The intermittent series of conflicts that England and France engaged in from 1337 to 1453 is known as the Hundred Years’ War. The conflict was sparked by the death of the last king of the French Capetian dynasty, Charles IV, who left no male children and therefore no direct heir to the throne. The closest relative with right of succession was the son of his sister: the fifteen-year-old king of England, Edward III. Alarmed by the prospect that an Englishman could become their master, the French nobility elected as ruler King Philip VI of the Valois dynasty. Edward III promptly opposed the decision, but when the French threatened him with the confiscation of English holdings in the southern part of France (what remained of the vast fief that the English had acquired in the twelfth century, through Eleanor of Aquitaine), Edward III was forced to back down and reluctantly recognize Philip VI as the new king of France.
Tensions reemerged when Philip VI, taking advantage of the war between England and Scotland, moved to take hold of the English possessions in southern France and also gain control of Flanders (present-day Belgium). In the end, disappointed England lost its French fief and was unable to annex Scotland to its domain. France’s success in regaining its territorial unity was curbed by its failed campaign against Flanders, which maintained its independence. Flanders’s prosperity greatly increased with the English conquest of Calais in 1347, which allowed a collaborative trade between the two countries: England shipped wool to Flanders, where it was processed into fine cloth that was then turned into highly profitable merchandise. (The women who spun the wool into yarns were called “spinsters.” The term came to be associated with unmarried women who had to work because they did not have husbands who could provide for them.)
As the countries of Europe were beginning to stabilize their boundaries and political identities, and also develop more competent secular institutions, a collision with the church became inevitable. A significant moment occurred at the beginning of the fourteenth century when the king of France, Philip IV, imposed heavy taxes on all French citizens, clergy included. The pope, who at that time was Boniface VIII, angrily protested, saying that members of the church could not be taxed without papal approval. To retaliate against the pope, Philip IV blocked all monetary contributions to the Roman papacy. The jubilee of 1300, which was proclaimed by Boniface VIII, was in great part prompted by the need to compensate, with the contributions provided by the pilgrims who flocked to Rome, for the considerable loss of money that the church suffered from its feud with France.*1
The tremendous success of the jubilee, which saw the arrival in Rome of 200,000 pilgrims, was linked to the pope’s promise that all those who made the pilgrimage to the sacred city would have their sins forgiven.
The quarrel between Boniface VIII and Philip IV reached a dramatic climax when the French king, rejecting the idea that the clergy was to be considered immune from secular law, allowed his courts to put on trial and imprison a French bishop. In response, Boniface VIII excommunicated the French king and promulgated the papal bull (or decree) Unam sanctam (1302), in which, with extravagant imperiousness, he proclaimed the absolute temporal and spiritual supremacy of the pope over all human beings, kings included. “Every human creature is subject to the Roman Pontiff,” he stated with finality.
In reaction to that extreme statement, the exasperated king of France attacked the pope with a scathing list of accusations, which included simony, heresy, and immorality. Subsequently, he dispatched to Anagni, in central Italy, where the pope resided, a group of royal emissaries who arrested Boniface and threw him in prison. After three days with no food or water, the pope was finally released. But the humiliating experience proved too harsh for a man close to seventy. Boniface VIII never recovered and died shortly after. The brief pontificate of Benedict XI was followed by a clash between Italian and French cardinals fighting for the election of their own candidate. Eventually, the French cardinals prevailed, and Clement V was elected pope in 1305. Because he feared a vendetta on the part of the Roman aristocracy, Clement V decided to transfer the papal Curia to Avignon, in the southeastern part of France.
The sixty-seven years in which the papacy resided in Avignon is known as the Babylonian captivity. As described in the Old Testament, the exile of the Jews in Babylon had earned the city a very negative reputation as a hotbed of depravity and sin. In Apocalypse, that reputation was revived once again to describe Rome as the “mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” When the Curia left Rome, the appellation was repurposed to criticize the worldliness of the huge and luxurious court of Avignon, where the popes enjoyed a princely existence surrounded by a multitude of assistants and servants paid with the money collected from ecclesiastical taxation. After visiting Avignon, a Spanish prelate wrote, “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the papal court, I found brokers and clergy engaged in weighing and reckoning the money that lay in heaps before them….Wolves are in control of the Church, and feed on the blood of the Christian flock.” The biting rhetoric and scathing words that the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch employed to criticize the church’s betrayal of its apostolic origin went even further. The church, Petrarch wrote, is
the impious Babylon, the hell on earth, the sink of vice, the sewer of the world. There is in it neither faith nor charity nor religion nor the fear of God….All the filth and wickedness of the world have run together here….Old men plunge hot and headlong into the arms of Venus; forgetting their age, dignity, and powers, they rush into every shame, as if all their glory consisted not in the cross of Christ but in feasting, drunkenness, and un-chastity….Fornication, incest, rape, adultery are the lascivious delights of the pontifical games.
It took the supplicant appeals of people like Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) to finally persuade Gregory XI to bring the papal Curia back to Rome in 1377. But it was not a smooth transition: after the death of Gregory XI, the clash of interests between French and Italian cardinals caused the election of a pope in Rome and a so-called antipope in Avignon. At one point the rift, which is known as the Great Schism, produced as many as three popes, each denouncing as invalid the appointment of the others.
Among the widespread criticism that the monarchical attitude of the church generated were many popular tales full of mockery toward the pope and the clergy. Authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) vividly captured in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales the intensity of the anticlerical feelings that dominated the times. Among the amusing stories that Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron is the tale of a Jew by the name of Abraham. After having traveled to Rome, Abraham tells a friend that he found that the church dignitaries were “gluttons, winebibbers, and drunkards without exception, and that next to their lust they would rather attend to their bellies than to anything else, as though they were a pack of animals.” That terrible realization, Abraham concludes, firmly persuaded him to convert to Christianity. In response to the utter surprise of his friend, Abraham explains that the simple fact that Christianity has been able to survive despite all attempts of church dignitaries to destroy its reputation appears to him as a definite proof that it is a powerful religion with a mighty Holy Ghost as “foundation and support.”
The greatest threat that confronted the church in the fourteenth century came from dissident movements that, offended by the corrupted behavior of the papacy, preached a humble and apostolic faith based on an intimate relation with God that did not require the mediating intervention of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Among those movements, the two most influential were the one inspired by John Wycliffe (ca. 1320–1384) in England and the one led by Jan Hus (1369–1415) in Bohemia. Both men and their respective followers, the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, took a firm position against the infractions committed by the church: the selling of indulgences, the laxity of clerics, and the papal meddling in secular and political affairs. Wycliffe rejected the pope’s claim that he was the vicar of God, arguing that the papal institution had been established by man, not God, and that the teaching of the Bible could be directly acquired without the intermediary help of priests. For that reason, he translated the Bible into English. After his death, the ecclesiastical authorities, concerned with his influence, condemned to destruction all the copies of Wycliffe’s Bible. The flames that destroyed piles of books also incinerated many people accused by the church of being heretics. Hus, who did not hesitate to publicly condemn the church for its moral depravity, its political ambition, and its indifference toward the needs of the poor, was accused of heresy. By condemning Hus to death and burning him at the stake, the church turned the Bohemian preacher into a hero and martyr with much greater influence in death than in life.
In 1347, the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, appeared in the West, carried by ships coming from the East. In only five years, twenty-five million people perished, one-third the overall population of Europe. The psychological scar left by the devastating epidemic caused the spreading of superstition, magic, and witchcraft, as well as the fanatical excesses of the flagellants who publicly whipped themselves as a way to expiate the sins that, they believed, had induced God to punish the world. Conspiracy theories were also fast to spread. As usual, the first to be accused were the Jews, who were charged with poisoning the water supplies in order to kill all Christians.
Yet, like a fire whose destruction ends up regenerating the soil, the dramatic loss of population that the plague caused ultimately benefited those who survived: the shortage of food that Europe had experienced the preceding century, due to the sharp increase in population, coupled with several years of adverse climate conditions, ceased to be a concern after the plague, while the diminished availability of people resulted in more job opportunities for a new generation of workers. As the demand for manpower grew, so did the leverage of a working class that now felt entitled to fight for better living conditions and wages. Class-based insurrections, such as the Jacquerie that occurred in France in 1358, the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381, and the revolt of the Ciompi or wool carders in Florence in 1378, were symptomatic of that gigantic shift in the attitudes and expectations of commoners and, in general, those belonging to the lower, working class. The cry for justice with which the poor confronted the abuses of the rich directly appealed to the values of Christianity that the English peasants, revolting in 1381, framed with these powerful words: “We are made men in the likeness of Christ, but you treat us like savage beasts.”
The events described above show that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were certainly very turbulent times in the history of Europe. Yet despite the many setbacks, Europe had begun to undertake a course destined to provide significant improvements in the general well-being of all people.
THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES
After the eleventh-century emergence of the powerful maritime republics of Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, the Italian cities that began to experience a greater cultural development were those that, although nominally part of the German Empire, had been able to resist imperial and feudal control to become self-sufficient centers of industry and commerce. With the exception of Flanders and the Hanseatic towns, in northern Europe, the prosperity that those Italian cities enjoyed had no equal in the rest of Europe. That prosperity also rested on a wide range of accounting and banking techniques developed by Italian financiers, such as insurance contracts, credit, and double-entry bookkeeping. Lombard Street, in the financial district of London, owes its name to the Italian moneylenders who settled there in the thirteenth century.
The civic pride that the commercial middle class enjoyed, due to such successes, became one of the most prominent characteristics of those Italian municipalities, which were called communes because their government was based on the collaboration of assemblies formed by the representatives of the major guilds or trade unions, without any external interference from imperial and clerical control.*2
The freedom and independence that characterized those self-governing cities found an obvious comparison with the Greek city-states and especially the Roman Republic. In his book History of the Florentine People, the historian Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) used classical references to law, order, and civic devotion to affirm that Florence was a place of justice where merit, rather than privilege, determined social status and where all citizens had an equal say in the management of the state. Contemporary scholars warn us not to take those optimistic claims too literally: in the Florentine Republic, as in the other Italian city-states, participation in government was limited to the members of the wealthy guilds to the exclusion of the less affluent citizens. In that sense, writes the historian John Larner, the equality that the humanists praised was a myth produced by a narrow class that had succeeded in equating its specific interest with the larger, common good. The oligarchic nature of Florence is confirmed by numbers: in a population of approximately 100,000, only 4,000 had the right to vote.
In Florence, the seven major guilds, which constituted the popolo grasso (the richest members of society), included Judges and Lawyers, Cloth and Wool Merchants, Doctors, Silk Weavers and Vendors, Furriers, Tanners, and, most important, Bankers. The lesser bourgeoisie, the popolo minuto, belonged to the minor guilds of Butchers, Cobblers, Blacksmiths, Locksmiths, Bakers, and Winemakers. The proletariat, which constituted the poorer strata of society, was mainly formed by peasants who had abandoned the countryside with the hope of finding better opportunities in the city but ended up performing the most menial work. What we should remember is that apart from a few interludes, like the Ciompi revolt mentioned earlier, political control in Florence remained firmly in the hands of the richest guilds. As the historian Alison Brown writes, “Apart from a few ‘radical interludes,’ as [the scholar Philip] Jones calls them, the policies of these communes remained conservative and restrictive, their outlook upper-class, not populist.”
The blatant discrepancy that separated reality from that idealistic narrative didn’t dim the citizens’ civic and political pride, as also shown by the many references to Roman architectural style with which they filled their urban environment. In his History of the Florentine People, Bruni, in a way that was evocative of Greek and Roman writers, asserted that the beauty of Florence revealed the nobility of spirit of its citizens.
In the past, the only structure that had dominated the landscape of the city was the cathedral. The relevance that grand and austere private buildings were now given, as well as the imposing presence of public town halls, reveals the enormous importance that the secular world had gained vis-à-vis the church. In Florence, the commanding presence of the massive Palazzo Vecchio was further enhanced by the nearby Loggia dei Lanzi: an open space framed by three wide arches topped by Corinthian capitals decorated by Agnolo Gaddi’s allegorical representation of the four cardinal virtues: Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence. The space was built to display the statues whose symbolic meaning best conveyed the political ethos cherished by the city. Today the Loggia dei Lanzi contains masterpieces such as Perseus (with the severed head of the Medusa), executed by Benvenuto Cellini between 1545 and 1554, and Giambologna’s Hercules Beating the Centaur Nessus (1599). In 1353, the first mechanical clock, placed on the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, secularized the sound of church bells that until that moment had marked the phases of the day. The precise measure that from then on the passing of the hours received gave an efficient but also accelerated quality to time: in a city so committed to business, time became money and as such a precious commodity that could not be wasted.
The paintings that Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290–1348) was hired to execute in the Palazzo Pubblico (town hall), which was the seat of Siena’s republican government, are helpful in understanding the pride that animated the republican spirit of the Italian city-states. Like Florence, the commune of Siena had become a rich economic enterprise: a city led by merchants and artisans who used art to commemorate their achievements and advertise the virtuous quality of their civic engagement. Lorenzetti’s four frescoes are an allegorical representation of the positive effects that Good Government had in the city and its surroundings, in contrast with the evil disunity produced by Bad Government (see this page).
The figure of the old man with a white beard, placed at the center of the first composition, is the allegorical personification of the Commune. Above his head are placed the three main theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, while at his side are the cardinal virtues of Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice with two other figures representing Peace and Magnanimity. The figure on the right of the Commune, sitting on a throne, is Justice. Right below Justice is Concord, which is also the point of departure of a long cord held by a procession of twenty-four citizens (the representatives of the upper guilds that led the city government). The image symbolizes the spirit of collaboration that allowed the community to thrive, as shown in the portrait of the city buzzing with the activity of merchants, artisans, and labor workers. Against a background of imposing palaces, churches, towers, and shops, a dancing group of young and elegantly dressed women further enhances the harmony that exudes from that overall image of cheerful prosperity.
The frescoes of Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena—allegories of the positive effects of Good Government
The bird’s-eye view of the Tuscan countryside, in the next image, delivers a similarly positive message: as in the city, Good Government assured safety and prosperity in the surrounding lands, as shown by the villas, the castles, and the rich abundance of the plowed fields. In stark opposition to Good Government, Bad Government is represented as a dark, satanic monster with horns and fangs accompanied by Tyranny, Greediness, Ambition, and Vanity.
The image of two little, naked children, placed at the center of the composition under the personification of the Commune, is a proud reminder of the Roman origin of Siena. The pedigree was used to validate the ethical link that connected Siena to the values of ancient Rome. Religion was not forgotten but rather fused with the concept of civic virtue that mixed Christian principles with the exemplary lessons of Rome’s heroic past.
A few years after Lorenzetti completed his work, the government of Siena asked Taddeo di Bartolo (ca. 1362–1422) to paint a cycle of frescoes, again for the town hall, dedicated to Roman republican heroes. A central inscription explained with these words the significance of those exemplary images: “Take Rome as your example if you wish to rule a thousand years; follow the common good and not selfish ends; and give just counsel like these men. If you only remain united, your power and fame will continue to grow as did that of the great people of Mars. Having subdued the world, they lost their liberty because they ceased to be united.”
Describing Lorenzetti’s frescoes, John Larner writes that they are a “document of singular importance” in that they highlight the contrast between past and present: whereas the city of medieval times was a random maze of tortuous streets and precarious houses, the commune was exalted as a model of rationality where beauty went hand in hand with efficiency and functionality. The need to trumpet, in such a forceful way, that greatness of the commune reflected the pride of an emerging bourgeoisie, which for centuries had been dismissed with contempt by the landed nobility as ignorant and vulgar nouveaux riches. The prejudice was reinforced by the church, which claimed that the pursuit of wealth was a corrupting practice because it encouraged self-promotion and the excessive attachment to luxury and riches. In contrast with that view, what the merchants who led the government of the commune were eager to convey was that their rule produced not simply wealth but also progress, peace, collaboration, justice, beauty, and civilization.
But the blissful atmosphere of communal happiness celebrated in Lorenzetti’s paintings didn’t fully reflect the actual events of history: with constant infighting among competing wealthy families and rivalries with neighboring powers, the city-states were perennially rocked by tremors that were as constant and unpredictable as the moods of a live volcano. In that sense, more than altruism and cooperation what prevailed in the Italian city-states was ambition and competition—the passionate desire to surpass and outshine all competing rivals in the quest for money, power, fame, and recognition. Contrary to the feudal Middle Ages, which were all about the solid immobility of authority and tradition, humanism and the Renaissance were all about the forward dynamic of an entrepreneurial and feisty mercantile society.
In time, the tug-of-war between the richest families led to the demise of the communes and the birth of the signorie, from signore, to indicate that a single ruler was in charge of the city-state. Among those ruling families were the Visconti in Milan, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Bentivoglio in Bologna, the Montefeltro in Urbino, the Este in Ferrara, the Scaligeri in Verona, and most famously the Medici in Florence. As in previous times, martial activity remained a constant feature of the signorie, with bigger cities constantly striving to annex and control smaller ones. Florence, for example, ruled Pisa and Pistoia, Venice Padua and Verona, Milan Pavia and Lodi, and so on. The trait that most persistently seemed to link all those powerful rulers was the tenacity with which they worked at imitating, in manner and style, the snobbish attitudes that had belonged to the landed aristocracy. The enormous amount of art that the Renaissance produced was sponsored by a merchant class eager to use the splendor of the city as a testimony of its own greatness. In pursuit of that purpose, the court of Milan sponsored artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante, while Mantua boasted Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, and Correggio, and Florence patronized Donatello, Brunelleschi, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli, to mention just a few.
The term “Renaissance,” which is based on the French word meaning “rebirth,” was first used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858. Shortly after, the term was given further popularity by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance was a sudden explosion of talent and creativity after centuries of dull and ignorant darkness was largely influenced by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors—people like the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the painter and author Giorgio Vasari, who in his 1550 book, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, described as “golden” the time that Florence was experiencing under the rule of the Medici family. Even if no one can deny the excellence and originality of the many artists whom Vasari’s book takes into consideration, to describe their activity as symptomatic of the birth of a new, free, and self-determined man, as Burckhardt and other scholars of his generation suggested, can be deceiving in that it does not take into consideration the fact that what those artists produced was not so much the expression of their free creativity, but the visual translation of what their rich patrons demanded. Furthermore, as many contemporary critics underline, the Renaissance was not a widespread phenomenon but the expression of a small and wealthy elite eager to declare its superiority in relation to an era (the Middle Ages) that they discarded as nothing more than an insignificant parenthesis placed in the middle of two extraordinary times: the classical past and the Renaissance.
In contrast with those views, modern scholars argue that the Renaissance did not burst out of nothing but was the result of a long process of maturation (which, as we have seen, started in the twelfth century), without which the new era would never have borne its fruits.
Bearing this in mind, we will continue to use the practical term “humanism” to name the first part of the period called the Renaissance, whose overall dates are generally set between 1300 and 1550. As we will see, humanism was characterized by scholars who, following the example set by Petrarch, crisscrossed Europe in search of old manuscripts. From the lesson of the illustrious forebears that those old manuscripts brought to light, the humanists derived new models with which to improve art and also the basic principles concerning politics, ethics, and philosophy. The discussion that follows will focus on (a) the literary quality that humanism assumed under the influence of Petrarch and (b) the change that occurred a generation later, when, with the rediscovery of authors such as Livy and Cicero, writers and intellectuals switched their interest from literature to politics.
