Using Sandro Botticellis portrait of Giuliano de Medici

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Using Sandro Botticellis portrait of Giuliano
de Medici
HSTY2647 Renaissance Italy The Renaissance in
Florence
The End of the Renaissance?
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Relevant readings from your set texts

• John Jeffries Martin. The Renaissance Between
  Myth and History. The Renaissance. Italy and
  Abroad. Ed. John Jeffries Martin. Routledge,
  2003. 1-23.
• Lauro Martines. Power and Imagination.
  City-States in Renaissance Italy. Johns Hopkins
  UP, 1979. Reprinted 1988. Chapter XVI The End
  of the Renaissance.

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• This question of when the Renaissance ended can
  be dangerous it imposes a strict chronological
  hierarchy on history that doesnt exist. It is
  impossible to identify one single event that
  changed the Renaissance irrevocably, or one
  single year in which life took on a new style.
  What is more instructive is to look at what
  changes do take place, that seem to be leading us
  towards new ideas, new ways living, new ways of
  writing or painting, for example.
• Politically, Italy in the late fifteenth century
  and early sixteenth century is starting to move
  towards a courtly society. Art and architecture
  naturally change as a result of these political
  developments Martines or Charles Stinger even
  argue that the humanists are beginning to adopt a
  new focus in this period, tailoring their ideas
  to the elite. Its in this period that the idea
  of a Golden Age becomes popular in cities like
  Florence, Rome and Venice.
• Perhaps this glorification is designed to hide
  the harsh reality of what is going on in Italy in
  this period, however. The major cities in the
  Italian penisula are quite weak in this period
  the Church is threatened by the rise in
  Protestantism in the north of Europe
  economically, the major cities take a slump in
  this period socially, the gap between the elite
  and the rest of society is getting wider and
  wider. The entire penisula is constantly under
  threat of foreign invasion.

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• These kinds of realities are all encapsulated in
  one of the seminal events of this period the
  Sack of Rome in 1527. Foreign armies have been in
  Italy for the last thirty or so years. Charles
  VIII had entered Florence in 1494 in 1501
  Ferdinand of Aragon is invited by Louis XII of
  France to help conquer Naples two years later,
  Ferdinand is driven out by the Spanish, who
  consolidate their power in southern Italy. In
  1506, Pope Julius II begins an active campaign in
  Perugia and Bologna, in order to increase the
  size of the papal states. In 1508, with France,
  Spain and Germany, the pope organises the League
  of Cambrai, in direct opposition to Venice. So
  the major cities that we have considered are
  politically unstable and threatened in this
  period.
• None of this, however, is on a par with the Sack
  of Rome. Leo X, a Medici pope, spends his
  political time trying to tread a fine line
  between the French (in Milan) and the Spaniards
  (in Naples). Right before his death, however, he
  makes a league with Charles V, emperor-elect, in
  opposition to France. As a result of this, the
  French lose Milan in 1521. By 1525, Francis I of
  France is trying to recover Milan Clement VII
  (de Medici) is pope. In an effort to protect
  foreign powers from taking over all of Italy
  indiscriminately, Clement VII makes a league with
  the French and Venetians (the League of Cognac)
  against the Spaniards, in May 1526. The League is
  able to take back Cremona, but not to overcome
  the imperial troops. On May 6 1527, an unpaid
  horde of imperial soldiers marches on Rome,
  encouraged by protestant German soldiers (or
  Landsknecht). They break down the walls, enter
  the city, and put it to the sack. Clement VII is
  safe inside the fortress of Castel SantAngelo.
  He doesnt return to Rome until October 1528.
• The effect of these barbarian hordes on Rome
  and the idea of Rome has traditionally been
  considered a turning point. Aside from the
  physical havoc they wrought, the event struck a
  blow to the Roman consciousness and, by
  extension, to the rest of Italys powerful
  cities. It said that no one was immune not even
  the holy city of Peter, not the city that sat on
  the site of glorious Ancient Rome. In practice,
  the Sack also caused a diaspora, a dispersal of
  the major artists and humanists working in the
  court of Rome.

