Plague and Pleasure: The Renaissance World of Pius II by Arthur White (review)

This admirable book exemplifies what the author calls a “metanarrative” (p. xvi): an extensive and consistent theme—here an interpretation of Italian cultural life from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries—reinforced by a “sample” (p. xvii) to illustrate the thesis in depth. The sample in this case is yet another biographical study of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, that prolific, self-promoting, minor Sienese nobleman who served briefly as Pope Pius II (1458–64). With an acknowledgment to Johann Huizinga for his famous study of tormented northern mentalities, White fits Pius into an equivalent southern picture—a fearful, pessimistic world of sudden deaths from war and pestilence (he provides at the end of the book a list of plague-infected locations year by year, 1347–1691)—characterized culturally by varieties of escapism and fantasy building. Thus, for White, the so-called Italian Renaissance was the typical outcome, with its aspirations to imitate the values and attainments of Greek and Roman antiquity; it was the thirteenth century that contained the seeds of progress in Western civilization.

Pius is a good choice because he devoted himself to seeking his own immortal fame, whether as poet, international statesman, Christian leader, or martyr, and wrote so much about himself and his times. His vainglorious illusions included the project, partly realized, of rebuilding his birthplace, Corsignano, as a showpiece of Renaissance architecture renamed Pienza, although White leaves the reader uncertain whether this was merely the upgrading of a “hardscrabble . . . village” (p. 48) or an experiment in utopian urban planning. In any case he presents it as illustrating another typical Renaissance motive: the urge to retreat into seclusion from a horribly dangerous world, as a prince into his studiolo or a penitent into his or her frugal cell (such as Catherine of Siena, whom Pius canonized). White recounts Pius’s life story skillfully, making use of the abundant printed source material and secondary literature. He is good at clarifying the complex politics of Italy in Pius’s time and judges that the pope made a fatal mistake by abandoning the French or Angevin claim to the throne of Naples (Pius made no secret of his rather unapostolic loathing of the French, nor indeed his detestation of the Venetians). It does not seem that Pius dwelt excessively on the horrors of plague and war, although he describes how he once thought he had found a plague boil on his own body; in fact, he glorified war if it was in the interests of the Church, suffering remorse for his slowness and limited success in launching Holy War against the Turks (he ended by dying from chronic illness and exhaustion at Ancona, still believing that his crusade was going ahead).

Some readers fascinated by Pius might find it irksome that he is sometimes lost to view in this long book. There are whole chapters that hardly mention him, such as those expounding “Renaissance Chivalry,” “The Age of Spectacle,” and “Villas and Gardens”; he even plays little part in “Urban Dreams.” Some might also have preferred a map confined to central Italy so that more of the places visited by Pius could be shown and more precisely located. The copyeditor seems to have missed a few minor errors, such as the misspelling throughout of the name Rubinstein as Rubenstein and Pavia (p. 73) becoming Padua a few pages later (p. 76); the black-and-white illustrations also might have been clearer. But generally the production is exemplary, with full bibliography, index, and—above all—footnotes, the last being so rare to find these days, particularly in a book intended for a wide readership. White is justified in his wish, whether or not his overall argument is acceptable, to correct some of the conventional platitudes about the Renaissance and to have insisted that the true paths of human progress were already defined before the fourteenth century. One wonders if he...