A Short History of the Italian Renaissance (2013) by Kenneth R. Bartlett

The first thing you should know about “A Short History of the Italian Renaissance” (2013) by Kenneth Bartlett of the University of Toronto is that it isn’t particularly short. With fifteen richly illustrated thematic chapters covering nearly 350 pages, this book feels more authoritative than the title would otherwise suggest. In fact, it is the best overview of the period that I discovered over the past year of rather intense reading on the Renaissance.

Many scholars today reject the idea of periodization, but Bartlett isn’t one of them. He says historical periods, such as the Renaissance, roughly 1400 to 1600, “exist in a very real way.” He says that the Renaissance was “the first self conscious creation in historiography.” In other words, the Italian Renaissance – “a self-conscious age eager to define itself based on principles borrowed and re-applied from the ancient world” – was fully self-conscious and aware of itself. Moreover, the idea of the Renaissance also naturally created the idea of the Middle Ages. Finally, Bartlett emphasizes the foundational role of humanism. It was, he says, the hallmark of Renaissance philosophy, and served as the “energizing myth” that Renaissance Italians were indeed different and separated from the values and styles of the Middle Ages.

The modern conception of the Italian Renaissance was fully shaped by Jacob Burckhardt’s “Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” (1860). Indeed, no other historical period is so indebted to one piece of scholarship. The Renaissance themes Burckhardt developed – the recovery of antiquity, the dignity of man, the state as a work of art, unbridled egoism, naturalism – still define our conception of the age today. Bartlett says that the Italians of the fifteenth century saw themselves as “special, gifted, fortunate, and almost omnipotent,” but what mattered most of all to them was their “virtu,” which the author defines as resourcefulness or prowess, along with the ability to command oneself and others.

The crusades between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries played a pivotal role in the economic development of the Italian peninsula, Bartlett says, particularly for the maritime cities of Genoa and Pisa, and most importantly for the celebrated commercial gerontocracy of Venice, all of whom acquired strategic ports in the eastern Mediterranean as reward for their crusader participation and support. The supply, transport, equipping, and financing of the crusader armies stimulated economic growth and urban development, which served as the preconditions for the Renaissance, Bartlett argues. In short, the crusades helped establish Italy as the financial and logistical hub that bridged the luxury markets of the eastern Mediterranean to the virgin economic terrain of western Europe.

The shift from the older values of the Middle Ages to the newer values of the Renaissance is often accredited to one man, Petrach, the son of an exiled Ghibelline notary from Florence born in Arezzo in 1304. Generally regarded as the first “Renaissance Man” and the spiritual father (or perhaps midwife) of humanism, which has been called “the central cultural expression of the Renaissance.” Petrarch was also, according to Barnett, “a cultural schizophrenic, and he knew it.” On the one hand, he was a sincere and pious Christian. On the other hand, he was notoriously vain, desirous of earthly fame, and an ardent opponent of medieval scholasticism, which sought to reconcile faith and reason of Christian theology and classical philosophy, mainly through the works of Aristotle, a method he saw as both ugly and uselessly esoteric.

Thus, Petrarch bridged the pagan and Christian worlds. He valued the works of classical antiquity both because of their style, which was long revered, and their content, which was long held as pagan and therefore highly suspect. Petrarch believed the pagan ancients were men of true morality and virtue from whom much of value could be learned. He maintained that “good letters, good style, and good speech are social virtues,” Bartlett says, and they tend to produce good citizens. He sought to recover as much source material from the ancients as possible and was the era’s first dedicated manuscript hunter, most famously recovering Cicero’s lost letters to Atticus, among other monumental finds. The recovery, study, transmission, and interpretation of the heritage of classical antiquity was a cornerstone of humanism and the Renaissance more broadly. Humanism emphasized the secular and the practical, just as scholasticism had emphasized the theological and the theoretical.

