Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

18

The Arrival of the Secular: Capitalism, Humanism, Individualism

Jan van Eyck’s double portrait known as The Arnolfini Marriage painted in 1434, is deservedly celebrated as a magnificent example of early Renaissance Flemish art. It shows the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his new bride Giovanna Cenami, standing in a room of their house, tenderly holding hands. With fine brushwork and subtle lighting effects, the picture cleverly captures the pious, serene and yet slightly self-satisfied expressions of the bourgeois newly-weds – it is a striking psychological study. Yet it is also something else entirely. The painting invites the viewer to concentrate on the extraordinary range of possessions with which the newly-weds are blessed. There is the Oriental rug on the floor, woven in small, intricate lozenges; there is the high-backed chair, covered in cloth and embellished with carved pommels; there is the red-canopied bed, the convex Venetian mirror, its ornate frame inset with miniature idls showing scenes from Christ’s passion – all this beneath a shiny brass chandelier twisted into intricate floral patterns. Both figures are dressed lavishly, too, with fur-lined sleeves and hems to their tunics, and with complicated stitching and folding in Giovanna’s headdress. Finally, on the floor lies a pair of wooden pattens, a form of thick-soled clog which shows that the Arnolfinis could afford to rise above the mud of the city streets. As the historian Lisa Jardine has remarked, this is not just a record of a pair of individuals – it is a celebration of ownership. ‘We are expected to take an interest in all this profusion of detail as a guarantee of the importance of the sitter, not as a record of a particular Flemish interior . . . The composition is a tribute to the mental landscape of the successful merchant – his urge to have and to hold.’¹

The painting is highly relevant to the theme of this chapter because while the Renaissance is probably the single most familiar period of history, few aspects of the past have undergone such a profound reassessment in the last generations as the idea that there was a ‘Renaissance’ of thought and culture between 1350 and 1600. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and thanks mainly to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a view evolved that the Renaissance was ‘of transcendent importance’ in the development of the modern world, that, after the stagnation of the Middle Ages, a ‘cultural springtime’ spread over Europe associated with a new appreciation of classical literature and a remarkable surge of brilliance in the visual arts. While some of this is undoubtedly true, what is no less true is that the Renaissance is now understood far more as an economic revolution as a cultural one.²

On reflection, this ought not to be surprising in view of the fact that the Renaissance was itself the result of some important developments, many of which were economic in character. The last three chapters have shown that, probably from the tenth, and certainly from the eleventh century on, major changes were afoot in Europe – in religion, in psychology, in the growth of towns, in agriculture, and in the spread of learning. There were new forms of architecture, the pagan world of science, medicine and philosophy had been rediscovered and major innovations had occurred in time-keeping, mathematics, in reading, in music and in art, where perspective had been discovered. In no sense could the High Middle Ages be called a period of stagnation. Beginning with the Harvard historian Charles Haskins in the 1920s, scholars began to talk about the twelfth-century renaissance, a concept that is now widely accepted.³

In some quarters, there is now a scepticism towards ‘mega’ periods in history. This is regarded as a nineteenth-century ‘triumphalist’ version of the past, in which the Renaissance is pitched against the Middle Ages. It is also the case that, as twentieth-century historians such as Erwin Panofsky have pointed out, there have been several other ‘renascences’: the Carolingian renaissance, the Ottonian, the Anglo-Saxon and the Celto-Germanic. So it was not only the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth century who rediscovered classical antiquity. However, it is still true to say that, despite these reservations, the Italians – more than anyone else – recognised what was happening. Even Panofsky conceded that the Italian Renaissance was a ‘mutation’, a decisive and irreversible step forward, rather than an ‘evolution’.⁴

Various factors – mainly technological and economic – appear to have combined to help create what we might call the Renaissance proper. Technologically, these were: the arrival of the magnetic compass from China, which made possible a number of exceptional off-shore navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder – which also arrived from China and, as was alluded to earlier, contributed to the overthrow of the old feudal order and helped the rise of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which transformed man’s relationship to time and in particular work, freeing the structure of human activity from the rhythms of nature; and the printing press, which accounted for a quantum jump in the spread of learning, and moreover eroding the monopoly on it once held by the church. In addition, silent reading promoted solitary reflection that helped in an insidious way to free individuals from the more traditional forms of thinking, and from the collective control of thinking, helping to fuel subversion, heresy, originality and individuality.

A great deal of ink has been spilled over the impact of the great plague, the Black Death, on the Renaissance. For example, in the fourteenth century, as a result of the plague, many areas of the countryside were short of people. This had the effect of forcing many landlords to give in to peasant demands and the resulting improvement in living standards has been born out by archaeological discoveries which have demonstrated a shift at this time from earthenware to metal cooking pots.⁵ The plague seems to have had two main effects on the Church, and on religious life. The very great number of deaths made people pessimistic and drove them inwards, towards a more private faith. Many more private chapels and charities were founded in the wake of the plague than hitherto, and there was a rise in mysticism. There was also a new focus on the body of Christ: whereas Lateran IV had stipulated that Catholics should take communion at least once a year, the faithful now sought to partake as often as they could.⁶ At the same time, of course, many people went in the opposite direction, psychologically speaking, and started to doubt the existence of a providential God. The second main effect of the plague was on the structure of the Church itself: some 40 per cent of priests had been carried off and in many cases very young clergy were appointed to replace those who had died. These young priests were much less well-educated than their predecessors and this reinforced the fact that the Church’s authority in the area of learning was much reduced. Catholic schooling collapsed in many areas. Any link between the Black Death and the Renaissance is thus tenuous and the specific evidence goes both ways. Yes, the less well-educated clergy may have contributed to a lessening of clerical authority, but the greater piety in the wake of the plague is the very opposite of what we see in the Renaissance. Perhaps the best that can be said is that, in helping to destroy the old feudal system, which was already waning, the Black Death delivered the coup de grâce, allowing a new system to flourish.

More convincing are the explanations for why the Renaissance originated and went furthest in Italy. This had a great deal to do with the small size of the Italian city-states. They had retained their independence largely because of the long-running battles between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, Italy’s geography – one-fifth mountainous and three-fifths hilly, a long, thin peninsula with a very long coastline – discouraged agriculture and encouraged commerce, seafaring, trade and industry. Together, this political and geographical set-up promoted the growth of towns: by 1300 Italy had twenty-three cities with a population of 20,000 or more. A relatively urban population, with a large measure of independence, together with its trading position, between northern Europe and the Middle East, meant that Italy’s merchants were better educated than most and in a better position to profit from the changes taking place.

