The Renaissance

What Was Reborn

The word Rinascimento ("rebirth") was used by Giorgio Vasari in 1550 to describe what had happened in Italian arts since Giotto. It is a slippery word. Nothing was literally reborn — the texts of Cicero and Vitruvius had circulated in monastic libraries throughout the Middle Ages — but a new attitude toward antiquity, toward the human body, toward perspective and proportion, toward the living world as a worthy subject, took hold in Italy in the fourteenth century and travelled, with letters and traders, across Europe over the next two hundred years.

The shock of the Black Death (1347–51), which killed perhaps half the population of Italy, plays a part in any honest account. So does the rediscovery of Greek scholarship after the Council of Florence (1439) and the fall of Constantinople (1453), which brought Greek scholars and manuscripts west. So does the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, which made the recovered classics affordable. The Renaissance was not a date but a long shift in what literate Europeans understood themselves to be doing when they thought.

The City on the Arno

Florence in 1400 was a republic of about 60,000 people, governed by a constantly rotating Signoria of guildsmen, dominated economically by the wool and silk trades and a precocious banking sector. Its currency, the gold florin, was the international reserve of the Mediterranean. Its rivals — Milan, Venice, Pisa, Naples, the Papal States — kept the peninsula in a permanent low-grade war that paradoxically protected the cultural autonomy of each city.

The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore had been begun in 1296 but stood roofless for a century: nobody knew how to span its 45-metre octagonal crossing. In 1418 the goldsmith Filippo Brunelleschi proposed a self-supporting double-shell dome with a herringbone brick pattern requiring no centring. The dome was completed in 1436. Its silhouette is what tourists still photograph; it was, in its day, the most audacious engineering on the continent.

The Pater Patriae

Cosimo "il Vecchio" inherited the Medici Bank from his father in 1429 and made it the largest financial institution in Europe, with branches from Bruges to Constantinople, including the Vatican account that handled the Papal Tithe. Cosimo never held formal office in the Florentine government — that would have been bad republican manners. He simply made sure that the men in office owed him something.

His private spending on Florence was unprecedented: the rebuilding of San Lorenzo, the cells of San Marco, his villa at Careggi, the Palazzo Medici by Michelozzo, and — most importantly — a personal library that grew into the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Cosimo employed Niccolò Niccoli to scour Europe for Latin and Greek manuscripts and Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato. The first complete Latin Plato in a millennium was a Medici project.

His grandson Lorenzo "il Magnifico" (1449–92) inherited and expanded the role: poet, patron, statesman, brother of the assassinated Giuliano. The Medici would furnish Florence with two more dukes, two queens of France, and four popes, ending only with Anna Maria Luisa, who in 1737 willed the family's collections to the Tuscan state on condition they never leave Florence. They have not.

The Humanists

Humanism was, in its original sense, a curriculum: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, all studied in classical Latin and (after 1397) Greek, on the model of Cicero and Quintilian. Petrarch (1304–74) is the conventional founder; he hunted down forgotten Cicero letters in cathedral archives. Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence, made humanism the city's quasi-official ideology.

The next generation included Leonardo Bruni (translator of Aristotle), Poggio Bracciolini (who unearthed Lucretius's De Rerum Natura at a German monastery in 1417), Lorenzo Valla (who in 1440 proved philologically that the Donation of Constantine was a medieval forgery), and Pico della Mirandola, whose Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) is sometimes called the "manifesto of the Renaissance." Its argument: that man is the only creature without a fixed nature and may rise toward the angels or sink toward the beasts as he chooses.

"O highest and most marvellous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills."— Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de Hominis Dignitate, 1486

Il Magnifico

Lorenzo de' Medici took control of Florence at twenty after his father Piero's death. He ruled — informally, as had Cosimo — for twenty-three years. He survived the Pazzi Conspiracy of 26 April 1478, in which his brother Giuliano was murdered at the cathedral altar during High Mass; the response, in which the conspirators were hanged from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria, was painted with terrible accuracy by the boy Leonardo, who was twenty-six.

