The Ugly Renaissance (56 page)

we turn with admiration to the august figure of the great Genoese, by whom a new continent beyond the ocean was demanded, sought, and found, and who was the first to be able to say: “il mondo è poco”—the world is not so large as men thought.

As new horizons were opened to the imagination, and new peoples were encountered with every passing year, both the world and humanity itself gradually assumed an entirely different character, and though often mediated by the great maritime nations of Portugal and Spain, news of the new discoveries was absorbed with tremendous enthusiasm by Italians from Venice to Naples, before finding expression in the writings of humanists and scholars up and down the peninsula.

Even before the discovery of the
Madeira archipelago and the
Azores, fourteenth-century Florentines, in particular, had shown a marked appetite for knowledge of the oceanic territories and their peoples, and
Peter Burke has rightly observed that from the beginning Italians “played an important role” not only in “the process of discovery” but also “in spreading the news.”
Drawing on the tales of a maritime adventurer named
Niccolò da Recco,
Boccaccio penned an excited account of a journey to the Canary Islands (the
De Canaria
) that was replete with details about the inhabitants’ exotic dress, social institutions, agricultural practices, and musical habits. A little later, even Petrarch—whose source of information appears to have been a “
man of noble stock mixed of the royal blood of Spain and France,” presumably Luis de la Cerda—displayed his excitement about the new lands, by including an excursus on the habits of the Canary Islanders in his
De vita solitaria
. Both texts revealed a close interest in recording precise—and, on occasion, even pedantic—details about the new lands, and displayed a hunger for knowledge about the topography and anthropology of the Atlantic territories that is redolent of a wide-eyed inquisitiveness.

During Filippo Lippi’s own lifetime, the speed with which information began to arrive from the Canary Islands and the Azores seems to have stimulated an even greater interest in the recovery of exact knowledge. In this regard, it is telling that
the two canon lawyers appointed by
Pope Eugenius IV to inquire into the future legal status of the islanders at the Council of Basel—
Antonio Minucci da Pratovecchio and
Antonio Roselli—were preoccupied with identifying the religious and social habits of the Canarian natives. Similarly, richly illustrated accounts of the conquests of
Béthencourt and de la Salle (especially
Le Canarien
, by
Jean Le Verrier and
Pierre Bontier) not only became wildly popular throughout Europe but also helped to meet a growing fascination for the new Atlantic world among lettered men.

Not only did literary appetites grow ever stronger after Lippi’s death, but the feast that was offered to sate the hunger of Italians avid for news also became richer in almost every respect. Even before Columbus made landfall on
San Salvador, Poliziano wrote to the king of Portugal with breathless excitement about the “
discoveries of new lands, new seas, new worlds,” and one can only imagine the palpitations of amazement that followed the announcement of the Genoese captain’s great finds. The sixteenth century had barely begun when firsthand accounts
started to circulate, first in manuscript form, then in finely turned printed volumes.
Columbus’s account of his travels rapidly circulated; Vespucci’s description of his own voyage enjoyed considerable popularity; and the narrative of the Florentine
Giovanni da Verrazzano (who concentrated on the North American coast) was enthusiastically read, despite its relative obscurity today. Even secondhand accounts were phenomenally popular (possibly more so than their better-informed source texts) and testify to the excitement that was abroad. Swiftly following in the wake of Vespucci’s letters, the Italian-born Pietro Martire d’
Anghiera (1457–1526) published a raft of works on the exploration of the Americas—including the
Decades
and the
De orbe novo
—which constituted an important vehicle for disseminating information about the new lands to a wider audience. And in a similar vein, the Venetian bureaucrat
Gianbattista Ramusio responded to the popular desire for more specific accounts of the topographical and anthropological character of the Americas with his multivolume
Delle navigationi et viaggi
(1550–59), often described as one of the first truly modern works of geography. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know just how small the world was becoming.