We saw in an earlier chapter that the twelfth-century renaissance was associated with a change in schooling – from monastic schools to cathedral schools, and a change in teaching, from solitary charismatic masters with pupils on a one-to-one basis, to much larger classrooms and book-learning. Likewise, in Renaissance Italy there was a further change which, says Paul Grendler in his study of Schooling in Renaissance Italy, cannot be overestimated. ‘The extraordinary political, social, economic and even linguistic diversity [in Italy] – diversiveness would be a better term – threatened to pull the peninsula apart at any moment. But schooling united Italians and played a major role in creating the Renaissance. Humanistic pedagogues developed a new educational path very different from education in the rest of Europe in the early fifteenth century. Thereafter, Italy’s elite of rulers, professionals, and humanists shared the language of classical Latin. They shared a common rhetoric. And they drew from the same storehouse of moral attitudes and life examples learned in school. The humanistic curriculum unified the Renaissance, making it a coherent cultural and historical epoch of great achievement.’⁷

Behind Renaissance education, says Grendler, lay the optimistic presupposition that the world was susceptible to understanding and control. By the mid-1300s, when the medieval Church schooling system collapsed, there emerged in Italy three types of school. These were the Communal Latin School, run by the municipality, independent schools (or private schools, as we would say), and abbaco schools, for training merchant and business skills. According to figures Grendler quotes for Venice, some 89 per cent of students attended independent schools, compared with 4 per cent who went to communal schools. He says that 33 per cent of boys of school age had a rudimentary literacy, 12 per cent of girls, and that overall about 23 per cent of the inhabitants of Venice were literate by 1587.⁸ Venice, he says, was not atypical.

In the fifteenth century the humanists changed the curriculum. Out went the verse grammars and glossaries, the morality poems and the ars dictaminis. Instead, they substituted grammar, rhetoric, poetry and history based on recently recovered classical authors and, above all, they introduced the letters of Cicero ‘as the Latin prose model’. Most of the schoolmasters were humanists and, by 1450, says Grendler, schools in a majority of northern and central Italian cities taught the studia humanitatis.⁹ Education focused on learning to read, on eloquent letter-writing, on poetry, and history, ‘a new subject not found in the medieval curriculum’. Grendler rejects the criticism that the study of Latin stifled originality and made students docile. The very fact of the Renaissance, he says, disproves this. Instead, he says that the majority of students ‘loved Latin and the civilisation it unlocked’. This, he argues, is what helps explain the Renaissance, and he likens the learning of Latin then to the learning of music and athletics today. Young people so love what they do, and what lies at the end of their exertions, that those exertions are not felt as such: people are fascinated by the skill and know how important its mastery is for what lies ahead. Above all, the education was secular and that, of course, had a big effect on the outlook of countless graduates of the system, whether they were artists, civil servants or businessmen.

The abbaco schools took their name from the Liber abbaco written in the early thirteenth century by Leonardo Fibonacci, the son of a Pisan governmental official sent to direct the Pisan trading colony at Bougie, Algeria, where he encountered Hindu-Arabic numerals and other aspects of Arabic mathematics (see also Chapter 12). Fibonacci never had much effect on mathematical theory in the universities but he was a big influence on Italian Renaissance business. Boys studied abbaco for about two years at the mid-point of their other schooling. Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, enrolled in an abbaco school at the age of ten years and eight months and stayed for twenty-two months. Almost all boys who enrolled in these schools were between eleven and fourteen at the time. Sometimes the communes hired masters to teach abbaco, sometimes they were independent.¹⁰ The importance of these skills are shown by the fact that even Leon Battista Alberti, in Della famiglia, recommends that children study abbaco. ‘Students should then return to the “poets, orators and philosophers”.’¹¹ Abbaco consisted of basic arithmetic, finger-reckoning, accounting, calculating interest, memorising multiplication tables, some geometry and, the heart of the system, study of up to two hundred mathematical problems of business – weights and measures, currency conversion, problems of division when there is a partnership, loans and interest, and double-entry book-keeping. The abbaco books – especially the section on merchant problems – acted as reference works after schooling was over: when a merchant couldn’t solve a problem, he looked through the abbaco until he found something roughly comparable. These books also taught good business practice – how to tie up in a bundle all the paperwork of a particular financial year, how to keep a record of disputes, how to anticipate inheritance problems and so on. There was no reference to the ‘just price’.¹²

Once again, we shouldn’t make more of these schools than is there, but nor should we overlook the fact that this was the first time any civilisation had routinely and systematically trained its children, or adolescents, in good business practice. The explosion of imagination, for which the Renaissance is chiefly known, was not based only on commercial prosperity, but numeracy and business skills were regarded as an integral element in the education of Italian children in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their contribution ought not to be overlooked or minimised.

Among the Italian city-states, Florence stood out. At about 95,000 souls, its population was around half that of Milan, Venice or Paris, and much the same as Genoa and Naples.¹³ Some way from the sea, Florence had no harbour but by the late fifteenth century it mixed the craft-related services of Milan or Venice with banking. There were, says Peter Burke, 270 cloth-making workshops, eighty-four for woodcarving and inlay, eighty-three for silk, seventy-four for goldsmiths and fifty-four for stone-dressers. The city’s many new palaces had modern plumbing, as can be seen from contemporary accounts which are full of references for wells, cisterns, cesspools and latrines. The streets were already properly paved and kept clean by sewers that drained into the Arno.¹⁴ All of which reflected the fact that between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, the economy of Florence grew to dimensions which were paralleled nowhere else. This was based on three foundations: trade in textiles, the textile industry itself, and banking. Italy in general and Florence in particular was home to a commercial revolution in which trade, and international trade at that, was the basis of everything else.¹⁵ As an example, in the mid-fourteenth century, the Bardi family had agents in Seville, Majorca, Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Avignon, Paris, Lyons, Bruges, Cyprus, Constantinople and Jerusalem. The Datini family conducted transactions with two hundred cities from Edinburgh to Beirut.¹⁶ Robert Lopez says that no other economic upheaval has had such an impact upon the world, ‘with the possible exception of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Italy played the same part in this first great capitalist transformation as England did in the second, four hundred years later.’¹⁷

