The Beauty and the Terror, The Italian Renaissance

 

When I came to write The Beauty and the Terror, my alternative history of the Italian Renaissance, one of the questions I wanted to explore was: why is it that the big names of Renaissance art are all men? Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael... women scarcely get a look in.

 In his The Lives of the Artists, which established the canon of Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari devoted only one chapter to a female artist. That was the Bolognese sculptor Properzia de' Rossi, whose chapter also had to accommodate his comments on Plautilla Nelli and Sofonisba Anguissola as well as a brief mention of the much lesser-known Madonna Lucrezia.

 The question of how far women had a Renaissance (in the cultural sense) has long prompted debate. There were clearly individual exceptions, like the patron Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, who purchased and commissioned numerous works from writers and artists. Yet as the evidence is reconsidered, it's become apparent that women were active not only in the visual arts but also in the world of literature.

 One barrier to the participation of women in the art world was access to training. That accounts for the large proportion of them who came from artistic families, among them the Bolognese portraitist Lavinia Fontana and, in the seventeenth century, Elisabetta Sirani.

 Sofonisba Anguissola was an exception to that rule. The daughter of a nobleman from Cremona, near Milan, she was educated from the age of about 14 in the house of a local painter, Bernardino Campi. The portrait of her sister as a nun, painted in 1551 when the artist was just 16, shows her early promise.

 She benefited from the patronage of the elderly Michelangelo who showed her 'honourable and thoughtful affection', praising her work. Her images of domestic warmth and informality were novel, and she went on to serve as a lady-in-waiting at the Spanish court, where she continued to work as a portraitist.

 Numerous women were active in the literary world of sixteenth-century Italy, even in the face of sexism and oppression. Vittoria Colonna, member of a prominent noble family, was a poet who broke new stylistic ground, writing eloquently of the traumas of war. Yet even while praising her achievement in 'equalling the most widely esteemed and wisest men', her contemporary Paolo Giovio felt the need to add a detailed paragraph on her 'most delicate cleavage' and breasts 'swelling with heavenly nectar'.

 

That was the polite version. An anonymous satirist claimed that after her husband's death in the Italian Wars had turned to religion only because she couldn't find a lover (or, as the writer put it, 'a pestle to grind her mortar'). As if that wasn't bad enough, her interest in religious reform attracted the notice of the Inquisition (these were the early years of the Reformation), and she was under investigation for heresy when she died in 1547.

 The ferment of religious change in the mid-sixteenth century combined with long-running wars to shake up gender roles as many men went off to war, leaving women to manage at home.

 The climate favoured experimentation. Chiara Matraini saw family members imprisoned and executed after a rebellion in 1533; widowed in her 20s, she embarked on a scandalous affair with a married poet and wrote extensively on that most masculine of topics: war, making the case for the superiority of learning over the military arts.

 Matraini was only one of the women writers of these years whose personal relationships fell outside the conventions of marriage. Tullia d'Aragona, bastard daughter of a cardinal, was mistress to the richest man in Florence, Filippo Strozzi, and author of Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, a radical defence of women's sexual and spiritual desires. She was exempted from a ban on prostitutes wearing luxury clothing thanks to her 'rare knowledge of poetry and philosophy'.

 Another of Strozzi's mistresses, however, gave an insight into the reality of such relationships when she complained that Strozzi expected her to sleep with his friends and had made her an 'object of contempt'. Veronica Franco, who also combined the careers of courtesan and writer, warned that the life of a courtesan 'always results in misery'.

 Yet for all the trauma of war, widowhood and exploitation faced by these authors and poets, they had their triumphs too. In 1556 the distinguished writer Cassandra Fedele, then aged 91, was invited to give a public oration to welcome the queen of Poland to Venice, praising the Queen's 'admirable mind amid the winds of war'.

 The year 1559 saw the publication of Europe's first collection of women's poetry, featuring 53 authors. Across the arts, there was much more to the later Renaissance than simply 'Great Men'.

 The beauty and the terror: an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. By Catherine Fletcher.

Art UK , March 18, 2020.

