The Ugly Renaissance (55 page)

The perception of cultural inferiority, barbarism, and savagery had a number of important implications for the manner in which black Africans were treated in everyday life. Since there was no doubt in most Italians’ minds that they were somehow “less human” than white Christians, it was manifestly obvious that no degree of autonomy or independence could be attributed to any colored person, no matter how positive his or her behavior or manner might be. Thus, while black Africans frequently appear in the art of the period, colored individuals—with the exception of Balthazar—are presented only in the role of supporting or subsidiary characters. In Mantegna’s various renditions of Judith beheading Holofernes, for example, it is of considerable significance that the rather passive servant girl is black, and Judith—who would surely have been of the same ethnic origin—is not. So, too, in Gozzoli’s
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
, the only black face in the entire scene is that of a rather weedy-looking page gamely running alongside the Medici’s horses. This lack of autonomy necessarily carried with it a sense that blacks could, and should, be treated in whatever way their “natural” superiors wished. Female black
slaves were habitually subject to sexual advances and even sexual attacks from their masters, and in each case blame was foisted on the victim rather than on the perpetrator.

Yet perhaps the most important implication of this perception of cultural and moral inferiority was with regard to the legal status of black Africans. Although there was always a mixture of free and unfree among the colored population of Renaissance Italy, the belief in a “natural” barbarism gave rise to the contention that colored people were somehow “naturally” slaves. Building on a perversion of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of slavery, humanists, lawyers, and churchmen accepted that the uncivilized societies of the Dark Continent had been ordained by nature to be ruled over by white, civilized men. And no matter how strong the sense of Christian fellowship may have been, the pernicious idea of a race of natural slaves shaped Renaissance encounters with sub-Saharan Africa.

The enslavement of Christians was categorically forbidden by the
Church, but theologians quickly came to believe that sub-Saharan Africans constituted a special case because of their supposed character. Only eleven years after
Alberto da Sarteano arrived back in Florence with the Ethiopian delegation,
Pope Nicholas V promulgated the bull
Dum diversas
in an attempt to mediate between the competing claims of Spain and Portugal to supremacy in the new lands being discovered. In the course of this wide-ranging and far-reaching proclamation, Nicholas affirmed that the kings of both nations had the absolute right to invade whatever kingdoms they wished and to reduce the entire population of any territory to slavery, irrespective of creed. Although this was subsequently overturned by Pius II, it was later reaffirmed with even greater insistence in a sequence of bulls that effectively condemned Africans to perpetual and unremitting slavery and set in motion a centuries-long trend that constitutes one of the most unpleasant and vile episodes in human history. It was, indeed, the openness of the Renaissance that led to one of humanity’s greatest evils.

As Alberto da Sarteano and his Ethiopian companions left Florence after the heady excitement of the ecumenical council, the friar could have been forgiven for feeling satisfied. Consciously and unconsciously, he had been responsible for pushing back the boundaries of the Renaissance world and for breaking down the barriers of myth and legend. In adding to the humanistic understanding of sub-Saharan Africa, he had paved the way for generations of explorers and for the growth of genuine ties with entirely new lands. He was, moreover, overjoyed that Christendom itself seemed to have grown massively larger, almost overnight.

Although no written testimony has survived to give any indication of what they made of their Italian sojourn, the Ethiopians would perhaps have been less excited. Despite having been feted in lavish style, they would certainly have been put off by the servile condition into which fellow Africans were being forced, and distressed by the disdain with which they had been treated in the street. They were Christians like any others, but it would have been obvious that they were not viewed as Christians of quite the same stripe. The attraction of learning from and trading with white Italians would perhaps have given them cause
for hope, but a sense of fear and anxiety would have been inescapable. It was to their credit as Christians that they put aside such concerns, but it would undoubtedly have been much better had they turned their backs on Florence and run as fast as they could to warn their people of what was already in the air. Tolerance and acceptance were just a facade, and as they may already have suspected, it would have been much better for Africans everywhere if the Renaissance had just left them alone.

14

B
RAVE
N
EW
W
ORLDS

A
T ABOUT THE
time he was completing the
Barbadori Altarpiece
,
Filippo Lippi was unconsciously standing on the threshold of one of the greatest periods of adventure and discovery in human history. Although
Renaissance Italy had come into progressively closer contact with Hebraic, Islamic, and black African cultures over the past century, its entire worldview was about to be shattered by a series of staggering voyages that would transform the earth for ever more. In a little over fifty years, the
Atlantic would open, and an Italian navigator would set foot on the unimagined shores of
America.

Despite the monumental scale of the discoveries that were beginning to take shape, they had comparatively little impact on the cultural imagination of the period. From the late 1430s onward, Italians nurtured only the most distracted form of curiosity about the new and unknown lands being explored. Not only had very little hard evidence of the mysterious new islands reached the peninsula by that stage, but a sense of intellectual arrogance also conspired to keep expectations of the Atlantic world low. There was little willingness to believe that explorers could find anything more than a different route to already familiar lands. At best, it was thought that a few vague references to shadowy islets in the classical histories might be fleshed out and a new means of trading with the East might be discovered, but nothing more. And even if there actually were something unexpected out there, it was firmly believed that all that was civilized had already been found.

Filled with supreme self-confidence, humanists were happy to extol the heroism of pioneering navigators, but fell back on fantasy and disdain when it came to the peoples and territories being explored. Artists like Filippo Lippi, however, failed even to register the changing fate of humanity.
Cartography aside, not a single trace of the Atlantic world is to be found in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century art, and it seems almost
as if a conscious effort were made to ignore the voyages of discovery in their entirety.

