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AT ABOUT THE time he was completing the Barbadori Altarpiece, Filippo Lippi was unconsciously standing on the threshold of one of the greatest periods of adventure and discovery in human history. Although Renaissance Italy had come into progressively closer contact with Hebraic, Islamic, and black African cultures over the past century, its entire worldview was about to be shattered by a series of staggering voyages that would transform the earth for ever more. In a little over fifty years, the Atlantic would open, and an Italian navigator would set foot on the unimagined shores of America.
Despite the monumental scale of the discoveries that were beginning to take shape, they had comparatively little impact on the cultural imagination of the period. From the late 1430s onward, Italians nurtured only the most distracted form of curiosity about the new and unknown lands being explored. Not only had very little hard evidence of the mysterious new islands reached the peninsula by that stage, but a sense of intellectual arrogance also conspired to keep expectations of the Atlantic world low. There was little willingness to believe that explorers could find anything more than a different route to already familiar lands. At best, it was thought that a few vague references to shadowy islets in the classical histories might be fleshed out and a new means of trading with the East might be discovered, but nothing more. And even if there actually were something unexpected out there, it was firmly believed that all that was civilized had already been found.
Filled with supreme self-confidence, humanists were happy to extol the heroism of pioneering navigators, but fell back on fantasy and disdain when it came to the peoples and territories being explored. Artists like Filippo Lippi, however, failed even to register the changing fate of humanity. Cartography aside, not a single trace of the Atlantic world is to be found in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century art, and it seems almost as if a conscious effort were made to ignore the voyages of discovery in their entirety.
With the benefit of hindsight, this is perhaps the most surprising and counterintuitive feature of the Renaissance. But in unpicking the various strands of this story, we can see that in coming into contact with the undreamed-of lands and peoples of the western ocean, the men and women of the Renaissance revealed the truest extent of their intellectual ambivalence and cultural cynicism.
EXPANDING HORIZONS
Before about 1300, the Atlantic Ocean had been treated only with the most indirect interest and was seen primarily through the lens of the trade with the Far East. Although Pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville had hinted vaguely about a few scattered islands off the African coast, and the Nordic sagas had told of a shadowy area that they dubbed Vinland, Italians had had little time for such apparently fanciful myths. To them, the Atlantic was a watery void that separated Europe from China, Java, and “Cipangu” (Japan), a notion readily enshrined in carefully prepared but grotesquely ill-conceived maps. Back in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo had authoritatively stated that Cipangu was an island that was likely to be reached well before China if one were to sail west from Portugal, and whenever medieval writers spoke of islands out in the Atlantic—such as the “Isle of the Seven Cities,” allegedly colonized by Christians who had fled from Muslim Spain—the presumption was that they were merely part of the giant, little-known archipelago east of India from which spices were brought. And while perceptions of these “Indian” islands were still dominated by ideas of dog-headed men and rivers of gold, there was little sense that anything totally unexpected was out there.
The allure of a sea route to the Indies was, however, to provide the impetus that led to a more searching exploration of the Atlantic world. Thoughts had begun to turn to discovering a new means of trading with the East even before the Renaissance bore its first fruits. As early as 1291, two Venetian brothers—Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi—had set sail in two galleys in the hope of reaching India by voyaging around the Moroccan coast, and though the expedition disappeared without a trace, the appetites of seagoing states had been whetted by the first whiff of possibility. By the dawn of the fourteenth century, more concerted efforts were already being made. The discovery of Lanzarote in 1312 by the Genoese sailor Lancelotto Malocello marked something of a watershed. Although his journey, too, failed to reveal the hoped-for route to the Indies, it nevertheless showed that there was more to ancient and medieval tales than anyone had previously supposed, an impression further strengthened by a subsequent, more systematic expedition to the Canary Islands in 1341. The Atlantic wasn’t just an empty void. There was definitely something else out there. And what was more, the inhabitants of the Fortunate Isles (as the Canaries were known) had shown that there were people out there, too.