The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020) is a new history of a familiar era. Focusing on the years 1492-1571, it covers topics including developments in art and literature, the early years of European colonialism, the Italian Wars of 1494-1559, and the impact of the Reformation and religious change. It suggests that the Italian Renaissance was far stranger and darker than many of us realise, and that sex and sexuality played an important role in this unsavoury side of the sixteenth century.

 NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about?

 Fletcher: I’m trying to do two things with the book. One is to give people who come across the work of the ‘famous names’ of the later Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael or Machiavelli—some context. The other is to bring together a series of narratives that are often treated separately: the Reformations, the rise of European empires, later Renaissance culture and the Italian Wars of 1494-1559.

 NOTCHES: How do we know about sex and sexuality in Renaissance Italy? Are there any problems with/ limits to the surviving sources?

 Fletcher: We have a good range of sources, from law and trial records to letters, literary sources (including plenty of satire), and visual culture. These are often mediated via government officials or elite writers: we don’t hear so much from lower-ranking people or from women.

 NOTCHES: Many people will associate the Italian Renaissance with salacious stories of high-class courtesans and papal ‘nephews’- but is that an accurate representation of how things really were?

 Fletcher: There’s definitely a ‘courtesan culture’ in sixteenth-century Italy and examples of women like Tullia d’Aragona who combined that role with a career as a writer. You have the tale of Pope Julius III (r. 1550-1555) making his lover a cardinal, and plenty of noblemen had mistresses and illegitimate children. But that’s only part of the bigger picture: it’s a bit like focusing only on the expensive end of escorting in a study of the sex industry today. There was also a great deal of official harassment: for example, prostitutes were often required to wear a symbol of their status, such as a yellow scarf.

 NOTCHES: We also associate this period with nude paintings. Was there a lot of sex/ nudity in Renaissance literature and art, and if so did this reflect changing attitudes/ behaviours?

 Fletcher: There’s certainly nudity in Renaissance art and literature, though not always in sexual contexts: it’s a notable element of religious painting too. In her book on the Italian Renaissance Nude Jill Burke has explored the rise of the female nude in the context of changing attitudes towards beauty. As printing became more widespread with it came printed pornography, including the notorious I Modi, published and banned in the 1520s, which depicted a series of sixteen sexual positions without a classical gloss to give them respectability. Series showing the Loves of the Gods were more acceptable, and the decoration of the Palazzo Te in Mantua, the summer palace of the city’s rulers, likewise drawing on ancient myth, is explicitly sexual.

 NOTCHES: Some of the stories in your book suggest that Renaissance sexual attitudes benefitted men (especially powerful men) far more than women. Would it be fair to say that the Renaissance (or at least this aspect of it) was more fun for men than woman?

 Fletcher: In short, yes. Women’s honour was focused very much around their chastity and to ignore that risked severe social censure. Men had a great deal more sexual freedom. On the other hand we do hear of women who broke the rules, like the writer Chiara Matraini, who as a widow had a very public affair with a married poet.

 NOTCHES: You mention that sex between men was extremely common in parts of Italy during this period. Why was this, and was everyone happy about it?

 Fletcher: The attitudes towards sex between men were contradictory. From a Christian point of view sodomy (a term that incorporated all sorts of non-procreative sex) was a sin. On the other hand certain types of sexual relationship between men could be socially acceptable, especially where these were between older/higher status active partners and younger/lower status passive ones. Gary Ferguson’s recent book on Same Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome deals with the case of a group of migrant men who had sex with men, and raises important questions about the greater risk of persecution facing marginalised communities.

 NOTCHES: How much impact did syphilis have on Renaissance Italy?

 Fletcher: The ‘pox’, often identified as syphilis, was first noted in Italy shortly after the French invasion of 1494, hence the name ‘French disease’. In its initial phase it seems to have been particularly pernicious and was exacerbated by poor harvests, a severe winter and the presence of troops (which put further pressure on supplies); it was often seen as God’s punishment for ill-living. Numerous well-known figures fell ill, including the duke of Ferrara and the future pope Julius II. Good personal care, which wasn’t available to all, helped the wealthy survive: the marquis of Mantua lived for twenty-three years after his initial symptoms.

