RINASCIMENTO

RINASCIMENTO

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

### I. THE CONCEPT OF THE RENAISSANCE

Among the men who lived between the 15th and 16th centuries, this term implied a more or less clear opposition between their age and the preceding one. For the most part, according to this concept, the Renaissance signifies a return to the sources of ancient knowledge and art, marking a revival of studies abandoned during the millennium that elapsed between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fifteenth century. This so-called "media aetas" is characterized, according to Renaissance men, by darkness and ignorance. For L. Bruni, the beginning of cultural decline is traced to the loss of civil freedom under the Caesars, the transfer of the imperial capital to Constantinople, and the subsequent barbarian invasions. The same view is found in M. Palmieri and F. Biondo. Lorenzo Valla, for his part, directs his criticism especially against medieval jurists (such as Accursio, Baldo, Bartolo da Sassoferrato), who, with their intricate commentaries, verbosity, and useless twisting of texts, have supplanted the clear and lucid minds of ancient jurists like Ulpian, etc.

Artists and art historians also do not fail to rail against medieval barbarism and to lament the destruction of ancient monuments and "so much Greek and gentle art," largely due, according to L. Ghiberti (*Commentarii*), to the untimely zeal of the new religion. Giotto, for the first time, knew how to renew art, which had been stifled during the millennium, freeing it from the "coarseness of the Greeks" (Byzantines). The pseudo-Manetti sees, more than in Giotto, in Brunelleschi the true renewer of "good ancient art," while Filarete directs his arrows against the hated "Gothic style."

This apology for antiquity is never divorced in these men from a moving exaltation of their own age and from the proud confidence in their own powers, from the fierce awareness of knowing not only to imitate but to surpass the proud models handed down by the ancients. C. Salvatelli declares his master Petrarch superior even to Cicero and Virgil, having attained the heights of perfection in both prose and poetry. The same L. Valla hails his own century as the one in which all studies have been reborn to a better life, and F. Biondo proceeds along the same lines. No less enthusiasm for the "second golden age," in which he lived and worked, is found in M. Ficino. That all these men did not attribute less weight to their own personality and the power of their own genius is shown by the pseudo-Manetti (*Vita di Ser Filippo Brunellesco*), who recalls that his hero would have gained nothing from having discovered and studied ancient monuments in Rome if divine inspiration and his ready and fertile spirit had not come to his aid, suggesting to him the creation of new, powerful, and original works rather than pale, narrow, and sterile imitations of the ancients.

It must be added that many of the men of the Renaissance were not so entirely devoid of critical sense as not to know how to distinguish, even amid the dense darkness in which the "Middle Ages" were enveloped, different epochs and who indeed knew how to recognize the slow progress of civilization achieved between the restoration of the Empire by Charlemagne and the first timid awakening, after the year 1000, of urban life.

The further one moves away from the living sources of early humanism, the more one sees the concept of the Renaissance harden into certain infallible aesthetic and literary canons and dogmas, and the less one perceives the links of this age with the Middle Ages, which fell into profound disdain until the 19th century. From the work of Vasari onward, Raphael and Michelangelo are considered the highest peaks of the Renaissance, while all their precursors are viewed with a somewhat scornful indulgence, because they still bear the stigmata of a Gothic and barbarous age. With this criterion, Renaissance art is judged by Leandro Alberti (*Descriptione dell'Italia*, 1553), by R. Borghini, and by late 16th-century architects such as S. Serlio and V. Scamozzi (*L'idea dell'architettura universale*, published only in 1616). A philologist, Chr. Keller (Cellarius), sees in Bruni, Guarino, Poliziano, etc., the true restorers of the Latin language, corrupted and defaced during the Middle Ages (*Dissertatio de fati latinae linguae*, ed. 1706), while a historian of philosophy, G. Horn, asserts that Christian doctrine, which had become barbarous in the period from Albertus Magnus to Ockham, was rescued from its decline by the Florentine Platonists, an effort continued by Erasmus, L. Vives, P. Ramus, Fr. Patrizzi, and others.

