The Italian Renaissance in Australia

The Italian Renaissance in Australia Lost in Europe's crimson dreams we're queueing at the sacred sights, drifting past the Tintorettos, testing a different red each night. The metaphors recycle nicely from Hebrew and the Ancient Greek. Back home the honeyant 's hill; the rainbow snake defines a creek.1 Italian Renaissance studies have, over the past thirty years, become well established in the older Australian universities. Courses are offered and research papers and monographs published across the country in Departments of History, Fine Arts, Italian, Music, Classics, Architecture and European Studies, and Australia has become an internationally recognised centre of Florentine Renaissance studies. A recent review of Renaissance historiography refers to the 'combined North American-British-Australian effort' that has reconstructed the history of Florence.2 For the most part, the exponents of the discipline, hired in the 1960s and 1970s, received then training in North America and Britain, but in recent years they have gone on to produce their o w n postgraduate students. The prospects for these students, and indeed for the discipline, appear less rosy in the present days of economic rationalism, the demand for relevance—often a very narrowly 1 Geoff Page, 'Renaissance Red', Human Interest, Melbourne, 1994, p. 51. Edward Muir, 'The Italian Renaissance in America', American Historical Review 100.4 (1995), p. 1112. For a discussion of some Australian studies on Renaissance Italy, see R. J. B. Bosworth, 'Italian History and Australian Universities', Risorgimento (1983), 197-209. P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 224 R. L. Pesman conceived relevance—the 'downsizing' of the humanities, and an emphasis on national and regional identity. While the development of a professional interest in the history of Renaissance Italy is much slighter and more recent in Australia than in North America, the beginnings did predate the expansion of tertiary education in Australia in the 1960s. James Bruce, Australian born but Oxford educated, offered courses at the University of Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s.3 It was Bruce who first aroused in M a x Crawford his passion for Florence and the Renaissance. Crawford went on to make the Renaissance a central focus of historical studies at the University of Melbourne. H e was later to reminisce on hisfirstencounter with Florence: The rain continued, and I was weary for lack of sleep: but I felt no disappointment—only an exhilaration that I have rarely felt in the presence of historical remains. Perhaps it was that even then I knew more about the history of Florence than I knew of any other city, and the sense of the past was more easily roused. But I believe that it was the sheer beauty of it—simple, austere, even in its colour subdued by torrential rain.4 Another student of Bruce, writer and historian Marjorie Barnard, informed a meeting of the Dante Aleghieri Society in Sydney on her return from Europe in 1933 that Florence has retained the narrow, passionate aspiration of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is probably the best known of all historical periods and this makes Florence seem familiar. The streets are sown with names all the world knows.5 Florence had, in fact, long been familiarterritorytoeducated colonists, and interest in Renaissance culture can be traced back to the early days of white settlement. The European civilisation that was brought to Australia was primarily British, but British civilisation was never exclusively British. It was a product of Western Christendom and of Western civilisation. Part of that tradition stemmed from the Italian peninsula, and the foundation of white 3 On Bruce, see B. H. Fletcher, 'G. A. Wood and J. F. Bruce 1891-1930', in His at Sydney. Centenary Reflections, ed. B. Caine, B. Fletcher, M. Miller, R. Pesman, D. Schreuder, Sydney, 1992, pp. 22-26. 4 R. M. Crawford, 'Paradise of Exiles', in Quaderni dell'Instituto di Cultura 4, Melbourne, 1971, p. 22. 5 Italian Bulletin of Commerce, December 1933. The Italian Renaissance in Australia 225 settlement in Australia coincided with the second great wave of Italomania in Britain. Thus the British culture which was transmitted to the colonies included Italian cultural texts, images and traditions.6 The intention in...