 NOTCHES: Did you find anything that particularly surprised you? And/or did you come across anything particularly interesting which you had to leave out of the book?

 Fletcher: As I went through the biographies of the leading military commanders, I was struck by just how many of them were also accused of domestic violence or rape. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise given that we know that rape was widespread in the Italian Wars, but it’s a part of the story that hasn’t featured in the literature. I would have liked to dig down more but decided that would have to wait for an article.

NOTCHES: How (if at all) are Renaissance ideas about, and experiences of, sex relevant today?

 Fletcher: Those issues around interpersonal violence and military violence, and rape as a weapon of war, are still very present in conflicts today. Some of the arguments about clerical celibacy that came to the fore with the Reformation are still going on in the Catholic Church. And I’m interested in the parallel between the fairly routine acceptance of same-sex relationships in some Renaissance circles and how young people are thinking about sex now.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

Fletcher: Immediately after my first degree (which wasn’t in History) I was elected convenor of what was then the National Union of Students Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campaign. I learnt a lot informally about the history of sexuality in that role, and although it’s never been a primary focus of my academic research I do keep coming back to it in different contexts.

 NOTCHES: What are you working on now that this book is published?

Fletcher: At the risk of becoming a “Sex and Violence” cliché, I’m close to finishing a couple of articles that build on the book’s discussion of gun culture, and have more work still to come on aspects of the Italian Wars.

 The Beauty and the Terror. Notches, March 6 , 2020. 

History Hack discusses The Beauty and the Terror with author Catherine Fletcher.  HistoryHack, April 10, 2020

The historian Catherine Fletcher has a well-deserved reputation as a specialist in 16th-century skulduggery and intrigue. In Our Man in Rome (2012) her subject was Gregorio Casali, a wily Italian fixer who served as Henry VIII’s ambassador at the papal court during the crisis of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In The Black Prince of Florence (2017) she recounted the brief and lurid career of Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of a Medici duke and a Moorish maidservant, who jockeyed to power as the first hereditary ruler of Florence, married a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was murdered in the course of an adulterous liaison at the age of 26.

 These are lively, well-researched books built round an interestingly dodgy central character. Her latest offering, The Beauty and the Terror, has a much larger canvas, covering a whole sweep of 16th-century Italian political and cultural history. She begins in the 1490s – an exciting but deeply turbulent decade: the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the French invasion of Lombardy, Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper in Milan, the election of the libertine Borgia pope, Alexander VI.

 The decades that followed were ones of almost continuous warfare. External military threats – French, Spanish, Ottoman – were counterpointed by endless internal squabbles among the principalities and city-states of the peninsula. Fletcher tracks through a complex and dismal story of alliances, betrayals, sacks, sieges, famines, assassinations and gruesomely ingenious tortures.

 The conquest of the Romagna by the pope’s warlord son, Cesare Borgia, was swift and vicious. It was closely observed by a Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, who made it a case study in his book The Prince, written about 1512 and published posthumously 20 years later. This laconic breviary of amoral realpolitik – memorably described by Bertrand Russell as a “handbook for gangsters” – is the keynote text of these wartorn years. The impact of the Lutheran Reformation and the retrenchment of the Counter-Reformation add further dimensions of religious ideology to the conflicts.

Fletcher navigates this difficult terrain with great skill. She creates atmosphere and drama without any surrendering of clarity. Those with only a vague knowledge of the League of Cambrai or the Council of Trent will find them crisply explained and contextualised. She also has some trenchant chapters on the sexual politics of the era – as evidenced in the enforced seclusion of women in convents, and the glorification of rape in the pornographic poetry of Pietro Aretino and his followers.