The enthusiasm of the 18th century for the Renaissance stems first and foremost from the blind confidence of that century in the imminent triumph of the lights of reason. This thesis, although varying from writer to writer and from nation to nation, remains unchanged in substance among men like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, Gibbon, Ab. Lanzi, S. Bettinelli, L. A. Muratori, Robertson, W. G. Tennemann, and J. Brucker. Finally, the Renaissance sympathies of Goethe (*Ital. Reise*, preface to the *Life of B. Cellini*) are noteworthy: his admiration for Lorenzo the Magnificent, Palladio, and his aversion to "Giotto's barbarism." A more serene evaluation of the Renaissance only emerged in the 19th century with the work of J. Burckhardt (*La civiltà italiana all'epoca della Rinascenza*, 1859): the Basel historian was the first to attempt to bring together various manifestations of this age into an organic and unified vision. The major defect of his work, however, was to set the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in too rigid an opposition, so much so that one of his critics, E. Gebhardt, rightly observed that the connection between the two appears "barely visible." This connection was later claimed to have been discovered by Henry Thode (*Francesco d'Assisi e gli albori del Rinascimento*, *Michelangelo e il tramonto del Rinascimento*) and then by C. Burdach, who traces the true origins of the Renaissance not only to the medieval period (Dante, St. Francis, Joachim of Fiore, etc.) but also to the Paleochristian era and to certain mystery religions of the early centuries.

It must be said that the discussion surrounding the “concept of the Renaissance” is still ongoing today. First of all, an attempt has been made—one that is not entirely new—to apply the term “Renaissance” not to the Italian Quattrocento but to the 12th and 13th centuries, a period in which, particularly in France and the Low Countries, a revival of the natural sciences and philosophy is indeed observed (C. J. Haskins, Fr. Funk-Brentano, J. Nordström), as well as a flourishing of the arts (Gothic cathedrals, etc.). Following in the footsteps of L. Courjado, who believed he could trace in the Renaissance age a source of contamination between genuine French and Nordic art, several writers beyond the Alps strove to see the “true Renaissance” in France rather than in Italy. Alongside these nationalistic tendencies, a current has also emerged in Italy that, while rightly rejecting the rationalism and skepticism attributed by Burckhardt to Renaissance figures, sees nothing in their cultural output but a reaction of Catholic orthodoxy against the “heretical” and “Averroist” Trecento and the triumph of a pietistic doctrine that would be a renewed Catholicism permeated by the classical and ancient spirit. If some Catholic and non-Catholic writers (Chesterton, Berdyaev) have sought to exalt the spiritual values of the Middle Ages while instead viewing the Renaissance as a source of moral corruption and the origin of a pernicious scientific individualism (even J. Maritain regards the Renaissance with disdain for the same reasons), G. Papini, on the contrary, sees in the Renaissance the “return to the Father” and the triumph of true and complete Christianity over the “abstract” Christianity of the Middle Ages (an overview of these disagreements can be gained by consulting the collection of studies: *Pensée humaniste et tradition chrétienne aux XVe et XVIe siècles*, Paris 1950; the most comprehensive bibliography on the subject is found in C. Angelieri, cited in the bibliography).

Some German writers (L. Woltmann, C. Neumann) have attempted to interpret and explain the Renaissance phenomenon as the infiltration of “fresh Germanic blood” (invasions, etc.) into the withered veins of ancient Mediterranean civilization; some even went so far as to offer a “physiological” demonstration of this thesis, presenting “Nordic” profiles of Dante, Michelangelo, and others. To all this, it may be added that, according to a distinguished French historian still living (L. Febvre), there has never been any “Italian Renaissance,” and what is counted under the name of various Renaissances depends on subjective considerations, illusions, and whims of various writers who drape such a name over phenomena that are quite dissimilar (according to L. Febvre, it was especially J. Michelet [v.] who invented the myth of the Renaissance).

Now, taking due account of what has been established in this field by various historians, philosophers, and literary figures of the past—discarding exaggerations, inaccuracies, and perspectival errors into which more than one of them has fallen—it may be held that the Renaissance was certainly not a “miracle” suddenly arising from nothing (as Vasari would have it), nor an age in any way “privileged” and standing apart (J. Burckhardt), but neither was it a mere continuation of the ideas and way of life that preceded II. If there is agreement in framing the Renaissance within certain chronological limits and in making a specific country (Italy) its principal stage rather than treating it as a mere abstract concept outside of time and varying according to epochs, places, and individuals, then one must first seek its historical origins.

