Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine. The enigmatic smile and smoky quality of this portrait can be found in many of Leonardo's works. (Czartoryski Museum, Krakow/The Bridgeman Art Library)
What makes a genius? An infinite capacity for taking pains? A deep curiosity about an extensive variety of subjects? A divine spark as manifested by talents that far exceed the norm? Or is it just “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” as Thomas Edison said? To most observers, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the Western world. In fact, Leonardo was one of the individuals that the Renaissance label “genius” was designed to describe: a special kind of human being with exceptional creative powers.
Leonardo (who, despite the title of a recent bestseller and movie, is always called by his first name) was born in Vinci, near Florence, the illegitimate son of Caterina, a local peasant girl, and Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary public. Caterina later married another native of Vinci. When Ser Piero’s marriage to Donna Albrussia produced no children, he and his wife took in Leonardo. Ser Piero secured Leonardo’s apprenticeship with the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. In 1472, when Leonardo was just twenty years old, he was listed as a master in Florence’s “Company of Artists.”
Leonardo’s most famous portrait, Mona Lisa, shows a woman with an enigmatic smile that Giorgio Vasari described as “so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human.” The portrait, probably of the young wife of a rich Florentine merchant (her exact identity is hotly debated), may actually be the best-known painting in the history of art. One of its competitors in that designation would be another work of Leonardo’s, The Last Supper, which has been called “the most revered painting in the world.” Leonardo’s reputation as a genius does not rest simply on his paintings, however, which are actually few in number, but rather on the breadth of his abilities and interests. In these, he is often understood to be the first “Renaissance man,” a phrase we still use for a multitalented individual. He wanted to reproduce what the eye can see, and he drew everything he saw around him, including executed criminals hanging on gallows as well as the beauties of nature. Trying to understand how the human body worked, Leonardo studied live and dead bodies, doing autopsies and dissections to investigate muscles and circulation. He carefully analyzed the effects of light, using his analysis to paint strong contrasts of light and shadow, and he experimented with perspective.
Leonardo used his drawings as the basis for his paintings and also as a tool of scientific investigation. He drew plans for hundreds of inventions, many of which would become reality centuries later, such as the helicopter, tank, machine gun, and parachute. He was hired by one of the powerful new rulers in Italy, Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan, to design practical things that the duke needed, including weapons, fortresses, and water systems, as well as to produce works of art. Leonardo left Milan when Sforza was overthrown in war and spent the last years of his life painting, drawing, and designing for the pope and the French king.
Leonardo experimented with new materials for painting and sculpture, some of which worked and some of which did not. The experimental method he used to paint The Last Supper caused the picture to deteriorate rapidly, and it began to flake off the wall as soon as it was finished.
Leonardo actually regarded it as never quite completed, for he could not find a model for the face of Christ that would evoke the spiritual depth he felt it deserved. His gigantic equestrian statue in honor of Ludovico’s father, Duke Francesco Sforza, was never made. The clay model collapsed, and only notes survived.
He planned to write books on many subjects but never finished any of them, leaving only notebooks. Leonardo once said that “a painter is not admirable unless he is universal.” The patrons who supported him — and he was supported very well — perhaps wished that his inspirations would have been a bit less universal in scope, or at least accompanied by more perspiration.
Questions for Analysis
1. In what ways do the notion of a “genius” and of a “Renaissance man” support one another? In what ways do they contradict one another? Which seems a better description of Leonardo?
2. Has the idea of artistic genius changed since the Renaissance? How?
Sources: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. 1, trans. G. Bull
(London: Penguin Books, 1965); S. B. Nuland, Leonardo da
Vinci (New York: Lipper/Viking, 2000).
The Prince A treatise by Machiavelli on ways to gain, keep, and expand power; because of its subsequent impact it is probably the most important literary work of the Renaissance.
One of the central preoccupations of the humanists Education Was education and moral behavior. Humanists poured
Out treatises, often in the form of letters, on the structure and goals of education and the training of rulers. They taught that a life active in the world should be the aim of all educated individuals and that education was not simply for private or religious purposes, but benefited the public good.
Humanists put their ideas into practice. They opened schools and academies in Italian cities and courts in which pupils began with Latin grammar and rhetoric, went on to study Roman history and political philosophy, and then learned Greek in order to study Greek literature and philosophy. These classics, humanists taught, would provide models of how to write clearly, argue effectively, and speak persuasively, important skills for future diplomats, lawyers, military leaders, businessmen, and politicians. Gradually, humanist education became the basis for intermediate and advanced education for a large share of the males of the middle and upper classes.
Humanists were ambivalent about education for women. While they saw the value of exposing women to classical models of moral behavior and reasoning, they also thought that a program of study that emphasized eloquence and action was not proper for women, whose sphere was private and domestic. Humanists never established schools for girls, though a few women of very high social status did gain a humanist education from private tutors. The ideal Renaissance woman looked a great deal more like her medieval counterpart than did the Renaissance man.
No book on education had broader influence than Baldassare Castiglione’s (ball-duh-SAH-ree kah-stee-lee-OW-nee ) The Courtier (1528). This treatise sought to train, discipline, and fashion the young man into the courtly ideal, the gentleman. According to Castiglione, who himself was a courtier serving several different rulers, the educated man of the upper class should have a broad baekground in many aeademie subjeets, and his spiritual and physical as well as intellectual capabilities should be trained. Castiglione envisioned a man who could compose a sonnet, wrestle, sing a song and accompany himself on an instrument, ride expertly, solve difficult mathematical problems, and, above all, speak and write eloquently. Castiglione also included discussion of the perfect court lady, who, like the courtier, was to be well educated and able to play a musical instrument, to paint, and to dance. Physical beauty, delicacy, affability, and modesty were also important qualities for court ladies.
