Epilogue
OF ALL LEON Battista Alberti’s many and varied achievements, his most important and enduring contribution to the Renaissance was his contention that the ideal painting should be so vivid a representation of reality that when fixed to a wall, it could be mistaken for an “open window” (finestra aperta). The painter’s skill, he believed, lay in persuading the viewer that what he was looking at was, in fact, not a picture but the world itself.
The ultimate refinement of Alberti’s preoccupation with perspective, this idea was the foundation on which the edifice of Renaissance art was erected. It was the illusionistic effects of linear perspective—extolled so highly in Alberti’s De pictura—that permitted the art of the Renaissance not only to imitate the perceived perfection of classical statuary but also to imitate nature itself. And it was this unprecedented combination of breathtaking classicism and staggering naturalism that endowed Renaissance art with the aura of sublime beauty for which it has become famed.
By virtue of its impact on the visual arts, Alberti’s image of the painting as a finestra aperta has also come to play an important role in the way that the period as a whole has come to be viewed. When one is confronted with any of the great artworks of the age—from the anonymous Ideal City and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ to Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—it is all too easy to be seduced into thinking that one is, in fact, looking at a window onto the Renaissance as it really was, and to regard the lives of men like Alberti with the admiring awe that such paintings inspire.
But what was really important about Alberti’s idea of the “open window” was that it was an illusion. Although a skillful artist could delude the viewer into thinking that a painting was a window onto reality, the painting always remained just a painting. It showed the world not as it was but as the artist and his patron wished it to be. It was a fantasy.
That Alberti’s perfect artist was an illusionist par excellence, however, is not to say that the visual arts do not provide a window onto the Renaissance. Quite the reverse. If we look behind the facade of beauty, the social world on which the artist’s imagination fed shines through in the circumstances of composition, in the attitudes embodied in the scene, and in incidental details that are included (or omitted). And it is in this that the true character of the Renaissance becomes clear. Far from being an age of unalloyed wonder, it was a period of sex, scandal, and suffering. Its cities were filled with depravity and inequality, its streets pullulated with prostitutes and perverted priests, and its houses played home to seduction, sickness, shady backroom deals, and conspiracies of every variety. Bending artists to their will, its foremost patrons were corrupt bankers yearning for power, murderous mercenary generals teetering on the edge of sanity, and irreligious popes hankering after money and influence. And it was an age in which other peoples and cultures were mercilessly raped, while anti-Semitism and Islamophobia reached fever pitch, and ever more insidious forms of bigotry and prejudice were developed to accommodate the discovery of new lands. If Alberti’s window looks onto the Renaissance, it looks onto a very ugly Renaissance indeed.
Although at some considerable remove from familiar perceptions of the period, this is not an indictment of the Renaissance. Nor does it mean that the artistic and literary accomplishments of men like Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, Petrarch, and Boccaccio should be downplayed. Far from it. By understanding the true awfulness of the social life of the Renaissance, we can appreciate its achievements all the more. While not everything about the Renaissance may be praiseworthy, or even particularly pleasant, it is far more impressive that artists and litterateurs should have created works that can still be admired for their brilliance and beauty, despite their having lived in an age of ghastliness, suffering, bigotry, and intolerance. Indeed, this only seems to lend an even greater sense of excitement and exhilaration to the Renaissance as a whole. Had the period’s cultural actors been living gods inhabiting a heavenly land, their quest for the sublime would seem neither surprising nor particularly impressive. When the ugliness of the period is brought to light, it seems all the more inspiring that men and women should have aspired to the perfect and the ideal, and dreamed of creating something better and more radiant than anything they had ever experienced. To put this rather differently, it is more impressive that a man lying in the gutter should reach for the stars than that a god atop Olympus should shape cherubs from clouds.
Yet if the visual arts can be used as a window onto the Renaissance as it really was, the culture of this most remarkable of periods can also serve as a mirror for today’s world, and it is at this point that the exaltation of the past must give way to an indictment of the present.
One of the most striking things about the “ugly” Renaissance is that—with the exception of technology—it was not so very different from the modern world. There is certainly no less suffering than there was in Italy six hundred years ago. The streets still crawl with vice, and the city squares are still home to rape, robbery, and murder. Politicians are still corrupt, shady characters, mercenaries still rampage around certain parts of the world, and bankers are still growing fat from their ill-gotten gains. Even though popes may be rather nicer than they were in the past, there is still no paucity of intrigue and sexual scandal in the Vatican. What is more, there is no less intolerance, no less bigotry, no less sickness, no less inequality. Poverty still abounds, and racism is still a terrifyingly common feature of daily life. Hatred between nations still grows, and appreciation of other cultures floats on the surface of a deep well of crude stereotypes and prejudicial ignorance.
But whereas the vileness of the Renaissance inspired both patrons and artists to strive for something more, today’s world seems all too comfortable to surround itself with an ocean of unimaginative grayness. Even though technological developments have made it possible to achieve more than ever before, there is no real aspiration to go beyond function, no desire to aspire to anything better or more perfect. Indeed, if anything, there is a sense of contented mediocrity, of self-satisfied cultural stagnation, and of deliberate disdain for beauty and excellence.
History is admittedly a poor teacher, and such lessons as it can impart should usually be treated with extreme caution. But when we hold the mirror of the Renaissance up to the face of the modern world, it is hard not to be roused by a sense that there is, in fact, a lesson that needs to be learned, and urgently. However dreadful contemporary life may be, it is essential never to be deluded into thinking that material suffering necessitates cultural mediocrity, unabashed ugliness, or the abandonment of the ideal. Exactly the opposite is true. The darker the night may seem, the more fervently should men yearn for the clear light of the dawn, and the more avidly should they long to fill it with beauty and wonder. If scandal, suffering, and corruption must exist, let them do so while filling the world with monuments to the indomitable brilliance of the human imagination, transforming the earth into a living, breathing monument to the sublime, so that in six hundred years’ time men may look back at this age and sigh with amazement to think that such miracles were possible. In short, dreams must be dreamed again. A new Renaissance is long overdue.