By the time Filippo Lippi had completed the Barbadori Altarpiece, exploration west of the Pillars of Hercules was gaining pace, and as the steady rise of the Ottoman Turks put ever more obstacles in the way of the Silk Road, the urge for maritime adventurism grew ever stronger. While hopes for a new passage to the East were still running high, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Atlantic was a much busier and richer place than even people of Lippi’s grandparents’ generation had dared dream. Although the Spanish and the Portuguese were taking the lead, Italian sailors were taking part in ever more far-reaching expeditions, and a veritable torrent of news of new and exciting lands was reaching Florence every day. In 1418–19, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira discovered Porto Santo and Madeira, and barely eight years later, in 1427, Diogo de Silves found the Azores while venturing even farther west of the African coast. In the years that followed, Prince Henry the Navigator set his sights on exploiting the resources of the new lands and sent out a number of expeditions both to document the precise character of the islands and—if possible—to establish permanent trading settlements in the name of the Portuguese crown. The full-scale conquest of the Canary Islands—beginning with the 1402 expedition of Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle and continuing throughout the century—opened the doors to an ever more direct and searching quest for commercially and militarily valuable information.
By the autumn of 1492, an almost unknown Genoese captain would cross the Atlantic and change the world forever. Despite not being altogether sure at first about the identity of the new lands he had discovered, Christopher Columbus landed at San Salvador on the morning of October 12 and became the first European to set foot on Cuba just over two weeks later, on October 28. Irrespective of the inaccuracies and vagaries of his initial stabs at geography, Columbus opened the doors to a completely new world, and the floodgates to the full-blown exploration of the Americas were blown open. On his subsequent voyages in 1493–94, Columbus followed up his first successes with the discovery of modern-day Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles. Barely three years later, Zuan Chabotto (John Cabot) made landfall in Newfoundland, and in the last years of the fifteenth century Columbus, Alonso de Ojeda, and the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci had begun to penetrate the mysterious depths of South America. And by the time the sixteenth century was under way, the Atlantic had become a veritable superhighway of adventure and exploration.
NEWS TRAVELS
In terms of importance and magnitude, the voyages of discovery that began in the early fourteenth century and continued well into the sixteenth were far greater than the first manned mission to the moon, and it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the sense of wonder felt by Europeans. This being so, it is perhaps no surprise that “discovery” should have become so integral to the way in which the Renaissance as a whole has come to be seen, and there remains a peculiar resonance to Burckhardt’s view of its impact. “Yet ever and again,” the Swiss historian wrote, thinking of Columbus,
we turn with admiration to the august figure of the great Genoese, by whom a new continent beyond the ocean was demanded, sought, and found, and who was the first to be able to say: “il mondo è poco”—the world is not so large as men thought.
As new horizons were opened to the imagination, and new peoples were encountered with every passing year, both the world and humanity itself gradually assumed an entirely different character, and though often mediated by the great maritime nations of Portugal and Spain, news of the new discoveries was absorbed with tremendous enthusiasm by Italians from Venice to Naples, before finding expression in the writings of humanists and scholars up and down the peninsula.
Even before the discovery of the Madeira archipelago and the Azores, fourteenth-century Florentines, in particular, had shown a marked appetite for knowledge of the oceanic territories and their peoples, and Peter Burke has rightly observed that from the beginning Italians “played an important role” not only in “the process of discovery” but also “in spreading the news.” Drawing on the tales of a maritime adventurer named Niccolò da Recco, Boccaccio penned an excited account of a journey to the Canary Islands (the De Canaria) that was replete with details about the inhabitants’ exotic dress, social institutions, agricultural practices, and musical habits. A little later, even Petrarch—whose source of information appears to have been a “man of noble stock mixed of the royal blood of Spain and France,” presumably Luis de la Cerda—displayed his excitement about the new lands, by including an excursus on the habits of the Canary Islanders in his De vita solitaria. Both texts revealed a close interest in recording precise—and, on occasion, even pedantic—details about the new lands, and displayed a hunger for knowledge about the topography and anthropology of the Atlantic territories that is redolent of a wide-eyed inquisitiveness.
During Filippo Lippi’s own lifetime, the speed with which information began to arrive from the Canary Islands and the Azores seems to have stimulated an even greater interest in the recovery of exact knowledge. In this regard, it is telling that the two canon lawyers appointed by Pope Eugenius IV to inquire into the future legal status of the islanders at the Council of Basel—Antonio Minucci da Pratovecchio and Antonio Roselli—were preoccupied with identifying the religious and social habits of the Canarian natives. Similarly, richly illustrated accounts of the conquests of Béthencourt and de la Salle (especially Le Canarien, by Jean Le Verrier and Pierre Bontier) not only became wildly popular throughout Europe but also helped to meet a growing fascination for the new Atlantic world among lettered men.
