AP European History

Barron’s

The Italian Renaissance

Overview

While the Renaissance was a period of artistic, cultural, and intellectual revival, the term renaissance, a rebirth, can be misleading. It implies that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked a distinct awakening for Europeans from the “darkness” of the Middle Ages. Actually, the medieval period gave rise to the basic institutions of Europe: its laws, languages, and economics. The elite culture that developed during the fifteenth century in the city-states of the Italian peninsula not only borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome, but also expressed a new conception of humankind, individualism, through innovative art and literature. It was in these independent domains, governed by a merchant class, by despots, or by republicans, that pure secularism (a belief that life was more than a preparation for the hereafter) first appeared in the modern world. The name Renaissance was not used until Jules Michelet employed it in the late nineteenth century, which explains why some historians may now see the delineation of the Renaissance as a separate era from the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution as arbitrary. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks caused many scholars of the Byzantine Empire to relocate in Italy, which helped usher in the Renaissance.

Humanism (a literary and educational movement that was truly modern in that a class of non-clerical writers concerned themselves with secular issues but based their answers to current problems on the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans), rose in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With their special affinity to classical Greek and Roman culture, schools such as the Florentine Academy emerged based upon studying classical authors such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. In northern Europe, the “pagan” humanism of the Italian Renaissance was rejected in favor of a blend of religion and classical literature. Christian Humanists, such as Erasmus and Thomas More, tried to recapture the moral force of early Christianity by studying the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers.

Whether or not the Renaissance marks the beginning of the modern age, it provided a conception of the role and destiny of humankind vastly different from the ideas of the Middle Ages, and its artistic achievements influenced the culture of all Europe.

Since the Renaissance is defined less by specific events than by individual accomplishments and ideas, the following review focuses on significant personalities, achievements, and concepts. First, though, a few words about the setting for one of the most creative periods in all of human history.

The Italian City-States

Italy was not so much a nation as an idea in the fifteenth century. It was an amalgamation of many distinct political entities known as city-states. By the fifteenth century, certain northern Italian towns that had been trade centers of the Roman Empire expanded into independent city-states that ruled wide areas of the surrounding countryside.

“Geography is destiny” proved true for the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Fragmented as a nation since the fall of Rome, and their land becoming a battleground for the more unified peoples of Europe, Italians took advantage of their proximity to the sea. They applied the energy that springs from being always at the focus of crisis to establish a seagoing trade with the peoples in the eastern Mediterranean. They became the “middlemen” of Europe.

The Major City-States

• • The Republic of Florence (considered the cultural center of the Italian Renaissance; often compared to ancient Athens for its utter brilliance over a brief period).
• • Republic of Genoa
• • Duchy of Milan
• • Rome, the Papal States
• • Naples, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
• • Venice, Venetian Republic
• • Venice, Genoa, and Pisa (in the Republic of Florence) used their strategic locations on the Mediterranean Sea to control the European trade with the Middle East and Asia.
  1. Florence, and to a lesser extent Rome, Naples, and Milan, thrived as manufacturing and market centers.
• • Bankers from these prosperous cities made profitable loans to the people who shaped European life at the time:
  1. Popes and monarchs of Europe financed successful commercial ventures.
     1. The economic power of these city-states, combined with Rome as the center of Catholic power, made Italy a center of culture and luxury in Western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
     2. As a major cog in trade routes between Europe and Asia, Italian city-states helped to spread ideas from different cultures around the world throughout Europe.
  2. The city-states shared Arab mathematics and technology as well as Asian ideas and products with the continent (for a price-and a hefty profit).
  3. Ideas from many cultures including the revival of ancient Greek and Roman ideas were present.
     1. Revived a sense of Italian pride in their past.
     2. These factors all contributed to creating a prosperous merchant-centered society that fostered the age of the Renaissance .
  4. The powerful middle class of merchants and bankers controlled the governments of the city-states and served as patrons to the artistic geniuses of the times.
  5. Their newfound wealth encouraged appreciation of earthly pleasures and diminished dedication to the pious traditions of the Middle Ages.
  6. It was not that most were irreligious, but rather that accidents of history and geography presented them with great wealth, far beyond any expectations of the subsistence feudal economy that had ruled Europe for a thousand years.
  7. Money was meant to be spent; it just so happened that the more they spent on the beautiful handiwork of the skilled artisans in their cities, the more beautiful things were made for the buying.
• • Thus, the Renaissance saw the beginning of the market economy in art, which drew the most talented geniuses to the field in search of profits and fame, setting the stage for other markets to emerge in labor and other resources, for example,
  1. Beauty for its own sake, and art for art’s sake-values absent from European culture since the end of the ancient world-replaced the medieval notion that art that is not dedicated to God is irreverent.
  2. To these people, the world could be changed without the help of God. “Money is power” was becoming true regardless of one’s status at birth.
  3. Secularism, the concept of pursuing the pleasures of this life rather than the promises of the afterlife, was born: the rich nurtured it; the lower classes copied it.

The Medici Family

This was the most famous dynasty of those merchants and bankers who used their vast wealth both to govern the city-states and to patronize illustrious creators in the arts.

• • Giovanni de’ Medici (d. 1429) Merchant and banker of Florence, founder of the dynasty
  1. Could be considered one of the world’s first modern persons, an ultimate adapter who ignored the Church’s prohibitions of lending for interest to provide the necessary funds for a changing world economy.
  2. Although his son and great-grandson were the ones who brought glory to the family name by spending the fortune that he established, his originality is reflected in his deeds rather than his ideas, and he is one of the people of Europe whose restless genius molded the modern world.
• • Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464) Son of Giovanni who used the family fortune to fill the vacuum of power resulting from the lack of a national monarchy.
  1. Allied with other powerful families of Florence, he became unofficial ruler of the republic.
• • Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492) Cosimo’s grandson, not only the republic’s ruler but a lavish patron of the arts.
  1. He personified the Renaissance attitude of living life rather than waiting for its fufillment after death.
  2. His genius was his recognition and support of the creative talent in his city; his luck was to be surrounded by geniuses.

The Medici family ruled the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, of which Florence was the principal city, well into the eighteenth century. Two popes, many cardinals, and two queens of France belonged to the family.