Worldly Goods (1996) by Lisa Jardine

For most people the Renaissance is synonymous with art; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Duerer are the names that define the age. Lisa Jardine, the late Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University, argues in “Worldly Goods” (1996) that the art-objects associated with the Renaissance were, in fact, the fabulous by-products of an increasingly wealthy and competitive society of merchant princes.

The last sentence of “Worldly Goods” should have been the first: “The world we inhabit today, with its ruthless competitiveness, fierce consumerism, restless desire for ever wider horizons, for travel, discovery and innovation, a world hemmed in by the small-mindedness of petty nationalism and religious bigotry but refusing to bow to it, is a world which was made in the Renaissance.” Indeed, when has greed, flattery, conspicuous consumption, and self-promotion not been the order of the day? In his letters to Lucillus, the Roman statesman Seneca famously bemoaned the practice of the city’s wealthy elite in keeping elaborate and obscenely expensive fish ponds as a frivolous symbol of excess and opulence. The same is true to today with billionaires and their gargantuan yachts.

Jardine’s main theme is that Renaissance art was meant to aggrandize the wealthy men who commissioned them, not the gifted men who produced them. Merchants were the new nobility and their accumulation of valuable art-objects represented their prestige and power. They were looking for ways to aggrandize themselves. Nearly all of the paintings from this period were “a visual celebration of conspicuous celebration,” according to Jardine. Today what we consider to be artistic masterpieces were then more like a mail order catalog that advertised all the “covetable commodities” the mid-fifteenth century had to offer. Commissioned artists were ordered to use the rarest and most conspicuously expensive pigments in their work, such as paint in ultramarine blue that was made by grinding down semi precious lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The viewer was supposed to be impressed not only by the artist’s amazing talent, but by the expensive colors used in the painting and the luxury commodities ostentatiously depicted in the painting that advertised the power and wealth of the patron who paid for it. “It was, after all,” Jardine says, “the benefactor who was to be remembered, not the artist.”

Indeed, the Renaissance artists we admire today were actually more like craftsmen in the service of the rich and powerful. By the fifteenth century these were mainly men of commerce, bankers, and merchants. Trade with the Middle East and beyond was paramount to the burgeoning capitalist class on the Italian peninsula. When the Muslim ruler Mehmet II sacked Constantinople in 1453, trade with Christian Venice and Genoa was barely interrupted. Business was more important than religion. Mehmet only charged the Venetians a 2 percent customs duty on goods entering or leaving Ottoman territory. The merchants could live with that, even if it meant now dealing with Muslim rulers instead of Christian ones.

These fabulous goods and commissions had to be paid for and ready money was rarely available in sufficient quantities. “Credit became the mainstay of the world of consumer goods during the fifteenth century,” Jardine says. Social and political success in Renaissance Italy required looking the part, and that required money – lots and lots of it. The author shows that even the most fabulously wealthy families of the period went into staggering debt to support their extravagant lifestyles, dazzling their peers with their stunning pieces of art and architecture. Indeed, the author says that there was “a habit of indebtedness” across Western Europe in the fifteenth century.

Banking, lending, and international money-changing were not, by themselves, terribly lucrative, according to the author. Rather, the Fuggers and the Medicis linked substantial loans to lucrative manufacturing and distribution rights on key commodities, especially silver and copper, which is where the real money was made. For instance, the Fuggers in Augsburg became rich because they virtually monopolized the silver mines of Europe, which they had acquired over many years as collateral for the massive loans they fronted to the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Hungary. These mining deals made the Fuggers “unimaginably rich,” according to Jardine. For the Medicis of Florence, the opportunity for acquiring transformational wealth came with the speculative discovery of alum (the key agent in all cloth-dyeing) at Tolfa. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Medici family possessed a fortune that was “almost unimaginable.”. “The art we value and admire is inextricably bound up with the financial prosperity through trade of particular regions,” Jardine writes, “and the business successes of particular individuals and groups of individuals.” What the author does not make clear is what drove this explosion of commerce in the fifteenth century that in turn drove the commissioning of world class art. Why did this not happen earlier? Or later?

Beginning in the 1470s (the first printed edition of Livy appeared in Rome in 1469), something entirely different began to appear in the art-object collections of wealthy Europeans: printed books. Personal libraries came to serve two distinct purposes: a vital resource in the new tradition of classical learning and also a status symbol. “Ostentatious expenditure on fine books guaranteed that the purchaser would be established for posterity as a person of virtue, honor, and nobility,” Jardine writes, “regardless of his social origins or the source of his wealth.” For the first half century after Guttenberg’s invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century printed books were an exclusive luxury item affordable to only the super rich. Far and away, the most expensive part of production, representing two-thirds of the total cost of the book, was paper. “The greatest printers in Europe all had to set up business relationships with bankers and merchants in order to launch the new trade,” Jardine says. In other words, book publishing was a highly capital-intensive business – at least at first.

