The natural changes in worldly affairs make poverty succeed riches … the man who first acquires a fortune takes a greater care of it, having known how to make his money, he also knows how to keep it … his heirs are less attached to a fortune they have made no effort to acquire. They have been brought up to riches and have never learned the art of earning them. Is it any wonder that they let it slip through their fingers?
Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, no. 33
The focus of this book has been the description and analysis of social and cultural ‘structures’ – that is, factors which remain fairly constant over a century or two. They were not static, but it makes for clarity to treat them as if they were. Artistic, ideological, political and economic factors have so far been treated in relative isolation. Such a procedure has its advantages if the aim is to analyse as well as describe. It is obvious, however, that what contemporaries experienced was the combination or conjuncture of all these factors, and that this conjuncture was constantly changing. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to draw together the themes of different sections and to concentrate on the historian’s traditional business – the study of change over time.
It is in practice useful to distinguish different kinds of change, as Braudel did in his famous study of the Mediterranean.1 There is short-term change, the time of events, of which contemporaries are well aware, and there is long-term change, almost impossible to notice at the time but visible to historical hindsight. There are times when it is useful to distinguish the long term from the very long term, as Braudel does, but not in the case of a study concerned, as this one is, with a mere two centuries.
In the study of short-term changes, a useful and attractive concept is that of ‘generation’. The concept is attractive because it seems to grow out of experience, that of identifying oneself with one group and distancing oneself from others. It helps in finding links between the history of events and the history of structures, the area where Braudel’s study is at its weakest. The concept of generation would seem to be particularly useful in the case of a group as self-conscious as the artists and writers of the Renaissance. It was in fact when discussing Mannerism that the art historian Walter Friedländer formulated his ‘grandfather law’, arguing that ‘A generation with deliberate disregard for the views and feelings of the generation of its fathers and direct teachers skips back to the preceding period and takes up the very tendencies against which its fathers had so zealously struggled, albeit in a new sense.’2
It is often said that a generation lasts about thirty years, the period between maturity and retirement. However, the average length of adult life varies over time, and so does the age distance between parents and children.3 In any case, generations are not objective facts; they are cultural constructs. As in the case of social classes, the consciousness of belonging to a generation is a crucial part of the experience. Characteristic of generations as of social classes is what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called ‘a common location in the social and historical process’, which encourages certain kinds of behaviour and inhibits others.4
If generation-consciousness is created by the historical process itself, generations will not be equally long or divided equally sharply from their predecessors. Momentous events are likely to bind the members of an age-group together more closely than is normal. The Spanish writers known as the ‘generation of 1898’, for example, from Miguel de Unamuno to José Ortega y Gasset, were bound together by the realization, following the loss of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, that Spain was no longer a great power.5 It may well be that such acute generation-consciousness is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon (the result of accelerating political, social and cultural change after 1789), a phenomenon that we must beware of projecting onto an earlier past. It is, however, at least worth attempting to see whether major events in Renaissance Italy made certain age-groups aware of their common location in history, and whether this awareness affected the arts.
The importance of political events in the early fifteenth century in creating a generation has been emphasized by a number of scholars, notably Hans Baron (above, p. 41), in his study of what he calls the ‘crisis of the early Italian Renaissance’.6 Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan from 1395 to 1402, built up an empire by seizing Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and then Pisa, Perugia, Siena and Bologna. The Florentines, virtually encircled, might well have thought that their turn was next. However, they were able to defend themselves until the duke was carried off by the plague.
Leonardo Bruni, chancellor of Florence, presented the war between Florence and Milan as a struggle between liberty and tyranny. He identified Florence with the Roman Republic under which the city was supposed to have been founded; this is the point of his remark (quoted above, p. 32) that the brilliant minds of Rome vanished under the tyranny of the emperors. In his oration on the death of the patrician Nanni Strozzi, Bruni also identified Florence with classical Athens and the values expressed in the funeral speech of Pericles, which he took as his model.
In the early fifteenth century, there came a relatively sudden change of style in the visual arts in Florence, a move towards the art of ancient Rome. The artists responsible had generally been at an impressionable age when the threat from Giangaleazzo Visconti was removed from their city. Brunelleschi, for example, was twenty-five in 1402; Ghiberti was twenty-four; Masolino was nineteen; Donatello was sixteen or thereabouts.
