The Renaissance

by Will Durant

Every town in Italy has fathered genius, and banished it.

“It went against my bent painfully to acquire an art that I would not practise dishonestly, and could hardly hope to practise otherwise.”

rhyming; soon, he feared, “the very cattle would begin to low in verse.”

An alien can translate the thought, but who shall translate the music?

By common consent he was the first humanist, the first writer to express with clarity and force the right of man to concern himself with this life, to enjoy and augment its beauties, and to labor to deserve well of posterity. He was the Father of the Renaissance.

The hold of the absent papacy upon the city was reduced to the theoretical authority of a legate, who was ignored.

Amid this chaos and penury the mutilated remains of a proud antiquity nourished the visions of scholars and the dreams of patriots.

texts. He smiled at the discord of philosophers, among whom he found “no more agreement than among clocks.”17 “Philosophy,” he complained, “aims only at hair-splitting, subtle distinctions, quibbles of words.”

“Distrustful of my own faculties… I embrace doubt itself as truth… affirming nothing, and doubting all things except those in which doubt is sacrilege.”

Power, like freedom, is a test that only a sober intelligence can meet.

“So but I live honestly, and conscience prick me not of aught, let who will speak to the contrary.”

The finest of Boccaccio’s novelle is the ninth of the fifth day—of Federigo, his falcon, and his love, almost as self-sacrificing as Griselda’s.

In the second story of The Decameron the Jew Jehannat is converted to Christianity by the argument (adapted by Voltaire) that Christianity must be divine, since it has survived so much clerical immorality and simony.

The Decameron remains one of the masterpieces of world literature. Its fame may be due more to its morals than to its art, but even if immaculate it would have merited preservation.

It will be enjoyed when all of Petrarch’s poetry has entered the twilight realm of the praised unread.

only to learn that eloquence without guns finds no ears among diplomats.

Again he yielded to the philosopher’s ancient failing—to tell statesmen how to manage states.

Partisans of the popes and partisans of the emperors not only divided Italy, they split almost every city into Guelf and Ghibelline; and even when that strife subsided the old labels were used by new rivalries, and the lava of hate flowed into all the avenues of life.

Perhaps there would have been no Renaissance if Petrarch had had his way. The fragmentation of Italy favored the Renaissance. Large states promote order and power rather than liberty or art. The commercial rivalry of the Italian cities inaugurated and completed the work of the Crusades in developing the economy and wealth of Italy.

Renaissance Italy, like Goethe’s Germany, had many Parises.

IN 1309 Pope Clement V removed the papacy from Rome to Avignon. He was a Frenchman, the former bishop of Bordeaux; he owed his elevation to Philip IV of France, who had startled all Christendom by not only defeating Pope Boniface VIII but arresting him, humiliating him, and almost starving him to death.

He entrusted the task to a man with the fervent faith of a Spaniard, the energy of a Dominic, and the chivalry of a Castilian grandee.

“Why all this fuss? Do you mistake a Frenchman for a eunuch?”20

So the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrible, mingled in the flux and chaos of the Christian life. The simple folk of Italy remained contentedly medieval, while the middle and upper classes, half drunk with the long-cellared wine of classic culture, moved forward with a noble ardor to create the Renaissance, and modern man.

The sunshine of the Italian spirit would break through the northern mists; men and women would escape from the prison of medieval fear; they would worship beauty in all its forms, and fill the air with the joy of resurrection. Italy would be young again.

But it took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money—smelly bourgeois money: the profits of skillful managers and underpaid labor; of hazardous voyages to the East, and laborious crossings of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear; of careful calculations, investments, and loans; of interest and dividends accumulated until enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art.

Money is the root of all civilization. The funds of merchants, bankers, and the Church paid for the manuscripts that revived antiquity.

Doubting the dogmas of the Church, no longer frightened by the fear of hell, and seeing the clergy as epicurean as the laity, the educated Italian shook himself loose from intellectual and ethical restraints; his liberated senses took unabashed delight in all embodiments of beauty in woman, man, and art; and his new freedom made him creative for an amazing century (1434–1534) before it destroyed him with moral chaos, disintegrative individualism, and national slavery.

The Renaissance was not a period in time but a mode of life and thought moving from Italy through Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.

The political history of Florence, like that of modern states, was first the victory of the business class over the old landowning aristocracy (1293), and then the struggle of the “working class” to acquire political power.

The Florentines loved freedom, but it was, among the poor, the freedom to be commanded by Florentine masters, and, among the rich, the liberty to rule the city and its dependencies without imperial or papal or feudal impediment.

But if we embrace in our judgment not only Cosimo Pater Patriae, but his descendants Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, and Clement VII, we may admit that in the patronage of learning and art the Medici have never been equaled by any other family in the known history of mankind.

Or was it only the smile of Leonardo himself that Lisa wore—of the inverted spirit that could hardly recall the tender touch of a woman’s hand, and could believe in no other destiny for love or genius than obscene decomposition, and a little fame flickering out in man’s forgetfulness?

Perhaps in those outwardly idle hours Leonardo was burying the artist in the scientist, the Apelles in the Faust.

“The truth of things,” he wrote, “is a supreme food for fine intelligences, but not for wandering wits.”

Like every artist, every author, and every homosexual, he was unusually self-conscious, sensitive, and vain. Se tu sarai solo tu sarai tutto tuo, he wrote; “if you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company.”

His curiosity, his inversion, his sensitivity, his passion for perfection, all entered into his most fatal defect—the inability or unwillingess to complete what he had begun.

Art, he said, lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution; this was labor for lesser minds.

He passed too quickly from one task or subject to another; he was interested in too many things; he lacked a unifying purpose, a dominating idea; this “universal man” was a medley of brilliant fragments; he was possessed of and by too many abilities to harness them to one goal. In the end he mourned, “I have wasted my hours.”

He wrote five thousand pages, but never completed one book.

“the knowledge of past times and of geography adorns and nourishes the intellect,”

Demetrius declared that he took no more account of the wind that came from their mouths than of that which they expelled from their lower parts.”

“Always make the figure so that the bosom is not turned in the same direction as the head”;

“Make figures with such action as may suffice to show what the figure has in mind.”

He kept these horrors out of his paintings, which owed some loyalty to beauty, but he had to find room for them in his philosophy.

Perhaps nature pleased him more than man did, for nature was neutral, and could not be accused of evil as malice; everything in her was forgivable to an unbiased eye.

Shocked by the wars and crimes of mankind, disheartened by the selfishness of ability and the perpetuity of poverty, saddened by the superstitions and credulities with which the nations and generations gild the brevity and indignities of life, we feel our race in some part redeemed when we see that it can hold a soaring dream in its mind and heart for three thousand years, from the legend of Daedalus and Icarus, through the baffled groping of Leonardo and a thousand others, to the glorious and tragic victory of our time.

“Whoever refers to authorities in disputing ideas works with his memory rather than with his reason.”

“Force with material movement, and weight with percussion, are the four accidental powers in which all the works of mortals have their being and their end.”

“Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?”