The Ugly Renaissance (57 page)

On the one hand, there was always a niggling suspicion that previously unknown territories were home to monsters who were either manifestly hideous or otherwise bereft of the physiological “humanity” possessed by all those in Europe. The Bible was, after all, replete with stories of strange giants and horrific creatures who lived before the Flood, and it was hard to shake the feeling that perhaps some of them had survived unscathed in the distant lands of the West. On the other hand, even if new peoples passed the test of “physical or biological anthropology,” that did not mean they were automatically entitled to be regarded as full members of the human race. A rather peculiar reading of the early chapters of Genesis could lead Renaissance thinkers to equate humanity with certain fairly rigid standards of existence. Although “
evidence of social anthropology”—in terms of “behaviour, conduct,
[and] technology”—was one of the principal criteria upon which the human status of new peoples was judged,
David Abulafia has observed (with characteristic brilliance) that any deviation from accepted norms of “civilized” existence could be taken as proof that superficially manlike beings were actually “inhuman” creatures who lacked the soul that was possessed even by such hated heretics as Jews and Muslims. Judged against such criteria, any new cultures were always going to have difficulty coming off well. Indeed, it was nigh on impossible for any aboriginal person to convince a Renaissance explorer of his humanity unless he appeared dressed in the latest European fashion, speaking flawless Latin from the threshold of his stone-built town house.

Although
Boccaccio seems to have been comparatively ahead of his time in attempting to present the Canary Islanders as the inhabitants of some sort of pastoral idyll, untouched by the sins of Italian city life, the general Renaissance attitude toward the peoples of the Atlantic was—unsurprisingly—overwhelmingly negative. Both eyewitness testimonies and secondhand accounts seemed to go out of their way to stress the unchristian barbarity and subhuman savagery of the aboriginals of the Atlantic world. Taking an uncharacteristic swipe at his friend Boccaccio, Petrarch wasted few words in dismissing the Canary Islanders as scarcely worth the consideration of Christian believers. Though noting that they were, in some senses, exemplars of a certain version of the
vita solitaria
he wished to praise, Petrarch observed that the inhabitants of the “Fortunate Isles”

are without refinement in their habits and so little unlike brute beasts that their action is more the outcome of natural instinct than of rational choice, and you might say that they did not so much lead the solitary life as roam about in solitudes either with wild beasts or with their flocks.

It was hardly a ringing endorsement of even the most limited sense of “humanity,” but it was still an awful lot more positive than the statements that were shortly to follow. Only two years before Lippi completed the
Barbadori Altarpiece
, that is, in 1436, King Duarte of Portugal wrote to Eugenius IV in an attempt to persuade the pope to give him exclusive rights to own the Canary Islands, and, in doing so, endeavored to justify the total enslavement of their inhabitants by making
their bestial savagery all too plain.
If their complete ignorance of the most basic norms of civilized existence (metalworking, boatbuilding, writing) were not sufficient to highlight their distance from the Christian understanding of human nature, Duarte contended they were “nearly wild men” who lacked all understanding of law and lived “in the country like wild animals.”

But worse was yet to come. Although less openly abusive than Duarte’s letter to Eugenius IV,
Amerigo Vespucci’s narrative of his first voyage to the Americas contained a description of an aboriginal people that was, if anything, even more scathing in its implications. Every last point upon which their claim to “humanity” could be based was demolished with breezy insouciance:

They observe most barbarous customs in their eating: indeed, they do not take their meals at any fixed hours, but eat when- ever they are so inclined, whether it be day or night. At meals they recline on the ground and do not use either tablecloths or napkins, being entirely unacquainted with linen and other kinds of cloth. The food is served in earthen pots which they make themselves, or else in receptacles made out of half-gourds … In their sexual intercourse, they have no legal obligations. In fact, each man has as many wives as he covets, and he can repudiate them later whenever he pleases, without it being considered an injustice or disgrace, and the women enjoy the same rights as the men. The men are not very jealous; they are, however, very sensual. The women are even more so than the men. I have deemed it best (in the name of decency) to pass over in silence their many arts to gratify their insatiable lust.