PETRARCH’S LITERARY HUMANISM
After Thomas Aquinas, the Scholastic method of learning with its rigorous, logical analysis had slowly exhausted itself by turning into an ever more abstract and arid intellectual exercise. (The common question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is meant to mock the extremes of Scholastic inquiry.) The cultural revival that followed the waning of Scholasticism was called humanism. The term “humanism” is a nineteenth-century expression used to describe a new generation of scholars who, placing aside the concerns of theology and metaphysics, passionately dedicated themselves to the revival of what Bruni called the studia humanitatis, meaning the study of endeavors, specifically human, whose qualities made them valuable for the forward progress of civilization.
The beginning of humanism coincides with the work of two major Tuscan authors: Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374). Boccaccio’s most famous work was the collection of novellas, written in Italian vernacular, called the Decameron. The protagonists of the Decameron are a group of seven young women and three young men who leave Florence for the countryside when the city is struck by the plague. The stories that they tell during ten days of their sojourn constitute the one hundred tales of the Decameron. Boccaccio’s tendency to focus on everyday life, his irony, his loose morality, and the witty and irreverent way with which he addresses the church and the clergy show the secularized mentality that the new urban culture had introduced.
After the Decameron, the other influential book by Boccaccio is the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, a compendium of pagan mythology that became a rich source of inspiration for writers and visual artists eager to find fresh images and ideas with which to replace the by then stale language of the old Christian devotion.
Petrarch, who is commonly considered the father of humanism, was born in Arezzo in Tuscany in 1304. Compelled by his father, he initially studied law in Montpellier and Bologna. But he soon abandoned those studies to dedicate himself to his literary passion, in particular the study of the classics. Petrarch’s father, who was a very traditional man, did not take lightly his son’s change of heart. To express his disdain toward pagan culture, he burned many of what he considered his son’s “heretical books.” Undeterred, Petrarch continued to follow his literary calling for the rest of his life. Most of his literary activity took place in Avignon, where he held different clerical positions at the papal court, and then in the Vaucluse in Provence, where he pursued his work under the patronage of rich sponsors. The echo of the troubadours who had once thrived in Provence is strongly audible in the Neoplatonic celebration of love and beauty that Petrarch expresses in his verses.
Because he was a fervent admirer of the classics, Petrarch traveled all over Europe in search of old manuscripts kept in remote monastic libraries. Cicero’s oration called Pro Archia and his Letters to Atticus, which Petrarch found in Liège, were among his most valuable discoveries. Petrarch, who died in Arquà, in the Veneto region, in 1374, left his vast collection of books to the city of Venice.
Petrarch’s passion for antiquity was so vivid that he kept up an imaginary conversation with his favorite classical authors—people like Cicero, Virgil, Homer, and Horace—to whom he wrote fictional letters. Petrarch was a devout Christian, but that did not prevent him from criticizing the cultural poverty that, in his view, had dominated the Christian Middle Ages: an age, he claimed, that was responsible for the gross distortion of the classical heritage that the Christians had labeled sinful and dark because not illuminated by the grace of God. Petrarch used the same attribute to condemn as “dark” the Middle Ages, saying that it had been a period dominated by ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. The definition of the Renaissance as a rebirth derived in large part from Petrarch’s belief that the cultural achievements that the classical era had bequeathed humanity were a precious reservoir of wisdom that could have helped, rather than hindered, the progression of the Christian world.
Dante had advocated the re-creation of the Holy Roman Empire, with the emperor in charge of temporal matters and the pope of spiritual ones. Petrarch, who lived in an epoch when the ideal of the empire was rapidly declining, sided with Cicero and Livy, who praised instead the virtues of the Roman Republic. To those values Petrarch dedicated his books Africa (about Scipio Africanus, the famous Roman general who defeated Hannibal during the Punic War) and De viris illustribus (On illustrious men): a book, inspired by Livy, that was an attempt to establish a continuity between pagan and Christian wisdom by pairing exemplary characters equally drawn from ancient history, mythology, and the Old Testament.
Petrarch’s fame was so great that in 1340 he was asked to choose between Paris and Rome as his favored setting for a ceremony to award him the title of poet laureate (a recognition comparable to the prestige of today’s Nobel Prize). Petrarch, who chose Rome, was crowned on the Capitol, April 8, 1341. On that occasion, he visited the Forum, the Colosseum, and other ancient ruins and lamented the indifference that had allowed such majestic splendor to rot in dirt and neglect. His hope to revive the ancient romanitas made him welcome, a few years later, the rise of a flamboyant character, named Cola di Rienzo, who used a skillful rhetoric to advocate the restoration of Rome’s antique glory. Touched by that nostalgic dream, the Roman populace, who just a few years before had seen the papacy move to Avignon, put their trust in that self-proclaimed “tribune of the people” and did not oppose the coup d’état that he staged to take control of the city. For a short period of time, Cola’s rule maintained a relative level of stability, but when the delusional promoter of that alleged revolution, theatrically dressed with a white toga trimmed in gold, declared that as a restorer of the Holy Roman Empire he had the authority to free all the Italian cities from their rulers and then become emperor thanks to their support, people understood that they had fallen for a charlatan and chased him out of the city.
Despite his many talents, Petrarch’s incapacity to recognize Cola’s shortcomings is revealing of his lack of acuity when it came to practical and political matters. Petrarch might have been aware of that: except for his short-lived enthusiasm for Cola, he never got involved in politics, praising instead the value of a solitary life. Petrarch was a moralist who bitterly criticized the corruption and hypocrisy of his times but never questioned his own aristocratic refusal to engage in the political arena nor his opportunistic association with wealthy patrons for purely convenient and self-serving purposes. By his own admission, his greatest concern was his own reputation. He was unapologetic about it: true genius, he believed, deserved recognition and the imperishable glory of eternal fame.
Petrarch was a bundle of contradictions. Like Dante, he was a man torn between the excitement for the new and the fear of change that his time was experiencing. The poet laureate was at his best when, in the Canzoniere (Book of songs, also known as Rime Sparse, “scattered verses”), as his vernacular collection of poems was called, he acknowledged those fears and hesitations and confessed the doubts that tormented his Christian consciousness. Similar to the tradition of the Dolce Stil Novo, from which Dante also had emerged, Petrarch modeled his Canzoniere on the Neoplatonic fashion of describing love as a purely mental exercise: because the woman remains unapproachable, the lover withdraws to contemplate within the image of beauty created by the power of his own imagination. His idealized love object, Laura, who like Beatrice is married to someone else and dies at a very young age, is a symbol of beauty and purity rather than a real woman. The male speaker, who laments her perennial absence, uses that absence as a springboard of poetic inspiration. Petrarch reminds us of that connection by persistently associating the name Laura with the lauro, or “laurel”: the tree of poetry and eternal fame.
In the first sonnet of the Canzoniere, Petrarch directly addresses his audience to affirm that the “scattered verses” they are about to hear represent an “error” of youth: the futile hopes and sorrows of a painful love experience for which the poet desires to receive pity and forgiveness. The beginning of the Canzoniere is disconcerting: Why does the poet ask us to listen to his verses if he is the first to reject, as an illusion, the value of his passion and that of his poetry? Rather than providing an answer, the sonnet that follows further confuses the reader’s expectations. His first encounter with the beloved, Petrarch says, occurred the day of Christ’s death (Good Friday), when the sun withdrew its rays from the world. The darkening of the scene audaciously acknowledges the sinful violation implicit in the amorous experience: the passion that the poet describes in his verses is placed in direct opposition to the all-absorbing devotion that a Christian was expected to pursue. That ambiguous tone is maintained throughout the Canzoniere: while a melodious style delivers images of Laura that are as transfixing as heavenly visions, Petrarch continues to remind himself, and the reader, of the danger that the poetic illusion poses to the spiritual clarity required by religious engagement.
Unlike the fictional Beatrice, whom Dante transforms into a celestial vessel of salvation, Petrarch’s Laura represents a poetry that, like the laurel she evokes, remains inextricably rooted within the poet’s human and secular reality. That does not mean that Petrarch’s verses aim at describing a real woman. On the contrary, the image of Laura that Petrarch conjures up from the most delicate aspects of nature (a murmuring brook, a whispering breeze, a perfumed shower of flowers) is an enchanting yet completely ephemeral symbol of beauty that is abstract and poetic rather than tangible and concrete. What fascinated the author of the Canzoniere was not an actual woman but the visionary power of his own creative imagination, explored from an angle that was emotional, artistic, and psychological rather than spiritual and religious.
The fact that the idealized image of the woman conveyed by poetry did not necessarily improve the way women were regarded in real life emerges in a letter where Petrarch, writing to a friend, uses these chauvinistic words to describe his feelings toward the opposite sex: “The woman is the embodiment of the devil, the enemy of peace, the cause of impatience, the source of discords and disputes, and man should try to avoid her if he wants to find tranquility in life.”
The moral dilemma that in the Canzoniere divides the poet’s earthly and spiritual concerns is explored by Petrarch in a prose book called the Secretum, which is a fictional dialogue between himself and Augustine—the personification of the Christian dogma that Petrarch fears and respects, even when he desperately tries to bend the rigid rules of its dictate to grant a greater legitimacy to his passion and ambition. To convince Augustine that his literary pursuit is not inappropriate, Petrarch says that as a muse of love and poetry Laura has filled his mind with lofty thoughts and virtuous desires. Augustine remains untouched by the poet’s argument: as an inflexible judge and a severe alter ego, he tells Petrarch that all those who prove incapable of leaving behind the cupiditas, or desire for earthly attachments (beauty, poetry, and fame), fall into error, because nothing besides God is worthy of human interest and attention.
After a long discussion, Petrarch is forced to concede that Augustine is right. The dialogue ends with the poet promising Augustine that he will abandon his illicit pursuit, but not before the completion of his Canzoniere, on which he had pinned his hope for eternal fame.
The religious anguish that torments Petrarch is completely medieval, but the stubbornness with which, despite his sense of guilt, he refuses to give up the devotion toward his literary endeavor announces the beginning of a new era in which religion is not so much dismissed as reshaped into a faith less austere and dogmatic; in other words, a faith capable of accepting man’s accomplishments as concordant with rather than antithetical to the values of Christianity.
Petrarch’s dedication to the classics shows the unorthodox approach he maintained in regard to culture. Art, for Petrarch, was an expression of freedom and, as such, deserved a respect that was to remain free from prejudiced views dictated by doctrine or ideology. Eugenio Garin writes that Petrarch and his fellow humanists truly “discovered” the classics not just because they brought to light old manuscripts buried in dusty and secluded monasteries but because they learned to appreciate them as unique expressions of singular talents belonging to a specific historical time. Rabanus Maurus, who lived between the ninth and the tenth centuries, had characterized the medieval handling of past knowledge this way: “When we find something useful we convert it to our faith,” and when we find “superfluous things, that concern the idols, love or the preoccupation with things of this world, we eliminate them.”
In total contrast with the medieval habit of channeling all past accomplishments within the narrow parameters fixed by Christianity, the humanists were the first scholars to teach that the classics had to be appreciated for their own unique merits, free from the shackles imposed upon them by ideology and religion.
Following the moral imperative of rescuing the classics, many humanistic scholars spent years combing all corners of Europe in search of manuscripts “held captive” (to use the expression of the humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini) in monastic and cathedral libraries. The great number of manuscripts that were assembled, of authors such as Cicero, Tacitus, Seneca, Ovid, Lucretius, and Vitruvius, were used by the humanists to undertake a major work of philological restoration aimed at bringing back the original integrity of the texts. At the core of the humanistic approach was the view that, as in classical time, virtue was to be expressed in action rather than contemplation and that education was essential to assure man’s moral and intellectual maturation, without which the stability of society could not be guaranteed.
POLITICAL HUMANISM
After Petrarch, the majority of humanists abandoned the poet’s solitary striving toward literary perfection to emphasize matters that were more specifically related to the civic and political life of the city-state. Mostly inspired by the rediscovery of Cicero, the creed that animated this new generation of scholars was that the highest and noblest way of life was the one placed at the service of the state. This mental attitude ushered in once again the secular belief that history was a process shaped and put in motion by human work and aspirations. Aristotle’s statement that “he who is not a citizen is not a man” was at the root of that conviction and with it the corollary belief that a free state was essential for the realization of man’s destiny as prime agent of civilization.
To promote the knowledge of the classics, Coluccio Salutati, who was chancellor of Florence from 1375 to 1406, persuaded the city government to invite the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach the Greek language in Florence. (Unlike Boccaccio, neither Dante nor Petrarch could master Greek.) The importance that Salutati and his followers attributed to Greek and Latin culture alike was based on the belief that the study of ancient authors was necessary to build man’s moral character, without which a just and strong society could not be created. The studia humanitatis, which replaced the medieval emphasis on the trivium and quadrivium, included rhetoric, eloquence, history, and moral philosophy: in other words, disciplines that had to do, primarily, with the moral and rational strengthening of the human personality for the sake of an active and engaged political existence. In a similar way, the term artes liberales (liberal arts), which was made complementary to the definition of studia humanitatis, indicated that culture assured the freedom of the human spirit. Eugenio Garin summarizes with these words the essence of that new mentality:
The humanistic culture that flourished in the cities of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries manifested itself above all in the field of the moral disciplines by means of a new access to ancient authors. It took concrete shape in new educational methods practiced in the schools of grammar and rhetoric. It became a reality in the formation of a new class of administrators of the city-state to whom it offered more refined political techniques. It was used not only in order to compose more efficient official letters but also to formulate programs, to compose treaties and define ideals, to elaborate a conception of life and the meaning of man in society.
Despite the optimism that humanists placed in republican virtues, many communes were short-lived, soon replaced by the signorie.
Salutati’s confidence that as a civically engaged city Florence would have avoided the destiny of other city-states was put to the test during the clash with Milan, which had fallen under the rule of the Visconti family at the end of the thirteenth century. The power that the Visconti gained when they became sole rulers of the city made them similar to monarchs, but the fact that as businesspeople they lacked a proper title was often a source of profound insecurity. For that reason, the Visconti family paid 100,000 florins to the king of France to buy the title of dukes. The same thing was done by the Gonzaga, the ruling family of Mantua, who, having acquired the title of marquises in 1433, sported their right to wear the English royal livery, which featured proudly in an Arthurian fresco cycle they commissioned from the artist Pisanello.
Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who assumed full control of Milan after the brutal murder of his uncle with whom he had initially co-ruled, was an extremely ruthless and ambitious man, determined to extend the Milanese possessions throughout the northern territories of Italy. The official justification for that expansion was that Italy would have benefited by being unified under a single ruler. After conquering Padua, Verona, and Vicenza, Gian Galeazzo turned his interest toward Bologna and Florence. Fearing an imminent attack, Salutati rallied the patriotic spirit of the Florentines with a powerful speech that denounced the evils of tyranny. As the city, pressed by Salutati, prepared to resist the enemy’s attack, news arrived that Gian Galeazzo had suddenly fallen sick and died in 1402. Salutati chose not to diminish the symbolic importance of the moment: by praising the Florentines’ courageous determination to defend their liberty, the eloquent chancellor greatly contributed (just as Pericles had done so many centuries before) to the optimistic belief that against the threat of tyranny nothing was more powerful than people’s love for freedom and independence.
The historian Leonardo Bruni, who like Salutati was a passionate supporter of the republican system, believed that the example of social and political rectitude provided by Florence represented a universal principle valid for all of humanity. To understand how the humanists considered ideal a society that, in essence, was led by a small oligarchy of rich and influential families, we have to remember how still ingrained was the notion that the universe was a hierarchically ordered system. The metaphor most commonly applied to society was that it was comparable to the human body: a unity of different parts each contributing, in its own specific way, to the overall well-being of the organism. What differentiated the new era from the medieval past was social mobility: whereas in the Middle Ages class status was considered an unalterable trait inherited at birth, those in charge of the republic believed that they had gained access to government through skill, wit, and ingenuity. Discussing the positive effects produced by the republican system, Bruni wrote,
The hope of winning public honors and ascending is the same for all, provided they possess industry and natural gifts and lead a serious-minded and respected way of life….Whoever has these qualifications is thought to be of sufficiently noble birth to participate in the government of the republic….But now it is marvelous to see how powerful this access to public office, once it is offered to a free people, proves to be in awakening the talents of the citizens. For where men are given the hope of attaining honor in the state, they take courage and raise themselves to a higher plane; where they are deprived of that hope, they grow idle and lose their strength. Therefore, since such hope and opportunity are held out in our commonwealth, we need not be surprised that talent and industry distinguish themselves in the highest degree.
Bruni’s assertion that nobility was not a hereditary trait but an outcome of virtue and that competition within a free society was the best way to assure the blossoming of the human personality formed the core of an ideal that influenced political thinkers for many generations to come. In his Panegyric of the City of Florence, Bruni painted this idealized portrait of Florence and its people: “The men of Florence especially enjoy perfect freedom and are the greatest enemies of tyrants. So I believe that from its very founding Florence conceived such hatred for the destroyers of the Roman state and underminers of the Roman Republic that it has never forgotten to this very day….Fired by a desire for freedom, the Florentines adopted their penchant for fighting and their zeal for the republican side, and this attitude has persisted down to the present day.”
The notion that civic engagement was a moral imperative that allowed man to express his better self and, in doing so, also favorably sway to his advantage the course of destiny was shared by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who epitomized the concept of “Renaissance man”: the multitalented and broadly learned individual who also came to be embodied by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Alberti, who was fond of saying that “men can do all things if they will” and was known for his boundless energy, was a master of archery, an excellent rider, and an intellectual who could juggle with equal ability a conversation about literature, law, linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, music, and geometry. Additionally, he was a great architect—the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, the facade of Santa Maria Novella, and the Palazzo Rucellai are among his most famous achievements—and a skilled painter. In his treatise On the Art of Building, Alberti used the precepts of the newly rediscovered De architectura, written in the mid-20s B.C. by the Roman architect and author Vitruvius, to conclude that to produce a beautiful building, the architect was to reproduce the same geometrical and arithmetical proportions that God, the supreme Architect, had imposed on the body of man. This belief, which derived from the Greeks, who had first linked the harmony of the human body to the harmony of the cosmos, was re-proposed by Leonardo da Vinci in his Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490)—a perfectly proportionate male body with extended arms and legs, enclosed within a square (symbol of earthly reality) and a circle (symbol of God’s eternity) to indicate that man represented a scaled-down version of the divinely infused universe.
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490)—the human body in perfect harmony with the cosmos
Alberti, who also wrote the books On Painting and On Sculpture, was among the first writers to elevate to a higher status the role of the artist, who in the past had simply been defined as a craftsman, meaning a manual worker dealing with the manipulation of matter—an activity felt to be vastly inferior to the disciplines that had to do with the world of ideas. Challenging that prejudice, Alberti affirmed that the ingenuity displayed in the work of painters and architects made their crafts deserving of being placed among the liberal arts. For Alberti, as for Leonardo in later years, an artist was not simply an “artisan, but rather an intellectual prepared in all disciplines and all fields.”
