An Art Lover's Guide to Florence

1. Historical Background

Chapter 1 hISTOrICaL BaCkGrOuNd a TImE OF TurmOIL T he background against which the achievements of the Italian renaissance in general, and the Florentine renaissance in particular, took place is neither simple nor terribly attractive. We confront an endless series of broken treaties and treacheries, savage pillaging and pointless battles that settled nothing, murders, massacres, assassinations, plots and counterplots, lies, deceits, and political double-dealing on a scale that leaves the modern reader’s head spinning. And not just the modern reader. The perpetual discord and disunity of Italy in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and the perpetual vulnerability of Florence were also the despair of those who lived through the times. Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the first half of the 1300s, resounds with the author’s rage and frustration at the political conditions and circumstances that led to his lifelong exile from Florence. The two greatest historians of the era, Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolò Machiavelli, both complained about the problem. Guicciardini begins his History of Italy, written in the 1530s, with a bitter acknowledgment of “those events, which have occurred in Italy within our memory, ever since French troops, summoned by our own princes, began to stir up very great dissentions here.” Machiavelli, who wrote his History of Florence in the 1520s, ends his work on this dark note: “soon after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici [in 1492], those evil plants began to germinate, which in a little time ruined Italy, and continue to keep her in desolation.” In the final portion of his most famous work, The Prince, Machiavelli also laments Italy’s disunity, discusses the failings of previous rulers, and concludes by suggesting 10 aN arT LOVEr’S GuIdE TO FLOrENCE that Lorenzo de’ Medici, the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose death Machiavelli had mourned in his History, has the power and strength to restore Italy’s pride, but this hope proved futile. Why was Italian unity so elusive? An obvious reason is geography—Italy is a “porous” peninsula. Its boot-shaped protuberance into the Mediterranean sea offers eight thousand miles of coastline pocked with hundreds of harbors both large and small, and even the Alps that bind the peninsula to the north are full of passes, many of them in use since ancient roman times. As a result, invasions have been a part of Italian history since its beginnings; the nineteenth-century english historian Thomas Hodgkin’s study, Italy and Her Invaders, runs to eight thick volumes. This vulnerability was compounded by internal geography as well. The Appenine mountain range, running nearly the entire length of the peninsula, divides the eastern and western sides of Italy from each other, and many smaller ranges also made long-distance travel difficult. A lack of navigable rivers complicated the development of trade routes and communications and encouraged the growth of numerous mutually incomprehensible local dialects. The result of all this is what Italians call campanilismo—a narrow attachment to the small region within the sound of one’s own church bell and a corresponding indifference or hostility toward happenings and people elsewhere. Another barrier to unity was created by profound differences that developed between the northern and southern parts of the peninsula. During the medieval centuries, cities such as Naples, salerno, and Palermo had been commercially successful as well as brilliant cultural centers, but through conquest they became part of the empires of France and spain. Both conquerors exploited and impoverished sicily and southern Italy without improving either region. A further advantage for the northern part of Italy was its proximity to the rich markets of northern europe—France, england, the Netherlands, and Germany. The north, and Florence in particular, pulled ahead economically and culturally in the 1300s, and the south never caught up. Italy had a further, unique, problem: territories controlled by the papacy extended like a broad belt across the peninsula, and the popes saw no advantage to themselves in a united Italy. As popes functioned like secular rulers in those centuries and contested with emperors over whose authority was supreme, Italy’s various city-states, communes, and principalities lined up on one side or the other, wherever they felt their own best interests lay. Those who supported the Church were known as Guelphs, those who favored the emper- Historical Background 11 ors were called Ghibellines, and such allegiances were taken dead seriously. Italian cities fought each other, and towns were...