The ‘Baron thesis’ provides an elegantly economical explanation for a wide variety of phenomena. It is relevant to the humanism of Bruni and his circle and also to the visual arts. In the arts, it is relevant to form, to the creation of a more ‘antique’ style, as well as to iconography; as we have seen (above, p. 181), the representations of David and St George had political overtones. The thesis applies to both patrons and artists. Brunelleschi and Donatello were stimulated by civic patronage, and civic patronage was stimulated by the crisis.
Yet this interpretation of the relation between politics and culture is a little more ambiguous than it may look. It is possible to argue either that the events of the year 1402 were decisive in forming the new generation or that this formation was the work of a longer period, extending from the 1390s to the 1420s. To argue, as Baron himself has tended to do, that one year was crucial, involves controversial questions such as the dating of certain works by Bruni and also the omission of figures as important as Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who expressed similar ideas too early, and Masaccio (1401–c.1428), who was born too late.7
It seems more plausible to argue that the whole struggle with Milan, and possibly the earlier War of the Eight Saints between Florence and the papacy (1375–8) as well, were the decisive events; but that, of course, spreads the events too thinly for the creation of a generation. It must also be admitted that we know very little of the political attitudes of leading artists such as Brunelleschi and Donatello, or even whether Bruni’s stress on liberty was a heartfelt conviction or the expression of an official attitude required by his administrative position. In any case, the argument applies only to Florence. The Florentines were the leaders in innovation, but there were other important humanists, such as Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona, and other important painters, from Pisanello to Jacopo Bellini. The two humanists did not show any distaste for princes: Vittorino was employed at the court of Mantua, Guarino at that of Ferrara.
Another political event which was supposed to have had a profound impact on culture took place in 1453: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.8 Long embedded in textbooks as the explanation of the Renaissance, this thesis goes back to the period itself, to the Lombard humanist Pier Candido Decembrio. The fall of the city, so the argument goes, forced Greek scholars to migrate to Italy, bringing with them their knowledge of the Greek language and literature and so stimulating the revival of ancient learning. The obvious objection to this thesis is that Greek scholars were working in Italy before 1453. Gemistos Plethon and Bessarion attended the Council of Florence in 1439, and Bessarion remained in Italy. Demetrios Chalcondylas and Theodore Gaza arrived in Italy in the 1440s. As in the case of the year 1402, however, it is perhaps a mistake to focus attention too narrowly on a particular date. The crucial political event was the westward advance of the Turks, which was clear enough before 1453. Indeed, it was the Turkish threat which underlay the rapprochement between Latin and Greek Christians at the Council of Florence. The humanist Theodore Gaza went to Italy after his native city of Salonika had been taken by the Turks in 1430. After the fall of Constantinople, more Greek scholars, such as Janos Argyropoulos and Janos Lascaris, arrived in Italy.
These immigrants had an important effect on the Italian world of learning, not unlike that of scholars from Central Europe – including specialists on the Renaissance – on the English-speaking world after 1933. They stimulated Greek studies. However, their importance was that they satisfied a demand which already existed. The fall of Constantinople shocked the Christian world, but it does not seem to have bound together a generation. Indeed, the artists and writers born between 1420 and 1450 (Ficino, for example, or Ghirlandaio) seem a much less politically minded group than their predecessors, whether because they reacted against them or because the age in which they were in their prime was an age of relative peace in the peninsula, the age of the balance of power within Italy.
After two essentially Florentine generations came one which was genuinely Italian. Of the eighty-five members of the creative elite born between 1460 and 1479, only twenty-one were Tuscans. In any case, political events made the generation of 1460–90 (which includes Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Ariosto and Bembo, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael) aware of their common destiny as Italians. Their formative years were marked by the French invasion of 1494 and the long wars which followed, a struggle for mastery between the French (Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I) and the forces of Spain (under Ferdinand the Catholic) and the Empire (under Maximilian and Charles V). Many Italians were killed, whether fighting with or against the invaders. Many cities were captured and some were sacked. ‘Crisis’ is a term which is overworked by historians. Indeed, it ought to be obligatory on anyone who uses the term about a particular period to show that it was preceded and followed by years of non-crisis.9 All the same, it is clear that Italy was passing through a ‘time of troubles’.
