Renaissance

RENAISSANCE. - The concept designated by the word "R." (or rebirth) is commonly applied to the period of Italian history extending roughly from the last decades of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century.

I. CONCEPT OF THE RENAISSANCE

Among men who lived between the 15th and 16th centuries, this term implies the meaning of a more or less clear opposition between this age and the preceding time. For the most part, according to this concept, the Renaissance epoch signifies a return to the sources of ancient knowledge and ancient art, and marks a revival of the studies abandoned during the millennium that elapsed between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Quattrocento. This period, which would later be called the "Middle Ages," is characterized, according to the men of the R., by darkness and ignorance. For L. Bruni, the beginning of cultural decadence is traced back to the loss of civil liberty under the Caesars, to the transfer of the capital of the Empire to Constantinople, and to the subsequent barbarian invasions. The same vision is found in M. Palmieri and in F. Biondo. Lorenzo Valla, for his part, inveighs especially against the medieval jurists (such as Accursius, Baldus, Bartolus of Sassoferrato), who, with their intricate commentaries, their verbosity, and their useless twisting of the texts, have supplanted the clear and limpid minds of the ancient jurists, such as Ulpian, etc. Artists and art historians, too, do not fail to inveigh against medieval barbarism and to lament the destruction of ancient monuments and of "so much and excellent and noble art," due in large part, asserts L. Ghiberti (Commentarii), to the untimely zeal of the new religion. Giotto was the first who knew how to renew the art that had died out during the millennium, freeing it from the "ropeza dei Greg" (Byzantines). The pseudo-Manetti recognizes, even more than in Giotto, in Brunelleschi the true renewer of the ancient "good art," while Filarete hurls his arrows against the abhorred "Gothic style."

This apology for antiquity is never divorced in all these men from a moving exaltation of their own age and from a proud confidence in their own powers, from the proud awareness of knowing not only how to imitate but to surpass the proud models handed down by the ancients. C. Salutati declares his master Petrarch superior to Cicero and Virgil themselves, for having known how to reach the heights of perfection both in prose and in poetry. L. Valla himself hails his own century as the one in which all studies have been reborn to a better life, and F. Biondo proceeds in step with him. No lesser enthusiasm for the "golden century," in which it falls to him to live and work, is found in M. Ficino. That all these men attributed no lesser weight to their own personality and to the power of their own genius is shown by the pseudo-Manetti (Vita di Ser Filippo Brunellesco), who recalls that for his hero it would have served no purpose to have discovered and studied ancient monuments in Rome, had not divine inspiration and his own ready and fertile spirit come to his aid, suggesting to him to create new, powerful and original works, rather than pale, narrow and sterile imitations of the ancients. It should be added that many of the men of the R. were not so totally devoid of critical sense as not to know how to distinguish, even amid the thick darkness in which the "Middle Ages" was wrapped, different epochs, and that they were indeed able to recognize the slow progress of civilization accomplished between the restoration of the Empire by Charlemagne and the first timid reawakening, after the year 1000, of city life.

II. FORTUNE OF THE RENAISSANCE

The further one moves away from the living sources of early humanism, the more one sees the concept of the R. tending to stiffen into certain infallible canons and dogmas, aesthetic and literary, and the less one perceives the ties of this age with the Middle Ages, which thus fell into profound contempt down to the 19th century. From Vasari's work onward, Raphael and Michelangelo are considered the highest peaks of the Renaissance, while all their precursors are regarded with a somewhat disdainful indulgence, because they still bear the stigmata of a Gothic and barbarous age. By such a criterion the artistic R. is judged by Leandro Alberti (Descrittione dell'Italia, 1553), by R. Borghini, by architects of the late sixteenth century such as S. Serlio and V. Scamozzi (L'idea dell'architettura universale, published only in 1616). A philologist, Chr. Keller (Cellarius), discerns in Bruni, Guarino, Poliziano, etc., the true restorers of the Latin language, corrupted and disfigured during the Middle Ages (Dissertatio de fatis latinae linguae, ed. 1706), while a historian of philosophy, G. Horn, affirms that Christian doctrine, having become barbarous in the period from Albertus Magnus to Ockham, was raised from its decadence by the Florentine Platonists, a work then continued by Erasmus, L. Vives, P. Ramus, Fr. Patrasi and others. The eighteenth century's enthusiasm for the R. stems above all from that century's blind confidence in the imminent triumph of the lights of reason. This thesis, despite its variety from writer to writer and from nation to nation, nonetheless remains unchanged in substance in men such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, Gibbon, the abbé Lansi, S. Bettinelli, L. A. Muratori, Robertson, W. G. Tennemann and J. Brucker. Finally, Goethe's Renaissance sympathies are well known

(Ital. Reise, preface to the Vita di B. Cellini), his admiration for Lorenzo the Magnificent, Palladio, his aversion to "Giottoesque barbarism." A more serene evaluation of the R. came in only in the 19th century with the work of J. Burckhardt (La civiltà italiana all'epoca della Rinascenza, 1859): the historian of Basel sought to be the first to bring together the diverse manifestations of this epoch in an organic and unitary overall vision. The greatest defect of his work, however, was to set the Middle Ages and the R. in too rigid opposition, so that one of his critics, E. Gebhardt, was right to observe that the link between the former and the latter appears "barely visible." Such a link was then believed to be discovered by Henry von Thode (Francesco d'Assisi e gli albori del R., Michelangelo e il tramonto del R.) and then by C. Burdach, who traces the true origins of the Renaissance back not only to the medieval epoch (Dante, A. Francesco, Joachim of Fiore, etc.), but also to the early Christian era and to certain mystery-religions of the first centuries.