No Renaissance book on any topic Political Thought Has been more widely read than the short political treatise The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (NICK-oh-loh mak-ee-uh-VEL-ee) (1469-1527). The subject of The Prince (1513) is
Raphael: Portrait of Castiglione
In this portrait by Raphael, the most sought-after portrait painter of the Renaissance, Castiglione is shown dressed exactly as he advised courtiers to dress, in elegant, but subdued clothing that would enhance the splendor of the court, but never outshine the ruler. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Political power: how the ruler should gain, maintain, and increase it. Its hero is Cesare Borgia, who ruthlessly conquered the Papal States and exacted total obedience from them (see page 310). As a good humanist, Machiavelli explores the problems of human nature and concludes that human beings are selfish and out to advance their own interests. This pessimistic view of humanity led him to maintain that the prince might have to manipulate the people in any way he finds necessary:
For a man who, in all respects, will carry out only his professions of good, will be apt to be ruined amongst so many who are evil. A prince therefore who desires to maintain himself must learn to be not always good, but to be so or not as necessity may require.1
The prince should combine the cunning of a fox with the ferocity of a lion to achieve his goals. Asking rhetorically whether it is better for a ruler to be loved or feared, Machiavelli writes, "It will naturally be answered that it would be desirable to be both the one and the other; but as it is difficult to be both at the same time, it is much more safe to be feared than to be loved, when you have to choose between the two.”2
Unlike medieval political theorists, Machiavelli maintained that the ruler should be concerned with the way things actually are rather than aiming for an ethical ideal. The sole test of a "good” government is whether it is effective, whether the ruler increases his power. Machiavelli did not advocate amoral behavior, but he believed that political action cannot be restricted by moral considerations. Nevertheless, on the basis of a crude interpretation of The Prince, the word Machiavellian entered the language as a synonym for the politically devious, corrupt, and crafty, indicating actions in which the end justifies the means. The ultimate significance of Machiavelli rests on two ideas: first, that one permanent social order reflecting God’s will cannot be established, and second, that politics has its own laws, based on expediency, not morality.
Machiavelli’s The Prince is often seen as a prime exSecular Spirit Ample of another aspect of the Renaissance, secularism.
Secularism A way of thinking that tends to find the ultimate explanation of everything and the final end of human beings in what reason and the senses can discover, rather than in any spiritual or transcendental belief.
Secularism involves a basic concern with the material world instead of with the eternal world of spirit. A secular way of thinking tends to find the ultimate explanation of everything and the final end of human beings within the limits of what the senses can discover. Even though medieval business people ruthlessly pursued profits and medieval monks fought fiercely over property, the dominant ideals focused on the otherworldly, on life after death. Renaissance people often had strong and deep spiritual interests, but in their increasingly secular society, attention was concentrated on the here and now. Wealth allowed greater material pleasures, a more comfortable life, and the leisure time to appreciate and patronize the arts. The rich, social-climbing residents of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Rome came to see life more as an opportunity to be enjoyed than as a painful pilgrimage to the City of God.
In On Pleasure, humanist Lorenzo Valla (VAHL-lah) (1406-1457) defends the pleasures of the senses as the highest good. Scholars praise Valla as a father of modern historical criticism. His study On the False Donation of Constantine (1444) demonstrates by careful textual examination that an anonymous eighth-century document supposedly giving the papacy jurisdiction over vast territories in western Europe was a forgery. Medieval people had accepted the Donation of Constantine as a reality, and the proof that it was an invention weakened the foundations of
Christian humanists Northern
Humanists who interpreted Italian ideas about and attitudes toward classical antiquity, individualism, and humanism in terms of their own traditions.
Bennozzo Gozzoli: Procession of the Magi, 1461
This segment of a huge fresco covering three walls of a chapel in the Medici Palace in Florence shows members of the Medici family and other contemporary individuals in a procession accompanying the biblical three wise men as they brought gifts to the infant Jesus. Reflecting the self-confidence of his patrons, Gozzoli places the elderly Cosimo and Piero at the head of the procession, accompanied by their grooms.
(Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Papal claims to temporal authority. Lorenzo Valla’s work exemplifies the application of critical scholarship to old and almost sacred writings as well as the new secular spirit of the Renaissance.
The tales in The Decameron (1350-1353), by the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio (jo-VAH-nee boh-KAH-chee-oh)
(1313-1375), which describe ambitious merchants, lecherous friars, and cuckolded husbands, portray a frankly acquisitive, sensual, and worldly society. Although Boccaccio’s figures were stock literary characters, The Decameron contains none of the "contempt of the world” theme so pervasive in medieval literature. Renaissance writers justified the accumulation and enjoyment of wealth with references to ancient authors.
Nor did church leaders do much to combat the new secular spirit. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the papal court and the households of the cardinals were just as worldly as those of great urban patricians. Of course, most of the popes and higher church officials had come from the bourgeois aristocracy. Renaissance popes beautified the city of Rome, patronized artists and men of letters, and expended enormous enthusiasm and huge sums of money. Pope Julius II (1503-1513) tore down the old Saint Peter’s Basilica and began work on the present structure in 1506. Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s is still considered his greatest architectural work.
Despite their interest in secular matters, however, few people (including Ma-chiavelli) questioned the basic tenets of the Christian religion. The thousands of pious paintings, sculptures, processions, and pilgrimages of the Renaissance period prove that strong religious feeling persisted.