Petrarch refused to return to Florence. His ideas were embraced and promoted there first by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and later by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), who played the role of an important transitional figure in humanism because of his active and engaged life in civic affairs, including having a family and serving in senior public office. Salutati, in turn, inspired and promoted the next generation of Florentine humanists, including Niccolo Niccoli (1367-1437), Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), and Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444). Through Petrarch, humanism, and his acolytes, Bartlett says, “the values of the ancient world had come to provide the energizing myth of the republic of Florence.” The Franciscan distrust of wealth and public service, along with the high Middle Ages’ embrace of saintly poverty had been thoroughly defeated by the promotion of wealth and public life of civic humanism. Suddenly, fame, glory, and recognition by posterity were promoted in humanist education and treatises, what Burckhardt called “unbridled egoism.” Important centers of humanist education, such as the University of Padua, taught the ancient classics as guides for life.

The spirit of humanism also helped generate a rebirth in art. Artist contemporaries of Dante in the early thirteenth century, such as Cimabue (1240-1302) and Giotto (1280-1337), began to create figures of volume that seemed to occupy three-dimensional space and expressed human emotion. “What the eye sees” became an obsession with Renaissance artists, Bartlett says, as artists like Massacio (1401-1428) sought to perfectly capture perspective and human symmetry and feeling. According to Bartlett, the classical elegance of the new Renaissance art was heavily invested with humanist values: “The application of correct anatomy and naturalistic execution made the depiction of the human body a powerful recognition of the influence of humanism, where man became the measure of things.” Humanism also heavily influenced Renaissance architecture, which was based on the buildings of ancient Rome and the writings of the Augustan architect, Vitruvius (80 BC-15 AD).

Ironically, the papacy played a pivotal role in the growth and development of art and humanism. “In many ways,” Bartlett says, “the papacy might be seen as a barometer of the currency of ideas, principles, and styles during the Italian Renaissance.” It started with Pope Eugenius IV (r. 1431-47), who consciously brought the Renaissance from Florence to Rome. Nicholas V (r. 1447-55) was a humanist who sought to rebuild Rome while also restoring classical learning and art. Sixtus IV (r. 1471-84) was a magnificent patron of art, learning, and architecture, including the Sistine Chapel and the Ponte Sisto, the first bridge across the Tiber since antiquity. His nephew, Julius II (r.1503-13), may have been a soldier at heart (he was known as Papa Terrible), but he left an indelible artistic legacy, too, such as the rebuilt St. Peter’s and the legendary Vatican works of Raphael and Michelangelo. Leo X (1513-21) was raised and educated as a humanist prince by his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici, and centered his court on luxury, music, and art. He recreated the University of Rome and promoted the excavation of the Eternal City. Clement VII (r. 1523-34), the illegitimate son of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s brother Guiliano, who had been murdered in the Pazzi Conspiracy, had one of the most unfortunate reigns in the history of the Church, including the sack of Rome in 1527 by renegade Hapsburg mercenaries. These pontiffs helped define the character of the Renaissance in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. Bartlett says that the threat posed by the Reformation ultimately “calcified” humanism and “had a chilling effect on the dynamic energy, self-confidence, and bold experimentation that we have identified with the Renaissance.”

Arguably the worst thing to happen to Renaissance Italy was the fall of Constantinople in 1453, although not for the most obvious reason of an existential military threat from the victorious Ottoman Sultans. Rather, it was the loss of trade routes to the eastern Mediterranean that motivated the pioneering voyages of the Age of Discovery. Columbus’s discovery for the New World (1492) and Vasco de Gama’s discovery of a sea route to the East Indies (1497) were “cataclysmic” to the Italian economy, Bartlett says. Prices of spices and luxury goods from the east collapsed. Small east coast hamlets like Lisbon suddenly emerged as the new entrepot of eastern goods to western markets. The fabulous wealth that had poured into the Italian city-states for centuries shrank to a trickle.

