The Ugly Renaissance (5 page)

F
LORENCE AND THE
I
LLUSION OF THE
I
DEAL

Florence in 1491 was a thriving metropolis.

From a population of around thirty thousand in ca. 1350, Florence had grown to become one of Europe’s largest cities.
As early as 1338, as the chronicler
Giovanni Villani recorded, its inhabitants consumed more than seventy thousand quarts of wine each day, and around a hundred thousand sheep, goats, and pigs had to be slaughtered each year to keep pace with the city’s appetite. By the mid-sixteenth century, it boasted no fewer than fifty-nine thousand inhabitants and was rivaled in size only by Paris, Milan, Venice, and Naples.

In 1491, Florence was an economic powerhouse. Despite its superficially unfavorable location—inland and at some distance from major trade routes—the city built on close links with the
papacy and the
kingdom of Naples to develop powerful mercantile and
banking concerns, and succeeded in all but cornering the European cloth market. As Villani explained in 1338, around thirty thousand laborers were employed
in cloth making, and the industry as a whole produced 1.2 million florins’ worth of cloth each year, most of it for export.
In the same year, eighty banks or money-changing businesses and six hundred notaries were listed, while some three hundred citizens were recorded as being merchants who worked overseas.
Although there were intermittent crises—such as the famines of the early fourteenth century, the collapse of the
Bardi, Peruzzi, and
Acciaiuoli banks, and the
Black Death of 1348—Florence was nothing if not resilient, and its expansion into new sectors—such as the
silk industry—and the growth of the Medici and Strozzi banks contributed to the continuation of the city’s economic miracle.

There was no doubt that the growth of wealth and the institutions of civic government had brought benefits. On the back of the emergence of humanism and the growth of a professional bureaucracy, standards of education and literacy reached levels that were not to be matched until well into the twentieth century and that would still be regarded as exceptional in many parts of the world today. In the mid-1330s, Villani recorded that eight to ten thousand boys and girls were
learning to read in the city at that time, a figure which would suggest that 67–83 percent of the population had some basic schooling. While we could be forgiven for treating Villani’s estimate with some skepticism, his testimony is borne out by the evidence of the
catasto
(tax records).
In the
catasto
of 1427, for example, around 80 percent of the men in the city were literate enough to complete their own returns. By the same token, serious attempts were made to provide for the poor, the sick, and the needy. Designed by Brunelleschi, the Ospedale degli Innocenti was established as a tax-exempt institution in 1495 to care for orphans and to provide facilities for needy women entering childbirth. In 1494, the city opened a hospital for victims of the plague that ensured the city would be insulated against epidemic and that provided medical care for the sick.

Money and civic confidence had also transformed Florence’s urban landscape. At the same time as private wealth was being poured into the construction of buildings such as the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, a deliberate effort had been made to imitate the architecture of antiquity and to create perfect cities.
Vitruvius’s
De architectura
—the most complete classical treatise on building methods and design—had been rediscovered in its entirety by the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini in 1415,
prompting a flurry of architects to put the ancient writer’s ideas into practice and to experiment with new approaches to the design and management of urban spaces. There was a veritable fetish for the ideal. Architects, artists, and thinkers vied with one another in producing the most utopian vision of city life, a tendency that is more than evident in
The Ideal City
(
Fig. 2
), painted by an anonymous artist toward the end of the fifteenth century.

This fetish for the ideal was mirrored by concerted efforts to put ancient architectural theory into practice, and as the confidence of city-states like Florence grew, the revival of the classical style became a powerful expression of civic identity and pride. There was a sense among Renaissance Florentines in particular that the utopianism of
The Ideal City
had been real in many ways and that their city was truly perfect. In his
Invective Against Antonio Loschi
(1403), the Florentine chancellor
Coluccio Salutati described Florence with characteristically gushing enthusiasm. “
What city,” he asked,

not merely in Italy, but in all the world, is more securely placed within its walls, more proud in its palazzi, more bedecked with churches, more beautiful in its architecture, more imposing in its gates, richer in piazzas, happier in its wide streets, greater in its people, more glorious in its citizenry, more inexhaustible in wealth, more fertile in its fields?