Thrilled by these discoveries, cartographers such as
Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482) and
Giovanni Matteo Contarini (d. 1507) rushed to improve their art so as to provide more accurate representations of a changing world, and humanists competed with one another in a bid to celebrate the “heroic” achievements of contemporary explorers in a fittingly classical fashion. In 1589, for example,
Giulio Cesare Stella (1564–1624) was obliged to rush into print with an unfinished version of part of his
Columbeis
—the first attempt to cast Columbus’s voyages in the mold of pseudo-Virgilian epic—to head off a pirated edition that was already hitting the market in response to heavy demand. If ancient conquerors and sailors deserved high praise, how much more praise did those who made the world a smaller place deserve?

I
NVISIBLE
W
ORLDS

Yet to say that there was a natural hunger for information about the discoveries being made is not to say that curiosity succeeded in firing the imagination quite as much as modern historians are often inclined to believe. Indeed, it is not implausible to suggest that the cultural impact Renaissance explorers are often thought to have exerted is more a construct
of recent perceptions of the intrinsic value of “scientific” novelty than of the realities of the artistic imagination of the period. Remarkable though the opening of the
Atlantic world may have been, artists both before and after Lippi’s lifetime simply weren’t all that gripped by the idea of the new lands in the West.

It was not that the adventures of Malocello, de Silves,
Béthencourt, Columbus, and Vespucci completely failed to find visual expression on Italian soil. After the advent of the printing press, editions of geographical works, chronicles, and first- and secondhand narratives—many of which were published on Italian soil—habitually included not only a selection of detailed maps but also a smattering of carefully crafted woodcuts or engravings by way of illustration. Thus, in the third volume of Ramusio’s
Delle navigationi et viaggi
(Venice, 1556), for example, there were detailed pictures of unfamiliar plants, such as maize and plantain leaves, and images of distinctive aboriginal tools, such as the fire drill. But for the most part, such visual images of the New World seldom merit description as serious works of representation. They were almost never drawn from direct observation (artists not being thought essential to voyages of discovery) and were habitually cobbled together from a mixture of hearsay and fantasy with a view more to titillating the reader than to recording any meaningful information. To make matters worse, a great number of woodcuts included in narrative accounts of early Atlantic encounters were simply recycled from other printed texts, most of which had absolutely nothing to do with the New World.
Hence, in some of the earliest printings of Vespucci’s
Quattuor navigationes
, the explorer meets a host of cannibalistic natives busily hacking up human limbs ready for their evening meal, while other texts commonly include depictions of Native Americans canoeing in bathtubs and inland waterways populated by mermaids.

Such hackneyed scrawls accounted for most of what was on offer. No one except the most amateurish of wood-carvers seems to have had the slightest concern for anything coming from across the Atlantic. For almost the entire
Renaissance, the lands to the west of the Pillars of Hercules failed to make any significant impact on art in any of its forms, and it is in vain that even the most dedicated of connoisseurs may search for some trace of the Canaries, the Azores, or even the Americas in the painting and sculpture of the period.
Even though a smattering of exotic artifacts had made their way across the Atlantic
into the collections of some of the more noted courtly collectors by the mid-sixteenth century, nothing seemed capable of stirring a single Italian artist into taking up his brush, charcoal, or chisel in the service of the New World, and it was with some alarm that the Spanish chronicler
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557) lamented the fact that neither
Leonardo da Vinci nor the otherwise acutely sensitive
Andrea Mantegna had bothered to capture anything “American” on canvas. No other area of the world, no other culture, and no other people was so poorly served by the arts. Even Jews, Muslims, and black Africans—all of whom were the objects of bigotry and hatred—were better represented in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting. Indeed, if the works of the Renaissance’s greatest artists were the only evidence used, it might seem as if the voyages of discovery never happened at all.

S
CARCELY
P
ROFITABLE AND
B
ARELY
H
UMAN

If the dreadful treatment meted out to Jews, Muslims, and black Africans seems to contradict the familiar image of the Renaissance as a time of open-mindedness and tolerance, the complete disregard shown by artists of the period for the Atlantic world appears to raise even more challenging questions about the extent to which “discovery” really played a role in shaping the character of the age that has become renowned for its sense of curiosity and learning. The paradox of Renaissance artists’ knowledge of and disregard for the leaps being made into the oceanic void demands some sort of explanation, if only to try desperately to rescue something from the ghastly mess in which Renaissance interactions with the “other” have become mired.