In the treatise On the Family (1443), Alberti stressed the important role that family and education had in the creation of a well-rounded personality. Unfortunately, the harmonic equilibrium between different social forces that Alberti so passionately advocated did not include women. By enforcing the old belief in the absolute authority of the father figure, Alberti, like most men of his age, kept women relegated to the same secondary role they were assigned to since antiquity.
Despite that stubborn prejudice, many women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were able to distinguish themselves by becoming scholars, writers, and poets in their own right. The majority of these women, like Isotta Nogarola, Veronica Gàmbara, Gaspara Stampa, and Vittoria Colonna, came from wealthy families, but others, like the Venetian Veronica Franco, were courtesans whose cultural sophistication earned them the respectful title of cortigiana onesta to distinguish them from lower-class prostitutes.
The celebration of man as a uniquely endowed creature was also articulated by the humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), who wrote a book titled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man in Four Books. The work was written in response to the pessimistic ideas that Pope Innocent III had expressed, almost two hundred years earlier, in his On the Misery of Man. The scholar Charles G. Nauert writes that whereas the pope in order to exalt the soul had focused “on the putrefying decay and the excrement of the body as symbols of true human nature, Manetti lauded the harmony and beauty of the human body, reflecting man’s creation by God in his own image.”
The humanists had good reason to be optimistic, especially in a place like Florence whose cloth and textile industry had allowed it to become the richest city in Europe. One of Florence’s great advantages was a secret dye derived from a lichen, brought home from the East by the Florentine merchant Federico Oricellari, that added a beautiful violet pigment to the high-quality wool that was shipped to Italy from England, Scotland, and North Africa. Another factor that allowed Florence to become a superpower was its banking activity, which was conducted by major Florentine families, like the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Strozzi, the Albizzi, and especially the Medici, who turned the fiorino into the strongest currency of Europe.
As prosperity grew, the guilds became increasingly engaged in the improvement of the city. The Arte della Lana (Wool Guild) and the Arte della Calimala (Cloth Guild) contributed funds for the building of the duomo, the Gothic-style church designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, which was built in 1296, as well as for the nearby baptistery, the bell tower designed by Giotto, and the oratory and grain market called Orsanmichele.
The great amount of money that the secular and business-dominated government of Florence assigned to artistic projects that in most cases were religiously inspired tells us that even if the reputation of the church as an institution had been devalued, religion, albeit often tinted with superstitious feelings, was still prominent just as the fear of God’s ultimate judgment. As we have seen, bankers who practiced usury in violation of the church’s ban often invested great sums of money in family chapels as a way to seek forgiveness for the “sin” they committed. The Florentine family of the Bardi and Peruzzi, for example, spent a huge amount of money for the decoration of the two chapels they owned in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce, one dedicated to the life of Saint Francis and a second one to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. Knowing that Saint Francis had repudiated the wealth of his merchant family for a life of poverty makes the choice quite odd—unless, of course, we conclude that the Bardi-Peruzzi did so as a means of penitential contrivance, which, they hoped, would have gained them God’s forgiveness for the transgressions committed in their professional activity. Additionally, Saint Francis might have been a convenient way to hide behind a mask of humility the enormous ambition that fueled their success—a necessary requirement in a city so sensitive to the danger of tyrannical aspirations. (The Bardi-Peruzzi eventually suffered a major blow from England: when King Edward III, who had received substantial loans from the Florentine family to finance his war against France, failed to repay those loans, he caused the disastrous demise of the Bardi-Peruzzi bank.)
FLORENCE: THE CITY OF SPLENDOR
Among the many wealthy members of Florentine society, a particular place of prominence was occupied by the Medici family, whose banking activity was initiated by Giovanni, a smart businessman who managed to become the official banker of the pope. The charitable benefactions on behalf of the city, like his contribution to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, an orphanage sponsored by the Silk Guild and designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (the building, with its classical references, is considered the first example of Renaissance architecture), were used by Giovanni to gain the benevolence of his fellow Florentines. When he died in 1429, Giovanni was succeeded by his son Cosimo (1389–1464), who, like his father, was not only a clever businessman but also an astute politician, keenly aware of the importance that cultivating a good reputation had for the family’s success. To present himself as fair and balanced, Cosimo always made sure to keep a low and unassuming profile. When the architect Brunelleschi, whom he had asked to design a project for the family residence, presented him with a plan for a palazzo that was extremely grand and lavish, Cosimo prudently refused, turning to the architect Michelozzo Michelozzi, who came up with a much less showy design.
Jealous of the high regard in which the head of the Medici family was held, a competitor, Rinaldo degli Albizzi, spread the rumor that Cosimo intended to take over the Florentine Republic. As a result, Cosimo was pushed into exile. But only for a very brief time: when Rinaldo degli Albizzi tried to assign to himself a position of political preeminence within the city, Cosimo was promptly called back and elected chief magistrate, or gonfaloniere, which was the highest executive office of the republic. Confirming his cautious approach to politics, Cosimo in the years that followed was able to gradually amass greater and greater power, but always with moves carefully conducted behind the scenes, such as briberies and political maneuverings that left intact the illusion that Florence was still a republic when in reality it was slowly morphing into a signoria. Cosimo’s capacity to mute his critics and sway in his favor the political winds without ever acknowledging, in an official fashion, the fact that the city was gradually becoming his own private princedom shows a deep affinity with the emperor Augustus, who did not hesitate to corrupt the electoral system to rise to power while astutely presenting himself as savior, rather than usurper, of the republic. The impression is confirmed by the title assigned to Cosimo, who, just like Augustus, was called pater patriae (father of the nation) by his fellow Florentines.
Among the many qualities that made Cosimo popular was his diplomatic ability. For example, to keep Florence safe from Milan’s expansionist ambition, Cosimo funneled a great amount of money to Francesco Sforza, the Milanese condottiere (military leader) who was eventually able to snatch control of Milan away from the Visconti. The alliance that Cosimo forged with the new ruler of Milan gave Florence leverage against Venice, the ambitious Queen of the Sea whose aggressive politics were a constant threat to the rest of Italy.
Cosimo’s approval was also kept high by his generous contributions to the city of Florence, whose fame and prestige he enhanced through the work of the many artists he sponsored, like Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello, Luca Della Robbia, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippo Lippi, Brunelleschi, and Donatello. Because, like other super-wealthy people, he feared the judgment of God, he never neglected to invest a lot of money in pious enterprises, like the reconstruction of the monastery of San Marco that became famous for the magnificent mystical frescoes executed by Fra Angelico. Influenced by humanist scholars, like the rich Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo also established in San Marco the first public library. Thanks to the great resources that Cosimo deployed for the search and purchase of manuscripts, the library of Florence became the largest collection of books in all of Europe. That precious repository of culture was later moved to a building originally designed by Michelangelo in 1523, the Biblioteca Laurenziana. The cult of books that the humanistic movement fostered was greatly facilitated in the middle of the fifteenth century by the invention of the printing press by the German Johannes Gutenberg, which rapidly transformed the privilege of culture that once belonged to a few into a tool widely available to many.
While many European cities thrived, Byzantium continued to experience a slow decline, despite the efforts of the emperor Michael VII Palaiologos, who tried to restore the city’s old prestige after the dramatic events that had occurred in the Fourth Crusade. But Byzantium’s frail condition, which was worsened by the constant threat of the Muslims, remained problematic. To find a solution, new diplomatic contacts were developed to attempt a reconciliation between the Latin and the Greek churches. Among the people who came to Italy to explore the possibility of some sort of entente between West and East was George Gemistus Plethon, a highly regarded Byzantine intellectual whom Cosimo befriended and invited to Florence for a series of lectures on Plato. At that time, Plato was still largely unknown in the West because, as indicated before, apart from indirect references from authors such as Cicero and Augustine, the only book that the Middle Ages possessed of the Athenian philosopher was the Timaeus, which had been translated into Latin by Calcidius in the fourth century A.D. The lectures on Plato that Gemistus Plethon gave in Florence set humanists, scholars, and intellectuals aflame with enthusiasm. Caught by the wave of interest that Plato’s mystical philosophy prompted, Cosimo decided to invest money in the creation of a Platonic Academy, which was founded in 1445. At the helm of the Academy, Cosimo placed the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who went on to translate from Greek to Latin all of Plato’s and Plotinus’s work and also the writing of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical figure who was erroneously believed to be an Egyptian wise man who had lived shortly after Moses (scholars now believe that the Hermetic writings belong to an unknown group of Greek authors who lived between A.D. 100 and 300). The work of Ficino and that of the humanists who attended the Platonic Academy were essential for making Plato central to the interests of most Renaissance scholars, thus bringing to an end the Scholastic passion for Aristotle that had dominated the Western mind for almost four hundred years.
Ficino’s most important work was the Theologia Platonica. The work that Will Durant defines as a “confusing medley of orthodoxy, occultism, and Hellenism” exalted Plato as an enlightened philosopher whose prophetic ideas anticipated truths eventually validated by Christianity. The pivotal concept of Ficino’s Neoplatonic philosophy was that by being a point of encounter between matter and spirit, man was an exceptional creature capable of recognizing in love and beauty the conduits necessary to reach higher forms of feeling and understanding. By exalting the Golden Age of Florence, Ficino wanted to exalt the makers of art who, as the critic Arthur Herman explains, had been moved by the desire to achieve virtue through creativity using the beauty of their work to draw themselves and their viewers closer to the divine creator of the universe—God.
Since the thirteenth century, Florence had indeed become the stage of an enormous amount of astounding artistic achievements. The thread that linked all those innovations was based on a revived interest in everything that the classical world could offer. But studying the models of the past had not been easy, given that Rome, the main showcase of antiquity, lay shattered in ruins, with most of its ancient treasures neglected and half buried in dirt. Brunelleschi and Donatello, who for ten years repeatedly returned to Rome to draw sketches of statues and reliefs and to measure the proportions of old buildings, would have been quite aware of those difficulties. The names Monte Caprino (Goat Hill) and Campo Vaccino (Field of Cows), which were given to the Capitoline Hill and the Forum because of the cows, goats, sheep, and pigs that were brought there to graze, give us a sense of the dilapidated condition into which the Roman antiquities had fallen.
Despite that widespread squalor, Rome had remained a popular destination for many Christian pilgrims who came to visit the city carrying with them a guide called Mirabilia urbis Romae (The marvels of Rome). But the wondrous remains that attracted those travelers were religious rather than secular, like the holy finger of Saint Thomas in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme; the arm of Saint Anne, mother of Mary; or the head of the Samaritan woman converted by Christ, which was kept in the Church of San Paolo Fuori le Mura. The fact that Brunelleschi and Donatello were not part of those pious crowds must have greatly puzzled the people of Rome: What were those two men doing wandering among the Roman ruins, and what were they looking for with their endless diggings? Maybe, people thought, they were treasure hunters in search of golden coins or some other precious object from the past. Superstition told them that men like that had to be avoided at all cost: disturbing the pagan spirits was a dangerous venture, and no one wanted to be part of it. Little did they know it was that very activity that would inspire the masterpieces that initiated the great artistic revolution known as the Renaissance.
In Brunelleschi’s case, the trip to Rome had come after his defeat by the artist Lorenzo Ghiberti, who won the competition that the city of Florence had organized to select the artist assigned to produce the bronze doors that were to decorate the baptistery. Losing to Ghiberti—who went on to produce those magnificent doors, which Michelangelo honored by naming them the Gates of Paradise—had been a painful disappointment for Brunelleschi, but vindication came when he was later chosen for the design of the cupola that was to be placed on top of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Brunelleschi, who brought that amazing task to completion in 1434, used as inspiration the Roman Pantheon. The cupola he designed was conceived as a double shell supported by a strong internal framework made of brick and stone that rested on an octagonal drum. The beauty of the massive dome rising effortlessly above Santa Maria del Fiore came to be praised as one of the major wonders of the world fated to inspire, for centuries to come, legions of future architects. In later years, while planning the cupola of Saint Peter in Rome, Michelangelo paid tribute to Brunelleschi’s masterpiece by saying, “I will do a bigger one but not more beautiful than that of the Duomo.”
Brunelleschi also became famous for his studies on linear perspective. As we have seen, because they favored God’s infinity over man’s relativity, medieval artists had consciously neglected the realism of three-dimensionality in favor of abstract and alogical visions of the divine, seen as complete otherness from the world of matter. In a radical reversal of that optical and mental perspective, Brunelleschi developed the mathematical and geometrical rules necessary to master the vanishing point that Renaissance painters used to prioritize the human subject’s point of view, thus making man, once again, the measure of all things.
Brunelleschi’s cupola of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, 1434—the duomo
With Donatello, the influence of classical times was translated into a vigorous realism that forever revolutionized the art of sculpture. We see this, for example, in the biblical figure of Habakkuk, which the Florentines named the Zuccone (dialect for “big head”), destined for one of the niches placed on top of Giotto’s bell tower. In contrast to the idealized serenity that Gothic artists had invariably attributed to biblical figures, Donatello’s Habakkuk is given a completely true-to-life likeness: an unflattering and odd-shaped bold head, a harsh face, and a strong body covered with a shapeless cloak that, less than a prophet, makes him look like a Roman senator unafraid of throwing himself into the messy affairs of the world (see this page). In his pursuit of realism, Donatello, who mastered all sorts of materials (stucco, marble, bronze, wood), was able to convey in an unprecedented way the drama of human life. Among his other powerful images are the bronze statue of John the Baptist that he produced for the Cathedral of Siena and the shockingly emaciated wooden-carved image of the penitent Mary Magdalene, who, as a medieval legend believed, had searched for salvation in the wilderness and in loneliness (see this page).
It seems fitting that it was such an extraordinary man who finally emancipated sculpture from the subordinate position it had been relegated to for more than a thousand years as a mere appendix of religious architecture. Besides the bronze equestrian statue of the military leader Gattamelata, the first statue that Donatello conceived outside the context of a church was the David—the first freestanding statue on the round to reappear in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire (see this page).
The bronze statue, which was probably commissioned by the Medici for the courtyard of their palace, portrays the young shepherd David as a naked adolescent proudly placing his foot on the head of the giant Goliath, the massive warrior who, as the Bible narrates, had spread fear among the Israelites during their war against the Philistines and was eventually killed by the rock flung from David’s sling. The intense eroticism that the statue exudes is accentuated by the long feather attached to Goliath’s helmet, which seems to caress the inner part of the boy’s right leg while reaching up to his groin. Nothing ethereal and spiritual can be found in this image: drastically severing the ties with tradition, Donatello not only gives the statue autonomy from the religious context but also makes the sensual and purely organic reality of the body a subject worthy of the admiration and celebration of art.
Donatello’s biblical Habakkuk, or Zuccone (Big Head)
Donatello’s emaciated Mary Magdalene
Donatello’s bronze David, the first freestanding statue in the West since the Roman Empire collapsed
As the works mentioned show, the spirit that moved Brunelleschi and Donatello was not to reproduce old models but to use them as inspiration for the creation of something completely new and unique. This principle had been advocated by Petrarch, who said that culture consisted not of arid erudition but of an active process of assimilation in view of a new, original synthesis. To explain that principle, Petrarch used as metaphor the work of bees that pick pollen from different flowers to then create their own unique honey.
As Brunelleschi did in architecture and Donatello in sculpture, the first painter who, after Giotto, articulated, in his own original way, the classical lesson was Masaccio (1401–1428). Masaccio, who died when he was only twenty-six years old, is essentially remembered for two main works: the Holy Trinity in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, which profoundly impressed his contemporaries for his skillful use of perspective (we will return to it later), and the frescoes he did for the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, in Florence. A sense of Masaccio’s style can be ascertained from the famous scene called The Tribute Money.
The scene visualizes the story told in the Gospel of Matthew: a tax collector stops Christ and His disciples to demand money for the state. The range of meticulously choreographed gestures, movements, and expressions performed by the solidly built figures (so evocative of Roman senators) conveys the variety of thoughts and emotions described in the story: assertiveness, surprise, hesitation, and indignation, all rotating around the calm presence of Christ, Who tells Peter to go to the lake to catch a fish and find a coin in its mouth. (Peter executing Christ’s command is seen in the rear of the picture.) The spatial depth, which demonstrates Masaccio’s familiarity with the rules of perspective, adds realism to the representation, as does the depiction of the natural light (which, as we have seen, had been abandoned for more than a thousand years) that the painter underlines through the long shadows that appear on the ground to indicate the afternoon hours of a cold winter day.
Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, the Brancacci Chapel, Florence Credit 11
The masterly technique used by Masaccio to enhance Christ’s humanity and immerse His presence in a completely realistic context was met with a chorus of praise by his contemporaries. Those compliments must have greatly pleased the silk merchant Felice Brancacci, who, like many other wealthy citizens, sponsored that work not only for devotional purposes but also to enhance his worldly status by showing that money and success had in no way diminished his sense of responsibility and commitment to civic duty. The money theme that Felice Brancacci chose for the painting is in itself an evident wink to his fellow citizens, who, pressed by the high expenses that the war with Milan required, had been discussing a possible increase in taxes, which Brancacci, who wanted to show off his civic virtue, was positively advocating.
Masaccio’s use of a religious theme to disguise secular intentions is also present in the work of his teacher Masolino (1383–ca. 1440), whose painting appears in the same chapel. The well-known scene, shown on this page, puts together two events separately narrated in the New Testament: Saint Peter miraculously raising the dead Tabitha and Saint Peter healing a crippled man.
The background that connects the two scenes depicts a sunny open space lined by an elegant group of pastel-colored houses, typical of the fifteenth-century Florence in which Masaccio and Masolino lived and operated. Placing biblical scenes in familiar contemporary surroundings was a fashion developed in Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels by fifteenth-century artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Robert Campin. In a similar manner, Masolino seems to take pleasure in lingering on details of everyday life: from the blankets hanging out of windows to be dusted off, to flowerpots, birdcages, and even an exotic pet monkey brought from some faraway land that we see on the ledge of one of the buildings. The calm routine of the beautiful morning is further animated by the presence of people going about their business in the streets of the city. Particularly relevant is the image of two men, clad with fancy Renaissance hats and garments, placed in the middle of the scene who appear so absorbed in their conversation as to remain completely unaware of Saint Peter’s miraculous actions that are occurring right next to them. The feeling that the viewer gets is of two completely independent and unrelated planes of reality: a secular plane and a religious one running on parallel tracks, with no evident connection to each other. How are we supposed to interpret that enigmatic choice? A comparison between the fancy richness of the city and the particularity of the two miracles is the key to the enigma: the crippled man and the dead woman restored to a healthy life were probably intended as a clever, indirect praise of the city of Florence, which, resurrected by the mercantile activity, had gained an unprecedented level of splendor and prosperity.
Masolino’s rendering of Saint Peter’s dual miracles, also in the Brancacci Chapel, with detail, above
Using religious themes to praise secular achievements reached a whole new level of audacity in the work of the famous painter Gentile da Fabriano (ca. 1370–1427), who was hired by the banker Palla Strozzi, the great rival of the Medici family, to produce an altarpiece titled The Adoration of the Magi, to be placed in the family chapel located in the sacristy of Santa Trinità in Florence.
Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece The Adoration of the Magi, in the sacristy of Santa Trinità, in Florence
What appears unique in this painting is where and how the sponsors of the artwork are depicted within the scene. In the mature phase of the Middle Ages, placing sponsors within a religious composition had become a common practice. But when it happened, two strict rules were maintained: the sponsor, who was always given a secondary position vis-à-vis the religious figures, had to show a humble and respectful deference toward the holy event. What makes this painting so strikingly different is the almost defiant way with which Gentile da Fabriano gives the members of the Strozzi family a size comparable to that of the Magi, while assigning them a place of enormous importance right next to the three kings. Behind them is the great procession of elegantly dressed people who represent the Strozzi’s fancy entourage.
But there is more: according to Christian tradition, Mother and Child were to be assigned a prominence that no other figure or event could overshadow. By placing the scene of the Nativity as the final destination of the long procession, Gentile da Fabriano at first seems to respect that rule. But what we realize, as soon as we linger a little longer on the image, is that the lively crowd, the colorful costumes, the exotic monkey, the hunting falcons, the restless horses, and the purebred dogs keep pulling our eyes away from the contemplation of that sacred moment. Our distraction appears shared by the characters portrayed in the painting: except for Palla Strozzi (recognizable by the falcon he holds on his left arm), none of the people who accompany him appear to pay attention to the Nativity scene. Even the big star glowing on top of the manger fails to attract their curiosity: caught by the excitement of the hunting day from which they have just returned, people look at each other as if sharing stories or simply marveling at two birds fighting right above their heads. Their eyes wander everywhere, except in the direction of baby Jesus. Such irreverence, in less permissive times, would have been condemned as an appalling sacrilege, only good to feed the flames of hell.
In spite of the morally ennobling claims of people like Alberti and Ficino who insisted that virtue was behind man’s celebration of beauty, what seemed to consume the rich Florentines were mainly temporal and political concerns. To prove the point, one need only look at the frescoes that Benozzo Gozzoli did for the Medici between 1459 and 1461 in the chapel situated in the family palace.
The pretext for the frescoes was an event that had occurred a few decades earlier: the Council of Florence (1438–1439) organized to try to reconcile the Roman and the Byzantine churches. Cosimo, for prestigious reasons, had been able to transfer the council from Ferrara to Florence, where he lavishly lodged and feted his famous guests, among whom was the emperor of the Eastern Empire and the patriarch of Constantinople. The council’s failure to achieve its purpose did not discourage the Medici: what they had wished to get out of the occasion was exposure and notoriety, and in that sense the council, for them, had definitely been a great success. For that reason, they chose a grand theme to honor the event: the Magi’s journey to Bethlehem, just as in Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece. The suspicion that the choice might have also been an attempt to upstage the rival family of the Strozzi derives from the huge size given to the project, which runs along three walls of the chapel, as well as the Medici’s choice to appear in the painting as personifications of the biblical Magi. Wealth was the justification for that daring choice: the Medici felt entitled to identify themselves with the Magi because of their rich contribution to the Christian world that they had provided with the organization of the Council of Florence. The additional implication, of course, was that among the wealthy Florentines no one was as deserving of the approval and recognition of God as the great Medici family.
Gozzoli’s fresco for the chapel in the Medici palace (ca. 1459–1461)
The figure that in Gozzoli’s frescoes is given greatest prominence is the young Lorenzo, recognizable by a royal turban decorated with gems and golden spikes. Right behind him, we see his father, Piero, and his grandfather Cosimo. The awesome cavalcade that follows the Medici-Magi shows a long line of lavishly dressed nobles, dignitaries, court members, squires, and pages within a landscape glistening in colors and fairy-tale beauty. Among that long parade of people we see the emperor of the Eastern Empire, John VIII Palaiologos, and the patriarch of Constantinople. Other celebrities include the Italian humanists Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino and the artist himself, identified by the name inscribed around the red cap he is wearing. The fact that Gozzoli dares to place himself in his own painting reveals the new level of self-awareness that artists had acquired, in particular when they realized how essential their role had become in buttressing the glory of those who held power.
Soon many artists began to depict themselves within their own paintings. The image on the facing page shows a later painting by Sandro Botticelli, the Adoration of the Magi, executed in 1476, which, again, was a tribute to the Medici. (Cosimo, kneeling in front of the Virgin, and his two sons, Piero and Giovanni, are presented as the Magi, while his grandsons Giuliano and Lorenzo look at the scene from the crowd.) The haughty look that Botticelli adopts while staring directly at the viewer from his own painting conveys the proud self-awareness that the Italian artists had now achieved.
There is no doubt that Gozzoli’s frescoes are aesthetically magnificent, but there is also no doubt that exploiting religious symbols to heighten their political power was quite an amazing display of hubris on the Medici’s part. What had happened to Cosimo, who was always so careful in avoiding all ostentatious displays of showiness? Confronted with that puzzling dilemma, many scholars have concluded that Cosimo only supervised the beginning of the work, while his son Piero (nicknamed il Gottoso, “the Gouty,” because he suffered from gout), who was much more taken with the pomp and pageantry of power, took charge of its ultimate completion. That Cosimo is the only figure riding a brown mule, rather than a horse (a clear reference to Christ, who rode a mule when he entered Jerusalem), might have been a way for Piero to pay tribute to the famous humbleness of his father, from whom he had learned so little.
One last thing about the chapel: when one enters, the dazzling beauty of the paintings is so overwhelming that it is easy to forget that what is missing in the composition is the main point of the biblical story—the scene of the Nativity. The small painting by Filippo Lippi that used to stand above the altar provided that detail, but almost as an afterthought that easily goes unnoticed. What that indicates is that while the Middle Ages had been pervaded by the desire to make the soul immortal, the only immortality that many rich Renaissance people appeared to truly crave was that of fame, applause, and recognition.
Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi (1476), with detail of the artist himself
That said, some expressions of pure spirituality remained. Among those who continued to use art as an instrument of religious meditation—and for that reason still relied on Byzantine style and techniques, with images lacking movement, perspective, and natural light—was Simone Martini (1284–1344), who lived and worked in Siena. In Florence, the religious approach found an extraordinary representative in Fra Angelico (1395–1455), who decorated with magnificent mystical visions the cells of the monks in the convent of San Marco.
Also Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), whose painting hung in the chapel decorated by Benozzo Gozzoli, exclusively devoted his art to religious themes. But his personality was quite different from that of the pious Fra Angelico. Having lost his parents at a very young age, Filippo was put in a convent where he took his priestly vows when he was only sixteen years old. He was a great painter but an erratic man who often failed to complete the work he was assigned. Cosimo often had him locked in a room to force him to work, but Filippo regularly escaped through the window. Eventually, he was accused of immorality because he fell in love with a nun whom he abducted from the convent. The many portraits he did of the Virgin Mary bore the features of the ex-nun who had become his lover. As we will see, the Dominican priest Savonarola sternly denounced those kinds of infringements as profoundly offensive to the spirit of Christianity.
LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT AND HIS COURT
After Cosimo’s death, Piero took over the reins of power but died only five years later, leaving his twenty-year-old son, Lorenzo, in charge of the family business. According to his contemporaries, even if Lorenzo lacked Cosimo’s knack for making money, he certainly had his grandfather’s facility for handling the clever maneuvering of politics. Like Cosimo, he staged a prudent approach to power, manipulating the decisions of the balìa, or Council of Seventy (established in 1480 as a permanent political council), by assuring for himself the loyal support of the majority of its members.
The prosperity and order that the city enjoyed under Lorenzo appeased, at least for a while, the rivalries between opposing parties: as long as the free circulation of trade and money continued, people appeared content, despite the loss of freedom. The transformation of Florence into a capital of light, elegance, gaiety, and amusement was used by Lorenzo to give even further prominence to the benevolent mask that the Medici’s rule had become so apt at staging. “If Florence was to have a tyrant,” wrote the sixteenth-century historian Francesco Guicciardini, “she could never have found a better one.”
Lorenzo was an intelligent and highly cultivated man. He mastered Latin and learned Greek at a very young age. He appreciated art, literature, and philosophy and surrounded himself with scholars and artists. Besides that engaged and serious side, Lorenzo was a cheerful person who enjoyed the light and entertaining aspects of life. Under his leadership, spectacular tournaments, beautiful processions, extravagant carnivals, and whimsical masquerades became trademarks of the city, as well as brilliant creative exploits of all sorts of artistic expressions: literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. As a sign of grateful recognition, the city to which Lorenzo had brought so much liveliness and prestige assigned him the title of il Magnifico, “the Magnificent.” But, as Lorenzo wrote in one of his poems, the future can often bring calamities unforeseen during the enchanted springtime of youth.
For Lorenzo, that sobering encounter with reality came when members of the rival Pazzi family, acting with the complicity of Pope Sixtus IV—a Franciscan who, in direct opposition to his vows, was a fierce political man who supported the Inquisition and shamelessly practiced nepotism—attacked him and his younger brother, Giuliano, with daggers while the two were attending Mass in the duomo, on Easter Day 1478. Lorenzo was able to escape, but the young Giuliano succumbed to the brutal attack of the killers. Lorenzo’s retaliation was fast and implacable as a bolt of lightning: he had the conspirators not only arrested but also immediately executed and hung for several days outside the windows of the Palazzo del Bargello as an admonition to any other possible plotters. The presence of the archbishop of Pisa among the men who were executed shocked the pope, who excommunicated Lorenzo and suspended business with the Medici’s bank. Lorenzo was too shrewd to let the tension last: using diplomacy with the same adeptness that had characterized his grandfather, he was able to eventually reestablish a good relationship with the pope and also maintain a delicate equilibrium with other major cities like Milan and Naples.
In Lorenzo’s multifaceted personality, the statesman, the tyrant, the warrior, the diplomat, the scholar, the poet, and the art lover seamlessly coexisted. It is hard to believe that the man who, among other things, ordered the sack of Volterra, which was an abominable act of violence, was the same man who penned the most delicate and nuanced praises of love and beauty in his book of poetic songs. Under such a leader, Florence became a de facto signoria but with an aura of glitter and glamour that ended up seducing even those from whom the dignity of self-rule and independence had been taken away.
With Lorenzo, the court of the Medici became a major locus of encounter of artists such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Piero and Antonio Pollaiolo, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, as well as authors like Luigi Pulci and Politian, and philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
Pulci (1432–1484) and Politian (1454–1494), both friends and protégés of Lorenzo’s, could not have been more different in taste, style, and personality. Pulci’s main work, Morgante, was a biting parody of chivalric ideals, while Politian, who was a classical scholar, poured his romantic heart into lyrical verses that were a direct tribute to Petrarch’s elegant and delicate style. His most famous poem, titled Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, was dedicated to the famous tournament that took place in the Piazza Santa Croce in honor of Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano. The composition of the poem, which was written in Italian but was full of pagan and classical references, was interrupted by Giuliano’s death.
While Politian was the mentor to Lorenzo in poetry and literature, Marsilio Ficino, who, as we have seen, Cosimo had put in charge of the Platonic Academy, was the man who inspired in Lorenzo the love for Platonic philosophy whose spiritual depth appeared to agree so well with the principles of Christianity. Richard Tarnas writes that the most extraordinary outcome that the exposure to Plato produced on Ficino was the realization that the search for wisdom and spiritual perfection had characterized the human quest since the dawn of time. That realization led Ficino into believing that a fundamental continuity linked Christianity to all of the great traditions that had preceded it, from the Egyptian hermetism to the Hebrew Kabbalah (a mystical and esoteric method used to interpret the mystery of Scripture), as well as the wisdom of Pythagoras and Plato and that of all the major Neoplatonic philosophers. Charles G. Nauert writes that according to Ficino, “all of these ancient sages were divinely inspired. Their mission down to the Incarnation was to prepare the world for Christian faith by teaching the superiority of spiritual over material goods.”*3
According to Ficino, the world was a living thing animated by a “divine influence emanating from God, penetrating the heavens, descending through the elements, and coming to an end in matter.” Man, who was placed by God at the center of that awesome hierarchy of beings, was given the freedom to choose what he wanted to be: either to remain trapped at an animal level or to rise above materiality to follow the inner spark of divine creativity that allowed him to reach the vertiginous heights that his nature was capable of. The devotion to artistic beauty that the Renaissance so fervently cultivated was also a way to celebrate the role of co-creator that God had assigned to His favorite creature—man.
Along with Ficino, the other important scholar and intellectual belonging to Lorenzo’s entourage was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), who acquired fame for his vast and eclectic culture, which included several languages: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Pico, who like Ficino believed that all knowledge was interwoven, proposed a synthesis of Christianity, Greek philosophy, the Jewish Kabbalah, the teaching of the mythical and mystical philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, and that of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. That complex amalgam was described by Pico as different stages of illuminations: what the wise men of antiquity had stated was reconcilable with Christianity as expressions of the same universal Soul that pervaded and regulated the whole of creation. The scholar Arthur Herman, in The Cave and the Light, writes that Pico’s “staggering range of interests and his inexhaustible scholarly energy were aimed at a single mission. This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge.”
The Middle Ages’ view of man as a feeble creature scarred by sin had made the role of Grace an indispensable instrument of human salvation. In Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496), none of that can be found. For Pico, man was a heroic creature endowed by God with the gift of intelligence and creativity and the absolute freedom to choose whatever he wanted to be: “Oh highest and marvelous felicity of man. To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.”
Sidestepping the story of the Fall, which, according to religious dogma, had made indispensable the redemptive action of Christ, Pico imagined God’s words to Adam this way: “I have placed you at the center of the world, so that you may easily survey all that is in the world. I have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that exalted and empowered as the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you choose. You will have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are bestial. You will have the power, by the judgment of your soul, to be reborn into the higher forms of life, which are divine.”
To explore these ideas, Pico proposed a public gathering of scholars in Rome. The meeting’s ambitious agenda was to discuss the nine hundred topics put together by Pico with the intention of finding the essential concordance that linked all philosophies and religions. Pico had wished to entertain a dialogue with the major scholars of his times; what he received, instead, was a veto from the church, which condemned as heresy twenty-three of his theses.
The works of Ficino and Pico sparked all sorts of sophisticated discussions, but the connection with the political ideals that the early humanists had so passionately cultivated remained mostly ignored within the cultural milieu of these later thinkers. Some scholars have suggested that the Medici deliberately promoted the abstract reasoning of Plato over thinkers who had more of a pragmatic approach because, as Charles G. Nauert writes, it “drew the educated classes away from civic ideals and republican liberty.” The exclusion from art of all the themes that had to do with a civically committed life seems to positively confirm that hypothesis: what developed, especially under Lorenzo’s leadership, was an aesthetically stimulating but politically and ideologically hollow culture typical of the taste and style of a court-like mentality.
In Botticelli’s paintings The Birth of Venus and Primavera (Spring), probably dedicated to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, cousin of Lorenzo, that intrinsic contradiction inevitably comes to the surface: after being enthralled by the beautiful references to mythology, the viewer comes to realize that beneath the splendid veneer what the painting truly wants to express is not so much the ethereal joys of spiritual and Platonic contemplation as the greatness of Florence’s bosses—the Medici.
As the myth narrates, after Cronus cut off and threw the genitals of his father, Uranus, in the ocean, a wave of foam was formed out of which Venus emerged. In Botticelli’s painting, the newly created Venus is brought from sea to land on a huge shell. The winds that push the drape off her body represent erotic passions, while the nymph who rushes to cover her nudity is the chaste purity of spiritual love. The lack of material consistency in the rendering of the graceful figures (so far from the realism of Donatello or Masaccio), combined with the dreamy atmosphere that exudes from the painting, seems to point to a transcendental Neoplatonic dimension. But it is only an illusion created for purposes that, being partisan and propagandistic, are completely at odds with the purity and spirituality that the painting purports to suggest. Venus’s arrival is used by Botticelli not to promote an ascetic withdrawal from life but to proclaim, with the inflated adulation typical of a courtier, that with the triumph of the Medici, Florence has been blessed with a beauty as noble and pristine as that of a Platonic ideal.
In the other famous painting by Botticelli, Venus, the goddess of love, is placed one more time in a center-stage position. Above her, we see a flying Cupid shooting his arrow at the central figure of the three dancing Graces that represents Chastity. The blooming of nature that occurs when Chastity is revived by Love is expressed by the advancing Flora, the spring goddess, who scatters flowers all around her. The nymph behind her is Chloris, who, according to the myth, was turned into Flora by the passion of the spring wind Zephyr (emerging from the trees behind her). At the opposite side stands Hermes, the messenger of the gods, who pushes away a cloud that threatens the bright serenity of the scene. The rhetorical question that the painting seems to raise is this: Where does the earthly paradise inhabited by Venus and the Graces reside? The answer, which was clearly “Florence,” was once again a sophisticated way to flatter Lorenzo, who, just like the philosopher-king dreamed by Plato, was said to have turned the city into a magical garden of perfect beauty and love. The etymological connection between Florence and fiorire, meaning “bloom” in Italian, was used as a metaphor for that mythical rebirth.
Botticelli’s most famous painting, The Birth of Venus
Botticelli’s almost equally famous painting, Primavera (Spring)
The esoteric nature of the painting with its learned pagan references was designed to please the intellectual coteries who, by decoding the visual riddle, could exhibit their cultural wit and in so doing affirm the exclusive superiority that their perch among the privileged guaranteed.
Within a few years, that court mentality found a champion in Baldassare Castiglione, who used the Montefeltro’s court in Urbino, one of the most active centers of Renaissance art and culture, as the setting of his Book of the Courtier, published in 1528 by the Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. Castiglione’s book was conceived as a manual on etiquette: how a perfect gentleman was expected to dress, talk, and behave in the sophisticated milieu of the court. The main point of the manual, which was based on the Ciceronian model expressed in the De Officiis and De Oratore, was that because elegance could not be attained without intellectual refinement, the courtier had to be a “universal man,” meaning someone who, besides excelling in various physical activities, could master Greek and Latin and also have knowledge of history, philosophy, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The effortless nonchalance with which the courtier was supposed to display his culture and quick wit was called sprezzatura. An interesting aspect of Castiglione’s book is the role assigned to women. The educated noble lady is described by Castiglione as a companion for the courtier, equal to man in wit and intellectual capacity. That said, the sense of individuality that the mature Renaissance brought to fruition should not be misinterpreted: the “self” that was exalted was built not on a concept of pure freedom and self-reliance but rather on the desire to be part of the highly exclusive universe that the court existence represented.
A similar caution should be used when considering the great artists of the Renaissance who, as mentioned earlier, were not completely free agents of their crafts but extremely talented people whose work was put at the service of their princely patrons.
Next to Botticelli, a good example in this sense can be offered by another famous painter belonging to the Medici entourage, Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Shown opposite is the work that Ghirlandaio did for the chapel of the Sassetti family in the Church of Santa Trinità in Florence, which was dedicated to Saint Francis.