Not only did literary appetites grow ever stronger after Lippi’s death, but the feast that was offered to sate the hunger of Italians avid for news also became richer in almost every respect. Even before Columbus made landfall on San Salvador, Poliziano wrote to the king of Portugal with breathless excitement about the “discoveries of new lands, new seas, new worlds,” and one can only imagine the palpitations of amazement that followed the announcement of the Genoese captain’s great finds. The sixteenth century had barely begun when firsthand accounts started to circulate, first in manuscript form, then in finely turned printed volumes. Columbus’s account of his travels rapidly circulated; Vespucci’s description of his own voyage enjoyed considerable popularity; and the narrative of the Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano (who concentrated on the North American coast) was enthusiastically read, despite its relative obscurity today. Even secondhand accounts were phenomenally popular (possibly more so than their better-informed source texts) and testify to the excitement that was abroad. Swiftly following in the wake of Vespucci’s letters, the Italian-born Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (1457–1526) published a raft of works on the exploration of the Americas—including theDecades and the De orbe novo—which constituted an important vehicle for disseminating information about the new lands to a wider audience. And in a similar vein, the Venetian bureaucrat Gianbattista Ramusio responded to the popular desire for more specific accounts of the topographical and anthropological character of the Americas with his multivolume Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550–59), often described as one of the first truly modern works of geography. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know just how small the world was becoming.
Thrilled by these discoveries, cartographers such as Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482) and Giovanni Matteo Contarini (d. 1507) rushed to improve their art so as to provide more accurate representations of a changing world, and humanists competed with one another in a bid to celebrate the “heroic” achievements of contemporary explorers in a fittingly classical fashion. In 1589, for example, Giulio Cesare Stella (1564–1624) was obliged to rush into print with an unfinished version of part of his Columbeis—the first attempt to cast Columbus’s voyages in the mold of pseudo-Virgilian epic—to head off a pirated edition that was already hitting the market in response to heavy demand. If ancient conquerors and sailors deserved high praise, how much more praise did those who made the world a smaller place deserve?
INVISIBLE WORLDS
Yet to say that there was a natural hunger for information about the discoveries being made is not to say that curiosity succeeded in firing the imagination quite as much as modern historians are often inclined to believe. Indeed, it is not implausible to suggest that the cultural impact Renaissance explorers are often thought to have exerted is more a construct of recent perceptions of the intrinsic value of “scientific” novelty than of the realities of the artistic imagination of the period. Remarkable though the opening of the Atlantic world may have been, artists both before and after Lippi’s lifetime simply weren’t all that gripped by the idea of the new lands in the West.
It was not that the adventures of Malocello, de Silves, Béthencourt, Columbus, and Vespucci completely failed to find visual expression on Italian soil. After the advent of the printing press, editions of geographical works, chronicles, and first- and secondhand narratives—many of which were published on Italian soil—habitually included not only a selection of detailed maps but also a smattering of carefully crafted woodcuts or engravings by way of illustration. Thus, in the third volume of Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi (Venice, 1556), for example, there were detailed pictures of unfamiliar plants, such as maize and plantain leaves, and images of distinctive aboriginal tools, such as the fire drill. But for the most part, such visual images of the New World seldom merit description as serious works of representation. They were almost never drawn from direct observation (artists not being thought essential to voyages of discovery) and were habitually cobbled together from a mixture of hearsay and fantasy with a view more to titillating the reader than to recording any meaningful information. To make matters worse, a great number of woodcuts included in narrative accounts of early Atlantic encounters were simply recycled from other printed texts, most of which had absolutely nothing to do with the New World. Hence, in some of the earliest printings of Vespucci’s Quattuor navigationes, the explorer meets a host of cannibalistic natives busily hacking up human limbs ready for their evening meal, while other texts commonly include depictions of Native Americans canoeing in bathtubs and inland waterways populated by mermaids.
