Renaissance For whom?

The common use of the term Renaissance to mean the cultural developments in Europe from the l4th to the 16th centuries is hazardous. For one thing, the word does not fit the facts very closely and, for another, it distinguishes one period too sharply from another. The word is too small and neat for the period. Coined by the Italian artist and art historian, Vasari, to applaud the return of classical excellence--rinascita means a rebirth--the term was taken up by later French historians and given a more general application. This was perhaps unfortunate, for even within the limited sphere of art and architecture the idea of a sudden rebirth was partly a myth and a delusion.

The concept, however, has won security of tenure by long usage and cannot be dislodged. Because it seems to lend special glamor to a particular time span and to play favorites with eras, it has offended some sensitive historians. Historians have seen a Renaissance in the 12th and 13th centuries, and they see maturer expressions of 15th-century trends in the 16th and l7th centuries. This is not surprising, for Clio, the muse of history, knows no periods.

In the past, when history was conceived of primarily as cultural and political history, and when historians took the humanists' notion of their own originality at face value, it was possible for some scholars to reduce the period to a few essentials: the rediscovery of man and the world; a renewed sense of joy in life; asceticism and symbolism giving way to sensuousness and naturalism; realism replacing idealism; and experimentation in the pursuit of knowledge displacing traditionalism and obscurantism.

To a degree, all of these formulas are correct, but they emphasize change at the expense of continuity. "Restless youth and crabbed age" do always live together, and new departures were shaped by old concerns and only gradually replaced them. In architecture the concept of a Renaissance veils the wonderful resilience of Gothic style in northern Europe. In England, for instance, there remain majestic monuments of Perpendicular Gothic from the 16th century, including the ethereal splendor of Kings's College Chapel, Cambridge, the fabric of which was completed in 1515. Often Renaissance historians underestimated the change and vitality of the Middle Ages, and naively equated the novel features of the Renaissance with the good, and the rest as husk that had to be outgrown before the world could come of age. Some scholars, disenchanted with the holocausts of modern Europe, have been less sanguine about the Renaissance. From the outset, they accept the period as a complex one. They view it as full of ambivalences; a period with a checkered moral legacy.

The unifying forces of the latter Middle Ages had been seriously weakened. New movements and institutions were bringing internal wars and social dislocation in their trains. At the same time, retrenchment and the specter of Ottoman invasion cast a gloom which makes the achievement of Renaissance humanists all the more remarkable, almost perverse. They remained optimistic about human nature and the possibilities of human reason, despite much of the evidence; they offered a set of secular and cultural values that threatened to replace the power of the papacy as a unifying factor until the Reformation sundered Europe spiritually forever; above all, they generated and disseminated an enthusiasm for "new learning" which, in spirit if not in form, is still alive. At least I hope it is still alive. Otherwise we are wasting our time here.

The Renaissance humanists achieved a remarkable thing--a pan-European culture and style that were won by sheer intellectual virtuosity despite the social and political tensions and the setbacks of the period. It is this virtuosity, one supposes, that tempts historians to try to sum up all developments in all few pithy phrases. Even if one could capsulate the Renaissance in pungent phrases, the more profound question would remain unanswered: What was the relationship between cultural changes and their social and political milieux? A Renaissance by whom or for whom? From one vantage point, cultural change may seem to be a mere reflection of social and other changes. For instance, the mounting chorus of applause for intellectual cultivation over more purely spiritual ends, seems to arise directly from an increasingly sophisticated scholasticism, the philosophy of the medieval past. The so-called Renaissance mirrors burgeoning universities, the vitality of cities, the emergence of secular patrons, and the crises that underscored the worth of sheer physical existence.

On the other hand, some developments belie this simple metaphor: everywhere diversity was filling the breaches in the cosmopolitan institutions and ideals of the past, yet Renaissance men were committing themselves to all search for new universal values. There is surely a reaching back--an element of reaction to their environment--in this process. This suggests that all culture can grow and flourish in and also stand apart from its context. It may even stand in judgment on its context. As a modern writer says of Goethe, genius is both representative and unrepresentative of its age. This saying could be applied to the diverse talents, esoteric cults, and intellectual movements that enrich the Renaissance era. The problem of tracing relationships--capable of a dazzling variety of answers--may founder on the complexities of reality. Indeed, separating culture from context is rather artificial, but doing so may further understanding.

