The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955) by Hans Baron

“The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance” (1955) by German-Jewish emigre Hans Baron is one of the most influential pieces of Renaissance history published in the last century. In it Baron introduces the term “civic humanism,” which has become a core element of contemporary Renaissance studies. While “Crisis” is a dazzling work of scholarship and synthesis, it is not an easy read and should be avoided by the lay reader with only a casual interest in the Italian Renaissance.

This is a highly pedantic book and it starts right in the title. Baron claims to use the word “crisis” in its more precise meaning of a turning point where the subject “regains its health and strength by successful resistance or adaptation to a vital challenge.” For early Quattrocento (1400s) Florence, the crisis pertained to the successful armed resistance to Giangaleazzo Visconti (1351-1402), the hard-driving and tyrannical Duke of Milan. A host of northern Italian city states succumbed to Giangaleazzo’s attacks – Bologna, Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Verona, Vincenza – while Florence alone held firm. The existential challenge and its defeat led directly to a profound shift in Florentine cultural attitudes, Baron says, the end result of which was the birth of civic humanism, a perspective that eventually spread outwards from Florence and essentially drove the Renaissance for the next two centuries.

Baron’s core thesis is that the republican freedom of the city-state played a central role in creating the Italian Renaissance – and that republican freedom was very nearly snuffed out around 1400. Florence found inspiration not only in her republican institutions, but also her ancient Roman heritage. “A new, almost dithyrambic worship of all things ancient pervaded the cultural atmosphere,” Baron says. Their dedication to antiquity was “single minded,” almost “militant.”. Within a single generation Florentine culture was fundamentally transformed. No longer was the highly educated sage or monk expected to keep aloof from society and public duties. On the contrary, he had a sacred duty to put his learning to the service of his community and fellow citizens.

Leonardo Bruni’s book “Dialogues” played a pivotal role in articulating the new values of civic humanism. Baron calls the book “the birth certificate of a new period.” It reinterpreted Florence’s relationship with its ancient roots. It argued that the blood and civic-mindedness of the Roman Republic literally pulsed in the veins of Quattrocento Florentines. Baron writes that it is this new love of the past that is “clearly the new factor” that created a new climate of public spirit and love of liberty in Florentine humanism. He says that the humanists viewed antiquity as universally superior to their own day and represented “the sole valid standard” against which contemporary acts should be measured. For classicists, this low opinion of contemporary life led many to remove themselves completely from society.

Bruni claimed that Florence was actually settled during the republican period of ancient Rome, not the monarchical imperial stage ushered in by Julius Caesar. Florence’s traditional origin story was that the city was founded by Caesar himself; Bruni now argued that Florence actually traced her founding to the settlement of Sulla’s veterans in the last century of the republic. Florence had much more in common with the Republic than the Empire. As Tacitus wrote and Bruni believed: “after the republic had been subjected to the power of one man, those brilliant minds vanished.” Thus, Florence suddenly saw herself as the direct descendant and heir to the political and cultural mission of Republican Rome.

This change in perspective was significant. “The emphasis on the Roman Republic had implications that were explosive,” Baron says, “the emphasis on Augustus and the Roman Monarchy [and the security, prosperity, and patronage they supposedly brought] fitted in with all the arguments of the medieval and Trecento traditions,” such as family, church, and empire, all of which, it was believed, were best ruled by one leader.

One’s personal perspective on Julius Caesar and his death said a lot about a person in early Quattrocento Florence. In Dante’s “Inferno” (1320), he condemns Caesar’s main assassins, Brutus and Cassius, to the deepest circle of hell, the ninth circle, which was reserved for traitors. The assassins, along with Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Jesus, are depicted as being eternally gnawed on by Lucifer himself. Caesar, meanwhile, escapes more lightly, lodged on the relatively comfortable confines of only the second level of hell, a place reserved for those guilty merely of lust. In the fourteenth century, Caesar and Augustus were viewed favorably as strong men who instituted a stable and prosperous Universal Monarchy, which was far preferable, it was believed, to a rotten and tumultuous liberty. Bruni and other Florentine humanists of the period, including his mentor Coluccio Salutati, were more partial to heroic Romans of the republican variety, such as Cicero or, even better yet, Camillus, who was revered for his virtue, resilience, and martial prowess in leading the Romans back against the Gauls after their sack of the Eternal City in 390 BC. “Caesar was to be judged not as the founder of a God-willed universal order,” Baron writes, “but by the consequences of his political ambition for the freedom and civic energies of the Roman people.”

By the 1390s, as Giangaleazzo Visconti slowly encroached from the north, Florence began to adopt the regional power politics that would ultimately define Quattrocento Italy and eventually all of western Europe. “[Florence] made up by economic industry, energy of diplomacy, and love of freedom what she lacked in military strength,” Baron says. It’s no wonder the city would informally adopt as her mascot the Biblical David.