Such hackneyed scrawls accounted for most of what was on offer. No one except the most amateurish of wood-carvers seems to have had the slightest concern for anything coming from across the Atlantic. For almost the entire Renaissance, the lands to the west of the Pillars of Hercules failed to make any significant impact on art in any of its forms, and it is in vain that even the most dedicated of connoisseurs may search for some trace of the Canaries, the Azores, or even the Americas in the painting and sculpture of the period. Even though a smattering of exotic artifacts had made their way across the Atlantic into the collections of some of the more noted courtly collectors by the mid-sixteenth century, nothing seemed capable of stirring a single Italian artist into taking up his brush, charcoal, or chisel in the service of the New World, and it was with some alarm that the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557) lamented the fact that neither Leonardo da Vinci nor the otherwise acutely sensitive Andrea Mantegna had bothered to capture anything “American” on canvas. No other area of the world, no other culture, and no other people was so poorly served by the arts. Even Jews, Muslims, and black Africans—all of whom were the objects of bigotry and hatred—were better represented in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting. Indeed, if the works of the Renaissance’s greatest artists were the only evidence used, it might seem as if the voyages of discovery never happened at all.
SCARCELY PROFITABLE AND BARELY HUMAN
If the dreadful treatment meted out to Jews, Muslims, and black Africans seems to contradict the familiar image of the Renaissance as a time of open-mindedness and tolerance, the complete disregard shown by artists of the period for the Atlantic world appears to raise even more challenging questions about the extent to which “discovery” really played a role in shaping the character of the age that has become renowned for its sense of curiosity and learning. The paradox of Renaissance artists’ knowledge of and disregard for the leaps being made into the oceanic void demands some sort of explanation, if only to try desperately to rescue something from the ghastly mess in which Renaissance interactions with the “other” have become mired.
But explaining why something did not happen is a precarious business, simply because the evidence—by definition—does not exist. Although it is clear that Renaissance artists all but ignored the voyages of discovery, the absence of visual references to the Atlantic world makes it difficult to determine why they did so. Yet even though conclusive proof may be hard to find, two parallel developments seem to offer an attractive—if not wholly encouraging—explanation for the staggeringly blinkered view of artists.
The first revolves around that most characteristically Renaissance preoccupation: money. Even more so than today, cash was king, and as previous chapters have shown, artists followed the financial interests of their patrons with the same enthusiasm that starved puppies chase meat carts. And the simple fact was that—insofar as Renaissance Italy was concerned—the voyages of discovery could pretty much go hang. Although the influx of gold and silver bullion from the New World kept all Europe afloat through the destructive warfare of later centuries, the first, tentative journeys into the Atlantic world didn’t generate very much in the way of money. It wasn’t that they didn’t put out feelers. The Genoese, for example, enthusiastically supported Portuguese and Spanish ventures from the early fifteenth century onward (partly in response to growing Venetian domination of the eastern Mediterranean), while a number of early transatlantic crossings were made by flotillas carrying Florentine prospectors—such as Giovanni da Empoli, who was sent into the unknown by his merchant-banking employers for the first time in 1503–4—in search of monetary reward. But despite this, none of Italy’s great trading centers felt any significant financial benefit from the opening of the Atlantic islands and the early trips to the American mainland except through the granting of loans to Catalan adventurers at spectacularly exorbitant rates of interest. Although the coastal territories of West Africa generated no end of cash, the Canary Islands, the Azores, the newly dubbed West Indies, and the Americas seemed to be all but barren, and even indirect trade through the Iberian powers (between whom the New World had already been divided up) brought little of any real value to the markets of Florence, Rome, and Milan. It was not until well into the sixteenth century that any signs of genuine profit began to emerge, and that men like the Florentine merchant banker Luca Giraldi (d. 1565) were tempted to seek their fortunes in the New World. And by then, the Renaissance proper was already on the wane. Since their patrons showed little more than a vague, peripheral curiosity in the Atlantic world, artists lacked any monetary incentive to show any interest either.
But if the first of the possible reasons for the absence of “discovery” from Renaissance art appears cynical, the second is disturbing. For if Italians of Lippi’s generation were money obsessed, they were also completely unwilling to open their minds up to novelty unless they were positively forced to do so.
At root, the belief that discovery, objective knowledge, and tolerant relativism are inescapably connected is a modern fiction. As previous chapters have suggested in relation to other peoples encountered by Renaissance Italians, the acquisition of knowledge was seldom anything less than highly subjective, and almost never led to anything like the self-questioning tolerance that post-Enlightenment individuals might feel to be natural. Indeed, if anything, the growth of understanding only led to the refinement of prejudice and the strengthening of hatred. The discovery of the Atlantic world simply put a new and even more sinister spin on an already well-established tendency.