 This is a powerful book, but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory. The argument is signalled by Fletcher’s ambitious subtitle, which promises us an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. The orthodoxy she challenges is the view of the Renaissance as an unbroken vista of exquisite art and aspirational inventiveness: a new dawn that flooded the superstitious murk of medievalism with the bright light of reason. As she points out, this somewhat utopian view was essentially a 19th-century invention, formulated in works such as Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and endorsed by eloquent Victorian aesthetes such as Walter Pater. For the majority of those who actually lived and worked in this supposed golden age, the reality was grim: they knew it as a time of terror more than beauty. In his Art of War (1521) Machiavelli argued that the cultivation of courtly art was a weakness. Looking back to the first French invasion of 1494, he criticised the complacency – the “splendour and deceit” – of the Italian princes. “They were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever assaulted them,” he wrote, and from this arose “great terrors, sudden flights and miraculous losses”.

 Burckhardt’s idealistic view of the Renaissance has long since been challenged – the Marxist historian Arnold Hauser dismissed it is an anachronistic attempt to “provide a genealogy” for 19th-century liberalism – but in Fletcher’s view it remains entrenched as a convenient cliche, and a whole lorryload of guidebooks to Italy could be cited to confirm she is right.

 So the argument of her “alternative history” is that this celebratory rhetoric “masks the brutal realities” of war, corruption, oppression and misogyny that are the facts of life in Renaissance Italy. So far, so good. But is it also true, as she asserts, that the great artistic achievements of the period are in themselves complicit in these brutalities and injustices? Her key example, heavily flagged up in the publisher’s promotion, concerns that most iconic of Renaissance artworks, The Mona Lisa. Here is the pitch: the woman portrayed in the painting, Lisa Gherardini, “was married to a slave trader”.

 This “backstory”, she believes, puts a new and very negative perspective “on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile”. Given the apparent gravity of this charge against Lisa’s husband, the silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, it is as well to state the facts behind it. Fletcher’s source is a recent discovery published in Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti’s Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting (2017). It shows that the archives of Florence cathedral record 11 baptisms sponsored by Francesco between 1487 and 1500. It is indeed likely that these people – 10 females and one 12-year-old boy – were slaves, being brought to the baptistry to be converted to Christianity: three of the women are described as “Moors” and another has an African-sounding name, Cumba. It is certainly significant that well-to-do households in Renaissance Italy had trafficked Africans among their servants; and it’s regrettable that Leonardo did not vet the moral purity of his clients more carefully. But to call Francesco a “slave trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite than a genuine argument.

In a similar vein she discusses the possibility that the Venetian courtesan Angela del Moro, AKA “La Zaffetta”, was the model for the languidly reclining nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino of c1534. She had earlier been the victim of a gang-rape, an episode lubriciously described in a poem by Lorenzo Venier, “Il Trentuno della Zaffetta” (1531). Thus, the argument might run: Titian’s Venus is implicated in the endemic sexual violence of the era, though as the identification of La Zaffetta as the model is highly speculative, this is once again a kind of special pleading. These notes of 21st-century disapproval – however justified – run counter to the clarity of historical vision that is otherwise a feature of this fine book.

 The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher review – the dark side of the Italian Renaissance

By Charles Nicholl. The Guardian,  March 12, 2020.

We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

 As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.

 The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?

 Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.

 Fletcher is particularly good, for example, on the initially surprising fact that women were more likely to wield political influence in princely states than in republics (think of the formidable figures of Lucrezia Borgia or Isabella d’Este). Elections in republics reflected classical prototypes that gave no public role to women. Elective rule typically produced a whole cohort of male leaders, in contrast to the princely state where a ruler’s spouse was expected to pick up the reins when her husband was away at war. Princely and aristocratic wives who ran their husband’s domain in their absence or after their death constitute a formidable cohort of influential rulers.

 More broadly, the opportunities offered by war are a major theme in Fletcher’s narrative: we learn a great deal about the developments in military technology that changed the face of conflict in Italy over the period covered by this book. Fletcher traces very skilfully the way in which the creation of more sophisticated firearms for soldiers encouraged greater pay differentials, which placed some strain on small Italian states heavily dependent on mercenary troops for their perennial conflicts over territorial advantage and dynastic security.

