THE RENAISSANCE

Between roughly 1350 and 1550, a cluster of crowded, quarrelsome Italian cities produced a body of art, scholarship and political writing that Europe has been arguing about ever since. The people involved thought they were doing something specific: recovering the language, literature and civic ideals of ancient Rome after what they called a dark middle age. They were wrong about the darkness and right about the recovery. This chapter follows the money that paid for it, the classical texts that fed it, the optical and chemical techniques that made painting look new, the wars that ended Italian independence, and the printing press that carried the whole package north. It also asks the harder questions: who was actually included in this rebirth, whose labor and whose captivity underwrote it, and whether “Renaissance” is a period or a piece of very effective public relations.

Section 1Plague, Money and the Italian City-States

A demographic catastrophe with paradoxical results

The Renaissance begins in a graveyard. The plague that reached Sicily in October 1347 and swept the peninsula through 1348 and 1349 killed somewhere between a third and half of the population in most Italian cities. Florence may have fallen from perhaps 90,000–120,000 people before 1340 to roughly 40,000 a century later—the tax census of 1427 counted about 37,000—and recurring outbreaks in 1363, 1374 and 1400 kept it down. Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through it, opens the Decameron with a description of bodies in the streets and neighbors abandoning neighbors that historians still quote because no one wrote a better one.

The paradox is that this catastrophe left the survivors richer per head. Land, houses, tools, ships and coin passed to fewer hands. Wages for skilled labor rose because labor was scarce; the price of grain fell because there were fewer mouths. Inheritance concentrated capital in merchant families who had not previously commanded so much liquid wealth. None of this “caused” the Renaissance in any simple sense—Petrarch was already working before the plague arrived—but it does help explain why a small, war-torn, epidemic-ridden region could afford so many chapels, tombs, altarpieces and libraries in the century that followed. A great deal of Renaissance art is, quite literally, funeral spending: money laid out by anxious men to shorten their time in purgatory and to keep their family name visible in a parish church.

The shape of Italian power

Italy in 1450 was not a country. It was a checkerboard of roughly a dozen significant states and dozens of minor ones, and its politics were shaped by two absences: no strong emperor and no strong king. The Holy Roman Emperor claimed northern Italy but rarely enforced the claim; the papacy had spent 1309 to 1377 at Avignon and then wrecked its own authority in the Great Schism (1378–1417). Into that vacuum stepped the commune—the self-governing city—and then, in most places, the signoria, one-family rule dressed in republican clothing.

Milan and Venice signed the Peace of Lodi in April 1454, Florence joined at once, and in 1455 all five powers bound themselves into the Italian League, producing forty years of comparative stability, a genuine balance-of-power system, and resident ambassadors—an Italian invention that later became standard European diplomacy. Warfare in this period was largely subcontracted to condottieri, professional captains under contract. Machiavelli would later blame mercenaries for Italy’s collapse; modern military historians are gentler, noting that condottieri fought hard when paid and that the real problem in 1494 was scale, not cowardice.

Banks, bookkeeping and the Medici

Florentine wealth rested on finishing and dyeing English and Spanish wool, on silk, and above all on international finance. The Florentine florin, struck in gold at a stable weight since 1252, and the Venetian ducat were the dollars of late medieval Europe. Merchants developed instruments that still exist in recognizable form: the bill of exchange, marine insurance, partnership contracts with limited terms, and double-entry bookkeeping, which the friar Luca Pacioli codified for print in his Summa de arithmetica of 1494 after Italian merchants had used it for well over a century.

The Medici bank, founded by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici in 1397, ran branches in Rome, Venice, Geneva, Bruges, London and elsewhere. Its most profitable business was not lending at interest, which canon law condemned as usury, but handling papal revenue and executing currency exchanges in which the profit was concealed inside the exchange rate. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), exiled in 1433 and recalled in triumph in 1434, spent enormous sums on the convent of San Marco, the Medici palace and the church of San Lorenzo. His grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492) was a better poet and politician than banker; branches failed under bad managers, and the bank was liquidated in 1494 when the family was expelled.