Far from being a pure source of fresh and unblemished learning, the potentially invaluable contribution of explorers’ observations of the new worlds of the Atlantic sat “as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumor, convention and endlessly recycled fable.” It was not just that the fragments of useful information they brought back were habitually twisted into altogether more fantastical forms by authors more willing to trust their imaginations than firsthand accounts, but also that explorers themselves were all too happy to use myth, fable, and downright prejudice as a lens through which to survey the new lands. A whole host of “bastard” sources were employed as intellectual crutches by explorers and their glossators—from woefully outdated classical geographies to medieval legends and old wives’ tales—but it was perhaps the prevailing religious sentiments of still deeply Catholic Europe that provided the greatest and most important filter for knowledge of the new western territories and their peoples. And, at root, religious prejudices really did stack the odds against the aboriginal inhabitants both of the Canary Islands and of the Americas ever being regarded as truly “human,” let alone civilized.
On the one hand, there was always a niggling suspicion that previously unknown territories were home to monsters who were either manifestly hideous or otherwise bereft of the physiological “humanity” possessed by all those in Europe. The Bible was, after all, replete with stories of strange giants and horrific creatures who lived before the Flood, and it was hard to shake the feeling that perhaps some of them had survived unscathed in the distant lands of the West. On the other hand, even if new peoples passed the test of “physical or biological anthropology,” that did not mean they were automatically entitled to be regarded as full members of the human race. A rather peculiar reading of the early chapters of Genesis could lead Renaissance thinkers to equate humanity with certain fairly rigid standards of existence. Although “evidence of social anthropology”—in terms of “behaviour, conduct, [and] technology”—was one of the principal criteria upon which the human status of new peoples was judged, David Abulafia has observed (with characteristic brilliance) that any deviation from accepted norms of “civilized” existence could be taken as proof that superficially manlike beings were actually “inhuman” creatures who lacked the soul that was possessed even by such hated heretics as Jews and Muslims. Judged against such criteria, any new cultures were always going to have difficulty coming off well. Indeed, it was nigh on impossible for any aboriginal person to convince a Renaissance explorer of his humanity unless he appeared dressed in the latest European fashion, speaking flawless Latin from the threshold of his stone-built town house.
Although Boccaccio seems to have been comparatively ahead of his time in attempting to present the Canary Islanders as the inhabitants of some sort of pastoral idyll, untouched by the sins of Italian city life, the general Renaissance attitude toward the peoples of the Atlantic was—unsurprisingly—overwhelmingly negative. Both eyewitness testimonies and secondhand accounts seemed to go out of their way to stress the unchristian barbarity and subhuman savagery of the aboriginals of the Atlantic world. Taking an uncharacteristic swipe at his friend Boccaccio, Petrarch wasted few words in dismissing the Canary Islanders as scarcely worth the consideration of Christian believers. Though noting that they were, in some senses, exemplars of a certain version of the vita solitariahe wished to praise, Petrarch observed that the inhabitants of the “Fortunate Isles”
are without refinement in their habits and so little unlike brute beasts that their action is more the outcome of natural instinct than of rational choice, and you might say that they did not so much lead the solitary life as roam about in solitudes either with wild beasts or with their flocks.
It was hardly a ringing endorsement of even the most limited sense of “humanity,” but it was still an awful lot more positive than the statements that were shortly to follow. Only two years before Lippi completed the Barbadori Altarpiece, that is, in 1436, King Duarte of Portugal wrote to Eugenius IV in an attempt to persuade the pope to give him exclusive rights to own the Canary Islands, and, in doing so, endeavored to justify the total enslavement of their inhabitants by making their bestial savagery all too plain. If their complete ignorance of the most basic norms of civilized existence (metalworking, boatbuilding, writing) were not sufficient to highlight their distance from the Christian understanding of human nature, Duarte contended they were “nearly wild men” who lacked all understanding of law and lived “in the country like wild animals.”