 This, in its turn, increased the attractions for Italian states of searching for powerful foreign allies who could afford standing armies of their own and were only too eager to go in search of power and profit in Italy. One of the most important shifts in Italian politics between the relatively peaceful situation in the mid-15th century and the blood-soaked chaos of the first half of the 16th, is the scale of foreign intervention. This began with the French attempt to secure the throne of Naples in the mid 1490s, when the ruler of Milan and the Pope encouraged the French king (Charles VIII) to supplant a Neapolitan monarch to whom they were hostile. It was a fateful start to decades of opportunistic foreign involvement in local Italian conflicts.

 Italy’s political history in the Middle Ages had seen a fair amount of this already, especially in the conflict between pro-papal states or groups and the supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, but the emergence of strong local dynasties in many Italian cities had stabilised things somewhat in the 1400s. By 1500, however, the stage was set for the peninsula to become a battlefield for European powers (especially France and Spain) to conduct their struggles, at an enormous cost to lives and resources.

 This cost was intensified by new technology; it is poignant to read about contemporary campaigns (and even legislation in some Italian states) to limit the production and use of new varieties of firearms, and laments at their evil effects in warfare. The Spanish were noted for their reliance on firepower, and although it is possible to exaggerate the role of firearms in the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, some Italians – and others like the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne – were not backward in characterising the Spanish campaigns there as barbaric, precisely in their use of overwhelming firepower against underequipped opponents.

 Against such a background, it is not surprising to learn that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in demand for their services as military engineers no less than as artists. Both were involved in large-scale projects, and da Vinci famously left designs for assorted weaponry, including what is often described as a machine gun. It was certainly the case that artists were expected to have a good basic grasp of engineering, and that the boundaries between art, architecture and engineering were very fluid.

 The stereotype of the “renaissance man” is accurate to the extent that the culture of the age characteristically did not favour specialisation, but the record of actual achievement is patchy. Some of da Vinci’s military designs were more or less feasible, others were not; the elegance and flair of his sketches should not mislead us into thinking that all these projects represented some visionary anticipation of modern machinery, and it is better to see them as brilliant thought experiments in solving engineering problems rather than exact designs.

 

****

 All this underlines the immense power of the Renaissance myth: from the 16th century onwards, the image of the tormented multifaceted genius, soaring ahead of the conventions of the age, has left us with a rather lopsided view of figures such as da Vinci. Giorgio Vasari’s famous Lives of the Artists (which first appeared in 1550) helped to fix the image of the inspired creative spirit – and to create a story in which Italy (and especially Florence) is the epicentre of all that is noble and truly humane in the rebirth of civilisation after centuries of barbarity. It was Vasari’s narrative that was embraced so eagerly by 19th-century European cultural historians.

 It continues to mould our understanding not only of the history of the period but our sense of what an artist and a genius really should be, and it would have been good to have in this book a slightly fuller account of how Vasari shaped the cultural “soft power” of the Italian Renaissance across the centuries – as described by Fletcher in an insightful final chapter. The Renaissance model of genius becomes a kind of witness to the sublime nature of Western civilisation as a whole; 16th-century Italy joins Periclean Athens or Marcus Aurelius’s Rome as a paradigm of timeless and universal human excellence.

 The force of Fletcher’s narrative is not so much in offering a radical new evaluation of Italian Renaissance civilisation as in insisting that we see it as a cluster of cultural strategies and techniques within an exceptionally turbulent political milieu. This does not mean for a moment that we relegate da Vinci or Michelangelo to some dramatically inferior position, but it might prompt us to greater caution about the way in which the Renaissance myth has served a rather dubious geopolitical agenda.

 Fletcher spells out at many points the role of Renaissance Italy in the great drama and tragedy of the age: the beginnings of the subjugation and enslavement of indigenous peoples on both sides of the Atlantic – through finance, seafaring expertise and, not least, by way of the legitimation given by the Papacy to various aspects of the colonial enterprise. As her final paragraph puts it, we need to be aware of where the great works of the period come from, and how their initial reception was “curated” by figures like Vasari.

