IN THIS CHAPTER
Summary: Between 1350 and 1550, Europe experienced a rebirth (renaissance) of commerce, interest in the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and confidence in human potential.
Key Ideas
• The Renaissance began on the Italian peninsula because of its location as the gateway to Eastern trade.
• The outstanding feature of Renaissance Italian society was the degree to which it was urban.
• Renaissance values were based on the revival of humanism—that is, an interest in an education program based on the languages and values of Classical Greek and Roman cultures.
• In the fifteenth century, Renaissance values spread northward to the rest of Europe.
Key Terms
guilds
doge
humanism
studia humanitas
Oration on the Dignity of Man
The Prince
neoplatonism
Florentine Academy
frescos
Michelangelo's David
Treaty of Lodi
Colloquies
lay piety
Introduction
The word “Renaissance” means rebirth. Historically, it refers to a time in Western civilization (1350—1550) that was characterized by the revival of three things: commerce, interest in the Classical world, and belief in the potential of human achievement. For reasons that are both geographical and social, the Renaissance began in Italy where renewed trade with the East flowed into Europe via the Mediterranean Sea and, therefore, through the Italian peninsula. The Italian Renaissance flowered for approximately a century until, as a result of invasions from France and Great Britain, it flowed north into the rest of Western Europe.
Renaissance Italian Society
The society of the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1550 was unique in Western civilization. The most outstanding characteristic of Italian society was the degree to which it was urban. By 1500, seven of the ten largest cities in Europe were in Italy. Whereas most of Western Europe was characterized by large kingdoms with powerful monarchs and increasingly centralized bureaucracies, the Italian peninsula was made up of numerous independent city-states, such as Milan, Florence, Padua, and Genoa. These city-states were, by virtue of their location, flourishing centers of commerce in control of reviving networks of trade with Eastern empires.
Social status within these city-states was determined primarily by occupation, rather than by birth or the ownership of land, as was common in the rest of Europe during this period. The trades were controlled by government-protected monopolies called guilds. Members of the manufacturing guilds, such as clothiers and metalworkers, sat at the top of the social hierarchy. The next prestigious were the professional groups that included bankers, administrators, and merchants. They were followed by skilled labor, such as the stone masons.
Because the city-states of Italy developed as commercial centers, wealth was not based on the control of land as it was in the rest of Europe during this period. Instead, wealth was in the form of capital, and power was the ability to lend it. Accordingly, the traditional landed aristocracy of the Italian peninsula was not as politically powerful as their other European counterparts. Rather, powerful merchant families dominated socially and politically. Their status as the holders of capital also made the commercial elites of Italy powerful throughout Europe as the monarchs of the more traditional kingdoms had to come to them when seeking loans to finance their wars of territorial expansion.
The city-states of Renaissance Italy were set up along a variety of models. Some, like Naples, were ruled by hereditary monarchs; others were ruled by powerful families, such as the Medicis of Florence; still others, like Venice, were controlled by a military strongman known as a doge.
Renaissance Values
Prior to the Renaissance, the values of European civilization were based on the codes of honor and chivalry that reflected the social relations of the traditional feudal hierarchy. During the Renaissance, these traditional values were transformed to reflect both the ambition and the pride of the commercial class that dominated Renaissance Italian society. In contrast to traditional European noblemen, who competed for prestige on the battlefield or in jousting and fencing tournaments, successful Renaissance men competed with displays of civic duty that included patronage of philosophy and arts.
At the center of the Renaissance system of values was humanism. Renaissance humanism combined an admiration for Classical Greek and Roman literature with a new-found confidence in what modern men could achieve. Accordingly, Renaissance humanism was characterized by the studia humanitas, an educational program founded on knowledge of the Classical Latin and Greek languages. Once these languages had been mastered, the Renaissance humanist could read deeply in the Classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman authors, absorbing what the philosophers of the last great Western civilization had to teach them about how to succeed in life and how to live a good life.
To the Renaissance humanist, the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were guides, but guides whose achievements could be equaled and eventually improved upon. The ultimate goal of the Renaissance humanist program was the truly well-rounded citizen, one who excelled in grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, politics, and moral philosophy. These scholarly achievements were valued in their own right, as a testament to the dignity and ability of man, but also for the way in which they contributed to the glory of the city-state.
Prime examples of early Renaissance humanism were Petrarch, who celebrated the glory of ancient Rome in his Letters to the Ancient Dead, and Boccaccio, who compiled an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology. The best articulation of the belief in the dignity and potential of man that characterized Renaissance humanism was Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity ofMan (i486). In the Oration, Pico argued that God endowed man with the ability to shape his own being, and that man has the obligation to become all that he can be.
