Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

for- the unimpassioned repose of Greek statuary before the Hellenistic

age. He had no use for a form that did not express feeling. He

lacked the classic restraint and sense of proportion; he made

shoulders too broad for the head, trunks too mighty for the limbs, and

limbs knotted with muscles, as if all men and gods were wrestlers taut

with strife. It must be admitted that in these dramatic

exaggerations of effort and emotion the art of the mannerists and

the baroque was born.

Michelangelo did not found a school as Raphael did, but he trained

some distinguished artists, and wielded pervasive influence. One

pupil, Guglielmo della Porta, designed for Paul III, in St. Peter's, a

mausoleum that could almost bear comparison with the tombs of the

Medici. But generally the successors of Angelo in sculpture and

painting imitated his excesses without redeeming them with his depth

of thought and feeling and his technical mastery. Usually a supreme

artist is the culmination of a tradition, method, style, and

historical mood; his very superiority fulfills and exhausts a line

of development, so that after him must come a period of helpless

imitation and decline. Then slowly a new mood and tradition grow; a

new conception, ideal, or technique struggles through a hundred

bizarre experiments to find another discipline, some original and

freshly revealing form.

The last word must be one of humility. We middling mortals, even

while presuming to sit in judgment upon the gods, must not fail to

recognize their divinity. We need not be ashamed to worship heroes, if

our sense of discrimination is not left outside their shrines. We

honor Michelangelo because through a long and tortured life he

continued to create, and produced in each main field a masterpiece. We

see these works torn, so to speak, out of his flesh and blood, out

of his mind and heart, leaving him for a time weakened with birth.

We see them taking form through a hundred thousand strokes of hammer

and chisel, pencil and brush; one after another, like an immortal

population, they take their place among the lasting shapes of beauty

or significance. We cannot know what God is, nor understand a universe

so mingled of apparent evil and good, of suffering and loveliness,

destruction and sublimity; but in the presence of a mother tending her

child, or of a genius giving order to chaos, meaning to matter,

nobility to form or thought, we feel as close as we shall ever be to

the life and mind and law that constitute the unintelligible

intelligence of the world.

ENVOI

-

IT has been a profound and grateful experience to study so many of

the phases and personalities of these rich and vibrant centuries.

How endless was the wealth of this Renaissance, which even in its

waning produced men like Tintoretto and Veronese, Aretino and

Vasari, Paul III and Palestrina, Sansovino and Palladio, Duke Cosimo

and Cellini, and such art as the rooms of the Ducal Palace and St.

Peter's dome! What frightening vitality there must have been in

those Renaissance Italians, living amid violence, seduction,

superstition, and war, yet eagerly alive to every form of beauty and

artistry, and pouring forth- as if all Italy had been a volcano- the

hot lava of their passions and their art, their architecture and

assassinations, their sculpture and liaisons, their painting and

brigandage, their Madonnas and grotesques, their hymns and macaronic

verse, their obscenities and piety, their profanity and prayers! Has

there ever been elsewhere such depth and intensity of Yea-saying life?

To this day we feel the lifting breath of that afflatus, and our

museums overflow with the spared surplus of that inspired and frenzied

age.

It is difficult to judge it calmly, and we grudgingly rehearse the

charges that have been brought against it. First of all, the

Renaissance (limiting that term to Italy) was based materially upon

the economic exploitation of the simple many by the clever few. The

wealth of papal Rome came from the pious pennies of a million European

homes; the splendor of Florence was the transmuted sweat of lowly

proletaires who worked long hours, had no political rights, and were

better off than medieval serfs only in sharing in the proud glory of

civic art and the exciting stimulus of city life. Politically the

Renaissance was the replacement of republican communes with mercantile

oligarchies and military dictatorships. Morally it was a pagan

revolt that sapped the theological supports of the moral code, and

left human instincts grossly free to use as they pleased the new

wealth of commerce and industry. Unchecked by censorship from a Church

herself secularized and martial, the state declared itself above

morality in government, diplomacy, and war.