The year 1494 has been taken as a turning point in the history of Italy – indeed, of Europe – from that day to this. Francesco Guicciardini and Leopold von Ranke are only two of the distinguished historians who began their narratives with that year. So, still closer to 1494, did Bernardo Rucellai.10 It cannot be assumed that 1494 marks a break in the history of Italian culture, but it is not difficult to find evidence which supports this suggestion.
The dispersal of artists and writers in this time of troubles is relatively easy to chart. In Florence, for example, the musician Heinrich Isaac left in 1494, when the Medici, his patrons, were driven out. In Naples, plans for improving the city were brought to an end by the French invasion, and the architect Fra Giocondo went back to France with Charles VIII. In Milan, the black year was 1499, when Ludovico Sforza fled from the French and the artists at his court were dispersed. The architect Bramante, the sculptor Cristoforo Solari, and the musician Gaspar van Weerbecke all went to Rome, while the historian Bernardino Corio retired to his country villa. In 1509, it was the turn of Venice to be attacked. Although the city was not captured, its mainland possessions were overrun. The University of Padua closed for some years, while the printer Aldo Manuzio left Venice for three years, whether for economic or political reasons.11
Two very different conscious responses to the time of troubles were given by Machiavelli and Savonarola. For Savonarola, the French invasion was the fulfilment of his prophecy of a new flood. He described Charles VIII as God’s instrument to reform the Church, who had been able to invade Italy because of her sins. Some humanists, such as Giovanni Nesi, joined Savonarola in expecting an immediate ‘new age’.12 For Machiavelli, too, Charles VIII’s easy conquest of Italy was a lesson, but what he learned from it was something rather different from Savonarola. Machiavelli learned that men are ‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers’, and that force, not reason, was decisive in politics. His work, like Guicciardini’s, reflects what has been called a ‘crisis of assumptions’.13 Events had called into question the conventional wisdom, the ideas of the perfectibility of man and the place of reason in politics held by fifteenth-century humanists. Like the Spanish generation of 1898, the Italian generation of 1494, from Machiavelli to Savonarola, however diverse their responses, seems to have been driven by the same need to explain the disaster which had struck them. The Venetians were spared this crisis, only to encounter one of their own in 1509, when the League of Cambrai was formed against them and the independence of the city-state was threatened.14
It is more difficult to say how far this disaster affected styles of art as well as styles of thought. The example of Botticelli suggests that it did. Although Botticelli was in his late forties when the invasion occurred, his style changed dramatically after 1494. The security of his earlier paintings was replaced by the much more unquiet quality of his Lamentation, for example, or his Mystic Nativity. The inscription on the latter painting is an unusually direct piece of evidence of a painter’s reaction to the time of troubles, which Botticelli, like Savonarola, interpreted in millenarian terms:
I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy in the half time after the time according to the eleventh chapter of St John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be chained in the twelfth chapter and we will see him trodden down as in this picture.15
Generally speaking, however, the evidence does not allow us to establish close connections between political events and pictorial style in this period. One Florentine painter, Baccio della Porta, an ardent supporter of Savonarola, became a Dominican in 1500, known as Fra Bartolommeo, but his style did not change. Leonardo’s drawings of the destruction of the world date from the early sixteenth century, when the destruction of Italy was taking place around him, but his notebooks do not suggest any connection. Leonardo’s style did not change at this time. He did not even leave Milan when the French invaded.
Thirty-three years after 1494 came another black year which has sometimes been taken to mark the end of a period: 1527, when Rome was sacked by the troops of the emperor Charles V. This was doubtless the greatest disaster to happen to the city since its sack by Alaric and the Visigoths over 1,100 years earlier. It was viewed by contemporaries as a cataclysm, and it can be shown, like the invasion of 1494, to have had tangible if limited effects upon the arts.