As the old sense of universalism was departing, in its stead had grown a new awareness of diversity; there were new focuses for popular allegiance. In Western Europe the nation-state was becoming the focus of strong loyalties; France and England were born as nations in the travail of the Hundred Years war; the unity of Spain was cemented by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469, and this pair completed their wedding pact by driving the Moslem Moors from their last foothold in Granada in 1492. To the north the Scandinavian countries had accepted a union under the Crown of Sweden, which had lasted for a sufficient time to break the chronic habit of local baronial warfare.

The many small states of Germany and Italy remained exceptions to the national rule, but they also shared the urge to develop strong communal loyalties. Although they were dwarfed by the giants to the West, they were nevertheless states with all the appurtenances and apparatus of statehood--diplomatic corps, networks of alliances, civil servants, and forces to command. Their local loyalties were equally if not more fully developed than national feelings.

In Italy the stronger cities managed to maintain a measure of independence but, by a process of large eating small, only seven major states existed by the end of the 15th century. The Kingdom of Naples, long disputed territory between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon, finally fell to Aragon in 1435, and Aragon also controlled Sicily. Spain thus came to control the southern half of the peninsula. Acting as a buffer between the feudal south and the commercial north, the papal states joined Adriatic Sea to Mediterranean. This loose conglomeration of cities and principalities was jostled from the north by the Duchy of Ferrara and the Republics of Florence and Siena. These, with the Duchies of Mantua and Modena, were the smaller principalities, Florence being dominant among them. All were flanked to the north by the larger holdings of the Dukes of Savoy, by Milan, and by the Venetian Republic.

It was in the north of Italy, among the furious world of little states that the Renaissance first flourished. The pendent, and most vital of them were republics. Since 1311 Milan had been ruled by despots of the Visconti family, whose male line died out in 1447. Sovereignty then reverted to the republic, until an upstart condottiero, Francesco Sforza, made himself Duke by starving the city into submission. Ferrara was governed by the Este family, and Mantua was governed by the Ganzagas. The papal states were never fully subjected to the papacy until the reign of that most immoral of popes, the Borgia, Alexander VI, whose son, Caesare, undertook a ruthless extortion of obedience from the surrounding principalities. His project was completed by "the warrior pope," Julius II, who left his successor, the Medici Leo X, a measure of stability and wealth sufficient to retain such talents as Michelangelo's and Raphael's to adorn Rome.

Florence, Venice, and siena were the outstanding republics, but a Renaissance republic should not be confused with a democracy. Siena was an oligarchy; the Medici family, by virtue of their wealth from banking and their constitutional astuteness, managed to dominate Florence's Councils. Venice, though it boasted a complex constitution of checks and balances, never pretended to be anything other than a mercantile oligarchy.

The first manifestations of the Renaissance are generally acknowledged to be Florentine. During the consolidation of the republican oligarchy, after the early 1380's, Florence found itself encircled and isolated by the conquests of the Duke of Milan. This threat distilled among Florentines an awareness both of their political danger and of the virtues that their republican system embodied. Its origins could be traced back to the ancient communes of Italy before the rise of the Roman Empire By exploring their special heritage, Florentines generated public pride and self-consciousness, and came to value and extol civic-mindedness in all pursuits, whether art or commerce, scholarship or government. In time, these attitudes spread far beyond Florence. when, for instance, Venice felt itself to be the last outpost of Republicanism, in 16th century Italy, then we find her artists and architects adorning her beauty. Self-awareness and a sense of individuality would seem to have been important factors.