 Recognising artistic excellence is not an excuse for failing to see the political and economic factors that make it practically possible – and this is bound to be shot through with a degree of moral shadow, where those factors include slavery and exploitation. A great achievement is not necessarily a timeless ideal; we can admire and even be astonished by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without using it or its designer as a universal measure of human creativity.

 If we demythologise the Renaissance a little, we may learn to do more justice to what preceded it. Professor Fletcher has a brief discussion of scientific advances in the mid 16th century, especially in anatomy, navigational skills and botany – the latter two spurred on by the fresh stimulus of colonial travel and discovery. But the fact that this treatment is relatively brief and relates to a period rather later than the “high Renaissance” should give us pause if we are inclined to think of this as an epoch of spectacular scientific progress.

 Many scholars have pointed out that the 15th and early 16th centuries are a rather stagnant period in many areas of natural science compared with some parts of the Middle Ages, when astronomy, mechanics and logic made substantial advances. The great 16th-century exception, Copernicus’s treatise of 1543 on the circulation of planets around the sun, was not a dramatic and total rejection of earlier astronomical method based on new scientific evidence, but a refinement designed to clear up the mathematics of charting the heavenly bodies. It was received with interest and some enthusiasm at the time, but was clearly not seen as a radical departure from the principles of Aristotle. Only with slightly later figures like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) did actual observation of the heavens play a decisive part in the argument.

 The uncomfortable truth is that the age of the Renaissance contributed very little to innovation in science. This was largely because the revival of classical learning and languages concentrated attention on what was called humanitas – literary and rhetorical accomplishment (hence our designation of some academic subjects as “humanities”) – rather than on empirical observation or technical skill in logic and mathematics.

 Later medieval philosophy had become achingly technical, and the recovery of classical literature offered a welcome relief. The writings of the medievals were mocked for their stylistic awfulness; and the exhilaration and enthusiasm for the Platonic tradition that arose in the later 15th century was, as much as anything, an enthusiasm for a philosophy that more obviously promised moral and spiritual insight, rather than the virtuoso analysis of concepts. So might a 20th-century student have felt on reading Jean-Paul Sartre after an unbroken diet of logical positivism in undergraduate philosophy.

 ****

 For good and ill, the Renaissance as an intellectual phenomenon was not a revolt in the name of “reason” or “liberty” or any such Enlightenment motive. It was an excited recovery of the ideals of formal elegance and proportion in writing and building. It was also the flowering of a sort of New Age fascination with ancient and hidden wisdom. The great strength of Professor Fletcher’s book is that it helps us keep the Renaissance in proportion, rather than seeing it as either the decisive foundation for Western modernity (it was in many ways backward-looking, its energy linked to models of revival and recovery rather than advance), or a melodrama of Olympian geniuses and (literally) Machiavellian villains.

 To learn that Lucrezia Borgia owned a mozzarella factory is somehow a useful corrective to the melodrama; to know that some of da Vinci’s supposed inventions were Heath Robinson fantasies balances the myth of universal genius.

 Reading this engaging book helps us to appreciate the undoubted exuberance of the period without signing up to a distinctly shopworn narrative of some triumphant awakening from dogmatic slumbers, destined to change the face of global humanity – whether global humanity liked it or not.

Breaking the Renaissance myth :  Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so too did slavery and warfare. By Rowan Williams. New Statesman, May 27,   2020

 

As Catherine Fletcher notes at the outset of her new book, The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, millions of tourists flock to Florence every year to gaze at the architecture and art of the Renaissance jewel box. They photograph the Duomo topped by Brunelleschi’s dome, wait in long lines to see Michelangelo’s David, fight their way across the Ponte Vecchio, and savor gelato. Such is the “beauty” of the title. Yet there is also “terror” shadowing these beauties, which Fletcher aims to bring to light in order to provide a richer account of the Italian Renaissance. In her introductory chapter, she highlights three examples: the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader; one possible model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a famous Venetian courtesan, was gang-raped; and the Florentine Republic symbolized by Michelangelo’s David came to an end in 1530 with the sack of the city and ensuing slaughter of thousands. The beauty and the terror.

