5.1 An Introduction — A New 'Urban Culture'

From the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, towns were growing across many countries of Europe. Along with the towns, a distinctive urban culture^? developed. Townspeople began to think of themselves as more 'civilised' than rural people. Three Italian towns — Florence, Venice and Rome — became centres of art and learning. Artists and writers were patronised by the rich and the aristocratic. The almost simultaneous invention of printing^? made books and prints available to many people, including those living in distant towns or countries. A sense of history also developed in Europe, and people contrasted their 'modern' world with the 'ancient' one of the Greeks and Romans.

Religion came to be seen as something which each individual should choose for himself. The Church's old earth-centric belief was overturned by scientists who began to understand the solar system. New geographical knowledge overturned the long-held Europe-centric view that the Mediterranean Sea was the centre of the world. There is therefore a vast amount of material on European history from the fourteenth century — documents, printed books, paintings, sculptures, buildings, textiles — much of it carefully preserved in archives, art galleries and museums in Europe and America.

5.2 The Revival of Italian Cities

After the fall of the western Roman Empire, many of the towns that had been political and cultural centres in Italy fell into ruin. There was no unified government, and the Pope in Rome, who was sovereign in his own state, was not a strong political figure. While western Europe was being reshaped by feudal bonds and unified under the Latin Church, eastern Europe under the Byzantine Empire, and Islam was creating a common civilisation further west, Italy was weak and fragmented. Yet it was these very developments that helped the revival of Italian culture.

With the expansion of trade between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic countries, the ports on the Italian coast revived. From the twelfth century, as the Mongols opened up trade with China via the Silk Route^? and as commerce with western European countries also increased, the Italian towns played a central role. They no longer saw themselves as part of a powerful empire but as independent city-states. Two of these — Florence and Venice — were republics; many others were court-cities, ruled by princes.

One of the most vibrant cities was Venice; another was Genoa. They differed from other parts of Europe in two crucial ways: the clergy were not politically dominant, nor were there powerful feudal lords. Instead, rich merchants and bankers actively participated in governing the city, and this helped the idea of citizenship^? to strike root. Even when these towns were ruled by military despots, the pride felt by the townspeople in being citizens did not weaken.

5.3 The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries — A Chronology

5.4 Universities and Humanism

The earliest universities in Europe had been set up in Italian towns. The universities of Padua and Bologna had been centres of legal studies from the eleventh century. Commerce being the chief activity of these cities, there was an increasing demand for lawyers and notaries^? (a notary combined the work of a solicitor and a record-keeper). Without skilled drafting and interpretation of written agreements, large-scale trade was simply not possible. Law was therefore a popular subject of study, but there was now a shift in emphasis. Law began to be studied in the context of earlier Roman culture.

5.4.1 Petrarch and the New Reading of the Classics

Francesco Petrarch (1304–78) represented this change. To Petrarch, antiquity was a distinctive civilisation that could best be understood through the actual words of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He therefore stressed the importance of a close reading of ancient authors. This educational programme implied that there was much to be learnt which religious teaching alone could not give. This was the culture which historians in the nineteenth century would later label humanism^?.

By the early fifteenth century, the term 'humanist' was used for masters who taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. The Latin word humanitas, from which 'humanities' was derived, had been used many centuries earlier by the Roman lawyer and essayist Cicero (106–43 BCE), a contemporary of Julius Caesar, to mean 'culture'. These subjects were not drawn from or connected with religion, and they emphasised skills developed by individuals through discussion and debate.

5.4.2 Florence — From Trade to Intellectual Capital

These revolutionary ideas attracted attention in many universities, particularly in the newly established university in Petrarch's own home-town of Florence. Until the end of the thirteenth century, this city had not made a great mark as a centre of trade or of learning. Things changed dramatically in the fifteenth century. A city is known by its great citizens as much as by its wealth, and Florence had come to be known because of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) — a layman who wrote on religious themes — and Giotto (1267–1337), an artist who painted lifelike portraits, very different from the stiff figures done by earlier artists.

From this period Florence developed into the most exciting intellectual city in Italy and a centre of artistic creativity. The phrase 'Renaissance Man'^? is often used to describe a person with many interests and skills — because many of the individuals who became well known at this time were people of many parts: scholar–diplomat–theologian–artist combined in one.

5.5 The Humanist View of History

Humanists thought that they were restoring 'true civilisation' after centuries of darkness, for they believed that a 'dark age' had set in after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Following them, later scholars unquestioningly assumed that a 'new age' had begun in Europe from the fourteenth century. The term 'Middle Ages' / 'medieval period'^? was used for the millennium (thousand years) after the fall of Rome. In the 'Middle Ages', humanists argued, the Church had had such complete control over men's minds that all the learning of the Greeks and Romans had been blotted out. The humanists used the word 'modern' for the period from the fifteenth century.

Recently, historians have questioned this division. With more research being done and more being found out about Europe in this period, scholars are increasingly reluctant to make sharp divisions between centuries in terms of being 'culturally vibrant' or otherwise. It seems unfair to label any period as the 'Dark Ages'. As we shall see in the closing section of this theme, careful study has shown that elements of 'Renaissance' creativity can in fact be traced back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — and even to the ninth-century Carolingian renewal in France.

5.6 Science and Philosophy — The Arabs' Contribution

Much of the writings of the Greeks and Romans had been familiar to monks and clergymen through the Middle Ages, but they had not made these widely known. In the fourteenth century, many scholars began to read translated works of Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle. For this they were indebted not to their own scholars but to Arab translators who had carefully preserved and translated ancient manuscripts. (In Arabic, Plato was Aflatun, and Aristotle Aristu.)

