The Renaissance
It is pleasant to turn from such barbarism to the continuing efficacy of Christianity in inspiring men and women to saintliness. The same century that saw the tribulations and corruptions of Avignon produced missionaries like Giovanni da Monte Corvino and Oderic of Pordenone, who tried to convert the Hindus and Chinese; but the Chinese, says a Franciscan chronicler, clung to the “error that any man could be saved in his own sect.”27 Unwittingly these missionaries contributed less to religion than to the science of geography.
St. Catherine of Siena was born, lived, and died in a modest room still shown to visitors. From that foot of earth she helped to move the papacy, and to revive in the people of Italy a piety that has survived Rinascita and Risorgimento alike. At fifteen she joined the Order of Penance of St. Dominic; this was a “tertiary” organization, composed not of monks or nuns, but of men and women living a secular life, yet dedicating themselves as much as possible to works of religion and charity. Catherine dwelt with her parents, but she made her room almost an anchoritic cell. lost herself in prayer and mystical contemplation, and hardly left her home except to go to church. Her parents were disturbed by her preoccupation with religion, and feared for her health. They laid upon her the heaviest drudgery of the household, which she performed without complaint. “I make a little corner apart in my heart for Jesus,” she said,28 and maintained a childlike serenity. All the joy, doubt, and ecstasy that other girls might derive from “profane” love Catherine sought and found in devotion to Christ. In the growing intensity of these solitary meditations she thought and spoke of Christ as her heavenly lover, she exchanged hearts with Him, saw herself, in vision, married to Him; and like St. Francis she thought so long about the five wounds of the Crucified that it seemed to her that she felt them in her own hands and feet and side. All temptations of the flesh she rejected as the wiles of Satan to withdraw her from her one engrossing love.
After three years of almost solitary piety she felt that she could safely venture into the life of the city. As she had devoted her womanhood to Christ, so she devoted her maternal tenderness to the sick and needy of Siena; she stayed to the last moment with the victims of plague, and stood in spiritual consolation beside condemned criminals until the hour of their execution.29 When her parents died and left her a modest patrimony, she distributed it among the poor. Though she was disfigured by smallpox, her face was a blessing to all who saw her. Young men at her word abandoned their wonted blasphemies, and older men heard with melting skepticism her simple and trusting philosophy. All the evils of human life, she thought, were the result of human wickedness; but all the sins of mankind would be swallowed up and lost in the ocean of God’s love; and all the ills of the world would be cured if men could be persuaded to practise Christian love. Many believed her; Montepulciano sent for her to come and reconcile its feuding families; Pisa and Lucca sought her counsel; Florence invited her to join an embassy to Avignon. Gradually she was drawn into the world.
She was horrified by what she saw in Italy and France: Rome filthy and desolate; Italy divorcing itself from a Church that had deserted to France; a clergy whose worldly living had forfeited the respect of the laity; a France already half ruined with war. Confident in her divine mission, she denounced prelates and pontiffs to their faces, and told them that only a return to Rome and to decency could save the Church. Herself unable to write, she, a girl of twenty-six, dictated stern but loving letters, in her simple and melodious Italian, to popes, princes, and statesmen; and on almost every page appeared the prophetic word Riformazione.30 She failed with the statesmen, but she succeeded with the people. She rejoiced when Urban V came to Rome, mourned when he left, lived again when Gregory XI came; she gave good advice to Urban VI, but was shocked by his brutality; and when the Papal Schism tore Christendom in two she was among the first casualties of that incredible conflict. She had reduced her meals to a mere mouthful of food; she carried asceticism so far, said legend, that the consecrated wafer received by her in communion was her only nourishment. She lost all power to resist disease; the Schism broke her will to live; and two years after its outbreak she passed away, aged thirty-three (1380). To this day she is a force for good in the Italy that she loved only next to Christ and the Church.
