-passed the system whenever he wished to grant a favour to a suitor. In appointments and promotions, the prime necessity was the prince’s favour. As Pius II remarked in his complaint of the miseries of courtiers, ‘at the courts of princes, what matters is not what you do but who you are’ (non enim servitia in curiis principum sed personae ponderantur).46
At the court of Rome, official positions were regularly sold, especially in the reign of Leo X, and the department of the Datary grew up to deal with this business.47 Offices were also sold in the states of Milan and Naples.48 The buyer of the office might not exercise it in person but ‘farm’ it – in other words, pay a substitute to perform the duties for the fraction of the proceeds, like the ‘vicar’ in a parish. Offices were seen as investments and were expected to bring in an income. However, official salaries were often inadequate. In Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century, the chancellor of the duke’s council was paid little more than an unskilled labourer. Administrators relied on presents, fees and other perquisites, such as the right to a proportion of confiscated goods.
Even the administration of republics was in many ways far removed from Max Weber’s model of an impersonally efficient bureaucracy. Indeed, in some respects, such as the corporate ethos of officials, Florence seems to have been less bureaucratic than Milan.49 The official system may have stressed equality and merit, but one also has to take into account what Italians today call the sottogoverno, the underbelly of the administration. In Venice, for example, some offices were bought, sold and given as dowries. In any Italian state of this period it is difficult to overestimate the importance of family connections and also of what was known euphemistically as ‘friendship’ (amicizia) – in other words, the links between powerful patrons and their dependents or ‘clients’. The many surviving letters addressed to members of the Medici family in the years immediately before Cosimo came to power in 1434 give a vivid impression of the importance of amicizia to both parties. These letters give substance to the contemporary complaint by Giovanni Cavalcanti that the Florentine commune ‘was governed at dinners and in private studies [alle cene e negli scrittoi] rather than in the Palace’.50
Many of the political conflicts of the time were struggles between rival ‘factions’ – in other words, between groups of patrons and clients. Perugia, where the Oddi fought the Baglioni, and Pistoia, where the Panciatichi fought the Cancellieri, were notorious for their factionalism. As Machiavelli put it in the twentieth chapter of his The Prince, it was necessary ‘to control Pistoia by means of factions’ (tenere Pistoia con le parti). Local rivalries continued to give some substance to the venerable party terms ‘Guelf’ (originally a supporter of the pope) and ‘Ghibelline’ (a supporter of the emperor) as late as the sixteenth century. The importance of patronage in political and social life gave its force to the Italian proverb ‘You can’t get to heaven without saints’ (Senza santi non si va in Paradiso), picturing the next world in the image of this one. The patronage of artists and writers formed part of this wider system.
At this point we may return to the links between politics and culture. Following Norbert Elias, it has been argued that Renaissance Italy illustrates the links between ‘state formation’ and ‘civilization’.51 More precisely, we might say that the organization of both political and artistic life was taking increasingly complex and sophisticated forms in Italy, which was in these ways ahead of many other parts of Europe. Given the contrast between different Italian regimes, a more precise question is also worth asking. Which was the better form of government for the arts, the republic or the principality?52 Contemporaries discussed the question, but their opinions were divided. Leonardo Bruni argued, as we have seen (p. 32), that Roman culture flourished and died with the republic, and Pius II suggested that ‘The study of letters flourished most of all at Athens, while it was a free city, and at Rome, while the consuls ruled the commonwealth.’53 On the other hand, the fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna complained bitterly: ‘Where the multitude rules, there is no respect for any accomplishment that does not yield a profit … everybody has as much contempt for the poets as he is ignorant of them, and will rather keep dogs than maintain scholars or teachers.’54
The fact that the two great republics, Florence and Venice, were the cities where most artists and writers originated is an obvious point in favour of the Bruni thesis. However, it is not enough to record a correlation; we have to try to explain it. Although it is impossible to measure the achievement drive, it is reasonable to expect it to be greater in republics because they are organized on the principle of competition, so that parents are more likely to bring up their children to try to excel over others. One might also expect this drive to be stronger in Florence, where the system was more open, than in Venice, where the major public offices were virtually monopolized by the nobility. So it was better for artists and writers to be born in a republic; they had a better chance of developing their talents.
