Overview of the Italian Renaissance

hi my name is ken bartlett i'm a professor of history and renaissance studies at the university of toronto i devoted my career to the study of the renaissance and i hope this introduction to the italian renaissance why it began and why it ended will provide an overview of that most remarkable period in european history and culture florence was the cradle of the renaissance and the reasons for this are relatively clear it was a city that developed a powerful mercantile economy based on the production of a very high quality wool and that wool was so attractive so beautifully finished so gorgeously dyed that a european market developed and the florentine merchants filled that market and with the profits that they made began in fact to uh create a banking industry money that's not put to use has no value so the idea is to lend that money to princes cities individuals other merchants so that the money can produce even more wealth and that others can then benefit as well from that concentration of capital and the result was that florence became a sophisticated city as we see here in this map that dates from 1480. the merchants though were remarkable they were dedicated to profit and they had a very highly developed organization based upon a guild system the merchants realizing they had to cooperate and had to share certain values and also had particular policy interests in common such as standard weights and measures a reliable coinage the florentines invented a reliable coinage in 1252 with the florin and um good means of communications solid walls and most importantly in some ways enforceable contracts the merchants did extraordinarily well indeed but the consequence was that it drove them into direct opposition into conflict with those who believe that political power was their monopoly and that is the old families the old rural manatee those feudal families from the countryside and their few urban associates the tension became very great indeed and it resulted in a world like the montagues and capulets and shakespeare's romeo and juliet where there were pitch battles in the street where there was constant danger and there was a sense of of not only anxiety but of of fear amongst those who were really driving this new florentine economy but they also realized that they had a certain set of skills and organizations and institutions that the old magnets did not and in particular this was the guild structure that allowed them not just to cooperate but to work together into pool resources in order to achieve particular ends and they did so very effectively indeed and the consequence of this was that in uh 1293 there was the revolt really a kind of bourgeois coup d'etat which established the republic of florence the ordinances of justice the laws that were promulgated as a consequence of this overthrow of the magnets and the creation of the guild-based republic gave the government of the city to those merchants those guildsmen and these individuals remarkable as they were turned the city into an instrument for their own benefit all groups in society once they control political and economic power use the institutions of the state in order to benefit them and their associates and that's exactly what happened in florence so the city became then not only a vehicle to fulfill the economic and social and political needs of this group but it also became a symbol of their success the city was rebuilt most significantly we can see in terms of uh politics the creation of the paleto del signoria now called the plato vecchio that palace that was constructed by arnold phil de cambio at the end of the 13th century and had begun to operate by the beginning of the 14th this was and still is the city hall of florence it's the place where political decisions were made and florence ceased to be a city dominated by old aristocratic families and became instead one dominated by nine priors a collective executive that ensured that the city would benefit those merchants who would accomplish that coup d'etat the thing about revolutions though and about any fundamental change in political and economic and social structures is that people need ideas they need an ideology in which to uh uh really discuss the things that mean the most to them what they need is a set of ideas that can also bind them together certainly economic and political interests bind all kinds of people but if you share a set of principles those principles then could be even more powerful and create a kind of unity that nothing else could one of the things about this bourgeois coup is that it put in place people who did not see themselves in the structures of the medieval medieval world they weren't aristocrats fighting on horseback they weren't peasants working in the field they were members of the third estate but they had great wealth they had political power and they had social mobility so they were looking for a set of models that would reflect their own reality and fortunately one was available in part because of the writings and self-interest of a particular person who came from a florentine family although his father was exiled with the same set of prescriptions at exiled dante named francesco petrarca petrarch was a poet he was a wandering scholar he was a person who had no roots in his city and so what he was and what he accomplished he created himself and this idea of human agency of self-creation the desire for self-knowledge and the desire to know a secular world in which human beings had control over their own universe rather than simply leaving everything to the intentions of god really connected well with these florentine merchants because after all they had engaged in social mobility they had risen above their status they had created their own wealth they worked and they saw working as something that was good they had no social models from the middle ages it really gave them a sense of pride and representation so these ideas that had developed in petrarch became very very attractive to them and petrarch himself rejected his time rejected the middle ages he wrote that he was born outside of his time he rather looked back to the past he looked to the world of ancient rome as not only a guide but also as a set of ideas and principles and institutions that could help him form his own life and which in turn then became models for those florentine patricians who were looking for the same thing he saw that in the late republic the world of marcus julius cicero whom we see here that it was a world not unlike florence it was a republic there was social mobility the dominant class uh tended to be those with wealth and uh and influence and there was a sense of secular authority and secular learning that gave individual men and women particularly men because we are talking about the 14th century um then this the sense that they could create themselves in their own image and that they could control their own destiny and that they could build a society that gave them some kind of meaning petrarch's letters and his work including the first psychological biography and his uh cansoniere his love poems to uh to laura all made him the most famous writer in europe and as a consequence in 1341 he was crowned as poet laureate in rome by king robert of naples this was a an event that hadn't happened since the fall of of ancient rome and it gave him an authority that permitted him to develop ideas that then became very very current because others saw themselves in petrarch's own search for an identity these ideas of republicanism of individual agency of self-fashioning of social mobility of collective values in a republic in which all would benefit reached florence very very early and very powerfully not because petrarch was from a florentine family but because those merchants were looking for an ideological structure one of petrarch's groupies we'd now call him uh was a great scholar named kalucho salutati salutati was a secular man he married in fact he married twice he was interested in classical learning and classical literature and he wrote to petrarch and petrarch returned his letters he saw in these new ideas something that could animate and drive the republic of florence and when he was elected chancellor of florence in 1375 the head of the civil service in effect he did what all people in positions of influence do he hired those who shared his values and he turned the florentine bureaucracy into a degree the florentine state into an image of the ideas that petrarch had began had begun to define saurothopti died in 1406 and in those years he established a platform in which a set of ideas based on classical antiquity and their application to the needs of um contemporary florence became current this is generally known as humanism and the humanism of salutati and the humanism of petrarch were those very things that gave energy and identity and a sense of community to those florentines who were looking for all of those things and as a justification for their own success well it wasn't only salutation to some extent illustrated the beginnings of these ideas and their institutionalization in florence in 1427 one of salutati's a circle someone who had been very close to him in previous years named leonardo bruni was elected chancellor bruni became the ultimate renaissance man in many ways he was a great historian he was a classical scholar he was a politician and in his position as chancellor after 1427 he began to go beyond salutati's abstract use of these ideas and then turn them into a civic ideology because florence as most italian cities were in this world where italy was not united and consisted of a mosaic of states florence was threatened by its neighbors particularly milan and bruni brilliantly described why it was that florence could never yield to a tyrant to a duke to those who wanted to take away its liberty he argued through history and through his assessment of the florentine people that the in the very dna of florence there was this desire for liberty and it was this ideology which has since been uh defined as civic humanism that florence took on a powerful set of ideas driving this ideological uh a a recreation of florentine society towards not just the institutionalization of humanism in florence but turning it into a kind of cast mark in other words if you wanted to be seen as a member of the elite it wasn't your birth it wasn't even necessarily your wealth although that always helps it was really your ability to speak well to have be a great rhetorician to know classical sources to have a complete command of latin to understand the world of the ancients and most importantly on a day-to-day basis how to use these in order to further the goals of the instruments of the society and the economy of the city of florence when bruni died in 1444 and this is his tomb by russellino in the church of santo croce we can see that these ideas had become so deeply embedded that they became really a definition of florence itself and the idea of creating a world where there is human agency in which human beings make decisions that will determine the character of their lives and communities this became part of the florentine uh uh florentine world we can see the symbolism here here is bruni lying on his beer with the history of florence on his uh uh on his chest and both the classical references uh in this uh in this tomb and the religious christian references because these men were all traditional christians and if we look at the actual sarcophagus the epitaph is really a statement about bruni and about civic humanism it says that historia lugit eloquencia muta asked history itself is in mourning and eloquence has been silenced with the death of leonardo bruni well it was more than the desire to understand society and to redefine it according to new principles it was the belief that human agency and self-knowledge and knowledge of others could provide an insight into every aspect of the human condition language is one it's perhaps the most effective way of externalizing individual knowledge and experience through your speech which is why rhetoric was so important in the italian renaissance but then how did i know that you were seeing what i saw how do you turn what we see into a vocabulary that becomes universal and this resulted in the development of linear perspective so that you could create a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional plane to actually see the world as each one of us as individuals do but now create a a vocabulary in art to share that effectively and by the 1420s this is the tribute money by masacho in the church of of academy name the image here is one of perfect linear perspective in which all of the figures relate to one another and they relate because of the need for community but also in order to produce a narrative that the observer can completely understand the idea of reproducing what the eye sees then becomes part of this humanist obsession this desire to not only understand the world but to interpret it for others well it's true also in uh in sculpture we saw that bust of cicero which was approximately contemporary with um that statesman who died in 43 bc but it was something that was rekindled why because if you're interested in others if you want to do business with them if you want to establish political alliances if you want to marry into their families you want to know what they look like you want to be able to identify them you want to see their individuality created and the portrait bust sculpture something that hadn't been practiced for a thousand years begins to explode by the middle of the 15th century in in florence and here is a sculpture um by uh uh by uh mayano of an apothecary he's not a prince he's not a mercenary captain he's not a pope he's a druggist member of one of the greater guilds and a member of that florentine elite and so here we can see a personality in all of his reality his age his drooping skin and we know that this man peter melini is a person that we would recognize on the street knowledge of yourself and knowledge of others then becomes extraordinarily important the idea then of florence being a place where the world can be reinterpreted where a society can be rekindled and restructured allows then for the overcoming even of what we see are the restrictions of time and place this is girlandaio it's from the