In the year (1380) and city of her death St. Bernardino was born. The tradition of Catherine molded him; in the plague of 1400 he gave his days and nights to caring for the sick. Having joined the Franciscans, he set the example of obeying the strict rule of the Order. Many monks followed him; with these he founded (1405) the Observantine Franciscans, or Brethren of the Strict Observance; and before he died three hundred monastic communities had accepted his rule. The purity and nobility of his life gave an irresistible eloquence to his preaching. Even in Rome, whose population was more lawless than that of any other city in Europe, he drew criminals to confession, sinners to repentance, and habitual feudists to peace. Seventy years before Savonarola’s Burning of the Vanities in Florence, Bernardino persuaded Roman men and women to throw their playing cards, dice, lottery tickets, false hair, indecent pictures and books, even their musical instruments, into a giant funeral pyre on the Capitol (1424). Three days later a young woman accused of witchcraft was burned on the same square, and all Rome crowded to the spectacle.31 Saint Bernardino himself was “a most conscientious persecutor of heretics.”32
So the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrible, mingled in the flux and chaos of the Christian life. The simple folk of Italy remained contentedly medieval, while the middle and upper classes, half drunk with the long-cellared wine of classic culture, moved forward with a noble ardor to create the Renaissance, and modern man.
Fig. 1—GIOTTO: Flight into Egypt; Arena Chapel, Padua PAGE 22
Fig. 2—SIMONE MARTINI: The Annunciation; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 35
Fig. 3—LORENZO GHIBERTI Doors of the Baptistery; Florence PAGE 91
Fig. 4—DONATELLO: Crucifixion, wood; Santa Croce, Florence PAGE 95
Fig. 5—DONATELLO: David, bronze; Bargello, Florence PAGE 93
Fig. 6—DONATELLO: Annunciation, sandstone; Santa Croce, Florence PAGE 95
Fig. 7—LUCA DELLA ROBBIA: Madonna and Child, terra cotta; relief over a portal of the Badia, Florence PAGE 97
Fig. 8—DONATELLO: Gattcmielata; Padua PAGE 94
Fig. 9—MASACCIO: The Tribute Money; Brancacci Chapel, Florence PAGE 100
Fig. 10—FRA ANGELICO: The Annunciation; San Marco, Florence PAGE 102
Fig. 11—FRA FILIPPO LIPPI: Virgin Adoring the Child; Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin PAGE 105
Fig. 12—ANDREA DEL VERROCHIO: The Baptism of Christ; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 131
Fig. 13—DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO: Portrait of Count Sassetti(?) and Grandson; Louvre, Paris PAGE 130
Fig. 14—SANDRO BOTTICELLI: The Birth of Venus; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 137
BOOK II
THE FLORENTINE RENAISSANCE
1378–1534
CHAPTER III
The Rise of the Medici
1378–1464
I. THE SETTING
THE Italians called this coming of age la Rinascita, Rebirth, because to them it seemed a triumphant resurrection of the classic spirit after a barbarous interruption of a thousand years.* The classic world, the Italians felt, had died in the German and Hun invasions of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries; the heavy hand of the Goth had crushed the fading but still fair flower of Roman art and life; “Gothic” art had repeated the invasion with an architecture precariously unstable and decoratively bizarre, and a sculpture coarse, crude, and gloomy with dour prophets and emaciated saints. Now, by the grace of time, those bearded Goths and those “long-beard” Lombards had been absorbed into the dominant Italian blood; by the grace of Vitruvius and the instructive ruins of the Roman Forum the classic column and architrave would again build shrines and palaces of sober dignity; by the grace of Petrarch and a hundred Italian scholars the rediscovered classics would restore the literature of Italy to
the pure idiom and precision of Cicero’s prose, and the mellow music of Virgil’s verse. The sunshine of the Italian spirit would break through the northern mists; men and women would escape from the prison of medieval fear; they would worship beauty in all its forms, and fill the air with the joy of resurrection. Italy would be young again.
