Italian Renaissance history

• The term "Renaissance" signifies "rebirth" but requires historical examination to understand its meaning.
• Jules Michelet coined the term, but Jacob Burckhardt conceptually crystallized it.
• Burckhardt's "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" (1860) captured the culture of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy.
• Burckhardt viewed the culture through the lens of Hegel's philosophical influence.
• Renaissance Italy saw a rebirth of the human spirit, contrasting with medieval culture's abstraction and religious worldview.
• Medieval people focused on the heavens leading to scorning the material world whereas, The Renaissance saw a return of classical antiquity's attention to the world.
• Burckhardt described the 'veil' that had obscured medieval vision melting away.
• Natural and social worlds became objects of curiosity, leading to anatomical studies and political science.
• The inner self was scrutinized as Renaissance men became spiritual individuals, recognizing themselves as such.
• Burckhardt saw men in the Middle Ages as part of larger groups but saw the Renaissance as the birth of the self-conscious individual.
• Renaissance men were proud, self-mastered, and abounding in vigor.
• Burckhardt cited Leon Battista Alberti as an example of an intellectual Renaissance man.
• Renaissance figures include artists and scientists. But also despots like Cesare Borgia, possessing an amoral will to power.
• Burckhardt considered the Italian Renaissance the crucible of modernity, disturbing, cynical, and promethean.
• Renaissance princes crafted their state as a 'work of art'.
• For much of the twentieth century, descriptions remained Burckhardtian in flavor, but since the edifice has been demolished brick by brick, today's Renaissance man is less atomistically individualistic, and more corporate.
• The Renaissance saw a revival of interest in classical antiquity instead of the rebirth of human spirit.
• Radically changed artistic and literary styles.
• The period led Italians to ask different questions, imagine differently, and represent the world in new ways.
• Renaissance was triggered by an intense engagement with classical culture by turning to classical texts, artifacts, and ruins.
• Europe had an economic reprise from the eleventh century and steady improvement despite the Black Death.
• Italy experienced commercial expansion and urbanization, especially in the north.
• Florence grew rapidly which led to expanding in the 1170s and again from the 1280s.
• The urbanization rate in Tuscany was 27% in 1300, while the European average was 10%.
• Wealth came from trade, commerce, banking, and financial services.
• Florence became a ruling class of wealthy merchants and bankers, supported by notaries and lawyers.
• Northern Italy was different from Europe, where power was held by a landed feudal aristocracy.
• Cities governed as independent city-republics, modeled on Greece and Rome.
• Republics were governed by consuls and then guild-based governments.
• This society looked to the ancient world, and had translations of ancient works, appealing beyond the clergy.
• The breadth and practicality distinguished the Italian Renaissance from medieval classical renaissances.
• Italy saw interest in how classical learning might be appropriated and deployed in everyday life as scholarly works on the classics accompanied the interest.
• Merchant cities in Italy had high literacy rates.
• Giovanni Villani estimated 8-10,000 elementary school students in Florence in the 1330s, and he also estimated 90,000 people.
• Others studied business or Latin, with census results showing 80% literacy among heads of household.
• The revival of classical culture has the advantage of aligning with the views of intellectuals at the time.
• Fifteenth-century Latin had no equivalent for the term 'Renaissance', yet, the notion existed of returning to norms of classical culture after ignorance.
• This inverted the view within medieval Christian culture.
• The modern narrative of 'classical', 'medieval', and 'Renaissance' eras invented in the fifteenth-century.
• The engagement with the classical world was appropriate as a symptom rather than cause.
• Print technology was introduced.
• The known world dramatically expanded.
• Christendom began a schism, with the coming of the Reformation.
• The classicizing movement of the Italian Renaissance grew to maturity, but Italian Renaissance art, thought, and literature were not derivative.
• The metaphor of 'rebirth' is misleading, in that what also developed was creative dialogue.

