Acceptance

The Renaissance account of its own origins did not go uncontested - the scholastic thought against which the classical revival defined itself did not simply disappear, especially in northern Europe - but it came to prevail in its own day and was accepted with very little criticism for several hundred years afterward. The major historians of the nineteenth century were still emphasizing many of the same themes as Petrarch: The Renaissance of Jules Michelet (1798-1874) stressed the revival of classical antiquity, The Revival of Classical Antiquity of Georg Voigt (1827-91) makes its emphasis clear in the title, and even the synthesis that suggests that there could have been a Renaissance without the revival of antiquity, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of Jakob Burckhardt (1818-97), admits that the classics guided the new modern individual to his or her full potential (Burckhardt 1958: 1:175; Coroleu 2004: 3-15). And indeed, the claim that the classics were reborn in the Renaissance still seems to explain many things that happened from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, for example, Italian education at the preuniversity level had been taken over by a new kind of teacher, the humanist schoolmaster, who taught grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, drawing on the classics for his texts. In A Program of Teaching and Learning (1459), Battista Guarino (1435-1505) tells us which authors his father, the famous teacher Guarino da Verona (1374-1460), taught: Valerius Maximus and Justin in history; Vergil, then Lucan, Statius, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s tragedies, Plautus, and Terence among the poets; Cicero for rhetoric, with Quintilian as a supporting text; and Cicero,

Aristotle’s Ethics, and Plato in moral philosophy (Kallendorf 2002: 260-309). Less talented teachers with less talented students might limit the curriculum, which could end up being restricted largely to Cicero in prose and Vergil in poetry, but in theory at least more classical authors were read with greater historical sensitivity in the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages (Waquet 2001: 7-40). What is more, Greek, which had largely disappeared in western Europe during the Middle Ages, was again taught regularly, at least to the best students.

Scholarly and literary activity at the higher levels gave further credence to the claim that antiquity had been revived. During the preceding centuries Cicero’s De oratore (On the orator), Orator, and Brutus, the complete text of Quintilian, and Statius’ Sylvae had for all practical purposes dropped from sight (Reynolds 1983: 102-9, 332-4, 398-9). Humanist scholars set out in conscious pursuit of these and other texts; what they found is chronicled elsewhere in this volume. These discoveries in turn stimulated new literary efforts like the love poetry of Joannes Secundus (1511-36) and the silvas of Angelo Poliziano (1454-94) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645).

A similar development might be observed in art and architecture. Roman columns were often incorporated into Romanesque churches that, in spite of what their name suggests, were built with a decidedly unclassical style and proportion. In dialogue with Vitruvius, however, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) wrote an influential treatise, On the Art of Building, then disseminated a new style that was clearly classical in inspiration, as seen in the Church of San Francesco in Rimini, San Sebastiano and Sant’Andrea in Mantua, and the Rucellai Palace, Santa Maria Novella, and the tribune of Santissima Annunziata in Florence (Grafton 2000: 261-330). To be sure, Mars and Jupiter had not died in the Middle Ages. But on the bell tower of the Florentine cathedral they took medieval form: as a knight and a monk, respectively. When Rosso Fiorentino depicts Mars with Venus in a drawing that appears to have been presented to Francis I, however, and Giulio Romano depicts Jupiter with Olympias in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, the medieval trappings are gone (Bull 2005: 157-9, 370).

This can only have come about because the Renaissance artist was conscious of historical distance in a way that his medieval predecessor was not. In other words, Mars could be seen as a knight only if the artist saw continuity between past and present. Once it became apparent, however, that classical antiquity no longer existed and that a thousand years separated the people of the fourteenth century from it, a conscious effort had to be made to reconstruct what had been lost. As Eugenio Garin has stressed, this can also be done through words: philology provided a tool for the study of language, and through an imaginative reconstruction of the past, the correct meaning of texts could be recovered (Garin 1965: xx-xxii). When Machiavelli spoke with the ancients, he used his philological skill to close the distance between himself and them.

Once this distance had been closed, the humanist scholar or artist could even, if he wanted, return from ‘‘the ancient courts of ancient men’’ with books and objects he had made himself, but present them as genuine. A protege of Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564), Francisco de Hollanda, for example, notes that the famous statue of Bacchus ‘‘was a work that Michelangelo had completed a long time ago for the purpose of fooling the Romans and the pope with its antique style’’ (Barkan 1999: 201-2).

In 1498, approximately two years after Michelangelo had finished his Bacchus, the Dominican Annius of Viterbo (1432-1502) published his Commentaries on Various Authors Discussing Antiquities. The book purports to be a history of the world in which Annius’ commentary connects his sources, some of which are genuine (e. g., Archilochus) and some not (e. g., Metasthenes) (Grafton 1991: 76-103). More outrageous yet was the forgery of Curzio Inghirami (1614-55), who used his position as a member of one of Tuscany’s powerful families to perpetrate a scandal that would ultimately attract the attention of the pope. Curzio indulged his countrymen’s eagerness to have proof of their heritage by forging a host of documents in Latin and Etruscan (the pre-Latin language of north-central Italy) and hiding them in scarith, small containers made of hair and mud. After ‘‘finding’’ the scarith, Curzio published the documents in a book, Fragments of Etruscan Antiquities (1636) (Rowland 2004). The same philological methods that allowed one scholar to manufacture nonexistent records from the past allowed others to expose them, with the give-and-take that arose around Renaissance forgeries showing the extent to which the past had indeed come alive again.

Fake statues and fake histories seem far removed from daily life, and indeed, Petrarch and his immediate followers - even the honest ones - preferred the study to the forum. A number of modern scholars have noted that some later humanists endorsed the active over the contemplative life (e. g., Garin 1965: xix), and when we look at the philosophical dialogues of the period, it appears that there is some truth in this observation. Rudolf Pfeiffer’s History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (1976), however, locates the classical tradition in men like Niccolio Niccoli (13641437), Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), and Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), then in their successors across the Alps - scholars rather than businessmen or politicians. And Gilbert Highet’s influential The Classical Tradition (1971) is tellingly subtitled Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. Again, we see Machiavelli retreating into his study. The classical tradition had been reborn, but it was a hothouse plant, one that flourished far from the everyday world.