In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, students Christian Humanism From the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England flocked to Italy, imbibed the "new learning,” and carried it back to their own countries. Northern humanists, often called Christian humanists, interpreted Italian ideas about and attitudes toward classical antiquity, individualism, and humanism in terms of their own traditions. They developed a program for broad social reform based on Christian ideals.
Christ ian humanists were interested in an ethical way of life. To achieve it, they believed that the best elements of classical and Christian cultures should be combined. For example, the classical ideals of calmness, stoical patience, and broad-mindedness should be joined in human conduct with the Christian virtues of love, faith, and hope. Northern humanists also stressed the use of reason, rather than acceptance of dogma, as the foundation for an ethical way of life. They believed that, although human nature had been corrupted by sin, it was fundamentally good and capable of improvement through education.
The Englishman Thomas More (1478-1535) envisioned a society that would bring out this inherent goodness in his revolutionary book Utopia (1516). Utopia, whose title means both "a good place” and "nowhere,” describes an ideal community on an island somewhere off the mainland of the New World. All children receive a good education, primarily in the Greco-Roman classics, and learning does not cease with maturity, for the goal of all education is to develop rational faculties. Adults divide their days between manual labor or business pursuits and intellectual activities. Because profits from business and property are held in common, there is absolute social equality. Citizens of Utopia lead an ideal, nearly perfect existence because they live by reason; their institutions are perfect.
Contrary to the long-prevailing view that vice and violence existed because people were basically corrupt, More maintained that acquisitiveness and private property promoted all sorts of vices and civil disorders. Since society protected private property, society’s flawed institutions were responsible for corruption and war. According to More, the key to improvement and reform of the individual was reform of the social institutions that molded the individual. His ideas were profoundly original in the sixteenth century.
Better known by contemporaries than Thomas More was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (dez-ih-DARE-ee-us uh-RAZ-muhs) (1466?-1536) of Rotterdam. His fame rested largely on his exceptional knowledge of Greek and the Bible. Erasmus’s long list of publications includes The Education of a Christian Prince (1504), a book combining idealistic and practical suggestions for the formation of a ruler’s character through the careful study of Plutarch, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato; The Praise of Folly (1509), a satire of worldly wisdom and a plea for the simple and spontaneous Christian faith of children; and, most important, a critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1516). In the preface to the New Testament, Erasmus explained the purpose of his great work:
I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel—should read the epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens.
Two fundamental themes run through all of Erasmus’s work. First, education is the means to reform, the key to moral and intellectual improvement. The core of education ought to be study of the Bible and the classics. (See the feature "Listening to the Past: An Age of Gold” on pages 335-336.) Second, the essence of Erasmus’s thought is, in his own phrase, "the philosophy of Christ.” By this Erasmus meant that Christianity is an inner attitude of the heart or spirit. Christianity is not formalism, special ceremonies, or law; Christianity is Christ—his life and what he said and did, not what theologians have written.
The fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch and the The Printed Word Sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus had similar ideas about many things, but the immediate impact of their ideas was very different because of one thing: the printing press with movable metal type. The ideas of Petrarch were spread slowly from person to person by
This sixteenth-century engraving captures the busy world of a print shop. On the left, men set pieces of type, and an individual wearing glasses checks a copy. At the rear, another applies ink to the type, while a man carries in fresh paper on his head. At the right, the master printer operates the press, while a boy removes the printed pages and sets them to dry. The well-dressed figure in the right foreground may be the patron checking to see whether his job is done. (Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)
Hand copying. The ideas of Erasmus were spread quickly through print, in which hundreds or thousands of identical copies could be made in a short time. Print shops were gathering places for those interested in new ideas. Though printers were trained through apprenticeships just like blacksmiths or butchers, they had connections to the world of politics, art, and scholarship that other craftsmen did not.
Printing with movable metal type developed in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century as a combination of existing technologies. Several metalsmiths, most prominently Johan Gutenberg, recognized that the metal stamps used to mark signs on jewelry could be covered with ink and used to mark symbols onto a surface, in the same way that other craftsmen were using carved wood stamps to print books. (This woodblock printing technique originated in China and Korea centuries earlier.) Gutenberg and his assistants made stamps—later called type— for every letter of the alphabet and built racks that held the type in rows. This type could be rearranged for every page and so used over and over. The printing revolution was also enabled by the ready availability of paper, which was also made using techniques that had originated in China.
Gutenberg’s invention involved no special secret technology or materials, and he was not the only one to recognize the huge market for books. Other craftsmen made their own type, built their own presses, and bought their own paper, setting themselves up in business (see Map 13.2). Historians estimate that somewhere between 8 million and 20 million books were printed in this manner in Europe before 1500, many more than the number of books produced in all of Western history up to that point.
The effects of the invention of movable-type printing were not felt overnight. Nevertheless, within a half century of the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible of 1456, movable type had brought about radical changes. Printing transformed both the private and the public lives of Europeans. It gave hundreds or even thousands of people identical books, so that they could more easily discuss the ideas that the
MAP 13.2 The Growth of Printing in Europe
The speed with which artisans spread printing technology across Europe provides strong evidence for the existing market in reading material. Presses in the Ottoman Empire were first established by Jewish immigrants who printed works in Hebrew, Greek, and Spanish. Use this map and those in other chapters to answer the following questions: [1] What part of Europe had the greatest number of printing presses by 1550? Why might this be? [2] Printing was developed in response to a market for reading materials. Use Maps 11.1 and 11.2 (pages 254 and 260) to help explain why printing spread the way it did. [3] Many historians also see printing as an important factor in the spread of the Protestant Reformation. Use Map 14.2 (page 358) to test this assertion.