Section 2Humanism: Reading the Ancients Again

What humanism actually was

The word confuses students because it means something different now. Renaissance humanism was a curriculum and a professional identity, not a philosophy of life and certainly not atheism. Its practitioners taught and practiced the studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, studied in the original Latin and, increasingly, Greek. The Italian word umanista was student slang for the teacher of these subjects, on the model of legista for a law professor.

Humanists defined themselves against the scholastics of the universities, who worked in a technical Latin on logic, metaphysics and theology and who dominated Paris, Oxford and Padua. The humanist charge was that scholastic Latin was barbarous and that its questions were sterile. The scholastic reply—that elegance is not truth—was not unreasonable. What the humanists offered instead was eloquence in the service of active life: the conviction, drawn from Cicero and Quintilian, that persuasive speech is what makes citizens out of individuals. Nearly all of them were Christians, many were clergy, and several were popes.

Petrarch and the invention of the Middle Ages

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), known in English as Petrarch, is the hinge. Trained in law at Bologna, he abandoned it for letters, hunted manuscripts across Europe, and in 1345 found in the cathedral library at Verona a lost collection of Cicero’s private letters to Atticus—a discovery that shocked him, because the Cicero of the letters was vain, indecisive and frightened, not the marble statesman of the speeches. Petrarch wrote letters back to Cicero, and to Livy and Homer, in a tone of intimate reproach. That gesture is the whole movement in miniature: the ancients treated as absent friends rather than as authorities.

Petrarch also invented the periodization we are still using. He described the centuries between the fall of Rome and his own day as a dark age of tenebrae, and imagined a coming return of light. This was a rhetorical weapon, not a historical finding, and it was unfair: the twelfth century had recovered Aristotle, built Chartres and founded universities. But the label stuck for six hundred years, which tells you something about the power of a well-turned phrase.

Civic humanism, Greek and the weaponizing of grammar

In Florence around 1400, humanism acquired a political edge. Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the republic from 1375 to 1406, and his protégé Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), chancellor himself from 1427, argued that the highest human life was not monastic withdrawal but service to a free city. Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence, written about 1403–1404 just after Florence had survived encirclement by Milan, cast Florence as the heir of the Roman republic and Milan as a new tyranny. Historians since Hans Baron in the 1950s have called this civic humanism; Baron’s tight causal link between the Milanese threat and the ideology has been substantially criticized since, and the dating of key texts remains contested, but the phenomenon itself is real enough.

Greek returned to the Latin West as a living classroom subject when the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras taught in Florence from 1397 to 1400. The Council of Ferrara–Florence in 1438–1439, called to reunite the Greek and Latin churches, brought further scholars, including the Platonist Gemistos Plethon, whose lectures helped inspire Cosimo de’ Medici to fund a translation program. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) produced the first complete Latin Plato, printed in 1484, and an influential fusion of Platonic and Christian thought. His younger associate Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) drafted 900 theses in 1486 and prefaced them with the speech we call the Oration on the Dignity of Man, arguing that human beings alone have no fixed nature and must choose what they become. The papacy condemned thirteen of the theses; the Oration went unpublished until after his death.

The sharpest tool humanists developed was philology: the study of how language changes over time. Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) used it in 1440 to demolish the Donation of Constantine, the document by which the papacy claimed that Constantine had granted the popes temporal rule over the western empire. Valla showed that its Latin contained words and usages that did not exist in the fourth century—that it was, on internal evidence alone, a forgery of several centuries later. He also annotated the Latin Vulgate against Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, quietly establishing that the Church’s official Bible contained translation errors. Erasmus found Valla’s notes in 1504 and printed them in 1505. Within a generation those two moves—a forged charter and a flawed translation—were live ammunition in the Reformation.