But explaining why something did
not
happen is a precarious business, simply because the evidence—by definition—does not exist. Although it is clear that Renaissance artists all but ignored the voyages of discovery, the absence of visual references to the Atlantic world makes it difficult to determine
why
they did so. Yet even though conclusive proof may be hard to find, two parallel developments seem to offer an attractive—if not wholly encouraging—explanation for the staggeringly blinkered view of artists.

The first revolves around that most characteristically Renaissance preoccupation: money. Even more so than today, cash was king, and as previous chapters have shown, artists followed the financial interests
of their patrons with the same enthusiasm that starved puppies chase meat carts. And the simple fact was that—insofar as Renaissance Italy was concerned—the voyages of discovery could pretty much go hang. Although the influx of gold and silver bullion from the New World kept all Europe afloat through the destructive warfare of later centuries, the first, tentative journeys into the Atlantic world didn’t generate very much in the way of money. It wasn’t that they didn’t put out feelers.
The Genoese, for example, enthusiastically supported Portuguese and Spanish ventures from the early fifteenth century onward (partly in response to growing Venetian domination of the eastern Mediterranean), while a number of early transatlantic crossings were made by flotillas carrying Florentine prospectors—such as
Giovanni da Empoli, who was sent into the unknown by his merchant-banking employers for the first time in 1503–4—in search of monetary reward. But despite this, none of Italy’s great trading centers felt any significant financial benefit from the opening of the Atlantic islands and the early trips to the American mainland except through the granting of loans to Catalan adventurers at spectacularly exorbitant rates of interest.
Although the coastal territories of West Africa generated no end of cash, the Canary Islands, the Azores, the newly dubbed West Indies, and the Americas seemed to be all but barren, and even indirect trade through the Iberian powers (between whom the New World had already been divided up) brought little of any real value to the markets of Florence, Rome, and Milan. It was not until well into the sixteenth century that any signs of genuine profit began to emerge, and that men like the Florentine merchant banker
Luca Giraldi (d. 1565) were tempted to seek their fortunes in the New World. And by then, the Renaissance proper was already on the wane. Since their patrons showed little more than a vague, peripheral curiosity in the Atlantic world, artists lacked any monetary incentive to show any interest either.

But if the first of the possible reasons for the absence of “discovery” from Renaissance art appears cynical, the second is disturbing. For if Italians of Lippi’s generation were money obsessed, they were also completely unwilling to open their minds up to novelty unless they were positively forced to do so.

At root, the belief that discovery, objective knowledge, and tolerant relativism are inescapably connected is a modern fiction. As previous chapters have suggested in relation to other peoples encountered by
Renaissance Italians, the acquisition of knowledge was seldom anything less than highly subjective, and almost never led to anything like the self-questioning tolerance that post-Enlightenment individuals might feel to be natural. Indeed, if anything, the growth of understanding only led to the refinement of
prejudice and the strengthening of hatred. The discovery of the Atlantic world simply put a new and even more sinister spin on an already well-established tendency.

Far from being a pure source of fresh and unblemished learning, the potentially invaluable contribution of explorers’ observations of the new worlds of the Atlantic sat “
as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumor, convention and endlessly recycled fable.” It was not just that the fragments of useful information they brought back were habitually twisted into altogether more fantastical forms by authors more willing to trust their imaginations than firsthand accounts, but also that explorers themselves were all too happy to use myth, fable, and downright prejudice as a lens through which to survey the new lands. A whole host of “bastard” sources were employed as intellectual crutches by explorers and their glossators—from woefully outdated classical geographies to medieval legends and old wives’ tales—but it was perhaps the prevailing religious sentiments of still deeply Catholic Europe that provided the greatest and most important filter for knowledge of the new western territories and their peoples. And, at root, religious prejudices really did stack the odds against the aboriginal inhabitants both of the Canary Islands and of the Americas ever being regarded as truly “human,” let alone civilized.