 In addition to informing admirers of the artistic and other familiar achievements of the Italian Renaissance of the often less-than-beautiful political and social context in which they were produced, Fletcher wants to contextualize the history of Italy during the period within larger trends across Europe and indeed the world, as indicated in her book’s subtitle. The Italian Renaissance has frequently been characterized — or caricatured — as the birthplace of modern Western civilization, or rather the rebirth (renaissance) of this civilization with the rediscovery of classical learning and art. In this interpretation, Italy is the source of the literary, artistic, and scientific movements that then spread throughout Europe and ultimately across “the West.” While she recounts the achievements of the Italian Renaissance and their influence, Fletcher puts as much emphasis on how the larger European and international context shaped the political, social, religious, economic, artistic, and intellectual currents in Italy during the period.

 Fletcher’s introduction — titled simply “1492” — provides a good illustration of her goal. That year witnessed three events that would have greater ramifications than those who lived through them could have appreciated. First, there was the death of Lorenzo “The Magnificent,” the head of the Medici family that effectively ruled Florence for the previous 60 years and an important patron of learning and art. In retrospect, Lorenzo’s death destabilized not only Florentine politics, for just two years later his heir would flee the city and the republic would be restored, but also the delicate balance of power in the Italian peninsula, opening the door for foreign armies to invade Italy and make it the battleground of Europe for the next 40 years.

 The second event of 1492 was the final reconquest of Spain with the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, followed in short order by the flight of the Jews. Apart from the dislocations caused by the event itself, the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella was representative of the formation of what would become the modern state in Spain, France, and elsewhere, a development that made Italy vulnerable to invasion and plunder, with its own unification having to wait nearly four more centuries. The third event was the discovery of the New World in October of that year, by a Genoese captain sponsored by their most Catholic majesties of Spain, to be followed a few years later by, among others, a Florentine merchant and navigator who lent his name to these newly discovered lands: Amerigo Vespucci. Soldiers, priests, and other adventurers followed, seeking the gold that soon flooded Europe, leaving behind smallpox while bringing back such unknown items as tomatoes and corn, without which Italian cuisine would be unrecognizable today.

 In short, as Fletcher shows in this chapter, the direction of influence between Italy and Europe (and the world) ran in both directions. Fletcher persuasively illustrates that understanding the Italian Renaissance requires understanding the larger context of the early modern world, and vice versa.

Beginning in 1492, with some glances backward to consequential incidents such as the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Fletcher ends her account with the defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Her reasons for choosing this end date are unclear. But it has the effect of extending the usual treatment of the “High Renaissance” beyond the customary terminus point of the end of the Italian Wars with the sack of Rome in 1527 or the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530. In terms of art, this makes some sense, lengthening the account through the first part of the “Late Renaissance” period. After all, Michelangelo would live for another 30 years after the fall of Florence (whose fortifications he oversaw), spending most of the rest of his life in Rome executing such projects as painting The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and overseeing the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. The dating choice makes less obvious sense otherwise. As Fletcher herself notes, the later period saw a decline in Italy’s fortunes as, paradoxically, the relative peace that succeeded the Italian Wars also effectively sidelined the peninsula politically and militarily.

As an overview of Italian Renaissance history in the continental and international context from 1492 to 1571, Fletcher’s book is largely successful. The 26 chapters are generally thematic, most being devoted to political or military events in Italy across the period, giving the book a coherence dictated by chronology. Other chapters, interspersed within this framework, take up such subjects as literary or artistic figures and movements, the discovery of the New World, women’s role in society, the Reformation, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Inquisition. Fletcher’s coverage of political, military, social, intellectual, and artistic issues is impressive, and she generally does an admirable job tying together these diverse subjects. The sheer number of people and events she covers is sometimes dizzying. Such coverage has a few drawbacks, however. Fletcher seems to want to tell a good story when she has one, and while I enjoyed many of the anecdotes she relates, sometimes they felt forcibly inserted into the narrative. There is also considerable repetition, and while it is useful to be reminded who someone is upon their most recent appearance, I did not need to be told over and over that Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este were sisters-in-law or reminded four times that Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, murdered Cardinal Alidosi. At any rate, as someone fairly well versed in this history, I did not have difficulty keeping up with all the people, places, and events, but I did wonder how someone less familiar with the subject would fare.

 Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance. Moreover, to recur to the three examples she gives of terror lurking behind beauty in her introductory chapter, I am not clear on how my view of the Italian Renaissance should be affected. The first example is the alleged fact that the subject of the Mona Lisa, Lisa Gherardini, was married to a slave trader. When we finally get to the story, we learn that he was a merchant involved at some small remove from the transatlantic trade, and that he had several enslaved people baptized in Florence, which does look suspicious. More surprisingly, given Fletcher’s initial statement and the marketing materials for the book, we are informed that he was “very likely” a slave trader. This is not the smoking gun we had been promised. (Incidentally, I believe Mona Lisa was Lorenzo del Giocondo’s third wife, not his second.)

The second example Fletcher gives is that a potential model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, the courtesan Angela Zaffetta, was gang-raped by 31 men (a ritual punishment for courtesans). This time Fletcher only claims the woman is a “possible” model for the painting, but while I learned more about the poor treatment of courtesans, I do not know how my view of the painting itself, much less Renaissance art, should be affected by this possibility. The third example is the fact that the Florentine Republic came to an end in 1530 with “a sack of ‘unheard-of cruelty.’” Yet that is not what happened. Florence surrendered after a year-long siege, and while the protracted fighting throughout the Florentine territories cost perhaps 10,000 lives, the surrender of the city itself was remarkably bloodless. The usual suspects among the republican leadership were rounded up — a few were executed, some tortured, others exiled ­— but otherwise it was a miraculously mild transition of power for the time. Indeed, perplexingly, Fletcher’s account of the events within her larger narrative is consistent with these facts. Her description in the introductory chapter sounds more like the 1527 sack of Rome.

 Finally, I caught a disturbing number of errors or omissions, and although I would not call any of them consequential for Fletcher’s larger aims, they did begin to undermine my faith in the details of her story. I restrict my attention to Machiavelli, since that is a subject I know something about. Writing of the French invasion of 1494 and the flight of the Medici from Florence, Fletcher characterizes Machiavelli as among the opponents of the Medici at that time. We have no evidence for such a claim, however, especially since the first extant letter we have from Machiavelli is from 1498 and also because we also know that his relationship with the family over time was rather more complicated. Later, Fletcher states that Machiavelli was released from prison due to influential friends, but his release was actually due to a general amnesty granted with the election of Giovanni de Medici as Pope Leo X. She also relays the often repeated but now discredited idea that Machiavelli was exiled from Florence during this same period. In fact, Machiavelli was in something of a “reverse exile” for he was ordered not to leave Florence and its territories for one year. Having been relieved of his official positions, he was only prohibited from entering his former workplace, the Palazzo della Signoria, and during this “exile” Machiavelli frequented the city and was even asked a number of times to return to the Palazzo to help wrap up unfinished business. Finally, Fletcher states that Michelangelo worked with Machiavelli on a 1503 plan to divert the Arno during Florence’s long siege of Pisa, whereas it was Leonardo da Vinci who did so. There are numerous readily available sources she could have consulted on this episode; the source she does cite in fact makes the same mistake with regard to Michelangelo, and itself cites as a source a mid-19th-century book (as Fletcher notes). Oddly enough, this book has nothing to say about the episode at all, in part because it occurred five years after the subject of the biography, Savonarola, had died. In turn, in her bibliography Fletcher mistakenly cites as the source a different book by the same author — a biography of Machiavelli. This is more promising, for Pasquale Villari does discuss the plan to divert the Arno — but with no reference to Leonardo, much less to Michelangelo.

These are the mistakes I caught only with regard to Machiavelli, but I fear there are more lurking in the volume. Even if they are not themselves particularly consequential, such errors are unfortunate and unnecessary, marring what would otherwise be an interesting and informative book.

 A Darker View of the Renaissance. By John T. Scott. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2020.

Catherine Fletcher  website