Reading about Renaissance Florence

 

Cover of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, English translation

It seems a straightforward question. You visit Florence, you would like to know why it is regarded as so special. There are plenty of books about the Renaissance, and many Renaissance cities, but Florence is regarded as the epicentre of the Renaissance – which may be because Florence had Vasari writing the story of art from a Florentine perspective. Whatever the case, Florence is worth reading more about.

My choice of books was not exceptional. I started with Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published 1860 but still being read. Why? Because Burckhardt gives the reader an image of the Renaissance as something new, something radical, something fundamentally different from what came before. Reading Burckhardt, there is an excitement, something lacking in so many academic works. Even the chapter titles suggest this passion: “The State as a work of art”, “The discovery of the world and of man”. Of course, today we challenge Burckhardt’s thesis – he overstates his case, he deliberately understates what happened in the Middle Ages. But he tells a great story.  

It is a noticeable contrast to turn to another classic title, written almost a hundred years later. Gene Brucker’s Renaissance Florence (1969)  indicates how much more mature the subject has become, the work of an academic who has clearly spent a considerable time in the archives. You feel that Brucker sets out to provide evidence for every argument.

Reading Brucker makes me think about the nature of historical writing. What can a historian tell us? Brucker’s method is one of the accepted ways of writing history. He takes a theme, for example, religion, politics, and then draws on many years of studying Florentine archives and primary sources to provide examples for and against a point of view. This view, implied or stated, is usually Burckhardt’s, which, for religion, is that there was a new emphasis on secularism. Here is Brucker’s opening of his chapter on the Church:

Studies of Florentine religion tend to fall into two categories. One interpretation, particularly favored by clerical authors, emphasize the continuity of religious institutions and traditions … At the other extreme are those historians like Jakob Burckhardt, who minimize the importance of Christianity in Renaissance Italy. For Burckhardt, the most significant feature of Italian religious history in the Renaissance was the secularization of institutions and beliefs. [Brucker, ch 5]

 Brucker examines the records, and gives us fascinating extracts. One monk records everything in the monastery archive, even the expenditure on eggs in his monastery (S. Trinita). But there is also a record of the same convent providing large quantities of beef, eggs, salad and fruit for a local festival in the parish. Another monk states it’s not worth bothering with keeping a record. Elsewhere, Brucker notes a report of men climbing over nunnery walls to get to the women inside. They fail to find the woman they were seeking, and then ran away to escape the fine imposed on them.

What’s the problem with such meticulous reporting? After all, these are all from good primary sources. Using this technique as a historical  methodology raises, I think, two problems. First, it is difficult for the reader to get an overall interpretation. Was religion taken seriously in Renaissance Florence or was it not? Did it decrease in importance or not? Brucker provides examples for and against, so the answer so often is “sometimes”. That doesn’t give us a very clear picture of the Renaissance. It may be more accurate than Burckhardt, but it is less clear.

Secondly, although this is less of a limitation, Brucker is restricted to whatever records exist. He has no control over the archives. Not surprisingly, the biggest archives appear to be official records, so, for the example above, the record is most likely the record of a fine imposed, with little information about the story behind it. We don’t know how typical or frequent such episodes were.

Neither of these problems is insuperable, but other historians, such as Eamonn Duffy, in my opinion solve them much better. Duffy, in The Voices of Morebath, uses official records, but mainly just one, the parish archive, and manages to create a vivid and captivating account of a whole generation in rural 16th-century England. Of course, Duffy’s writing is polemical – he is a Catholic, and arguing that much of England was far less radically Protestant than contemporary nationwide events might appear – but we can live with that. Iin fact, we prefer it from a historian. The best historians argue a case; they don’t try to be neutral, because neutral leaves us none the wiser. We want a kind of periodization, if only so that we can later react against it. We want to hear someone arguing for the celebration of the independent city-state, and the art it produced, even if we know that it all ends with Medici dominance, and (if the decoration of the Pitti Palace is anything to go by) two hundred years of poor art.