The Italian Renaissance was an intellectual and artistic movement in which renewed appreciation of Greek and Roman antiquity sparked creative advances in a number of fields, painting, sculpture, architechture, and not least history and linguistics.

It would be false to say that the men of the Italian Renaissance were, or wished to be entirely free of Christian influence; but some of them were now listening more closely to the prescriptions of the pagan Roman Cicero than the king whose kingdom is not of this world.  Certainly, the Italian Renaissance was a movement that was quite critical  of the international clerical establishment that had dominated intellectual life and all discussions of morality and values for so many centuries.

The Italians were not the only people doing interesting things in the fifteenth century.  In art especially, they seem to have learned some important things, such as the use of oil paints, from northerners.  The European printing press came out of Germany, not Italy.    But it was Italy, especially the city of Florence, which took the lead, setting styles in thought, literary expression, art and education that would spread across Europe in the years before 1500 and continue to have a catalytic effect in other cultures for decades, even centuries.

If the Italian Renaissance was in large part a movement of lay self-assertion, it is only natural that it should grow up in the country where the laity were most sophisticated and most educated.  Italy, though it was the home base of the Roman church and a country with a wealthy and influential clergy, was also a country where the laity was wealthy and self-confident.  Since the eleventh century, Italians had dominated the commercial dealings of the Mediterranean and Western European worlds, had done it by cleverly exploiting their initial advantages and consolidating those advantages through superior organization.

There can hardly be organization over vast distances without literacy.   For a long time before the Renaissance, north and central Italy, the most urbanized part of the peninsula, were areas where many people who had no aspirations for the priesthood thought that education had some value for them.  It was the fact that they were educated that made it possible for Italian laymen to hold their own in disputes with their clerical brothers and cousins.  The gap between them, in terms of sophistication, was not so great as it was most other places.

Another distinctive aspect of Italian medieval culture was that  many laymen counted for something in the life of the community.  Elsewhere medieval Europe, the most powerful laymen were almost exclusively from the nobility, whose claim to authority was the ability to fight and their control over the land and the peasants who worked it.  This is because political power
depended on rural resources.  But in Italy, as long ago as the year 1000, towns and the people in them were the key to prosperity and political clout.  As a result, during the High Middle Ages, Italian towns had gained independence from outside authority and, within their walls, governments based on the broad participation of the inhabitants.  In the 12th and 13th centuries, each town was run by a commune, a voluntary association of all the respectable citizens, sworn to common action and common responsibility for the good of the town.  The citizen ideal, so often associated with the Renaissance, existed in north and central Italy long before.

A prime example of a well-educated, active citizen in the medieval period is the poet Dante, author of the Divine Comedy (Details in class.)

The example of Dante, whose literary work became incredibly popular in his home town after his death, may have been a crucial influence in encouraging the lay citizens of Florence to intellectual ambition.  One of the most important for the further development of the Italian lay spirit was Francesco Petrarch, who lived from 1304 to 1374, most of the time out of his home city.  Petrarch was officially a cleric, and even held several clerical posts in his time, but increasingly through his life he became disenchanted with the clerical culture of his time, and its intellectual establishment.  He looked to ancient writers to provide a more elevating type of literary and moral formation: his favorites were Cicero and the late ancient bishop Augustine, a man great writing ability.  Petrarch wrote much himself, both in the Tuscan Italian language he shared with Dante, and Latin, which he considered to be inherently superior to the languages of his own time, at least if written in the antique manner.

Petrarch's legacy can be summarized in two points: First, he taught people that the ancients, especially the pagan ancients,
lived in world that was much different from their own.  Although medieval intellectuals were quite aware of the ages of paganism that preceded the Christian era, they had no clear idea of how the culture of antiquity differed from their own.  They knew that ancient people lacked the saving grace of Christianity, but had no idea that the ancients wore different clothes, talked about different subjects, and had different habits from themselves.  Pagan thinkers were studied in the schools, not as historical
figures, but as scientific or philosophical authorities who had, salvation apart, known a lot of useful things about the world.  Petrarch, reading classical works and such early Christians as Augustine from cover to cover instead of in textbook snippets, realized that Cicero, for instance, had been a real human being.  Petrarch valued the ancient writers, and what they said about virute so highly that he reversed a common saying about the pagan past.  It was not antiquity, before Christ, that was the age of
darkness; it was the intervening period between these great writers and himself that was the age of darkness, the dark or Middle Ages of our own historical imagination, which Petrarch helped invent..