After these talents had been developed, however, patronage was needed, and in this case it is less easy to say which political system benefited artists and writers most. In republics there was civic patronage, at its most vigorous in Florence in the early fifteenth century, when artisans still participated in the government, while Brunelleschi was elected to one of the highest offices, that of ‘prior’, in 1425. It was helped by campanilismo, a sense of local patriotism fuelled by rivalry with the neighbouring commune and expressed architecturally in the magnificent town halls of the period (the Sienese deliberately built their tower higher than that of Florence). Civic patronage was weaker in the later fifteenth century and weaker in Venice than in Florence, despite the official and quasi-official positions of Bembo, Titian and others. It is not surprising to find artists who had been born and trained in republics attracted to courts – Leonardo to Milan, Michelangelo to Rome, and so on. An enterprising prince who was willing to spend the money could make his court an artistic centre fairly quickly, by buying up artists who were already in practice. What he could not do was to produce artists. Whether young men chose to follow the career of artist or not depended, as we have seen, on the social structure.
One reason for the trend towards bureaucratic government not going further was that impersonal administration was impossible in what was still essentially a face-to-face society. Only two cities, Naples and Venice, had populations over 100,000. Loyalty to one’s quarter of town, or ward, or rione (as in Rome), or sestiere (as in Venice) was strong, a loyalty which has survived – whatever the reason – among the contrade of Siena today and is symbolized in the famous annual race, the palio.55 Within the quarter, the neighbourhood (vicinanza) was a meaningful unit, a stage for local dramas of solidarity and enmity. In Florence, the neighbourhood, or more exactly the gonfalone (a quarter within the quarter, or a sixteenth of the city), was a focus for political activity, as has been shown by studies of the ‘Red Lion’ and ‘Green Dragon’.56 The parish was often a community, and so was the street, which was frequently dominated by a particular trade, such as the goldsmiths in Via del Pellegrino in Rome. Cities were small enough for the sound of a particular bell, such as the marangone in Venice or the bell in the Torre del Mangia in Siena, to announce the opening of the gates, or the beginning of the working day, or to call the citizens to arms or to a council.57 Official impersonality was hindered by the fact that citizens might know officials in their private roles.
Renaissance Florence seems in some ways more like a village than a city, in the sense that so many of the artists and writers with whom we are concerned knew one another, often intimately. A vivid illustration of relationships in this face-to-face society is the meeting of experts called by the Opera del Duomo of Florence in 1503 to decide where to display Michelangelo’s David. Present were thirty men, mainly artists, including Leonardo, Botticelli, Perugino, Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, the Sangallos and Andrea Sansovino, all recorded in the minutes as discussing one another’s suggestions. ‘Cosimo has said exactly where I think it should go’, says Botticelli, and so on.58
However, Italian society was certainly complicated enough to need an elaborate system of classification. The range of occupations was expanding, especially what we now call ‘professions’ – not only lawyers and physicians, but professors, managers and secretaries.59 A simple way of illustrating this complexity is to quote a few examples of annual income, in lire, in order to show the range in variation, which works out at 3,500 to 1.60
As we have seen (above, p. 200) contemporaries were conscious of these complexities. There is no need to repeat their descriptions of society. What is required by the general argument of this study is a discussion of the extent to which Renaissance Italy was distinctive in its social structure, as it certainly was in its culture. This discussion will be focused on two questions. Was Italian society open? Was it bourgeois?
The first question can be rephrased more precisely. Was social mobility higher in Italy than elsewhere in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? In this formulation, the difficulty of giving it a straight answer will become more obvious. Individual cases of upward mobility are striking. Giovanni Antonio Campano, for example, a shepherd boy who became a university lecturer in Perugia and was made a bishop by Pius II, illustrates the traditional function of the Church as an avenue for advancement. Nicholas V, the so-called humanist pope, lived in poverty in his student days, although he was the son of a professional man, a physician. Bartolommeo della Scala was a miller’s son who became chancellor of Florence. Scala’s coat of arms featured a ladder, with the motto ‘step by step’ (gradatim). These were obvious heraldic puns on his name but also an appropriate symbol of his social mobility. His Apologia discusses great men of humble birth.61 Less impressive to contemporaries, but of greater interest to posterity, are the cases of peasants turned artists, from Giotto to Beccafumi (above, pp. 53–4).
