Florence and the Renaissance: Crash Course European History #2 (1)

Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History. So, as you'll recall from

our previous episode, a declining European population due to disease and war in the 14th

century meant that labor had become much more valuable, which shifted long-held beliefs

about how society should be organized. Amid all this upheaval, and to some extent

because of it, the Florentine author Francesco Petrarca, aka Petrarch, was unleashing his

critique of 14th century life. “Living,” he lamented, “I despise what melancholy

fate/ has brought us wretches in these evil years.”[i]

Oh, Petrarch, are you sure you weren't writing about now? It's almost like people always

feel like they live in the worst possible time.

At any rate, not happy with the state of things in Europe, he turned to Plato, Cicero, and

other ancient writers, whom he thought of as residents of the Old Age.

In fact, Petrarch gave the era in which he lived its name--calling them the “middle

ages” just as his writing and research helped usher in a New Age that we now call the Renaissance.

[Intro] According to Renaissance author Leonardo Bruni

in the early fifteenth century, “Francesco Petrarch was the first with a talent sufficient

to recognize and call back to light the ancient elegance of the lost and extinguished style.”

The Renaissance, meaning revival or renewal, harkened back to what was seen as the bright

light of classical antiquity, which had then been obscured in the dark and ignorant Middle

Ages. But in some ways, the Middle Ages existed

simultaneously with the Renaissance. Like just as scholars were reviving translations

of Plato and integrating knowledge from the Islamic world, the bubonic plague went on

killing people; and in Petrarch's hometown, ordinary people

like the Ciompi were vigorously protesting living conditions. Which brings us to an old

question here at Crash Course: Was the Renaissance really a thing? Was it in fact just a continuation

of the medieval world? Or was it the dramatic change that Renaissance thinkers believed

it to be? The writers and thinkers of the Renaissance

scoured monasteries for ancient works, initially written or at least influenced by Roman writers.

It was from this manuscript-hunting--especially for works by Cicero, and Tacitus, and Quintilian--that

Renaissance scholars began to focus on so-called humanism. That is to say, they became more

interested in worldly and human concerns. And because the Renaissance really was a revival,

this new thought was based on learning about old or ancient ways, especially in the study

of the “humanities”. The three liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, led

to the so-called sciences of theology, philosophy, laws, and medicine.

The study of the humanities as developed by the ancients focused not on the heavens or

saints but on human speech or rhetoric, human logic, and the correct use of language. And

by language, of course, they mostly meant Latin--being able to write in Latin and even

perform Latin orations was seen as key to a fully educated life, as every high school

Latin teacher will be happy to tell you. Competence in these fields was seen as crucial

to developing the self and a prerequisite for joining Florentine or Venetian elites.

Like, Venetian youth Lauro Quirini, for example, studied the humanities at the University of

Padua and then was sent to work in a Venetian enterprise on Crete, fully prepared for his

new job as a commodities trader, although he also worked as a translator and a writer.

You might say he was a real Renaissance Man. I'm sorry.

The Italian city-states were the heartland of the early Renaissance. In these prosperous

cities, artists, composers, writers, and scholars thrived along with the commerce that paid

for everything. Urban merchants and manufacturers built a

brisk business that brought in products and ideas from around Afroeurasia. And some families

achieved immense wealth, which allowed them to support the world of Renaissance thinkers

and artists in a system called patronage. I would like a phenomenally wealthy patron

like Lorenzo Medici. If any of you are out there, I am available. And I would like all

your ducats. You can visit patreon.com/crashcourse. But

at any rate, banking institutions also sprang up, and bankers funded civic events and the

construction of lavish cathedrals.

Bankers also backed or personally paid for the building of masterworks in the classical

style--that is, in the style of the restrained, stately design of the pre-Christian Roman

Empire.

Did the Globe open? Is there a neoclassical piggy bank in the

center of the world? There is! You know all those white statues of the renaissance

that take their whiteness from the white statues of the ancient Greeks and Romans? Yeah, they

were not white! They were painted. Like, here are some of

our best guesses of what actual classical statues looked like, and as you can see, not

very much like neoclassical white piggy banks. Nonetheless, the idea of unpainted marble,

or porcelain, or whatever has proven so powerful that even though we now know that ancient

statues were painted, we still don't paint our neoclassical ones.

Bankers also financed artists needing funds to complete their works, including Botticelli

and Michelangelo.

And city governments themselves were also important patrons of the Renaissance,

while individual leaders often spent as much as six percent of their personal income on

the arts. Why? Well, largely for the same reason rich

people fund art and buildings today--for status, for recognition, and maybe even for the love

of beauty. But also, funding public art and cathedrals and the like served to legitimize

the wealth of these families. The Church could not very well condemn merchant wealth if it

was used to build churches, nor could the governments that came to depend on it. We

see this again and again throughout history--wealth supports institutions that in turn legitimize

that wealth Regardless, in these artworks, you can see

the paradoxes of the Renaissance-- paganism is combined with Christianity, as it often

had been throughout Christian history. Profit-oriented bankers financed the Church, which was run

by priests who'd taken a vow of poverty, and founded by a figure who in the gospels

overturns the tables of moneylenders in the temple.