church of santa trinita the um society chapel and it is the giving of the rule to uh saint francis of assisi and that's what we see here uh on the uh in the top slide and it's fine except that the person who commissioned this who is the gentleman um uh here uh ceceti was a factor in the medici bank next to him is lorenzo di merici next to him is the seti's father and on the other side his son and here is the pope giving the rules and francis but also coming into the scene is the poet uh polizziano together with the sons of lorenzo de medici and all of it is taking place not in rome in the 13th century but in florence here is the plato de la signoria this is the piazza della signoria there is a logi de lansi in other words florence is a place where wonderful things happen and it is part of this moment of revelation and the revelation is both divine and human and it gave the florentine intellectual uh and cultural and economical elite a sense of self-confidence they believe they could do anything man is the measure of all things man can do anything if he but wills and this sense of self-confidence in any society at any time becomes self-perpetuating if you believe you can do anything you challenge yourself so that you do and we can see how the sense of community develops this is the baptistery in florence the church of san giovanni the renaissance believed it was an ancient building a temple of mars but it's not it's actually a romanesque uh baptist view that dates from about the year 1100 that was subsequently reclad but from our perspective we can see how this change of culture is happening the interior has a wonderful mosaic by one of the great mosaicists of the middle ages yakupotoriti and it was done about 1225. and of course it's the vision of the damned and the saved so here this image of of hell there is the devil eating all of those who in fact have been confined to uh to bottomless perdition but he's also wearing a um mickey mouse t-shirt which makes me a little bit concerned about uh disney being a satanic cult but this is an image that is based upon uh a medieval view of man not in control of his own universe but just in uh as a pilgrim waiting to be judged in the next life well let's compare it with the third set of doors made for this baptistery uh completed in 1452 by lorenzo guberti these doors are highly important and highly significant the way doors are because if you were born in florence um you were until you were baptized a soul destined for limbo but if you pass through these doors into the baptistry and you were baptized you came out a citizen and a christian so this act of liminality is so important it needed to be celebrated in art in visuals that would help reinforce the sense of individual agency in the moment of one of the most significant events of a christian's life and that is baptism but what gaberty has done is fill these images with a marvelous set of scenes those of reconciliation they were done in part during the period when there was an attempt to reconcile the eastern orthodox and the latin western churches that had been separated since 1054 in order to save constantinople from the turks and for a short period of time the churches were united and that's what these doors represent and of course it was signed if you believe in human agency you believe that man is a creator that augustinian notion of creature and on protest creare that because we are creatures of god we ourselves cannot create or but paint brushes or chisels in god's hands has now been superseded to the idea of homo father of man the creator and to sign it but enzo gaberty didn't use his name but did in fact make a bust of himself and his son on the other side and guberty signs it by showing us who he was so that we can identify him at those moments as well a contemporary of goberty um man who died in in 1446 was one of the great architects of the italian renaissance felipe brunelleschi and here he is brunelleschi was not only the architect of the dome on the cathedral of florence but he's one who saw building and structures as a way of building a new kind of community as creating an environment a kind of stage set in which these humanist ideas could operate effectively and operate with energy and power one example of this is the 1419 uh inochenki the hospitality de gentil is a foundling hospital it was designed to accept um surplus children poor families could only feed so many mouths and if their children lived after birth which was a not certain thing um many of them had to be given and previously this was an element of ecclesiastical charity it was one of the christian acts of charity that the community had to engage in but the difference here is that this is a secular building operated by a florentine guild in which the community the secular community acting together is now taking responsibility for this act that previously was confined to christian charity it's important because what we see here is the beginning of the idea of policy that the state and the law can be used in order to improve the lives of men and women on earth in the community and this building is a perfect example of that and of course brunelleschi being classically uh inspired has taken much of the vocabulary of ancient buildings and applied them to the facade of this truly wonderful and beautiful structure but he also did so in more private spaces a building that was originally to be the chapter house of the franciscan church of santa croce became instead the chapel of one of the great families of florence the posse and the potsie chapel um really created in the 1440s and not completed completely until brutaloski was dead is a splendid building in itself because first of all it engages the eye and the mind all of the platonic solos are represented the um uh the creation of the universe as an act of geometry plato had above the gates of the academy let none ignorant of geometry enter here and the image of god the great geometer creating the universe is something that goes back to the early church and was very popular in the middle ages well brunowski is taking these ideas and filtering them through that a sieve of of classical uh antiquity because he is doing things that will both provide insight into the person who is in this building that is the attempt to square the circle where you have a cube with a dome you can't square a circle but it almost looks like you can and the use of elements which in roman life were for different purposes a triumphal a roman triumphal arch around the altar indicating not here the triumph of a pagan emperor but the triumph of of of of christ over death the most important thing about this building though is that its perfect harmony its elegance its ideal proportions add to the humanity of the people who are in it the renaissance began to believe inspired by ancient writers like etruvius that your environment particularly your physical built environment can have a driving uh effect on who you become how you behave how you act so these buildings then become experiments a kind of social engineering in providing perfect harmony engaging the eye through the use of geometry well this can be done at a much larger scale for example the pope pius ii decided to build an entire ideal city he decided to build a city that would be perfectly constructed and which would affect the lives of those within it and of course he chose the little village in which he was born corsegnano renamed it after himself which is always a prerogative as piensam and between 1459 and 1464 the great architect rossellino the same one who made the tomb for uh for bruni a pupil of leon batista alberti decided to create this perfect space the idea is that if you live in an ideal city with perfect senses of proportion of idealized application of geometry and a sense of of of built form that emphasizes your experience and your humanity then you will be a better person the comm the huma community community itself will be much better organized it will be much more integrated it will be part of a shared experience and it will also bring joy because of the pleasure of seeing beautiful things well sculpture then developed in the same direction as both a symbolic element that captured an entire set of ideas and the recognition that god's greatest creation was the human body and the medieval concern almost almost occasionally repugnance of the naked human body which was so reminiscent of the fall from grace in the uh and the garden of eden um changed fundamentally so by the 1440s you have got donatello making for cosimo de medici the first freestanding male figure since antiquity in his david and it is a beautiful piece and as we can see um if we look at it from all directions it is exactly as an adolescent male uh would look but it's not only the figure of david but it's the implication and the ideological function of david when i said that salutati and particularly bruni had written in favor of freedom and the struggle of small states committed to their own liberty against more powerful states committed to suppressing that liberty it was a set of ideas based on on history and observation and to a degree nothing short of propaganda but in art david becomes the symbol of florence florence was david it had defeated the milanese in 1402 it maintained its independence despite the threats against it and so david becomes a kind of metaphor for the entire republic of florence and was consequently reproduced in almost every generation here is vedakyo's david which dates from 1473-1475 and for which by the way the model was probably the young leonardo da vinci who was in the workshop of uh of uh that archaeol and of course the most famous is michelangelo's michelangelo's david of 15 1 15 4 becomes a symbol of florence as it is to some extent to this day the idea that the florentines are chosen not by god necessarily but by their history their love of liberty and their intelligence and their love of beauty all of these davids are beautiful they have to be because of the renaissance belief that beauty is an outward invisible sign of goodness david was of course good and so consequently he had necessarily to be beautiful the city of florence and the republic that was founded in 1293 was a brilliant experiment in statecraft and changed the nature of how we view the state but all republics slip into factionalism individual groups or individual families um saw their own interest uh as more important than the interests of the community at large and that factionalism and the threats to the power of those in uh the most elite positions resulted in a set of circumstances that gave rise to an opposition of a popular party of people who wanted more of a return to the way the state had been originally conceived well the leader of this group was the richest man in europe the head of the medici bank qasimo de medici and after a clumsy attempt to first execute and then exile him he was recalled to the city in 1434 and that year begins the medici hegemony cosimo and this is a a a portrait by pontoromo painted after the death of of kosovo in 1464. cosimo wanted the republic to work when he was recalled he could have done anything he could have turned himself into a prince but he was a committed republican he believed the ideology that power distributed over many people is far better than power concentrated in one person's hands even his own so he let the republic continue and in fact in some ways he made it work better than it ever worked before and his only means of control to ensure that he had a majority on the committee that determined who was eligible for office and that is to decide how much opposition he was going to actually accept he too believed in the rebuilding of the city and the creation of the city is a work of art the florence that we know today is essentially still a renaissance city and that's because men like cosmo de medici and those who went before and those who came after saw the responsibility they had to use their wealth their power their influence into turning the city itself into something beautiful to create that ideal city we've already discussed so that the character the personality the shared values of citizens can all be reflected in the harmony of the architecture and in the beauty of the buildings cosimo constructed his own enormous palace it wasn't quite this big when he began it in 1444 um on the via latica and large it is but we have to remember that this isn't just his family home this is also the headquarters for the largest most important bank in europe so it was both his home and his banking center and it also because of his influence became a political center so it was necessary that it not only be beautiful but it also provide that sense of solidity you want to believe that buildings are powerful because the people in them are powerful and the money in your account is safe go to any north american city and what dominates the the uh cityscape banks and insurance companies so that you feel that you're nine dollars and 20 cents in your savings account will be safe it worked exactly the same way in florence cosimo then and his son uh piero piero the gauge unfortunately what a way to go through history and wanted to reinforce the sense of beauty cosmos spent a great deal of his own money in making the city more beautiful but also he wanted to focus his sense of his family and the relationship with the major questions of their time in such a way as to provide a means almost of education and that's what the medic you're doing here in the bernatso godzilla journey of the magi began in 1459 in the medici chapel it not only shows stylized portraits of members of the medici but also the uh artist here is um bernal to godzilla himself you can tell his name is on his hat but also the patriarch of constantinople the emperor of constantinople you've got metropolitans and bishops and popes in this group because it celebrates that moment when florence was the center of the christian universe that moment that briefly united the eastern and western churches to protect christendom from the infidel it didn't last but still this is a moment we're celebrating but from our perspective the important thing is that cosimo and his family are actors in this play they're actors in this theater of politics and of religion and of wealth and in power cosimo's grandson lorenzo known as lorenzo the magnificent um was one