Indeed, so pronounced was this sense of pride and excitement among Florentine intellectuals that an entire genre of literature devoted to the praise of the city was quickly developed. Written at approximately the same time as Salutati’s
Invective
,
Leonardo Bruni’s
Panegyric to the City of Florence
(1403–4) was designed to provide its citizens with an image of their city capable of filling them with republican pride and confidence and was hence even more packed with praise.

Despite having some doubts as to whether his eloquence was sufficient to describe the majesty of Florence, Bruni described the city’s many merits in exhaustive detail, beginning with an ostentatiously over-the-top celebration of the city’s inhabitants. But what he wished to stress above all else was the urban environment and, in doing so, he provided a wonderfully lyrical expression of the loom on which the
fabric of the Renaissance was woven. “
What in the whole world,” Bruni asked, “is so splendid and magnificent as the architecture of Florence?” “Wherever you go,” he eulogized,

you can see handsome squares and the decorated porticos of the homes of the noble families, and the streets are always thronged with crowds of men … Here large groups of people gather to do their business and enjoy themselves. Indeed, nothing is more pleasant.

The private houses that lined the streets—“which were designed, built, and decorated for luxury, size, respectability, and especially for magnificence”—were particularly awe inspiring, and Bruni declared that even if he had “a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron,” he could “not possibly describe all the magnificence, wealth, decoration, delights, and elegance of these homes.” And above all these houses, all these churches, and all this splendor loomed the imposing edifice of the Palazzo Vecchio, the center of government in Florence. Like an admiral in his flagship, the proud palazzo seemed to Bruni to stand atop the finest city in Italy, looking down approvingly at the abundance of balance, peace, and beauty below.

It was a sentiment that grew only stronger as the years went by. In his
De illustratione urbis Florentiae
, published ca. 1583, but most probably written in the last years of the fifteenth century,
Ugolino Verino observed that “
every traveler arriving in the city of the flower admires the marble houses and the churches textured against the sky, swearing that there is no place more beautiful in all the world.” Indeed, Verino—like Bruni—was acutely conscious that his abilities were insufficient for the task of describing this most awe inspiring of cities. “How can I properly describe the paved and spacious streets,” he asked,

designed in such a way that the traveler’s journey is impeded neither by mud when it rains nor by dust during the summer, so that his shoes are not dirtied? How can I sufficiently praise the grand temple supported by majestic columns consecrated to the Holy Ghost [Santo Spirito], or the Church of San Lorenzo erected by the pious Medici … ? What can one say about the great Cosimo’s magnificent palace, or about the four large bridges crossing the
Arno, the river which runs through the city before flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea?

It was no surprise that—as Verino’s near contemporary the merchant
Giovanni Rucellai reported—“
many people believe that our age … is the most fortunate period in Florence’s history” or that Verino himself could mock the ancients by claiming that their “
Golden Age is inferior to the time in which we now live.”

It all looks too good to be true. And the fact is that it was too good to be true. Despite the fantastic praise that Salutati, Bruni, and Verino heaped upon Florence, the visible signs of the city’s wealth coexisted with—and even depended upon—conditions that spoke to a very different mode of existence and that ultimately (if indirectly) contributed toward Michelangelo’s broken nose.