By the late Renaissance, humanism lost some of its ideal character, where scholarly achievements were valued for their own sake, and took on a more cynical quality that promoted only individual success. This shift is sometimes characterized as a shift from a “civic ideal” to a “princely ideal,” as texts like Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1513—1518) and Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) focused on the qualities and strategies necessary for attaining and holding social and political power.
Neoplatonism
Another aspect of Renaissance thought that had profound implications for the intellectual development of Western civilization was neoplatonism. At the core of Renaissance neoplatonism is a rediscovery and reinterpretation of the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Medieval scholastics had found the world view of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to be most compatible with Christianity. Accordingly, they made his philosophy the centerpiece of medieval scholasticism. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, however, ancient Greek manuscripts and accompanying Greek scholars flowed into Italy. Led by the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance scholars translated the works of Plato and made a version of his thought central to their own philosophy.
Plato’s writings distinguished between a changeless and eternal realm of being or form and the temporary and perishable world we experience. Crucially for Renaissance humanists, Plato contended that both human reason and love belonged to the world of forms. The implication for the Renaissance humanists was that, by cultivating the finest qualities of their being, humans could commune with God in an eternal realm of form and soul. In order to cultivate these human qualities, Ficino persuaded the Florentine merchant-prince Cosimo de Medici to fund the Florentine Academy, an informal gathering of humanists devoted to the revival and teachings of Plato.
The Renaissance Artistic Achievement
The unique structure of Renaissance society and the corresponding system of Renaissance values combined to give birth to one of the most amazing bursts of artistic creativity in the history of Western Civilization. The wealthy and powerful elites of Renaissance society patronized the arts for the fame and prestige that it brought them. The competitive spirit of the competing elites both within and among the Italian city states meant that artists and craftsmen were in almost constant demand.
For example, Lorenzo de Medici, who led the ruling family of Florence from 1469 until his death in 1492, commissioned work by almost all of the great Renaissance artists. As an art patron, he was rivaled by Pope Julius II, whose patronage of the arts during his papacy (1503—1513), including the construction of St Peter’s Basilica, transformed Rome into one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.
The artists themselves usually hailed not from the elite class but from the class of guild craftsmen. Young men with skill were identified and apprenticed to guild shops run by master craftsmen. Accordingly, there was no separation between the “artistic” and “commercial” sides of the Renaissance art world. All works were commissioned and the artist was expected to give the patron what he ordered. The Renaissance artist demonstrated his creativity within the bounds of explicit contracts that specified all details.
Another aspect of the guild culture that contributed to the brilliant innovations of the Renaissance period was the fact that the various media, such as sculpture, painting, and architecture, were not viewed as separate disciplines; instead, the Renaissance apprentice was expected to master the techniques of each of these areas. As a result, mature Renaissance artists were able to work with a variety of materials and to apply ideas and techniques learned in one medium to projects in another.
Whereas medieval art had been characterized by religious subject matter, the Renaissance style took the human being and the human form as its subject. The transition can be seen in the series of frescos painted by Giotto in the fourteenth century. Although he still focused on religious subject matter (i.e., the life of St Francis), Giotto depicted the human characters in realistic detail and with a concern for their psychological reaction to the events of St Francis’s life. The Renaissance artist’s concern for the human form in all its complexity is illustrated by two great sculptures, each nominally depicting the biblical character of David:
• One is Donatello’s version (completed in 1432), which was the first life-size, free-standing nude sculpture since antiquity, and which depicts David in a completely naturalistic way and casts him as a young Florentine gentleman.
• The second version was sculpted by Michelangelo Buonarroti (completed in 1504) and is characteristic of the last and most heroic phase of Renaissance art. Sculpted from a single piece of marble, Michelangelo’s David is larger than life and offers a vision of the human body and spirit that is more dramatic than real life, an effect that Michelangelo produced by making the head and hands deliberately too large for the torso. Upon its completion, the rulers of Florence originally placed Michelangelo’s David at the entrance to the city hall as a symbol of Florentine strength.
The Spread of the Renaissance
In the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Renaissance spread to France, Germany, England, and Spain. The catalyst for this spread was the breakup of the equilibrium that characterized the politics of the Italian peninsula. An internal balance of power had been established by the Treaty of Lodi (1454—1455) which brought Milan, Naples, and Florence into an alliance to check the power of Venice and its frequent ally, the Papal States. The balance of power was shattered in 1494 when Naples, supported by both Florence and the pope, prepared to attack Milan. The Milanese despot, Ludovico il Moro, appealed to King Charles VIII of France for help, inviting him to lead French troops into Italy and to revive his old dynastic claims to Naples, which the French had ruled from 1266 to 1435. French troops invaded the Italian peninsula in 1494 and forced Florence, Naples, and the Papal States to make major concessions. In response, the pope and the Venetians persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor, King Ferdinand of Aragon, to bring troops to Italy to help resist French aggression. From the late 1490s through most of the sixteenth century, Italy became a battleground in a war for supremacy between European monarchs.