It must be said that this discussion around the "concept of the R." is still continuing even now: above all, the attempt has been made, which is not in fact new, to call "renaissance," rather than the Italian Quattrocento, the 12th and 13th centuries, where, especially in France and the Low Countries, one indeed notes an awakening of the natural sciences and of philosophy (C. J. Haskins, Fr. Funk-Brentano, J. Nordström), and an artistic flourishing (Gothic cathedrals, etc.). Following in the footsteps of L. Courajod, who believed he saw in the age of the R. a source of contamination of genuine French and Nordic art, several writers beyond the Alps strove to see the "true R." in France rather than in Italy. Alongside these nationalistic tendencies, a current has also established itself in Italy which, rightly discarding the rationalism, skepticism, etc. attributed to the men of the R. by Burckhardt, sees nothing else in their cultural work but a reaction of Catholic orthodoxy against the "heretical" and "Averroistic" fourteenth century and the triumph of a learned "pietas" that would be a renewed Catholicism permeated by the classical and ancient spirit. If then some Catholic and non-Catholic writers (Chesterton, Berdyaev) have sought to exalt the spiritual values of the Middle Ages while instead recognizing in the R. a source of moral perversion and the beginning of a baleful scientific individualism (to J. Maritain too the R. is hateful for the same reasons), G. Papini on the contrary discerns in the R. the "return to the Father" and the triumph of true and more complete Christianity over the "abstract" Christianity of the Middle Ages (on these disagreements one can form a certain idea by leafing through the collection of studies: Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne aux XVᵉ et XVIᵉ siècles, Paris 1950; the most complete bibliography on the subject is found in C. Angeleri, cited in the bibliography). Some German writers (L. Woltmann,

C. Neumann) have sought to interpret and explain the phenomenon of the R. by the infiltration of "fresh Germanic blood" (invasions, etc.) into the dried-up veins of ancient Mediterranean civilization; some of them even went so far as to offer a "physiological" demonstration of this thesis, exhibiting "Nordic" profiles of Dante, Michelangelo, etc. To all this it is perhaps worth adding that, according to a distinguished French historian still living (L. Febvre), there has never been any "Italian R.," and what is to be counted under the name of various R.s depends on subjective considerations, on illusions, on the whims of various writers, who clothe with such a name phenomena quite dissimilar from one another (according to L. Febvre it was especially J. Michelet [v.] who invented the myth of the R.).

Now, taking due account of what was established in this field by various historians, philosophers, and men of letters of the past, discarding exaggerations, inaccuracies, and errors of perspective, into which more than one of them has fallen, one may hold that the Renaissance was certainly not a "miracle," almost sprung from nothing (as Vasari would have it), nor an epoch in some way "privileged" and standing by itself (J. Burckhardt), but neither was it a mere continuation of the idea and the form of life preceding it. If one agrees to frame the R. within certain chronological limits and to make a determined country (Italy) its principal theater, rather than making it a simple abstract concept outside of time and varying according to epochs, places, persons, etc., one must first of all investigate its historical origins.

III. THE IDEAL WORLD OF THE RENAISSANCE

If Italy had been throughout the Middle Ages the seat of the Empire and the Papacy, the "chosen land" of both pillars of Christianity, and also the first victim of their perennial discord, now toward the 1400s it is practically a no-man's-land, finding itself abandoned to itself, or rather to the initiatives, enterprises and greed of individual princes, cities and republics. If in other countries, down to the end of this century, national and feudal struggles are raging, and dynastic unity is gaining ever more the upper hand over medieval "separatism," if even Spain is engaged in an unflagging struggle against the Infidel (the reconquista) - and the sense of national, religious and territorial unity is rekindled -, Italy knows nothing of this dynastic, warlike, fanatical "nationalism," which gives to epic and "romantic" survivals a stamp of topicality; Italy devotes itself to problems of local and regional interest, such as enlarging a territory, despoiling a restless neighbor and extending its own commerce, and so on, holding to that political "equilibrium" in the Peninsula which will be attained only with great difficulty after the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the arbitration of Lorenzo de' Medici (who then held, in Guicciardini's words, "the needle of the balance"). All the Italian wars of the 1400s having this precise objective have the character of small skirmishes and guerrilla actions, without ever producing decisive results (including the famous battle of Fornovo), and they return, at regular intervals, to re-establish the "status quo ante." And since none of the Italian petty states is strong enough to impose its will on all the others and still less to unify the Peninsula under its own aegis (the failure in this sense of C. Borgia will be noted with bitter disappointment by Machiavelli), the advantage of all of them consists precisely not in waging war, but in negotiating, not so much in the use of the art of war (by now become the special task of mercenary militias) as in that of the art of diplomacy, and for this purpose are required: prudence, political shrewdness, patience, cunning and above all the art of oratory, the gift of polished, calculated, persuasive, "elegant" speech, which presupposes infinite resources of a ready wit, capable of embracing the most diverse and most tangled situations.