III. THE IDEAL WORLD OF THE RENAISSANCE

While Italy had been throughout the Middle Ages the seat of the Empire and the Papacy, the “land of election” of both pillars of Christendom, and also the first victim of their perpetual discord, by around the 15th century it was practically a no-man’s-land, abandoned to itself—or rather to the initiatives, enterprises, and ambitions of individual princes, cities, and republics. While in other countries, even up to this century, national and feudal struggles raged and dynastic unity increasingly gained the upper hand over medieval “separatism,” and even Spain was engaged in an unrelenting struggle against the Infidel (the Reconquista)—thus reviving a sense of national, religious, and territorial unity—Italy knew none of this “nationalism,” whether dynastic, martial, or fanatical, which lent epic and “romantic” survivals a touch of immediacy. Instead, Italy devoted itself to problems of local and regional interest, such as expanding territory, despoiling a restless neighbor, and extending its commerce, all the while maintaining that political equilibrium on the Peninsula which would be achieved only with great difficulty after the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the arbitration of Lorenzo de’ Medici (who, according to Guicciardini, then held “the needle of the balance”). All the Italian wars of the 15th century, fought with this precise objective, were little more than skirmishes and guerrilla actions, never producing decisive results (including the famous Battle of Fornovo), and at regular intervals they would return to restoring the *status quo ante*. And since none of the Italian city-states was strong enough to impose its will on all the others, let alone unify the Peninsula under its own banner (the failure of C. Borgia in this regard was noted with bitter disappointment by Machiavelli), the advantage of them all lay precisely not in waging war but in negotiating, not so much in the art of war—which had become the special task of mercenary troops—as in the art of diplomacy. To this end, prudence, political shrewdness, patience, cunning, and above all the art of oratory were required: the gift of polished, calculated, persuasive, and “elegant” speech, presupposing infinite resources of a quick and versatile intellect capable of grasping the most diverse and tangled situations.

Unable to rely on any monarchical, national, or other tradition, or on any principle of “legitimacy,” these “new men” were compelled to seek in the resources of their own minds and arms the foundations of their power and the guarantee of its endurance. And it is here, at least in part, that we must look for what Burckhardt called the “individualism” of the Renaissance. It is not that powerful individualities were lacking in the Middle Ages; however, the sense of their own strength was never divorced in them from a consciousness of a higher, divine mission. These men always regarded themselves as instruments of Providence and appeared as so many incarnations of both good and evil. What is distinctive of the Renaissance, rather, is a certain egocentrism that manifests itself in the “powerful” as a preoccupation with success and results (devoid of any moral evaluation), while among artists it takes the form of 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 period is not lacking in examples—sometimes too crude—of moral unscrupulousness, but in the end it could be said that it was no more and no less immoral than any other, and that if one sets aside certain striking figures of notorious scoundrels (B. Visconti, C. Borgia) who, however, have their equals even in the full Middle Ages (Ezzelino da Romano, Foulque d'Anjou), one also finds in the Renaissance climate many people of even more austere morals: exemplary mothers of families, devoted sons, faithful friends, etc. (it suffices to cite a Lucrezia Tornabuoni, an Alessandra Macinghi-Strozzi, and later the good Elisabetta Gonzaga), not to mention the holiness that heralded the Catholic Reformation (v.).

Some sought to link the Renaissance’s “moral laxity” to the supposed intrusion of paganism, but often the paganizing vein amounted to little more than rhetorical exercise, a bookish phraseology, a display of mythological erudition. Classical culture in the Renaissance was the privilege of an infinitesimal minority of the wealthier and more cultivated citizens of Florence, Venice, etc., while the masses of artisans and merchants found their spiritual sustenance chiefly among popular preachers (St. Bernardino of Siena, Roberto of Lecce, etc.), who, of course, tuned their sermons to the needs of the new times.