Renaissance art (the indictment continues) was beautiful, but seldom

sublime. It excelled Gothic art in detail, but fell short of it in

grandeur, unity, and total effect; it rarely reached Greek

perfection or Roman majesty. It was the voice of an aristocracy of

wealth that divorced the artist from the artisan, uprooted him from

the people, and made him dependent upon upstart princes and rich

men. It lost its soul to a dead antiquity, and enslaved architecture

and sculpture to ancient and alien forms. What an absurdity it was

to put false Greco-Roman fronts upon Gothic churches, as Alberti did

in Florence and Rimini! Perhaps the whole classical revival in art was

a grievous mistake. A style once dead cannot properly be revitalized

unless the civilization that it expressed can be restored; the vigor

and health of the style lie in its harmony with the life and culture

of its time. There was, in the great age of Greek and Roman art, a

stoic restraint idealized by Greek thought and often realized in Roman

character; but that restraint was quite foreign to the Renaissance

spirit of freedom, passion, turbulence, and excess. What could be more

contrary to the Italian temper in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries than the flat roof and ceiling, the regular rectangular

facade, the dreary rows of identical windows, that stigmatized the

Renaissance palace? When Italian architecture tired of this monotony

and artificial classicism, it let itself go, like a Venetian

merchant robed for Titian, in excessive ornament and splendor, and

fell from the classic into the baroque- corruptio optimi pessima.

Neither could classic sculpture express the Renaissance. For

restraint is essential to sculpture; the enduring medium does not

fitly embody a contortion or an agony that by its nature must be

brief. Sculpture is motion immobilized, passion spent or controlled,

beauty or form preserved from time by metal congealed or lasting

stone. Perhaps for this reason the greatest sculptures of the

Renaissance are mostly tombs or pietas, in which restless man has at

last achieved tranquillity. Donatello, try as he might to be

classic, remained striving, aspiring, Gothic; Michelangelo was a law

to himself, a Titan imprisoned in his temperament, struggling

through Slaves and Captives to find esthetic peace, but ever too

lawless and excited for repose. The recovered classic heritage was a

burden as well as a boon; it enriched the modern soul with noble

exemplars, but it almost smothered that youthful spirit- just come

of age- under a falling multitude of columns, capitals, architraves,

and pediments. Perhaps this resurrected antiquity, this idolatry of

proportion and symmetry (even in gardens), halted the growth of a

native and congenial art, precisely as the revival of Latin by the

humanists impeded the development of literature in the vernacular.

Renaissance painting succeeded in expressing the color and passion

of the time, and brought the art to a technical refinement never

surpassed. But it too had its faults. Its stress was on sensuous

beauty, on lordly raiment and rosy flesh; even its religious

pictures were a voluptuous sentimentality, more intent upon

corporeal forms than upon spiritual significance; and many a

medieval crucifix reaches deeper into the soul than the demure Virgins

of Renaissance art. Flemish and Dutch artists dared to picture

unattractive faces and homely dress, and to seek behind these simple

features the secrets of character and the elements of life. How

superficial the nudes of Venice- even the Madonnas of Raphael- seem

beside the Van Eycks' Adoration of the Lamb! Raphael's Julius II

is unexcelled, but is there anything in the hundred self-portraits

by Italian artists that can compare with Rembrandt's honest mirrorings

of himself? The popularity of portraiture in the sixteenth century

suggests the rise of the nouveaux riches, and their hunger to see

themselves in the glass of fame. The Renaissance was a brilliant

age, but through all its manifestations runs a strain of show and

insincerity, a flaunting of costly costumes, a hollow fabric of

precarious power unsupported by inner strength, and ready to fall into

ruins at the touch of a merciless rabble, or at the distant cry of

an obscure and angry monk.