Section 3Making the World Visible: Art and Technique

The engineering of appearance

Something changed in Italian painting between about 1400 and 1430 that is visible to anyone, expert or not: figures acquire weight, floors recede, light falls from a single direction, and the picture stops being a gold surface and becomes a window. That change was technical before it was philosophical.

The pivot was linear perspective. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), a goldsmith turned architect, demonstrated the principle sometime around 1413 with a painted panel of the Florence Baptistery, a small hole drilled through it and a mirror: viewers looked through the back of the panel at the reflection and could not distinguish painting from building. Leon Battista Alberti turned the trick into a teachable geometry in De pictura (1435, Italian version 1436), instructing painters to treat the picture as a cross-section of a visual pyramid and to run orthogonals to a single vanishing point at eye level. Masaccio (1401–1428) put it to devastating use in the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, painted about 1427, whose barrel-vaulted chapel appears to be cut into the actual wall.

Two other technical shifts matter as much. First, sculpture recovered contrapposto, the ancient device of shifting weight onto one leg so that hips and shoulders counter-rotate; Donatello’s bronze David, usually dated to the 1440s though the evidence allows anywhere from the 1420s to the 1460s, is generally called the first free-standing nude male statue since antiquity. Second, painters north and south adopted oil paint, worked out to a high standard in the Netherlands by Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries in the 1420s and 1430s. Oil dries slowly, allowing blending and correction, and it can be layered in translucent glazes that produce depth of color impossible in fast-drying egg tempera. Venetian painters, working on canvas in a damp lagoon city where fresco decayed, made oil the basis of a whole tradition of color that runs from Giovanni Bellini through Titian.

Who paid, and what they bought

Almost no Renaissance artwork was made speculatively. Contracts survive in quantity and they are startling to modern eyes: they specify the pigments (ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli imported through Venice, was priced by the ounce and named in the contract), the number of figures, the deadline, the penalty for lateness, and how much of the work the master must do with his own hand rather than delegating to the workshop. Confraternities, guilds, monastic houses, city governments, popes and private families all commissioned. The wool guild funded the cathedral dome. The Arte di Calimala paid for Ghiberti’s bronze baptistery doors, awarded by public competition in 1401 and finished, in the second set, in 1452.

The status of the artist rose across the period, but unevenly and by argument. Painters and sculptors began as guild craftsmen: painters in Florence were enrolled with the doctors and apothecaries because they bought pigments. Alberti, Leonardo and Vasari campaigned to redefine painting as a liberal art grounded in mathematics and invention, and by the sixteenth century the campaign had partly succeeded. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was addressed as il divino, negotiated with popes, and had two biographies published in his lifetime. That is a different social world from the one Giotto worked in.

Rome, Venice and the High Renaissance

By 1500 the center of gravity had shifted to Rome, where the papacy was rebuilding a city whose population had sunk to perhaps 20,000 during the Avignon years and had only begun to recover. Julius II (r. 1503–1513) began new St Peter’s in 1506, hired Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512) and Raphael for the papal apartments (from 1509). Leo X, a Medici, continued the spending; the sale of indulgences that helped fund St Peter’s is one of the direct threads connecting Renaissance patronage to Luther’s protest in 1517, which Chapter 8 takes up.

Venice went another way. Its painters cared less about drawn contour and more about color, atmosphere and the female nude in landscape, and its patrons commissioned for private palaces and civic halls as well as churches. Titian (c. 1488–1576) built an international clientele that included Emperor Charles V and Philip II of Spain, and he did it largely with oil on canvas—portable, rollable, shippable. It is worth noticing that the medium that let art travel is the medium that let artists work for foreign kings.