Although there were some technological advances, such as the invention of the caravel and the mobile foresail, the commercial revolution was mainly one of organisation. ‘A primitive striving after profit was replaced by expediency, calculation and rational, long-term planning.’¹⁸ Money of account developed around the same time as double-entry book-keeping and maritime insurance was born in the Tuscan cities where international commerce flourished. This caused freight tariffs to become more complex, which in turn increased paperwork. The archives of the Datini family at Prato include more than 500 account books and 120,000 letters, dating from 1382 to 1410. This represents an average of 4,285 letters a year, just under twelve a day. ‘Writing became the basis of all activity.’¹⁹

Does all this mark the birth of capitalism? Yes, in the sense that there was the steady accumulation of capital, an increased use of credit, the separation of management from the ownership of capital and the labour force. Yes, too, in the sense that there were deliberate attempts to expand the market through larger-scale operations. Yes, too, in the self-conscious way the young were educated in the skills for trade. But it was of course on a much smaller scale than today.²⁰

But perhaps the most visible sign of capitalism was the success of the other main Florentine activity – banking. This was an economic revolution in itself. The late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the rise of the great banking families – the Acciaiuoli, Amieri, Bardi, Penizzi and Scali – with networks of subsidiaries that were established by 1350 in all the principal trade centres: Bruges, Paris (twenty houses in 1292), and in London (fourteen). Most modern operations had already been introduced: currency exchange, deposit-taking, book transfers, credit for interest, overdrafts. Demand came from a relatively small group of European super-rich princes, whose passion for conspicuous consumption generated a huge demand for luxury goods – cloth, above all – and for banking services.²¹ Richard Goldthwaite says that this small group of aristocratic houses may be regarded as the creators of the Renaissance.²²

As commerce occupied more and more people, wealth became for the first time the main basis of class distinction, rather than birth. Merchants and even shopkeepers, if they were rich enough, were often knighted, whereupon, as often as not, they aped the old aristocracy by building palaces and buying country estates. It was this intermingling of the old aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, says Peter Burke, that produced a melding of values and qualities, ‘the military courage of the noble and the economic calculation of the bourgeois’. Out of this came a new spirit of enterprise, ‘part war-like, part-mercantile, first manifesting itself in maritime trade’. Eventually, this settled to the quieter, less adventurous form of inland trade, but it was the buccaneering spirit that first sparked the great commercial revolution.²³

This marriage of aristocrat and bourgeois also sparked a new urban elite – highly literate, educated and rational, which embodied a new order, as typified by double-entry book-keeping, the mechanical clock, and the widespread use of Hindu-Arabic numerals. But this was still an artisan society. Intellectual activity remained functional, related to specific vocational and professional purposes, and directed to meeting social needs in a secular world.²⁴ Psychologically, this produced an emerging cult of virtù, the man who set himself above all religious traditions and relied upon himself – a not entirely accidental parallel with the Greek concept of the hero.²⁵ For individuals, aware that they had to rely on their own strengths, conscious of the superiority of rationality over tradition, and that time- and money-management were the key, life took on a faster pace. Clocks in Italy now struck twenty-four hours a day.

While all this explains why Florence was so full of new wealth, it does not tell us why such wealth brought about such a great cultural explosion. Peter Hall, an expert on cities, puts it down to the fact that (as was true of classical Athens, and was also to be true of nineteenth-century Vienna) ‘the wealth-makers and the intellectual figures came from the same families’. Thus the aristocracy were not only patrons of art and learning, but were intimately involved. ‘Nearly every prominent family included a lawyer and cleric, many a humanist scholar . . . Cosimo de’ Medici was a banker, statesman, scholar, a friend and patron of humanists (Bruni, Niccoli, Marsuppini, Poggio), of artists (Donatello, Brunelleschi, Michelozzo) and learned clerics (Ambrogio Traversari, Pope Nicholas V).’ It was this which caused the pattern of artistic patronage to change and widen. Out of two thousand or so dated paintings from Italy produced between 1420 and 1539, Peter Burke has shown that 87 per cent are religious in subject matter, about half of which are of the Virgin Mary and one-quarter show Christ (the rest show saints). At the same time change was in the air. The first sign was that commissions for ecclesiastical works of art came less from the church authorities themselves and instead either from the great guilds or spiritual fraternities, or from private patrons.²⁶ It was the newly rich citizens, and not the clerics, who now chose the leading artists and discussed with them the details of the plans for, say, a dome or an entire church.

The second change came when secular patronage turned from the ecclesiastical to the public buildings of the cities as sites for commissions. For example, several important figures of fourteenth-century art – Giotto, Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti – spent the bulk of their careers in government service. Associated with this change was a move to introduce new secular themes, in particular the principal innovation of trecento art, which was the establishment of narrative.²⁷

A third change came in the status of art and the artist. To begin with, in the early Renaissance, art was still a craft, as it had been in Athens. A painting was a utilitarian object, commissioned for a particular altar, a sculpture for a specific niche. But the more intense demand which existed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy suggested to the artisan craftsmen that they develop new ideas and, above all, demonstrate their familiarity with new knowledge – perspective, anatomy, optics, classical art, even theory. ‘There was now and henceforth a market for art, first for church and convent complexes, then, about the middle of the fourteenth century, for one’s own house.’²⁸ Artists might in effect tout for commissions, but the patron could have considerable impact on the finished work. Contracts became in every sense business documents – they specified materials, price, delivery, size, the work of assistants and the details to be included (cherubs and lapis lazuli cost extra). A contract might specify that the master himself should execute the work; one, of 1485 between Giovanni d’Agnolo dei’ Bardi and Botticelli for an altarpiece, specifies so much for colours and so much for his brush (‘pel suo pennello’). Another, of 1445, for Piero della Francesca’s Madonna della Misericordia, specifies in italics that ‘no painter may put his hand to the brush other than Piero himself’.²⁹ Giotto was perhaps the first example: very successful in his business life, he seems to have combined the highest artistic skills with an acute commercial brain – by 1314 he had as many as six notaries looking after his interests.³⁰