Irregular eating hours, the absence of table linen, gender equality, and free love may not seem like the be-all and end-all of human nature today, but for a man of Vespucci’s Florentine upbringing they were sure signs of savage, even frightening bestiality, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that he may have woven in a few prejudices applied to other peoples (the echo of criticisms of Islamic polygamy is, for example, a tempting case in point) just to make his point all the clearer. But even if this were not enough, Vespucci felt it necessary to stress the total
inhumanity of the
Native Americans he encountered by adding a brief description of their religious—or, rather, irreligious—habits:

No one of this race, as far as we saw, observed any religious law. They can not justly be called either
Jews or Muslims; nay, they are far worse than the gentiles themselves or the pagans, for we could not discover that they performed any sacrifices, nor that they had any special places or houses of worship. Since their life is so entirely given over to pleasure, I should style it Epicurean.

Vespucci could hardly have been more damning if he tried. In the eyes of his Florentine contemporaries, such pleasure-loving aboriginals were infinitely more abhorrent than Jews or Muslims. A people without religion barely deserved to be called human.

Even had the Atlantic world had any real monetary interest for the cities of northern Italy before the late sixteenth century, such attitudes ensured that artists like Filippo Lippi would never really have any interest in depicting Canary Islanders or Native Americans in their works. Lacking any semblance of culture, apparently despising the norms of civilized existence, and seemingly contemptuous of any form of religion, these peoples were scarcely recognizable as men and were hence, as Lippi and his contemporaries suspected, beneath the attention of any self-respecting Renaissance artist. In contrast to Jews, Muslims, and
black Africans—all of whom were thought to have at least some underlying humanity worth exploiting, irrespective of the ghastly prejudices to which they were subject—the Atlantic peoples and their lands were simply not thought worthy of artistic attention. Their invisibility was the most damning form of condemnation and bigotry that could have been imagined, and, perversely, an eloquent statement of the attitudes that not only allowed the New World to be pillaged with such impunity by “civilized” Europeans in the coming years, but that also permitted its peoples to be enslaved, brutalized, and slaughtered with such wanton abandon for centuries to come.

Disdain for epoch-making discoveries that were gathering pace during the fifteenth century may not have been unusual, but it was neverthe-
less a revealing testimony to the true manner in which many Renaissance Italians perceived their relationship with the broadening horizons of the Atlantic world. Far from being the centerpiece of a new age of openness, filled with intellectual curiosity and learning that provided the stimulus for an unparalleled sense of self-reflection and self-discovery, the voyages of discovery were the opportunity for some of the worst sentiments imaginable. Minds were closed, the bounds of humanity were fenced in ever more tightly, and entire peoples were written off as unworthy of inclusion in the human race; and all the while, explorers were hailed as heroes and their horrific excesses glossed over in the most deadening artistic silence of all time.

But what is so remarkable is that the fate of the Atlantic peoples was merely the most extreme and breathtakingly underappreciated example of a broader trend in the history of the ugly Renaissance. It was an age not of tolerance and understanding but of exploitation and rapine. In the space of only a few brief years in Florence alone—the epicenter of the staggering cultural innovations that have come to cloak the period as a whole with such an aura of brilliance—
Salomone di Bonaventura experienced the first worrying signs of violent
anti-Semitism,
Alberto da Sarteano ushered in some of the earliest witnesses to the oppression of sub-Saharan Africa, and Filippo Lippi himself embraced the tide of Islamophobia while nodding quietly at the dispatch of the Atlantic. It may have been an age of unparalleled cultural encounters, but as far as artists like Lippi were concerned, everyone was fair game, and no people could ever expect more in return for their sufferings than the most patronizing of nods in the corner of a painting. Far from highlighting the glory of a period habitually celebrated for its “modernity,” the art of men like Filippo Lippi concealed a Renaissance that was, if anything, beyond merely ugly.