The scene depicts the confirmation of the Rule of Saint Francis (paradoxically, the favorite saint of bankers!) by Pope Honorius III. Sassetti, who had an important position in the Medici bank, is seen on the right, witnessing the scene next to his employer, Lorenzo, and another friend of the family’s, Antonio Pucci. Beside Sassetti is his younger son, while the three older sons, dressed in red, are placed on the left side of the painting. The most interesting aspect of the fresco is the background, which represents the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Any contemporary tourist can easily recognize the Palazzo Vecchio on one side and the three-arched Loggia dei Lanzi on the other. The big arch that looks closer to the viewer is, however, that of the Temple of Peace built by Maxentius and Constantine in Rome. As we know, Saint Francis met the pope in Rome, not in Florence, and the acknowledgment of the order occurred in the Vatican, certainly not among the pagan ruins of ancient Rome. So, why such a bizarre jumble of places and events? The main reason was to exalt Florence as a “new Rome,” and Lorenzo as the ruler of the city that was the true heir of that legendary past. The reference to the Roman Temple of Peace was an allusion to the peace that had followed the break between Florence and Rome due to the Pazzi conspiracy. Antonio Pucci, standing next to Lorenzo, was the man who had helped to bring together the two parties—of the pope and of the Medici. The multiple layers of meaning that are compressed in a single scene is mind-boggling—as is the cavalier attitude with which secular and religious symbols are reassembled to convey a laudatory acknowledgment of the Medici that, ultimately, has very little to do with Saint Francis and his order. Worldliness and secular ambition had definitely trumped mysticism and saintliness.
Ghirlandaio’s Confirmation of the Rule of the Order of Saint Francis, Sassetti Chapel, Church of Santa Trinità, Florence
THE GATHERING CLOUDS OF DISENCHANTMENT AND CYNICISM
The Medici’s golden years came to an end with the premature death of Lorenzo in 1492, when he was only forty-three years old. Two years later, Piero, who had succeeded his father, Lorenzo, found himself confronted with a terrible menace: the descent of Charles VIII of France, who invaded Italy to reclaim the kingdom of Naples that the house of Aragon (from eastern Spain) had taken from the French house of Anjou in 1435.
Suspicious of Charles’s expansionist intentions, Piero de’ Medici tried to gain the benevolence of the French king, by offering him the cities of Sarzana, Pisa, and Livorno. Offended by Piero’s cowardly behavior, the Florentines expelled him from the city and restored the republic. The confusion that ensued favored the ascent of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican prior of the monastery of San Marco, who had been instilling fear in the hearts of the Florentines with apocalyptic sermons in which he fulminated against the moral depravity of the people, promising that God would soon punish the transgressions of the corrupt city. The arrival of Charles VIII was interpreted by many as the realization of Savonarola’s prophecy. Fanned by the implacable words of the priest, a combustible mix of guilt, fear, and superstition exploded, giving way to hysterical expressions of puritan frenzy.
Ironically, Savonarola, who was originally from Ferrara, had initially come to Florence at the invitation of Lorenzo, who had been advised to do so by Pico della Mirandola, who admired the priest’s fervent faith and powerful rhetoric. Once in Florence, Savonarola became the head of the convent of San Marco. Lorenzo was soon surprised to discover the acrimony with which Savonarola condemned his fancy for art, beauty, and all sorts of intellectual pursuits. To try to appease the sullen monk, Lorenzo often sent gifts and contributions to San Marco, but his efforts were repeatedly rejected by the angry and scornful preacher. Lorenzo was a Christian more by formality than faith, but Savonarola must have touched some deep chord inside him: when Lorenzo suddenly fell sick and lay on his deathbed, he called for his harsh critic so he could receive his last rites and the absolution of his sins. According to Politian, who was present at the scene, Savonarola absolved Lorenzo on the condition that he repent of his transgressions and promise to change his life in case he recovered. A much less conciliatory version of the event was given by Savonarola’s biographer Villari, who claimed that the priest demanded that Lorenzo restore liberty in Florence. Because Lorenzo refused to answer, Savonarola denied him absolution.
The obsession with sin turned Savonarola into a sort of Florentine Taliban fixated on punishment and hell. But not everything he said was extreme or indefensible. Being offended by the use of religious art as an ornament for power, for example, would seem an understandable objection coming from a man of faith. As we have seen, besides the Medici many rich Florentines exploited religious symbols as ostentatious badges of personal honor. Giovanni Rucellai, who sponsored the splendid marble facade of Santa Maria Novella designed by Leon Battista Alberti, did not hesitate to have his name printed in big, bold letters right below the sun symbol of Christ that appears on top of the church. Even for us today, accustomed as we are to the bombardment of rich names splashed, in Trump-like fashion, all across our modern American cities, Rucellai’s egotism seems definitely over the top. The same thing could be said about the beautiful frescoes that Domenico Ghirlandaio executed (always in Santa Maria Novella, for his patron Giovanni Tornabuoni, uncle of Lorenzo de’ Medici), when he used Lucrezia, mother of Lorenzo and sister of Giovanni Tornabuoni, and other notable members of the Florentine elite as models for biblical figures. Savonarola’s objection to these excesses would have been understandable, but certainly not the violence with which he instigated his followers to create the infamous “bonfires of vanities,” where piles of books, objects of art, fancy clothes, cosmetics, and all sorts of luxury items were reduced to ashes. When Savonarola’s attacks turned against the corruption of the Vatican, which under Alexander VI had reached unprecedented levels of shameless venality, the pope immediately tried to silence his accuser by excommunicating him and accusing him of heresy. Untouched by the pope’s action, the unstoppable Savonarola continued to rail against all of those who, in his view, were staining the purity of Christianity with their satanic depravity. Among the many people who were shaken by the preacher’s words was the court painter Sandro Botticelli, who, seized by guilt, suddenly denounced all his previous works and went on to dedicate himself solely to pious art. An example of that spiritually reformed art is the Mystic Nativity, in which a beautiful chorus of angels dances in harmony above the divine crèche.
Eventually, the Florentines, tired of the doom and gloom preached by Savonarola, hanged him and burned his corpse to ashes on May 23, 1498. The execution took place in the Piazza della Signoria, in the very same spot where his bonfires of vanities had previously raged. Perhaps the most lasting effect of Savonarola’s legacy was to seed the Protestant revolution of Martin Luther, who greatly admired the apocalyptic priest whom he called a “saint.”
The fight for power that followed Savonarola’s death brought Florence to the verge of anarchy. To prevent the worst, the upper class elected the moderate Piero Soderini to the position of gonfaloniere for life. Among Soderini’s advisers was Niccolò Machiavelli, who was put in charge of several diplomatic missions and also the organization of a militia that, rather than mercenary troops, was formed of citizen-soldiers—a proposition that Machiavelli had always strongly advocated as essential for the safety and protection of the republic.
Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, his return to pious art
Machiavelli’s life took a sharp downturn in 1512, when the Medici, having regained power in Florence, accused him of conspiracy and deprived him of political responsibilities. After being tortured and imprisoned, Machiavelli was forced to retire to his country house, away from the city of Florence. Despite his many pleading letters, Machiavelli was never able to reacquire the trust and benevolence of the Medici. In a famous letter to a friend, he confessed that the only consolation he was left with was the reading of classical authors, with whom, just like Petrarch, he entertained a daily dialogue. He wrote, “At nightfall I return home and seek my writing room; and divesting myself on its threshold of my rustic garments, stained with mud and mire, I assume courtly attire; and thus suitably clothed, I enter within the ancient courts of ancient men, by whom, being cordially welcomed, I am fed with the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born, and am not ashamed to hold discourse with them and inquire the motives of their actions; and these men in their humanity reply to me; and for the space of four hours I feel no weariness, remember no trouble, no longer fear poverty, no longer dread death; my whole being is absorbed in them.”
It was during those difficult years that Machiavelli wrote his two main works: the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1531), in which he praises the value of the republic; and The Prince (1532), which, in apparent contrast to the spirit of the Discourses, is a despot’s manual on absolute authority. The cynical views contained in The Prince have puzzled generations of scholars: What inspired Machiavelli to praise a system that was so far from the republican ideal of which he had been an enthusiastic supporter for most of his life? Because Machiavelli never provided a direct explanation, many interpretations have been proposed: While some assume that the composition of The Prince was simply the result of his desire to ingratiate himself with the Medici, others emphasize the author’s patriotic feelings. Because the French invasion had led Machiavelli to the conclusion that Italy would succumb if it did not become a unified country, he wished to prepare, with The Prince, the arrival of a strong leader capable of bringing under his sway all the Italian city-states, just as other monarchs had done throughout the rest of Europe. A third interpretation takes into consideration the fact that Machiavelli, who had seen the government of Florence collapse three times during his formative years, had lost faith—not so much in the ideal of the republic per se as in the immediate capacity of his contemporaries to sustain a system based on selfless virtue and mutual collaboration. In Machiavelli’s practical approach, despotism might have appeared as a necessary step to impose order and peace at that moment in time, but that did not preclude the hope that sometime in the future the Florentine character would have matured to finally acquire the qualities needed to establish what he believed to be the best of all systems—the republic.
What cannot be denied is that at the core of Machiavelli’s argumentation is a profound sense of disenchantment in regard to human nature. Aristotle had claimed that man was born with the capacity to cultivate justice within a self-ruled community, based on respect for one another’s dignity and freedom. Machiavelli, who had shared that creed at a young age, grew increasingly skeptical of that ideal after being confronted with endless examples of human wickedness and selfishness. “Men,” he wrote in The Prince, “are fickle cowards, greedy and envious.” The notion, which appears to contravene the glowing qualities that Aristotle and with him all the major Renaissance thinkers attributed to man, proves that Machiavelli, applying a secular twist to the Christian concept of a flawed humanity, had come to believe that man was essentially a corrupt and defective creature. The examples offered by history were for Machiavelli an important lesson in that sense: the greatest enemy of freedom and justice resided not outside but inside the very nature of man. What could be done about it? Machiavelli was too pragmatic to try to solve that impossible dilemma: his times demanded solutions that were too urgent to be delayed by insoluble theoretical disquisitions.
It was in that spirit that Machiavelli turned to his ideal of a perfect prince—someone who could assure order in society by adapting his actions to reality, unafraid of using violence if the circumstances demanded. Following that logic, Machiavelli advised the prince to be, simultaneously, half man and half beast, with the latter being a combination lion and fox: in other words, a combination of strength and shrewdness that did not exclude, when necessary, the feigning of good and charitable intentions. Machiavelli’s theory was that the theatrics politics always required a balancing act, the alternate use of stick and carrot, as he bluntly acknowledged with these words: “When seizing a state, the conqueror should consider all the injuries he must inflict, and then inflict them all at once, so that he doesn’t have to repeat them day after day. In this way he can set the people’s mind at rest, and win them over when he distributes favors.”
The man who, for Machiavelli, best embodied the combination of cleverness and cruelty that leadership required was the unscrupulous son of the extremely corrupt pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia. With the help of his father, Cesare, who had received the title of cardinal when he was only eighteen years old, had tried to carve out for himself a powerful principality inside the papal territory of Marche and Romagna, which was full of turbulent men constantly locking horns to prevail over one another. To solve the problem, Cesare sent to the region a strongman, Ramiro dell’Orco, who in a short and very violent amount of time restored order and obedience in the land. Once the dirty job was done, Cesare, to convince people that he was not responsible for the brutality they had experienced, had Ramiro arrested and cut in half. The two parts of the body were then exposed in the public square to the jubilant approval of the population, who applauded Cesare for having saved them from such a horrible monster.
According to Machiavelli’s shrewd yet crude assessment, that kind of quick wit could only command appreciation and respect: to be successful in the political arena, one had to cast aside goodness and empathy and replace them with cold tactics exclusively designed to preserve the safety of the state. The virtue that Machiavelli associated with leadership was a manly and master-like rule that in no way was to be connected with the principles advocated by Christian morality. Yet, in Machiavelli’s view, it was advisable for the prince to simulate good qualities and pretend to respect religion, because nothing could induce men to behave more effectively than the fear of God’s wrathful punishment. Of course, deceit and dissimulation had accompanied the theater of power and politics since the beginning of civilization, but no one before Machiavelli had ever dared to talk about them in such an open way, let alone write a how-to manual on the proper way to lie and deceive in order to gain power. For Machiavelli, politics was an amoral business: the duty of a prince was to guarantee law and order, and if cruelty, dissimulation, and manipulation were needed to do so, it was fine, because the end justifies the means.
Machiavelli’s cynicism shocked his contemporaries, most of all because his political theory refuted the old illusion of a divine cosmos justly ordered and rationally organized. For Machiavelli, the prince alone held the rudder of power in a universe deprived of all providential assistance. The only thing that the prince could count on, Machiavelli argued, was his own strength and his own capacity to withstand the relentless pressure of competing forces—not only those of rival men, but also those unleashed by the blind vagaries of luck and fate (which he called fortuna, Italian for “fortune”).
In considering the theme of fortuna, Machiavelli was probably influenced by the Epicurean view of the Latin poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 94–ca. 55 B.C.), who in his book On the Nature of Things wrote that “chance” controlled destiny rather than some supernatural and divine plan. Humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini and Leon Battista Alberti had also discussed the issue of fortuna, but their melancholic approach was far from Machiavelli’s combative tone— like when he compared fortuna to a woman who had to be tamed with force and violence: “It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to control her, it is necessary to restrain and beat her.”
The fact that the same epoch produced the civic optimism of the early humanists, the religious mysticism of Fra Angelico, the elevation of man to a godlike status by Pico and Ficino, the fanatical excesses of Savonarola, and the pessimism of Machiavelli, with his disenchanted view of man, clearly reveals the complex intellectual tapestry of a period whose many threads cannot be easily disentangled with all their multiple, diverse, and often contrasting expressions.
In contrast with the optimism expressed by Jacob Burckhardt, the historian Eugenio Garin offers an eloquent account of the somber feelings that, besides its brilliance, pervaded the Renaissance, in particular the anxiety that the age expressed when confronted with the disappearance of the old reassuring belief that the universe was a divinely infused and morally ordered cosmos. Garin writes,
There was a way of writing history which pictured this rebirth of the free man as something like a triumphal march of certainties and resounding achievements. But if one peruses the most important testimonies of that age,…one will all the time discover that people, instead of being conscious of a beginning, were dimly aware that something was ending. The ending they sensed, though glorious, was nevertheless an ending. True, there is no lack of reminders that something new was being constructed. And there were assurances that man is indeed capable of carrying out a reconstruction of the world and of himself. But there was also an awareness of the fact that the secure tranquillity of a homely and familiar universe, ordered and adjusted to our needs, was lost forever.
THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE:
GLORY AND AMBIGUITY
As we have seen, the “Babylonian captivity,” which was the name given to the years in which the papal residence was transferred to Avignon (1305–1377), and the Great Schism (1378–1417), which saw different interest groups fight for control of the papacy, had profoundly shaken the reputation of the church, which had already been tarnished by the failure of the Crusades and the disruption produced by movements, such as the ones led by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, that gave voice to the grievances that many people felt toward the excessive wealth and corruption of the Curia.
The year 1417 was an important one for the church because it finally marked the end of the Great Schism and because, with the election of Martin V, the papacy, fully reestablished in Rome, began the work that eventually allowed the city to become, once again, the central fulcrum of Christianity.
During the years in which the papal court had resided in Avignon, the Italian territories belonging to the church had fallen into disarray, being either occupied by strongmen or harassed by brigands and robbers. Martin V (pope from 1417 to 1431) confronted the problem by vigorously dedicating himself to the recovery of the papal state. To accomplish that purpose, Martin used the immense prestige and connection that his aristocratic family, the Colonna, enjoyed as one of the most prestigious powerhouses of central Italy. The disreputable outcome of that policy was the granting of political favors with which the pope compensated family members—a practice known as nepotism (from the Latin nepos, meaning “nephew”).
During his very active years as pope, Martin V also addressed the dangerous state of decay into which the city of Rome had fallen. The task was daunting because of the poor hygienic conditions that the city was suffering especially from the lack of freshwater. (At that point, only one of its original twelve aqueducts was still functioning.) Because the only other source of water was the Tiber, many houses were huddled right next to the dirty river—a major misstep given the frequent inundations that regularly destroyed those poorly built shacks, leaving behind a swampy and polluted mess, filled with rats and mosquitoes that brought disease and death. To raise the large sums of money needed to restore the crumbling urban infrastructure, Martin V proclaimed a jubilee in 1423. The abundant revenues derived from the offerings of the many pilgrims who came to Rome were used to repair the city sewer system and also to employ thugs who got rid of the thieves and bandits who infested the city along with its many other pests. The money was further used to embellish important churches, like San Giovanni in Laterano, with the artwork of famous painters such as Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello.
Like Martin V before him, Eugene IV (pope from 1431 to 1447), had visited Florence, where he had greatly admired the city’s amazing beauty. Because he had been particularly struck by the masterful work that Ghiberti did for the doors of the baptistery, as soon as he became pope, Eugene hired the Florentine sculptor Filarete to cast the bronze doors of the old Basilica of Saint Peter. Filarete’s choice to place Christ, Mary, and the apostles Peter and Paul right next to Greek and Roman mythological figures such as Jupiter, Ganymede, and Leda shows how far the humanistic enthusiasm for pagan themes had reached, even among the highest representatives of the church.
Among other works, Filarete was also famous for conceiving the first urban plan for an ideal Renaissance city. The city, which was never actually built, was named Sforzinda, in honor of Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan. Filarete’s plan fascinated Leonardo, who became enthralled with the idea of creating an ideal city himself. In honor of the sacred principles of geometry celebrated since classical times, Filarete conceived Sforzinda as an eight-point star contained within a perfect circle. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, who in their book Collage City appropriately called Sforzinda “a city of the mind,” wrote that its design compounds “Revelation plus the Republic or the Timaeus, plus a vision of the New Jerusalem.”
The plan for Sforzinda, the ideal Renaissance city
Politically, one of Eugene’s most daring actions was to order the return to the church of the many parcels of land that Martin V had illegally assigned to several of his family members. The reaction of the Colonnas, who like other powerful families were extremely jealous of their privileges, came down on the pope with such a fury that, fearing for his life, Eugene was forced to escape from Rome in a rowboat that went down the Tiber bombarded by the rocks and pebbles thrown at him by his rivals. From Florence, where he took refuge, the pope plotted his revenge. The man he eventually hired to do the job was a famously ruthless buccaneer who compensated his militia with the money he earned in robberies. His name was Giovanni Vitelleschi; he was of all things the bishop of Recanati. Bloody vendettas were as recurrent in Rome as its sunny days. If the Tiber could have been drained, piles of bones would have resurfaced: a sinister reminder of the many thousands of people who had ended their days in those murky waters. The Romans had grown too cynical to be scandalized by those kinds of events: when Vitelleschi, through all sorts of cruel means, was able to restore order in the city, the citizens of Rome voiced the intention of erecting in his honor an equestrian statue in the Campidoglio. Worried that such a great amount of admiration would have fostered the rise of a future antagonist, the pope hired another ruffian, who promptly murdered Vitelleschi.
Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455), who succeeded Eugene IV, was a humanist who believed in the need to reconcile philosophy with religion, pagan literature with Christian writings, and secular artistic themes with religious ones. The question that obsessed him was this: How could Rome assume its role as head of Christianity if its appearance paled when compared with the pinnacles of splendor that other Italian cities, like Florence, Venice, and Milan, could boast? For Nicholas as for the long list of Renaissance popes who, like him, resembled worldly princes more than pastors of souls, the choice ahead was clear: as the seat of the papacy, Rome deserved a grandeur and a beauty that were to be superior to those of any other city in the world.
To collect the funds necessary for that awesome endeavor, the pope proclaimed yet another jubilee in 1450. The enormous proceeds produced by the successful event were immediately employed by Nicholas to fix the walls and gates of Rome, pave its streets, and repair of the Acqua Vergine aqueduct. He hired the Tuscan architect Bernardo Rossellino to improve the Churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, and San Paolo and San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura and asked Leon Battista Alberti to design new palaces, porticoes, and open piazzas. The pope also sponsored the construction of the Palazzo Venezia (familiar to many people because Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, used to harangue crowds from the balcony of that very palace). Among the most famous painters hired by Nicholas V were Andrea del Castagno and Fra Angelico.
Aside from the much-needed restoration of the old Basilica of Saint Peter, the most ambitious project that Nicholas V envisioned (but died before its realization, and for that reason was carried on by later popes) was the creation of the Vatican Palace as a new residence for the popes, who had traditionally resided in San Giovanni in Laterano. With that project in mind, Nicholas had twenty-five hundred cartloads of marble and travertine extracted from the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus. The audacity of the act, which seems strangely at odds with Nicholas’s humanistic sensitivity, was not uncommon. The Renaissance was passionate about collecting Roman antiquities, such as coins and especially statues, but when it came to Roman buildings, especially those that had already suffered the damage of time, careless attitudes were often taken, like quarrying them to provide the material for new constructions. The ancient temple of the Sun, for example, was dismantled to build a chapel in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, while the Sistine Chapel was built from material taken from the mausoleum of Hadrian. The same thing occurred during the construction of Saint Peter’s, which was embellished with marble stripped from different Roman classical palaces. Even the most admired ancient building of all, the Pantheon, eventually received a similar treatment: to produce the cannons of Castel Sant’Angelo and in part also the famous sculpted baldachin designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for the Church of Saint Peter, the Pantheon, in 1625, was completely stripped of the bronze roof that decorated its portico ceiling. Pope Urban VIII, of the Barberini family, who had ordered the removal of the bronze, was harshly criticized by the Romans with this satirical quote: “What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.”*4
The most tragic event that Nicholas V witnessed during his lifetime occurred in 1453, when the Ottoman Turks (Muslims from the Ottoman dynasty), who had repeatedly attempted to attack Byzantium, were finally able to breach the powerful walls that protected the imperial city using the deadly, explosive mix that the Chinese had invented in the ninth century—gunpowder. After plundering the city and reducing to slavery a great part of its population, the Ottoman Turks crowned their victory with the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
With the coming to an end of the Byzantine Empire that had thrived for fifteen hundred years, and with the ever-growing fear of the Muslims that the Christian world was experiencing, raising the power and glory of the capital of Christianity appeared more urgent than ever. For Pope Nicholas V, who was an intellectual and a passionate man of letters, that goal also included the permanent protection of the great past heritage. With that intention, Nicholas V sent his representatives all over Europe to collect as many ancient manuscripts as possible and welcomed to Rome a great number of Greek refugees, who, fleeing Byzantium, had been able to smuggle books out of the vandalized city. The many volumes that, thanks to Nicholas V, were assembled formed the basic core of the Vatican Library collection (a later pope, Sixtus IV, began the building of the actual architectural structure that today houses that collection).
Another influential pope was Pius II (reigned 1458–1464), who came from the noble family of the Piccolomini. He was a strong intellect with an unbound love for the classics but also for the pleasures of this world. Besides fathering many illegitimate children, Pius II produced a tremendous amount of poems, letters, and dialogues. The pompous style he employed in his memoirs, called the Commentarii, reveals his attraction for rhetorical flowering, especially when used to enhance the luster of his own persona. He attributed to himself the appellation of hero and athlete of the church and described his role as that of an agent of order within the chaos of the world. Besides nepotism, which he cultivated with particular devotion, Pius II, like Nicholas V, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the rulers of Italy and Europe to join forces in a crusade against the Turks. A memorable legacy of Pius II was the rebuilding of the small city of Pienza: his Tuscan city of origin that he turned into one of the great jewels of Renaissance art. During Pius II’s tenure, a great amount of alum, needed by the dye industry to fix colors, was discovered at Tolfa in the Papal States. Pius II assured a lucrative business for the church when he forbade Christians to import alum from Turkey.
In 1475, under the leadership of Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484), another jubilee took place in Rome. To commemorate the event, the pope had a bridge built across the Tiber—the first bridge in store to be erected in Rome since imperial Roman times. Sixtus IV was also responsible for opening the first public museum in Europe, known as the Capitoline museum. Among the many works showcased in that temple of art were the enormous head and hand of Constantine (the only fragments that remained of that massive sculpture) and the famous Spinario, a bronze statue of a young boy extracting a thorn from his foot that would inspire legions of Renaissance artists.
At this point in time, the passion for antiquarian artifacts had reached a fever-high intensity. Some humanists, like Giulio Pomponio Leto, who loved to mourn the past by wandering and weeping among the Roman ruins, assembled a huge collection of antiquities in his home and organized an academy where students could gather, talk, and pretend to still be living in the heyday of the Roman Republic. It was within this passionate atmosphere that a major archaeological search for old art masterpieces was launched. Among the main discoveries: the Apollo Belvedere and the statue of Laocoön, which was unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506. When parts of Nero’s Domus Aurea were first located, many thought that they were strangely decorated caves (grotte in Italian). Michelangelo and Raphael repeatedly visited the place, lowering themselves underground with the help of a ladder to study the frescoes. The style called grottesco, or “grotesque,” from grotta, which they admired and copied, was later adopted by many other Renaissance artists.
Besides the Vatican Library, Sixtus’s most ambitious project was the Sistine Chapel that was to be used for major papal functions. Perugino and Pinturicchio, both from Perugia, were the first two painters the pope hired to decorate the chapel. As we have seen, Sixtus IV was the pope who had been involved in the Pazzi conspiracy in Florence. After the break that had followed, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who wanted to resume business with the church, sent as an act of ingratiation some of his best artists to Rome to work for the pope. The paintings in the lower part of the Sistine Chapel bear their names: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli.
Sixtus’s reputation was particularly tarnished by his unrepentant habit of awarding important positions to family members. No one, though, was able to bring that bad habit to the degree of refinement reached by Alexander VI (pope from 1492 to 1503), who tirelessly worked at assuring the preeminence and political prestige of his family members. Alexander’s lack of religious vocation, his immoderate ambition, his taste for pleasure and luxury, and his cynical political astuteness gained him a reputation as one of the most corrupt popes of the Renaissance. He fathered many children, among them Cesare Borgia, who inspired Machiavelli’s Prince, and the beautiful Lucrezia, with whom, apparently, both brother and father had an incestuous relationship. Alexander, whose original name was Rodrigo Borgia, was born in Xàtiva, Spain, in 1431. He was made cardinal at a very young age by his uncle Pope Callixtus III, who had occupied the seat of Saint Peter between Nicholas V and Pius II. To pave his way to the papacy, Rodrigo generously disbursed money and favors to various cardinals. When, through bribes and corruption, he was finally able to realize his dream of becoming pope, Rodrigo chose to adopt the name Alexander in memory of the legendary Macedonian leader, whom he vainly wished to resemble.
Alexander VI was also the pope who gave the honorary title of Reyes Católicos, or “Catholic Regents,” to Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile: the monarchs who after eight hundred years of Muslim occupation had finally been able to retake control of all of Spain by conquering Granada, the last bastion of Islam within the Iberian Peninsula. Of course, the other main achievement of Ferdinand and Isabella was the sponsoring of Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492. Before Columbus’s landing in the New World, the Atlantic Ocean was believed to be an endless body of water that people feared because it was said to engulf all those who dared to cross it. The dictum that during the Middle Ages was connected with Gibraltar was Non plus ultra, which meant “not further than this point.” Dante’s metaphorical description of Ulysses’s adventure beyond the symbolic limit set by the Pillars of Hercules (as Gibraltar was called) was an audacious attempt to acquire knowledge of what, according to God’s command, was to remain forever unknown. Some scholars believe that the name of the Atlantic Ocean may derive from the legendary island of Atlantis, which, as Plato claimed, had been sunk by the gods to punish the excessive hubris of its inhabitants.
Because Alexander VI formally entrusted the lands of the Americas to Ferdinand and Isabella (except Brazil, which was later assigned to Portugal), he was rewarded with shiploads of gold sent back to Spain from America. That precious material was used for the moldings that we can still admire today on the ceiling of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.
It was during the papacy of Alexander VI that Michelangelo Buonarroti first came to Rome. Michelangelo was born in a small town in the Tiber valley in 1475. At a very young age, the family placed the young boy in the care of a nurse who was the daughter and wife of two stonemasons. When he was an old man, Michelangelo wrote to Giorgio Vasari, “Giorgio, if I have anything of genius, it came to me from being born in the keen sharp air of our town Arezzo; just as I drew in with my nurse’s milk the chisels and the hammer that I use to make the figures.” Michelangelo started his artistic career in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, where he learned the art of painting. Very soon, though, he understood that his true passion was for sculpture more than brushes and colors. Ghirlandaio, who was notoriously envious of all those who could be a threat to his artistic reputation, was more than happy to see the talented young boy leave his shop to go to the Medici garden in San Marco, which, besides a place where great art was displayed, was a school of sculpture.
Soon attracting the attention of Lorenzo, who was always on the lookout for new talents, Michelangelo, who at that time was a fifteen-year-old boy, was invited to occupy a room in the Medici palace. During the three years in which he lived in the Medici palace, Michelangelo regularly attended dinners with Lorenzo and his close entourage—a privilege that would have been unthinkable for a sculptor or a painter in medieval times. For the inquisitive young boy, being exposed to the sophisticated discussions of the intellectual caliber of Politian, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola must have been an overwhelming and truly illuminating experience. Things changed when, after Lorenzo’s death, his son Piero was expelled from the city because, as we have seen, he had so poorly handled the aggressive stance of the king of France, Charles VIII, and the fanatic Savonarola rose to power. Fearing the new atmosphere, the young Michelangelo fled Florence and wandered for some time between Bologna and Venice. Among the works that Michelangelo sculpted in those years is the image of a sleeping Cupid represented as a six-year-old child. The statue was so perfect that some friends of the artist suggested to artificially age the sculpture in order to sell it as a real archaeological find. Amused by the thought, Michelangelo agreed: he touched up the statue to make it appear ancient and sent it to Rome to a middleman who was able to sell it to the cardinal Raffaele Riario, a member of one of the most prestigious and well-connected families in Rome. The prank, which was eventually discovered, greatly offended Cardinal Riario, but not enough to prevent the angry (but also smart) art lover from inviting to Rome the extraordinary young artist who had been able to trick even his highly trained eyes. It was during that sojourn in Rome that Michelangelo was introduced to a French cardinal who was looking for a talented artist who would carve his funerary monument. The immortal Pietà, which the twenty-three-year-old Michelangelo executed in only one year, between 1498 and 1499, was the result of that commission.
Michelangelo’s immortal Pietà (ca. 1499)
Dramatically evoking, in a reverse manner, the Nativity scene, where the mother cradles her newly born baby in her arms, the completely lifeless body of Christ lies across His mother’s lap. In contrast with the abundant mantle that envelops Mary, the stark nakedness of Christ appears incredibly vulnerable and frail. It is hard to perceive any sign of salvation in the dead body of that all-too-human son, whom the mother holds with one arm while the other is extended in a gesture that seems to indicate both surprise and bewilderment. Her tearless expression indicates her obedient submission to the will of God, so similar to the stoic acceptance of Abraham when asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. Despite such a stoic attitude, the burden of pain remains intolerable, heightened by the extraordinary youth that Michelangelo attributes to Mary.
In the meantime, in Florence the political winds had turned once again with Savonarola’s being burned at the stake and the republic restored under the guidance of the gonfaloniere, Soderini. To celebrate the moment, the Wool Guild, in 1499, offered Michelangelo a colossal piece of marble, which had been discarded by a previous artist, in order to carve out a statue that would symbolize the freedom of the newly reestablished republic. To embody the love of freedom that the republic represented, Michelangelo, for his seventeen-foot-tall statue, used the image of the biblical David.
Just as with the athlete/hero of classical art, rather than the action moment, what we see is its announcement, as we deduce from the small stone barely visible within the grasp of David’s enormous hand and the intensity of the predatory gaze that guides, with unemotional resolution, that awesome mass of flesh and muscle. The daring choice to portray David in the nude (as Donatello had done before him) is meant to forcefully exalt the dignity of man and the redemption of its concrete, organic, material reality.
Michelangelo’s David, a celebration in marble of man’s inner and outward strengths and beauty
As a perfect consonance between psychological depth and physical strength, Michelangelo’s David embodies the empowering beauty of virtue, reason, and patriotism that Michelangelo and his fellow humanists associated with the establishment of the Florentine Republic. Nothing more was needed to indicate who, between David and Goliath (the latter symbolizing all enemies who threatened the freedom of Florence), was going to turn out to be the true winner at the end of the contest.
The grateful city had the statue placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio as a reminder to all citizens that no tyrant was to be feared because no strength was comparable to the power possessed by those who loved the republic and defended its freedom.
Following the success of the David, Soderini proposed two huge frescoes to be placed in the Hall of Five Hundred inside the Palazzo della Signoria. The other painter Soderini wanted to work alongside Michelangelo was Leonardo da Vinci (the genius who brilliantly contributed to an astounding array of disciplines, such as painting, architecture, music, literature, mathematics, anatomy, and astronomy). The idea was not too pleasing to Michelangelo, who resented Leonardo for having declared that painting was superior to sculpture. Fortunately for Michelangelo, he never had to confront Leonardo because he was suddenly summoned to Rome by the new pope, Julius II.
Julius II (reigned 1503–1513), who was close to sixty years old when he became pope, had been made cardinal at twenty-seven by his uncle Sixtus IV. Driven by an intense hate for his predecessor, Alexander VI, Julius II threatened to excommunicate all those who dared to remember or mention the Borgia pontiff. Like his uncle Sixtus IV, Julius II belonged to the Franciscan order established by the humble saint of Assisi. Being a Franciscan did not seem to mean much to Julius II, who resorted to plenty of corruption and manipulation to buy his election as pope. When asked what name he wanted to be called as pontiff, he chose a historical figure big enough to match his very inflated sense of self: Julius, as in Julius Caesar.
The name was fitting because, like Caesar, Julius II was an extremely ambitious and bellicose man. Like most Renaissance princes, he weaved his strategies with masterful and cynical ability, being deceitful even when he appeared conciliatory. He was called the papa guerriero (warrior-pope) because he personally led his troops to battle against the usurpers who, taking advantage of the absence of the church during the exile in Avignon, had taken control of the papal territories of Umbria and Romagna. The victory over Bologna and Perugia gave the pope’s reputation a legendary status.*5
To make sure that his memory would live forever, one of the first things that Julius II did when he became pope was to plan his funerary monument. Michelangelo, who by now was recognized as the greatest sculptor of his age, was summoned by the pope to realize the project, which, in his intention, was to rival the mausoleums of emperors as famous as Augustus and Hadrian. To match the grandiose ambition of the pope, Michelangelo suggested a huge monument decorated with forty statues: some personifying the pope’s territorial conquests, others the liberal arts in celebration of his humanistic contribution to culture. The symbolic association with Moses, whose image was to be placed on top of the monument, was meant to suggest that Julius II possessed qualities unmatched by all other previous leaders of the church.
Upon receiving the pope’s approval for the project, Michelangelo went to Carrara, where he remained for several months to supervise the quarrying of the enormous quantity of marble that was to be shipped to Rome on big cargo boats. Initially, the pope had decided that his funerary monument was to be placed in the Roman Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. But while Michelangelo was in Carrara, the pope changed his mind and decided that the right location for the monument was the actual Basilica of Saint Peter. When he was told that in order to fit the gigantic work that Michelangelo was going to execute, the roof of the old basilica had to be raised, the pope decided that it was better to demolish the church altogether and build in its place a bigger and more lavish one.
Many people considered the idea outrageously disrespectful. The Basilica of Saint Peter, which had been built by Constantine, had witnessed many centuries of church history: Charlemagne had been crowned inside those walls, and the bones of many popes had been put to rest next to that sacred edifice. But as everybody knew, trying to dissuade Julius, who was known for his violent fits of anger, was a lost cause. Better to suffer the destruction of the old church than the fury of the papa terribile (the terrible pope), as he was known. To take on that massive endeavor, the pope selected the architect Donato Bramante (1444–1514). When Michelangelo, upset by the news, returned to Rome and tried to see the pope to discuss his work and his retribution, the pope failed to grant him a meeting. Offended, Michelangelo promptly left for Florence with the intention of never returning to Rome to work for the pope.
It took a very long time for the pope to get Michelangelo to reverse his decision. When he finally agreed, Michelangelo was again disappointed: the reason the pope wanted him back in Rome, he soon discovered, was to work not on the tomb but on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was convinced that the jealous Bramante had plotted the change of plan: knowing that painting was not the medium Michelangelo was most comfortable with, Bramante had influenced the pope’s decision with the hope of seeing his rival fail. Michelangelo’s suspicion was probably unfounded: Julius II knew exactly what he was doing, and most likely no one, not even Bramante, had influenced his decision.
As we have seen earlier, patrons were accustomed to establishing the subject matter that artists had to execute. That was true also in the case of the Sistine frescoes, which as the pope told Michelangelo were to represent the twelve apostles and some geometrical designs in between. When Michelangelo protested, saying that the design was too simple, the pope, instead of getting angry, gave permission to Michelangelo to do whatever he preferred. That, at least, is what Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century biographer Ascanio Condivi claimed. Some scholars believe Condivi’s version of the facts; others reject them as false. It is unlikely, the second group says, that the pope would have left such a big responsibility in the sole hands of the artist without any guidance on his part or that of some theological expert. Those who believe Condivi’s words disagree: Julius II was a very impulsive man who was used to following what his immediate instinct suggested without regrets and second-guessing. For example, when he decided that Raphael was to decorate the Stanza della Segnatura, he did not show the slightest hint of hesitation in ordering the destruction of the works that previously decorated the walls, even if they belonged to painters as talented as Piero della Francesca, Signorelli, and Perugino. That said, this group of scholars continue, it is also the absolute originality of the frescoes that Michelangelo eventually did that seems to prove that the artist was allowed to conceive the program alone and was not obliged to submit his ideas to some pedantic expert who, for certain, would never have allowed such a swirl of naked bodies to occupy the sacred chapel.
We will never know for sure what really happened. However, what we can be completely sure about is this: if Julius II appeared so willing to postpone the building of his funerary monument, it was not because he had suddenly acquired a humble disposition but because he had come to realize that the Sistine Chapel had the potential of becoming a much greater tribute to his legacy and memory.