In line with this, artists began to put their own stamp on their works. Donor’s families began to appear in paintings, and so too the artist, as Benozzo Gozzoli did, in his Procession of the Magi (1459), and Botticelli in his Adoration of the Magi (c. 1472–1475). ‘By the fifteenth century a marked change in the social position of the artist was evident; Ghiberti and Brunelleschi both held important administrative posts in Florence, the latter even being a member of the Signoria.’ Public respect for artists had increased immeasurably; by the sixteenth century, when the adjective ‘divine’ was applied to Michelangelo, it could amount almost to adulation. For art historian Arnold Hauser, ‘The fundamentally new element in the renaissance conception of art is the discovery of the concept of genius; it was a concept unknown and indeed inconceivable in the medieval world-view, which recognised no value in intellectual originality and spontaneity, recommended imitation, considered plagiarism quite permissible, and disregarded intellectual competition. The idea of the genius was of course the logical result of the new cult of the individual, triumphing in free competition in a free market.’³¹

Associated with this shift in sensibility went architectural change. Some time after 1450 architects began to elaborate the façades of individual residences to mark their difference from each other and from the medieval buildings nearby. Residences began to acquire ever more impressive principal entrances. Shops were removed, so that the rest of the world could see just how big a residence was. From about 1450 too, interiors followed suit and it became the fashion to buy objects for their artistic qualities, not just because they were useful, and this included art works of earlier times. Such collecting implied, of course, knowledge about art, and the history of art. ‘Gentilezza, or refinement, became a constant theme, expressed in the goods Italians bought – tableware, musical instruments, works of art.’³²

And so the rise of the haute bourgeoisie and the rise of the artist went hand-in-hand. The Church and the monarchy were no longer the sole – or even the main – sources of patronage for the arts. Art collecting was still confined to a minority but it was a vastly wider activity than it had been before. Towards the end of the fifteenth century prices began to rise for art works and after 1480, when artists began to be given titles of nobility, painters and sculptors could aspire to affluence, like Raphael and Baldassare Peruzzi.³³

The other significant change in the Renaissance, according to Hans Baron, and this was over and above the concept of genius, was the abandonment of the medieval notion of renunciation. ‘The monk no longer monopolised virtue.’ Now the ideal was Aristotle, a man who concluded that he needed ‘la casa, la possessione, et la bottega’. The Florentines, like the Greeks before them, believed in achievement and saw life as a race. It was no longer the case, as Thomas Aquinas had argued, that everyone ‘had a fixed station in life’.³⁴ ‘The habit of calculation was central to Italian urban life’; numeracy was widespread; time was precious and had to be ‘spent’ carefully, through rational planning; thrift and calculation were the rule. ‘The whole trend of humanist speculation in Florence in the early fifteenth century was toward accommodation with the here-below, and a rejection, implied and sometimes explicit, of the abnegation hitherto officially associated with religion.’³⁵ The result was many different views of the world, which may well have stimulated intellectual innovation.

The new humanism, which we shall come to presently, essentially provided an alternative to the divine order, setting up in its stead a rational order based upon practical experience. ‘It was as if the world were one great mathematical entity with abstract, interchangeable, measurable and above all impersonal quantities.’³⁶ Virtue was therefore personal, obtained through individual endeavour and unrelated to the advantages of birth or estate, still less to supernatural powers. It was classical antiquity that provided the grounding for this approach and outside the Church scholasticism was largely abandoned.³⁷ This retreat by the Church was in large measure replaced by the state. Jacob Burckhardt in his famous study noted that ‘in the Italian city, for the first time, we see the emergence of the state as a calculated, conscious creation, the state as a work of art’.³⁸

In her study Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, the New York scholar Janet Abu-Lughod argues that, in the thirteenth century, ‘a variety of protocapitalist systems coexisted in various parts of the world, none with sufficient power to outstrip the others.’³⁹ She goes on to say that the advent of bubonic plague, in the fourteenth century, was one of the factors which affected adversely the Far Eastern trading networks disproportionately more than the European ones, and helped account for the rise of the West (these arguments were introduced in Chapter 15). Plague may well have played its part, and a vital part at that, but this purely economic analysis neglects the role of psychological and intellectual changes which also began in Italy, in Florence, in the fourteenth century. This was the rise of humanism and the acceleration of individualism.

The first figure in Renaissance humanism is Petrarch (1304–1374). It was Petrarch’s achievement to be the first person to recognise the ‘dark ages’, that the thousand years more or less before he lived had been a period of decline, since the grandeur of ancient Rome and, before that, classical Greece. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio Africanus, in looking back, also forecast a turning point in history.

Poterunt discussis forte tenebris

Ad puram priscumque iubar remeare nepotes

Tunc Elicona noua reuitentem stripe iudebis

Tunc lauros frondere sacras; tunc alta resurgent

Ingenia atque animi dociles, quibus ardour honesti

Pyeridum studii ueterem geminabit amorem.

‘Then perhaps, with the darkness dispersed, our descendants will be able to return to the pure and ancient light. Then you will see Helicon green again with new growth, then the sacred laurel will flourish; then great talents will rise again, and receptive spirits whose ardour for the honest study of the Muses will duplicate the ancient love.’⁴⁰

Petrarch was himself fortunate, of course, in living at a time when the efforts of the medieval schoolmen had borne fruit, in that, over the immediately preceding centuries, the ancient classics had gradually been recovered and translated. But Petrarch looked on these classics with a totally new eye. The scholars of the High Middle Ages, culminating in Thomas Aquinas, had concentrated, as we have seen, on the works of Aristotle and had attempted to integrate them with the Christian message. Petrarch’s innovation was twofold. Instead of being concerned with Aristotle’s science and logic, and with the Christian implications of the new learning, he responded to ancient poetry, history, philosophy and the rest on their own terms, as the ‘radiant examples’ of an earlier civilisation, which should be understood in that way. Europe, he felt, had simply forgotten this earlier period of greatness and he set about trying to understand its imaginative powers on its own terms. ‘Thus’, says Richard Tarnas, ‘Petrarch began the re-education of Europe.’⁴¹

In the world in which he lived, even Petrarch believed that Christianity was the divine fulfilment of all thought. But he added the idea that life and thought were not uni-dimensional, that the classical world was worth studying because it was the highest form of life available before Christ appeared on earth. In encouraging his fellow men to look back, Petrarch thus stimulated a further renewed search for the lost texts of antiquity. Here the West was fortunate in that this coincided with a period of change in Constantinople. Because of the threat of Turkish invasion (the city was to fall in 1453), many scholars started to leave and head for the West, Italy in particular, bringing with them, among many other things, the Greek Dialogues of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus and other texts in the Platonic tradition. And this was Petrarch’s second contribution, to stimulate a Platonic revival reminiscent of the Aristotelian revival in the twelfth century. In fact, although Petrarch was always fascinated by Plato, at the time he lived in the fourteenth century the new manuscripts had not yet arrived in the West. It was not until the early part of the fifteenth century that the original Greek works actually appeared (very few people in the West knew Greek before 1450). It was then left to other humanists – men such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola – to build on Petrarch and introduce these ideas to their contemporaries.