Also, In these city-states, access to a more humanistic educational approach helped boost

economic growth and fueled the creation of much art and architecture that is still really

influential. Now, many city states participated in this

humanist revival, but its headquarters was undoubtedly Florence. Let's go to the Thought

Bubble. 1. Artists of the time were following ancient

styles and taking them further. 2. Visual artists, like Sandro Botticelli

and Michelangelo,

3. focused on human dignity and realistic details.

4. Botticelli's portraits of Florentine citizens display the distinct features of

his subjects,

5. while his depictions of religious individuals show, for example, a plump infant Jesus realistically

reaching for his mother's garments.

6. Botticelli's portrait of the long-dead Dante similarly displayed his long, thin,

and pointed nose

7. rather than some idealized, formulaic hero.

8. And Michelangelo's “David” presents truly human characteristics

9. even as it sought to copy ancient sculptural styles.

10. Across the spectrum of Renaissance art, anatomical accuracy flourished,

11. which you can see in Michelangelo's sculptures

12. and also in the work of fellow Florentine Leonardo da Vinci--

13. both artists, incidentally, were able to render the human form in part because they

both dissected cadavers. 14. And nature, as a setting for humans and

thus humanism, was also glorified in Renaissance art,

15. as you can see in the Birth of Venus. Botticelli's painting focuses on the mythical

goddess from the classical world

16. but at the same time she's about to be clothed in the flowers found in the natural

world of the countryside.

17. In short, the artists of the Renaissance focused on situating a realistically depicted

human body

18. in both its natural environment and its civic setting.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. But amid this prosperity and cultural revival, Florentine history was

marked by a succession of economic and natural shocks, class divisions, corporate rivalries,

party struggles, conflicts with the church, and especially political crises.

And those arose from threats of external invasion as well as internal tyranny and discontent

among the lower classes. Like Venice, Florence took great pride in

being a Republic, although it was a bit different from contemporary republics and exceedingly

unstable. Like, there weren't really elections; instead,

names of members of Florence's guilds would basically be drawn out of a large leather

bag, and if your name was drawn, you got to serve on the Signoria, which ran the city.

And if you weren't psyched about the job, no worries--new Signorias were chosen every

two months, which might make it seem like lots of people were able to participate in

civic life, but 1. In order to be a member of a guild, you needed to be debt-free and

male and well-connected, and 2. in truth the lotteries were often rigged,

with wealthy families tending to win places on the signoria.

Also, there were frequent coups and countercoups, and the Republic would often cease to be republican

and at times become downright Monarchical. It was all quite Games of Thronesy--one might

even say that it was a bit Machiavellian. And no wonder--the political theorist Niccolo

Machiavelli did live in Florence. We'll discuss him more next week, but for

now, it's important to know that he saw--and suffered through--much of this turmoil, including

the rise and fall and rise again of the Medici family. The Medicis were tremendously powerful

in Florence, although contrary to what you might read they weren't the only important

family in the Renaissance. But they did make huge sums in banking and

investing, and were important patrons to artists--in fact Michelangelo carved one of their tombs.

Cosimo Medici and his grandson Lorenzo dominated the second half of the fifteenth century,

in Florence, while successive members of the family perpetuated its power and patronage

by serving as popes in the next centuries. Machiavelli argued that the Florentine Renaissance's

Golden Age ended with the death of Lorenzo de Medici in 1492 and the invasion of the

“barbarians.” Of course, “Barbarians” mostly means “Not

Us” throughout history--in fact the word itself comes from a feeling that the language

of Barbarians sounded like bar bar bar bar bar. Anyway, these particular Barbarians were

French, so I guess it sounded like Bar. I wasn't very good at High School French.

And so we return at last to the old question: Were there really broad shifts away from the

religiofication of all aspects of European life toward the human and the secular in the

Renaissance? Like, Michelangelo sculpted David, but he also painted the ceiling of the Sistine

Chapel. Perspective matters when you ask these questions--something

important and new was happening in 14th century Florence (and Venice and Milan and so on)

among merchants and intellectuals. But the lives of average people, especially peasants,

were not much transformed by this humanist thinking--at least not in the short run.

But in other ways, ordinary people did also have a Renaissance--ancient authors were translated

into Italian and French, which allowed those without access to Latin to read Cicero and

the like. But of course most Italian peasants couldn't read anything.

Historians also debate whether women experienced a Renaissance. Women were among the patrons

of the arts: Isabella d'Este sponsored musical events and loved Petrarch's poems so much

that she had music composed for them. She also sponsored painters, maintaining contacts

with Leonardo da Vinci. But, Isabella d'Este and her similarly accomplished

sister Beatrice are often seen as the exception. In general men, according to fifteenth century

writer Laura Cereta, discounted women's intellectual worth.

Deliberately following Petrarch's path as he had followed Cicero's, Cereta wrote a

famous letter to one misogynist that read in part: “I cannot tolerate your having

attacked my entire sex. . . . With just cause I am moved to demonstrate how great a reputation