Regardless of its wealth, Florence continually struggled to overcome the unpleasant effects of its thriving mercantile trade. The ostentatious displays of wealth indulged by the city’s merchants were frequently the object of opprobrium, not least from the
Dominican friar
Girolamo Savonarola, whose attacks on the rich concentrated on their luxurious palaces, extravagant clothing, and lavish private chapels. It all struck a discordant note with the standards of living experienced by the overwhelming majority of ordinary Florentines.
As mercantile fortunes rose, the wages of the unskilled fell.
Poverty was always around the corner. Begging was rife, and crime was endemic. Lacking any clear conception of economics as a distinct sphere of activity, the city government continually and unsuccessfully grappled with vast disparities in wealth, poor standards of living, and rampant disease. For more than two centuries, Florence was rent by political divisions and social rivalries, tormented by incessant epidemics, racked by crime, and blighted by social marginalization. And all of this was acted out in the same streets and squares that Salutati, Bruni, and Verino were so desperate to celebrate as the centerpieces of a new and ideal world and through which Michelangelo passed in 1491.

C
ULTURE
, R
ELIGION
, R
EVOLUTION
: S
AN
M
ARCO

The location of Michelangelo’s school embodied these contradictions. Large and well-appointed, the convent and church of San Marco were
home to a growing community of Dominican friars and looked every inch the embodiment of the calm and studious piety that Renaissance religious life might be thought to be.

Like the nearby Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, San Marco was the archetype of the learned cloister.
After receiving the massive sum of 36,000 gold florins from
Cosimo de’ Medici in 1437, it had been transformed into a sanctuary of art and learning. Adorned with frescoes by the convent’s own
Fra Angelico, it had been graced with a magnificent new library designed by Michelozzo, which it had promptly filled with a vast collection of the choicest manuscripts money could buy. Indeed, according to Verino’s
De illustratione urbis Florentiae
, the library of San Marco contained “
so many thousands of volumes written by the Greek and Latin fathers that it could rightly be called the archives of sacred doctrine.” Coupled with the school for artists that Lorenzo de’ Medici had established in the gardens outside, this rich repository of learning conspired to make San Marco one of the centers of Florentine intellectual life. By 1491, it had become a key meeting place for book-loving humanists like Pico della Mirandola and
Angelo Poliziano (both of whom were subsequently buried in the church) and for artists hungry to learn from the sculptures in its garden. It was no surprise that Verino thought San Marco the place “
where the Muses dwell.”

The church was, moreover, the site of genuine devotion. Among San Marco’s most treasured possessions and greatest attractions was the Christmas cradle, which has been on display since the fifteenth century and can still be seen today. Consisting of a large number of exquisitely carved figures, it captured the imagination of contemporaries (including
Domenico da Corella) and served as the
centerpiece of the city’s annual Epiphany celebrations. This dramatic event was a magisterial interplay of light and darkness, filled with music, costume, and the scent of incense. By cover of night, friars dressed as Magi and angels led a procession of the city’s most distinguished dignitaries into the church accompanied by burning torches. The carved Christ child was then symbolically brought to the cradle, where it was ritually adored by the “Magi” before being passed around to allow the congregation to kiss its feet. The atmosphere was apparently electric. An anonymous young man who witnessed the procession in 1498 observed that “
paradise was in these friaries, and [that] such spirit descended to earth that everyone burned in love.”

But San Marco was also rapidly becoming a hotbed of religious extremism, political intrigue, and outright violence. In July 1491—that is, at about the time Michelangelo’s nose was broken—Fra
Girolamo
Savonarola was elected prior of the convent. A deeply learned and powerful orator, this gaunt and self-denying man was suffused with a passion for the simplicity of what he perceived to be the true life of Christian piety and was consumed with contempt for the frivolous trappings of wealth. The Advent before his election, he had preached a series of blistering sermons that condemned usury, greed, financial deception, and the celebration of riches but reserved his most bitter scorn for precisely those whose lavishness had made San Marco so important a center of culture—the Medici. He railed against luxury, “lascivious” paintings, fine clothing, and even the poetry of those who frequented the cloister. Since he studied and worked in the shadow of San Marco, it was perhaps inevitable that Michelangelo should have joined those who crowded to hear Savonarola’s sermons. Although his enthusiasm was not quite as pronounced as that of Botticelli (who
briefly gave up painting under the friar’s influence), he could still recall
the sound of Savonarola’s powerful voice years later.