Books contained with one another in person or through letters. Printed materials reached an invisible public, allowing silent individuals to join causes and groups of individuals widely separated by geography to form a common identity; this new group consciousness could compete with older, localized loyalties.
Government and church leaders both used and worried about printing. They printed laws, declarations of war, battle accounts, and propaganda, and they also attempted to censor books and authors whose ideas they thought were wrong. Officials developed lists of prohibited books and authors, enforcing their prohibitions
Section Review
Humanist artists sought to understand human nature by using the idea of genius to develop their talents.
Humanists worked for the common good, setting up schools to enhance human mental, spiritual, and physical capabilities.
Machiavelli’s The Prince concludes that humans are selfish and a Godly social order cannot exist, thus acknowledging that politics is power, not morality.
Secularism marked a shift from concern with the spiritual to an interest in pleasure, as expressed in Valla’s On Pleasure and Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
Christian humanists believed that Christian virtues (faith, hope, love) and humanist ideals (education and reason) together were the means to reform social institutions.
Movable-type printing and a ready supply of paper meant the easy distribution and reading aloud of books, enhancing the exchange of ideas between the literate and the nonliterate.
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By confiscating books, arresting printers and booksellers, or destroying the presses of printers who disobeyed. None of this was very effective, and books were printed secretly, with fake title pages, authors, and places of publication, and smuggled all over Europe.
Printing also stimulated the literacy of laypeople and eventually came to have a deep effect on their private lives. Although most of the earliest books and pamphlets dealt with religious subjects, printers produced anything that would sell. They printed professional reference sets for lawyers, doctors, and students, and historical romances, biographies, and how-to manuals for the general public. They discovered that illustrations increased a book’s sales, so they published both history and pornography full of woodcuts and engravings. Single-page broadsides and flysheets allowed great public events and "wonders” such as comets or two-headed calves to be experienced vicariously by a stay-at-home readership. Since books and other printed materials were read aloud to illiterate listeners, print bridged the gap between the written and oral cultures.
How did changes in art both reflect and shape new ideas?
No feature of the Renaissance evokes greater admiration than its artistic masterpieces. The 1400s (quattrocento) and 1500s (cinquecento) bore witness to dazzling creativity in painting, architecture, and sculpture. In all the arts, the city of Florence led the way. But Florence was not the only artistic center, for Rome and Venice also became important, and northern Europeans perfected their own styles.
In early Renaissance Italy, powerful urban groups comArt and Power Missioned works of art. The Florentine cloth mer
Chants, for example, delegated Filippo Brunelleschi (Fill-EEP-oh broon-el-ES-kee) to build the magnificent dome on the cathedral of Florence and selected Lorenzo Ghiberti (law-REN-tsow gee-BER-tee) to design the bronze doors of the Baptistery. These works represented the merchants’ dominant influence in the community.
Increasingly in the later fifteenth century, individuals and oligarchs, rather than corporate groups, sponsored works of art. Patrician merchants and bankers and popes and princes spent vast sums on the arts as a means of glorifying themselves and their families. Patrons varied in their level of involvement as a work progressed; some simply ordered a specific subject or scene, while others oversaw the work of the artist or architect very closely, suggesting themes and styles and demanding changes while the work was in progress.
In addition to power, art reveals changing patterns of consumption in Renaissance Italy. In the rural world of the Middle Ages, society had been organized for war and men of wealth spent their money on military gear. As Italian nobles settled in towns (see page 248), they adjusted to an urban culture. Rather than employing knights for warfare, cities hired mercenaries. Expenditure on military hardware declined. For the rich merchant or the noble recently arrived from the countryside, a grand urban palace represented the greatest outlay of cash. Wealthy individuals and families ordered gold dishes, embroidered tablecloths, wall tapestries, paintings on canvas (an innovation), and sculptural decorations to adorn their homes. By the late sixteenth century the Strozzi banking family of Florence spent
More on household goods than on anything else except food; the value of those furnishings was three times that of their silver and jewelry.
After the palace itself, the private chapel within the palace symbolized the largest expenditure for the wealthy of the sixteenth century. Decorated with religious scenes and equipped with ecclesiastical furniture, the chapel served as the center of the household’s religious life and its cult of remembrance of the dead.
The content and style of Renaissance art were often Subjects and Style Different from those of the Middle Ages. The individual portrait emerged as a distinct artistic genre. In the fifteenth century members of the newly rich middle class often had themselves painted in scenes of romantic chivalry or courtly society. Rather than reflecting a spiritual ideal, as medieval painting and sculpture tended to do, Renaissance portraits showed human ideals, often portrayed in a more realistic style. The Florentine painter Giotto (JAW-toh) (1276-1337) led the way in the use of realism; his treatment of the human body and face replaced the formal stiffness and artificiality that had long characterized representation of the human body. Piero della Francesca (1420-1492) and Andrea Mantegna (1430/31-1506) seem to have pioneered perspective in painting, the linear representation of distance and space on a flat surface. The sculptor Donatello (1386-1466) revived the classical figure, with its balance and self-awareness. In architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) looked to the classical past for inspiration, designing a hospital for orphans and
Botticelli: Primavera, or Spring (ca. 1482)
Venus, the Roman goddess of love, is flanked on her left by Flora, goddess of flowers and fertility, and on her right by the Three Graces, goddesses of banquets, dance, and social occasions. Above, Venus's son Cupid, the god of love, shoots darts of desire, while at the far right the wind god Zephyrus chases the nymph Chloris. Botticelli captured the ideal for female beauty in the Renaissance: slender, with pale skin, a high forehead, red-blond hair, and sloping shoulders. (Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Rogier van der Weyden: Deposition
Taking as his subject the suffering and death of Jesus, a popular theme of Netherlandish piety, van der Weyden describes (in an inverted T) Christ's descent from the cross, surrounded by nine sorrowing figures. An appreciation of human anatomy, the rich fabrics of the clothes, and the pierced and bloody hands of Jesus were all intended to touch the viewers' emotions. (Museo del Prado/Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Foundlings in which all proportions—of the windows, height, floor plan, and covered walkway with a series of rounded arches—were carefully thought out to achieve a sense of balance and harmony. As the fifteenth century advanced, classical themes and motifs, such as the lives and loves of pagan gods and goddesses, figured increasingly in painting and sculpture. Religious topics, such as the Annunciation of the Virgin and the Nativity, remained popular among both patrons and artists, but frequently the patron had himself and his family portrayed in the scene.
