What does the Italian Renaissance mean?

You can’t say this blog does not tackle the big questions. No, it’s not the next winner of Celebrity Come Dancing, but the meaning of the Italian Renaissance.

For most people, including myself, the Italian Renaissance means, more than anything else, paintings and sculpture. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa – images as familiar to us as Beatles songs and national anthems. But, of course, devoid of any context, who knows what they represent to the modern eye. Part of it is the way museums hoick paintings out of any background and display them in a neutral gallery, against a blank wall, with nothing above or below.

Like many people, I enjoy looking at paintings in my spare time. I’d like to think it is more than simply train-spotting, just identifying the recognisable pictures in various galleries, but it becomes challenging to explain exactly what I have learned, or imbibed, after a quick tour around a fine art collection. And of all the mysteries, I am more often drawn to the Italian Renaissance pictures than any other (not quite true – to be precise, it’s the period 1500 – 1575, for me, but that’s another story). What is the fascination of the Italian Renaissance?

Well, for a start, the Italian Renaissance is immediately recognisable. There is no doubt in most art galleries which are the Italian Renaissance paintings. They have mastered perspective, which earlier generations did imperfectly, if at all, and while still being largely religious in subject matter, tend to depict their subjects in a more naturalistic way.

But beyond these rather simplistic and trivial details, there is a feeling, which you sense powerfully in Florence, but also in most major western art galleries, that the Italian Renaissance seems to have been something of a whirlwind. Everyone in the Renaissance seems to have been painting like there was no tomorrow. Of course, this might simply reflect the buying practices of the museums: are there more Italian renaissance paintings in Western galleries because more were produced, or is it simply that they are today valued more highly than other schools of art? Whatever the case, the Italian Renaissance is highly esteemed, and often given pride of place in museum collections.

The ubiquity of the Italian Renaissance! As soon as you start looking, you see references to the Italian Renaissance in so many places. Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) depicts mercilessly the communities of British and American wealthy individuals believing they could somehow imbibe the spirit of the Renaissance by living in the Tuscan hills overlooking Florence. The most famous of these individuals was of course Bernard Berenson, who made a highly effective combination of interests and income living at the villa I Tatti and advising wealthy clients which paintings to buy.

Donald Olsen’s 1986 book, The City as a Work of Art, is clearly a reference to Jacob Burckhardt. After a visit to Florence earlier this year, I recalled reading Burckhardt’s astonishing book for the first time, many years ago. The Florence he describes is not, of course, the real Florence of the Renaissance, but his vision was so compelling, and even the words he used have become fixed in the language: “The State as a Work of Art” is the title of his first chapter. In terms of influencing generations of visitors to Italy and students of Italian history, its importance cannot be overstated. Burckhardt’s vision of artists and thinkers probably led to the proliferation of Renaissance artefacts in Washington, New York and elsewhere as wealthy collectors in their enthusiasm collected objects in the belief that by ownership they could acquire something of this magical Renaissance spirit.

Of course, it’s another matter to decide if Burckhardt’s vision was correct, and if it still deserves its place as an introduction to Renaissance Italy. There is a topic! How far is Burckhardt relevant today, if at all, and does he misrepresent the Renaissance? Quite a theme, and quite a challenge. To be precise, the task would be to identify why Burckhardt appealed so much to his twentieth-century readers, and whether the more recent overviews of the same territory appeal and why.

For a start, Burckhardt’s subdivisions of the book make clear what he is omitting:

Part One: The State as a Work of Art

Part Two: The Development of the Individual

Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity

Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man

Part Five: Society and Festivals

Part Six: Morality and Religion

This does not appear include the private enterprise that was clearly flourishing at the time in Florence. But to look at that in detail would require something of a study of Burckhardt, as well as a comparison with more recent titles. For example,

Peter Burke’s single volume on the Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy, was consciously modelled on Burckhardt and attempted to update it for the second half of the twentieth century. Some 25 years after reading these books, I again looked at the Renaissance in the shape of a more recent overview, Art in Renaissance Italy, by Evelyn Welch (2000). It would be fascinating to compare the differences in their perceptions of what the Italian Renaissance meant at various points in modern history: 1860, 1972, 2000. Watch this space!