While some European scholars read Greek in Arabic translation, the Greeks translated works of Arabic and Persian scholars for further transmission to other Europeans. These works covered natural science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry. Ptolemy's Almagest (a work on astronomy, written in Greek before 140 CE and later translated into Arabic) carries the Arabic definite article 'al-', which preserves the Arabic connection.

Humanists reached out to people in many ways. Although the curricula in universities continued to be dominated by law, medicine and theology, humanist subjects slowly began to be introduced in schools — not just in Italy but in other European countries as well. The careful reading of Plato and Aristotle in good Latin or Greek translations transformed European philosophy and natural science alike.

5.7 Civic Humanism and Florence — Coluccio Salutati

Florentine humanism had a distinctive flavour. It was not the humanism of cloistered scholars; it was the humanism of statesmen, lawyers and citizens. Modern historians give it a special name — civic humanism^?. Civic humanists held that a fulfilled human life is impossible without active participation in the affairs of one's city. Education in the humanities was not for private contemplation but for service of the republic.

The pioneer of this Florentine current was Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who served as Chancellor of Florence from 1375 until his death in 1406. As chancellor he wrote the official letters of the Florentine republic in superb Latin — and his diplomatic prose was so persuasive that the Duke of Milan reportedly complained that "Salutati's letters do me more harm than thirty squadrons of cavalry." Salutati used his office to promote humanist learning, attract scholars to Florence and patronise the gathering of Greek and Latin manuscripts. Under his leadership, the Florentine Republic invited the great Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to lecture on Greek at the University of Florence — the moment from which the systematic teaching of Greek in western Europe truly begins.

Salutati's example was followed by his successors. The world of merchants, bankers, lawyers and chancery officials in Florence consciously cast itself in the language of republican Rome. The result was the birth of a new self-image: the citizen-scholar. This same civic spirit fed directly into Pico della Mirandola's later Oration on the Dignity of Man — a free human being using debate to seek truth in the service of his community.

5.8 Florence as a Cultural Centre — The Architects and Artists

By the early fifteenth century Florence was a magnet for talent. The wealth of the Medici^? banking dynasty, the patronage of the wool and silk guilds, and the energetic civic humanism of the chancery created the conditions in which architects, sculptors and painters could flourish — and could leave their names on their work.

5.8.1 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446)

Filippo Brunelleschi (1337–1446 in NCERT dating; modern scholarship gives 1377–1446) began his career as a sculptor and went on to design the spectacular Duomo^? (dome) of Florence Cathedral. The dome — completed without the use of internal scaffolding — was an engineering marvel and the unmistakable symbol of Renaissance Florence. Brunelleschi's experiments with linear perspective^? (treated more fully in Part 2) gave painters a mathematical language for representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface for the first time since antiquity.

5.8.2 Leon Batista Alberti (1404–72)

Leon Batista Alberti (1404–72) was a humanist of a different stamp — a scholar, architect, mathematician and theorist of art. He wrote treatises on painting, sculpture and architecture in which he set out the rules of proportion, perspective and harmony that humanists believed governed both man and the cosmos.

5.8.3 Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) trained in Florence and became the supreme artist of the High Renaissance. Equally skilled as painter, sculptor and architect, he was immortalised by three works in Rome alone: the ceiling he painted for the Pope in the Sistine Chapel; the sculpture 'The Pietà' showing Mary cradling the body of Jesus; and his design of the dome of St Peter's Church. NCERT highlights the fact that, from this period, artists "were known individually, by name, not as members of a group or a guild, as earlier" — a small but profound social change.

5.8.4 The University Networks — Padua, Bologna and Florence

Behind the artists stood the universities. Bologna (founded c. 1088) and Padua were the oldest centres of legal study in Europe; both became laboratories of humanist scholarship. Florence founded its own university in 1349 and provided the institutional home for civic humanism. The dialogue among these three universities — and the movement of scholars between them — fed directly into the careers of Petrarch, Salutati, Pico, Vesalius (whom we shall meet in Part 2) and Galileo.

5.9 A New Concept of Human Beings

One of the features of humanist culture was a slackening of the control of religion over human life. Italians were strongly attracted to material wealth, power and glory, but they were not necessarily irreligious. Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454), a humanist from Venice, wrote a pamphlet defending the acquisition of wealth as a virtue. In On Pleasure, Lorenzo Valla (1406–57) — who believed that the study of history leads man to strive for a life of perfection — criticised the Christian injunction against pleasure. There was also a concern at this time with good manners: how one should speak politely and dress correctly, what skills a person of culture should learn.

Humanism also implied that individuals were capable of shaping their own lives through means other than the mere pursuit of power and money. This ideal was closely tied to the belief that human nature was many-sided, which went against the three separate orders that feudal society had believed in. The ideal Renaissance man was not only a clergyman, only a noble, or only a peasant — he could be all of these in different aspects of his life.

5.10 Putting It Together — A New Civilisation in the Making

By 1500, Italy had quietly produced a new sort of civilisation. Trade had created independent city-states in which merchants and bankers, not bishops or feudal lords, ran public life. Universities at Padua, Bologna and Florence taught the new humanities. Petrarch had restored the close reading of the ancient classics; Coluccio Salutati had married scholarship to civic duty; Niccolò Niccoli had recovered the manuscripts; Pico della Mirandola had given the movement its great manifesto. Brunelleschi's dome rose over Florence, Alberti turned art into a theory, and the young Michelangelo was already astonishing his masters.

In the next part of this theme we shall watch this Italian seed grow — into the realism of Leonardo and Raphael, the printing revolution of Gutenberg, the new aspirations of women such as Isabella d'Este and Cassandra Fedele, the European Reformation launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and the scientific revolution of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The cultural changes that began in fourteenth-century Italian towns were about to remake the entire continent.