The literature of Renaissance Italy suggests a society which was unusually concerned with social mobility. Some of the literary references are hostile, such as the sixteenth Canto of Dante’s Inferno, with its critique of Florence for ‘the upstart people and the sudden gains’ (La gente nuova e i subiti guadagni). Others are more favourable, such as Poggio’s dialogue On True Nobility, which fits in better with the image of life as a race which the best man wins (above, p. 205). There was considerable interest in ancient Greek and Roman examples of men of humble origins rising to high place. The dominant value system (in Tuscany at least) favoured social mobility. However, a famous study of America in the mid-twentieth century revealed serious discrepancies between the theory and the practice of social mobility, discrepancies which cannot be discounted for earlier periods.62
It is unfortunately impossible to measure the rate of social mobility in Renaissance Italy. The evidence is too fragmentary and the different systems of taxation, and so on, in different states make precise comparison virtually impossible.63 This is particularly unfortunate in a field where the historian who does not make a statement about quantities says virtually nothing, for there is virtually no society without some measure of social mobility and no society where mobility is ‘perfect’ – in other words, where the status of individuals has a purely random relation to that of their parents. All societies are somewhere in between these two extremes; what matters is the precise position.
All the same there are good reasons for asserting that social mobility was relatively high in the cities of fifteenth-century Italy, and above all in early fifteenth-century Florence, with ‘new men’ (gente nuova) coming in from the countryside and becoming citizens and holding office in number sufficient to alarm patricians such as Rinaldo degli Albizzi, who, according to a contemporary chronicle, launched a violent attack on these new men in a meeting held in 1426.64 The competitiveness, the envy and the stress on achievement of the Florentines (discussed above, p. 204) look very much like characteristics of a mobile society.
By the later fifteenth century, however, the ranks had closed. In Padua, Verona, Bergamo and Brescia, the change came earlier, perhaps as a result of their incorporation into the Venetian empire. In Venice itself there was little opportunity for new men to enter the patriciate throughout the period, whatever mobility there may have been at lower levels.65
The second question which this section attempts to answer is whether Italian society of this period may reasonably be described as ‘bourgeois’. That it was bourgeois has been the assumption of many historians of the Renaissance, as we have seen, but this bold statement needs to be hedged about with at least a few qualifications and distinctions.66
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italy was one of the most highly urban societies in Europe. In 1550, about forty Italian towns had a population of 10,000 or more. Of these, about twenty had a population of 25,000 or more, as follows (figures have been rounded to the nearest 5,000).67
| 210,000 | Naples |
| 160,000 | Venice |
| 70,000 | Milan, Palermo |
| 60,000 | Bologna (1570), Florence, Genoa (1530) |
| 50,000 | Verona |
| 45,000 | Rome (55,000 in 1526) |
| 40,000 | Mantua, Brescia |
| 35,000 | Lecce, Cremona |
| 30,000 | Padua, Vicenza |
| 25,000 | Lucca, Messina (1505), Piacenza, Siena |
| 20,000 | Peruia, Bergamo, Parma, Taranto, Trapani |
In the rest of Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow, there were probably no more than another twenty towns of this size. About a quarter of the population of Tuscany and the Veneto was urban; in all the regions of Europe, only Flanders is likely to have had a higher proportion of townspeople.
It must not be assumed that all these townspeople were bourgeois. Renaissance Florence and other cities rested on the backs of what contemporaries called the popolo minuto, the ‘labouring classes’.68 Florence has been described as ‘two cities’ of rich and poor, even if the potential conflict between these two groups was reduced by patron–client relations, solidarity between neighbours and opportunities for social mobility.69 All the same, the relative importance of Italian towns is obviously linked with the relative importance of merchants, professional men, craftsmen and shop-keepers. All these groups are sometimes called ‘bourgeois’; none of them fits the traditional model of a society divided into clergy, nobles and peasants. However, it is necessary to distinguish between them. Rich merchants were sometimes important as patrons. The craftsmen sired the artists, while the professional men sired the writers and humanists, whether they were lawyers (Machiavelli’s father), physicians (Ficino’s father), notaries (Brunelleschi’s father) or professors (Pomponazzi’s father).