Lorenzo's circle gathered at his villa in Careggi: Ficino translating Plato, Pico arguing for the unity of religious truth, Poliziano composing Latin verse and the Italian Stanze. Botticelli painted the Primavera and Birth of Venus for a Medici cousin, probably to a programme suggested by Poliziano. The young Michelangelo Buonarroti, twelve years old, was taken into the Medici palace as an apprentice and ate at Lorenzo's table.

Lorenzo died on 8 April 1492. Within two years the French invaded Italy, the Medici were expelled, and Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican preacher of repentance, was burning vanities in the Piazza della Signoria. He himself was burned there in May 1498. The high Renaissance was about to migrate to Rome.

Da Vinci

Leonardo, born out of wedlock at Vinci near Florence, was apprenticed at fourteen to Andrea del Verrocchio. Vasari claims that on seeing the young Leonardo's contribution to a Verrocchio painting, the master vowed never to paint again. Leonardo went to Milan in 1482 to serve Ludovico Sforza, where he produced The Last Supper (1495–98) on a refectory wall using a poorly chosen oil-tempera technique that began to deteriorate within his lifetime.

His notebooks — about 7,000 surviving pages, written right-to-left in mirror script — describe heart valves, fetal development, the geology of stratified rock, the diffusion of light, helicopters, parachutes, and a tank. He completed perhaps fifteen paintings, of which the Mona Lisa (begun c. 1503) and Virgin of the Rocks are the most famous. He painted with maddening slowness, abandoning commissions, dissecting cadavers, building war machines for whoever was paying, and dying in 1519 at the French court of Francis I, who claimed to have held his head as he died.

Buonarroti

Michelangelo was the longest-lived and the most contradictory of the great Renaissance artists. The Pietà (1499) in St Peter's was carved when he was twenty-four; the David (1501–04) is a single block of Carrara marble that Florence had been arguing about for forty years. Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome to design his tomb; instead, he was made to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–12), 500 square metres of fresco he had never wanted to undertake, completed lying on his back on a scaffold he had designed himself.

The Last Judgment (1536–41) on the Sistine altar wall was painted in the Counter-Reformation atmosphere of the 1530s; its nudity caused scandal even before he had finished. He took over the rebuilding of St Peter's in 1546, designed Rome's Capitoline Square, wrote about three hundred sonnets — some to a young Roman nobleman, some to the poet Vittoria Colonna — and died in 1564 at eighty-eight, having outlived his pupils and most of his patrons.

The High Renaissance

Raphael Sanzio of Urbino arrived in Rome in 1508 at twenty-five and was given, by Julius II, the rooms of the Vatican apartments. The School of Athens (1509–11) on the wall of the Stanza della Segnatura is a Renaissance manifesto in fresco: Plato and Aristotle at the centre, Pythagoras and Euclid at the margins, Heraclitus modelled on Michelangelo, and Raphael himself looking out from the back. He painted Madonnas, society portraits, and tapestry cartoons; he ran the largest workshop in Rome; he was made architect of St Peter's after Bramante's death; and he died on his thirty-seventh birthday, possibly of fever, possibly, says Vasari, of overexertion in love.

Raphael's death in 1520, the Sack of Rome by mutinous Imperial troops in 1527, and Michelangelo's relocation to a more austere later style mark the close of the High Renaissance. What followed — Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino — historians call Mannerism, and it was Italy's response to the discovery that perfection had a ceiling.

Venice & Bellini

Venice's Renaissance arrived a generation after Florence's and looked different — more colour, less line; more atmosphere, less geometry. Giovanni Bellini's altarpieces taught the city how light fell on cloth. His pupils Giorgione and Titian — particularly Titian (c. 1488–1576), who lived to nearly ninety — invented the modern oil painting: layered glazes, broken brushwork, a saturation of pigment that nobody before could afford. Tintoretto and Veronese later filled the city's churches with vast theatrical machines.

