When you see a city in the midst of an artistic renaissance, such as Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it’s because the people in it are haunted by some fervent clash of values deep in their culture, and they struggle—usually fruitlessly—to resolve the tension. In the Florentine case, the clash between the classical moral ecology and the Christian one sparked off enormous energy. In a thousand different ways, the Florentines tried to square that unsquarable circle.
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