of the most remarkable figures of european history despite his short life he became the head of the medici family at the age of 20 after the early death of his um of his father and he was a remarkable human being a talented uh poet a brilliant um thinker and speaker he had a common touch he had superb taste he had a sincere religious uh belief and he became a kind of symbol of what the renaissance in florence could be this is a painted terracotta bust by uh by uh by veronica and probably was the model for the wax votives that were created in 1478 to celebrate his surviving attempt on his life during the party conspiracy and lorenzo had to be great this is his disco de parito that is his birthing tray that ritual gift to um women um about to or just having uh given birth and the symbol of it is so clear it's fame being worshipped by all the heroes of the past indicating that in the fullness of time lorenzo will be amongst them lorenzo had to live uh up to this fame it meant a great deal to lorenzo it was in his bedroom from the moment he was born until the day he died and is now in the united states it's in the um the metropolitan museum and it's worth seeing in making a pilgrimage to view it because it in some ways encapsulates these very ideas and views that we've been talking about the idea that you can make your life in yourself according to certain principles a a better thing you can devote it to principles like freedom and liberty you can devote it to success or power but it's within your power itself it's your choice and this idea of freedom of choice and the self-fashioned individual becomes one of the things that drives renaissance culture lorenzo was also interested in ideas and he surrounded himself with those who could talk about things that were increasingly recognized that were very difficult and complicated and that's especially true with his platonic academy a group of individuals who would meet at his villa at coreygi or elsewhere and talk about plato his grandfather had begun the translation of all of the works of plato as well as some other texts from the greek to latin by patronizing marsilio ficino who was amongst this group of four and these ideas became ever more powerful and ever more significant the problem with these ideas is that they are slipping into a kind of closed circle the platonic concepts that are discussed are very difficult they require a great deal of reading and knowledge if you're working in the counting house you're devoted to commerce it's difficult to achieve that and so the medici are beginning to bring the elite of the city out of their practical world into a kind of idealized one the best symbol of that is one of the great uh uh uh pictures of sandro balticelli this is ufc adoration and in many ways it is a standard adoration you've got the three kings you've got um one uh worshiping at the feet of the christ child because the next lining up and the third um but who these are is this is cosimo de medici this is his son piero this is his grandson lorenzo and what we see then is not the christian dispensation but the political dispensation of the medici the medici are bringing a new dispensation to the city of order of dignity of culture and this is something to be uh to be celebrated and indeed sandro botticelli in his only self-portrait puts himself right here so that he indicates clearly that he's part of it lorenzo unfortunately died young in 1492 and he was succeeded by every father's nightmare a son who was a braggart who was paranoid who was stupid despite his fine education uh who was a who was a brawler lorenzo once said i have three sons one is good one is clever and one's a fool and unfortunately the fool succeeded him in piero piero de leonzo pieros fortunato piero unlucky he was a disaster in every way and ultimately because of the french invasions of 1494 he tried to equal his father's diplomacy but in effect gave away florence's independence for a period of time and embarrassed the city and left it completely under the control of the french this is granachi's entry of charles viii of france into florence a moment which the florentine saw as the ultimate humiliation and pierrot quite rightly was blamed for allowing this to happen the period of the medici hegemony seemed to be over the problem was the medici had ruled for so long that they had destroyed the opposition there was a vacuum and the vacuum was filled by the only person with enough popular authority to do something and that was an apocalyptic a dominican preacher from ferrara named dralomo savannah savannah roller had already begun to attack the medici and the ideas of classical antiquity and the dignity of man based on human agency as contrary to the intentions and will of god and he developed a very very powerful following but it was a diverse following of anti-medicines of those who were cynical and trying to use him for their own purposes but also the unprivileged women and the poor flocked to their flock to his sermons because he gave them some measure of hope something that the highly uh richer shay world of neoplatonism could not do but he did not last he offended the pope and ultimately in 1498 he was tried for treason in the city and tried as a heretic by the church and he and two of his closest followers were burned but the end of savanna rolla did not end the problem of the constitution of florence florence had worked best to some extent when the constitution was manipulated from below by those who either share the same values or from above by one family like the medici was able to provide some measure of uh integrity and policy and some measure of of unity in action so florence became to some extent a place that was being increasingly marginalized the republic lasted until 1512 but so much of the genius that had been developed so many of the workshops that it's begun to produce these fabulous works of art and institutionalize them in the city began to lose the patronage and certainly by the early years of the 16th century a lot of that energy moved to rome and in part because of this man pope julius ii de la rovere who was elected pope in 1503. julius wanted to recreate ancient rome and he wanted to turn himself into not only the successor of saint peter but also the successor of constantine and he wanted to celebrate with the greatest artists and he wanted his fame to be everlasting which would mean building the greatest tomb uh since the mausoleum of king mazzolos of halicarnassus so in 1555 he poached the greatest of the florentine artists michelangelo to rome ostensibly to build a tomb but really to do whatever else the pope wanted in 1508 despite some early work on the tomb um the pope gave him a job of finishing the chapel that the pope's uncle sixtus iv had begun the chapel named after him the sistine chapel and the sealing vault was very simple and it wasn't grand enough for uh this pope which who loved grandeur so he gave michelangelo the commission to paint the vault and the result is one of the great art objects of the entire western tradition uh the ceiling of the sistine chapel painted between 15 8 and late 1511. those images which to us have become almost overly common such as the creation of of adam they're on t-shirts that you can buy in front of the vatican museums for heaven's sake imagine seeing this for the first time and seeing the sense of renaissance power the dignity of uh the human being the beauty of the human body and the connection to the divine michelangelo of course captured it in this one image and captured it powerfully so what he's done then is really almost distilled so much of that culture we've been talking about and he painted it on a ceiling in rome well he wasn't alone a young artist related to bramante who was the architect of the new basilica that julius ii wanted built over the tomb of the apostle peter named rafaela vurbino was invited to do some interior decoration rafael was young he was born in 1483 he became a master by the age of 20 and worked in in florence for a while but when he came to rome he was given the job of decorating the papal apartments in the apostolic palace and the result is a series again of symbolic moments here in the standard stance of dela signature which was to be the pope's library where he signed documents hence um is the school of athens and what it is that represents wisdom and knowledge through human understanding that is human knowledge and it is a collection of the philosophers of of of uh of antiquity of um uh of of plato and aristotle um of um uh euclid in fact bramante um appears twice uh both as as geometers the self-portrait of raphael himself is here and leonardo da vinci and here michelangelo added later um aseco after the fresco had been made because raphael had seen the sistine ceiling being painted and they were being painted at exactly the same time and of course the frame is this idealized open building which of course was the idea of bramante's new basilica of saint peter all of this takes place in this realm of human beauty and human understanding but opposite is the fresco of the disputation of the holy sacrament and raphael here indicates wisdom and knowledge through divine revelation and here the uh the consecrated host in the monstrance on the altar and the vertical line through the dove of the holy spirit to christ to god the father and the horizontal composition which is uh in three representing the trinity um is something that is profound in the extreme and it was designed so there would be a rhetorical relationship a dialogue between the school of athens and the uh the disputation it's a remarkable moment and again it's so reflective of the attitudes of the renaissance julius the second died in 1513 and he was succeeded by that clever second son of lorenzo de medici giovanni de medici who became pogba the tenth and here he is in a portrait by raphael uh together with his two cousins including uh the young julio uh who would become full clement vii he continued the work that raphael had begun the difference is that it becomes far more propagandistic here in the room of the fire in the borgo the salad chandio you've got um uh uh pope leo the fourth in 847 telling the fire that was destroying the area between saint peter's and um uh castles and angelo to stop one of the powers that a pope has but it's not only that it is more importantly the foundation of rome and the continuation from the example of of uh of the aeneid because here these are not people fleeing the fire of the bordeaux it's aeneas his old father and kaises and young son julius fleeing troy rome has become the new troy in which the uh divine destiny of the city is now linked between the ancient pagan destiny described in the enid and the christian destiny of of christ charged to peter that begins the roman church all of this was challenged of course with the rise of martin luther of the protestants by 1520 1521 the church had clearly been divided uh in a way that would be very difficult if not impossible to put together and it was that jude admitted she is pope clement vii who had to face the worst moment of this reformation clement vii was a brilliant man superbly educated very intelligent but he had the fatal flaw of not being able to make up his mind he was elected pope in 1523 at the height of the lutheran threat and he couldn't decide to how to balance the needs of the papacy in italy and the protection of rome from his need to uh make peace with a holy roman emperor and use all of the power of the church in the catholic state against the lutherans the result was no one was happy and the sack of rome of 1527 was one of the most barbarous acts in the history of europe and the sack of rome not only destroyed rome it also destroyed that sense of of human dignity and that concept of self-confidence and the belief that man was a measure of all things and is reflective of the beauty and intentions of god that sack of rome had unintended consequences it meant that the pope had to make peace with the holy roman emperor charles v and part of that piece was the emperor's promise to return florence to the medici so in 1529 florence which was still a republic the republic that had machiavelli as a senior civil servant um was challenged by a spanish army and here in is the siege of florence of the 1529-1530 of this was that in 1530 florence capitulated and was ruled by various medici governors one more incompetent than the next and the assassination of a bastard member of the family in 1537 gave rise to the first duke of florence the first hereditary duke of florence and eventually grand duke of tuscany cosimo the first so in 1537 cosimo decided he was going to turn florence into a monarchy and a hereditary monarchy he reestablished feudalism he began to ape and and practice the qualities of monarchy that uh existed north of the alps and he married a spanish princess the daughter of the spanish viceroy of naples florence then had ceased to be the cradle of the renaissance it had become something quite different it had become an absolute monarchy well in rome much the same was happening as a consequence of the sac and the reformation pope paul the third finale say um who was elected pope in 1534 had to deal with a fallout of the sack of rome and one of the instruments that was necessary was to ensure that protestantism would not spread any further that the church would maintain its authority over the faithful and perhaps even win back souls that had been lost to the reformation the year before he was elected in 1542 the roman inquisition was established there had been inquisitions uh in every diocese and after 1478 there was a special inquisition in spain but this was different this was a centralized office that determined from rome who was orthodox and who was heretical and it had an effect on the freedom of thought and freedom of expression that only the most uh repressive regimes today can equal the inquisition uh was a dangerous thing but it gave rise to in many ways a new sense of purpose and a new sense of energy the reformation had not only divided the church but it had kindled the obsession of the faithful uh uh in the roman catholic world to sustain and recover what they could and in 1540 popol iii recognized a new religious order fall founded by this man ignatius loyola his society of jesus or the jesuits was dedicated to three purposes preaching in order to make