In the years immediately before 1527, Rome had been an especially magnificent centre of patronage. Artists and writers had flocked to this ‘centre of the world’ (caput mundi), making their dispersal all the more spectacular. Aretino, Sebastiano del Piombo and Jacopo Sansovino all went to Venice, and Michele Sammicheli entered Venetian service in the following year. Parmigianino (who had been captured by German soldiers) and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi went to Bologna. Cellini, after the exploits he boasts about in his memoirs, went back to Florence. The painter Giovanni da Udine, a pupil of Raphael’s, returned to Udine, while his colleagues Perino del Vaga and Polidoro da Caravaggio went to Genoa and Naples respectively. Those who stayed on suffered unpleasant experiences. The painter–architect Baldassare Peruzzi, for example, was imprisoned until he paid a ransom. The humanist Jacopo Sadoleto lost his library, while another humanist, Angelo Colocci, lost both his manuscripts and his statues. It is no wonder that Colocci’s friend Pierio Valeriano was moved to write a book on the miseries of the litterati, ‘especially at this time’ – ‘Some killed by pestilence, others driven into exile and oppressed with want; these butchered by the sword, those assailed with daily torments.’16
The sack put an end to the cultural predominance of Rome. Whether it created a generation, or stimulated changes in style, is more difficult to decide. As in the case of the years 1402 and 1494, it would be a mistake to concentrate on 1527 to the exclusion of the years immediately before and after. The 1520s were terrible years for Italians – years of famine, years of plague, years of the siege and sack of cities such as Genoa, Milan, Naples and Florence as well as Rome. The 1520s were also years of spiritual crisis or, if that sounds too vague, of severe criticisms of the Church, leading to the foundation of new, strict religious orders (such as the Theatines and the Capuchins) and also to an interest in the ideas of Luther. The diffusion of prophecies in chapbook form suggests that ordinary townspeople were involved in this movement of crisis, criticism and the expectation of renewal.17 The ecclesiastical reaction to the crisis was to lead to the establishment of the Holy Office, a centralized inquisition, in 1542, and of the Index of Prohibited Books a few years later. The increasing effectiveness of ecclesiastical censorship was a crucial factor in the development of the arts in Italy after 1550.18
The 1520s were also the time when the style art historians now call ‘Mannerism’ emerged, breaking with the rules of perspective, proportion, the combination of architectural motifs, and so on. A famous example of rule-breaking is to be found in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, designed by Giulio Romano (1527–34), with its frieze in which every third triglyph is out of place and seems to be coming loose (above, p. 92: Plate 3.9). This was a kind of architectural joke, but it is worth asking whether the rejection of rules and reason, whether joking or serious, may not be a response to this time of troubles, which helped create a new generation, including the writers Aretino, Berni and Folengo and the artists Pontormo, Rosso, Giulio Romano, Cellini, Parmigianino and Vasari (all born between 1492 and 1511). The mood of this generation was an unstable one, veering between a violent rejection of the world and a cynical acceptance of it. A possible account of the movement would describe the changes in style as expressing changes in worldview and the changes in worldview as responses to changes in the world. Some writers would go so far as to talk of this as an ‘alienated’ generation.19
Such an account is too simple because it ignores the possibility of changes in style being – in part at least – reactions to art rather than to the world outside it. In any case, corroborative evidence is lacking yet again about the inner lives of most artists and their responses to the world around them. The one exception, Michelangelo, comes from an earlier generation (he was born in 1475). He was involved in the religious movements of his time, sympathetic to Savonarola in his youth and to Ignatius Loyola in his old age. His letters and poems do communicate a sense of spiritual anguish. However, the little we know about the lives and personalities of such artists as Giulio Romano and Parmigianino suggests that they were very different from Michelangelo. The most that could be safely said would be that the Mannerists responded in different ways to similar experiences, of which the sack of 1527 was the most important.20
At the same time as these dramatic events, other cultural and social changes were taking place in Italy, which were no less significant for passing virtually unnoticed at the time. If we compare the situation in the later sixteenth century with that in 1400, certain major differences will become apparent. In 1400, for example, what we now call the Renaissance was a movement restricted to a small group of Florentines, who made important innovations in the arts and criticized some traditional assumptions and values. They were surrounded, even in Florence, by colleagues with traditional attitudes, patrons who made the usual demands, and craftsmen who went on working in the customary manner. The new ideas and the new style gradually spread from Florence to the rest of Tuscany and from Tuscany to the rest of Italy.21
The invention of printing helped spread the ideals of the movement more quickly than had ever been possible before. Grammars and anthologies of poems and letters familiarized literate men and women all over Italy with Tuscan usage. The illustrated architectural treatises of Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio made the classical language of architecture equally familiar. The new art gradually created a market for itself. Patrons became aware that it was possible to commission statuettes or scenes from classical mythology, while the knowledge of the differences between the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders became part of a gentleman’s education.