Art produced in northern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tended to be more religious in orientation than that produced in Italy. Some Flemish painters, notably Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-1464) and Jan van Eyck (1366-1441), were considered the artistic equals of Italian painters and were much admired in Italy. Van Eyck, one of the earliest artists to use oil-based paints successfully, shows the Flemish love for detail in paintings such as Ghent Altar-piece and the portrait Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride; the effect is great realism and remarkable attention to human personality. Northern architecture was little influenced by the classical revival so obvious in Renaissance Italy.
In the fifteenth century the center of the new art shifted to Rome, where wealthy cardinals and popes wanted visual expression of the church’s and their own families’ power and piety. Michelangelo, a Florentine who had spent his
Young adulthood at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, went to Rome in about 1500 and began the series of statues, paintings, and architectural projects from which he gained an international reputation: the Pieta, Moses, the redesigning of the Capitoline Hill in central Rome, and, most famously, the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Pope Julius II, who commissioned the Sistine Chapel, demanded that Michelangelo work as fast as he could and frequently visited the artist at his work with suggestions and criticisms. Michelangelo complained in person and by letter about the pope’s meddling, but his reputation did not match the power of the pope, and he kept working.
Raphael Sanzio (rah-fahy-EL) (1483-1520), another Florentine, got the commission for frescoes in the papal apartments, and in his relatively short life he painted hundreds of portraits and devotional images, becoming the most sought-after artist in Europe. Raphael also oversaw a large workshop with many collaborators and apprentices—who assisted on the less difficult sections of some paintings—and wrote treatises on his philosophy of art in which he emphasized the importance of imitating nature and developing an orderly sequence of design and proportion.
Venice became another artistic center in the sixteenth century. Titian (TISH-uhn) (1490-1576) produced portraits, religious subjects, and mythological scenes, developing techniques of painting in oil without doing elaborate drawings first, which speeded up the process and pleased patrons eager to display their acquisition. Titian and other sixteenth-century painters developed an artistic style known in Engl ish as "mannerism” (from maniera or "style” in Italian) in which artists sometimes distorted figures, exaggerated musculature, and heightened color to express emotion and drama more intently. (This is the style in which Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, shown in the frontispiece to this chapter.)
Whether in Italy or northern Europe, most Renaissance artists trained in the workshops of older artists; Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and at times even Michelangelo were known for their large, well-run, and prolific workshops. Though they might be "men of genius,” artists were still expected to be well trained in proper artistic techniques and stylistic conventions, for the notion that artistic genius could show up in the work of an untrained artist did not emerge until the twentieth century. Beginning artists spent years copying drawings and paintings, learning how to prepare paint and other artistic materials, and, by the sixteenth century, reading books about design and composition. Younger artists gathered together in the evenings for further drawing practice; by the later sixteenth century some of these informal groups had turned into more formal artistic "academies,” the first of which was begun in 1563 in Florence by Vasari under the patronage of the Medicis.
The types of art in which more women were active, such as textiles, needlework, and painting on porcelain, were not regarded as "major arts,” but only as "minor” or "decorative” arts. Like painting, embroidery changed in the Renaissance to become more classical in its subject matter, naturalistic, and visually complex. Embroiderers were not trained to view their work as products of individual genius, however, so they rarely included their names on their works, and there is no way to discover who they were.
Several women did become well known as painters in their day. Stylistically, their works are different from one another, but their careers show many similarities. The majority of female painters were the daughters of painters or of minor noblemen with ties to artistic circles. Many were eldest daughters or came from families in which there were no sons, so their fathers took unusual interest in their
Artemisia Gentileschi: Esther Before Ahasuerus (ca. 1630)
In this oil painting, Gentileschi (jen-tee-LES-kee) shows an Old Testament scene of the Jewish woman Esther who saved her people from being killed by her husband, King Ahasuerus. This deliverance is celebrated in the Jewish holiday of Purim. Both figures are in the elaborate dress worn in Renaissance courts. Typical of a female painter, Artemisia Gentileschi was trained by her father. She mastered the dramatic style favored in the early seventeenth century and became known especially for her portraits of strong biblical and mythological heroines.
(Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY)
Section Review
Individuals and oligarchs spent elaborate sums on works of art to display their wealth and power.
Art began to be more realistic and show human ideals, often portraying individuals or families.
Rome and Venice gained international fame as art centers, producing artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael Sanzio, and the “mannerism” painter, Titian.
Leonardo da Vinci epitomized the “Renaissance man” as a painter, scientist, and inventor.
Young artists became apprentices, creating formal groups called “academies” that excluded women.