Unable to avail themselves of any monarchical, national, etc. tradition and of any principle of "legitimacy," these "new men" find themselves forced to seek in the resources of their own spirit and their own arm the bases of their power and the guarantee of its duration. And here, at least in part, is to be sought what Burckhardt called the "individualism" of the Renaissance. Not that powerful individualities were lacking in the Middle Ages: yet the sense of their own strength was never in them divorced from the awareness of a superior and divine mission: these men always regarded themselves as instruments of Providence and appeared as so many incarnations of both good and evil. What, on the other hand, is proper to the R. is a certain egocentrism that manifests itself among the "powerful" in the politics of success and results (which lacks any moral evaluation), while among artists it takes the form of a boundless confidence in their own work (L. B. Alberti, L. da Vinci).

One might ask to what extent the accusations of immorality leveled at the Renaissance were justified. Certainly this era is not lacking in examples, even excessively crude ones, of moral unscrupulousness, but, in conclusion, one could assert that it was neither more nor less immoral than any other, and that if certain flamboyant figures of notorious scoundrels are set aside (B. Visconti, C. Borgia), who nonetheless have their equals even in the full Middle Ages (Ezzelino da Romano, Foulque d'Anjou), one also finds in the climate of the Renaissance many pious people and even people of austere morals, exemplary mothers of families, affectionate sons, faithful friends, etc. (it suffices to mention a Lucrezia Tornabuoni, an Alessandra Macinghi-Strozzi and later the good Elisabetta Gonzaga), not to speak of the sanctity that preludes the Catholic Reformation (v.).

There were those who sought to link the moral "laxity" of the R. to the presumed intrusion of paganism, but often the paganizing vein was nothing other than rhetorical exercise, a bookish phraseology, a display of mythological erudition. Classical culture in the Renaissance was the privilege of a tiny minority of the wealthier and more cultivated citizens of Florence, of Venice, etc., while the masses of artisans and merchants found their spiritual nourishment above all in the popular preachers (St. Bernardino of Siena, Roberto of Lecce, etc.), who of course attuned their sermons to the needs of the new times.

Complexity of the R.! If in the vein that starts from Alberti "realism" dominates, there is no weakening of religious faith in other artists, from Fra Angelico to Piero della Francesca, to Raphael, to Bartolomeo della Porta, to Michelangelo.

Yet the eternal joy and serenity attributed, for example, to the R. by Goethe, are nothing but a "myth": reality is more complex than these easy models; neither pessimism nor absolute optimism is the prerogative of an age. There is in the poetry of the R. a variety of attitudes, expressions and inspirations: there is, alongside those sorrowful regrets, that stifled anguish, the breath of the spring breeze in the stanzas of Poliziano, there is the enchantment of the wondrous tales of Boiardo. M. Ficino extols (De Theol. Plat.) in man a reborn Daedalus; Pico boasts (De Hominis dignitate) of the wondrous power of the human being, superior, by virtue of its protean nature, to the angelic mind itself, and the same may be said of B. Fazio and of G. Manetti and of N. Machiavelli himself, who leverages human "virtue" to combat the blind world of "fortune." However, all these apologies have nothing to do with various modern exaltations of the "superman," of the inimitable life, etc., since such superior capacity of man is closely linked to his sense of the divine, and if man is made to lord over nature, it is because he is a "son of God" ("...l'uomo fattura tua meravigliosa": Altercazione of Lorenzo de' Medici).

Now, the culture of the R. is exhausted neither in literary and stylistic exercises, nor in fatuous beliefs and astrological superstitions, and the same "Ciceronianism" is but an entirely secondary side of the new humanism, whose fortunes are tied to the discovery of ancient codices, thanks to the intelligent encouragement of certain popes (such as Nicholas V) and of certain wealthy patricians (Cosimo de' Medici, Palla Strozzi, etc.). One of the most important discoveries of the age was that of the Greek manuscripts of Plato and of Plotinus (the latter was entirely unknown in the Middle Ages, while of the former there were only certain unfaithful versions mangled by medieval glossators). The discovery of Plato would not, however, in itself have such importance, if the thinkers of the R. had not raised various problems of a metaphysical nature, concerning the relationship between man, nature and God. And precisely the controversies of various Councils (1430 and 1439) gave the impetus to such speculations. Thus Card. Cusanus takes his starting point from the dispute around the problem of the supremacy of the Pope and of the Councils in order to develop his doctrine on "complicatio et implicatio" (De docta ignorantia), which, however, had very few resonances in Italy.

Instead the disputes between Greeks and Latins at the Council of Florence (1439), on the respective merits of Plato and of Aristotle, provoked in that same city a very great effervescence, determining Cosimo the Elder to found the so-called "Platonic Academy." Ficino's dominant thought is to prove, with the aid of Plato and of Plotinus as well as of various pre-Christian theologies, the fundamental unity of faith and of "reason founded on Mosaic revelation," whose esoteric meaning would be revealed and confirmed, according to Pico, in the cabalistic books. In the thought of the R. there also circulates the doctrine of the "double truth," which, already propagated by Paduan Averroists, was upheld by P. Pomponazzi, a follower of the "true Aristotle," already rediscovered by E. Barbaro. One notes, in opposition to these "innovators," also certain conservatives, partisans of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas, enemies of every kind of paganism (G. Dominici, St. Antoninus and Card. Adriano da Corneto, etc.).