Section 4Courts, Wars and the Politics of Reality

1494 and the end of Italian independence

The forty-year Italian equilibrium broke in September 1494, when Charles VIII of France marched an army of perhaps 25,000 men with a modern siege train of bronze cannon into Italy to claim the throne of Naples. Fortresses that had held out for months fell in days. Charles walked the length of the peninsula, and the Medici were expelled from Florence for letting him. What followed was sixty-five years of the Italian Wars, in which France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire fought each other on Italian ground, with Italian states switching sides as survival required.

Between 1494 and 1498 Florence was governed under the moral influence of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar from Ferrara whose sermons predicted divine punishment and whose followers held the famous “bonfire of the vanities” in 1497, burning wigs, mirrors, playing cards, cosmetics and some books and paintings. Savonarola is a useful corrective to lazy pictures of the age: the same city that commissioned Botticelli produced mass public repentance, and Botticelli himself is reported to have been among the friar’s sympathizers. Excommunicated and abandoned, Savonarola was hanged and his body burned in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498.

Machiavelli and the separation of politics from moralizing

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) served the Florentine republic as second chancellor and diplomatic secretary from 1498 to 1512, watched Cesare Borgia at close range, and organized a citizen militia because he distrusted mercenaries. When the Medici returned in 1512 he was dismissed, implicated in a conspiracy, tortured with the strappado, and released into rural exile. In 1513 he wrote The Prince, a short handbook he hoped would get him a job. It did not. It was published in 1532, five years after his death, and placed on the papal Index in 1559.

The Prince is disturbing because of a single methodological move. Earlier “mirrors for princes” described the virtues a ruler ought to have. Machiavelli says he will describe instead the verità effettuale, the effective truth of the matter, and that a ruler who insists on being good among so many who are not will come to ruin. Hence the notorious conclusions: it is safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both; a prudent ruler cannot and should not keep his word when keeping it would harm him; cruelty applied once and decisively is less cruel than cruelty spread out. He introduces virtù—not Christian virtue but skill, force and timing—set against fortuna, the tide of circumstance, which he says governs about half of what we do.

The last chapter is a passionate appeal to expel the “barbarians” from Italy, which is the key to reading the whole book: Machiavelli wrote as a patriot watching foreign armies march through his country at will. And his longer, more considered work, the Discourses on Livy, is a defense of republican government in which he argues that a free state needs the friction of class conflict, that citizen armies beat mercenaries, and that liberty depends on institutions rather than on good men. Scholars still disagree about how to reconcile the two books—whether The Prince is emergency advice, cynical job application, or covert republican satire—and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you the question is settled.

Courts, manners and the question of women

Where Florence produced civic humanism, the smaller princely courts—Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara, Milan—produced a culture of refinement. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, set in Urbino in 1507 and published in 1528, was translated across Europe and taught generations how to behave at court. Its central idea is sprezzatura: a studied nonchalance that conceals the effort behind every accomplishment, so that skill appears to be nature. It is the Renaissance ancestor of the modern instruction to make hard work look effortless, and it is a shrewd observation about how elites signal status.

Did women share in this rebirth? A minority did, and the record is real: Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), marchioness of Mantua, was a formidable collector, patron and political manager; Laura Cereta and Cassandra Fedele circulated Latin letters and delivered public orations in the 1480s and 1490s; Vittoria Colonna was a poet of high reputation and Michelangelo’s close friend; Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) spent more than a decade at the court of Philip II of Spain as painter and lady-in-waiting to the queen. But in 1977 the historian Joan Kelly asked “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” and answered no, at least for noblewomen: compared with their twelfth-century predecessors they lost economic independence, political function and sexual agency, while courtly ideals redefined them as chaste ornaments of male honor. Kelly’s argument has been qualified in the decades since—evidence on working women, widows, nuns and convent writers complicates it—but her core point stands as a permanent warning: a period is not “progressive” in general, only for particular people in particular ways.