Once the isolation of the Italian peninsula was shattered, the ideals and values of the Renaissance spread through a variety of agents:
• teachers migrating out of Italy
• students who came to study in Italy and then returned home
• European merchants whose interests now penetrated the peninsula
• various lay groups seeking to spread their message of piety
However, the major cause of the spread of Renaissance ideals and values was the printing press. Invented by Johann Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz about 1445 in response to increased demand for books from an increasingly literate public, the moveable type printing press allowed for faster, cheaper mass-produced books to be created and distributed throughout Europe. By 1500, between 15 and 20 million books were in circulation. Among the ideas that spread with the books were the thoughts and philosophies of the Renaissance humanists, which were both adopted and transformed in northern Europe.
The most important and influential of the northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, sometimes referred to as “the prince of the humanists.” Spreading the Renaissance belief in the value of education, Erasmus made his living as an educator. He taught his students both the Latin language and lessons on how to live a good life from Latin dialogues that he wrote himself. Published under the title of Colloquies, Erasmus’s dialogues also displayed the humanist’s faith in both the power of learning and the ability of man by satirizing the old scholastic notions that the truth about God and nature could be discerned only by priests. Erasmus argued instead that, by mastering ancient languages, any man could teach himself to read both the Bible and an array of ancient philosophers, thereby learning the truth about God and nature for himself.
In France, England, and Spain, the existence of strong monarchies meant that the Renaissance would be centered in the royal courts. In the smaller, independent German provinces, the characteristics of the Renaissance were absorbed into a tradition of lay piety, where organized groups, such as the Brethren of Common Life, promoted pious behavior and learning outside the bureaucracy of the Church. In that context, German scholars, such as Martin Luther, who were educated in a context that combined the humanistic and lay piety traditions, would be prominent in the creation of the Reformation.
• Rapid Review
The revival of commerce, interest in the Classical world, and belief in the potential of human achievement that occurred on the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1550 is known as the Renaissance. Within the independent, urban city-states of Renaissance Italian society, the successful merchant class sought a well-rounded life of achievement and civic virtue which led them to give their patronage to scholars and artists. Accordingly, both scholarship and artistic achievement reached new heights, and new philosophies like humanism and neoplatonism were fashioned.
In 1494, mounting jealousy and mistrust between the Italian city-states caused the leaders of Milan to invite intervention by the powerful French monarchy, thereby breaking a delicate balance of power and causing the Italian peninsula to become a battleground in a war for supremacy between European monarchies. The destruction of the independence of the Italian city-states caused the spread and transformation of Renaissance ideals and values. A northern European humanism, less secular than its Italian counterpart, developed and served as the foundation of the Reformation.
• Chapter Review Questions
1. Reasons that the Renaissance originated on the Italian peninsula include all of the following EXCEPT the peninsula’s
(A) geographic location
(B) political organization
(C) religion
(D) social structure
(E) economic structure
2. Which of the following is NOT a Renaissance value?
(A) mastery of ancient languages
(B) patronage of the arts
(C) scholarly achievement
(D) proficiency in the military arts
(E) civic duty
3. Renaissance humanism
(A) devalued mastery of ancient languages
(B) urged the development of a single talent to perfection
(C) valued ancient philosophers as the final authorities on all matters
(D) denied the existence of God
(E) valued scholarship for its own sake and for the glory it brought the city-state
4. The belief that by cultivating the finest qualities of their beings, human beings could commune with God was a conclusion of
(A) guildsmen
(B) neoplatonists
(C) the lay piety movement
(D) the Catholic Church in Renaissance Italy
(E) the doge
5. Which of the following was NOT a factor that contributed to the Renaissance artistic achievement?
(A) the patronage of the pope
(B) the invasion of Italy by the French
(C) the competitive spirit of competing elites
(D) the apprentice system
(E) the lack of separation between artistic and commercial aspects of the Renaissance art world
6. Which of the following did NOT enable the
spread of the Renaissance?