The men who spoke so were too near the event to see the “Rebirth” in historical perspective, or in the confusing diversity of its constituents. But it took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money—smelly bourgeois money: the profits of skillful managers and underpaid labor; of hazardous voyages to the East, and laborious crossings of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear; of careful calculations, investments, and loans; of interest and dividends accumulated until enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art. Money is the root of all civilization. The funds of merchants, bankers, and the Church paid for the manuscripts that revived antiquity. Nor was it those manuscripts which freed the mind and senses of the Renaissance; it was the secularism that came from the rise of the middle classes; it was the growth of the universities, of knowledge and philosophy, the realistic sharpening of minds by the study of law, the broadening of minds by wider acquaintance with the world. Doubting the dogmas of the Church, no longer frightened by the fear of hell, and seeing the clergy as epicurean as the laity, the educated Italian shook himself loose from intellectual and ethical restraints; his liberated senses took unabashed delight in all embodiments of beauty in woman, man, and art; and his new freedom made him creative for an amazing century (1434–1534) before it destroyed him with moral chaos, disintegrative individualism, and national slavery. The interlude between two disciplines was the Renaissance.
Why was northern Italy the first to experience this spring awakening? There the old Roman world had never been quite destroyed; the towns had kept their ancient structure and memories, and now renewed their Roman law. Classic art survived in Rome, Verona, Mantua, Padua; Agrippa’s Pantheon still functioned as a place of worship, though it was fourteen hundred years old; and in the Forum one could almost hear Cicero and Caesar debating the fate of Catiline. The Latin language was still a living tongue, of which Italian was merely a melodious variant. Pagan deities, myths, and rites lingered in popular memory, or under Christian forms. Italy stood athwart the Mediterranean, commanding that basin of classic civilization and trade. Northern Italy was more urban and industrial than any other region of Europe except Flanders. It had never suffered a full feudalism, but had subjected its nobles to its cities and its merchant class. It was the avenue of trade between the rest of Italy and transalpine Europe, and between Western Europe and the Levant; its commerce and industry made it the richest region in Christendom. Its adventurous traders were everywhere, from the fairs of France to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. Accustomed to dealing with Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Chinese, they lost the edge of their dogmas, and brought into the literate classes of Italy that same indifference to creeds which in nineteenth-century Europe came from widening contacts with alien faiths. Mercantile wisdom, however, conspired with national traditions, temperament, and pride to keep Italy Catholic even while she became pagan. Papal fees trickled to Rome along a thousand rivulets from a score of Christian lands, and the wealth of the Curia overflowed throughout Italy. The Church rewarded Italian loyalty with a generous lenience to the sins of the flesh, and a genial tolerance (before the Council of Trent, 1545) of heretical philosophers who refrained from undermining the piety of the people. So Italy advanced, in wealth and art and thought, a century ahead of the rest of Europe; and it was only in the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance faded in Italy, that it blossomed in France, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain. The Renaissance was not a period in time but a mode of life and thought moving from Italy through Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.
It made its first home in Florence for much the same reasons that gave it birth in northern Italy. Through the organization of her industry, the extension of her commerce, and the operations of her financiers, Fiorenza—the City of Flowers—was in the fourteenth century the richest town in the peninsula, excepting Venice. But while the Venetians in that age gave their energies almost entirely to the pursuit of pleasure and wealth, the Florentines, possibly through the stimulus of a turbulent semidemocracy, developed a keenness of mind and wit, and a skill in every art, that made their city by common consent the cultural capital of Italy. The quarrels of the factions raised the temperature of life and thought, and rival families contended in the patronage of art as well as in the pursuit of power. The final—not the first—stimulus was given when Cosimo de’ Medici offered the resources of his own and other fortunes and palaces to house and entertain the delegates to the Council of Florence (1439). The Greek prelates and scholars who came to that assembly to discuss the reunion of Eastern and Western Christianity had a far better knowledge of Greek literature than any Florentine could then possess; some of them lectured in Florence, and the elite of the city crowded to hear them. When Constantinople fell to the Turks many Greeks left it to make their home in the city where they had found such hospitality fourteen years before. Several of them brought manuscripts of ancient texts; some of them lectured on the Greek language or on Greek poetry and philosophy. So, by the concourse of many streams of influence, the Renaissance took form in Florence, and made it the Athens of Italy.