Epilogue

T
HE
W
INDOW AND THE
M
IRROR

O
F ALL
L
EON
Battista
Alberti’s many and varied achievements, his most important and enduring contribution to the Renaissance was his contention that the ideal painting should be so vivid a representation of reality that when fixed to a wall, it could be mistaken for an
“open window” (
finestra aperta
). The painter’s skill, he believed, lay in persuading the viewer that what he was looking at was, in fact, not a picture but the world itself.

The ultimate refinement of Alberti’s preoccupation with
perspective, this idea was the foundation on which the edifice of Renaissance art was erected. It was the
illusionistic effects of linear perspective—extolled so highly in Alberti’s
De pictura
—that permitted the art of the Renaissance not only to imitate the perceived perfection of classical statuary but also to imitate nature itself. And it was this unprecedented combination of breathtaking classicism and staggering
naturalism that endowed Renaissance art with the aura of sublime beauty for which it has become famed.

By virtue of its impact on the visual arts, Alberti’s image of the painting as a
finestra aperta
has also come to play an important role in the way that the period as a whole has come to be viewed. When one is confronted with any of the great artworks of the age—from the anonymous
Ideal City
and
Piero della Francesca’s
Flagellation of Christ
to
Michelangelo’s
Doni Tondo
and
Leonardo da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa
—it is all too easy to be seduced into thinking that one is, in fact, looking at a window onto the Renaissance as it really was, and to regard the lives of men like Alberti with the admiring awe that such paintings inspire.

But what was really important about Alberti’s idea of the “open window” was that it was an illusion. Although a skillful artist could delude the viewer into thinking that a painting was a window onto reality, the
painting always remained just a painting. It showed the world not as it was but as the artist and his patron wished it to be. It was a fantasy.

That Alberti’s perfect artist was an illusionist par excellence, however, is not to say that the visual arts do not provide a window onto the Renaissance. Quite the reverse. If we look behind the facade of beauty, the social world on which the artist’s imagination fed shines through in the circumstances of composition, in the attitudes embodied in the scene, and in incidental details that are included (or omitted). And it is in this that the true character of the Renaissance becomes clear. Far from being an age of unalloyed wonder, it was a period of sex, scandal, and suffering. Its cities were filled with depravity and inequality, its streets pullulated with prostitutes and perverted priests, and its houses played home to seduction, sickness, shady backroom deals, and conspiracies of every variety. Bending artists to their will, its foremost patrons were corrupt bankers yearning for power, murderous mercenary generals teetering on the edge of sanity, and irreligious popes hankering after money and influence. And it was an age in which other peoples and cultures were mercilessly raped, while anti-Semitism and Islamophobia reached fever pitch, and ever more insidious forms of bigotry and prejudice were developed to accommodate the discovery of new lands. If Alberti’s window looks onto the Renaissance, it looks onto a very ugly Renaissance indeed.

Although at some considerable remove from familiar perceptions of the period, this is not an indictment of the Renaissance. Nor does it mean that the artistic and literary accomplishments of men like Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, Petrarch, and Boccaccio should be downplayed. Far from it. By understanding the true awfulness of the social life of the Renaissance, we can appreciate its achievements all the more. While not everything about the Renaissance may be praiseworthy, or even particularly pleasant, it is far more impressive that artists and litterateurs should have created works that can still be admired for their brilliance and beauty, despite their having lived in an age of ghastliness, suffering, bigotry, and intolerance. Indeed, this only seems to lend an even greater sense of excitement and exhilaration to the Renaissance as a whole. Had the period’s cultural actors been living gods inhabiting a heavenly land, their quest for the sublime would seem neither surprising nor particularly impressive. When the ugliness of the period is brought to light, it seems all the more inspiring that men and women
should have aspired to the perfect and the ideal, and dreamed of creating something better and more radiant than anything they had ever experienced. To put this rather differently, it is more impressive that a man lying in the gutter should reach for the stars than that a god atop Olympus should shape cherubs from clouds.