Whereas Aristotelianism had been conducive to the scholastic mind, Platonism provided the humanists with a way of looking at the world that suited the change they were trying to bring about. The essential idea of Platonism was that the human mind is the image and likeness of God, the ‘deiformity of knowledge’, in William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden’s clever phrase. More important still was ‘The notion that beauty was an essential component in the search for the ultimate reality, that imagination and vision were more significant in that quest than logic and dogma, that man could attain a direct knowledge of things divine – such ideas held much attraction for the new sensibility growing in Europe.’⁴² On top of everything, Plato’s fluid style was far more attractive than Aristotle’s mere notes, on which the twelfth-century revival had been based, and this too helped fashion the new sensibility. Many people believed that Aristotle’s account of Plato was highly inaccurate. Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Niccoli both believed that Plato was superior to Aristotle, that Socrates’ eloquence was the ideal to be sought after, while Leonardo Bruni’s book celebrating humanism and the stylistic splendours of Socrates, Plato and Cicero became a best-seller: 250 vellum copies of his manuscript survive today.⁴³ Hans Baron called Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum the ‘birth-certificate of a new period’.⁴⁴

It was also the case that, by now, getting on for two hundred years after Aquinas, scholasticism was ossifying, becoming stultified and rigid in the universities, as scholars fought over the minutiae of what he and the other medieval masters had really meant. It was no accident therefore that when a Platonic academy was founded just outside Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century, it met not in the university but under the private patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, and was led by Marsilio Ficino, the son of a physician. It was here, in a very informal setting, that the traditional view of learning was transformed. Great banquets were given on Plato’s birthday and a lit candle always illuminated his bust.⁴⁵ Ficino eventually translated the entire Platonic corpus into Latin.⁴⁶

In Platonism, or Neoplatonism, the humanists recognised an ancient spiritual stream just as old as, and in many ways not dissimilar to, Christianity itself. In turn this threw a new light on the faith. Christianity might still be the final form of God’s purpose for the world, but the very existence of Platonism implied that it was not the only expression of this deeper truth. In this vein, the humanists did not stop at Greek literature. The academy in Florence (actually at Careggi, outside the city) promoted the study of all intellectual, spiritual and imaginative writing, wherever it was found – in Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, in Zoroastrianism, in the Hebrew Kabbalah. The point was, under Neoplatonism, which included the ideas of Plotinus as well as Plato, the whole world was permeated by divinity, everything was touched by a ‘numinous’ quality, nature was in effect enchanted and God’s purpose could, with care, be deciphered, his message being revealed through number, geometry, form – above all, through beauty. Platonism taught an aesthetic understanding of the world, which helps explain both the efflorescence of art in the Renaissance and the improved status of artists. Marsilio Ficino wrote a book entitled Platonic Theology in which he argued that man was of ‘almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens’.⁴⁷

And because Platonism valued aesthetics above most things, imagination now came to be exalted above the Aristotelian virtues of close observation and, as we would say, research. Metaphysical truth, revealed by God to men of genius – through number, geometry, intuition – was assumed to offer greater access to ultimate knowledge. As part of this, astrology returned, along with horoscopes and the zodiac – and their mystical numerology. The old Graeco-Roman gods did not quite have the dignity of the Judaeo-Christian God, but classical mythology had a new lease of life and respect, understood sympathetically as the religious truth of those who had lived before the Incarnation. People even looked forward to a new golden age in which the religion of the future would be a mix of Christianity and Plato.⁴⁸

Behind this, the importance of the accumulation of wealth should not be underestimated. In the words of one historian, ‘The man of the renaissance lived, as it were, between two worlds . . . He was suspended between faith and knowledge. As the grip of medieval supernaturalism began to loosen, secular and human interests became more prominent. The facts of individual experience here on earth became more interesting than the shadowy afterlife. Reliance on God and faith weakened. The present world became an end in itself instead of a preparation for a world to come.’⁴⁹ The accumulation of wealth clearly assisted this change, a change which the same historian also highlights as one of the three great changes in sensibility in history, ‘the other two being the arrival of ethical monotheism, around 600 BC . . . and the change wrought by Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century’. On this reading, the Renaissance is understood as three interlinked developments which together comprise this new sensibility. These three elements are humanism, capitalism and the aesthetic movement, the cult of beauty which led to the greatest proliferation of the arts the world has yet seen. Capitalism, now understood as a form of self-expression no less than of economics, could not have matured without the humanists’ ideas about the primacy of ‘this world’, and the proliferation of the arts would not have been possible without the great fortunes amassed by the early capitalists.

Humanism was less concerned with the rediscovery of the sciences of the ancients than with re-establishing a pagan set of values, in effect the secular outlook of the Greeks and the Romans, in which man was the measure of all things. This attitude, as Petrarch was the first to realise, had been lost for about a thousand years, as Christians took heed of the warnings of Augustine against becoming ‘too engrossed’ in earthly interests, lest one’s entry into the New Jerusalem be threatened (the City of Man rather than the City of God).⁵⁰ But the ancients had been more interested in a happy and fruitful life, right here on earth, than with the eternal destiny of their souls, and classical philosophy, for example, was more about how to live successfully now, than in the afterlife. The humanists took this on board. Here, for example, is Erasmus: ‘Whatsoever is pious and conduces to good manners ought not to be called profane. The first place must be given to the authority of the Scriptures; but, nevertheless, I sometimes find some things said or written by the ancients, nay, even by the heathens, nay, by the poets themselves, so chastely, so holily, and so divinely, that I cannot persuade myself but that, when they wrote them, they were divinely inspired . . . To confess freely among friends, I can’t read Cicero on Old Age, on Friendship . . . without kissing the book.’⁵¹ Erasmus had certain of his characters argue that such titles as St Socrates or St Cicero were not blasphemous.

Central to the humanist ideal was the notion that there was, in fact, a new aristocracy in Italy, which was aesthetic and educational, rather than based on inherited privilege, land or even money. It stemmed from cultural appreciation and achievement in the arts and learning, and it valued above all self-expression. The Renaissance was possibly the time above all when aesthetic theory was at its height (though Ernst Cassirer argued that the eighteenth century was even more conscious of this aspect of experience – see Chapter 29). Poetry and art were conceived as holding the secrets to the harmony of the world. This is considered in more detail in Chapter 19.