The historiography of the R. decisively abandons the old medieval schemas, turning its attention still to the origins and development of individual Italian cities and republics and to the fortunes of various princely lineages. Rome, while preserving its prestige, is no longer, for example, at the center of the concerns of an L. Bruno or a Poggio Bracciolini: it is their city, Florence, that, although being the younger daughter of Rome, is now called to renew culture and to hand down to posterity illustrious works, whose decorum and style are no less than the doctrine and the moral content.

In various manifestations of the R. there is also a tendency toward accord, harmony, reconciliation: accord between faith and reason (Ficino, Pico), between the contemplative and active virtue (C. Landino, De disputationibus Camaldulensis), between the plastic beauty of a work of art and its divine eurhythmy in the same cosmic creation (L. B. Alberti, L. Pacioli), between the love of creatures and that of the Creator in the doctrine of "Platonic love" of Ficino, later propagated through Il Cortegiano of B. Castiglione, the Dialoghi d'Amore of Leone Ebreo, the Asolani of P. Bembo, in short between divine and human things (according to Card. Sadoleto). For the last time the equilibrium of the R. will be illustrated, under the pontificate of Leo X, by Raphael (Stanze del Vaticano). Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, another epoch begins, an epoch of dramatic tension and acute conflicts, an epoch that will give its imprint to a new form of religiosity, to a new direction in art, to a new sensibility in literature, in brief, to a new style and a new civilization.

For the philosophy of the R., besides the individual authors v. ARISTOTELISMO; PLATONISMO. V. also ITALIA. V. Letteratura; UMANESIMO.

Eugenio Anagnine

IV. ART

The definition of the R. from the point of view of the figurative arts and the determination of the limits within which it may be legitimate to speak of the R. undergo the same uncertainties that are revealed in the field of the history of thought and culture. As in these, so too with regard to art, the term R. has been given the most diverse definitions.

As for the possibility of tracing its origins, scholars are divided into two main camps: some see the R. arising as early as the thirteenth century and link the phenomenon of the rebirth of the arts to the rise of the Communes or to the great French civilization of the thirteenth century, which gave a very lively impulse through architecture and sculpture to the whole of artistic production; others, more justly, assigning to the concept of R. a precise historical as well as qualitative value, recognize that only with the beginning of the fifteenth century, and more precisely with the Florentine Quattrocento, are those conditions of particular harmony between the arts and between these and the cultural world determined, by which were made possible the very powerful and singular creative impulse and the formation of the new concept of artistic autonomy which for at least two centuries spread throughout Europe and had, even subsequently, profound repercussions in the world down to the threshold of the modern age.

1. Characteristics

When one wishes to assign to the term R. that value which humanists and artists contemporary with or immediately subsequent to the development of the new ideas consciously gave it, one must consider the art and artistic culture of the Quattrocento as something new, albeit produced by the ever more intense and free artistic creation of the preceding centuries and above all by the high awareness of the phenomenon of art testified to by Dante, by Giotto, by Petrarch. To understand the novelty of that time it would suffice to read some of the pages of those artist-humanists who, besides working in the midst of the age as architects, sculptors, painters, were driven by curiosity for knowledge and by the maturity of their culture to assume that attitude of self-awareness and theoretical demand that is typical of the R. See, for example, the dedication to Filippo di Ser Brunellesco prefixed to the treatise "De pictura" by L. B. Alberti, the great humanist architect, who, arriving from his exile in Venice, becomes aware with astonishment precisely of that "new time" that we call the R. He fully understands its universal value, and his pages, in which the greatest artists of Quattrocento Florence are cited, must be considered as the "Manifesto" of the Rinascita. In them he not only recognizes the creative originality of those artists, but considers them as exemplars of the new generation which, from the comparison with the ancients, does not arrive at a continuation and a subsequent development of classical art, but places itself "on a par" with ancient art while preserving the full autonomy of artistic creation. Hence, in Alberti's words, the definition of the R. as an age "autonomous" in the face of antiquity, a concept to be kept well in mind so as not to fall back into the cultural error of seeing the R. only as a rebirth of classical art. Even if the term, created in the humanistic sphere, is meant to indicate above all a new sprouting of classical art, what matters most is to understand this classicism as a polemical attitude against medieval and (as would be said later in the Cinquecento) "barbarous" art.

Moreover, if one wished to trace the fortune of classical art before the R., one would arrive (by subtle paths but clarified by modern criticism) at classical art itself, inasmuch as the tradition of classicism was never extinguished, even while shifting its ground through the centuries. It is more reasonable, therefore, to consider the R. as the attainment of a particular and rare harmony among the arts and between these and scientific and philosophical speculation, which was mirrored in Greek and Roman civilization, recognizing itself therein, and thus clearly defining its own speculative and expressive character.

To define even better the value of the R. in the face of medieval tradition, one should think of what the Florentine artists of the very early Quattrocento found before them, immediately preceding or contemporary with their new speculations: the end of the Trecento and the first decades of the Quattrocento had seen the affirmation of a fantastic efflorescence, whence the term "flamboyant Gothic," which well indicates the aspects of the late Gothic style.