Because discussing the symbolic meaning of the 343 figures that Michelangelo depicted in the chapel would be inexhaustible, I will linger on just a few intriguing examples, like the replacement, on the lower perimeter of the vault, of the twelve apostles initially proposed by the pope with seven prophets and five mythological sibyls of pagan times. What united the prophets and the sibyls was the gift of prophecy, a gift that was meant to be an anticipatory allusion to the advent of the Messiah.
One of Michelangelo’s prophetic sibyls in the Sistine Chapel
Some scholars believed that next to that most obvious interpretation a second intriguing suggestion is possible: that what the prophets and sibyls might have hinted at was also the birth of the new Rome, seen as a triumphal confluence of paganism and Christianity, made possible by the advent of another messianic figure—Julius II. Attributing to a mere human being, even a pope, such an inflated status may seem for us an unthinkable proposition, especially for a place of prayer. What we should not forget is that our contemporary view has been shaped by many centuries of tradition that, among many other things, include the long age of atonement that, after the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation represented. But in the dangerously secularized version of religion that the times we are considering experienced, such exorbitant claims might not have appeared as unscrupulous and offensive, especially if coming from a pontiff who, acting like an emperor, used religion in the same calculating and politically advantageous manner that Caesar and later Augustus had done when they had assumed the title of pontifex maximus. For a pope, insatiably craving power and a long-lasting legacy, implying that God had selected in him a Moses-like avatar assigned to the messianic duty of spreading Christianity throughout the world—a world that with the newly discovered lands of America had become so much vaster—would have appeared as an opportunity much too great to miss and ignore.
The thrones on which the prophets and sibyls are seated are divided by painted columns on top of which are depicted a series of naked figures (called ignudi, from nudi, meaning “naked” in Italian). What role those muscular naked bodies represented has remained a mystery. Perhaps they were intended as a tribute to pagan art whose many masterpieces had recently been unearthed, for example, the statue of the Laocoön, which they so closely resemble. The garlands with big acorns on the heads of some of these ignudi were most likely allusions to Julius II, who belonged to the family Della Rovere, meaning “oak tree” in Italian. In time, the scandal that the depiction of ignudi provoked, especially during the years of the Counter-Reformation, led Pope Paul IV to order the painter Daniele da Volterra to cover those sacrilegious sights with a veil. The task earned Daniele da Volterra the nickname il braghettone, meaning “the pantaloon maker.”
The most famous scenes of the Sistine Chapel frescoes cycle are placed in the central rectangular space, where Michelangelo depicts several scenes derived from Genesis, such as God’s division of light from darkness, the creation of the sun and the moon, and the division of the waters from the land, as well as the creation, temptation, and fall of the first two humans. Of all of the images, of course, the most striking is the moment in which Adam, newly created, is endowed with the miraculous spark of life by God, Who touches with His index finger the extended hand of His languidly reclined creature. The absence of any biblical reference to such a touch makes certain the fact that Michelangelo was the sole author of that highly moving and poetic gesture.
Nothing is more beautiful than this extraordinary image. But having examined medieval art, the way we have done in this book, it is easy to see how greatly Michelangelo dared to distance himself from the traditional tenets of theology. As we have repeatedly said, other than through a hand appearing from the sky or via the Christ, providing a visual representation of God had been categorically forbidden throughout the Middle Ages. The first clear transgression of that rule appears in Masaccio’s Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, where perspective is used to push to further and further levels of depth and meaning the message of the Passion: from the level of reality that the donors occupy by being placed in the foreground, to the further vision contained within the arched niche where Mary and Saint John are seen standing next to the crucified Christ. At even greater depth, farther removed from the viewer, we see the figure of God the Father, featured as an old man, placed behind the cross.
God bestowing the spark of life on Adam—one of the most extraordinary (and revolutionary) images in Western art
Masaccio’s Holy Trinity (ca. 1427–1428) in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, one of the first real transgressions of the stricture against representing God the Father
Masaccio’s skillful adaptation of the modern technique of perspective to symbolically indicate the layers of meaning contained in the mystical vision must have greatly impressed some people but also scandalized many others, like the theologically conservative Savonarola, who must have felt that Masaccio had committed a deplorable transgression by attributing human features to the nonquantifiable and non-circumscribable mystery of God. The other artist who dared to give human features to God the Father was Jacopo della Quercia. The image is found in the scene representing the creation of Adam, which is part of a series of reliefs that Jacopo della Quercia did for the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Yet, when compared with the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, both examples pale. In Michelangelo’s representation, God is an old man with a massive and semi-naked body barely covered by a short tunic Who appears surrounded by a group of angels on whom He almost seems to rely to remain airborne. The image was so alien to the people of his time that when Paolo Giovio, the bishop of Nocera, saw Michelangelo’s frescoes in 1520, he was unable to recognize the “old man in the middle of the ceiling, who is represented in the act of flying through the air.”
The abundant cloak that covers the body of God in other scenes does not do much to improve the theological correctness of the images. On the contrary: in the scene that depicts the creation of the firmament, the human-like description of God is so incredibly tangible, organic, and anatomically detailed that when it is seen from behind, we can even recognize the shape of God’s buttock!
As we know, according to tradition, when scenes from Genesis were depicted, God was to be given the features of Christ, Who in turn perfectly mirrored the beauty that Adam possessed before the Fall. The solution was important because it avoided the representation of God the Father, Who was to remain a mystery to man, while stressing man’s duty to imitate the lesson of Christ the Son. The essence of that lesson was not that man could become like God but that his life was a journey—a striving forward toward a greater and greater form of perfection, which nonetheless was never to find full realization here on earth.
God, viewed from behind, in the Sistine Chapel
Even though Michelangelo’s frescoes make reference to the sin of Adam and Eve (with the tempting snake bearing a feminine face as a symbol of the sinful sensuality traditionally attributed to women), the central importance granted to Adam, seen as a beautiful and young-looking man, in contrast to an aged God, is amazing and puzzling at the same time. The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, where, as we have seen, the dignity and freedom of man are celebrated by these words attributed to God: “Thine own free will shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature.” The historian Arthur Herman, in his book The Cave and the Light, says that the most striking suggestion implicit in Pico’s words is that man was granted the permission to become whatever he wanted to be, with no divinely imposed limits to his knowledge and will: “To [man] is granted the power to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.”
Pico’s extraordinary endorsement of the limitless potential of human life is reproposed in Michelangelo’s work, where God and man appear to be placed on an equal plane of importance. Yes, God is suspended in space as if flying, while man’s body is sustained by the ground on which he is reclining, but, apart from that unequal dimension, everything else about the figures—youth, beauty, vigor—seems to exalt man almost more than God. The choice, besides Pico’s Oration, brings to mind Hesiod’s Theogony, where each new generation of gods eventually comes to take possession of the powers and privileges previously held by their divine parents. If we accept such a proposition, Michelangelo’s Adam can almost be compared to a Prometheus-like figure, proudly conscious of his titanic creative capacity to master, in a way that increasingly appears godlike, the forces of nature and life.
In attributing to God human features, man implied that his intelligence could contain God and encompass Him within his own dimension. The limits of human nature were gone. The Renaissance’s greatest transgression was the invention of a God made in the image and likeness of man.
In the same years in which Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, another amazing artist was working for Julius II, Raphael Sanzio. Raphael, who was eight years younger than Michelangelo, was born in Urbino in the Marche region in 1483. Under the rule of Federico II of Montefeltro, the court of Urbino had become a sophisticated center of culture and art. It is not a coincidence that Castiglione chose that refined court as the stage for his famous book, Il cortigiano, or The Book of the Courtier (written in 1514 and published in 1528). At the court of Federico, the young Raphael was introduced to the work of Italian and Flemish artists such as Paolo Uccello, Luca Signorelli, Piero della Francesca, Hieronymus Bosch, and Joos van Gent. The time he spent as an apprentice in the workshop of Pietro Perugino gave Raphael’s brush the graceful elegance he never lost throughout his stellar career, which was cut short by an early death when he was only thirty-seven years old. The other important painter who had a formative influence on Raphael’s style and technique was Leonardo, whom he met during a sojourn in Florence. (By that time, Leonardo had already painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper in 1495–1497.)
In 1508, the same year in which he summoned Michelangelo to Rome, Julius II, maybe following the recommendation of Bramante, who was also originally from Urbino, invited the young Raphael to Rome to paint a series of rooms in the Vatican that were part of his apartment. It is believed that Julius’s project was prompted by the desire to outshine Alexander VI, a man he detested, whose apartments were right below his. Because the task he was assigned was enormous, Raphael had to hire several assistants who contributed to the completion of the work.
Raphael started the work in 1509. The first room he painted was the Stanza della Segnatura, which was to house the pope’s library and was intended for the official signing of documents. The subject matter of the frescoes, which contain the essence of humanism with its cocktail of pagan and Christian themes, is devoted to the beauty of poetry, the wisdom of philosophy, and the truth of theology. The first two walls that Raphael painted were Disputation over the Most Holy Sacrament and the School of Athens. In the first fresco, which focuses on the Eucharistic transformation of the body and blood of Christ, God the Father appears above His son, Who is seated on a throne surrounded by Mary and John the Baptist. In the crowd that surrounds them we recognize biblical characters like Abraham, David, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul, as well as theologians and saints such as Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, Saint Stephen, Saint Lawrence, and even Savonarola (possibly intended as an insult to Alexander VI, who dealt with the rebellious monk) and Dante. The fact that Dante is given a place of honor among so many saintly figures seems to sanction the poet’s journey in the afterworld as theologically acceptable.
After that first representation, Raphael turned his attention to the School of Athens. The vast open space surmounted by a massive, Roman-like vault is the setting that Raphael used to present an imaginary gathering of philosophers—Pythagoras, Socrates, Diogenes, Heraclitus, and many others. The depth of the scene that the skillful use of perspective enhances well complements the intellectual depth that those pensive figures convey. At the very center of that crowded scene are the two leading figures among all philosophers: Plato and Aristotle. Plato, who holds the Timaeus, points upward, while Aristotle, who hold his Nicomachean Ethics, points downward. The proximity of the two philosophers and the equal importance that they are given illustrate the unity of knowledge that the Renaissance had finally achieved.
On the third wall, Raphael placed the representation of Mount Parnassus with Apollo and the Muses and around them a gathering of famous poets such as Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and, again, Dante. The representation of the cardinal virtues on the fourth wall completes the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE SACK OF ROME
When Julius II died in 1513, Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel had just been unveiled. But according to the pope’s plan for the Vatican a lot more was still to be done. For that reason, in the last days of his life, Julius issued a pronouncement that assured indulgence to all those who would have contributed money to the completion of the work that the Curia had planned. After his death, his successor, who was the Florentine son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, became pope with the name of Leo X (reigned 1513–1521). Like many wealthy and privileged people, Leo began a career in the church at a very young age. He became a priest when he was eight years old, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino at eleven, and cardinal at thirteen. When he became pope, after years of never allowing faith and humility to distract him from his pursuit of power and glamour, he cheered, “Let us enjoy the Papacy, since God has given it to us.” True to his word, he made entertainment and gaiety the trademark of his papacy. Some among his most deplorable predecessors had already made Rome famous for the depravity that took place during festivals, which often included the spectacle of public executions. Among the most cherished traditions were the festivities that took place during Carnival, when bulls were let loose in the streets of Rome so that men on horses could chase and kill them with their lances. Another popular amusement was a race where Jews, dressed in silly costumes, were forced to run down the street while people mocked them and insulted them and soldiers terrorized them with their spears. During Leo’s tenure, bullfights were organized in the Belvedere Courtyard, built by Bramante, in the Vatican Palace, while big hunting expeditions often took place in the Roman countryside.
Leo, who was fond of collecting exotic animals, such as monkeys, parrots, and lions, was surprised by the king of Portugal with the gift of an elephant named Hanno. When he arrived at the Vatican, the elephant, who was wearing two pairs of red shoes similar to the ones worn by the popes, knelt two times in front of Leo. The relation between the papacy and Portugal had become extremely cordial since Pope Nicholas V had issued a bull that allowed the colonial expansion of Portugal and also validated its profitable trade of slaves with these words: “We grant you…full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and the pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ…to reduce their persons in perpetual slavery.” Similar privileges had been granted, in earlier times, to Spain by Alexander VI.
Because he was in need of revenues, Leo X promoted once again the selling of indulgences, a payment that was said to shorten the amount of time a sinner had to spend in purgatory. The decision sparked the anger of Martin Luther (1438–1546), a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, who, disgusted with the corruption of the church, nailed ninety-five theses against the indulgences on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Saxony. The essence of Luther’s message was that faith alone—sola fide—could affect salvation and that the teachings of the Bible could be received without the intermediary intervention of the clerics and the popes. With that claim, the assumption that the church, as the custodian of revelation, had the right to control the life of people through confession, penance, and the performance of rituals and sacraments (of the seven sacraments, Luther accepted only Baptism and the Eucharist) was suddenly pushed aside, leaving the individual free to confront, alone, the truth expressed by the Scriptures. The change should not be interpreted as an empowerment of man. For the German preacher, in fact, man remained a very wicked and insufficient creature who could find salvation only by totally submitting and annulling himself in the cultivation of faith, which was a direct gift from God.*6
To confute Luther’s proposition, the pope issued a bull that condemned his teaching and ordered him to recant his theses. When Luther refused, the pope excommunicated him. Probably not even Luther anticipated the earth-shattering effects that his action eventually produced, especially among the poor, who had come to deeply resent the venality of the church and the callous indifference that the institution, which was supposed to embody the charitable spirit of Christianity, reserved toward those who suffered. With the printing press, which, as we have seen, was introduced in the middle of the fifteenth century, becoming available, Lutheran principles spread with the speed of fire throughout Europe.
Luther’s position proved particularly successful in Germany, which was still a mosaic of independent principalities that, lacking a centralized form of government, could not as effectively contain, as in France or in England, the power of the church and the excessive taxes that the Curia imposed on the Christian flock. The best description of the greediness that for so long had characterized the church was uttered by an English king who said that the successors of the apostles “were commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to pasture, not to fleece them.”
Once it appeared clear that the widespread discontent could not be appeased, a diet, or congress, was organized in Speyer in 1526, where it was established that each German principality could decide if it wanted to be Catholic or Protestant. Three years later, the emperor Charles V of the Habsburg family, who through a complicated series of dynastic successions and marriages had simultaneously become the ruler of Flanders, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, as well as Spain (with its colonial territories of Mexico and Peru), all of southern Italy, and Burgundy and Artois in France, revoked the agreement reached in the Diet of Speyer probably because he feared that the fast spread of Lutheranism would have weakened even further the already tenuous power he held on the German territories. But it was too late. When he realized that he could not contain any longer the ever-growing movement, the emperor was compelled to sign the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which confirmed, once again, the edict of the Diet of Speyer.
Italy had enjoyed a relative peace almost until the end of the fifteenth century. But the frail condition of the politically fragmented peninsula soon became an irresistible temptation for many foreign powers. As we have seen, the French king Charles VIII first entered Italy in 1494 with the purpose of heading south to recover the kingdom of Naples that had been snatched away from the French house of Anjou by the Spanish house of Aragon. Charles VIII was forced to retreat when confronted by the Holy League formed by the alliance of powers that feared the expansionist intentions of the French king. The powers that joined the Holy League were Austria, Spain, England, Milan, Venice, and the papacy led by Alexander VI.
A few years later, when the French reentered Italy and occupied Milan, Pope Julius II formed a new Holy League (1511) with Venice, Austria, Spain, and England. The coalition was able once again to push the French out of Italy. But it did not last. By 1515, the French, led by Francis I, again took hold of Milan. To curb the growing ambition of the rival country, Charles V, the Habsburg ruler, intervened against France. After a brief period of time in which Milan was tossed back and forth between the two powers, Charles V was able to capture and imprison the French king, Francis I. (Besides that shameful humiliation, Francis I is known for introducing the spirit of the Renaissance in France by sponsoring a great amount of art and also by inviting Leonardo and Benvenuto Cellini to live and work at his court.)
Only when he promised to give up his claim on Milan was the French king granted freedom. In a typical Renaissance manner, Francis I broke the promise and went on to form an alliance with several Italian states and Pope Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534), who was the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s younger brother, who had been killed in the Pazzi conspiracy.
Clement’s decision to change sides and align himself with France was probably dictated by the fear of the much greater threat that Charles V posed. The move proved disastrous for the pope, whose decision was punished with the sack of Rome in 1527. It was enacted by a German division of mercenary soldiers whom the emperor Charles V failed to pay for lack of funds. As a consequence, the Landsknechts, who as followers of Luther hated the papacy, diverted their course toward Rome with the intention of looting it with no opposition on the part of the emperor. When they reached Rome, the Landsknechts pillaged the city of its treasures and also gave free rein to the anger they felt toward those who had abused their role as pastors of the Christian flock. Churches were desecrated, reliquaries smashed, nuns raped, and thousands of people killed.
Clement VII was praying in the beautiful chapel that Fra Angelico, commissioned by Pope Nicholas V, had painted when the rebellious German troops made their way into the Vatican. The pope escaped using a corridor that connected the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo, which had been turned into a papal fortress by Alexander VI. Some mercenaries, who recognized him by the white toga he was wearing, tried to kill him, but Clement was able to escape.
THE LAST JUDGMENT
After the disastrous sack of 1527, Clement VII’s successor, Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–1549), of the prestigious Farnese family, became convinced that a reform was necessary for the survival of the church, and for this purpose he established the Council of Trent that in 1545 initiated the Counter-Reformation. Paul III was also the pope who instituted the morally and intellectually rigorous order of the Jesuits (to which belongs the current pope Francis) and reorganized the Inquisition to persecute heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft. When the king of England, Henry VIII, asked him to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, the pope refused. After Henry VIII declared the independence of the Church of England from Rome with the Act of Supremacy of 1534, Paul III excommunicated him. The inflexible severity that characterized the pope’s career did not translate in his private life: indifferent to the vow of chastity that all priests were supposed to maintain, he had a mistress and five children. His questionable morality is also illustrated by the authorization, issued in 1548, in which he allowed ownership of Muslim slaves within the Papal States. Paul III was also responsible for calling Michelangelo back to Rome to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
When the first Medici, Leo X, had become head of the church, he had sent Michelangelo back to Florence to complete the facade of the family church of San Lorenzo. After three years of planning, the project was suspended for reasons that remain unclear. The bare appearance of the Church of San Lorenzo that to this day lacks a facade is an odd sight in a city so resplendent with marble and stones of all colors. The adjacent Medici Chapel, which was conceived as a mausoleum for the family, was designed by Michelangelo, who also decorated the interior with the magnificent reclining figures that appear on the sarcophagi that represent Evening, Dawn, Night, and Day.
When he called Michelangelo back to Rome, Paul III had in mind a variety of assignments that would employ all of the artist’s talents as architect, sculptor, and painter. Besides the design for the cupola of Saint Peter’s, the most memorable legacy that this last phase of Michelangelo’s boundless artistic creativity produced is the scene of the Last Judgment that he painted, between 1536 and 1541, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel—a fresco that the pope, still shaken by the events that had taken place in 1527, intended as a warning against all transgressors of the Christian teaching.