RENAISSANCE

Complexity of the Renaissance. If in the current stemming from Alberti “realism” predominates, there is no weakening of religious faith among other artists, from the Blessed Angelico to Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Fra Bartolomeo, and Michelangelo.

Yet the eternal joy and serenity attributed, for example, to the Renaissance by Goethe are but a “myth”: reality is more complex than these facile models; neither pessimism nor absolute optimism is the exclusive province of any epoch. In Renaissance poetry there is a variety of attitudes, expressions, and inspirations: alongside those sorrowful princes and that stifled anguish there is the breath of a more feminine breeze in Poliziano’s rooms, there is the enchantment of Boiardo’s wondrous fairy tales. Marsilio Ficino extols (De Theol. Plat.) in man a reborn Daedalus; Pico vaunts (De hominis dignitate) the marvelous power of the human being, who, by virtue of his protean nature, surpasses even the angelic mind, and the same is said by Bartolomeo Fazio, Giannozzo Manetti, and even Niccolò Machiavelli, who relies on “human virtue” to combat the blind world of “fortune.” Yet all these apologies have nothing to do with modern exaltations of the “superman,” of an inimitable life, etc., since this superior capacity of man is strictly connected to his sense of the divine, and if man is made to master nature, it is because he is “a son of God” (“…l’uomo fattura una meravigliosa alterazione di Lorenzo de’ Medici”).

Now, Renaissance culture is not exhausted in literary and stylistic exercises, nor in credulous beliefs and astrological superstitions, and even “Ciceronianism” is but a secondary aspect 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 certain wealthy patricians (Cosimo de’ Medici, Palla Strozzi, etc.). One of the most important discoveries of the age was that of Greek manuscripts of Plato and Plotinus (the latter was entirely unknown in the Middle Ages, while of the former only some unfaithful, mangled versions by medieval glossators had survived). The discovery of Plato would not, however, have had such importance in itself had not Renaissance thinkers raised various metaphysical questions concerning the relationship among man, nature, and God. It was precisely the controversies of several Councils (1430 and 1439) that gave impetus to such speculations. Thus Cardinal Cusanus took his starting point from the dispute over the supremacy of the Pope and Councils to develop his doctrine of “complicatio et implicatio” (De docta ignorantia), which, however, met with scant resonance in Italy.

Instead, the disputes between Greeks and Latins at the Council of Florence (1439), over the respective merits of Plato and Aristotle, provoked in that very city a great ferment that led Cosimo the Elder to found the so-called “Platonic Academy.” The dominant thought of Ficino is to prove, with the aid of Plato and Plotinus as well as various pre-Christian theologies, the fundamental unity of faith and “reason founded on Mosaic revelation,” whose esoteric meaning would, according to Pico, be revealed and confirmed in the Cabalistic books. In Renaissance thought there also circulated the doctrine of “double truth,” already propagated by Paduan averroists, which was upheld by Pietro Pomponazzi, a follower of the “true Aristotle,” already rediscovered by Ermolao Barbaro. Over against these “innovators” there also stood some conservatives, partisans of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, enemies of every kind of paganism (Giovanni Dominici, St. Antoninus, Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, etc.).

Renaissance historiography decisively abandons the old medieval schemas, turning instead to the origins and development of individual Italian cities and republics and to the fortunes of various princely courts. Rome, though retaining its prestige, no longer, for example, stands at the center of the concerns of a Leonardo Bruni or a Poggio Bracciolini: it is their city, Florence—though the younger daughter of Rome—that is now called upon to renew culture and transmit to posterity illustrious works whose elegance and style are no less than their doctrine and moral content.

In various manifestations of the Renaissance there is also a tendency toward accord, harmony, reconciliation: accord between faith and reason (Ficino, Pico), between contemplative and active virtue (Cristoforo Landino, De disputationibus Camaldulensis), between the plastic beauty of a work of art and its divine harmony in the same cosmic creation (Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli), between the love of creatures and that of the Creator in Ficino’s doctrine of “Platonic love,” later propagated by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani—in short, between divine and human things (in the words of Cardinal Sadoleto). For the last time, the Renaissance’s equilibrium would be illustrated, under the pontificate of Leo X, by Raphael (Stanze of the Vatican). By the mid-sixteenth century, another age begins—an age of dramatic tension and acute conflicts, an age that would stamp its imprint on a new form of religiosity, a new direction in art, a new sensibility in literature, in short, on a new style and a new civilization.