The desire for stability and order ultimately undermined many of the principles that were central to the formation of the Renaissance mentality, including the sacrifice of the traditions and practice of political freedoms. After 1494 the Italian peninsula was divided between two foreign and hostile camps: the French Valois in the north, centered in Milan, and the Spanish Habsburgs in the south, centered in Naples. The age of the small city-state power like Florence or Venice was over forever; they were mere ciphers in the great power struggle being played out in their backyards. Only those states capable of fielding huge armies of professional and diversified soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands supported by heavy artillery could hope to compete for power.

By the sixteenth century, the muscular civic humanism of the city-state republics was replaced by neo-platonism, a philosophy of “all talk and no action” more amenable to the despots of principalities looking to maintain complete control over their domain, such as the Medicis of Florence. “A world of action gave way to a world of introspection,” Bartlett writes. Platonic philosophy only became fashionable after the 1350s. Ironically, the center of Renaissance neo-Platonic thought was Florence, the birthplace of civic humanism. The leading neo-Platonist of the Renaissance was Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), head of Lorenzo de Medici’s Platonic Academy and one of the leading scholars of the age. The motivating principles of Renaissance neo-platonism were love and harmony. Dante’s love for Beatrice and Petrarch’s for Laura were taken as nearly ideal forms of platonic love. The main themes were the harmony generated by the strict hierarchy of nature, a deep commitment to human dignity and our place in the world, and the immortality of the soul, which rationalized the philosophy with traditional Christianity. Bartlett says that neo-platonism was, like civic humanism, another sort of energizing myth, albeit one more suitable to the newly emergent courtier class where decorum was the highest social and intellectual good. The shift in outlook was similar to that experienced in ancient Rome as it transitioned from a democratic Republic to a monarchical Empire. The external liberty of civic humanism was replaced by the internal liberty of neo-platonism, a method that could more easily co-exist with despotism. “Neo-platonism was passive, introspective, exclusive, and dedicated to the liberty of the inner spirit,” Bartlett says, unlike civic humanism, which was “dynamic, inclusive, and dedicated to the concept of general liberty from external constraint.” The humanists strove for perfection in life; the neo-platonists recognized that perfection in the external world was impossible and hence unworthy of serious involvement.

It was the catastrophic defeat of the small mercenary armies at the hands of the “barbarians” (i.e. northern Europeans) that inspired Niccolo Machiavelli to write “The Prince” (written in 1513 and published in 1532). Bartlett says that “The Prince” is really “a desperate cry for both national renewal and national freedom.” The lessons learned from recent experience, he argued, was the need for Italian unity along with national professional armies and the willingness to be brutal and insolent. This form of overwhelming power made republican civic humanism – the belief in the dignity of the free individual serving his free community – no longer tenable. The old republic was increasingly seen as a failed experiment – irresolute and unable to provide its citizens safety and stability. “Perhaps the answer lay not in individual genius and human dignity, human potential, and good letters,” Bartlett writes, “but with Savonarola’s omnipotent, angry, vengeful, jealous God who was now punishing them for their pride.” The energizing myth of humanism was supplanted by the glorification – worship almost – of the prince, who became the personification of the state. The Counter-Reformation and the union of crown and altar completed the revolution. Faith and total obedience to authority became the dominant attitude.

Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) took an even more pessimistic view in “The History of Italy” (published posthumously in 1561). Bartlett says that Guicciardini was the greatest historian between Tacitus (56-120) and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), although he was a difficult man to like. A cynical opportunist distrusted and disliked by most of his contemporaries, Guicciardini nevertheless succeeded in writing a “true history” of Florence in the best humanist tradition. He does not argue a particular position, but rather argues that man, because of his inherent faults, is helpless and impotent in the face of fortune or chance. He believed that change and challenge are the only constants in the world of politics and international relations. Bartlett says that with Machiavelli there is still hope for man, but with Guicciardini none.

In conclusion, Bartlett’s critique of the Renaissance as the dawn of modernity challenges popular perceptions, framing the period as a bridge rather than a definitive turning point. In particular, he places heavy emphasis on the physical transformation of cities during the Renaissance, arguing that urban design, public spaces, and monumental architecture were as significant as literature and art in shaping the period’s cultural identity.