AP European History

Why Italy: the context of the Renaissance

The Renaissance ("rebirth") began in the Italian city-states in the 14th century and was in full flower by the 15th. Several features of Italy help explain why it started there. The peninsula was politically fragmented into republics such as Florence and Venice, duchies such as Milan, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, so no single monarch or empire controlled it. Rival states competed for prestige and talent, and wealthy elites competed to commission art, buildings and scholarship.

Italy was also the commercial heart of Europe. Merchants and bankers in Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan made fortunes from Mediterranean trade, banking and cloth manufacture, and this money paid for patronage. The Medici family of Florence, who ran a bank and dominated the city's politics from the 1430s, are the best known example. Italy was also littered with the physical remains of Rome, and Italian scholars received Greek manuscripts and Greek-speaking scholars as the Byzantine Empire weakened and then fell to the Ottomans in 1453.

The Black Death of the mid-14th century and the long crisis that followed unsettled older certainties, and the growing wealth of cities encouraged a confident, worldly culture. Medieval Europe had not forgotten the ancient world, but Renaissance writers approached it differently: they treated classical Greece and Rome as models to be studied directly and imitated, rather than as a background to Christian theology.

Humanism

Humanism was the intellectual movement at the center of the Italian Renaissance. Humanists studied the "humanities" (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy) through the writings of ancient Greece and Rome. They did not usually reject Christianity; most remained believers. What changed was the emphasis. The university curriculum of the Middle Ages centered on theology, law and scholastic logic, whereas humanists argued that education should produce eloquent, morally serious citizens who could take part in public life.

Petrarch, writing in the 14th century, is often called the father of humanism. He collected classical manuscripts, wrote letters in the manner of Cicero and criticized the centuries between antiquity and his own day as a dark age. Later humanists built on his work. Leonardo Bruni wrote a history of Florence that praised the republic's civic liberty and translated Greek works into Latin. Lorenzo Valla applied close philological analysis to texts and showed in the 15th century that the Donation of Constantine, a document the papacy had used to support claims to secular power, was a forgery, because its Latin could not have been written in the fourth century.

Marsilio Ficino, working under Medici patronage in Florence, translated Plato and sought to reconcile Platonic philosophy with Christianity. Pico della Mirandola's oration on the dignity of man is a well-known statement of the humanist belief in human potential and free will. Both were part of a Platonic revival that gave educated Italians a philosophy different from the Aristotelianism of the medieval schools.

Civic humanism

Admiration for the republics of Greece and Rome shaped civic humanism, which flourished above all in Florence. Civic humanists held that educated men had a duty to serve the state and that liberty and active citizenship were goods in themselves. Bruni is the standard example. This strand of humanism helped produce secular ideas about how individuals and states should behave.

Secular models of behavior

Several Italians wrote works that described conduct without leaning on religious authority. Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine official who lost his post when the Medici returned in 1512, wrote The Prince, which advises a ruler to act according to what keeps the state secure, including cunning and force, rather than according to conventional Christian virtue. Francesco Guicciardini, another Florentine, wrote a history of Italy that analyzed political events in terms of human interest and chance. Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier described the ideal courtier at the court of Urbino as skilled in arms, letters, music and graceful manners, and it became a model for elite behavior across Europe.

The humanist emphasis on the individual, and the idea that people could shape their own lives through learning and effort, is often summed up as individualism. Historians debate how far this was new and how far it applied beyond a small elite of men, as most women and the poor had limited access to humanist education, although some elite women, such as Isabella d'Este of Mantua as a patron, took part.

Art and patronage

Renaissance artists drew on classical models and developed techniques for portraying the natural world with unprecedented accuracy. Linear perspective, a geometric method of representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface, is credited to Filippo Brunelleschi and described theoretically by Leon Battista Alberti, who also wrote on architecture and painting. Artists studied anatomy, light and proportion, and the result was naturalism: figures with believable bodies and settings.

Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral of Florence reworked Roman building principles. Donatello revived freestanding sculpture in the round, including a bronze David that recalled classical nudes. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often called the High Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo produced works that became standards of balance and harmony; Michelangelo's David and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and Raphael's School of Athens, with its gathering of ancient philosophers, are famous examples. Andrea Palladio, working in the 16th century, designed villas and churches in the Veneto based on classical architecture, and his style spread across Europe.

Art was used to promote political and religious goals. Merchant families, guilds, city governments, princes and popes commissioned works to display their wealth, piety and legitimacy. The Medici paid for chapels, palaces and paintings, and the papacy rebuilt Rome as a grand capital, with works that included the new St. Peter's Basilica. A portrait, a tomb or a palace façade announced the standing of its owner. Patronage also supported the rise of the artist as a named individual with reputation, rather than an anonymous craftsman.

Political fragmentation and the secular state

Italy's division into rival states shaped political thought. States made alliances and broke them, and in 1494 the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy, starting a long series of wars in which France and the Habsburgs fought for control of the peninsula. Italian city-states developed permanent diplomacy, with resident ambassadors, to manage their rivalries. Machiavelli's writing about power reflects this world of competing states, where a ruler could not assume that tradition or religion would protect him. His ideas, together with those of Guicciardini, contributed to a developing concept of the state as a secular entity with its own interests, which is one of the foundations of modern political thought.

Effects on Europe

The humanist revival of Greek and Roman texts, later spread by the printing press, challenged the institutional power of the universities and the Catholic Church by encouraging critical reading of authorities and shifting education away from a primary focus on theological writings toward classical texts. Humanist textual scholarship, including Valla's, trained a generation to read documents for their historical accuracy; that habit was later applied to the Bible itself. Renewed interest in nature and in observation also prepared the ground for scientific inquiry.

Politically, the Renaissance added secular models for individual and political behavior, and a language of civic duty and liberty that would be drawn on in later centuries. Culturally, it set the aesthetic standards of European art and architecture for hundreds of years.

Interpretations

Jacob Burckhardt, in the 19th century, portrayed the Renaissance as the birth of the modern individual and a sharp break with the Middle Ages. Later historians have qualified this. They point to earlier medieval revivals of classical learning, to the continued importance of religion in Renaissance life, and to the fact that the movement was largely confined to educated and wealthy men in a few cities. Some prefer to see the Renaissance as a change in emphasis within a continuous tradition, and others stress its social and economic context, such as the connection between commerce, urban wealth and cultural production.