In the High Middle Ages, the intellectual revolution had shown, among other things, that the ancient authorities disagreed among themselves, and that moreover these authorities had often lived full lives without the benefit of the scriptures. At the same time, life had been communally organised – in congregations, guilds, universities. After the changes introduced by the clock, gunpowder, the plague and so on, and with growing wealth, individualism began to extend beyond the ‘academic’ world of cathedral and university. In addition, the old Middle Ages experience – of the clergy always being the better educated – also broke down as a result of the decimation of the Church by the Black Death. When the introduction of printed books and silent reading was added in, the spread of individualism was more or less complete. Individualism plus wealth, whether it helped create capitalism or was itself a product of early capitalism, were jointly the first elements in what we would now call the modern way of life. In their different ways, Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Montaigne wrote about intellectual freedom, individual expression, very often spiced with a scepticism towards the Christian message.⁵² After the invention of printing, the rise of vernacular literatures provoked diversity at the expense of uniformity. It was this constellation of beliefs that gave Renaissance thought its character.

In Renaissance philosophy, Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525) was typical. He concluded that Aristotelianism could not prove the independent existence of the soul and though he did not deny the soul’s immortality, he thought that the question was insoluble and that, therefore, a system of ethics based on rewards and punishments after death was meaningless. Instead, he thought we should construct a system that related to this life. ‘The reward of virtue is virtue itself,’ he said, ‘while the punishment of the vicious is vice.’ The religious authorities looked on Pompanazzi with disfavour and he only escaped the stake because of his great friendship with Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) who was himself an admirer of pagan/classical thought. But Pompanazzi’s books were burned.

Nevertheless, his philosophy shows how views were beginning to change and that change included a growth in scepticism of a sort. Erasmus, Peter Ramus (1515–1572), Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Pierre Charron (1541–1603), Francisco Sánchez (1562–1632) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) could all be called sceptics; though none of them were sceptics in the way that Hume or Voltaire would become sceptics, all objected to the pedantry of the schoolmen, the dogmatism of the theologians and the superstitions of mystics. Erasmus remarked that it made him ‘angry and weary’ to read Duns Scotus.⁵³ (This scepticism, the ‘third force’ in seventeenth-century thought, to use Richard Popkins’ phrase, is considered more fully in Chapter 25.)

A great linguist and scholar, a fine Latin stylist, and a much-travelled sceptic, Erasmus was the most famous of the humanists, just as Aquinas was the most famous scholastic and Voltaire the most famous rationalist.⁵⁴ Born in Holland about 1466, his mind dominated intellectual Europe for a generation. One of his friends once said, ‘I am pointed out in public as the man who has received a letter from Erasmus.’⁵⁵ His mother and father both died when he was in his early teens and his guardian sent him to a monastery. This might have been a dead-end, but in 1492 he became a priest and moved to the court of the bishop of Cambrai and then on to his goal, the University of Paris. This was a great disappointment, however, for once there Erasmus found the great institution much diminished and the verbal wrangles of the scholastics dry and rigid, preoccupied with sterile detail, harking back to the arguments of Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Aquinas. The mind of the once-great university had withered.⁵⁶

If Paris was a formative influence on Erasmus in a negative sense, the visit he made to England in 1499, where he met Thomas More, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, John Colet and other English humanists, changed his life fundamentally for the better. To Erasmus these pious and even ascetic men nevertheless seemed the perfect combination of classical scholars and devout Christians. These were generous souls, he felt, in honest pursuit of the truth, unblemished by the petty squabbles and arid self-defences of the Paris schoolmen. In the house of Sir Thomas More, he glimpsed what he came to realise should be his life’s work – the reconciliation of Christianity with the classics. Not the classics as understood by Aquinas, of course, which had mainly been the Aristotelian canon, but the newer discoveries, which treated Plato as central. For Erasmus, Plato, Cicero and the others were a revelation. ‘When I read certain passages of these great men,’ he wrote, ‘I can hardly refrain from saying, St Socrates, pray for me.’⁵⁷ This feeling was so strong that when he returned from England, and though he was already thirty-four, he set about learning Greek, so he could read his beloved classics in the original. It took him three years. Now began the most frantic time of his life as he translated and edited the works of antiquity. By 1500 he had formed a collection of eight hundred or so Adages, sayings and epithets from the Latin classics, which went into several popular editions. He didn’t turn his back on Christianity, however, and still found time to produce his own translation of the Bible (Greek on one page, Latin on the facing page), together with editions of the Church Fathers.

In 1509 Henry VII of England died. Erasmus’ friends wrote to him and urged him to come to England in the hope of finding advancement under Henry VIII. Then in Italy, Erasmus set out for England straight away, and while he was crossing the Alps he conceived the idea for what was to become his most famous work, The Praise of Folly. This satire on monkish life was written in a week, while he stayed again at the house of Sir Thomas More. As a form of acknowledgment Erasmus entitled the work Moriae Encomium. Published in 1511, it was an instant success, and was translated into many languages. For a later edition, in 1517, Hans Holbein the Younger, then eighteen, added a set of drawings in the margins, making this surely one of the most beautiful, interesting and valuable books of all time. It also inspired a whole genre of satiric works, including those by Rabelais. The ‘humour’ of this book seems pretty heavy-handed to us today, as Erasmus lays into the sloth and stupidity and greed of the monks, but in the spirit of the times he seems to have judged his tone just right, in that his readers could laugh along with him without seriously questioning their beliefs. The fool had been a familiar figure in medieval stories and dramas and it was this genre that Erasmus evoked. As Petrarch had provided two messages – aesthetics and Plato – so Erasmus had two messages: that the classics were a noble and honourable source of knowledge and pleasure, and that the Church was increasingly empty, pompous and intolerant.⁵⁸