The second legacy of Petrarch was his belief that the recovery of the unabridged works of antiquity andthe mastery of the pure Latin of old was the most important goal of anyone who desired to be wise and virtuous.  Similarly, reviving the pure old Latin as a means of expression, was vital.  This emphasis on literary excellence on an ancient model is called humanism.  (Note the difference between this definition and the most common use of "humanism" today.)   In Florence a small but influential group formed something like a cult of humanism.  It was in Florence itself that the next steps in the Renaissance were taken.

Florence in the late 14th and the early 15th centuries was perhaps uniquely favorable home for a lay philosophical movement. Florence was still one of the wealthiest cities in Europe.  Florence was also a city with a lot of social elbow room.  The
government of Florence from our point of view would seem extremely conservative and oligarchical, fearful of potential violence from the poor workers who were denied political influence.  But Florence was much freer than other Italian cities.  By 1400, all the other major cities except Venice had lost their republican constitutions, and were ruled by tyrants, strongmen who were trying to make themselves hereditary princes.  On this standard of comparison, Florence was a sturdy republic.  It was a good
place to debate questions of virtue and how to attain it, the central concern of most humanists, because many people had the possibility of acting on their own conclusions.

But up until about 1400, Florentine humanists, led by the chancellor of the republic, Caluccio Salutati, had a scant appreciation for their own environment.  Humanism at this point was a very small, very elitist movement, with little concern for the public dimension of a man's life. Attaining virtue was seen pretty much in terms of withdrawal from the world, as clerical thinkers had been preaching for a thousand years.

In the years just after 1400, however, younger humanists from Salutati's circle adopted a uniquely Florentine stance that was to be extremely important.  To a great degree, this was a result of the political situation their home city found itself in those years.  Florentine independence and republican liberty were in grave danger.  Florentine resistance had been steadfast; Florentines had some reason to think well of their own courage and patriotism during the crisis.  When situations caled for them to fight for liberty, they responded positively again and again, and with luck, they won.

Among the people who were inspired by this struggle were the humanists.  In humanist circles, though not only there, the idea grew up that Florentine civic liberty was a heritage of antiquity, the most valuable heritage left by the Romans.  We can see the change in humanist attitudes in their historical theories of Florentine origins.  Early humanists had, like non-humanists, been proud of the legend that Julius Caesar had founded Florence, and that Florence had fought with him in the Roman civil
wars.  In the fifteenth century, humanists, struck by the similarity between the dictator Caesar and their tyrannical and monarchical enemies, looked for, and found, roots for Florence in the pre-Caesarian Roman republic, or farther back in the free Etruscan city states.  The new origins emphasized that humanists were now valuing in their own city what their educated but non-humanist fellow citizens had long appreciated:  its liberty.  The humanists could now see that it was liberty that made their
own cultural pursuits possible, and they began to appreciate Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, men whose Latin was not up to  snuff by the latest standards, as men who had accomplished something valuable.  They were founders of a Florentine tradition whom the humanists were now proud to be part of.
 
Humanists reinterpreted their ideal of education as the education suitable for the active man, the citizen who was not afraid to take part in the world's business, and not afraid to succeed.  Fifteenth century humanistsbegan to think of themselves as opposed not only to clerical intellectual mumbo-jumbo, but also opposed to monastic morality.  Poggio Bracciolini, one of the more forthright, wrote a book called  Against Hypocrites, in which he called monks "pseudo-humans," because they preached poverty and in his words "[made] our life sour," while "we [non-monks] keep them alive and build cities [Faludy, 37]."  This was written, it should be noted, at about the same time Czech radicals were attacking monasteries as contrary to true
religion.  Building cities, working in the world, was more meritorious in Poggio's eyes than any amount of ascetic self-denial, self-denial that was, as his title implies, a false front more often than not.

It is fascinating that in this time of struggle Florence was also giving birth to the artistic revolution that would give the Renaissance its powerful visual imagery.  There exists no proof that there was a direct connection between the civic humanists and the early revolutionary artists. Artists were still not the social equals of scholars. Nevertheless, Florence was blessed with some strong-minded, highly individualistic artists who also looked to both the ancient world and the artistic history of Florence itself for inspiration.