Venice's other contribution was the printed book. Aldus Manutius's Aldine Press (founded 1494) issued Greek classics in pocket octavo editions, invented italic type, and used the dolphin-and-anchor mark. The Aldine Press is the deep ancestor of every paperback you have ever owned.

The Northern Renaissance

The Renaissance crossed the Alps in two directions and arrived in northern Europe with its own genius. Jan van Eyck of Bruges (d. 1441) had already perfected oil painting before any Italian; the Arnolfini Portrait (1434) is denser with detail than any contemporary Italian work. Hieronymus Bosch in 's-Hertogenbosch painted his hallucinated triptychs at the turn of the sixteenth century. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg (1471–1528), who travelled twice to Italy, brought back perspective and proportion and forwarded an extraordinary series of woodcuts and engravings (the Melencolia I, the Knight, Death and the Devil) that defined what the printed image could be.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), the most famous humanist of the early sixteenth century, edited the Greek New Testament (1516) and wrote In Praise of Folly (1511) — a satire of clerical corruption that arguably prepared the soil for the Reformation he then refused to join. His friend Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516); Hans Holbein painted them both.

Machiavelli

"It is better to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both."— Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ch. xvii, 1513

Niccolò Machiavelli, a senior Florentine civil servant under the post-Medici republic, was tortured and exiled when the Medici returned in 1512. From a small farm at San Casciano he wrote, in the evenings, the slim treatise Il Principe (1513), addressed to Lorenzo's grandson Giuliano. The book was an attempt to win readmission to politics; it failed. It also founded modern political science, by treating the state as a problem of effectiveness rather than virtue. The longer Discourses on Livy (1517) is a republican companion to the more famous, more cynical Prince.

A New Heaven

The Renaissance's contribution to natural knowledge has been undervalued. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish canon trained partly at Padua, published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543, on his deathbed: the sun, not the earth, sat at the centre. Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, also 1543, replaced Galen's animal-based anatomy with detailed human dissections, beautifully illustrated by Titian's workshop. Gerardus Mercator's projection (1569) made navigation arithmetic. The compass, the printing press, gunpowder — what Francis Bacon would later call the three transforming inventions — were Renaissance commonplaces.

Galileo Galilei trained his improved telescope on the moon in 1609, and the four moons of Jupiter the following year, breaking the medieval certainty that the heavens were perfect and immutable. The Renaissance physical world ends, in some sense, with the Roman Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo in 1633, but the genie was out.

The Reformation

On 31 October 1517, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther sent his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz; whether or not he also nailed them to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, copies were soon being printed across Germany. Within a decade Lutheranism had taken root in much of Saxony, Brandenburg, Württemberg, and the Scandinavian kingdoms. Calvin's reform reached Geneva (1536), then Scotland and the Netherlands. Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 over an annulment.

The Catholic Counter-Reformation, formalised at the Council of Trent (1545–63), responded with the Jesuits, the Index of Prohibited Books, and a more disciplined Roman art (Bernini, the Baroque). Religious wars — the Schmalkaldic, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, the catastrophic Thirty Years' War (1618–48) — dominated the next century and a half. The unified Latin Christendom that the Renaissance had taken for granted was over.

The Long Echo

To list the Renaissance's bequests is almost to list modernity. Linear perspective — the rendering of three dimensions on a flat surface as our eyes report them — became the default of Western image-making until the twentieth century. The vernacular literatures (Dante, Petrarch, Cervantes, Shakespeare) gave the European nations the languages they would think in. The printed book detached learning from monasteries. The signed self-portrait, beginning with Dürer's 1500 image as Christ, founded the modern idea of the artist as autonomous self.

The Renaissance also bequeathed — and we should not pretend otherwise — the slave trade, the colonial extractive empires of Spain and Portugal, and a tradition of European cultural superiority that has done immense damage. The same impulse that admired Cicero made conquistadors believe Aztec civilisation was a kind of barbarism. To celebrate the Renaissance honestly is to hold both its achievements and its ruptures in the same hand.