The environmental conditions and, far more, the intellectual and ethical conditions of the Florentine artists of the early Quattrocento, who had had in their tradition a painter like Giotto, an architect and sculptor like Arnolfo di Cambio (artists already concerned with a particular expressive clarity that often borders on the geometrization of spaces and the musical cadence of rhythms), in the strong impulse toward a simpler and more natural reality opposed to the aristocratic complications of the late Gothic, permitted the admirable advent of an art founded on the clarity and truth of representation supported by a very strong demand for synthesis and rationally balanced with architecture, expression of a new measure of the imagination (which had already constituted the fulcrum of classical art), man. It is not difficult, in fact, to recognize in the renewed value of man as the measure of things the greater power of autonomy and originality of the art of the R.: even in the field of thought and in the formulation of Renaissance philosophy, the center of speculation is man, from whose exaltation the new artistic vision arises. One of the fundamental conquests of the art of the R. has its origin precisely in the dominant position of man before nature: it is perspective.

2. Value of perspective

Many factors contribute to the "discovery," or rather rediscovery, of the optical and geometric laws that govern perspectival vision, nor should one believe that the Middle Ages was devoid of any perspectival notion: above all Giotto, as some details of the frescoes of Assisi and, better, of Padua demonstrate, had confronted and resolved certain problems of illusionistic vision, which increases the spatial effect of the environment in which one paints; but one must reach the early Quattrocento, and precisely Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, to find ourselves before a full awareness of the perspectival rules used for the representation of reality, according to a clear organization, preferably according to "central perspective."

Giorgio Vasari speaks with uncertainty of the rediscovery of the laws of perspective and attributes it now to Brunellesco, now to Masaccio or to Paolo Uccello, but modern critical studies have concentrated on Brunellesco the perspectival interest that passed immediately to the artists of his generation and found its most enthusiastic developments in sculpture, in painting, even in the art of the intarsia-makers, until, with Piero della Francesca, it received a systematic treatment in the book: "De prospectiva pingendi."

To understand the fundamental speculative value of the perspectival conception, one must remember that it is not merely a figurative fact, but that this is the expression of a total vision of the world in relation to man, insofar as it arises from the taking possession that man himself carries out of the surrounding reality from his own "point of view," considered autonomous and central. Hence the exaltation of individual personality and the need to bring about a synthetic vision of reality entirely mastered by man: as philosopher, as politician, as man of action, as artist. Such a conception was foreign to the Middle Ages because the immanent transcendence of the world stood opposed to it; therefore the Middle Ages did not know perspective in the Renaissance sense, that is, as the dominant and centralizing element of vision.

Perspective informed the character of the figurative arts of the Quattrocento, even though the veristic-decorative tradition of the International Gothic persisted at the same time, and it had an enormous effect on the development of the Renaissance (R.) also outside Italy, through the multiplication of treatises on the arts or the translations of celebrated Italian treatises. To confirm this faith in perspective and in the proportional rules of things, and above all of man, there came opportunely and teeming with results the study of classical treatises, sometimes interpreted with intuitive freedom, in any case always invoked as an example of the coherence and rationality of the classical spirit.

This singular attitude, which tends to rationalize artistic intuition and to establish principles beyond the rules formulated in the pages of treatises on art, is symptomatic of the Renaissance spirit, even if, from the early Middle Ages onward, certain principles of technique and style were collected for the use of painters. The difference between these centos or "summae" and the true "treatises" of the Renaissance consists in the totally different spirit with which the labor of compiling such collections is approached. Up to the "Libro dell'Arte" of Cennino Cennini, still largely medieval, in the mixture of theoretical principles and practical advice

(often of touching naivety) such publications concerned the didactics of art and, in a certain sense, the conceptual world of the artist in close relation to the religious themes he addressed, whereas with the treatises of the Renaissance, of which the most singular examples are offered by L. B. Alberti, of a exquisitely humanistic and pedagogical nature, one passes onto a clearly different plane where the artist is at the same time creator and investigator of subtle geometric and mathematical speculations and where for the first time the relationship among the arts, poetry, music, and philosophy is extensively discussed.

Another of the distinctive characteristics of the artist's personality in the Renaissance is that of his many-sidedness, not to be confused with eclecticism. There is no doubt that even in the Middle Ages there existed artists who practiced various activities in the figurative field at the same time, and the example of Giotto—painter, architect, and author of models in clay for the sculptures of his Florence campanile—would suffice once again; but if this arose from the native uniqueness of artistic manifestation (all the more valid the more original and autonomous it was), in the Renaissance the very frequent phenomenon of the many-sided artist is understood as a proof of the completeness of the personality, while it is undoubtedly stimulated and nourished by the tendency to reduce to theoretical principles, equally valid for all the arts, the singularity of artistic expressions. Brunelleschi (architect and sculptor), Donatello (sculptor and architect), Leon Battista Alberti (architect, sculptor, painter, treatise writer), Piero della Francesca (painter, architect, treatise writer), and others up to Leonardo da Vinci, who reaches the maximum of complexity in the relations between art and thought, and Michelangelo himself are but a few examples, among the greatest, of the many-sidedness of the Renaissance artist, even if each of them then practiced in a particular way one of the artistic activities known to him.