But worse was yet to come. Although less openly abusive than Duarte’s letter to Eugenius IV, Amerigo Vespucci’s narrative of his first voyage to the Americas contained a description of an aboriginal people that was, if anything, even more scathing in its implications. Every last point upon which their claim to “humanity” could be based was demolished with breezy insouciance:
They observe most barbarous customs in their eating: indeed, they do not take their meals at any fixed hours, but eat when- ever they are so inclined, whether it be day or night. At meals they recline on the ground and do not use either tablecloths or napkins, being entirely unacquainted with linen and other kinds of cloth. The food is served in earthen pots which they make themselves, or else in receptacles made out of half-gourds … In their sexual intercourse, they have no legal obligations. In fact, each man has as many wives as he covets, and he can repudiate them later whenever he pleases, without it being considered an injustice or disgrace, and the women enjoy the same rights as the men. The men are not very jealous; they are, however, very sensual. The women are even more so than the men. I have deemed it best (in the name of decency) to pass over in silence their many arts to gratify their insatiable lust.
Irregular eating hours, the absence of table linen, gender equality, and free love may not seem like the be-all and end-all of human nature today, but for a man of Vespucci’s Florentine upbringing they were sure signs of savage, even frightening bestiality, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that he may have woven in a few prejudices applied to other peoples (the echo of criticisms of Islamic polygamy is, for example, a tempting case in point) just to make his point all the clearer. But even if this were not enough, Vespucci felt it necessary to stress the total inhumanity of the Native Americans he encountered by adding a brief description of their religious—or, rather, irreligious—habits:
No one of this race, as far as we saw, observed any religious law. They can not justly be called either Jews or Muslims; nay, they are far worse than the gentiles themselves or the pagans, for we could not discover that they performed any sacrifices, nor that they had any special places or houses of worship. Since their life is so entirely given over to pleasure, I should style it Epicurean.
Vespucci could hardly have been more damning if he tried. In the eyes of his Florentine contemporaries, such pleasure-loving aboriginals were infinitely more abhorrent than Jews or Muslims. A people without religion barely deserved to be called human.
Even had the Atlantic world had any real monetary interest for the cities of northern Italy before the late sixteenth century, such attitudes ensured that artists like Filippo Lippi would never really have any interest in depicting Canary Islanders or Native Americans in their works. Lacking any semblance of culture, apparently despising the norms of civilized existence, and seemingly contemptuous of any form of religion, these peoples were scarcely recognizable as men and were hence, as Lippi and his contemporaries suspected, beneath the attention of any self-respecting Renaissance artist. In contrast to Jews, Muslims, and black Africans—all of whom were thought to have at least some underlying humanity worth exploiting, irrespective of the ghastly prejudices to which they were subject—the Atlantic peoples and their lands were simply not thought worthy of artistic attention. Their invisibility was the most damning form of condemnation and bigotry that could have been imagined, and, perversely, an eloquent statement of the attitudes that not only allowed the New World to be pillaged with such impunity by “civilized” Europeans in the coming years, but that also permitted its peoples to be enslaved, brutalized, and slaughtered with such wanton abandon for centuries to come.
Disdain for epoch-making discoveries that were gathering pace during the fifteenth century may not have been unusual, but it was neverthe- less a revealing testimony to the true manner in which many Renaissance Italians perceived their relationship with the broadening horizons of the Atlantic world. Far from being the centerpiece of a new age of openness, filled with intellectual curiosity and learning that provided the stimulus for an unparalleled sense of self-reflection and self-discovery, the voyages of discovery were the opportunity for some of the worst sentiments imaginable. Minds were closed, the bounds of humanity were fenced in ever more tightly, and entire peoples were written off as unworthy of inclusion in the human race; and all the while, explorers were hailed as heroes and their horrific excesses glossed over in the most deadening artistic silence of all time.
But what is so remarkable is that the fate of the Atlantic peoples was merely the most extreme and breathtakingly underappreciated example of a broader trend in the history of the ugly Renaissance. It was an age not of tolerance and understanding but of exploitation and rapine. In the space of only a few brief years in Florence alone—the epicenter of the staggering cultural innovations that have come to cloak the period as a whole with such an aura of brilliance—Salomone di Bonaventura experienced the first worrying signs of violent anti-Semitism, Alberto da Sarteano ushered in some of the earliest witnesses to the oppression of sub-Saharan Africa, and Filippo Lippi himself embraced the tide of Islamophobia while nodding quietly at the dispatch of the Atlantic. It may have been an age of unparalleled cultural encounters, but as far as artists like Lippi were concerned, everyone was fair game, and no people could ever expect more in return for their sufferings than the most patronizing of nods in the corner of a painting. Far from highlighting the glory of a period habitually celebrated for its “modernity,” the art of men like Filippo Lippi concealed a Renaissance that was, if anything, beyond merely ugly.