Part One

I've written about this before. About how the participants in the 'Italian Renaissance' had no awareness whatsoever of the history-shaping movement that they were helping to create. 'Italian Renaissance' would have been a concept entirely foreign to them.

The closest we get to any coherent expression of the idea from near the time comes with Giorgio Vasari and his book 'Lives of the Artists' (1550). This is the most plentiful source by far of information about the artists of the era. Sometimes tedious, sometimes entertaining, it is a book which readily mixes fact with fiction. Vasari cannot resist a good story, which might amount to nothing more than a rumour whispered into Vasari's ears decades after the event.

In 'Lives of the Artists', Vasari effectively shapes a personal mythology - one which, with time, only too readily becomes 'history'. For him, the 'Dark Ages', Byzantium and the early medieval period, are anathema. Cultureless, devoid of any creative spark, barbaric. Without exaggeration, we can state that Giorgio loathed and despised these times.

And then came the artists, the ones we know and love. Great figures, who incorporate into their thought and art the newly-discovered treasures of classical Greece and Rome. Typically envisioned as beginning with Cimabue (late thirteenth century), the artists not only re-introduced the creative and innovative spirit; they saved western civilisation.

The notion of the Italian Renaissance as popularly known and accepted nowadays hails from a more recent time. For this, we may thank the scholars, historians, and students of art of Victorian times. 'The Italian Renaissance' finally came into being over three hundred years after the event.

The term seems to have been first employed by French historian Jules Michelet in 1858. However, it really gained traction with the publication of Jacob Burckhardt's 'The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy' two years later, in 1860. From there on in, it was accepted enthusiastically and generally uncritically as a concrete reality, a historical 'given'. Following Burckhardt's great tome, the Italian Renaissance gained popularity courtesy of writers such as Bernard Berenson (late 19th, early 20th, centuries), and continuing into the mid-20th century thanks to figures such as Ernst Gombrich and Frederick Hartt.

These writers are giants of art history and criticism. They continue to be popular and influential sources of information, seeding a certain view of Italian Quattrocento life and art into the public domain. There is much to be commended in these weighty volumes. As far as the Italian Renaissance goes, though, they tend to convey a rather rosy and optimistic view of the time. Painters, poets, philosophers, 'humanists', all flourishing under the enlightened patronage of leaders and rulers of the various city-states which comprised central and northern Italy. Lorenzo de' Medici - 'the Magnificent' - is the most famous and celebrated, but there were plenty others. 

In 'Titian, the Last Days', Mark Hudson brings this all to life in an excellent colourful paragraph about the painting apprentice. He is writing about Venice, but it could easily be Florence, Siena, or any other hub of 'Renaissance activity'.         

"...... if we apprehend the Renaissance first and foremost through the mind of the nineteenth century, our sense of the life of a young apprentice in the late fifteenth century comes principally from the imaginings of Victorian history painters and children's book illustrators: the carousing in the streets, the brawling with apprentices of rival guilds, the carrying of banners through the streets on saints' days, the earnest labour in the studio of the master, the tights, the doublets, the pageboy haircuts, the little round caps that tell us we're in the cosily picturesque world of the Quattrocento - the Early Renaissance - whose modest scale and untainted optimism the Victorian mind esteemed almost more than the grander but more self-conscious High Renaissance."

And he ends with a curious yet insightful remark: "And who's to say it wasn't more or less like that?"

Part Two

The pendulum swings. In particular, it swings with regard to the 'enlightened patrons', whose finance and general enthusiasm fuelled our Renaissance. A closer look, we are told in more recent times, will reveal that these characters were no better than any other dictators and tyrants who have populated history.

As usual when a pendulum swings, it does so from one partial extreme to another. Read in a little more depth about the Medici and the other families who supported the Renaissance - the Gonzaga, the D'Este, and so on - and you will find that their governance over the city states that comprised much of Italy was indeed often full of deception, broken promises, brutality, the search for personal fame and glory, and the rest. At the same time, to put them in the same camp as Vlad the Impaler is not quite right.

Some appear to have had a genuine passion for 'the higher life', for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Others bought into the splendour, the paintings, the libraries, the castles and precious tapestries, more as a sign of personal glorification, as a means of impressing, of proving ones worth.  

Part Three 

Set deep in the hills and vineyards of central Tuscany, surrounded by picture-postcard landscapes, sits aloft the small hillside town of Volterra. Encircled as it is by the larger and more famous cities of the region - Florence, Siena, Lucca, and the rest - I imagine it to be a rather quiet and peaceful place, maybe with a modest stream of visitors during the summer months, functioning as a suitable escape for the day from the fray of the bigger places. Many years ago, however, it was the focus for one of the more infamous and vicious frays of the Quattrocento which, if nothing else, goes to demonstrate the less cosy and picturesque side to this period in Italian history. 

It all kicked off in 1470, when a bunch of 'speculators' discovered a rich deposit of alum in Volterra territory. Alum was essential for the fixing of dye in cloth; and Florence, just down the road and a major producer of fine fabrics, was in constant need of alum.

So far, so good. However, and to cut a few corners in the tale, the monopoly on alum production in Italy was, until this moment, held by none other than Lorenzo de' Medici - the Magnificent - at a place called Tolfa.     

Now, despite being a leading banking family, the Medici seem to have been beset by grave financial difficulties for most of their history. So, in a nutshell, Lorenzo was none too happy with the prospect of losing his monopoly to cut-price alum.

He hired another leading Renaissance figure, Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, to lead his army and sort things out. Volterra was duly put under siege. It was clear that the Volterrans had no chance against this Florentine army. Unfortunately, some of the mercenaries that the Volterrans had hired, on seeing the writing on the wall, opened the gates of the city and invited in the Florentine army to join them in sacking the city.   

The sacking of a city is always a gruesome affair, but this was especially terrible, as Federico gave his army plenty of time for rape, pillage, and plunder, before calling them off, as was the custom. Evidence exists that Federico benefitted personally from the looting, which again was not what was expected professionally.

Misgivings about the affair and the needless killing of innocents were plentiful in Florence. Nevertheless, the official version of events treated the episode as a great triumph, with Federico, Duke of Urbino, welcomed as a hero.

Image and public relations are everything. Not only does the atrocity (which is what it was) show Lorenzo the Magnificent in a bad light; it also casts a long shadow over the reputation of Federico, Duke of Urbino.

Like Lorenzo, Federico is typically portrayed as one of the more enlightened and humane among the rulers and movers and shakers of the Quattrocento. I have been reading a biography of Federico, 'The Light of Italy' by Jane Stevenson ( 'The Light of Italy', by the way, is the title given to Federico by Baldassare Castiglione, author of 'The Courtier', in a moment of great enthusiasm). She has succeeded in producing a very readable book, managing to balance the two perceptual extremes of enlightened Renaissance patrons and Vlad the Impaler lookalikes. 

Duke Federico the humanist warrior; the man who kept his promises in a faithless age; the Christian prince. Such are the images popularly conveyed. There are elements of truth in all of these. But, to quote Jane, 'the image of Federico as the ideal virtuous ruler was very carefully crafted.' Image and public relations were everything, and the Renaissance dudes knew it. 

Nothing much has changed...... 

Images: Giorgio Vasari; Quattrocento Florence; Volterra; Federico da Montefeltro