As production increased, prices fell, although books remained expensive to the working class. By 1500 in the city of Venice, the author says that a volume of Euripides or Homer could be purchased for 1.5 ducats, roughly a week’s pay for a teacher or skilled craftsman. But books began to flood the market. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, over 25,000 separate titles had been published in Germany alone. One of the first pieces of commercial manufacturing carried out by the printing press was Indulgences sold by the Catholic Church. These “passports to paradise” served as something between a tax and a commodity. Indulgences became one the Church’s largest and most reliable revenue streams. The German Fugger bankers became the overall managers of the Church’s bustling Indulgences business. They took a 5 percent cut on each indulgence sale, and also charged a commission for exchanging currency to remit to the Vatican. Of course, it was this practice of selling indulgences in Germany that led directly to Martin Luther’s revolt.

Fifty years later (1550), Jardine says “book-production itself had lost its glamour and became an almost humdrum affair.” By that point, scholars, specialists, along with political and religious leadership had lost control of the book. “The circulation of printed books was the vital blood-supply to the Renaissance growth and dissemination of knowledge,” Jardine writes. The more common and everyday books became, the more dangerous they were. “The printed book revolutionized the transmission of knowledge, and permanently changed the attitudes of thinking Europe,” Jardine writes. Indeed, it is difficult to see how Martin Luther could have succeeded without Johannes Gutenburg. Surprisingly, it took the Catholic Church over a century before it issued its first list of forbidden books in 1559.

The wealthy during the Renaissance sought to collect more than just art-objects like paintings and books – they sought to collect geniuses, too. Rich bankers and merchants often had “Renaissance men” on their payroll. Jardine says that belonging to a great Court or house would transform a talented tradesman like Michelangelo into a “gentleman in service,” thereby vastly increasing his social standing. These “resident humanists” performed all sorts of tasks for their patron, from writing letters in flawless Latin and drafting speeches peppered with classical references to painting family portraits and possibly designing sprawling estates. Leonardo designed costumes for the wild parties thrown by the Duke of Milan. Many were also instrument makers and constructed all sorts of elaborate devices – astrolabes, planispheres, quadrants – the utility of which is unclear. Over time, these men of letters took on the added role of “all-purpose intelligencer,” Jardine says. The printing press led to “an information boom of bewildering proportions” that required learned men to “absorb and process the increasingly unmanageable flow of information on all manner of subjects.”

The enormous profits from silver, copper, and alum earned by the leading banking families of the day supported the epoch-making Age of Discovery that would upend the global economy. Portuguese explorations around Africa and into the Indian Ocean had an immediate impact upon the price of rare spices. Even with dramatically reduced prices the voyages that circumvented the slow and multi-phased overland journey to the Mediterranean (Java to Ceylon to Aden to Cairo to Venice) were highly profitable. In 1505, one of the first expeditions supported by German merchants returned a profit of 175 percent. Almost twenty years later, Magellan’s epic voyage looking for “spices and Christians” was primarily backed by the Nuremberg Fuggers, “heavily funded by German merchants, and carried a German-financed cargo, flying under the Spanish flag.”

Finally, Jardine notes that tapestries were one of the most lavish and most expensive expressions of wealth and magnificence, although you’d never know it today. Gold and silver threads and silks were ten times more expensive than the finest paints. Moreover, tapestries were more portable than paintings or sculpture and could thus more easily accompany the wealthy patron on his travels so he could impress more people. Tapestries such as “The Conquest of Tunis,” “The Voyage to Calicut,” “The Spheres,” and “The Story of Scipio” date from the early- to mid-sixteenth century and cost literal fortunes to make. Jardine says these elaborate and often enormous works of art “combined exquisite design and workmanship with extremely labor-intensive (and therefore valuable) craft skills; they rendered any room in which they were hung instantly sumptuous; they kept large, ill-insulated rooms warm and draught-free; they displayed the owner’s erudition (if the narrative they depicted was literary), good taste (if they simulated rural scenes of idyllic landscapes) or personal prestige (if they represented some scene from his or his family’s history).” What Jardine does not make clear is why these elaborate and artistically stunning tapestries have faded from the artistic canon of the High Renaissance. The same goes for “portrait medals,” hand-crafted gold, silver, or bronze coins bearing the likeness of the patron in profile. These coins were the “currency of fame,” Jardine says, and everyone from the banker Jakob Fugger to the humanist Erasmus had them. They were given out as gifts by those who had them made, which was an integral part of the package of obligations and indebtedness that accompanied Renaissance era services. “For the rich and powerful,” Jardine writes, “lavish gift-giving was part of a highly codified way of establishing networks of personal indebtedness, which could be called in in times of need.” These portrait medals, like tapestries, seem to have disappeared from the main exhibits at major art museums.

In closing, “Worldly Goods” is an excellent review of the relationship between Renaissance era commerce, wealth, and social norms to the promotion and development of artistic achievement in everything from paintings and sculptures to books and tapestries. That said, I would have liked Jardine to spend more time on why things happened and not just what things happened, as the timing of the Renaissance still does not make a lot of sense to me.