The cultural geography of the Italian Renaissance

• There was no single 'Italian' Renaissance, but multiple Renaissance cultures, each one tied to a city.
• The first question scholars ask about a new writer or thinker is their origin.
• Regionalism was important due to Italy's political history.
• Northern and central Italy: independent city-republics, exerting sway over country area whereas, in the South: a united kingdom, with a single royal dynasty.
• Southern dynasties were invariably foreign.
• Southern Italy and Sicily were ruled first by the French dynasty of Anjou and the by Iberian dynasty of Aragon.
• City-republics devolved into signorie or lordships, with shifts in the Italian lords frequently referring to despots.
• The shift has been emphasized as continuities between republican and seigneurial rule.
• Signorie consolidated into quasi-monarchic regimes, acquiring trappings and marrying into families.
• Azzo d'Este, lord of Ferrara, invested 51,000 ducats to buy a marriage alliance in 1305.
• Ercole II d'Este paid 180,000 ducats in 1539 to be reconfirmed as duke.
• Over two centuries Italy began as a genuine mosaic and simplified politically, such as the extension power over surrounding territory.
• By the fifteenth century, seven principal regional powers existed: duchies of Savoy and Milan, republics of Genoa and Venice.
• Florence was under the informal sway of the Medici family.
• Papal States extended northwards on the Adriatic coast up to the Romagna.
• The vast kingdom of Naples was under Aragonese.
• Northern Italian cities were culturally distinctive.
• States were subjugated, yet retained their civic identity.
• Culture was a form of compensation for loss of independence.
• By the mid-sixteenth century, northern Italy had publishing houses, academies that organized plays, fostered literature, conducted all cultural activity with eye on neighboring towns, and spent lavishly on architecture.
• Italians evoke 'bell-towerism,' a fierce attachment to the town of one's birth which evoked the emulative spirit.
• Cultural novelties were generated in the Italian Renaissance due to emulation.
• Richard Goldthwaite argued that artistic production in Florence resulted from patronage and competition.
• Workshops responded by differentiating their products in formal and stylistic terms.
• Italy's disunity meant not being possessed of a sole capital city but being a land of competing capitals.
• Florence, Rome, and Naples were not merely the great powers.

When was the Renaissance?

• The beginning of the Renaissance is reasonably well established, but answers may differ.
• Literary history: the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century and the later fourteenth century for something that may comfortably be called movement,
• The early fifteenth century for the move of the concerted study of the classics and its effect towards the mainstream.
• Art history has similar trajectory, though less linear, with classical art and architecture most apparent early fifteenth century.

Where did this take place?

• Geoffrey Chaucer, born in 1343, is seen as medieval, as in his fifteenth-century successor John Lydgate. On the other hand, Francesco Petrarca (c. 1304) and Giovanni Boccaccio (b. 1313) already meet claims to be Renaissance as a foreteller.
• When the Renaissance in ended in Italy is a more difficult and ideologically charged question.
• Traditional periodization: posits an early and High Renaissance.
• With the artistic production culminating in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling in the early sixteenth century, and the works of Leonardo and Raphael.
• The traditional periodization posits an exact end date to the Renaissance, such as. the Sack of Rome in 1527.
• Literary and intellectual historians have posited the mid-sixteenth century.
• The Council of Trent (1545-63) was the long meeting of Catholic clerics at which the imperatives of Counter-Reformation defined.
• Council's remit: was principally doctrine and church discipline, and made attempts to bring secular culture under some moral control.
• Introduction of print censorship resulting in which anti-clerical views were not welcome.
• TheCounter-Reformation has been regarded in Italy as marking a new age of cultural retrogression.
• Soldered into place in Italy after Unification when new, national histories of Italian literature were written.
• The Counter-Reformation represented for the modern Italian tradition of literary history a brutal end-point for the explosion of creative energies.
• Freedom questing intellectuals were executed or silenced.
• Sensuous, world-embracing works replaced by religious works.
• Back into outer darkness of belated Middle Ages that was cultural Italy cast culturally at the Counter-Reformation.
• Scholars accept narrative, despite character, thought and literature under-investigated.
• Renaissance religious literature is lost content.
• Model of periodization even as the black legend has been dispelled within the discipline of religious history.

Whose was the Renaissance?

• Forged in the nineteenth century, modern notion of 'man' to designate humanity was problematic, generally meaning elite, literate etc.
• Historians debunk tendency to class, considerations of race, class, and gender.
• Joan Kelly-Gadol asked 'Did women have a Renaissance?' for racial or religious outsiders.
• A less mystical conception has changed the nature of questions of transformation of human spirit.
• Questioning self-defining individuals, whether a given group participated in the cultural transformation.
• A cut-off point of 1526, 1560, and 1600 give different answers, with high art and literare.
• The considerations of language and communications media are vital in understanding the diffusion of Renaissance.
• texts tended to circulate largely in manuscript or in technology.
• The extent of dissemination caused this, with printers commercial consideration from to exploit the ample market of readers from outside Latin
• Vernacular readersclassical learning became considerably more accessible. At the with commentaries identifying their allusions,
• A Venetian in 1550 would pass Jacopo Sansovino.
• A Florentine of 1600 walking in Piazza could muse on edificying tales by Benvenuto Cellini
• The Florentine also completed in 1582.
• Renaissance cities streets and piazzas, to celebrate events, a vehicle for allegorical messages.
• Ferinando and Christine, seven triumphal arches were constructed, paintings served as the bible .
• The Bologna in 1550 and verse autobiography of poet Giulio was the son of blacksmith.
• He used the world’s greatest to launch a career.
• Found local dignitaries, piazza, dialoging.