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Careers. Many women began their careers before they were twenty and produced far fewer paintings after they married, or stopped painting entirely. Women were not allowed to study the male nude, which was viewed as essential if one wanted to paint large history paintings with many figures. Women could also not learn the technique of fresco, in which colors are applied directly to wet plaster walls, because such works had to be done out in public, which was judged inappropriate for women. Joining a group of male artists for informal practice was also seen as improper, and the artistic academies that were established were for men only. Like universities, humanist academies, and most craft guild shops, artistic workshops were male-only settings in which men of different ages came together for training and created bonds of friendship, influence, patronage, and sometimes intimacy.
Women were not alone in being excluded from the institutions of Renaissance culture. Though a few “rare men of genius” such as Leonardo or Michelangelo emerged from artisanal backgrounds, most scholars and artists came from families with at least some money. Renaissance culture did not influence the lives of most people in cities and did not affect life in the villages at all. A small, highly educated minority of literary humanists and artists created the culture of and for an exclusive elite. The Renaissance maintained, or indeed enhanced, a gulf between the learned minority and the uneducated multitude that has survived for many centuries.
What were the key social hierarchies in Renaissance Europe, and how did ideas about hierarchy shape people's lives?
The division between educated and uneducated people was only one of many social hierarchies evident in the Renaissance. Every society has social hierarchies; in ancient Rome, for example, there were patricians and plebeians (see page 89).
Such hierarchies are to some degree descriptions of social reality, but they are also idealizations — that is, they describe how people imagined their society to be, without all the messy reality of social-climbing plebeians or groups that did not fit the standard categories. Social hierarchies in the Renaissance built on those of the Middle Ages but also developed new features that contributed to modern social hierarchies.
Renaissance people did not use the word race the way Race We do, but often used "race,” "people,” and "nation”
Interchangeably for ethnic, national, and religious groups — the French race, the Jewish nation, the Irish people, and so on. They did make distinctions based on skin color that provide some of the background for later conceptualizations of race, but these distinctions were interwoven with other characteristics when people thought about human differences.
Ever since the time of the Roman republic, a few black Africans had lived in western Europe. They had come, along with white slaves, as the spoils of war. Even after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Muslim and Christian merchants continued to import them. Unstable political conditions in many parts of Africa enabled enterprising merchants to seize people and sell them into slavery. Local authorities afforded them no protection. Long tradition, moreover, sanctioned the practice of slavery. The evidence of medieval art attests to the continued presence of Africans in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and to Europeans’ awareness of them.
Beginning in the fifteenth century sizable numbers of black slaves entered Europe. Portuguese sailors brought perhaps a thousand Africans a year to the markets of Seville, Barcelona, Marseilles (mahr-SAY), and Genoa. In the late fifteenth century this flow increased, with thousands of people leaving the west African coast. By 1530 between four thousand and five thousand were being sold to the Portuguese each year. By the mid-sixteenth century blacks, slave and free,
Carpaccio: Black Laborers on the Venetian Docks (detail)
Enslaved and free blacks, besides working as gondoliers on the Venetian canals, served on the docks: here, seven black men careen-clean, caulk, and repair-a ship. Carpaccio's (kahr-PAH-choh) reputation as one of Venice's outstanding painters rests on his eye for details of everyday life.
(Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice/Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Constituted about 10 percent of the population of the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Evora and roughly 3 percent of the Portuguese population. In the Iberian peninsula, African slaves intermingled with the people they lived among and sometimes intermarried. Cities such as Lisbon had significant numbers of people of mixed African and European descent.
Although blacks were concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula, there must have been some Africans in northern Europe as well. In the 1580s, for example, Queen Elizabeth I of Engl and complained that there were too many "blackamoores” competing with needy English people for places as domestic servants.4 Black servants were much sought after; the medieval interest in curiosities, the exotic, and the marvelous continued in the Renaissance. Italian aristocrats had their portraits painted with their black pageboys to indicate their wealth (see the illustration on page 316, in which Gozzoli’s depiction of Cosimo de’ Medici shows him with a black groom). Blacks were so greatly in demand at the Renaissance courts of northern Italy, in fact, that the Venetians defied papal threats of excommunication to secure them. In 1491 Isabella of Este, duchess of Mantua, instructed her agent to secure a black girl between four and eight years old, "shapely and as black as possible.” The duchess saw the child as a source of entertainment: "We shall make her very happy and shall have great fun with her.” She hoped the girl would become "the best buffoon in the world,”5 as the cruel ancient practice of a noble household’s retaining a professional "fool” for the family’s amusement persisted through the Renaissance—and down to the twentieth century. Tradition, stretching back at least as far as the thirteenth century, connected blacks with music and dance. In Renaissance Spain and Italy, blacks performed as dancers, as actors and actresses in courtly dramas, and as musicians, sometimes making up full orchestras.
Africans were not simply amusements at court. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy, slaves supplemented the labor force in virtually all occupations—as servants, agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and as seamen on ships going to Lisbon and Africa. Agriculture in Europe did not involve large plantations, so large-scale agricultural slavery did not develop there; African slaves formed the primary work force on the sugar plantations set up by Europeans on the Atlantic islands in the late fifteenth century, however (see page 386).
Until the voyages down the African coast in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little concrete knowledge of Africans and their cultures. They perceived Africa as a remote place, the home of strange people isolated by heresy and Islam from superior European civilization. Africans’ contact, even as slaves, with Christian Europeans could only "improve” the blacks, they thought. The expanding slave trade only reinforced negative preconceptions about the inferiority of black Africans.