sure that catholics knew what the faith was teaching the best schools in europe to make sure that their faith would never be challenged by uh uh non-catholic ideas and missionary activities to make sure that the people newly contacted after the voyages of discovery would be catholics the jesuits uh needed to impose a new order and a new dignity on the church and with the council of trent that lasted almost 20 years the church was then reinforced and a new sense of belonging and a very clear sense of truth was made absolutely clear to all catholics and the ideas of the republi of the protestants were then suppressed this was reinforced by perhaps the most dangerous and pernicious of all of the ideas and that is the index of prohibited books first promulgated in 1559 and then finished in 1564. this terrible list that lasted until 1966 decided from rome who uh could read what what books could never be known or even possessed by catholics and this resulted in a new world it resulted in the world of a baroque a world in which churches have become the waiting rooms of heaven and beautiful in the extreme in which renaissance ideas of space and and uh perspective would be used in order to create a theatrical world in which human perception was insufficient it was a place of faith in which there had to be a a a a sense of of ultimate belief and the buildings that emerged such as the basilicas and peter they'll illustrate that so clearly the world then of the baroque the world of the counter reformation is a kind of anti-humanism a kind of anti-renaissance it's a world in which ideas were imposed and where questions could not really be answered they had to in fact be simply accepted as true the great buildings that emerged are wonderful in themselves but to some extent a lot of energy had been lost and with that loss of energy that sense of self-confidence that belief in the dignity of the individual uh man with agency and power to create himself in his community was to a degree compromised and that is my argument of why the renaissance ended i hope you have questions and i would be delighted to answer i'll look forward to your questions and i hope you've enjoyed this quick view um over the founding and the eventual dissolution of the italian renaissance hi a pleasure to be back and i hope you enjoyed the lecture there are some terrific questions and i'd like to begin right away in order to do justice to them there are a couple of questions on the uh the idea that florence and italy at the beginning of the renaissance was a kind of unique place and it it really was there are no comparators um partly because historical comparisons tend to be a parlor game anyway but the reality was that there was a sort of officium um a critical mass of circumstances that had to do with a lot of discretionary wealth that had to do with a particular social structure uh republican government and uh social mobility and access to the levers of political social and economic power and also the idea that moving away from the traditional mobility meant that those in positions of influence and authority needed to have instantly recognizable cast marks and part of this was the humanist education part of it was building grand palaces in order to indicate your status and part of it was the uh the patronage of art and in fact i've written elsewhere that the patronage of art in the italian renaissance was really war by other means a way of establishing a a kind of hierarchy of of authority based upon the um the ability to create beauty and create ideas and those ideas operated in almost every sphere so you can't really compare the renaissance in italy with any other place on earth because it was a unique a unique experience you asked about a little bit more information on how the built environment affects personality well i think you just have to remind yourself of your own experience a beautiful space a perfectly proportioned elegant building with lots of natural light in which you feel comfortable where there's easy movement and where you identify with the decoration and with the uh structure and where the structure is in proportion to your own human body so that you don't feel overwhelmed by the space this is what it really means the idea that you can create a sense of harmony and a sense of belonging by constructing spaces that conform to certain basic principles some of those principles were outlined in vitruvius's books on architecture that chief architect of the emperor augustus whose book made so much influence when it was rediscovered at the beginning of the 15th century and then was built on by other architects such as palladio and de leon batiste alberti so space does have an effect on us including our moods and the way that we relate to uh to other people uh there's a question about the plague this is actually a really important question because it's to some extent counterintuitive the florentine banking industry had developed as an uh really a europe-wide phenomenon by the early 1340s it had established branches all across europe and the enormous profits from the wool trade were then invested in lending and in the transfer of uh of money from one place to another on the continent and this um allowed the florentines to get even wealthier unfortunately a number of them made a terrible mistake especially the two largest banking firms out of the bodhidhi and [Music] they had made huge loans to the king of england and uh edward iii was told at some point about 1343 that he couldn't really ever repay those loans that the uh the amounts were so large that it was impossible for him to really fulfill his obligations so he defaulted and he repudiated the loans and he also uh took the property of italian merchants in england and he exiled them all the result was the collapse not just of the florentine economy but the european economy this was a terrible terrible thing uh it resulted in an enormous uh amount of suffering because those banks had taken on deposit small amounts of discretionary wealth uh that even lesser gills men shoemakers and barrel makers had to put on deposit in order to get what they thought was a reasonable and reliable return so the economy of much of italy but particularly florence fell with the bardin the purusi bank the argument has been made that the plague that was introduced from from the east probably on a january ship from the city of kapha because when kapha was besieged uh the bodies of plague victims were catapulted into the genoese colony on the black sea um sometime around no late 1347 maybe as late as early 1348 that the plague was worse than it otherwise would have been because there wasn't sufficient wealth for cities towns princes rulers to distribute cheap grain uh in times of famine so you could argue that the entire nutrition level of europeans declined as a consequence of the um uh the financial crisis of 134 1343 but there was also a sort of silver lining in this and this is where economics really do become the dismal science the financial crisis was to some extent undone by the black death because of the patterns of patrician marriage where you married within your own social and economic group it meant that all of your relatives were wealthy if you were wealthy and if you lost most of them in the plague it meant that all of their wealth was funneled to those survivors it's called the inheritance effect and what the inheritance effect did was recapitalize large numbers of florentine firms as well as other european firms but particularly florentine firms they were able then to recapitalize after the crisis and the result was that the black death was in many ways the salvation of the florentine economy despite the dislocation everybody in some ways benefited those who were manual laborers benefited because they could agitate for higher wages cloth still had to be produced so you needed workers to do it and those workers um were in demand and so they could get higher wages and consequently live somewhat more comfortably so the plague was in fact a a kind of mixed blessing there's a question about the church and where whether the church was jealous of uh florentine independence and uh and success um the short answer is no they were extraordinarily involved in it florence and florentine banks like the native bank became the papal bankers it was those organizations that moved around the vast amounts of money collected across christendom and then uh transferred to um to rome so the uh the church benefited from and encouraged and was engaged in the same activity you might ask about the um prescriptions against usury well um there have always been prescriptions against usury but no one paid a lot of attention because ecclesiastical institutions especially this the head office of the church in rome needed money like any principality so they got around it by by fictions by lending money in one currency and had payment in another so it's for example um i would lend you money in canadian dollars but then ask for payment in us dollars and the spread between the two would be a profit on a on paper same amount of money but the reality is in fact that you have made a profit through the lending of uh of money and the church did permit uh lending at um uh at interest under a number of circumstances if there was danger of risk of life if there was some danger of loss of capital altogether because the church realized the world is an economic place and they had to be had to be part of it and intellectually the church was just as involved in in humanism as anywhere else and in fact the papal curia became a kind of um really training ground uh for young humanists because the church needed so many of these people and didn't require them at a certain level to be clerics um florence was in fact a small city could the renaissance have happened in a larger one well it's not really a question of size i think it's a question of of circumstance and larger cities such as milan could uh benefit and actually did adopt a number of renaissance attitudes a bit later and venice larger still uh later yet again but nevertheless it's not a question of size it's a question of a degree of social political and economic sophistication because that cosmopolitanism that comes with international trade and travel really is the perspective the lens through which many of these ideas could be uh could be adopted um everything about the renaissance was in fact based on class or uh or status this is uh true and it's also a kind of um of complaint about the study of renaissance uh italy it was an elite movement it required leisure it required wealth in order to acquire the latin and greek to read the manuscripts to buy the manuscripts for your library to engage in conversation um all of these things presupposed a level of discretionary wealth and um and social status and education this is true but that doesn't necessarily mean that those who are outside the beneficial areas of these um uh of these structures didn't have some um uh influence and most more importantly were not influenced by these ideas simple people are not stupid people they walked into santa croce and they saw the body and puruzi chapels painted by chato in the 1320s and they realized something new was happening they saw by the early decades of the 15th century characters that look like them that they could identify with that they saw their city of florence represented as i showed you in the girl and diol slide from santa trinita in other words there was a kind of cultural trickle-down effect i sincerely believe did they actually participate in the level of uh cultivated discourse and the commissioning of art no it required wealth and leisure that they simply did not have but did it affect their quality of life and their ability to understand the world around them yeah i think it i think it really uh really did um the final question that we have time for is a question about the relationship between the renaissance and the scientific revolution there is a fundamental connection between the two and it has to do with human agency the reproduction of what the eye sees and the confidence that what you see is not only valid but will be valid to others by that i mean if you look at a scientific a a at an experiment or you look at a scientific phenomenon or a natural phenomenon you believe that what you see is actually what is happening and you have the confidence to write it down and then draw it or provide some kind of schematic to allow it to be transferred to others and that is the value of them of of naturalism and art and the ability to reproduce what the eye sees so people then could could look at a leaf and realize that the oak tree is the same tree in the venato as in sicily because they can look at the attributes and the reproduction of the leaf and the reproduction of the tree itself gives them a sense that they are engaging in a phenomenon that has some measure of universality and everything in including the voyages of discovery without the invention of linear perspective that is placing objects in relation to one another in space cartography is almost impossible maps became far more sophisticated and attitudes of space as well as attitudes of time and attitudes of perspective and all of the things that we've talked about become much more precise and then finally anatomy it's not an accident that the celias produced um uh they fabrica humanity corporis in 1517 it's not an accident at all and when it was printed and made universal by the 1540s what you have got in those editions of the salience are correct anatomical drawings of the human body they are not dependent on galen they are not dependent on what the um on hysterical action or on demons being held inside the brain they had actually got to do with how the body works and so yes there is a direct connection from one to the other well our time is up i hope that you've enjoyed the uh the lecture and i look forward to speaking to you again and remember there is beauty to be found in everything and the renaissance has given us some of the tools in order to appreciate that beauty thank you very much you