The growth of a public interested in the new ideals was itself a force for change, encouraging the development of a more allusive art and literature. Aretino and Berni were among the writers who parodied the love lyrics of Petrarch. To enjoy their poems the reader needs to have some familiarity with Petrarch and his fifteenth-century imitators, a familiarity which breeds boredom if not exactly contempt.22 In a similar way the deliberate mistakes or solecisms in Giulio Romano’s frieze at Mantua imply spectators who are educated enough to know the rules, to entertain certain visual expectations, to receive a shock when those expectations are falsified, and finally to enjoy being shocked because familiarity with the rules has made them rather blasé.
Another unintended consequence of the spread of the new ideals was the gradual diminution of regional diversities, which had been enormously important in earlier centuries and remained visible even in the sixteenth century in Lombardy, in Naples and especially in Venice.23 Domenico Beccafumi, for example, was not as distinctively Sienese a painter as (say) Neroccio de’ Landi had been. From Milan to Naples, literature composed in dialect was giving way to literature composed in Tuscan.24
Other cultural changes have been discussed more than once in this study. Individual style in art and literature was becoming more noticeable, and was indeed attracting more notice in the sixteenth century than before (above, pp. 230ff.). There was a slow but steady secularization of the arts – for example a rise in the proportion of paintings with secular subjects.25 There was an increasing concern with gravity, elegance, grace, grandeur and majesty in art and literature alike.26 As a result, many words had to be eliminated from literature (dialect terms, technical terms, ‘vulgar’ terms, and so on) and many gestures had to be eliminated from art. Wölfflin’s example is a striking one: ‘St Peter, in Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper of 1480, gestures with his thumb towards Christ, a gesture of the people, which High Art forthwith rejected as inadmissible.’27 In the course of the sixteenth century, the upper classes gradually withdrew from participation in popular festivals. They did not give up Carnival, but they created a Carnival of their own, parallel to popular festivities rather than a part of it. In short, the cultural differences between regions were replaced by cultural differences between classes. As the gap between Lombard culture and Tuscan culture narrowed, the gap between high culture and low culture widened.28
Why did these changes take place? It would be presumptuous even to attempt to explain them down to the last detail, but it would also be absurd to ignore obvious connections with social changes that were taking place both in the milieu of the arts and in Italy as a whole.
There was, for example, a gradual rise in the social status of artists and also in their social origin. Such leading artists of the early fifteenth century as Fra Angelico, Jacopo Bellini (son of a tinsmith), Andrea Castagno (son of a peasant), Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Masolino and Michelozzo all had humble social origins. On the other hand, a number of leading artists born in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century were of relatively high status: Paris Bordone, for example (whose mother was noble), Angelo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Leone Leoni (who was knighted) and Pirro Ligorio (a nobleman). Most cases of ennobled painters are later than 1480 or thereabouts, as are most cases of painters with a splendid style of life, such as Raphael (whom some expected to be made a cardinal) and Baldassare Peruzzi, who was taken for a nobleman when he was captured during the sack of Rome. In his life of Dello Delli, Vasari noted that, in the fifteenth century, unlike ‘today’, artists were not ashamed to paint and gild furniture. The obvious reason for this increase in shame is a rise in social status. Another sign of the separation of artists from the main body of craftsmen was the foundation of academies, such as the Accademia di Disegno in Florence (founded in the 1560s) and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (founded in the 1590s); the models for these institutions were the literary academies, which were clubs of noble amateurs. In 1400, the social status of art was low, and so were the social origins of artists; each factor helps explain the other. By 1600, however, the status of art and the origins of artists had risen together.
There were also significant changes in patronage during the period. By the sixteenth century, it is possible to find a significant number of collectors who, like the well-documented Isabella d’Este or the Venetian patrons of Giorgione, bought works of art for their own sake, were interested in the style and the iconographic details, and were concerned to acquire a Raphael or a Titian rather than a Madonna or a St Sebastian. Artistic individualism was now profitable, and, although artists are rarely named in inventories before 1600, there is other evidence of a shift in certain circles from ‘cult images’ in the religious sense to the ‘cult of images’ for their own sake.29 There was also a shift in the balance of power between the patron and the artist. Their rising status perhaps improved the bargaining position of artists. Michelangelo, who stood up to patrons in a manner which most of his colleagues could not emulate, was the son not of a craftsman but of a Florentine magistrate. On the other hand, the increasing independence of artists, who were becoming more like poets and less like carpenters, doubtless enhanced their status. The roles of artist and patron were mutually dependent and they changed together. They were also part of a much larger network of social roles and were affected by changes in the social structure.