From this, which might seem merely a consideration relating to the inner richness of such artistic personalities, arises the important acknowledgment that Renaissance art, in its vital dialectic between naturalism and idealism, between experience and theory, between art and science, attained that rare equilibrium almost unknown to other artistic civilizations (with the possible exception of ancient Greece), precisely because within one and the same artist problems of expression proper to the individual manifestations of art itself were elaborated and found their solution: whence the conviction, for example, that, as Michelangelo said, no one can understand architecture who does not understand anatomy.

Granted that, in attempting to define the typical characteristics of the individual arts in the Renaissance, one performs a work of generalization and abstraction in the face of the vital substance of artistic personalities, one may nonetheless indicate certain constant aspects of the arts in the Renaissance in order to contribute to the knowledge of this artistic period.

3. The arts in particular

Architecture reacts against the planimetric and decorative complications of the Gothic, which had reached its decadence, but from it inherits the constructive spirit and the subtle technical experience, bringing volumes and surfaces back to a geometric and yet living simplicity, availing itself of the passionate study of ancient buildings.

Even if the Middle Ages had knowledge of antiquity and often ingeniously interpreted some of its characteristics, this is not comparable to the conscious enthusiasm and the depth of research with which the new architects of the Renaissance approached the study of ancient monuments, measuring them, tracing their proportional relationships, mastering the decorative modules with far different coherence and rationality, precisely because they were already prepared, in their ideals of harmony and proportion, to exploit the experience of antiquity as an operative element in the imagination. The natural desire for simplicity and measure, which stood polemically opposed to the last complications of Gothic architecture, favored the acceptance of decorative modes, of precious details that Roman architectural decoration had in part inherited from Hellenistic architecture and from Greek classicism: around the round arches reappear cornices with elegant and crisp profiles; beneath the overhangs and cornices of buildings return delicately carved brackets and marble dentils; along the extended surfaces stand out pilasters and plain or fluted pillars, crowned by capitals of the most refined taste.

Among the highest examples of this new architectural style are the buildings designed by Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, by Michelozzo, by Leon Battista Alberti, by Luciano Laurana, by Cronaca, by Giuliano da S. Gallo.

In sculpture, starting from the experiences of the mature Trecento which, above all with Andrea Pisano, had brought formal simplification, in contact with classical art, to a level of the highest style (see the panels of Giotto's campanile and the compartments of the first door of the Florence Baptistery), the new artists, taking from the Gothic that spirit of intimate vitality which was also a living teaching in architecture, approach the human figure anew with a greater desire for plasticity and compositional breadth: man, above all man in the perfection of his nudity, interests artists more than flourishing decoration. Even the surrounding environment, in bas-relief, feels the effect of the more acute and rational naturalistic experience, through perspective used in different ways, but at the same time, by artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello.

The individuality of the artist, exalted as a source of autonomy in creation, gives rise to that "spirit of emulation" that would be typical of the Renaissance world, while new motifs, also born from the civilization of the R., stimulate the imagination of sculptors. The "Portrait," for example, which had already reappeared in the fourteenth century through funerary or commemorative sculpture, or even in painting, but in a humble and modest guise, assumes fundamental importance in the fifteenth century: from Donatello to Francesco Laurana, to Mino da Fiesole, to Desiderio da Settignano, and on down to Pollaiuolo, to Verrocchio, portrait busts enter the home, alongside the living person who takes pleasure in handing down his likeness to posterity, often in polychrome terracotta, for a greater effect of truth. At the same time the rare examples of equestrian statues of the Middle Ages, bound to the chivalric and heraldic spirit (one thinks of the Scaliger tombs of Verona), are replaced by a new plastic and humanistic ideal: the "Equestrian Monument," likewise erected for commemorative reasons, but with an entirely different spirit and closely bound to the art and ideals of classicism. The idea of raising in a piazza an equestrian monument to a condottiere, later to a prince or a sovereign, marks the rebirth of that exaltation of military glory (or more generally of "glory") which had led the ancients to the parallel conceptions of the triumphal arch and the equestrian monument.

Bronze, a ductile and noble material also according to the Renaissance conception, is used with enthusiasm to cast the equestrian statues then raised on marble bases in the antique manner, and the highest examples of this art will remain, albeit in two different conceptions, the monument to Gattamelata, by Donatello in Padua, and that of Bartolomeo Colleoni, by Verrocchio in Venice.

Naturalism and classicism intertwine throughout the sculpture of the R. up to the powerful heroic and dramatic effort of Michelangelo, which interrupts its living dialectic: often the two tendencies merge in the same artist (Donatello) and in the same work, inasmuch as Hellenistic-Roman sculpture also provided admirable examples of the full elaboration of the two attitudes. In new modes, of almost Hellenic elegance, wall funerary monuments flourish in close collaboration between architecture and sculpture, while from the great art to the various expressions of the so-called "minor arts," medieval craftsmanship, refined and culturally far more profound, spreads and a "Renaissance taste" bound to common ideals develops effectively, reaching to the threshold of modern civilization.