hi my name is ken bartlett i&#39;m a professor of history and renaissance studies at the university of toronto i devoted my career to the study of the renaissance and i hope this introduction to the italian renaissance why it began and why it ended will provide an overview of that most remarkable period in european history and culture florence was the cradle of the renaissance and the reasons for this are relatively clear it was a city that developed a powerful mercantile economy based on the production of a very high quality wool and that wool was so attractive so beautifully finished so gorgeously dyed that a european market developed and the florentine merchants filled that market and with the profits that they made began in fact to uh create a banking industry money that&#39;s not put to use has no value so the idea is to lend that money to princes cities individuals other merchants so that the money can produce even more wealth and that others can then benefit as well from that concentration of capital and the result was that florence became a sophisticated city as we see here in this map that dates from 1480. the merchants though were remarkable they were dedicated to profit and they had a very highly developed organization based upon a guild system the merchants realizing they had to cooperate and had to share certain values and also had particular policy interests in common such as standard weights and measures a reliable coinage the florentines invented a reliable coinage in 1252 with the florin and um good means of communications solid walls and most importantly in some ways enforceable contracts the merchants did extraordinarily well indeed but the consequence was that it drove them into direct opposition into conflict with those who believe that political power was their monopoly and that is the old families the old rural manatee those feudal families from the countryside and their few urban associates the tension became very great indeed and it resulted in a world like the montagues and capulets and shakespeare&#39;s romeo and juliet where there were pitch battles in the street where there was constant danger and there was a sense of of not only anxiety but of of fear amongst those who were really driving this new florentine economy but they also realized that they had a certain set of skills and organizations and institutions that the old magnets did not and in particular this was the guild structure that allowed them not just to cooperate but to work together into pool resources in order to achieve particular ends and they did so very effectively indeed and the consequence of this was that in uh 1293 there was the revolt really a kind of bourgeois coup d&#39;etat which established the republic of florence the ordinances of justice the laws that were promulgated as a consequence of this overthrow of the magnets and the creation of the guild-based republic gave the government of the city to those merchants those guildsmen and these individuals remarkable as they were turned the city into an instrument for their own benefit all groups in society once they control political and economic power use the institutions of the state in order to benefit them and their associates and that&#39;s exactly what happened in florence so the city became then not only a vehicle to fulfill the economic and social and political needs of this group but it also became a symbol of their success the city was rebuilt most significantly we can see in terms of uh politics the creation of the paleto del signoria now called the plato vecchio that palace that was constructed by arnold phil de cambio at the end of the 13th century and had begun to operate by the beginning of the 14th this was and still is the city hall of florence it&#39;s the place where political decisions were made and florence ceased to be a city dominated by old aristocratic families and became instead one dominated by nine priors a collective executive that ensured that the city would benefit those merchants who would accomplish that coup d&#39;etat the thing about revolutions though and about any fundamental change in political and economic and social structures is that people need ideas they need an ideology in which to uh uh really discuss the things that mean the most to them what they need is a set of ideas that can also bind them together certainly economic and political interests bind all kinds of people but if you share a set of principles those principles then could be even more powerful and create a kind of unity that nothing else could one of the things about this bourgeois coup is that it put in place people who did not see themselves in the structures of the medieval medieval world they weren&#39;t aristocrats fighting on horseback they weren&#39;t peasants working in the field they were members of the third estate but they had great wealth they had political power and they had social mobility so they were looking for a set of models that would reflect their own reality and fortunately one was available in part because of the writings and self-interest of a particular person who came from a florentine family although his father was exiled with the same set of prescriptions at exiled dante named francesco petrarca petrarch was a poet he was a wandering scholar he was a person who had no roots in his city and so what he was and what he accomplished he created himself and this idea of human agency of self-creation the desire for self-knowledge and the desire to know a secular world in which human beings had control over their own universe rather than simply leaving everything to the intentions of god really connected well with these florentine merchants because after all they had engaged in social mobility they had risen above their status they had created their own wealth they worked and they saw working as something that was good they had no social models from the middle ages it really gave them a sense of pride and representation so these ideas that had developed in petrarch became very very attractive to them and petrarch himself rejected his time rejected the middle ages he wrote that he was born outside of his time he rather looked back to the past he looked to the world of ancient rome as not only a guide but also as a set of ideas and principles and institutions that could help him form his own life and which in turn then became models for those florentine patricians who were looking for the same thing he saw that in the late republic the world of marcus julius cicero whom we see here that it was a world not unlike florence it was a republic there was social mobility the dominant class uh tended to be those with wealth and uh and influence and there was a sense of secular authority and secular learning that gave individual men and women particularly men because we are talking about the 14th century um then this the sense that they could create themselves in their own image and that they could control their own destiny and that they could build a society that gave them some kind of meaning petrarch&#39;s letters and his work including the first psychological biography and his uh cansoniere his love poems to uh to laura all made him the most famous writer in europe and as a consequence in 1341 he was crowned as poet laureate in rome by king robert of naples this was a an event that hadn&#39;t happened since the fall of of ancient rome and it gave him an authority that permitted him to develop ideas that then became very very current because others saw themselves in petrarch&#39;s own search for an identity these ideas of republicanism of individual agency of self-fashioning of social mobility of collective values in a republic in which all would benefit reached florence very very early and very powerfully not because petrarch was from a florentine family but because those merchants were looking for an ideological structure one of petrarch&#39;s groupies we&#39;d now call him uh was a great scholar named kalucho salutati salutati was a secular man he married in fact he married twice he was interested in classical learning and classical literature and he wrote to petrarch and petrarch returned his letters he saw in these new ideas something that could animate and drive the republic of florence and when he was elected chancellor of florence in 1375 the head of the civil service in effect he did what all people in positions of influence do he hired those who shared his values and he turned the florentine bureaucracy into a degree the florentine state into an image of the ideas that petrarch had began had begun to define saurothopti died in 1406 and in those years he established a platform in which a set of ideas based on classical antiquity and their application to the needs of um contemporary florence became current this is generally known as humanism and the humanism of salutati and the humanism of petrarch were those very things that gave energy and identity and a sense of community to those florentines who were looking for all of those things and as a justification for their own success well it wasn&#39;t only salutation to some extent illustrated the beginnings of these ideas and their institutionalization in florence in 1427 one of salutati&#39;s a circle someone who had been very close to him in previous years named leonardo bruni was elected chancellor bruni became the ultimate renaissance man in many ways he was a great historian he was a classical scholar he was a politician and in his position as chancellor after 1427 he began to go beyond salutati&#39;s abstract use of these ideas and then turn them into a civic ideology because florence as most italian cities were in this world where italy was not united and consisted of a mosaic of states florence was threatened by its neighbors particularly milan and bruni brilliantly described why it was that florence could never yield to a tyrant to a duke to those who wanted to take away its liberty he argued through history and through his assessment of the florentine people that the in the very dna of florence there was this desire for liberty and it was this ideology which has since been uh defined as civic humanism that florence took on a powerful set of ideas driving this ideological uh a a recreation of florentine society towards not just the institutionalization of humanism in florence but turning it into a kind of cast mark in other words if you wanted to be seen as a member of the elite it wasn&#39;t your birth it wasn&#39;t even necessarily your wealth although that always helps it was really your ability to speak well to have be a great rhetorician to know classical sources to have a complete command of latin to understand the world of the ancients and most importantly on a day-to-day basis how to use these in order to further the goals of the instruments of the society and the economy of the city of florence when bruni died in 1444 and this is his tomb by russellino in the church of santo croce we can see that these ideas had become so deeply embedded that they became really a definition of florence itself and the idea of creating a world where there is human agency in which human beings make decisions that will determine the character of their lives and communities this became part of the florentine uh uh florentine world we can see the symbolism here here is bruni lying on his beer with the history of florence on his uh uh on his chest and both the classical references uh in this uh in this tomb and the religious christian references because these men were all traditional christians and if we look at the actual sarcophagus the epitaph is really a statement about bruni and about civic humanism it says that historia lugit eloquencia muta asked history itself is in mourning and eloquence has been silenced with the death of leonardo bruni well it was more than the desire to understand society and to redefine it according to new principles it was the belief that human agency and self-knowledge and knowledge of others could provide an insight into every aspect of the human condition language is one it&#39;s perhaps the most effective way of externalizing individual knowledge and experience through your speech which is why rhetoric was so important in the italian renaissance but then how did i know that you were seeing what i saw how do you turn what we see into a vocabulary that becomes universal and this resulted in the development of linear perspective so that you could create a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional plane to actually see the world as each one of us as individuals do but now create a a vocabulary in art to share that effectively and by the 1420s this is the tribute money by masacho in the church of of academy name the image here is one of perfect linear perspective in which all of the figures relate to one another and they relate because of the need for community but also in order to produce a narrative that the observer can completely understand the idea of reproducing what the eye sees then becomes part of this humanist obsession this desire to not only understand the world but to interpret it for others well it&#39;s true also in uh in sculpture we saw that bust of cicero which was approximately contemporary with um that statesman who died in 43 bc but it was something that was rekindled why because if you&#39;re interested in others if you want to do business with them if you want to establish political alliances if you want to marry into their families you want to know what they look like you want to be able to identify them you want to see their individuality created and the portrait bust sculpture something that hadn&#39;t been practiced for a thousand years begins to explode by the middle of the 15th century in in florence and here is a sculpture um by uh uh by uh mayano of an apothecary he&#39;s not a prince he&#39;s not a mercenary captain he&#39;s not a pope he&#39;s a druggist member of one of the greater guilds and a member of that florentine elite and so here we can see a personality in all of his reality his age his drooping skin and we know that this man peter melini is a person that we would recognize on the street knowledge of yourself and knowledge of others then becomes extraordinarily important the idea then of florence being a place where the world can be reinterpreted where a society can be rekindled and restructured allows then for the overcoming even of what we see are the restrictions of time and place this is girlandaio it&#39;s from the church of santa trinita the um society chapel and it is the giving of the rule to uh saint francis of assisi and that&#39;s what we see here uh on the uh in the top slide and it&#39;s fine except that the person