To go beyond these relatively precise points requires speculation. Was there an affinity between Renaissance values, notably the concern with abstraction, measurement and the individual, and the values of one or more groups within the bourgeoisie? The analogies are obvious enough, but the point must not be made too crudely. Machiavelli was a master of political calculation, but he expressed contempt for Florence as a city governed by shop-keepers (uomini nutricati nella mercanzia), and he described himself as ‘unable to talk about gains and losses, about the silk-guild or the wool-guild’.70
There are other links between the social structure of Renaissance Italy and its art and literature. The importance of the lineage and the value set upon its cohesion, in noble and patrician circles at least, helps explain the importance of the family chapel and its tombs, the focus of a kind of ancestor worship. No ancestors, no lineage. Large sums of money were spent on palaces partly because they were a symbol of the greatness of the ‘house’ in the sense of the family. Loggias might be built (as, in the most famous case, that of the Rucellai in fifteenth-century Florence) as a setting for feasts and other rituals involving a large group of kinsmen. On the other hand, a breakdown of the cohesiveness of the extended family may well have encouraged Renaissance ‘individualism’ (the self-consciousness no less than the competition).71
Finally, this brief survey of Italian society suggests that the ambiguous status of the painter, the musician and even, to some extent, the humanist are special cases of a more general problem: that of finding a place in the social structure for everyone who was not a priest, warrior or peasant (above, p. 200). If the status of the artist was ambiguous, so was that of the merchant. It is probably no mere coincidence that it was in cities of shop-keepers, Florence in particular, that the artist was accepted most easily. It was probably easier for achievement-oriented merchant cultures to recognize the worth of artists and writers than it was for birth-oriented military cultures such as France, Spain and Naples. It is no surprise to find a relatively mobile society like Florence associated with respect for achievement and also with a high degree of creativity.
The fact that towns were larger and more numerous in Italy than elsewhere does a good deal to explain the importance in the social structure of the different ‘middle classes’, such as the craftsmen, merchants and lawyers. But this explanation leads to a further question: why were towns so important in Italy?
Once established, towns were able to maintain their position by their economic policies. Cities generally controlled the countryside around them, their contado, and they might enforce at the expense of the countryside a policy of cheap food for their own inhabitants, as a study of Pavia, for instance, has demonstrated.73 The contado was also forced to pay more than its share of tax, which must have been an incentive for the more prosperous peasants to migrate to the city. Revolts against cities by their rural subjects were not uncommon; Tuscan highlanders rebelled in 1401 and again in 1426 against their domination by Florence.74 Citizens also enjoyed legal and political privileges which inhabitants of the countryside lacked. In the sixteenth century, pregnant women used to come into Lucca from the contado to give their children the advantages of birth within the city walls.75 No wonder that there was an Italian proverb to the effect that the countryside is for animals and the city for men.
These policies do not, of course, explain how the cities came to grow up where they did in the first place. The siting of the major urban centres of Renaissance Italy owed a good deal to the communication system inherited partly from nature and partly from ancient Rome. Genoa, Venice, Rimini, Pesaro, Naples and Palermo are all seaside towns, while Rome and Pisa are not far from the coast. Pavia and Cremona are on the Po, Pisa and Florence on the Arno, and so on. The Roman Via Emilia, still followed by the railway, links Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Imola, Faenza, Forli and Rimini.76
These advantages are still insufficient to explain the importance of the towns of Renaissance Italy. Towns develop in response to demands from other places, either their immediate hinterland or more distant areas, because they perform services for these other places. In the case of pre-industrial Europe, it is useful to distinguish three types of service and three types of city.
First, there was the commercial city, usually a port, such as Venice and its rival Genoa. The hinterland they served was much more than the Veneto or Liguria. Genoa was no longer so great a commercial power as it had been in the thirteenth century, especially after the Turks took Caffa, its trading post on the Black Sea, but its role in the grain and the wool trade involved economic relations with France, Spain and North America.77 As for Venice, in a sense its economic hinterland was the whole of Europe because Venetian merchants were the principal middlemen in the trade between Europe and the East (Aleppo, Alexandria, Beirut, Caffa, Constantinople, Damascus, etc.), without serious competitors before the Portuguese began to use the Cape route at the end of the fifteenth century. In the early fifteenth century, Venice was one of the greatest merchant cities in the world (after Cairo, Guangzhou and Suzhou) and exported 10 million ducats’ worth of goods a year. The Venetians imported cotton, silk and spices (especially pepper), for which they paid partly in woollen cloth (English as well as Italian) and partly in silver coins minted specially for the purpose. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, 2.5 million pounds of spices came to Venice every year from Alexandria, and 300,000 ducats, besides merchandise, went back in return. The spices were resold to the merchants of Augsburg, Nuremberg and Bruges.78