Painting, starting from the concept, ever clearer, that in "drawing" consists the first principle of every art, is transformed by looking at nature with new awareness and interpreting it in its infinite variety, through the integral synthesis produced by "linear perspective" which soon turns into "pictorial" perspective after having given solidity and consistency to bodies in space. The perspectival intuition, derived from the spatial requirement, already alive in Giotto, came to a halt, in the fourteenth century, through the effect of the wholly medieval conception of the world whose figurative unfolding was posed as narrative on the pictorial plane or, at most, on the ideal footlights of a limited space, after having surpassed the "infinite" space of Byzantine art. In the conception of the R. space is measured by man, who can suggest its infinity only through perspectival conquest: and the point of view is that assumed by the artist himself in the act of dominating his world.

One must not, however, understand perspective as a science "applied" to the arts in their aid (and of which a history could be written outside of pure mathematical or geometrical science). The perspective of the artists of the R., arisen from a figurative and spiritual requirement, assumes as many aspects as there are artists who understand its necessity for their own representation. After the examples of an allusive perspective offered by the painting of the international Gothic, that illusionistic perspective of the Quattrocento must have seemed a revelation: the enthusiasm with which artists seized upon it is clear testimony to this. But while perspectival effects were immediately taken up by decorative painting, preparing the scenographic illusionism of the late R., the truest painters made use of them in close relation to their own stylistic requirements: thus in Masaccio, who through his frequentation of Brunelleschi was able to refine the natural plastic requirement into a broader spatial breath, there was a very high example of perspectival measure by which human action is not dispersed, but rather intensified in the perfect collaboration between the relief of forms and the depth of the environment (see the scenes of the deeds of St. Peter in the Brancacci Chapel, at the Carmine, in Florence). The same Masaccio then gave a further interpretation of perspective and foreshortening according to the new principles in the fresco of the "Trinity" in S. Maria Novella, again in Florence.

A very high example of the new Renaissance vision and of the requirement for an extremely intimate relationship among the various arts is the personality of Piero della Francesca, architectural adviser to Federico da Montefeltro for the Ducal Palace of Urbino, painter of the most absolute purity in the perfect union of geometry and poetic intuition of reality, a severe treatise-writer on perspective and on the geometry of bodies in the footsteps of Euclid. See his "De prospectiva pingendi" in which even the body of man and its various parts are considered in proportional and perspectival relation like architecture, something that would be developed, through the treatise of Luca Pacioli, beyond the border, up to the rise of analogous phenomena even where the Gothic had dominated for a great part of the century, e.g., in Germany, with Albrecht Dürer.

Yet the richness of developments of the painting of the R. in Italy cannot be limited by the perspectival taste; it informs, it is true, a great part of the new artistic civilization, but in parallel different attitudes appear, some of which seem to link back to the international Gothic tradition: after the generation of painters of the first half of the century, for whom perspective assumes a dominant character, artists such as Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Antonio Pollaiolo and Andrea del Verrocchio bring back into vogue the expressive line of movement and relief, placing the perspectival problem in the background or even avoiding it. From the pictorial narrative of Filippo Lippi arises the musically poetic style of Botticelli, interpreter of the humanistic ideals of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent and of the paganizing fantasies of Poliziano, but equally original in the creation of an extremely sensitive world, sensuous and yet acutely illustrative. Through the changing of his style which, through the effect of Savonarola's preaching, bends painfully to interpret religious spirituality, one can follow up to the Cinquecento the parabola of Botticelli's art which in so great a part coincides with the very developments of Renaissance figurative art. But at the end of the century, when even Luca Signorelli seemed to return to the medieval vision in the scenes of the Antichrist (Orvieto, Cathedral, chapel of S. Brizio) while pictorial narrative, after Benozzo Gozzoli, embodied by Ghirlandaio, turns to the documentary illustration of contemporary civilization, there arise the great individualities of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo.

The pictorial R. developed variously according to local traditions: the new perspectival intuitions united with scrupulous Flemish naturalistic attention passed into northern Italy whence, from the Paduan center, at the same time, radiated the humanistic and heroic conception of Andrea Mantegna; in Venice the opposition to the flamboyant Gothic carried out by the Bellini was alive, especially by Giovanni with the intervention of Antonello da Messina and the contacts with Paolo Uccello, while in southern Italy the same Antonello was at the center of the new pictorial vision founded on the geometry of bodies and on the conception of a naturalism sublimated by perspectival synthesis.

In the reflections that the Flemish brought beyond the Alps, acquiring the sense of measure and of a perspective no longer optical but spatial, one can understand how fruitful were the teachings of Italian Renaissance painting, just as in the architectural and sculptural field the relations with foreign courts, commercial exchanges, military enterprises and the increasingly frequent travels of foreign artists in Italy produced a vast and profound movement of reflux that from Italy reached all of Europe, more or less effectively, bringing the new figurative language and the new artistic culture into contact with the individual local traditions.

In the early years of the Cinquecento, with Bramante, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, artistic problems, on the bases of the Quattrocento R., assume the value of individual synthesis and, at the same time, already betray requirements of renewal that would lead to "Mannerism," prelude to the "Baroque."