These changes in the social structure may be summed up in two words, standing for two conflicting trends: ‘commercialization’ and ‘refeudalization’.
A certain amount of evidence for commercialization has been offered in earlier chapters. Towns were growing in the fifteenth and still more rapidly in the sixteenth century. The population of Florence, for example, grew from about 40,000 in 1427 to about 70,000 in the early to mid-sixteenth century. Naples contained about 40,000 people in 1450 but more than 200,000 a century later. The growth of these and other towns involved the commercialization of agriculture. Share-cropping spread in Tuscany, for example, a system which implies that landlords were increasingly inclined to think like businessmen about profits rather than a steady income from a fixed rent. At the same time, the book market was becoming important, thanks to the invention of printing. So, as we have seen, was the market in works of art, ancient and modern, originals and reproductions alike.
Yet this trend was to some degree offset by another, which historians describe as ‘refeudalization’ (in the wide, Marxist sense of the term ‘feudal’) or, as Braudel does, as the ‘treason of the bourgeoisie’.30 A number of wealthy merchants (how many in any given decade it is unfortunately impossible to say) shifted their investments from trade to land. The trend is most noticeable in the two cities that have concerned us most in this study, Florence and Venice, where the patricians, poised for a long time between bourgeoisie and nobility, opted by their changing style of life for the latter. In Florence, the movement was gradual, almost imperceptible in any one generation, though obvious enough if one compares the patriciate of 1600 with its equivalent in 1400 or the better-documented year 1427. In Venice, the movement was more sudden. It was after the year 1570 or thereabouts that the patricians began to switch their investments from trade to landed estates on the mainland, from neighbouring Padua to distant Friuli.31 They changed from being entrepreneurs to rentiers; from having a dominant interest in profit to a dominant interest in consumption. The elegant gestures in Florentine portraits by Bronzino and others reflect the attitudes of the sitters, who were no longer prepared to get their hands dirty as their fathers and grandfathers had done (good merchants, as Giovanni Rucellai had observed in the later fifteenth century, always have inky fingers).32 The most splendid Venetian villas, starting with Villa Maser, built by Palladio and decorated by Veronese in the early 1560s for the Barbaro family, belong to this period of the return to the land.
Why did this change take place? It looks like an example of the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves cycle, the third-generation syndrome which the American economist W. W. Rostow called ‘the pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics’, after the Lübeck family described in a famous novel by Thomas Mann.33 As in Mann’s novel, so in Renaissance Italy one can point to examples (most obviously that of the Medici) of families ruined for trade by a humanist education; Lorenzo the Magnificent composed poems while the family bank went into decline. However, the significant change is the one that affected not only some families but a whole social group. Families had withdrawn from trade before; what was new, in Florence, Venice and elsewhere, was the lack of new families to replace them.
Why? The fundamental explanation was probably an economic one. As a result of the discovery of America, the centre of gravity of European trade was shifting away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic. The Italians were losing their traditional role as middlemen in international trade, which was being taken over by the Portuguese, the English and, above all, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch. We have returned to the theme of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’ (above, p. 239). At the same time food prices were rising, so that, to wealthy urban Italians, land appeared an increasingly attractive investment.
This change in the style of life of the patriciate was good for the arts in the short term but not so beneficial in the long run. The ruling class was more inclined to patronize the arts because this was part of their new aristocratic lifestyle, but in the long term the wealth which permitted them to build palaces and buy works of art dried up. The change in values – especially the emphasis on birth and the contempt for manual labour – worked against the newly risen status of the artist. There was a kind of ‘brain drain’ (brains being what an artist mixes his colours with) thanks to the diffusion of Renaissance ideals abroad and the consequent demand for Italian artists in Hungary, France, Spain, England and elsewhere. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italy, a country of merchant republics, had been as distinctive socially as she was culturally. As she came to resemble other European societies, Italy lost her cultural lead. There was also a shift of creativity from the visual arts into music, which has been explained by the decline of the city-state as well as increasing ecclesiastical control of the media.34 All the same, Italian art remained the envy of Europe until the death of Bernini in 1680.