who commissioned this who is the gentleman um uh here uh ceceti was a factor in the medici bank next to him is lorenzo di merici next to him is the seti&#39;s father and on the other side his son and here is the pope giving the rules and francis but also coming into the scene is the poet uh polizziano together with the sons of lorenzo de medici and all of it is taking place not in rome in the 13th century but in florence here is the plato de la signoria this is the piazza della signoria there is a logi de lansi in other words florence is a place where wonderful things happen and it is part of this moment of revelation and the revelation is both divine and human and it gave the florentine intellectual uh and cultural and economical elite a sense of self-confidence they believe they could do anything man is the measure of all things man can do anything if he but wills and this sense of self-confidence in any society at any time becomes self-perpetuating if you believe you can do anything you challenge yourself so that you do and we can see how the sense of community develops this is the baptistery in florence the church of san giovanni the renaissance believed it was an ancient building a temple of mars but it&#39;s not it&#39;s actually a romanesque uh baptist view that dates from about the year 1100 that was subsequently reclad but from our perspective we can see how this change of culture is happening the interior has a wonderful mosaic by one of the great mosaicists of the middle ages yakupotoriti and it was done about 1225. and of course it&#39;s the vision of the damned and the saved so here this image of of hell there is the devil eating all of those who in fact have been confined to uh to bottomless perdition but he&#39;s also wearing a um mickey mouse t-shirt which makes me a little bit concerned about uh disney being a satanic cult but this is an image that is based upon uh a medieval view of man not in control of his own universe but just in uh as a pilgrim waiting to be judged in the next life well let&#39;s compare it with the third set of doors made for this baptistery uh completed in 1452 by lorenzo guberti these doors are highly important and highly significant the way doors are because if you were born in florence um you were until you were baptized a soul destined for limbo but if you pass through these doors into the baptistry and you were baptized you came out a citizen and a christian so this act of liminality is so important it needed to be celebrated in art in visuals that would help reinforce the sense of individual agency in the moment of one of the most significant events of a christian&#39;s life and that is baptism but what gaberty has done is fill these images with a marvelous set of scenes those of reconciliation they were done in part during the period when there was an attempt to reconcile the eastern orthodox and the latin western churches that had been separated since 1054 in order to save constantinople from the turks and for a short period of time the churches were united and that&#39;s what these doors represent and of course it was signed if you believe in human agency you believe that man is a creator that augustinian notion of creature and on protest creare that because we are creatures of god we ourselves cannot create or but paint brushes or chisels in god&#39;s hands has now been superseded to the idea of homo father of man the creator and to sign it but enzo gaberty didn&#39;t use his name but did in fact make a bust of himself and his son on the other side and guberty signs it by showing us who he was so that we can identify him at those moments as well a contemporary of goberty um man who died in in 1446 was one of the great architects of the italian renaissance felipe brunelleschi and here he is brunelleschi was not only the architect of the dome on the cathedral of florence but he&#39;s one who saw building and structures as a way of building a new kind of community as creating an environment a kind of stage set in which these humanist ideas could operate effectively and operate with energy and power one example of this is the 1419 uh inochenki the hospitality de gentil is a foundling hospital it was designed to accept um surplus children poor families could only feed so many mouths and if their children lived after birth which was a not certain thing um many of them had to be given and previously this was an element of ecclesiastical charity it was one of the christian acts of charity that the community had to engage in but the difference here is that this is a secular building operated by a florentine guild in which the community the secular community acting together is now taking responsibility for this act that previously was confined to christian charity it&#39;s important because what we see here is the beginning of the idea of policy that the state and the law can be used in order to improve the lives of men and women on earth in the community and this building is a perfect example of that and of course brunelleschi being classically uh inspired has taken much of the vocabulary of ancient buildings and applied them to the facade of this truly wonderful and beautiful structure but he also did so in more private spaces a building that was originally to be the chapter house of the franciscan church of santa croce became instead the chapel of one of the great families of florence the posse and the potsie chapel um really created in the 1440s and not completed completely until brutaloski was dead is a splendid building in itself because first of all it engages the eye and the mind all of the platonic solos are represented the um uh the creation of the universe as an act of geometry plato had above the gates of the academy let none ignorant of geometry enter here and the image of god the great geometer creating the universe is something that goes back to the early church and was very popular in the middle ages well brunowski is taking these ideas and filtering them through that a sieve of of classical uh antiquity because he is doing things that will both provide insight into the person who is in this building that is the attempt to square the circle where you have a cube with a dome you can&#39;t square a circle but it almost looks like you can and the use of elements which in roman life were for different purposes a triumphal a roman triumphal arch around the altar indicating not here the triumph of a pagan emperor but the triumph of of of of christ over death the most important thing about this building though is that its perfect harmony its elegance its ideal proportions add to the humanity of the people who are in it the renaissance began to believe inspired by ancient writers like etruvius that your environment particularly your physical built environment can have a driving uh effect on who you become how you behave how you act so these buildings then become experiments a kind of social engineering in providing perfect harmony engaging the eye through the use of geometry well this can be done at a much larger scale for example the pope pius ii decided to build an entire ideal city he decided to build a city that would be perfectly constructed and which would affect the lives of those within it and of course he chose the little village in which he was born corsegnano renamed it after himself which is always a prerogative as piensam and between 1459 and 1464 the great architect rossellino the same one who made the tomb for uh for bruni a pupil of leon batista alberti decided to create this perfect space the idea is that if you live in an ideal city with perfect senses of proportion of idealized application of geometry and a sense of of of built form that emphasizes your experience and your humanity then you will be a better person the comm the huma community community itself will be much better organized it will be much more integrated it will be part of a shared experience and it will also bring joy because of the pleasure of seeing beautiful things well sculpture then developed in the same direction as both a symbolic element that captured an entire set of ideas and the recognition that god&#39;s greatest creation was the human body and the medieval concern almost almost occasionally repugnance of the naked human body which was so reminiscent of the fall from grace in the uh and the garden of eden um changed fundamentally so by the 1440s you have got donatello making for cosimo de medici the first freestanding male figure since antiquity in his david and it is a beautiful piece and as we can see um if we look at it from all directions it is exactly as an adolescent male uh would look but it&#39;s not only the figure of david but it&#39;s the implication and the ideological function of david when i said that salutati and particularly bruni had written in favor of freedom and the struggle of small states committed to their own liberty against more powerful states committed to suppressing that liberty it was a set of ideas based on on history and observation and to a degree nothing short of propaganda but in art david becomes the symbol of florence florence was david it had defeated the milanese in 1402 it maintained its independence despite the threats against it and so david becomes a kind of metaphor for the entire republic of florence and was consequently reproduced in almost every generation here is vedakyo&#39;s david which dates from 1473-1475 and for which by the way the model was probably the young leonardo da vinci who was in the workshop of uh of uh that archaeol and of course the most famous is michelangelo&#39;s michelangelo&#39;s david of 15 1 15 4 becomes a symbol of florence as it is to some extent to this day the idea that the florentines are chosen not by god necessarily but by their history their love of liberty and their intelligence and their love of beauty all of these davids are beautiful they have to be because of the renaissance belief that beauty is an outward invisible sign of goodness david was of course good and so consequently he had necessarily to be beautiful the city of florence and the republic that was founded in 1293 was a brilliant experiment in statecraft and changed the nature of how we view the state but all republics slip into factionalism individual groups or individual families um saw their own interest uh as more important than the interests of the community at large and that factionalism and the threats to the power of those in uh the most elite positions resulted in a set of circumstances that gave rise to an opposition of a popular party of people who wanted more of a return to the way the state had been originally conceived well the leader of this group was the richest man in europe the head of the medici bank qasimo de medici and after a clumsy attempt to first execute and then exile him he was recalled to the city in 1434 and that year begins the medici hegemony cosimo and this is a a a portrait by pontoromo painted after the death of of kosovo in 1464. cosimo wanted the republic to work when he was recalled he could have done anything he could have turned himself into a prince but he was a committed republican he believed the ideology that power distributed over many people is far better than power concentrated in one person&#39;s hands even his own so he let the republic continue and in fact in some ways he made it work better than it ever worked before and his only means of control to ensure that he had a majority on the committee that determined who was eligible for office and that is to decide how much opposition he was going to actually accept he too believed in the rebuilding of the city and the creation of the city is a work of art the florence that we know today is essentially still a renaissance city and that&#39;s because men like cosmo de medici and those who went before and those who came after saw the responsibility they had to use their wealth their power their influence into turning the city itself into something beautiful to create that ideal city we&#39;ve already discussed so that the character the personality the shared values of citizens can all be reflected in the harmony of the architecture and in the beauty of the buildings cosimo constructed his own enormous palace it wasn&#39;t quite this big when he began it in 1444 um on the via latica and large it is but we have to remember that this isn&#39;t just his family home this is also the headquarters for the largest most important bank in europe so it was both his home and his banking center and it also because of his influence became a political center so it was necessary that it not only be beautiful but it also provide that sense of solidity you want to believe that buildings are powerful because the people in them are powerful and the money in your account is safe go to any north american city and what dominates the the uh cityscape banks and insurance companies so that you feel that you&#39;re nine dollars and 20 cents in your savings account will be safe it worked exactly the same way in florence cosimo then and his son uh piero piero the gauge unfortunately what a way to go through history and wanted to reinforce the sense of beauty cosmos spent a great deal of his own money in making the city more beautiful but also he wanted to focus his sense of his family and the relationship with the major questions of their time in such a way as to provide a means almost of education and that&#39;s what the medic you&#39;re doing here in the bernatso godzilla journey of the magi began in 1459 in the medici chapel it not only shows stylized portraits of members of the medici but also the uh artist here is um bernal to godzilla himself you can tell his name is on his hat but also the patriarch of constantinople the emperor of constantinople you&#39;ve got metropolitans and bishops and popes in this group because it celebrates that moment when florence was the center of the christian universe that moment that briefly united the eastern and western churches to protect christendom from the infidel it didn&#39;t last but still this is a moment we&#39;re celebrating but from our perspective the important thing is that cosimo and his family are actors in this play they&#39;re actors in this theater of politics and of religion and of wealth and in power cosimo&#39;s grandson lorenzo known as lorenzo the magnificent um was one of the most remarkable figures of european history despite his short life