The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (review)

The Renaissance Bazaar sets out to explode "the myth of the European Renaissance" (4) by tracing the initiative for it back to the Eastern, Islamic rather than the Western, Christian Mediterranean world. The argument is twofold. First, the originality and value of many traditionally regarded monuments of Renaissance culture are questioned, on the grounds that they were attained not by objective interest in abstract principles of "science," "beauty," or "truth" but by the self-interest of their creators. Second, it is argued that these achievements were in any case anticipated in the marketplaces, courts, and salons of the Islamic East. Following Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, the author's earlier collaboration with Lisa Jardine, this book seeks to redefine the Renaissance as a movement catalyzed by economic and cultural contacts with Islam, the product of a time "when eastern and western societies vigorously traded art, ideas, and luxury goods in a competitive but amicable exchange" (1).

Recently reissued in paperback, Renaissance Bazaar is beautifully designed and illustrated. It seems aimed at a general audience and, in particular, for the use of students. The title is somewhat misleading. Less than half the book treats the subject of Christian-Muslim commerce. The remainder rehearses some well-known revisionist accounts of Renaissance history and culture, some of them by now decades old though presented here (without benefit of notes) as revolutionary and explosive: the Italian humanists were not seekers of truth but self-promoting careerists; artists and poets alike worked as commercial contractors in pursuit of patronage and pay; the researches of natural philosophers were often socially conditioned if not politically directed; princes and states exploited the arts, along with the religious fervor and patriotic sentiment of their subjects, to their own advantage.

So far, so good. The Renaissance was not all that Burckhardt claimed, and this is a lesson that bears repeating. But Renaissance Bazaar would make an unfortunate choice for a textbook. It is littered with errors. To cite a small selection: Constantinople did not fall to the Turks on 28 May 1453 (49). Printing did not arrive in Rome in 1465 (78). Lorenzo de' Medici was not Cosimo's son (102). It is doubtful that any medieval cartographer marked "uncharted waters" as terra incognita (158); Istanbul means neither "throne" nor "capital" in Turkish (51); the inscription in Costanzo da Ferrara's Seated Scribe is not Arabic but Persian (137). Federico da Montefeltro rather famously refused to "invest heavily" in printed books (77); Copernicus spent little if any time "gazing at the stars through scientific instruments of his own invention" (187).

And yet errors are not the crucial point. At issue is a more fundamental question about the role of value judgments in the writing of history. Accusing his readers of a naïvely worshipful attitude toward the Renaissance (the period which "is supposed to be the origin of all civilized life" [17]), the author proceeds through a joyless exposé of its sordid underpinnings, subtracting points as he goes. We learn that most homegrown features of the Renaissance as we know it were tainted by the "ethically dubious" (193), "sinister" (117), "ignominious" (182), "ruthless" (102), and "ambivalent" motives of their creators (89, 91, and 95); indeed, "the price of many of the great achievements of the period was misery, persecution, and death" (182).

Still, there is plenty left to admire about the Renaissance, most of which, Brotton argues, is owed to the cultures of the Islamic East. A constant stream of material goods and technical skills imported from the Muslim world was what underpinned the genuine achievements of the age. The argument here rests on a slender base of evidence: the medieval translation of Arabic scientific works (hardly a Renaissance phenomenon); the journeys of less than a dozen Quattrocento artists and humanists to the Ottoman Porte; the proliferation of Islamic artifacts...