Venice had always been more stable than the other Italian states; and though this stability was often credited to her constitution, it owed more to the uniform seafaring interest of her peoples and to the relatively invulnerable position of the island capital. On the mainland, not only was state pitted against state but also class warred against class. Lesser guilds clamored for power against greater guilds and, cutting through all these squabbles, Guelphs campaigned against Ghibellines, Ghibellines were those who favored and relied on the old Imperial connection, and Guelphs were those who were opposed to the link and who looked to the papacy for support. Northern Italy offered the stimulating prospect of endless turmoil and incessant commotion.

If this lusty independence was a breeding ground of the Renaissance, it is also true that the Renaissance was an urban phenomenon. The bustle of the city included the busy hum of commerce. While it is true that the middle class was proliferating, the period was one of considerable dislocation, of closing of frontiers, and of limited surpluses, especially in Northern Europe. Some bourgeois were declining, particularly those whose fortunes were tied up in the woolen guilds. In England, on the other hand, the export of wool cloth was increasingly profitable. Guilds, as such, however, both in England and Italy, were slowly losing influence in society at large as they lo. control of their own members.

Throughout the period the guilds fought a defensive battle to supervise the standards of production and to oversee wages, prices, and the conditions of apprenticeships. A market system and market values were making breaches though their older restrictive practices. Individual and joint stock ventures had become the high roads to wealth traveled by a minority. Banking, trading, the exploitation of mines and forests, the holding of a concession here and a monopoly there, all these were still fields of promise provided that one streamlined operations and supervised every detail of business with the utmost rigor--in the style of a Jacob Fugger. Even so, a fabulous fortune could be dissipated by bad luck or political miscalculation.

For classes below the bourgeoisie the pattern was similar. An artisan, breaking from the guild and manning his own shop, might profit; another less venturous craftsman might not. In this period the petit bourgeois began to form as a class with an uncertain future. By and large, small farmers, and tenants improved their real standards of living. Copyholders were in the same situation. These copyholders were neither freeholders nor leaseholders, but people who enjoyed the use of land for certain terms of years in return for prescribed services, all of which were recorded on a copy kept in the manor court. Serfdom began to disappear in the West, although East of the Elbe it revived with an even greater intensity of exploitation than earlier. The Renaissance took shallower root in Eastern Europe, for it thrived in an economic environment that was at once rapacious and ebullient.

The Renaissance was indebted to another social transformation: the pacification of the nobility. Pacification is not the same thing as decline; nobility adjusted themselves surprisingly well to new conditions. Of course, this pacification advanced fitfully and varied from area to area. In Italy the process occurred earlier than in France and England. Swords were never beaten into plowshares, but they were used less frequently in battle and more decoratively as emblems of rank. The brooding castle was abandoned for a fortified manor house; and the house, in turn, was exchanged for a town or a country dwelling. And as this occurred, music, art, and literature found an ever-growing and appreciative audience among the aristocracy.

The seeking out of patrons became an art in itself with flattery as its attendant vice. Men of second rank had to attach themselves to a patron to survive. Only the greatest scholars and artists could afford the luxury of unbridled individualism. Patronage continued to be wielded by the guilds, but the significant change was the emancipation of the artist from the guilds because of an expanding market elsewhere. Private individuals and heads of state were investing in culture for themselves, and lavishly. So church patronage, though still prodigious, faced rich and powerful secular rivals.

Art, letters, philosophy, science, and music freed themselves increasingly from the tutelage of the church, matching the steady growth of court and individual lay patronage. Indeed the church found itself drawn willy-nilly into the wake of new intellectual fashions that it had not prescribed. The spectacle of Gregory VII with an Emperor (Henry IV) at his knees in the snow begging him for forgiveness in 1076 was quite different from that of Julius II (in 1506) hoping that Michelangelo would not leave Rome after a tiff. Speculation and scholarship had once been the virtual monopoly of the Church; now popes and bishops were patron-pupils of the Renaissance. Laymen crowded clergy at the fountains of knowledge and the Renaissance saw the quickening of a process that is till occurring, the laicization of culture.