Renaissance art is characterized not only by its interest in the individual, but by the development of technique that made that depiction possible.  In sculpture, the direct study of ancient work made possible the mastery of correct proportion.  In painting, however, the Florentines were on their own because no ancient examples survived.  This merely pushed them on.  Brunelleschi developed mathematical principles of perspective that have been the meat and drink of artists ever since.  Mathematical analysis
of Roman buildings revealed similar secrets.  Brunelleschi also solved a problem that had been bothering Florentine architechs for decades.  The new cathedral required a dome to cover a central area 140 feet in diameter.This was too big, however, for medieval techniques, and so architects worked on other parts of the building rather than tackle it.  Brunelleschi was able to come up with a solution that did not require an impossibly large interior scaffolding, and finish off Florence's greatest public
building.  Well before this was done, the first of Florence's classical styled and inspired buildings, including Brunelleschi's own design for the Foundlings' Hospital, had been built.

Slowly this artistic movement and civic humanism grew closer together. Leon Battista Alberti, who worked in the mid-century, was a painter, writer, architect, and athlete, and a theorist of humanist education.

I must stress that neither the civic-moral movement nor the aristic one carried all before it.  For instance,  the morality of renunciation was energetically preached by Saint Bernardino of Siena, and got a good response in Florence as elsewhere.  Yet by the 1440s, the classically-oriented literary and artistic movements of Florence had made the city's name anew.  The ideas
inherent in these movements were extremely attractive, elsewhere in Italy and even north of the Alps.

The spread of Florentine influence was advanced by the stabilization of Italian politics in the same decade.  In part because of the efforts of the Florentine merchant Cosimo de' Medici and his international connections, connections all the
more solid because he was the banker of half of Europe, Italy settled down into five regional states, Florence, Milan, Venice, Naples and the Papal States, and several other small lordships dependent on them.  In 1454, an Italian League comitted the big five to a stable balance of power in the peninsula, a situation that was highly successful for about twenty years and lasted in a weaker form until 1492.

About the same time, Italian princes and popes began to compete in the field of patronage, and Florentine artists and architechs. Indeed, monarchs all over Europe wanted what only Florence had had in earlier days:  secretaries and propagandists who could justify their regimes in the best prose and with allusions to the greatness of the distant past.  An example of this is the English king, Henry VII, who supported an Italian historian who vilified Richard III's memory for him.

We must ask ourselves, when considering the spread of the Renaissance, what exactly was spreading.  Art, certainly.  A taste for a literature formed along classical lines, yes.  A greater appreciation for antiquity as something more the prelude to Christianity, of course.  A feeling for exactly how eras differ from one another, and the critical use of sources to explore the past through its documents was spreading among scholars all over Europe.  A cult of individualism and a belief in progress, spread too, since progress, in some fields, was so evident in the present.  Education in the classics was widely seen as the best guide to a virtuous life.  Even the study of Greek, hardly known in the west until it was pioneered in Florence in Cosimo's time, was increasingly taken up.

One thing that was not spreading was the ideas of republican liberty.  Some Renaissance attitudes transplanted quite nicely into a courtly setting, and these were easily incorporated in the monarchies, large and small, that dominated Europe.  Republicanism was far more restricted, and few felt that they could imitate the classical republics, or even propose that imitation.

Even in Florence itself, civic humanism was somewhat out of place by the mid-fifteenth century.  The success of Cosimo de' Medici in building a balance of power in Italy had been preceded by another -- the acquisition of ascendency within the Florentine Republic.  In 1434, exploiting divisions among the upper class, and the resentment of the upper class by the poor, Cosimo became the strongman of Florence.  He was not exactly a prince, because he claimed no title and held no offices within the Republic.  But he and his allies were able to control elections, reward their friends and punish their enemies through the tax system, and generally run the city.  But both Florentines and outsiders knew that really Cosimo, his son Piero, and his famous grandson Lorenzo Magnifico, were princes.  Among the wealthiest men in Europe of any rank, they were allied with royal houses and were able to put their sons and nephews into the College of Cardinals, from which two advanced to become popes.

In what was now a princely state under republican trappings, culture naturally became more aristocratic, classical in style but in some ways little different from court culture north of the Alps.  The Renaissance, in many of its manifestations, was becoming the pursuit and accomplishment of the perfect courtier, not the good citizen. 

But despite the glorious ascendency of the Medici, and the lack of opportunities for civic ideals to be expressed even in Florence, they were not dead.  In changed circumstances, civic ideals would come back to life to provide one element in the most dramatic episodes of Florentine history. Before we talk about that, however, we must visit some other countries.
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
Hans Baron,  The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance
Gene Brucker,  Renaissance Florence
George Faludy,  Erasmus of Rotterdam
Denis Hay,  Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.