Secondly, there was the craft-industrial town such as Milan or Florence. Florence was the industrial town par excellence, and cloth-making the chief industry; a late fifteenth-century description of the city lists 270 cloth-making workshops, compared with 84 for woodcarving and inlay, 83 for silk, 74 for goldsmiths and 54 for stonedressers. Through cloth-making the Florentines became involved in trade. Their Calimala guild (discussed earlier as a patron of the arts) imported cloth from France and Flanders, arranged for it to be ‘finished’ (sheared, dyed, and so on), and re-exported it.79 Cloth-making was also important in Milan, but the city was best known for its armourers and other metal-workers.80 Genoese silks had an international reputation, while Venice was famous for its glass, its ship-building and, from the 1490s or thereabouts, its printing industry; Aldo Manuzio was the most scholarly and the most famous but far from the only Venetian printer of the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century, Venice was the most important centre of printing in Europe.81
Thirdly, there was the service city. One of the most profitable services to offer was financial. From the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, the Italians dominated European banking. The leading firms included the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence (till Edward III and other rulers bankrupted them), the Medici, and, at the end of the period, the Pallavicini and the Spinola of Genoa, who lent vast sums to King Philip of Spain. Capital cities offered other kinds of service – Naples and Rome, for example, were cities of officials and centres of power. In the case of Naples, the hinterland for the ‘services’ provided by judges, advocates, tax collectors, and so on, was the Kingdom of Naples or, in the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, his entire Mediterranean Empire. In the case of Rome, the hinterland was sometimes the Papal States, but for some functions it was the whole Catholic world. Rome was, as a contemporary critic remarked, ‘a shop for religion’ (una bottega delle cose di Cristo). Among its invisible exports were indulgences and dispensations. This huge business required management, and an important role was played by the pope’s bankers, from the Medici to Agostino Chigi of Siena, remembered today for his patronage of Raphael.82
Despite the growing importance of grain imports, this elaborate urban structure rested on the foundation of Italian agriculture.83 Particularly fertile was the Po valley, one of the great plains of Europe. It owed this fertility partly to nature – a well-distributed rainfall – and partly to human activity. In the course of the fifteenth century several canals were dug in Lombardy, and irrigation schemes allowed formerly waste land to be brought under the plough. By the year 1500, some 85 per cent of the land between Pavia and Cremona was under cultivation, an extremely high proportion for the period when marshes and woods were much more widespread than they are today. Dairy farming was becoming important.84
South of the Po valley the picture was less rosy. In Tuscany, although the hilly terrain restricted agriculture, the interior valleys were fertile. The Valdarno was best known for grain, the Valdichiana for wine, the Mugello for fruit, and the area around Lucca for olives. However, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century land was going out of cultivation in Tuscany, and 10 per cent of the villages disappeared altogether.85 Further south, the rocky terrain and the low rainfall in the growing season have always been obstacles to cultivation, and, despite pockets of prosperity around Naples and elsewhere, southern agriculture was in decline. There was a gradual shift from arable to pasture, accompanied by a fall in population. As in Thomas More’s England, the sheep were eating up the men.
To maintain Italy’s high urban population, it was necessary for many farmers to produce for the market. For example, the concentration in Venice of some 160,000 people who did not grow their own food led to the commercialization of agriculture not only in the Veneto but as far afield as Mantua, the Marches and even, perhaps, Apulia. The Italian cloth industry encouraged the growing of woad in Lombardy and the keeping of sheep in the Roman Campagna and in the south, as well as in Tuscany.
This brief description of the Italian economy is intended as no more than an introduction to the question of its links with the Renaissance. Before discussing these links, however, it is necessary to tackle one major problem. Was the economy ‘capitalist’? Capitalism has been defined in many different ways, but it may be useful to emphasize two features of this mode of production: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few entrepreneurs and the institutionalization of a rational, calculating approach to economic problems. It may also be useful to draw distinctions between commercial, financial and industrial capitalism.86
It is not difficult to find spectacular examples in this period of rich entrepreneurs, such as Averardo di Bicci de’Medici (the grandfather of Cosimo), who left a fortune of 180,000 florins in 1428. It was possible for entrepreneurs to accumulate capital in this way because in some leading industries many of the workers were no longer independent craftsmen. Cloth-making was the industry in which the division of labour was most highly developed; contemporaries distinguished some twenty-five or more steps in the process of turning a fleece into a piece of finished cloth, and most of these stages involved a specialized occupation. In Florence, several of these jobs, such as beating, sorting and combing the wool, were carried out in large workshops, which it is tempting to regard as ‘factories’, by men who were paid by the day. Much of the spinning was done by women living at home, but they might still be dependent on the entrepreneur who supplied them with the raw material. In Genoa and Lucca, the silk merchants provided not only the raw material but also spinning machines and workshops, which they hired out to spinners who worked for them, as they hired looms out to weavers.87 This system is very different from industrial capitalism in the nineteenth-century sense of large-scale organization and direct control by the manufacturer, but it is clear that the entrepreneur played a central role and that he exercised considerable control by indirect means.