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (ca. 1536–1541), a fresco that covers the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel and that from the start aroused criticism and controversy
Two of Michelangelo’s magnificent figures outside the Medici Chapel of the Church of San Lorenzo
The Last Judgment is characterized by a dark and thunderous quality conveying the terror of an apocalyptic storm (see this page). The focal point of the scene is occupied by the figure of a mighty judging Christ, Whose almost naked body bears a great resemblance to the classical sculpture of the Apollo Belvedere kept in the Vatican. By raising His hand in a powerful gesture of command, Christ divides the blessed from the damned by assigning to each soul the place it will occupy for eternity in paradise or hell. The whirlwind of figures that surround the severe Pantocrator, or “Almighty,” is composed of saints and trumpeting angels awakening the dead, as well as a crowd of martyrs, each carrying the instrument with which he or she was tortured and killed. At the right and left corners, on the very top of the scene, holy figures present the instruments of Christ’s Passion, the cross and the pillar. The intensity of Dies irae, or “God’s wrath,” is fully felt on the left of Christ, where the damned souls are dragged down to hell by horrible demons serving the king of darkness, Lucifer. Charon with his boat carrying the damned souls across the infernal river is a direct quotation of the same scene from Dante’s Inferno that greatly inspired Michelangelo. When the frescoes were restored a few years ago, two wings along the side of Charon’s boat came into focus. For Michelangelo, who was an assiduous reader of the Divine Comedy, the detail was probably a reference to Dante’s Ulysses, whose winged boat (in Inferno 27.125, Dante’s Ulysses compares the oars of the boat to wings and calls his journey a “mad flight”) sank for having transgressed the limit imposed on human knowledge by God. Within the spirit of moral reform that now animated the times, the choice was very likely a way to cast judgment on the Renaissance—a time that, by encouraging all sorts of adventures in pursuit of knowledge, had ended up, just like Dante’s Ulysses, going well beyond the limit that the Christian God had imposed on mankind.
The detail was probably also used to express the sense of guilt that the sixty-five-year-old Michelangelo felt toward some aspects of his own artistic journey. The sharp contrast between the theological consistency of The Last Judgment and the daring representation of God next to the Prometheus-like exaltation of man, to which more than a quarter of a century earlier Michelangelo, in that very same chapel, had given shape and form, speaks for itself.
What confirms that suspicion can be found in the upper section of the fresco, where Michelangelo depicts Saint Bartholomew, the martyr who was flayed alive, holding his own skin in his hand. In the folds of that skin, Michelangelo chose to place his own features. The echo of the Divine Comedy can be heard once again. As we have seen, at the opening of Paradiso, Dante places an invocation to Apollo, the god of poetry whom the poet symbolically uses as a representation of Christ. Asking Apollo to inspire his words was meant to suggest that the Christian poet would never have dared to describe paradise if his words were not directly inspired by the divine. The clever solution was used by Dante to declare that he was simply an instrument of the superior, divine power that had selected in him its messenger and prophet. Affirming otherwise, by implying that the sole power of his human words would have been sufficient to describe the kingdom of God, would have been, for the Christian author, deserving of the same punishment that Apollo inflicted on the satyr Marsyas when the latter dared to compete with the god and for that reason was punished by being flayed alive.
Detail in The Last Judgment of Saint Bartholomew holding his own skin—which has Michelangelo’s own features—in his hand
The harsh judgment that Michelangelo appears to reserve for himself reflects the profound spiritual crisis that the artist was undergoing, which was probably also influenced by his close friendship with the very religious noblewoman Vittoria Colonna. His personal sense of guilt might also have been affected by the attraction he felt for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman with whom he became infatuated.
Although homosexuality, especially in Florence, was widespread (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Donatello, and Leonardo, to mention just a few, were all homosexuals), the church condemned relations between members of the same sex as a very serious infringement. Many people without a prestigious name and social position (such as the one held by Michelangelo and the artists and intellectuals mentioned above) ended up burned at the stake for that very same violation. Michelangelo, who was a highly intelligent and sensitive man, must have been keenly aware of that discrepancy: the characteristic that he witnessed most often in his lifetime was hypocrisy—especially among church members and representatives. Michelangelo’s anticlerical feelings clearly emerge in some major choices he made, like placing the darkest point of hell right above the door where the priest entered the chapel to perform the Mass, or applying the features of Biagio da Cesena, the Curia’s master of ceremonies, to Minos, the monstrous guardian of hell.
The pessimistic view that Michelangelo especially in the last part of his life acquired appears to combine aspects of both Savonarola and Machiavelli. As the unity of the church was forever split by Luther’s Reformation and as the dream of the republic was forever lost with the rise of despotic governments in all major Italian cities (Florence included), a growing sense of uncertainty about the greatness of human nature seemed to take hold of Michelangelo. The Renaissance had been called a rebirth, but the feeling we get when we look at Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is that at the end of that dazzling era something deep in the mind and heart of man had shriveled and died away in a fast-expanding cloud of hopelessness and disenchantment. Faith remained, but it was a dark trust in a wrathful God with little space left for hope and charity.
In the scene of the Last Judgment, the representation of the blessed is indicative in this sense. According to Christian iconography, all those destined for paradise were imagined as souls finally freed from the heavy consistency of the body. In the frescoes that Luca Signorelli did in the Chapel Brizio at the Orvieto Cathedral, which were very familiar to Michelangelo, the point is clearly stressed: materiality fades as the blessed rise toward the spiritual purity of God’s realm.
Nothing similar can be found in Michelangelo: ascending to paradise seems hard even for the blessed, oppressed as they are by the presence of their bulky and heavy bodies. For that reason, instead of easily rising up, they labor as if ascending with great difficulty a harsh and non-welcoming mountain. In one instance, a figure is seen pulling another one up using a rosary as a cord. Salvation, Michelangelo, seems to say, is a distant dream for a creature like man, burdened by so many ambiguities, flaws, and contradictions.
Even Mary, the loving Mother always so willing to intercede in favor of man, looks overwhelmed by the wrath of her Son. Instead of the supplicant position that she is traditionally given, she recoils in a gesture that seems to express, at the same time, horror, sorrow, and resignation.
Signorelli’s fresco of the blessed destined for paradise in the Chapel Brizio at the Orvieto Cathedral
In contrast with Signorelli, Michelangelo’s blessed ascend to heaven with great labor. Credit 12
Mary almost recoiling in revulsion from the wrath of her Son
The celebration of man, seen as the heroic maker of his own destiny, fades away with the waning of the Renaissance, leaving behind an overwhelming sense of sadness with only one gift left in the Pandora’s box of the age: doubt.
CONCLUSION
The Renaissance, which was sparked by the rediscovery of the brilliant heritage of the past, greatly revamped the confidence in man and in his capacity to be a free and self-determined agent of his own existence. Faith remained central but within a world where urbanization, secularization, and the broadening of the cultural horizon favored an attitude that, rather than dogmatic, was now increasingly open, unprejudiced, and inclusive. Even if unsystematic, this new critical disposition allowed a vast circulation of all sorts of new ideas aimed at discerning, as Eugenio Garin writes, the “hidden correspondences” and “occult sympathies” that pervaded the universe. The difference with the preceding era, Garin continues, is that while the Middle Ages had been extremely fearful of “the notion that man might use nature as an instrument,” what now prevailed was a self-confident disposition that, instead of the self-erasing humbleness of earlier times, welcomed and even urged the active manipulation of reality for the sake of man’s benefit and advantage. The fervid interest in magic, astrology, and alchemy (a proto-science aimed at the transformation of lead into gold) well represents the lively spirit of the epoch and the unbridled faith it associated with all the possibilities that man’s genius and creativity were capable of conceiving. The underlying idea, as Pico della Mirandola articulated, was that man, being the central protagonist of creation, possessed the absolute freedom to be whatever he wanted to be and also transform, as he wished, himself and the world. Art perfectly mirrored that belief. In fact, besides the great improvement in technical abilities, what characterizes Renaissance art is an increased pleasure in portraying reality: the beauty of the human body (studies in anatomy greatly helped to achieve that purpose) and the beauty of a world domesticated by the wit and talent of man. For that reason, rather than wild landscapes, what abounds in Renaissance art is the image of a perfectly ordered and manicured nature whose solar splendor is used as background to the elegant silhouette of geometrically harmonious cities.
As we have seen, toward the end of the sixteenth century that optimism was shaken by a series of disruptive events that, from politics to religion, tarnished the youthful zest that had animated the early part of the Renaissance. The feelings of disappointment and disenchantment that ensued prompted the problematic argumentations that have challenged, ever since, the modern mind: Why are humans bound to coexist with the persistent reappearance of instability, uncertainty, and contradiction? Why is chaos always interfering with the orderly cosmos created by our dreams and ideals? Why is the human journey bound to remain an unending quest rather than a final conquest of an everlasting truth?
The knowledge that followed did not help much in providing reassuring answers to those questions. On the contrary, the more knowledge advanced, the more man realized how secondary and small he was within the scheme of the universe. The greatest blow to the central position that the Renaissance had attributed to man came from the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who affirmed that the sun, not the earth, as Ptolemy had believed, was the center of the solar system. Probably because he realized how controversial his claim would have been, Copernicus, who apparently formulated his theory when he was forty, failed to reveal it for thirty years. When it was finally printed, shortly before his death, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolution of the heavenly spheres) found an immediate opponent in Luther, who condemned the work as sacrilegious. The church, which did not immediately react to Copernicus’s theory, eventually did so when it accused Galileo Galilei (1546–1642), who was a supporter of the heliocentric theory, of heresy and forced him to recant.
The attempt to silence the voices that dissented from the dogma found its greatest victim in Giordano Bruno (1571–1600), the philosopher and mathematician who, pushing his conclusion even further than Copernicus, claimed that the universe was not a finite and perfectly hierarchically organized system, as Christian tradition had always claimed, but an infinity with no specific center that extended beyond all dimensions of space and time. No theory had ever reduced to such an extent the relevance of man within the scheme of creation. Because the vastness of such infinity proved irreconcilable with the Scriptures, the Inquisition accused Bruno of heresy. Bruno, writes Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve, defended his position by saying “that the Bible was a better guide to morality than charting the heavens.” The defiance of the philosopher did not go well with the church, which condemned Bruno to death. He was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
But the church’s attempt to contain change proved useless, as shown by scientists like Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and, later on, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whose work provided a clearer understanding of the universe and the solar system. Christianity had consistently maintained that the heavenly bodies, led by angelic spirits, followed a circular motion because the circle, in its geometrical perfection, revealed the essence of God, whose love, as Dante had poetically written, moved “the sun and the other stars.” Kepler’s discovery that the motion of the planets was elliptical, not circular, directly challenged the dogma, as did Newton’s discovery that gravity was the all-pervading force of the universe and that it was that pull that determined the orbital trajectory of the planets. Although Kepler’s and Newton’s views did not conform with the orthodoxy, the two men were in no way atheists. At that moment in time, religion was still too deeply ingrained in people’s minds for that to happen. That said, it cannot be denied that a significant mental shift was in the making, especially in regard to science, which was becoming significantly more rigorous and, as such, more assertive in establishing its autonomy from any external authority. The claim was that science’s field of investigation had to do with natural phenomena that could be verified, not supernatural truths that were essentially unverifiable. The cultivation of a stricter empirical approach, which began to take hold, led to the scientific revolution heralded at the closing of the Renaissance by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and René Descartes (1596–1650), who is called the father of modern philosophy.
But the Renaissance also spawned a persistent undercurrent of skepticism prompted by the suspicion that the spirit of innovation that the era so proudly celebrated had failed to replace the old with an improved and more reliable new. Among the many critical voices, that of the English lawyer and social-philosopher Thomas More (1478–1535), who assigned to his Utopia (meaning “no place” in Greek) his dream of a perfect society, and the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), who, in his Praise of Folly, ironically uses the personification Folly to condemn the most deplorable aspects of his times, including the abuses of the clergy. Erasmus’s hope that the Christian world would have returned to the holy simplicity of heart that the wisdom of the Scriptures taught paved the way for the Reformation. The man who best embodied the skepticism of the era was Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who consciously abandoned the pompous ground of philosophical disquisitions to limit to his single self the scope of his Essays. But the difficulty of pinpointing the essence of the “I” beyond the complex influence of external factors and the volatility of the human personality proved that the inner reality of man was as hard to chart as the mysterious vastness of the universe. In one of his Essays, entitled “On Cannibals,” Montaigne criticized the haughty sense of superiority that the Europeans felt toward the native people who inhabited the lands of the New World that had been recently discovered. The fact that people whom the Europeans called barbarous possessed, in Montaigne’s view, a moral uprightness that, despite the primitive nature of their society, appeared much greater than the one displayed in the Christian world, made him doubtful that Western civilization was as great as it claimed to be (the sanguinary fights between French Catholics and Protestant Huguenots that Montaigne witnessed in his own lifetime may have had a lot to do with the critical way in which he viewed his own world). He wrote, “We call barbarous anything that is contrary to our habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land that we live.” The comparison between the simple yet noble life of the native inhabitants of the New World (which anticipated Rousseau’s view of the “bon sauvage”) and the ails of the European society coupled with the realization that truth could never be absolute increased Montaigne’s melancholic bent, as he expressed in his famous quote, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?).
The sense of bewilderment that accompanied the late Renaissance only grew as history progressed. The most dramatic moment occurred when Charles Darwin, in the nineteenth century, revealed that, rather than springing into existence as fully developed Adams and Eves, we, just like all other living organisms, are only the outcome of a cumulative, opportunistic, and entirely mechanistic process based on evolution and natural selection. The discovery was hard to accept, principally because it proved that the mechanical laws of nature have absolutely nothing in common with the passionate, even romantic desire for order, meaning, and purpose that our logic demands. All that is to say, the more we push forward, the more we become aware of the insufficiency of our egocentric parameters; the more we progress, the more we are bound to accept that, rather than ultimate truths, what we are destined to find is only more complexity, ambiguity, and doubt.
In that sense, notwithstanding our many awesome achievements, our history can be defined as a very humbling experience. As the author James Barrie put it, “Life is a long lesson in humility.” That means that each time we believe we have reached a summit of understanding, we realize how much our striving and forward thinking still have to accomplish.
Is that bad? Not necessarily. A crisis, as we know, is often also a great opportunity to reflect on past experiences in order to decide what lessons are more deserving of our attention and respect.
In other words, there is always a flip side to each coin. For example, we have learned that we are imperfect creatures: we crave great ideals, but our finiteness hardly ever allows us to fully realize what we dream. The flip side of the coin is precisely because we are frail, we need one another. That includes the more familiar other but also the less familiar one that the great diversity of our modern society includes. We have to overcome the tribal instinct to withdraw into the small corner of our provincial dimension to assign loyalty only to those who are and think like us—a tendency that has always been the greatest impediment to the progression of history.
Working at strengthening our collective self while expanding its parameters to include diversity in our union is as important as nurturing our single identity. One cannot exist without the other: civilization is a collaborative effort that demands the same care and responsibility we dedicate to ourselves.
As we have repeated over and over, the sin that since the dawn of time has been considered the greatest of all human shortcomings is hubris, which means both lack of humility and the ambition to think that one does not need the input of others to enrich the meager finitude of the self. In our times, so obsessed with the cult of celebrities and personalities, that lesson should not be forgotten. Narcissism and unbridled ambition, the Greeks warned, are like maladies coiled in the darkest part of the human spirit that, if left unchecked, can grow to completely overcome the balance and clarity of the mind. For that reason, the Greeks always feared tyrants or despots: people who, dismissing the value of collective wisdom and collaboration, arrogantly assumed that their talent alone was sufficient to rule society. The effects of such a malevolent attitude, the Greeks argued, can be disastrous, especially given the tendency that all autocrats have to become demagogues, ready to deform reality with untruthful words just to serve their selfish interests and their insatiable appetite for reverence and adulation.
As we have seen, hubris also characterized men’s ambition to consider themselves superior to women. Besides erroneously thinking that women did not possess rationality, men made the mistake of assigning greatness to a mind devoid of emotion and passion (qualities invariably associated with women). What modern science has discovered is that by defining in that way the ideal of rationality, masculine culture has in fact greatly reduced the overall understanding of how the brain actually functions. As advanced studies in psychology and neuroscience have proven, the traits once rejected as feminine, like intuition and emotion, are, in reality, among the most intrinsic and powerful qualities of what we call today rationality.
The same lesson could be applied to all those who have been chastised for being different—by ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. Divisions, walls, perimeters, boundaries: all that has been erected around the “I” to rigidly define its identity in contrast to some “Other” has proven to be, in the end, as ruinous as everything that remains too inflexible. To maintain its health the mind needs to nurture its capacity to grow. Accumulation of information and knowledge would not mean much if not followed by improvement and maturation. In other words: progress has value only if it expands and enhances our humanness.
One of the most meaningful passages of the Bible takes place when God asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain, who does not want to confess the murder of his brother, responds to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer is obvious: yes. We cannot expect to improve ourselves if we don’t assume the responsibility of being our brothers’ (and sisters’!) keepers.
Martin Luther King wrote: “We have learned to fly like birds and swim the sea like fish but we have not learned the simple art to live together as brothers.” He was right: our most urgent task is to improve the simple art of living together by accepting the notion that identity always involves a singular as well as a plural notion. As W. H. Auden stated, “Civilization should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.” The most important lesson we can derive from history is that identity is built never on a monologue but always on the honest, respectful, and committed exchange of ideas that true dialogue represents.
*1 Initially, jubilees were set to take place at the beginning of every new century. However, because of the economical advantages they offered, the time between jubilees was soon shortened to fifty years and then to twenty-five.
*2 The guilds, which emerged with the urban development of the high Middle Ages, were craft associations created to protect and regulate trade. Every craft had its own guild, and each guild had its own system of apprenticeship. Members of a guild were connected through a solemn pact of mutual protection and respect. The high standards of civility that the members of the guilds maintained among themselves were extended to the city toward which all those involved in trade and business felt profoundly connected. Every guild had a patron saint to whom specific festivals were dedicated.
*3 It is interesting to note that the Renaissance’s indiscriminate enthusiasm for all sorts of past theories and traditions also led to the support of disciplines devoid of any true empirical validity, like occultism, astrology, divination, magic, and alchemy. Ficino’s fascination with magic, occultism, oracles, and spells was also shared by the skeptical Machiavelli (whom we will discuss more at length later), who, despite his materialistic views, often connected prodigies and prophecies to actual events of history.
*4 The quote was posted on the famous talking statue, called Pasquino, placed near Piazza Navona in Rome. The badly damaged statue, from the third century A.D., was used from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century as a sort of billboard where the Romans placed satirical lampoons, often written in verses, directed to popes, prelates, and politicians.
*5 Julius’s troops were composed of mercenaries from Switzerland. Their colorful costumes, designed by Michelangelo, are still used today by the Swiss guards assigned to protect the pope.
*6 In Switzerland, the spirit of reformation assumed an even more radical stance with Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and especially John Calvin (1509–1564), who articulated the concept of predestination: because he was a depraved and sinful creature, man’s action, Calvin said, had no power in attaining salvation—an undeserved gift that could derive only from God’s mercy and love.