The notion of class—working class, middle class, up-Class Per class — did not exist in the Renaissance. By the thir
Teenth century, however, and even more so by the fifteenth, the idea of a changeable hierarchy based on wealth, what would later come to be termed "social class,” was emerging alongside the medieval concept of orders (see page 221). This was particularly true in towns. Most residents of towns were technically members of the "third estate,” that is "those who work” rather than "those who fight” and "those who pray.” However, this group now included wealthy merchants who oversaw vast trading empires and lived in splendor that rivaled the richest nobles. As we saw earlier, in many cities these merchants had
In this detail from a fresco by the Italian painter Lorenzo Lotto, the artist captures the mixing of social groups in a Renaissance Italian city. The crowd of men in the right foreground includes wealthy merchants in elaborate hats and colorful coats. Two mercenary soldiers (carrying a sword and a pike), probably in hire to a condottiero, wear short doublets and tight hose stylishly slit to reveal colored undergarments, while boys play with toy weapons at their feet. Clothing like that of the soldiers, which emphasized the masculine form, was frequently the target of sumptuary laws both for its expense and its “indecency." At the left, women sell vegetables and bread, which would have been a common sight at any city marketplace. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Gained political power to match their economic might, becoming merchant oligarchs who ruled through city councils.
The development of a hierarchy of wealth did not mean an end to the hierarchy of orders, however, and even poorer nobility still had higher status. If this had not been the case, wealthy Italian merchants would not have bothered to buy noble titles and country villas as they began doing in the fifteenth century, nor would wealthy English or Spanish merchants have been eager to marry their daughters and sons into often impoverished noble families. The nobility maintained its status in most parts of Europe not by maintaining rigid boundaries, but by taking in and integrating the new social elite of wealth.
Along with being tied to the hierarchy of orders, social status was also linked with considerations of honor. Among the nobility, for example, certain weapons and battle tactics were favored because they were viewed as more honorable. Among urban dwellers, certain occupations, such as city executioner or manager of the municipal brothel, might be well paid but were understood to be "dishonorable” and so of low status.
Renaissance people would not have understood the Gender Word gender to refer to categories of people, but they
Would have easily grasped the concept. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, learned men (and a few women) began what was termed the “debate about women” (querelle des femmes), a debate about women’s character and nature that would last for centuries. Misogynist (mi-SOJ-uh-nist) critiques of women from both clerical and secular authors denounced females as devious, domineering, and demanding. In answer, several authors compiled long lists of famous and praiseworthy women exemplary for their loyalty, bravery, and morality. Christine de Pizan was among those writers who were not only interested in defending women, but also in exploring the reasons behind women’s secondary status—that is, why the great philosophers, statesmen, and poets had generally been men. In this they were anticipating recent discussions about the "social construction of gender” by six hundred years. (See the feature "Listening to the Past: Christine de Pizan” in Chapter 12 on pages 305-306.)
Debate about women Debate among writers and thinkers about women’s qualities and proper role in society.
Section Review
Social hierarchies of the Renaissance were based on how people imagined their societies to be, not on how society actually worked.
Black Africans first came to Europe in Roman times as spoils of war, but were not present in great numbers until the Renaissance and the onset of the slave trade.
Free and enslaved blacks worked in all occupations, but the wealthy sought them as exotic household novelties.
The nobility maintained its status by integrating the newly economically and politically powerful merchant class.
Female rulers maintained their power by assuming masculine qualities but debates emerged about women's secondary status.
With the development of the printing press, popular interest in the debate about women grew, and works were translated, reprinted, and shared around Europe. Prints that juxtaposed female virtues and vices were also very popular, with the virtuous women depicted as those of the classical or biblical past and the viceridden dressed in contemporary clothes. The favorite metaphor for the virtuous wife was either the snail or the tortoise, both animals that never leave their "houses” and are totally silent, although such images were never as widespread as those depicting wives beating their husbands or hiding their lovers from them.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the debate about women also became one about female rulers, sparked primarily by dynastic accidents in many countries, including Spain, England, France, and Scotland, which led to women serving as advisers to child kings or ruling in their own right (see pages 330 and 353). The questions were vigorously and at times viciously disputed. They directly concerned the social construction of gender: could a woman’s being born into a royal family and educated to rule allow her to overcome the limitations of her sex? Should it? Or stated another way: which was (or should be) the stronger determinant of character and social role, gender or rank? There were no successful rebellions against female rulers simply because they were women, but in part this was because female rulers, especially Queen Elizabeth I of Engl and, emphasized qualities regarded as masculine-physical bravery, stamina, wisdom, duty—whenever they appeared in public.
Ideas about women’s and men’s proper roles determined the actions of ordinary men and women even more forcefully. The dominant notion of the "true” man was that of the married head of household, so men whose class and age would have normally conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not participate to the same level as their married brothers. Unmarried men in Venice, for example, could not be part of the ruling council. Women were also understood as "married or to be married,” even if the actual marriage patterns in Europe left many women (and men) unmarried until quite late in life (see page 298). This meant that women’s work was not viewed as supporting a family-even if it did — and was valued less than men’s. If they worked for wages, and many women did, women earned about half to two-thirds of what men did even for the same work. Of all the ways in which Renaissance society was hierarchically arranged — class, age, level of education, rank, race, occupation-gender was regarded as the most "natural” and therefore the most important to defend.
Politics and the State in the Renaissance (ca. 1450-1521)
How did the nation-states of western Europe evolve in this period?