he became the head of the medici family at the age of 20 after the early death of his um of his father and he was a remarkable human being a talented uh poet a brilliant um thinker and speaker he had a common touch he had superb taste he had a sincere religious uh belief and he became a kind of symbol of what the renaissance in florence could be this is a painted terracotta bust by uh by uh by veronica and probably was the model for the wax votives that were created in 1478 to celebrate his surviving attempt on his life during the party conspiracy and lorenzo had to be great this is his disco de parito that is his birthing tray that ritual gift to um women um about to or just having uh given birth and the symbol of it is so clear it&#39;s fame being worshipped by all the heroes of the past indicating that in the fullness of time lorenzo will be amongst them lorenzo had to live uh up to this fame it meant a great deal to lorenzo it was in his bedroom from the moment he was born until the day he died and is now in the united states it&#39;s in the um the metropolitan museum and it&#39;s worth seeing in making a pilgrimage to view it because it in some ways encapsulates these very ideas and views that we&#39;ve been talking about the idea that you can make your life in yourself according to certain principles a a better thing you can devote it to principles like freedom and liberty you can devote it to success or power but it&#39;s within your power itself it&#39;s your choice and this idea of freedom of choice and the self-fashioned individual becomes one of the things that drives renaissance culture lorenzo was also interested in ideas and he surrounded himself with those who could talk about things that were increasingly recognized that were very difficult and complicated and that&#39;s especially true with his platonic academy a group of individuals who would meet at his villa at coreygi or elsewhere and talk about plato his grandfather had begun the translation of all of the works of plato as well as some other texts from the greek to latin by patronizing marsilio ficino who was amongst this group of four and these ideas became ever more powerful and ever more significant the problem with these ideas is that they are slipping into a kind of closed circle the platonic concepts that are discussed are very difficult they require a great deal of reading and knowledge if you&#39;re working in the counting house you&#39;re devoted to commerce it&#39;s difficult to achieve that and so the medici are beginning to bring the elite of the city out of their practical world into a kind of idealized one the best symbol of that is one of the great uh uh uh pictures of sandro balticelli this is ufc adoration and in many ways it is a standard adoration you&#39;ve got the three kings you&#39;ve got um one uh worshiping at the feet of the christ child because the next lining up and the third um but who these are is this is cosimo de medici this is his son piero this is his grandson lorenzo and what we see then is not the christian dispensation but the political dispensation of the medici the medici are bringing a new dispensation to the city of order of dignity of culture and this is something to be uh to be celebrated and indeed sandro botticelli in his only self-portrait puts himself right here so that he indicates clearly that he&#39;s part of it lorenzo unfortunately died young in 1492 and he was succeeded by every father&#39;s nightmare a son who was a braggart who was paranoid who was stupid despite his fine education uh who was a who was a brawler lorenzo once said i have three sons one is good one is clever and one&#39;s a fool and unfortunately the fool succeeded him in piero piero de leonzo pieros fortunato piero unlucky he was a disaster in every way and ultimately because of the french invasions of 1494 he tried to equal his father&#39;s diplomacy but in effect gave away florence&#39;s independence for a period of time and embarrassed the city and left it completely under the control of the french this is granachi&#39;s entry of charles viii of france into florence a moment which the florentine saw as the ultimate humiliation and pierrot quite rightly was blamed for allowing this to happen the period of the medici hegemony seemed to be over the problem was the medici had ruled for so long that they had destroyed the opposition there was a vacuum and the vacuum was filled by the only person with enough popular authority to do something and that was an apocalyptic a dominican preacher from ferrara named dralomo savannah savannah roller had already begun to attack the medici and the ideas of classical antiquity and the dignity of man based on human agency as contrary to the intentions and will of god and he developed a very very powerful following but it was a diverse following of anti-medicines of those who were cynical and trying to use him for their own purposes but also the unprivileged women and the poor flocked to their flock to his sermons because he gave them some measure of hope something that the highly uh richer shay world of neoplatonism could not do but he did not last he offended the pope and ultimately in 1498 he was tried for treason in the city and tried as a heretic by the church and he and two of his closest followers were burned but the end of savanna rolla did not end the problem of the constitution of florence florence had worked best to some extent when the constitution was manipulated from below by those who either share the same values or from above by one family like the medici was able to provide some measure of uh integrity and policy and some measure of of unity in action so florence became to some extent a place that was being increasingly marginalized the republic lasted until 1512 but so much of the genius that had been developed so many of the workshops that it&#39;s begun to produce these fabulous works of art and institutionalize them in the city began to lose the patronage and certainly by the early years of the 16th century a lot of that energy moved to rome and in part because of this man pope julius ii de la rovere who was elected pope in 1503. julius wanted to recreate ancient rome and he wanted to turn himself into not only the successor of saint peter but also the successor of constantine and he wanted to celebrate with the greatest artists and he wanted his fame to be everlasting which would mean building the greatest tomb uh since the mausoleum of king mazzolos of halicarnassus so in 1555 he poached the greatest of the florentine artists michelangelo to rome ostensibly to build a tomb but really to do whatever else the pope wanted in 1508 despite some early work on the tomb um the pope gave him a job of finishing the chapel that the pope&#39;s uncle sixtus iv had begun the chapel named after him the sistine chapel and the sealing vault was very simple and it wasn&#39;t grand enough for uh this pope which who loved grandeur so he gave michelangelo the commission to paint the vault and the result is one of the great art objects of the entire western tradition uh the ceiling of the sistine chapel painted between 15 8 and late 1511. those images which to us have become almost overly common such as the creation of of adam they&#39;re on t-shirts that you can buy in front of the vatican museums for heaven&#39;s sake imagine seeing this for the first time and seeing the sense of renaissance power the dignity of uh the human being the beauty of the human body and the connection to the divine michelangelo of course captured it in this one image and captured it powerfully so what he&#39;s done then is really almost distilled so much of that culture we&#39;ve been talking about and he painted it on a ceiling in rome well he wasn&#39;t alone a young artist related to bramante who was the architect of the new basilica that julius ii wanted built over the tomb of the apostle peter named rafaela vurbino was invited to do some interior decoration rafael was young he was born in 1483 he became a master by the age of 20 and worked in in florence for a while but when he came to rome he was given the job of decorating the papal apartments in the apostolic palace and the result is a series again of symbolic moments here in the standard stance of dela signature which was to be the pope&#39;s library where he signed documents hence um is the school of athens and what it is that represents wisdom and knowledge through human understanding that is human knowledge and it is a collection of the philosophers of of of uh of antiquity of um uh of of plato and aristotle um of um uh euclid in fact bramante um appears twice uh both as as geometers the self-portrait of raphael himself is here and leonardo da vinci and here michelangelo added later um aseco after the fresco had been made because raphael had seen the sistine ceiling being painted and they were being painted at exactly the same time and of course the frame is this idealized open building which of course was the idea of bramante&#39;s new basilica of saint peter all of this takes place in this realm of human beauty and human understanding but opposite is the fresco of the disputation of the holy sacrament and raphael here indicates wisdom and knowledge through divine revelation and here the uh the consecrated host in the monstrance on the altar and the vertical line through the dove of the holy spirit to christ to god the father and the horizontal composition which is uh in three representing the trinity um is something that is profound in the extreme and it was designed so there would be a rhetorical relationship a dialogue between the school of athens and the uh the disputation it&#39;s a remarkable moment and again it&#39;s so reflective of the attitudes of the renaissance julius the second died in 1513 and he was succeeded by that clever second son of lorenzo de medici giovanni de medici who became pogba the tenth and here he is in a portrait by raphael uh together with his two cousins including uh the young julio uh who would become full clement vii he continued the work that raphael had begun the difference is that it becomes far more propagandistic here in the room of the fire in the borgo the salad chandio you&#39;ve got um uh uh pope leo the fourth in 847 telling the fire that was destroying the area between saint peter&#39;s and um uh castles and angelo to stop one of the powers that a pope has but it&#39;s not only that it is more importantly the foundation of rome and the continuation from the example of of uh of the aeneid because here these are not people fleeing the fire of the bordeaux it&#39;s aeneas his old father and kaises and young son julius fleeing troy rome has become the new troy in which the uh divine destiny of the city is now linked between the ancient pagan destiny described in the enid and the christian destiny of of christ charged to peter that begins the roman church all of this was challenged of course with the rise of martin luther of the protestants by 1520 1521 the church had clearly been divided uh in a way that would be very difficult if not impossible to put together and it was that jude admitted she is pope clement vii who had to face the worst moment of this reformation clement vii was a brilliant man superbly educated very intelligent but he had the fatal flaw of not being able to make up his mind he was elected pope in 1523 at the height of the lutheran threat and he couldn&#39;t decide to how to balance the needs of the papacy in italy and the protection of rome from his need to uh make peace with a holy roman emperor and use all of the power of the church in the catholic state against the lutherans the result was no one was happy and the sack of rome of 1527 was one of the most barbarous acts in the history of europe and the sack of rome not only destroyed rome it also destroyed that sense of of human dignity and that concept of self-confidence and the belief that man was a measure of all things and is reflective of the beauty and intentions of god that sack of rome had unintended consequences it meant that the pope had to make peace with the holy roman emperor charles v and part of that piece was the emperor&#39;s promise to return florence to the medici so in 1529 florence which was still a republic the republic that had machiavelli as a senior civil servant um was challenged by a spanish army and here in is the siege of florence of the 1529-1530 of this was that in 1530 florence capitulated and was ruled by various medici governors one more incompetent than the next and the assassination of a bastard member of the family in 1537 gave rise to the first duke of florence the first hereditary duke of florence and eventually grand duke of tuscany cosimo the first so in 1537 cosimo decided he was going to turn florence into a monarchy and a hereditary monarchy he reestablished feudalism he began to ape and and practice the qualities of monarchy that uh existed north of the alps and he married a spanish princess the daughter of the spanish viceroy of naples florence then had ceased to be the cradle of the renaissance it had become something quite different it had become an absolute monarchy well in rome much the same was happening as a consequence of the sac and the reformation pope paul the third finale say um who was elected pope in 1534 had to deal with a fallout of the sack of rome and one of the instruments that was necessary was to ensure that protestantism would not spread any further that the church would maintain its authority over the faithful and perhaps even win back souls that had been lost to the reformation the year before he was elected in 1542 the roman inquisition was established there had been inquisitions uh in every diocese and after 1478 there was a special inquisition in spain but this was different this was a centralized office that determined from rome who was orthodox and who was heretical and it had an effect on the freedom of thought and freedom of expression that only the most uh repressive regimes today can equal the inquisition uh was a dangerous thing but it gave rise to in many ways a new sense of purpose and a new sense of energy the reformation had not only divided the church but it had kindled the obsession of the faithful uh uh in the roman catholic world to sustain and recover what they could and in 1540 popol iii recognized a new religious order fall founded by this man ignatius loyola his society of jesus or the