Section 5Print, the North, and the Limits of Rebirth

What Gutenberg actually invented

Printing with carved blocks existed in East Asia centuries earlier, and Korean printers cast movable metal type before Europe did. Johannes Gutenberg’s achievement at Mainz, culminating in the 42-line Bible of about 1455, was a manufacturing system: an adjustable hand mould that let a workshop cast thousands of identical letters quickly, a lead-tin-antimony alloy that cast crisply and wore slowly, an oil-based ink that adhered to metal, and an adapted screw press. In an alphabet of a few dozen characters, this combination was transformative in a way it had not been for scripts with thousands of characters.

The scale-up was extraordinarily fast. Presses reached Italy at Subiaco in 1465, Rome by 1467, Venice by 1469, Paris by 1470 and London by 1476, and by 1500 more than 250 European towns had one. Surviving records list roughly 28,000 to 30,000 distinct editions printed before 1501—the incunabula—and total copies are usually estimated in the millions, though the figures depend heavily on assumptions about print runs and should be treated as orders of magnitude, not measurements. Venice became the industry capital; Aldus Manutius introduced italic type in 1501 and small, affordable octavo editions of the classics that a reader could carry.

Christian humanism north of the Alps

When humanist method crossed the Alps, it hit a different religious temperature and turned toward Scripture and reform. The northern movement is usually called Christian humanism, and its emblem is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536), the illegitimate son of a priest, an Augustinian canon who obtained release from the cloister and became the most widely read author in Europe. His Adages (1500, repeatedly expanded) made classical proverbs common property. His Praise of Folly (1511) satirized monks, theologians and popes with a wit sharp enough to be dangerous and elegant enough to be forgiven. His most consequential book was the 1516 Novum Instrumentum, the first Greek New Testament to be published, printed alongside a fresh Latin translation that showed readers where the Vulgate had gone astray. Erasmus called his program the philosophia Christi: a simple ethical Christianity grounded in the Gospels rather than in scholastic technicality.

Others worked the same seam. Thomas More published Utopia in 1516, a Latin fiction about an island commonwealth without private property whose exact ironies scholars still argue over. Cardinal Cisneros in Spain organized the Complutensian Polyglot Bible in parallel Hebrew, Greek and Latin columns; its New Testament volume was printed in 1514 and the set completed in 1517, but papal permission to circulate it came only in 1520, which is why Erasmus reached readers first. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples produced reforming biblical commentary in France. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) traveled to Venice, absorbed Italian proportion theory, and made his living from a northern medium he raised to the status of major art—the printed image, engraved and woodcut, sold in editions across Europe.

When Luther posted his objections in 1517, all of this was already in the air, and the printers were already in place. Erasmus, who wanted reform without schism, spent his last years attacked by both sides; he left Basel for Catholic Freiburg in 1529 when the city turned Protestant, returned in 1535, and died there the following year. The old jibe that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched is unfair but not baseless.

How much of a rebirth was it?

Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) argued that the period saw the birth of the individual, of the state as a work of art, and of the modern secular outlook—that the medieval veil of faith and illusion melted away. It is a magnificent book and much of it has been dismantled. Charles Homer Haskins showed in 1927 that a genuine renaissance of law, philosophy and Latin letters had occurred in the twelfth century. Medievalists point out that individual self-awareness is visible in Abelard and Dante. Economic historians note that Italy’s commercial peak was before 1348, not after. Religious historians note that the age of Ficino and Pico was also an age of relic cults, astrology, witchcraft prosecutions and Savonarola.

What survives of the claim is more modest and more defensible. Between about 1350 and 1550 a durable change occurred in the European educational curriculum, in the visual conventions of representation, in the technology of textual reproduction, and in the willingness to date and criticize sources. Those four things persisted and compounded. Meanwhile the same decades saw Europeans enter the Atlantic slave trade, expel Jews from Spain in 1492, and begin the conquests treated in Chapter 9. The Renaissance was not a moral improvement in the human condition. It was a change in tools—of language, of vision, of reproduction—and tools serve whoever picks them up.

Words worth knowing