The High Middle Ages had witnessed the origins of many of the basic institutions of the modern state. Sheriffs, inquests, juries, circuit judges, professional bureaucracies, and representative assemblies all trace their origins to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The linchpin for the development of states, however, was strong monarchy, and during the period of the Hundred Years’ War, no ruler in western Europe was able to provide effective leadership. The resurgent power of feudal nobilities weakened the centralizing work begun earlier.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, rulers utilized aggressive methods to rebuild their governments. First in Italy, then in France, England, and Spain, rulers began the work of reducing violence, curbing unruly nobles, and establishing domestic order. They emphasized royal majesty and royal sovereignty and insisted on the respect and loyalty of all subjects.
The Hundred Years’ War left France drastically depop-France Ulated, commercially ruined, and agriculturally weak.
Nonetheless, the ruler whom Joan of Arc had seen crowned at Reims, Charles VII (r. 1422-1461), revived the monarchy and France. He seemed an unlikely person to do so. Frail, indecisive, and burdened with questions about his paternity (his father had been deranged; his mother, notoriously promiscuous), Charles VII nevertheless began France’s long recovery.
Charles reconciled the Burgundians and Armagnacs (ahr-muhn-YAKZ), who had been waging civil war for thirty years. By 1453 French armies had expelled the English from French soil except in Calais. Charles reorganized the royal council, giving increased influence to middle-class men, and strengthened royal finances through such taxes as the gabelle (guh-BEL) (on salt) and the taille (teyl) (land tax). These taxes remained the Crown’s chief sources of income until the Revolution of 1789.
By establishing regular companies of cavalry and archers —recruited, paid, and inspected by the state—Charles created the first permanent royal army. His son Louis XI (r. 1461-1483), called the "Spider King” because of his treacherous character, improved upon Charles’s army and used it to stop aristocratic brigandage and to curb urban independence. The army was also employed in 1477, when Louis conquered Burgundy upon the death of its ruler Charles the Bold. Three years later, the extinction of the house of Anjou (AN-joo) brought Louis the counties of Anjou, Bar, Maine, and Provence.
Two further developments strengthened the French monarchy. The marriage of Louis XII (r. 1498-1515) and Anne of Brittany added the large western duchy of Brittany to the state. Then the French king Francis I and Pope Leo X reached a mutually satisfactory agreement about church and state powers in 1516. The new treaty, the Concordat of Bologna, approved the pope’s right to receive the first year’s income of new bishops and abbots. In return, Leo X recognized the French ruler’s right to select French bishops and abbots. French kings thereafter effectively controlled the appointment and thus the policies of church officials in the kingdom.
English society suffered severely from the disorders of England The fifteenth century. The aristocracy dominated the
Wars of the Roses Civil war in
England over who would become the next king.
Government of Henry IV (r. 1399-1413) and indulged in mischievous violence at the local level. Population, decimated by the Black Death, continued to decline. Between 1455 and 1471 adherents of the ducal houses of York and Lancaster waged civil war, commonly called the Wars of the Roses because the symbol of the Yorkists was a white rose and that of the Lancastrians a red one. The chronic disorder hurt trade, agriculture, and domestic industry. Under the pious but mentally disturbed Henry VI (r. 1422-1461), the authority of the monarchy sank lower than it had been in centuries.
The Yorkist Edward IV (r. 1461-1483) began establishing domestic tranquility. He succeeded in defeating the Lancastrian forces and after 1471 began to reconstruct the monarchy. Edward, his brother Richard III (r. 1483-1485), and Henry VII (r. 1485-1509) of the Welsh house of Tudor worked to restore royal prestige, to crush the power of the nobility, and to establish order and law at the local level. All three rulers used methods that Machiavelli himself would have praised—ruthlessness, efficiency, and secrecy.
Edward IV and subsequently the Tudors, excepting Henry VIII, conducted foreign policy on the basis of diplomacy, avoiding expensive wars. Thus the English monarchy did not depend on Parliament for money, and the Crown undercut that source of aristocratic influence.
Royal council The body of men who represented the center of royal authority; Renaissance princes tended to prefer middle-class councilors to noble ones.
Henry VII did summon several meetings of Parliament in the early years of his reign, primarily to confirm laws, but the center of royal authority was the royal council, which governed at the national level. There Henry VII revealed his distrust of the nobility: though not completely excluded, very few great lords were among the king’s closest advisers. Regular representatives on the council numbered between twelve and fifteen men, and while many gained high ecclesiastical rank, their origins were in the lesser landowning class, and their education was in law. They were, in a sense, middle class.
Court of Star Chamber A division of
The English royal council, a court that used Roman legal procedures to curb real or potential threats from the nobility, so named because of the stars painted on the ceiling of the chamber in which the court sat.
The royal council handled any business the king put before it—executive, legislative, and judicial. For example, the council conducted negotiations with foreign governments and secured international recognition of the Tudor dynasty through the marriage in 1501 of Henry Vll’s eldest son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The council dealt with real or potential aristocratic threats through a judicial offshoot, the court of Star Chamber, so called because of the stars painted on the ceiling of the room. The court applied principles of Roman law, and its methods were sometimes terrifying: accused persons were not entitled to see evidence against them; sessions were secret; torture could be applied to extract confessions; and juries were not called. These procedures ran directly counter to Engl ish common-law precedents, but they effectively reduced aristocratic troublemaking. Because the government halted the long period of anarchy, it won the key support of the merchant and agricultural upper middle class.
Secretive, cautious, and thrifty, Henry VII rebuilt the monarchy. He encouraged the cloth industry and built up the English merchant marine. English exports of wool and the royal export tax on that wool steadily increased. Henry crushed an invasion from Ireland and secured peace with Scotland through the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the Scottish king. When Henry VII died in 1509, he left a country at peace both domestically and internationally, a substantially augmented treasury, and the dignity and role of the royal majesty much enhanced.
World History