jesuits was dedicated to three purposes preaching in order to make sure that catholics knew what the faith was teaching the best schools in europe to make sure that their faith would never be challenged by uh uh non-catholic ideas and missionary activities to make sure that the people newly contacted after the voyages of discovery would be catholics the jesuits uh needed to impose a new order and a new dignity on the church and with the council of trent that lasted almost 20 years the church was then reinforced and a new sense of belonging and a very clear sense of truth was made absolutely clear to all catholics and the ideas of the republi of the protestants were then suppressed this was reinforced by perhaps the most dangerous and pernicious of all of the ideas and that is the index of prohibited books first promulgated in 1559 and then finished in 1564. this terrible list that lasted until 1966 decided from rome who uh could read what what books could never be known or even possessed by catholics and this resulted in a new world it resulted in the world of a baroque a world in which churches have become the waiting rooms of heaven and beautiful in the extreme in which renaissance ideas of space and and uh perspective would be used in order to create a theatrical world in which human perception was insufficient it was a place of faith in which there had to be a a a a sense of of ultimate belief and the buildings that emerged such as the basilicas and peter they&#39;ll illustrate that so clearly the world then of the baroque the world of the counter reformation is a kind of anti-humanism a kind of anti-renaissance it&#39;s a world in which ideas were imposed and where questions could not really be answered they had to in fact be simply accepted as true the great buildings that emerged are wonderful in themselves but to some extent a lot of energy had been lost and with that loss of energy that sense of self-confidence that belief in the dignity of the individual uh man with agency and power to create himself in his community was to a degree compromised and that is my argument of why the renaissance ended i hope you have questions and i would be delighted to answer i&#39;ll look forward to your questions and i hope you&#39;ve enjoyed this quick view um over the founding and the eventual dissolution of the italian renaissance hi a pleasure to be back and i hope you enjoyed the lecture there are some terrific questions and i&#39;d like to begin right away in order to do justice to them there are a couple of questions on the uh the idea that florence and italy at the beginning of the renaissance was a kind of unique place and it it really was there are no comparators um partly because historical comparisons tend to be a parlor game anyway but the reality was that there was a sort of officium um a critical mass of circumstances that had to do with a lot of discretionary wealth that had to do with a particular social structure uh republican government and uh social mobility and access to the levers of political social and economic power and also the idea that moving away from the traditional mobility meant that those in positions of influence and authority needed to have instantly recognizable cast marks and part of this was the humanist education part of it was building grand palaces in order to indicate your status and part of it was the uh the patronage of art and in fact i&#39;ve written elsewhere that the patronage of art in the italian renaissance was really war by other means a way of establishing a a kind of hierarchy of of authority based upon the um the ability to create beauty and create ideas and those ideas operated in almost every sphere so you can&#39;t really compare the renaissance in italy with any other place on earth because it was a unique a unique experience you asked about a little bit more information on how the built environment affects personality well i think you just have to remind yourself of your own experience a beautiful space a perfectly proportioned elegant building with lots of natural light in which you feel comfortable where there&#39;s easy movement and where you identify with the decoration and with the uh structure and where the structure is in proportion to your own human body so that you don&#39;t feel overwhelmed by the space this is what it really means the idea that you can create a sense of harmony and a sense of belonging by constructing spaces that conform to certain basic principles some of those principles were outlined in vitruvius&#39;s books on architecture that chief architect of the emperor augustus whose book made so much influence when it was rediscovered at the beginning of the 15th century and then was built on by other architects such as palladio and de leon batiste alberti so space does have an effect on us including our moods and the way that we relate to uh to other people uh there&#39;s a question about the plague this is actually a really important question because it&#39;s to some extent counterintuitive the florentine banking industry had developed as an uh really a europe-wide phenomenon by the early 1340s it had established branches all across europe and the enormous profits from the wool trade were then invested in lending and in the transfer of uh of money from one place to another on the continent and this um allowed the florentines to get even wealthier unfortunately a number of them made a terrible mistake especially the two largest banking firms out of the bodhidhi and [Music] they had made huge loans to the king of england and uh edward iii was told at some point about 1343 that he couldn&#39;t really ever repay those loans that the uh the amounts were so large that it was impossible for him to really fulfill his obligations so he defaulted and he repudiated the loans and he also uh took the property of italian merchants in england and he exiled them all the result was the collapse not just of the florentine economy but the european economy this was a terrible terrible thing uh it resulted in an enormous uh amount of suffering because those banks had taken on deposit small amounts of discretionary wealth uh that even lesser gills men shoemakers and barrel makers had to put on deposit in order to get what they thought was a reasonable and reliable return so the economy of much of italy but particularly florence fell with the bardin the purusi bank the argument has been made that the plague that was introduced from from the east probably on a january ship from the city of kapha because when kapha was besieged uh the bodies of plague victims were catapulted into the genoese colony on the black sea um sometime around no late 1347 maybe as late as early 1348 that the plague was worse than it otherwise would have been because there wasn&#39;t sufficient wealth for cities towns princes rulers to distribute cheap grain uh in times of famine so you could argue that the entire nutrition level of europeans declined as a consequence of the um uh the financial crisis of 134 1343 but there was also a sort of silver lining in this and this is where economics really do become the dismal science the financial crisis was to some extent undone by the black death because of the patterns of patrician marriage where you married within your own social and economic group it meant that all of your relatives were wealthy if you were wealthy and if you lost most of them in the plague it meant that all of their wealth was funneled to those survivors it&#39;s called the inheritance effect and what the inheritance effect did was recapitalize large numbers of florentine firms as well as other european firms but particularly florentine firms they were able then to recapitalize after the crisis and the result was that the black death was in many ways the salvation of the florentine economy despite the dislocation everybody in some ways benefited those who were manual laborers benefited because they could agitate for higher wages cloth still had to be produced so you needed workers to do it and those workers um were in demand and so they could get higher wages and consequently live somewhat more comfortably so the plague was in fact a a kind of mixed blessing there&#39;s a question about the church and where whether the church was jealous of uh florentine independence and uh and success um the short answer is no they were extraordinarily involved in it florence and florentine banks like the native bank became the papal bankers it was those organizations that moved around the vast amounts of money collected across christendom and then uh transferred to um to rome so the uh the church benefited from and encouraged and was engaged in the same activity you might ask about the um prescriptions against usury well um there have always been prescriptions against usury but no one paid a lot of attention because ecclesiastical institutions especially this the head office of the church in rome needed money like any principality so they got around it by by fictions by lending money in one currency and had payment in another so it&#39;s for example um i would lend you money in canadian dollars but then ask for payment in us dollars and the spread between the two would be a profit on a on paper same amount of money but the reality is in fact that you have made a profit through the lending of uh of money and the church did permit uh lending at um uh at interest under a number of circumstances if there was danger of risk of life if there was some danger of loss of capital altogether because the church realized the world is an economic place and they had to be had to be part of it and intellectually the church was just as involved in in humanism as anywhere else and in fact the papal curia became a kind of um really training ground uh for young humanists because the church needed so many of these people and didn&#39;t require them at a certain level to be clerics um florence was in fact a small city could the renaissance have happened in a larger one well it&#39;s not really a question of size i think it&#39;s a question of of circumstance and larger cities such as milan could uh benefit and actually did adopt a number of renaissance attitudes a bit later and venice larger still uh later yet again but nevertheless it&#39;s not a question of size it&#39;s a question of a degree of social political and economic sophistication because that cosmopolitanism that comes with international trade and travel really is the perspective the lens through which many of these ideas could be uh could be adopted um everything about the renaissance was in fact based on class or uh or status this is uh true and it&#39;s also a kind of um of complaint about the study of renaissance uh italy it was an elite movement it required leisure it required wealth in order to acquire the latin and greek to read the manuscripts to buy the manuscripts for your library to engage in conversation um all of these things presupposed a level of discretionary wealth and um and social status and education this is true but that doesn&#39;t necessarily mean that those who are outside the beneficial areas of these um uh of these structures didn&#39;t have some um uh influence and most more importantly were not influenced by these ideas simple people are not stupid people they walked into santa croce and they saw the body and puruzi chapels painted by chato in the 1320s and they realized something new was happening they saw by the early decades of the 15th century characters that look like them that they could identify with that they saw their city of florence represented as i showed you in the girl and diol slide from santa trinita in other words there was a kind of cultural trickle-down effect i sincerely believe did they actually participate in the level of uh cultivated discourse and the commissioning of art no it required wealth and leisure that they simply did not have but did it affect their quality of life and their ability to understand the world around them yeah i think it i think it really uh really did um the final question that we have time for is a question about the relationship between the renaissance and the scientific revolution there is a fundamental connection between the two and it has to do with human agency the reproduction of what the eye sees and the confidence that what you see is not only valid but will be valid to others by that i mean if you look at a scientific a a at an experiment or you look at a scientific phenomenon or a natural phenomenon you believe that what you see is actually what is happening and you have the confidence to write it down and then draw it or provide some kind of schematic to allow it to be transferred to others and that is the value of them of of naturalism and art and the ability to reproduce what the eye sees so people then could could look at a leaf and realize that the oak tree is the same tree in the venato as in sicily because they can look at the attributes and the reproduction of the leaf and the reproduction of the tree itself gives them a sense that they are engaging in a phenomenon that has some measure of universality and everything in including the voyages of discovery without the invention of linear perspective that is placing objects in relation to one another in space cartography is almost impossible maps became far more sophisticated and attitudes of space as well as attitudes of time and attitudes of perspective and all of the things that we&#39;ve talked about become much more precise and then finally anatomy it&#39;s not an accident that the celias produced um uh they fabrica humanity corporis in 1517 it&#39;s not an accident at all and when it was printed and made universal by the 1540s what you have got in those editions of the salience are correct anatomical drawings of the human body they are not dependent on galen they are not dependent on what the um on hysterical action or on demons being held inside the brain they had actually got to do with how the body works and so yes there is a direct connection from one to the other well our time is up i hope that you&#39;ve enjoyed the uh the lecture and i look forward to speaking to you again and remember there is beauty to be found in everything and the renaissance has given us some of the tools in order to appreciate that beauty thank you very much you

Transcript for:Overview of the Italian Renaissance

Transcript for:
Overview of the Italian Renaissance