(A) the Treaty of Lodi
(B) Milan’s invitation to Charles VIII to bring troops to Italy
(C) the printing press
(D) students and teachers migrating in and out of the Italian peninsula
(E) the lay piety movement
7. Renaissance art
(A) was characterized by the severe specialization of its artists
(B) was characterized by religious subject matter
(C) abandoned painting in favor of sculpture
(D) was characterized by its concern for the human form
(E) did not require patrons
8. Northern humanism
(A) was less secular than Italian humanism
(B) linked scholarship and learning with religious piety
(C) criticized the notion that priests were required to understand the Bible
(D) contributed to the Reformation
(E) all of the above
• Answers and Explanations
1. C. The religion of Renaissance Italy, which was Catholicism, was shared by many of the European kingdoms. Choice A is incorrect because the Italian peninsula’s geographical location was a reason the Renaissance began here: As the gateway to Europe for Eastern trade coming in through the Mediterranean Sea, Italy was the first region to benefit from economic recovery and the influx of ancient texts. Choice B is incorrect because the fact that the Italian peninsula was organized politically into independent city- states (choice B) that competed with each other commercially (choice E) meant that the traditional nobility was less powerful and that social status was less hierarchical and based on occupation (choice D). All these factors allowed for the development of the individual ambition and civic pride that characterized Renaissance values and ideals.
2. D. Proficiency in the martial arts had been a traditional value of the nobility of medieval Europe, but it was downplayed in the Renaissance. The other choices are values particular to the Renaissance.
3. E. Renaissance humanism did indeed value scholarship. In contrast, choice A is incorrect because Renaissance humanism did not devalue the mastery of ancient languages; in contrast, it sought to revive and encourage such learning of Greek and Latin, for example. Choice B is incorrect because Renaissance humanism emphasized well-roundedness, not just the perfection of a single talent (think of today’s use of the term “Renaissance man”). Choice C is incorrect because, although Renaissance humanists respected the ancient philosophers, they did not view them as the final authorities but instead believed they could enter into conversation with and eventually surpass them. Finally, choice D is incorrect because Renaissance humanists did not deny the existence of God at all: In contrast, they believed that all of man’s abilities were gifts from God that should be developed to the fullest.
4. B. The belief that by cultivating the finest qualities of their beings, human beings could commune with God was a conclusion of the neo- platonists. Choice A is incorrect because the term guildsmen refers to members of the artisan class, not to a school of philosophy. Choice C is incorrect because the lay piety movement emphasized pious behavior and learning outside the Church bureaucracy, which obviously had nothing to do with communing with God. Choice D is incorrect because the Catholic Church in Italy maintained the traditional Christian view that pride in human achievement was a sin, a view at odds with aspiring to cultivate finer qualities in oneself. Finally, a doge was a military leader who wielded political power in some Italian city-states and had nothing to do with this (or any other) belief about communing with God.
5. B. The invasion of Italy by the French triggered the spread of the Renaissance to the rest of Europe, but it did not contribute to the Renaissance artistic achievement. Choice A is incorrect because the Renaissance popes were motivated by Renaissance ideals to patronize the arts, so they were a factor contributing to artistic achievement. Similarly, choice C is incorrect because the popes’ elite counterparts in other city-states were also motivated to patronize the arts, so they were also a factor contributing to artistic achievement. Choice D is incorrect because the apprentice system helped increase the number of artists, which therefore led to more artistic works, increased ability to mix the techniques of various artistic media (e.g., painting and sculpting), and greater artistic achievement. Finally, choice E is incorrect because the commissioning of artistic works by specific business contracts meant that there was an unprecedented call for Renaissance artists.
6. A. The Treaty of Lodi, signed in the midfifteenth century, established a balance of power that helped keep other European powers out of the Italian peninsula, which therefore inhibited rather than enabled the spread of the Renaissance. Choice B is incorrect because Milan’s invitation to Charles VIII to bring troops to Italy helped shatter that balance of power and isolation at the end of the fifteenth century, which then began a series of events that did lead to the spread of the Renaissance. Choice C is incorrect because the invention of the printing press helped spread Renaissance ideas elsewhere in Europe. Choice D is incorrect because students and teachers who migrated in and out of the Italian peninsula also helped spread Renaissance ideas. Finally, choice E is incorrect because the lay piety movement associated learning with pious behavior, which also helped spread Renaissance ideas.
7. D. Renaissance art was characterized by its concern for the human form. Choice A is incorrect because Renaissance artists did not specialize; in contrast, they were trained in all media. Choice B is incorrect because this focus on the human form was a move away from religious subject matter, which characterized most art before the Renaissance (for example, think of all the Medieval Madonna-and-child paintings and depictions of other Biblical scenes and Church icons). Choice C is incorrect for the same reason as choice A: Again, Renaissance artists did not abandon painting in favor of sculpture; instead, they were trained and worked in all media. Finally, choice E is incorrect because Renaissance art was, in fact, a business: Patrons commissioned and paid for all Renaissance art, so they were definitely required by artists during this time.
8. E. All of the answer choices are true: Choices A, B, and C are accurate and constitute the ways in which northern humanism helped to bring about the Reformation, thus choice D is also true.