The numerate mentality of Italian townsmen has already been discussed (above, p. 209). What needs emphasis here is the existence of institutions which both expressed and encouraged this mode of thought and the existence of a complex credit structure which depended on abstraction and calculation and included banks, a public debt, commercial companies and even maritime insurance. As we have seen, banking was something of an Italian speciality in this period. Besides banks, there were also communal pawnshops (Monti di Pietà), which spread in the later fifteenth century with the encouragement of the Church. These Monti borrowed money as well as lending it, and paid regular interest. They were modelled on the public debt, the Monte commune, which had been set up in Florence in the middle of the fourteenth century, thus making the citizens into investors in the state. Florence also had a ‘Dowry fund’ (Monte delle doti), in which the investor received his money back with interest at the marriage of his daughter.88 Commercial companies existed, and it was possible to invest in them without taking part in their management and with only a limited liability in the case of the company’s failure. It was also possible to insure against the loss of ships – Venice was the great centre of marine insurance – while, in Genoa, husbands could even insure against the risk of their wives dying in childbirth.89
In many ways, economic organization remained traditional. The small workshop and the family business were the most common forms of industry and trade. Many peasants paid their rent in kind. However, the new forms of organization were unusually well developed in Italy, particularly in large cities such as Florence, Rome and Venice, where so much of what we call the Renaissance was taking place. It is natural to look for links between the state of economy and the state of the culture, more particularly the material culture, the visual arts.
These links are not difficult to find, but they are not easy to describe without falling into a narrow precision or its opposite, a grandiose vagueness. To begin with the detail, we may observe that art and ideas often followed the trade routes.90 Books followed the route from Venice to Vienna, for example. Venice imported decorative motifs as well as spices from Damascus and Aleppo, and exported art and artists as well as spices to Central Europe. Titian and Paris Bordone went to Augsburg and Jacopo de’Barbari to Nuremberg (just as Dürer arrived in Venice from Nuremberg). Sebastiano del Piombo left Venice for Rome at the invitation of the banker Agostino Chigi; thanks to his business connections, Chigi had come to be well acquainted with the Venetian artistic scene. Tuscan artists also followed the trade routes – Rosso and Leonardo to France and Torrigiani to England (in his case, it is known that Florentine merchants with English contacts arranged this visit). Pictures travelled in both directions. Florentine paintings were shipped to France for the collection of Francis I, but the famous Portinari altarpiece now in the Uffizi was brought to Florence by the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank.
Precise information of this kind has its interest, but it does not take us very far towards a historical explanation of the Renaissance – why the movement took place in this particular society at this time. Was wealth the key factor? Did Italy have a Renaissance because she could afford it? The problem here is that the dates do not fit. An economic recession followed the devastating plague of 1348–9, and recovery was slow. As we have seen, the economic historian Roberto Lopez has argued that this recession was just what was needed for the Renaissance, that merchants spent their money on the arts at times when there were fewer profitable ways of placing their money than usual – ‘hard times and investment in culture’.91 However, the study of patronage (above, pp. 133ff.) suggests that merchants did not think in terms of investment when they commissioned works of art but rather of piety, pride or pleasure.
A social factor, style of life, has to be inserted between trends in the economy and trends in culture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florentines and Venetians were coming to value conspicuous consumption more than before. It may be that this change in lifestyle can itself be explained in economic terms, that the shift from entrepreneurs to rentiers was an adaptation to economic recession – a case of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’, a kind of sour grapes effect. It has also been suggested that the Italian economic structure was unusually favourable to the development of a luxury market, thanks not only to the accumulation of wealth but also to its wide distribution among a constantly changing group of urban consumers.92
In these circumstances, competition for status thrived so that building magnificently became a strategy for distinguishing some families from others.93 It would be unhistorical to treat Renaissance art as no more than a set of status symbols, forgetting the piety that underlay the patronage of sacred images or the pleasures of a private collection. Yet it would be equally unhistorical to treat the art of this period as if it had no connections with conspicuous consumption at all. The strength of the connections was subject to change over time. To examine the links between cultural and social change is the purpose of the following chapter.