For Renaissance philosophy, beyond individual authors V. ARISTOTELISM; PLATONISM. See also ITALY; Literature; HUMANISM.

The complexity of the Renaissance! If in the current that stems from Alberti "realism" dominates, no weakening of faith

IV. ART

The definition of the Renaissance from the standpoint of the figurative arts and the determination of the limits within which it is legitimate to speak of a Renaissance suffer 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 Renaissance 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 Renaissance arising as early as the 13th 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 13th century, which imparted a very strong impulse through architecture and sculpture to all artistic production; others, more justly, assigning to the concept of Renaissance a precise historical as well as qualitative value, recognize that only with the beginning of the 15th century, and more precisely with 15th-century Florence, were those conditions of particular harmony between the arts and between these and the cultural world created, conditions which made possible the very strong and singular creative impulse and the formation of the new concept of artistic autonomy that spread throughout Europe for at least two centuries and had, even afterward, profound repercussions in the world up to the threshold of the modern age.

1. Characteristics

When one wishes to assign to the term Renaissance 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 15th century as something new, even if it was 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 attested by Dante, Giotto, and Petrarch. To understand the novelty of that time, it is enough to read some of the pages of those artist-humanists who, besides working in the midst of the age as architects, sculptors, and painters, were driven by a curiosity for knowledge and the maturity of their culture to adopt that attitude of self-awareness and theoretical exigency that is typical of the Renaissance. One need only look, for example, at the dedication to Filippo di Ser Brunelleschi prefacing the treatise *De pictura* by L. B. Alberti, the great humanist architect, who, returning from exile in Venice, perceives with amazement precisely that “new time” which we call the Renaissance. He fully grasps its universal significance, and his pages, in which the greatest artists of 15th-century Florence are cited, should be considered the “Manifesto” of the Renaissance. In them, he not only recognizes the creative originality of those artists but also sees them as exemplars of the new generation that, in its confrontation with the ancients, does not arrive at a continuation and further development of classical art but sets itself “in comparison” with ancient art while preserving the full autonomy of artistic creation. Hence, in Alberti’s words, the definition of the Renaissance as an age “autonomous” in relation to the ancient, a concept to be kept well in mind so as not to fall into the cultural error of seeing the Renaissance merely as a rebirth of classical art. Even if the term, coined in humanist circles, is meant above all to indicate a new flourishing of classical art, what matters most is to understand this classicism as a polemical stance against medieval art and (as will be said later in the 16th century) “barbaric” art.

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

To define even more clearly the value of the Renaissance in contrast to medieval tradition, one need only consider what the Florentine artists of the very early 15th century found before them, immediately preceding or contemporary with

practitioners (often of touching naivety), such publications dealt with 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 distinctly humanistic and pedagogical nature—one moves onto a distinctly different plane where the artist is at once creator and investigator of subtle geometric and mathematical speculations and where, for the first time, the relationship between the arts, poetry, music, and philosophy is widely discussed.

Another of the distinguishing features of the Renaissance artist’s personality is his many-sidedness, not to be confused with eclecticism. There is no doubt that even in the Middle Ages there were artists who practiced various activities in the figurative field, and one need only recall, once again, the example of Giotto, painter, architect, and author of plaster models for the sculptures of his bell tower in Florence. But whereas this arose from the innate unity 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 evidence of the completeness of 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, and theorist), Piero della Francesca (painter, architect, and theorist), and others up to Leonardo da Vinci, who reaches the height of complexity in the relationship between art and thought, and Michelangelo himself are but a few of the greatest examples of the many-sidedness of the Renaissance artist, even if each later exercised in a particular way one of the artistic activities he knew.

