Isn't the fifteenth century Renaissance in Italy the most important period in modern history? I mean, it was the time when our culture experienced a rebirth of learning, of curiosity, of individuality after centuries of the "Dark Ages." As Sir Kenneth Clark remarked in the first episode of "Civilisation," we came through by the skin of our teeth.
Of course, that is a gross simplification of history. Clark, after all, was talking about Charlemagne in that first episode, and we can really look back to the 12th century, to the "Children of Aristotle"--Averroes, Abelard, Aquinas et al--as igniting the sparks of the rebirth of learning. Still, something extraordinary happened in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that did lead to the opening of the west in the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on past the modern age and on through to our post-modern predicaments. Outside of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini, what happened? And why Italy at that time?
Jacob Burkhardt gives one of the first modern interpretations of the Renaissance. In fifteenth century Italy, Burkhardt says, "man became a spiritual individual…and recognized himself as such." Men became devoted to their own individual development as summed up by the great artist, architect, engineer Alberti: "Men can do all things if they will." Burkhardt's main thesis is that this development was "due above all to the political circumstances of Italy." Whereas the other states of Europe were beginning to coalesce into modern nations or empires, Italy was still fragmented into a number of warring factions that were able to resist incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire. Much of that fragmentation was due to Rome, ironically enough, and the continuing struggle between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufen family ruling the empire. The Papacy still had illusions of political power, even though it had so recently returned to Rome after the "Babylonian Captivity," and had even more recently ended the "western schism" of the church, when as many as four different popes or "anti-popes" claimed jurisdiction over the Church, in 1417. This was the age of the condottieri who either worked as thugs for hire for any number of political factions or would grab power on their own and rule the state with force of arms. "Intrigue, armaments, leagues, corruption, and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period." Men grabbed and held onto power through their own "fitness…worth and capacity," than through birthright or law. There was "no other nobility than personal merit."
This age of political intrigue and moral chaos fostered the growth of skepticism and individualism. "The spirit of the people, now awakened to self consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest." This coincided with the recovery of a number of Latin and Greek texts that sought for the answers to life's problems and mysteries outside the church. Eventually these texts "were held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge." Humanists became the speech writers and the spin doctors of their day while employed by the princes or the papacy, but more importantly, educating those princes and their families. "Social intercourse…was based simply on the existence of an educated class."
The breach in medieval thought and religion by humanism was the opening for great art and for modern science. Now artists and courtiers began to experience the world more objectively and to experience the outward world as "seen and felt as something beautiful." The discovery of nature led to close observations of the external world, and "Italy…held incomparably the highest place among European nations in mathematics and natural sciences." "The great earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and form absorbed most of the higher faculties."
The great reawakening of fifteenth century Italy was the discovery of the individual. Burkhardt tells us that "the human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life." Individuality was sought for its own sake, not in the mastery of a particular skill or branch of knowledge, but for the whole man, the l'uomo universale, who "mastered all the elements of the culture of the age." The foremost example, of course, is Leonardo, who was not only a great painted, a great engineer, a great architect and city planner, a great inventor, a great party planner, but he also played a mean lute, sang beautifully, and was a good athlete to boot. And although Benvenuto Cellini was a crook and a murderer, Burkhardt tells us, "He is a man who can do all and does do all…he lives…as a significant type of modern spirit." As with ancient Greece, this individualism led to an emphasis on glory and the "cult of historical greatness." It was "the burning desire to achieve something great and memorable."
This grasping after glory, this boundless ambition and thirst for greatness, had a dark side. "The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism." Individuals saw themselves as freed from the restraints of law and justice. Premeditated crime, murder, assassination, and revenge were symptoms of a "grave moral crisis." It was Machiavelli who objectively understood the realities and necessities of power politics--whatever it takes to help the state survive and thrive. He said, " We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above all others." And Burkhardt makes it clear that this moral morass finally caught up with them when the condottieri/usurper Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro, who was one of Leonardo's major patrons, ignited an invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, setting off a whole series of French-Italian wars that eventually resulted in the sack of Florence and Rome in 1527. With that defeat and the "Spanish enslavement" of Italy, the civilization of the renaissance in Italy began to shut down. "The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered scholars, no less than artists, in every direction." Eventually the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent put an end to it all: "the Counter-Reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people." But, Burkhardt adds, it probably saved the papacy from being totally secularized as it had come close to being during the term of the Borgias, and it probably also saved Italy from "relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under Turkish rule."
So the conditions for the development of the Renaissance are the same conditions that eventually led to its destruction. On the one hand, "the Italian Renaissance must be called the mother of the modern age," and on the other, it is an amoral "school for scandal, the like of which the world cannot show." The conditions for greatness are also the conditions for evil and depravity. Great creativity and freedom come at the price of great destruction and suffering. Do we want greatness? Do we want safety and civility? Are they incompatible?
Author: Burckhardt, Jacob
Date Published: 1860
Length: 385 pp
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