Tolerance, in particular religious tolerance, was a particular aspect of humanism with long-term consequences and here the names of Crotus Rubianus, Ulrich von Hutten and Michel de Montaigne shine through. Letters of Obscure Men, by Rubianus and von Hutten, is often called the most devastating satire before Swift. Its origins were complex. A German Jew, Johann Pfefferkorn, had converted to Christianity. Like many converts, he had become wildly fanatical in his new belief and proposed that Jews who had not seen the light as he had should be forced to attend Christian churches and be forbidden from lending money at interest. He also wanted all Jewish books save for the Old Testament to be burned. Because of who he was, or had been, Pfefferkorn’s views were taken seriously and the opinions of many German clerics and scholars were canvassed. One of them, John Reuchlin, after considering the subject, concluded that, on the contrary, Jewish literature was to be praised, by and large, though he did concede that certain mystical works be discarded. And so, instead of approving Pfefferkorn’s ideas, he took the opposite stance and went on to suggest that a chair of Hebrew should be established in all universities ‘in order that Gentiles might become better acquainted with, and therefore more tolerant of, Jewish literature’.⁵⁹ Anti-Semites everywhere were enraged by this but Reuchlin received letters of support from many of his distinguished friends, some of which he published under the title Letters of Eminent Men. It was this that suggested to Rubianus and von Hutten a satire on the persecutors of Reuchlin. Published in 1515, Letters of Obscure Men purported to be a collection of missives written by lesser priests and ignorant churchmen to a real person, Ortuin Gratius, a leading German Dominican who at that time epitomised the bigotry and pedantry of the scholastics. Part of the point of the Letters was its coarseness and absurdity (the drunken churchmen ask whether it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, when the chick in the egg becomes meat and is therefore forbidden on Fridays), but it was a major assault on scholastic pedantry, which never afterwards regained its former prestige.⁶⁰

The other main achievement/effect of humanism was in education. So complete was its triumph that the language and literature of pagan antiquity became the basis of the curriculum, a position of pre-eminence which still exists in many places. This classical curriculum was first adopted in the Italian universities, from where it spread to Paris, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Oxford and Cambridge. The humanistic curriculum was introduced to Cambridge by Erasmus himself and to the universities of Germany by men such as Agricola, Reuchlin and Melanchthon. Erasmus advocated humanistic education all over Europe and he was enthusiastically supported in England by Thomas More and Roger Ascham and in France by Le Fèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Bude. Under the influence of the humanists the universities became more tolerant of science, in particular mathematics. Medicine also spread, as we shall see in a later chapter.

In 1517, the year Hans Holbein the Younger added his illustrations to The Praise of Folly, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on indulgences to the door of Wittenberg church. Erasmus shared many of Luther’s misgivings about the Church but temperamentally the two men were very different. In early 1517, months before Luther took decisive action, he had written as follows about Erasmus: ‘Human considerations prevail with him much more than the divine.’ For a humanist, it was a back-handed compliment.

Unlike Luther, Erasmus knew that to push criticism of the Church too far would only result in intransigence on both sides, a stand-off that would allow no movement and might actually prevent the sort of change they both wanted to see. The following exchange of letters between the two men sums up their differences and goes to the root of what humanism tried to achieve. ‘Greeting,’ Luther wrote. ‘Often as I converse with you and you with me, Erasmus, our glory and our hope, we do not yet know one another. Is that not extraordinary? . . . For who is there whose innermost parts Erasmus has not penetrated, whom Erasmus does not teach, in whom Erasmus does not reign? . . . Wherefore, dear Erasmus, learn, if it please you, to know this little brother in Christ also; he is assuredly your very zealous friend, though he otherwise deserves, on account of his ignorance, only to be buried in a corner, unknown even to your sun and climate.’ Erasmus’s reply was tactful but crystal clear. ‘Dearest brother in Christ, your epistle showing the keenness of your mind and breathing a Christian spirit, was most pleasant to me. I cannot tell you what a commotion your books are raising here [at Louvain]. These men cannot be by any means disabused of the suspicion that your works are written by an aide and that I am, as they call it, the standard-bearer of your party . . . I have testified to them that you are entirely unknown to me, that I have not read your books and neither approve nor disapprove anything . . . I try to keep neutral, so as to help the revival of learning as much as I can. And it seems to me that more is accomplished by civil modesty than by impetuosity.’⁶¹

After Luther was excommunicated in 1520, Albrecht Dürer appealed to Erasmus to take the side of Luther, but he wrote back that he had not the strength for martyrdom and that if ‘tumult’ should arise, ‘I should imitate Peter.’

But, despite his moderation, Erasmus couldn’t entirely escape the fight. Catholic bigots accused him of laying the eggs ‘which Luther and Zwingli hatched’ and The Praise of Folly was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, while Erasmus himself was condemned by the Council of Trent as ‘an impious heretic’. In other words, he was welcome in neither camp. This was perhaps inevitable but it was no less tragic for all that. Erasmus had lived, or tried to live, the ideal life of a humanist, as someone who believed in the life of the mind, that virtue could be based on humanity, that tolerance was as virtuous as fanatical certitude, that thoughtful men could become good men and that those who were familiar with the works of all ages could live more happily and, yes, more justly, in their own time.

In an earlier chapter we saw how the rise of Latin scholarship had helped unify Europe. The Reformation, considered in a later chapter, had strong nationalistic elements – for example, Luther was undeniably German and Henry VIII implacably English. There were scholars who came after Erasmus who were no less cosmopolitan than he (Lipsius, Grotius) but, in a sense, he was the last truly European figure.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) thought that the Florentine Renaissance was due to a change in human nature. He thought that rivalry, envy, the search for glory and fame had helped propel change in the city, that life now moved faster in the bourgeois world of merchant and banker. Nowadays, we are more apt to see these feelings and ways of behaving as symptoms of the change, rather than causes. Nevertheless, the new sensibility does need to be explored.

It was in Florence for instance that our modern idea of the artist as a genius and bohemian, operating by his own rules, was first aired. It arose out of an adaptation of ancient medicine. At that time, the four temperaments as identified by Hippocrates (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic) were still in use, though added to them was a system of ‘correspondences’. For example, the sanguine temperament, believed to be explained by the preponderance of blood, made men quiet, happy, disposed to love and was associated with Venus and the spring. Melancholics, explained by the preponderance of black bile (hence ‘melan’-‘cholic’), were associated with Saturn and autumn. But Aristotle had suggested that all great men were melancholics and the humanist Marsilio Ficino built on this, adding in Plato’s notion of inspiration as divinely inspired frenzy (furor). This picture, of the artist as a moody genius, proved enduring.⁶²