From what might seem merely a consideration of the inner richness of these artistic personalities, an important deduction arises: the artistic Renaissance, in its vital dialectic between naturalism and idealism, between experience and theory, between art and science, achieved that rare equilibrium almost unknown to other artistic civilizations (with the possible exception of ancient Greece) precisely because, in a single artist, problems expressive of the individual manifestations of art itself were elaborated and found their solution. Hence the conviction, for example, that, as Michelangelo said, one cannot understand architecture who does not understand anatomy.

Granted that, in attempting to define the typical characteristics of the individual arts in the Renaissance, one engages in an act of generalization and abstraction in the face of the vital consistency of artistic personalities, one can nonetheless indicate certain constant aspects of the arts in the Renaissance to contribute to the understanding of this artistic period.

3. The Arts in Particular

Architecture reacts against the complex planimetric and decorative solutions of Gothic art, which had reached its decline, but inherits from it the constructive spirit and refined technical experience, restoring volumes and surfaces to a geometric yet living simplicity, drawing upon the passionate study of ancient buildings.

Even though the Middle Ages had knowledge of antiquity and often interpreted some of its features with genius, this cannot be compared to the conscious enthusiasm and profound research with which the new architects of the Renaissance approached the study of ancient monuments, measuring them, tracing their proportional relationships, and mastering decorative motifs with a coherence and rationality entirely different, precisely because they were already prepared, in their ideals of harmony and proportion, to exploit the experience of antiquity as an operative element in their imagination. The natural desire for simplicity and measure, which polemically opposed the final complexities of Gothic architecture, favored

the acceptance of decorative motifs and precious details that Roman architectural decoration had partly inherited from Hellenistic architecture and Greek classicism: around the round arches, elegant and clear cornices reappear; beneath the eaves and cornices of buildings, delicately carved brackets and marble dentils emerge; along the extended surfaces, simple or strigilated pilasters and columns are set off, 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 Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Leon Battista Alberti, Luciano Laurana, il Cronaca, and Giuliano da Sangallo.

In sculpture, starting from the experiences of the mature Trecento, which—especially through Andrea Pisano—had brought formal simplification, in contact with classical art, to a level of the highest style (see the panels of Giotto’s bell tower and the sections of the first door of the Baptistery of Florence)—the new artists, taking from Gothic art that spirit of inner vitality which in architecture was also a living lesson, approached the human figure with a greater desire for plasticity and broad compositional scope: man, above all man in the perfection of his nudity, interested the artists more than ornate decoration. Even the surrounding environment, in bas-relief, reflects a more acute and rational naturalistic experience, through perspective used in different but contemporary ways by artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello.

The individuality of the artist, exalted as a source of autonomy in creation, fosters that “spirit of competition” which would become typical of the Renaissance world, while new motifs, also arising from Renaissance civilization, stimulate the imagination of sculptors. The “portrait,” for example, which had reappeared in the Trecento through funerary or commemorative sculpture, or even in painting, but in a humble and modest aspect, assumes fundamental importance in the Quattrocento: from Donatello to Francesco Laurana, to Mino da Fiesole, to Desiderio da Settignano, and on to Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and others, bust-portraits enter homes alongside the living person who takes pleasure in bequeathing their likeness to posterity, often in polychrome terracotta for greater verisimilitude. At the same time, the rare examples of equestrian statues from the Middle Ages, tied to chivalric and heraldic spirit (think of the Scaliger tombs in Verona), are replaced by a new plastic and humanistic ideal: the “equestrian monument,” also erected for commemorative reasons but with a wholly different spirit and closely linked to the art and ideals of classicism. The idea of erecting an equestrian monument to a condottiere in a public square, later to a prince or sovereign, marks the revival of that exaltation of military glory (or more generally of “glory”) which had led the ancients to parallel conceptions of the triumphal arch and the equestrian monument.

Bronze, a ductile and noble material according to Renaissance conception, is enthusiastically used to cast equestrian statues later raised on ancient-style marble pedestals, and the highest examples of this art will remain—albeit in two different conceptions—the Gattamelata monument by Donatello in Padua and that of Bartolomeo Colleoni by Verrocchio in Venice.