This bold departure--the founding and development of a nonclerical intellectual aristocracy--was fortified by the authority of the past, especially in Italy where the remains of ancient Rome were still to be seen. The classical (sometimes misleadingly called the pagan) revival was a primary and original impetus for changes in intellectual manners, and it remained a constant influence throughout this period. Antiquity gave legitimacy to the secular pursuits of the Renaissance. It offered a treasury of literature, art, architecture, jurisprudence, philosophy, and science--all of which to the Renaissance mind had been inadequately appreciated in the past.

The Renaissance was, indeed, unfair to the Middle Ages; it overestimated its own achievement and underestimated the fervor and vitality of the earlier period. It scoffed at medieval enslavement to tradition but, in abandoning one authority, the Renaissance was quick to substitute another; the distant past was venerated because its prestige shed security on the secular invasion of hidden mysteries. As a layman venturing to write a cosmic epic--The Divine Comedy-- Dante (1265-1321) was comforted by the companionship of Virgil in his journey to the other world. Yet antiquity was more than a brace and a touchstone of legitimacy. It was an ideal, a source of inspiration, and sometimes an obstruction. Possibly Leonardo da Vinci might have discovered the circulation of the blood if Galen's theory of invisible pores in the wall of the heart had not inhibited him.

The rediscovery of classical Latin style and its imitation were preconditions of Renaissance success. Classical usage symbolized, by discarding scholastic Latin, an improvement on the whole scholastic tradition; pure classical Latin became the universal language through which the Renaissance could exert its utmost influence. Moreover, in elegance and precision it well suited the courtly patronage that sustained the humanists.

The consideration of antiquity also encouraged the use of vernacular, since Latin and Greek, in their day, had been vulgar tongues. Actually, the formation of vernacular speech began far back in the Middle Ages. What was novel was that the humanists dignified local dialects by employing them in their finest works. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, devout classicists as they were, helped to make their native Tuscan the language of Italy by giving it shape and beauty. The use of vernacular also accompanied the growing sense of national identity. Thus the patriot-heretic Wycliffe, wrote vigorous and balanced English prose, which Chaucer simplified and smoothed in preparation for the splendor of the Elizabethan era. In France, Rabelais followed in the footsteps of irreverent troubadours and poets who sang and rhymed in the vernacular; and Cervantes performed a similar service for Spain.

In the short run the revival of classical Latin served the humanists' elitist purpose well enough, but in the long run it is clear that they killed a vital, living language in order to revive a dead thing. In patronizing the vernacular tongues, however, the Renaissance laid the basis for mass national literacy and the mass secular culture that is how in being.

Strictly speaking, humanists were scholars of the classics but, in the broader, Ciceronian sense, humanitas meant a literary refinement and mental cultivation that went far beyond mere academic discipline. In the fullest sense it amounted to an attitude toward life, to a fresh view of man's place in the cosmos, and to a substantial reassessment of his scale of values. Whereas the saint, the ascetic, or the chivalrous knight formerly had been ideal types, now homage was paid to the prince and the courtier. Castiglione's The Courtier idealized the man of affairs with a quiver-full of accomplishments, devoted to his prince.

This courtier was expected to have mastered etiquette and the classics. He should possess every grace; he should spice every conversation with wit, and should give honest counsel to the prince under the spur of his strong sense of civic duty. He was also expected to be a hardy warrior. Few men approximated to this ideal. Michelangelo was no courtier; Leonardo was too preoccupied with his experiments to be a man of affairs. Benvenuto Cellini was half genius and half undisciplined adolescent, and Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan sea-dog and courtier, was deficient in emotional balance though not in talents. If no one was perfect, there were plenty of men who were jacks of many trades and masters of them too. The specialization of functions, characteristic of both modern and medieval society, did not then exist, and distrust between the humanities and science was not yet abroad.

So persuasive was the ideal of the "Renaissance man" that new schools sprang up exemplifying a novel philosophy of education. Vittorini da Feltre hoped to produce able, graceful, cultivated dilettanti by steeping them in an all-round curriculum centered on the classics. In general, Western European education followed that pattern until this century, and the ideal of the good "all-rounder" still has currency in English private schools. American universities still follow the pattern, if not the spirit, with American history and the history of Western Civilization, rather than the classics, forming the core of the liberal-arts programs.