But the greatest psychological change in the Renaissance, first drawn attention to by Jacob Burckhardt but added to by others since then, was the rise in individuality. Peter Burke says there are three aspects to this: a rise in self-consciousness, a growth of competitiveness (linked to capitalism?) and an increased interest in the uniqueness of people. The increase in self-portraits, autobiographies and diaries – greater even than in the period between 1050 and 1200 – was one aspect, as was the innovation of ‘how to do it’ books, such as Machiavelli’s Prince, Castiglione’s Courtier and Aretino’s Ragionamenti, where the emphasis, as often as not, is on technique and on choice, meaning that individuals could select from alternatives whichever suited their character, pocket, or whim.⁶³ At much the same time, flat, non-distorting mirrors were first produced in bulk in fifteenth-century Italy (in Venice, mainly) and these too are held to have been important in promoting self-consciousness. A carnival song about mirrors in sixteenth-century Florence highlights this aspect. Translated into plain text it reads: ‘A man’s own defects can be perceived in the glass, defects which are not easy to see like those of others. So a man can take his own measure and say, “I will be a better man than I have been”.’⁶⁴ Then there was Castiglione’s idea of sprezzatura, nonchalance, that everything should be calculated to look natural – and this too was an aspect of self-consciousness, a reflection that individual style matters.⁶⁵

Burckhardt further argued that the modern sense of fame was born in the Renaissance, though other scholars have dismissed this, arguing that the chivalry of knights in the Middle Ages embodied the same psychology. Peter Burke, however, finds that in the literature of the Renaissance words that imply self-assertiveness, competition and a desire for fame were very common – for example, emulation, competition, glory, rivalry, envy, honour, shame and, above all, valour or worth (valore, virtù).⁶⁶ Burckhardt himself noted the new use of singolare and unico as terms of praise, and Vasari, for instance, had this to say: ‘Rivalry and competition, by which a man seeks by great works to conquer and overcome those more distinguished than himself in order to acquire honour and glory, is a praiseworthy thing.’⁶⁷ The cult of fame is generally regarded as one of the most important products of humanism. ‘The study of antiquity brought fresh contact with a generally pagan concept of personal glory – “famam extendere factis, / hoc uirtutis opus” (to broaden fame with actions, this is the task of virtue; Aeneid 10.468–9) – and the sheer survival of the classical records of such achievement gave force to the possibility that contemporary efforts might similarly endure.’⁶⁸ There was a sense of ‘vertigo’ associated with individualism, say William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, and they quote Machiavelli: ‘I am entirely convinced of this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if one wishes to hold her down, to beat her and fight with her.’⁶⁹

Linked to all this, there was a stress on achievement rather than on birth, which was another marked change from medieval times, where the values of ‘blood’ had been paramount. This was related to the idea that man was a rational, calculating animal. In Italian the word for ‘reason’, ragione, was used in a variety of ways, but all implied calculation. Merchants called their account-books libri della ragione. The Palace of Reason in Padua was a court, for justice involves calculation. In art, ragione meant proportion or ratio. The verb ragionare, which still means ‘to talk’ in Italian, reflects the fact that man reasons (and calculates) in his talk, which separates him from the animals. Calculation, which as we have seen began in various walks of life after the twelfth century, became ingrained in the Renaissance. Burckhardt draws our attention to the statistics of import and export in both Venice and Florence, and to the budgets of the Church in Rome.⁷⁰ Until the end of the fourteenth century, time was in general divided up into the parts of the day, with short amounts counted in Aves, the amount of time it took to say a ‘Hail Mary’. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, public clocks went up in Bologna, Milan and Venice and shortly afterwards portable clocks were invented (horologi portativi). In Antonio Filarete’s utopia, Sforzinda, even the schools had alarm clocks. In Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on the family, he argues that time is ‘precious’ and showed a hatred of idleness.⁷¹ There was too a growing concern with utilitas, utility. Filarete, in his utopia, even went so far as to outlaw the death penalty, arguing that criminals were more ‘useful’ if they were forced to undertake the unpleasant duties that no one else wanted. This is crude, but it is calculation.

Insofar as education helped in one’s calculations, study was felt to add to the dignity of man. Renaissance writers were especially concerned with what they called the humana conditio, the human condition. The ideal of the humanists was to become as rational as possible and so grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and ethics were known in Florence as the studia humanitatis, the humanities, because they helped make a man complete. Self-knowledge was considered essential to the completion of man.⁷² This led to a new concept of education, or rather we should say a revived concept – education not only as learning but understood as the production of good citizens, the old classical idea that the complete individual naturally takes part in the life of the polis. Medieval humanism had been aloof from the world. Renaissance humanism was a form of civic humanism and as such it represented another aspect of the rediscovery of antiquity.⁷³

One should not exaggerate these changes but we should not downplay them either. There was a downside to the Renaissance. There was violence in the streets, bitter and prolonged family feuds, political factionalism, vicious cruelty. Piracy and banditry at times seemed endemic. Magic and devil worship proliferated and even papally sanctioned assassination was not unknown. The Church, ‘the West’s fundamental institution’, seemed at times spiritually bankrupt.⁷⁴ Was this due to the rapid build-up of wealth and the disruption of traditional values? Was it a by-product of rampant individualism? There are those who doubt now that individualism was quite as new or as rampant in the Renaissance as Burckhardt argued. Indeed, he himself began to doubt it towards the end of his life.⁷⁵ Here is another area where the real change may have taken place in the renaissance of the twelfth century. But compared with the medieval view that man was a fallen, miserable creature, waiting here on earth in anticipation of a paradise somewhere else, the Renaissance humanists were far more concerned with the here-and-now, with the possibilities of this life, its pleasures and opportunities, with what could be achieved on earth.⁷⁶ In much the same way, the old obsession with the contemplative life and with poverty was replaced by a passion for the active life and the praise of wealth. For example, Poggio Bracciolini, philologist, polemicist and antiquarian, produced a dialogue On Avarice, which was a defence of something that hitherto had been a vice. Men must produce more than they need, he says, otherwise, ‘All the splendour of cities will be removed, divine worship and its embellishments lost, no churches or arcades built, all the arts will come to an end . . . What are cities, commonwealths, provinces, kingdoms, but public workshops of avarice?’⁷⁷ Conspicuous consumption, another innovation of the Renaissance, was itself a form of calculation, for the effect it had on one’s reputation and fame. Cosimo de’ Medici said that his greatest mistake ‘ever’ was not to have begun to spend his money ten years before he did.⁷⁸

Despite his backtracking on individualism, Burckhardt stood by his claim that the Italian was ‘the first-born among the sons of modern Europe’. In the Renaissance, the secular world expanded hugely, though there was as yet no retreat from Christian belief.