Naturalism and classicism intertwine throughout Renaissance sculpture until the powerful heroic and dramatic effort of Michelangelo, who brings their dialectic to an end: often the two tendencies merge in the same artist (Donatello) and in the same work, since Hellenistic-Roman sculpture also provided admirable examples of the full elaboration of both attitudes. In new modes, of almost Hellenic elegance, funerary wall monuments flourish in close collaboration between architecture and sculpture, while from great art to the various expressions of the so-called “minor arts,” the medieval craftsmanship—refined and culturally far more sophisticated—spreads and develops a “Renaissance taste” linked to common ideals that extends to the threshold of modern civilization.

Painting, starting from the increasingly clear concept that “design” constitutes the primary principle of all art, transforms itself by looking at nature with new awareness and interpreting it in its infinite variety through the integral synthesis produced by “linear perspective,” which soon becomes “painterly perspective” after having given solidity and consistency to bodies in space. The perspectival intuition, derived from spatial exigency and already present in Giotto, had halted in the Trecento due to the entirely medieval conception of the world, whose figurative development was presented as a narrative on the pictorial plane or, at most, on the ideal proscenium of a limited space, after having overcome the “infinite” space of Byzantine art. In the Renaissance conception, space is measured by man, who can suggest infinity only through the conquest of perspective: and the point of view is that assumed by the artist himself in the act of dominating his world.

RINASCIMENTO

**from S. Serlio, Libro II di prospettiva, Venice 1566, p. 36)**

**RINASCIMENTO — Street with buildings constructed according to Serlio’s rules — Example from the Vatican Library.**

One should not, however, understand perspective as a science «applied» to the arts as an aid to them (and about which one might write history outside of pure mathematical or geometrical science). The perspective of the artists of the Renaissance, arising from a figurative and spiritual need, assumes as many aspects as there are artists who recognize its necessity for their own representation. After the examples of an allusive perspective offered by the painting of the International Gothic, the 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 adopted by decorative painting, paving the way for the scenographic illusionism of the late Renaissance, the truest painters used it in close relation to their own stylistic needs: thus in Masaccio, who from his frequent association with Brunelleschi could refine the natural plastic exigency into a broader spatial vision, there arose a supreme example of perspectival measure in which human action is not dispersed but rather intensified through the perfect collaboration between the relief of forms and the depth of the environment (see the scenes of the stories of St. Peter in the Brancacci Chapel at the Carmine in Florence). Masaccio himself later gave a further interpretation of perspective and foreshortening according to the new principles in the fresco of the *Trinity* in Santa Maria Novella, also in Florence.

Yet the uncritical application of these principles, especially in the decorative arts, produced a decline in their admirable principles and gave rise to the worst eclecticism.

In this aspiration to surpass the limits of human proportion, the painting of the Cinquecento tends to exceed architectural spaces and to create illusions of spatial depths greater than reality: in this sense, the work of Correggio, which begins with Mantegna and reaches the threshold of the Baroque, is among the most significant. While his keen sensitivity as a great storyteller of refined sensuality inspired masterpieces such as *Danaë* (Galleria Borghese) and *Jupiter and Antiope* (Vienna), as well as ingenious fantasies like the decoration of the *Camera di San Paolo* in Parma, his yearning for spatial illusion led him to the grand compositions of the cupolas of San Giovanni and the Duomo in the same city, which already stand in opposition to 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 its relationships with other colors), embodied by Giorgione (but prepared by Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio), through the fervent and grandiose work of Titian, opened new possibilities to painting and, by the end of the great Vecellio’s life, was already “impressionistic.” Venetian painting, through the perilous yet dramatic luminism of Tintoretto and the serene compositional and chromatic exaltation of Paolo Veronese, avoiding the temptations of Mannerism, reached the threshold of modern colorism, surpassing drawing in favor of open-air light and tonal color. The development of Venetian painting in the hinterland, with fewer demands for compositional novelty, determined a fresh and renewed approach to nature in its landscape episodes: the Bassanos are a typical example of this abandonment of Mannerism and of an uninhibited approach to the truth. Precisely from the Venetian tradition established in the provinces, painting gained new substance, giving rise to the art of Savoldo and Moretto, from which the modern conception of Caravaggio would emerge.

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