COURSE GUIDEBOOK_Italian Renaissance.pdf

The Italian Renaissance

Part I

Professor Kenneth Bartlett

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

Kenneth Bartlett, Ph.D.

Professor of History and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto

Kenneth Bartlett, Professor of History and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto, received his Ph.D.

from the University of Toronto in 1978. He served as editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et

Réforme and president of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. He was founding director of the University

of Toronto Art Centre and remains coordinator of faculty programs in Arts and Science.

Much of Professor Bartlett’s career has been devoted to bringing Renaissance culture into the undergraduate and

graduate classroom. He has taught regularly in the University of Toronto Program in Siena, Italy, as well as in the

Oxford Program. In 2002, he was appointed the first director of the Office of Teaching Advancement for the

University of Toronto. He has been the recipient of the Victoria University Excellence in Teaching Award, the

Students Administrative Council and Association of Part-Time University Students Teaching Award, and the

Faculty of Arts and Science Teaching Excellence Award. In 2005 he was awarded a prestigious national 3M

Teaching Fellowship.

Dr. Bartlett is the author of The English in Italy, 1525–1558: A Study in Culture and Politics (1991); The

Civilization of the Italian Renaissance (1992); and Humanism and the Northern Renaissance (with M. McGlynn,

2000). He was co-editor or translator of four other books and the author of more than 35 articles and chapters on

Renaissance history and culture. In 2003, Dr. Bartlett was co-curator of the exhibition Gods, Saints and Heroes:

Italian Renaissance Maiolica from the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art. In

addition, he has been the academic consultant on the Illuminated Filmworks videos on the Vatican Library, The

Halls of Virtuous Learning , The Galleries of Sixtus V , and Pages of Light , as well as for the international

exhibitions Raphael and His Circle: Drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor and Angels from the Vatican at

the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Dr. Bartlett lives in Toronto with his wife, Gillian.

Table of Contents

The Italian Renaissance

Part I

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Course Scope .......................................................................................................1

Lecture One The Study of the Italian Renaissance.........................3

Lecture Two The Renaissance—Changing Interpretations.............6

Lecture Three Italy—The Cradle of the Renaissance .....................10

Lecture Four The Age of Dante—Guelfs and Ghibellines............13

Lecture Five Petrarch and the Foundations of Humanism............17

Lecture Six The Recovery of Antiquity ......................................20

Lecture Seven Florence—The Creation of the Republic.................23

Lecture Eight Florence and Civic Humanism ................................27

Lecture Nine Florentine Culture and Society ................................30

Lecture Ten Renaissance Education ............................................33

Lecture Eleven The Medici Hegemony ............................................36

Lecture Twelve The Florence of Lorenzo de’Medici ........................40

Timeline .............................................................................................................43

Visconti and Medici Family Trees ..................................................................48

Map of Italy .......................................................................................................50

Glossary .............................................................................................................51

Biographical Notes ......................................................................................Part II

Bibliography .............................................................................................. Part III

The Italian Renaissance

Scope:

This course on the Italian Renaissance will attempt to answer the question: Why was there such an explosion of

creative culture, human ingenuity, economic development, and social experimentation in Italy beginning in the 14 th

century? It will also address the question of why the Renaissance ended in the middle years of the 16 th century.

In order to investigate the phenomenon of the Renaissance in Italy, it is necessary to look at every facet of human

endeavor. Thus, this series will not be a discussion of major political, military, or economic events, although these

will appear, as appropriate. Rather, the course will follow the model of writing Renaissance history designed by its

first great practitioner, Jacob Burckhardt, whose 1860 book-length “essay,” The Civilization of the Renaissance in

Italy , initiated the model of cultural history, that is, looking at a period in the past from several perspectives

simultaneously to produce a sophisticated, multidimensional image. Just as each tessera in a mosaic contributes to

the whole, so each element in social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual, and religious history contributes to

the composite picture of life in Italy in the years between the birth of Petrarch in 1304 and the terrible events of the

1520s–1540s that extinguished the flame that the poet first lit.

Several elements must first be assessed before the question of cultural development can be answered. We must

investigate why the Italian peninsula was so different from the rest of Europe in the 13 th and 14 th centuries. How did

the city-states of Italy manage to develop such sophisticated societies based on various forms of government, with

social mobility and secular education, and amass such enormous wealth, when most of the rest of the continent still

lived under feudal regimes, largely local economies, and clerically dominated culture? To what extent was the very

lack of unity in the peninsula an advantage? And why did such states as Florence choose to invest so much of their

surplus capital in art and learning? What was Humanism and why was it a peculiarly Italian phenomenon in the 14 th

century? And why do we begin our study of the culture of the Renaissance with Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), or

Petrarch, a poet and thinker who believed he had the misfortune to have been born outside his age? These are

complex parts of a complex story, but one worth telling because the Renaissance gave us so many of the tools by

which we still interpret our lives and the world around us.

In discussing these aspects of the culture of the Renaissance, we will see that many of the fundamental perspectives

of the modern world were formed at that time. It has been argued that Petrarch invented the contemporary concept

of the individual, writing in his Secret Book , the first psychological autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions .

Such artists as Donatello and Brunelleschi developed the principles of linear perspective, which permitted the

creation of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional plane. In so doing, not only did they open the way for

Naturalism in art—reproducing what the eye sees—but they set the intellectual stage for modern cartography and,

hence, the voyages of discovery, because objects could be put in correctly calibrated relative space and distances

could be precisely mapped. The desire of Renaissance thinkers to know themselves and others drove artists to

perfect the reproduction of correct anatomy in painting and sculpture, with Donatello’s David the first freestanding

male nude figure since antiquity. Portraiture allowed viewers to identify their fellow citizens or famous men and

women through their appearances and, soon after, through the skill of the painter, acquire an insight into their

characters. All of this was the product of the Italian Renaissance mind.

In addition, Renaissance writers, in their desire to know the world around them and make correct observations about

that world and the variety of its inhabitants, extended the importance of individual experience and privileged it. In

other words, life became less a vale of tears on the part of faithful servants of God acting out a role he had

determined for them with little sense of personal agency. Rather, individuals, acting either alone or in concert with

their fellow citizens, could assume some responsibility for creating art, ideas, and even social experiments that

benefited our lives on Earth. Secular knowledge, practical skills, political involvement, marriage, family, and even

the paying of taxes became instruments for human fulfillment and the means of constructing a more pleasant and

meaningful life. The human perspective changed from the theocentric world of the Middle Ages to the

anthropocentric world of the Renaissance. This shift emphasized the ideal of the creation of an individual life as a

work of art and the building of cities that were equally things of beauty and commodity. It celebrated human

achievement, including social mobility and social responsibility. This is not to say that the Renaissance was pagan

or any less Christian—it was not—but it shifted the balance in the role of human free will and unleashed the

creative spirit of thousands of individuals. Fame and history became important to Italians, who saw themselves as

part of the human continuum; the ancient pagan classics could be applied to contemporary situations in art, learning,

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