With the benefit of hindsight, this is perhaps the most surprising and counterintuitive feature of the Renaissance. But in unpicking the various strands of this story, we can see that in coming into contact with the undreamed-of lands and peoples of the western ocean, the men and women of the Renaissance revealed the truest extent of their intellectual ambivalence and cultural cynicism.

E
XPANDING
H
ORIZONS

Before about 1300, the
Atlantic Ocean had been treated only with the most indirect interest and was seen primarily through the lens of the trade with the
Far East. Although
Pliny the Elder and
Isidore of Seville had hinted vaguely about a few scattered islands off the African coast, and the Nordic sagas had told of a shadowy area that they dubbed
Vinland, Italians had had little time for such apparently fanciful myths. To them, the Atlantic was a watery void that separated Europe from
China,
Java, and “Cipangu” (
Japan), a notion readily enshrined in carefully prepared but grotesquely ill-conceived maps. Back in the thirteenth century,
Marco Polo had authoritatively stated that Cipangu was an island that was likely to be reached well before China if one were to sail west from Portugal, and
whenever medieval writers spoke of islands out in the Atlantic—such as the “Isle of the Seven Cities,” allegedly colonized by Christians who had fled from Muslim Spain—the presumption was that they were merely part of the giant, little-known archipelago east of India from which spices were brought. And while perceptions of these “Indian” islands were still dominated by ideas of dog-headed men and rivers of gold, there was little sense that anything totally unexpected was out there.

The allure of a sea route to the Indies was, however, to provide the impetus that led to a more searching exploration of the Atlantic world. Thoughts had begun to turn to discovering a new means of trading with the East even before the Renaissance bore its first fruits.
As early as 1291, two Venetian brothers—
Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi—had set sail in two galleys in the hope of reaching India by voyaging around the Moroccan coast, and though the expedition disappeared without a trace, the appetites of seagoing states had been whetted by the first
whiff of possibility. By the dawn of the fourteenth century, more concerted efforts were already being made.
The discovery of
Lanzarote in 1312 by the Genoese sailor
Lancelotto Malocello marked something of a watershed. Although his journey, too, failed to reveal the hoped-for route to the Indies, it nevertheless showed that there was more to ancient and medieval tales than anyone had previously supposed, an impression further strengthened by a subsequent, more systematic expedition to the Canary Islands in 1341. The Atlantic wasn’t just an empty void. There was definitely something else out there. And what was more, the inhabitants of the Fortunate Isles (as the Canaries were known) had shown that there were
people
out there, too.

By the time
Filippo Lippi had completed the
Barbadori Altarpiece
, exploration west of the Pillars of Hercules was gaining pace, and as the steady rise of the Ottoman Turks put ever more obstacles in the way of the
Silk Road, the urge for maritime adventurism grew ever stronger.
While hopes for a new passage to the East were still running high, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Atlantic was a much busier and richer place than even people of Lippi’s grandparents’ generation had dared dream. Although the Spanish and the Portuguese were taking the lead, Italian sailors were taking part in ever more far-reaching expeditions, and a veritable torrent of news of new and exciting lands was reaching Florence every day. In 1418–19,
João Gonçalves Zarco and
Tristão Vaz Teixeira discovered
Porto Santo and
Madeira, and barely eight years later, in 1427,
Diogo de Silves found the
Azores while venturing even farther west of the African coast. In the years that followed, Prince Henry the Navigator set his sights on exploiting the resources of the new lands and sent out a number of expeditions both to document the precise character of the islands and—if possible—to establish permanent trading settlements in the name of the Portuguese crown. The full-scale conquest of the Canary Islands—beginning with the 1402 expedition of
Jean de Béthencourt and
Gadifer de la Salle and continuing throughout the century—opened the doors to an ever more direct and searching quest for commercially and militarily valuable information.

By the autumn of 1492, an almost unknown Genoese captain would cross the Atlantic and change the world forever. Despite not being altogether sure at first about the identity of the new lands he had discovered,
Christopher Columbus landed at
San Salvador on the morning of
October 12 and became the first European to set foot on
Cuba just over two weeks later, on October 28. Irrespective of the inaccuracies and vagaries of his initial stabs at geography, Columbus opened the doors to a completely new world, and the floodgates to the full-blown exploration of the Americas were blown open. On his subsequent voyages in 1493–94, Columbus followed up his first successes with the discovery of modern-day Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles. Barely three years later, Zuan Chabotto (John Cabot) made landfall in
Newfoundland, and in the last years of the fifteenth century Columbus,
Alonso de Ojeda, and the Florentine
Amerigo Vespucci had begun to penetrate the mysterious depths of South America. And by the time the sixteenth century was under way, the Atlantic had become a veritable superhighway of adventure and exploration.

N
EWS
T
RAVELS

In terms of importance and magnitude, the voyages of discovery that began in the early fourteenth century and continued well into the sixteenth were far greater than the first manned mission to the moon, and it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the sense of wonder felt by Europeans. This being so, it is perhaps no surprise that “discovery” should have become so integral to the way in which the Renaissance as a whole has come to be seen, and there remains a peculiar resonance to Burckhardt’s view of its impact. “
Yet ever and again,” the Swiss historian wrote, thinking of Columbus,