-

Well, what shall we say to this harsh indictment of an epoch that we

have loved with all the enthusiasm of youth? We shall not try to

refute that indictment: though it is weighted with unfair comparisons,

much of it is true. Refutations never convince, and to pit one

half-truth against its opposite is vain unless the two can be merged

into a larger and juster view. Of course the Renaissance culture was

an aristocratic superstructure raised upon the backs of the laboring

poor; but, alas, what culture has not been? Doubtless much of the

literature and art could hardly have arisen without some concentration

of wealth; even for righteous writers unseen toilers mine the earth,

grow food, weave garments, and make ink. We shall not defend the

despots; some of them deserved a Borgian garroting; many of them

wasted in vain luxury the revenues drawn from their people; but

neither shall we apologize for Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo, whom

the Florentines obviously preferred to a chaotic plutocracy. As for

the moral laxity, it was the price of intellectual liberation; and

heavy as the price was, that liberation is the invaluable birthright

of the modern world, the very breath of our spirits today.

The devoted scholarship that resurrected classic letters and

philosophy was chiefly the work of Italy. There the first modern

literature arose, out of that resurrection and that liberation; and

though no Italian writer of the age could match Erasmus or

Shakespeare, Erasmus himself yearned for the clear free air of

Renaissance Italy, and the England of Elizabeth owed to Italy- to

"Englishmen Italianate"- the seeds of its flowering. Ariosto and

Sannazaro were the models and progenitors of Spenser and Sidney, and

Machiavelli and Castiglione were powerful influences in Elizabethan

and Jacobean England. It is not certain that Bacon and Descartes could

have done their work had not Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, Telesio and

Bruno paved the way with their sweat and blood.

Yes, Renaissance architecture is depressingly horizontal, always

excepting the lordly cupolas that rise over Florence and Rome. The

Gothic style, ecstatically vertical, reflected a religion that

pictured our terrestrial life as an exile for the soul, and placed its

hopes and gods in the sky; classic architecture expressed a religion

that lodged its deities in trees and streams and in the earth, and

rarely higher than a mountain in Thessaly; it did not look upward to

find divinity. That classic style, so cool and calm, could not fitly

represent the turbulent Renaissance, but neither could it be allowed

to die; rightly a generous emulation preserved its monuments, and

transmitted its ideals and principals to be a part- a sharer but not a

dictator- of our building art today. Italy could not equal Greek or

Gothic architecture, nor Greek sculpture, nor, perhaps, the noblest

flights of Gothic sculpture at Chartres and Reims; but it could

produce an artist whose Medici tombs were worthy of Pheidias, and

his Pieta of Praxiteles.

For Renaissance painting there shall be no word of apology; it is

still the high point of that art in history. Spain approached that

zenith in the halcyon days of Velasquez, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbaran,

and El Greco; Flanders and Holland came not quite so close in Rubens

and Rembrandt. Chinese and Japanese painters scale heights of their

own, and at times their pictures impress us as especially profound, if

only because they see man in a large perspective; yet their cold,

contemplative philosophy or decorative elegance is outweighed by the

richer range of complexity and power, and the warm vitality of

color, in the pictorial art of the Florentines, of Raphael and

Correggio and the Venetians. Indeed, Renaissance painting was a

sensual art, though it produced some of the greatest religious

paintings, and- as on the Sistine ceiling- some of the most

spiritual and sublime. But that sensuality was a wholesome reaction.

The body had been vilified long enough; woman had borne through

ungracious centuries the abuse of a harsh asceticism; it was good that

life should reaffirm, and art enhance, the loveliness of healthy human

forms. The Renaissance had tired of original sin, breast-beating,

and mythical post-mortem terrors; it turned its back upon death and

its face to life; and long before Schiller and Beethoven it sang an

exhilarating, incomparable ode to joy.

The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the

thousand-year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe. From Italy by a

hundred routes the good news of the great liberation passed over

mountains and seas to France, Germany, Flanders, Holland, and England.