Leonardo Bruni wrote the “Laudation of the City of Florence” in 1403. Baron says it a pivotal event in the history of the Renaissance. Bruni modeled his “Laudation” on Aristides’s panegyric to the city of Athens written in the second century AD. Just as Athens defended the Greek city-states from the all-engulfing expansion of the Persian monarchy, so did Florence defend the Italian city-states from the scourge of Visconti imperialism – or in Baron’s words: “victorious resistance to the Milanese colossus.” The period engendered a spirited patriotic elan that had a direct effect on not only Florentine society, culture, and civic responsibility, but also directly on art, architecture, and literature. The ancient skill of rhetoric suddenly became useful and highly prized. The recognition that humanism could provide the necessary skills to contribute both to a good personal life and to the benefit of the community as a whole animated the Florentine Republic. Eventually competition became the vehicle for excellence in politics, society, and culture. Florence soon became an artistic and architectural monument to humanist principles. Citizen magistrates worked to turn Florence into a work of art, literally and figuratively.

Overall, the early fifteenth-century Florentine humanists viewed Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as intellectual giants whose works laid the foundation for the cultural and intellectual flourishing of the Renaissance. But Baron says they called into question their intellectual stature vis a vis the most prominent ancient writers, although their opinion warmed over time. For instance, Poggio Bracciolini wrote of Petrarch, the pioneer of humanism: “For he was the first who with his labor, industry, and watchful attention called back to light the studies almost brought to destruction, and opened the path to those who were eager to follow.” Likewise, Boccaccio credited Petrarch with clearing an overgrown and forgotten path up a spectacular mountainside. Yet, Petrarch also espoused many beliefs contrary to the tenets of civic humanism, such as contempt for married life and civic responsibility, and the aloofness of the sage from community engagement. Meanwhile, contemporary humanists, such as Niccolo Niccoli (1364-1437), openly scorned the pursuit of wealth and ambition. Although he wrote in the Volgare and not the classical Latin of Cicero, Dante was the intellectual most admired by the humanists of the early Quattrocento. Unlike Petrarch and Boccaccio, the great poet was married and served his city both in government office and in the citizen-army. Baron says that the humanists believed that Dante cultivated and ennobled the Volgate just as Homer and Virgil had cultivated and ennobled Greek and Latin. Baron says that the civic humanists used antiquity as a model in building “a new literature with a new language in a new city.” “The Athens of Demosthenes and the Rome of Cicero will be followed by a third flowering of letters in a free republic where civic eloquence is trained in a native tongue.”

The decades after the death of Giangaleazzo and the defeat of the Milanese forces were ones of episodic threats to Florence from Pisa and Naples, and a resurgent Milan. Baron says that the Florentine humanists saw their series of victories as analogous to Rome’s grueling victory over Hannibal. In 1450 the existential threat posed by the Visconti in Milan came to an end when Francesco Sforza, a mercenary general, seized control and established himself as the new Duke of Milan. Baron says that Florentine banker and burgeoning politician Cosimo de Medici quickly recognized that the Sforza represented “a tamer and less dangerous version” of Milanese tyranny.

In 1428, a quarter century after the “Laudation,” Bruni delivered a second panegyric of Florence. It was a funeral speech in honor of a Florentine general named Strozzi who had been killed fighting the Milanese on the Po River the year before. Bruni’s speech was modeled on the famous funeral speech of Pericles in Thucydides extolling the virtues of classical Athens. Just as Athens served as “the school of Greek culture,” so too did Florence for the rest of Italy. Bruni said that the uniqueness of Florence’s institutions and liberty were inherited from her distant past. As in Athens, freedom was Florence’s paramount achievement and it was only attainable through some form of democracy; liberty “cannot exist under the rule either of one man or of a few,” Bruni wrote. Concerning Florentine laws, Bruni further wrote: “aim, above all, at the liberty and equality of all citizens” and employ legal checks and short term limits on all officeholders. An important manifestation of this freedom was the free and open competition found in business, art, and politics.

Florence, also like Athens, served as a model for her neighbors, never an imitator. “It was the political implications and Renaissance ideals inherent in Bruni’s concepts of Florence’s historical mission for liberty and humanistic culture,” Baron writes, “which impressed the readers of Bruni’s speech and acted as a weapon against Milan.” Moreover, Baron says that Bruni’s speech demonstrated a shocking self-awareness of the emerging Renaissance and its development from the unique interrelationship between the humanist movement and the remarkable Florentine city-state.

Baron concludes that the Renaissance represented a pivotal moment in western civilization, laying the foundation for modernity through its synthesis of classical and Christian traditions. The core themes were a call to active civic engagement in the city-state, a new historical interpretation of ancient Rome focusing on the republic over the empire, and, finally, a new vernacular humanism that held that literary works in the Vulgate were every bit as important and meaningful as those in Greek or Latin. However, the rise and eventual dominance of civic humanism in early fifteenth century Florence was relatively fleeting. Already by the 1460s it was in decline, Baron says; the age of the Florentine autocrat Lorenzo de Medici was beginning. Ironically, it was the deranged Dominican monk Savonarola and the arch-realist philosopher Machiavelli who would, according to Baron, restore civic freedom to Florence.