For this reason, and for the progressive abandonment of those proportional ideas, of those plastic and pictorial principles founded on measure, rhythm and proportion, many critics see in the Cinquecento a moment different from the true R. of the preceding century and call it the "second R." But, apart from the fragility of such divisions, it seems absurd to exclude these very high personalities who are nevertheless the fruit of Renaissance researches (and, indeed, crown them in exemplary fashion) from the true and proper R.; perhaps it is more just to mark at approximately the middle of the 16th century a complicating of spiritual, cultural and artistic problems that marks the progressive exhaustion of the R. whose ideas, however, in very many cases, continue to inform great works of art: suffice it to think of the architecture of Andrea Palladio and of the classicism of his art which not only stamps the end of the century with its own character, but, transplanted through Inigo Jones into England, gives rise to a humanistic current so valid that it reaches as far as Neoclassicism, marking it with its own character.

In this second phase of the Renaissance, as the Aretino already clearly saw, everything tends to aggrandize and to appear greater than the truth, just as human actions are seen under the heroic aspect: the measure of man, the standard and proportion of deeds and representations in the Quattrocento, no longer suffices, and art tends toward the colossal: the comparison between the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi or the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence and that of the Farnese in Rome, as well as that between the tomb of Sixtus IV by Pollaiolo and the projects for the tomb of Julius II by Michelangelo, or again that between the Quattrocento decoration of the Sistine Chapel and the vault of the same Chapel painted by Buonarroti, serve very well to indicate the sensibly changed taste and the yearning for the gigantic in the Cinquecento. Leonardo, who unites in himself the greatest sum of the values of science and art of the Renaissance, is a "modern" man for his yearning for ceaseless research and his full faith in experience as opposed to theoretical principles assumed as infallible documents: and yet the miraculous equilibrium between science and art, speculation and intuition, would not have come about in this genius, had he not sunk his roots in the age of Brunelleschi, of Alberti, of Piero della Francesca. In architecture Bramante, educated in the Renaissance taste at Urbino, after his Lombard experience arrives in Rome laden with superhuman dreams: the project for the new St. Peter's marks a fundamental epoch in the history of the civilization of the Renaissance; his idea of a building with a central plan and an immense hemispherical dome lays the foundations of what Michelangelo realized in the second half of the century, shifting however Bramante's spatial conception onto a plastic plane, of towering mass. Sacred and civil buildings are profoundly affected by the Cinquecento conception inaugurated by Bramante, through Baldassarre Peruzzi, Antonio da S. Gallo, down to Giacomo della Porta and Vignola.

As for sculpture, it is dominated by Michelangelo's ideal which, starting from Donatello and Jacopo Della Quercia, immediately arrives at a quite different dramatic expression: in his work the Renaissance principles of beautiful form and of "characteristic" form undergo a radical transformation and are turned into heroic idealism, rising above man in his everyday appearance, sublimating the nude to the expression of universal feelings and concepts, until in the last phase of his art the plastic Renaissance has already set beneath the impetus of a profound religious need.

Raphael, on the other hand, in the brief season of his most genuine work, which culminates with the fresco of the Mass of Bolsena in the Vatican Stanze, exalts to the highest degree the values of pictorial Renaissance, basing himself on the innate contemplative serenity that transfigures reality into regular, harmonious forms, yet warm with life, arriving at a perfect fusion of plastic and pictorial problems miraculously balanced; but the collaboration of a broader school, which the master himself regarded as valid almost as a new gathering of talents after the model of ancient Greece of Pericles, produced a decline of his inimitable principles and gave the start to the worst eclecticism.

In this aspiration to surpass the limits of human proportionality, the painting of the Cinquecento tends to overstep architectural spaces as well and to create the illusion of spatial depths greater than reality: in this sense the work of Correggio, which begins from Mantegna and reaches the threshold of the Baroque, is among the most significant: while his acute sensibility as a great fabulist, refinedly sensual, dictates masterpieces to him such as the Danae (Galleria Borghese) or Io (Vienna) and ingenious fantasies such as the decoration of the "room of St. Paul" in Parma, the yearning for spatial illusion drives him to the great compositions of the domes of S. Giovanni and of the Cathedral of the same city, which are already at the opposite pole from the spatial concept of the Renaissance.

Meanwhile the Venetian pictorial reform, founded on "tone" (that is, on the consideration of color in its luminous intensity and in its relations with other colors) and personified by Giorgione (but prepared by Giambellino and Carpaccio), through the most fervent and grandiose work of Titian, opens new possibilities to painting and, toward the end of the great Old Man's life, is already "impressionistic." Venetian painting, through the dangerous but dramatic luminism of Tintoretto and the scenically exalted compositional and chromatic display of Paolo Veronese, avoiding the temptations of Mannerism, reaches the threshold of modern colorism, in the overcoming of drawing in favor of open-air light and tonal color. The development of Venetian painting in the hinterland, with lesser demands for compositional novelty, determines a fresh and renewed approach to nature in its rustic episodes: the Bassano are a typical example of this abandonment of Mannerism and of an unprejudiced approach to the truth. Precisely from the Venetian tradition established in the provinces, painting takes on new consistency, giving rise to the art of Savoldo and Moretto, whence the modern conception of Caravaggio will take life.

Beyond these developments, one can point only to the exceptional and symptomatic manifestation of El Greco, who started from the Byzantine tradition, was nourished by free Venetian colorism and refined by the conceits of Mannerism. He would arrive in Spain, carrying painting of pure color to its ultimate developments and exhausting in himself, with his tragic, hallucinated apocalyptic visions, those Renaissance principles that had dominated Europe for more than two centuries. - See plates L-LI.

Valerio Mariani