Scholars like Aleandro and Scaliger, artists like Leonardo, del Sarto,

Primaticcio, Cellini, and Bordone took the Renaissance to France;

Italian painters, sculptors, architects took it to Pesth, Cracow,

Warsaw; Michelozzo carried it to Cyprus; Gentile Bellini ventured with

it to Istanbul. From Italy Colet and Linacre brought it back with them

to England, Agricola and Reuchlin to Germany. The flow of ideas,

morals, and arts continued to run northward from Italy for a

century. From 1500 to 1600 all western Europe acknowledged her as

the mother and nurse of the new civilization of science and art and

the "humanities"; even the idea of the gentleman, and the aristocratic

conception of life and government, came up from the south to mold

the manners and states of the north. So the sixteenth century, when

the Renaissance declined in Italy, was an age of exuberant germination

in France, England, Germany, Flanders, and Spain.

For a time the tensions of Reformation and Counter Reformation,

the debates of theology and the wars of religion, overlaid and

overwhelmed the influence of the Renaissance; men fought through a

bloody century for the freedom to believe and worship as they pleased,

or as pleased their kings; and the voice of reason seemed stilled by

the clash of militant faiths. But it was not altogether silent; even

in that unhappy desolation men like Erasmus, Bacon, and Descartes

echoed it bravely, gave it fresh and stronger utterance; Spinoza found

for it a majestic formulation; and in the eighteenth century the

spirit of the Italian Renaissance was reborn in the French

Enlightenment. From Voltaire and Gibbon to Goethe and Heine, to Hugo

and Flaubert, to Taine and Anatole France, the strain was carried

on, through revolution and counterrevolution, through advance and

reaction, somehow surviving war, and patiently ennobling peace.

Everywhere today in Europe and the Americas there are urbane and lusty

spirits- comrades in the Country of the Mind- who feed and live on

this legacy of mental freedom, esthetic sensitivity, friendly and

sympathetic understanding; forgiving life its tragedies, embracing its

joys of sense, mind, and soul; and hearing ever in their hearts,

amid hymns of hate and above the cannon's roar, the song of the

Renaissance.

-

THANK YOU, FRIEND READER

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

to editions referred to in the Notes

-

Books marked with a forward slash (/) are recommended for further

study.

-

ABRAHAMS, ISRAEL, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages,

Philadelphia, 1896.

ADAMS, BROOKS, The New Empire, New York, 1903.

ADDISON, JOSEPH, et al., The Spectator, New York, 1881, 8V.

ADDISON, JULIA D., Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages, Boston, 1908.

ANDERSON, W. J., Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy,

London, 1898.

ARETINO, PIETRO, Works: Dialogues, New York, 1926.

ARIOSTO, LODOVICO, Orlando furioso, Firenze, n.d.

ASCHAM, ROGER, The Scholemaster, London, 1863.

ASHLEY, W. J., Introduction to English Economic History and

Theory, New York, 1894 and 1936, 2V.

-

/BACON, FRANCIS, Philosophical Works, ed. J. M. Robertson,

London, 1905.

BAEDEKER, KARL, Northern Italy, London, 1913.

BALCARRES, LORD, Evolution of Italian Sculpture, London, 1909.

BANDELLO, MATTEO, Novels, tr. Payne, London, 1890, 6V.

/BARNES, H. E., History of Western Civilization, New York, 1935, 2V.

BASLER, E., Leonardo, Collection des maitres, Braun, Paris, n.d.

BEARD, MIRIAM, History of the Business Man, New York, 1938.

BEAZLEY, C. R., The Dawn of Modern Geography, Oxford, 1906, 3V.

BERENSON, BERNARD, Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, New

York, 1912.

---, North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York, 1927.

---, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, London, 1901-17, 3V.

---, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, New York, 1897.

BEUF, CARLO, Cesare Borgia, Oxford University Press, 1942.

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, Amorous Fiammetta, New York, 1931.

---, Decameron, New York, n.d.

BOISSONNADE, P., Life and Work in Medieval Europe, New York, 1927.

BRINTON, SELWYN, The Gonzaga Lords of Mantua, London, 1927.

/BURCKHARDT, JACOB, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,

London, 1914.

-

CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY, New York, 1924f, 8V.

CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY, New York, 1907f, 12V.

CARDAN, JEROME, The Book of My Life (De vita propria liber), New

York, 1930.

CARLYLE, R. W., History of Medieval Political Theory in the West,

Edinburgh, 1928, 6V.

/CARTWRIGHT, JULIA, Beatrice d'Este, London, 1928.

/---, Isabella d'Este, London, 1915, 2V.

/---, Baldassare Castiglione, London, 1908.

/CASTIGLIONE, BALDASSARE, The Courtier, Everyman's Library.

CASTIGLIONI, A., History of Medicine, New York, 1941.

/CELLINI, BENVENUTO, Autobiography, tr. J. A. Symonds, Garden

City, New York, 1948.

/CHUBB, THOMAS C., Aretino, Scourge of Princes, New York, 1940.

COMMINES, PHILIPPE DE, Memoirs, London, 1900, 2V.

/CORNARO, L., Art of Living Long (De vita sobria), Milwaukee, 1903.

COULTON, G. G., The Black Death, New York, 1930.

---, Five Centuries of Religion, Cambridge University Press,

1923f, 4V.

---, From St. Francis to Dante, a tr. of the Chronicle of Salimbene,

London, 1908.

---, Inquisition and Liberty, London, 1938.

---, Life in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1930, 4V.

---, Medieval Panorama, New York, 1944.

/CRAVEN, THOMAS, Treasury of Art Masterpieces, revised ed., New

York, 1952.

/CREIGHTON, MANDELL, History of the Papacy during the Reformation,

London, 1882, 4V.

CROCE, BENEDETTO, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, New

York, 1920.

CROWE, J. A., and CAVALCASELLE, G. B., A New History of Painting

in Italy, London, 1864, 3V.

CRUMP, C. G., and JACOB, E. F., The Legacy of the Middle Ages,

Oxford, 1926.

-

DANTE, La commedia divina, ed. Paget Toynbee, London, 1900.

DILLON, EDWARD, Glass, New York, 1907.

DOPSCH, ALFONS, Economic and Social Foundations of European

Civilization, New York, 1937.

DUHEM, P., Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci: Ceux qu'il a lus et ceux qui

l'ont lu, Paris, 1906f, 3V.

-

EINSTEIN, ALFRED, The Italian Madrigal, Princeton, 1949, 3V.

ELLIS, HAVELOCK, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Philadelphia,

1911, 6V.

/EMERTON, EPHRAIM, The Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua,

Harvard

University Press, 1920.

EMPORIUM: Rivista mensile d'arte e di cultura, LXXXIX, no. 534

(June, 1939), Bergamo.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 11th ed. when so specified.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 14th ed. when no edition is specified.

-

/FATTORUSSO, J., Wonders of Italy, Florence, 1930.

---, Florence Album, Florence, 1935. (Part of preceding)

/FAURE, ELIE, The Spirit of Forms, tr. Walter Pach, New York, 1937.

FERRARA, ORESTES, The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, New York, 1940.

FIGGIS, J. N., From Gerson to Grotius, Cambridge University

Press, 1916.

FOLIGNO, CESARE, The Story of Padua, London, 1910.

FREUD, SIGMUND, Leonardo da Vinci, New York, 1947.

FRIEDLANDER, L., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire,

London, n.d., 4V.

-

GARRISON, F., History of Medicine, Philadelphia, 1929.

GENOA, a Descriptive Booklet, Genoa, 1949.

/GIBBON, EDWARD, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Everyman's

Library, 6V.

GIERKE, OTTO, Political Theorics of the Middle Age, Cambridge

University Press, 1922.

GREGOROVIUS, FERDINAND, History of the City of Rome in the Middle

Ages, London, 1900, 8V.

/---, Lucrezia Borgia, London, 1901.

GRONAU, G., Titian, London, 1904.

GROVE, SIR GEORGE, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed., New

York, 1928, 5V.

/GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO, History of the Wars in Italy, London,

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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