II. THE MATERIAL BASIS
Florence, in the fifteenth century, was a city-state ruling not only Florence but (with interruptions) Prato, Pistoia, Pisa, Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, and their agricultural hinterland. The peasants were not serfs but partly small proprietors, mostly tenant farmers, who lived in houses of crude cemented stone much as today, and chose their own village officials to govern them in local affairs. Machiavelli did not disdain to chat and play with these hardy knights of the field, the orchard, or the vine. But the magistrates of the cities regulated sales, and, to appease a troublesome proletariat, kept food prices too low for peasant happiness; so the ancient strife of country and city added its somber obbligato to the songs of hate that rose from embattled classes within the city walls.
According to Villani the city of Florence proper had in 1343 a population of some 91,500 souls; we have no equally reliable estimate for later Renaissance years, but we may presume that the population grew as commerce expanded and industry thrived. About a fourth of the city dwellers were industrial workers; the textile lines alone, in the thirteenth century, employed 30,000 men and women in two hundred factories.1 In 1300 Federigo Oricellarii earned his surname by bringing from the East the secret of extracting from lichens a violet pigment (orchella, archil). This technique revolutionized the dye industry, and made some woolen manufacturers into what today would be millionaires. In textiles Florence had already reached by 1300 the capitalistic stage of large investment, central provision of materials and machinery, systematic division of labor, and control of production by the suppliers of capital. In 1407 a woolen garment passed through thirty processes, each performed by a worker specializing in that operation.2
To sell its products Florence encouraged its merchants to maintain trade with all ports of the Mediterranean, and along the Atlantic as far as Bruges. Consuls were stationed in Italy, the Baleares, Flanders, Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, Persia, India, and China to protect and promote Florentine trade. Pisa was conquered as an indispensable outlet of Florentine goods to the sea, and Genoese merchant vessels were hired to carry them. Foreign products competitive with Florentine manufactures were excluded from the markets of Florence through protective tariffs set by a government of merchants and financiers.
To finance this industry and commerce, and much else, the eighty banking houses of Florence—chiefly the Bardi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, Pit
ti, and Medici—invested the savings of their depositors. They cashed checks (polizze),3 issued letters of credit (lettere di pagamenti),4 exchanged merchandise as well as credit,5 and supplied governments with funds for peace or war. Some Florentine firms lent 1,365,000 florins ($34,125,000?) to Edward III of England,6 and were ruined by his default (1345). Despite such catastrophes Florence became the financial capital of Europe from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century; it was there that rates of exchange were fixed for the currencies of Europe.7 As early as 1300 a system of insurance protected the cargoes of Italy on their voyages—a precaution not adopted in England till 1543.8 Double-entry bookkeeping appears in a Florentine account book of 1382; probably it was already a century old in Florence, Venice, and Genoa.9 In 1345 the Florentine government issued negotiable gold-redeemable bonds bearing the low interest rate of five per cent—a proof of the city’s reputation for commercial prosperity and integrity. The revenue of the government in 1400 was greater than that of England in the heyday of Elizabeth.
The bankers, merchants, manufacturers, professional men, and skilled workers of Europe were organized in guilds. In Florence seven guilds (arti, arts, trades) were known as arti maggiori or greater guilds: clothing manufacturers, wool manufacturers, silk goods manufacturers, fur merchants, financiers, physicians and druggists, and a mixed guild of merchants, judges, and notaries. The remaining fourteen guilds of Florence were the arti minori or minor trades: clothiers, hosiers, butchers, bakers, vintners, cobblers, saddlers, armorers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, innkeepers, masons and stonecutters, and a motley conglomeration of oil sellers, pork butchers, and ropemakers. Every voter had to be a member of one or another of these guilds; and the nobles who had been disfranchised in 1282 by a bourgeois revolution joined the guilds to regain the vote. Below the twenty-one guilds were seventy-two unions of voteless workingmen; below these, thousands of day laborers forbidden to organize, and living in impotent poverty; below these—or above them as better cared for by their masters—were a few slaves. The members of the greater guilds constituted in politics the popolo grasso, the fat or well-fed people; the rest of the population composed the popolo minuto or little people. The political history of Florence, like that of modern states, was first the victory of the business class over the old landowning aristocracy (1293), and then the struggle of the “working class” to acquire political power.