Above the Sack of Rome Below the re-building of
St Peters after the Sack, as drawn by Van
Heemskerk
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• In Art in Renaissance Italy, Paoletti and Radke
  argue that courtly society had to find particular
  answers to the kinds of insecurities reflected in
  an event like the Sack of Rome. The kinds of
  artistic answers that are turned to highlight
  concepts like stability peace harmony
  authority. The artistic solution to the real
  problems of instability on the penisula is to
  emphasise the opposite to create the kind of
  visual propaganda that Stinger argues the
  humanists in Rome were creating for the pope in
  their writing. So the mythical allusions of
  artists like Giorgione and Titian, the creation
  of a golden age, are very popular among Venetian
  nobles precisely at the time when their
  position is threatened by the League of Cambrai.
  (See Giorgiones Pastoral Concert 1508-09, for
  example above right.)
• The style of art is changing in this period, too
  a style that is known as Mannerism (from the
  Italian maniera, manner or style). Art
  historians are unable to agree whether artists
  such as Pontormo are deliberately trying to
  distance themselves from their predecessors (by
  moving away from that heavily classical style),
  or whether this kind of art represents a true
  aesthetic change an aesthetic choice.
• So whats different here? (Take Pontormos
  Deposition, c. 1528, for example below right.)
  
• Definitely the use of colour
• Proportion
• The realistic impulse or naturalistic
  depiction
  
• The shift in naturalistic depictions in
  Mannerism is often seen as a celebration of
  artifice again, theres a connection here with
  the court. The idea of appearance versus reality,
  and how these concepts interact. (Look at
  Parmigianinos Madonna of the Long Neck, c. 1534,
  for example below left.)

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• You can see here how historians and art
  historians alike are linking cultural
  developments, such as in art, to political
  developments. Martines does this quite explicitly
  in Power and Imagination he says the true
  innovations of the Renaissance arose from or in
  response to communal government, republican
  activity. With the foreign threats and the rise
  of the court, the political structures that had
  allowed such developments, Martines argues, fell
  and thus those innovations were changed into
  something else entirely.
• Inherent in these considerations are questions of
  individual taste (do you like fifteenth-century
  or sixteenth-century art better, for example?).
  Also part of the question When did the
  Renaissance end?, however, is the issue of what
  you see the Renaissance as being how you
  characterise its important developments and
  innovations. And once youve done that, you need
  to consider why you think they could take place
  in the time they did.
• Again, underpinning these considerations is the
  idea that the Renaissance is somehow the door to
  the modern era were back to Burckhardt, which
  is fitting, given the importance of his work on
  this topic. Are we looking for some kind of
  parallel to our own times and in looking for
  that, do we run the risk of historical
  anachronism? Does it help us at all to consider
  when the Renaissance ended is it perhaps more
  helpful to go back to the beginning and askhow
  did these developments come about, to begin with?

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• There is a danger in seeking to identify
  ourselves too much with the people of a
  completely different time and place. Louise de
  Ramée (known as Ouida, the daughter of an
  Englishwoman and Frenchman, who arrived in
  Florence in 1871) sees Florence and the
  Florentines thus
• The beauty of the past goes with you at every
  step in Florence. Buy eggs in the market, and you
  buy them where Donatello bought those which fell
  down in a broken heap before the wonder of the
  crucifix. Pause in a narrow street and it shall
  be that Borgo Allegri, which the people so
  baptised for the love of the old painter
  Cimabue and the new-born art. Stray into a
  great dark church at evening-time, where peasants
  tell their beads in the marble silence, and you
  are where the whole city flocked, weeping, at
  midnight, to look their last upon the dead face
  of their Michelangelo. Pace up the steps of the
  palace of the Signoria, and you tread the stone
  that felt the feet of Savonarola. Glance up
  to see the hour of the evening, and there, sombre
  and tragical, will loom above you the walls of
  the communal palace on which the traitors were
  painted by the brush of Sarto, and the tower of
  Giotto, fair and fresh in its perfect grace as
  though angels had built it in the night just
  past
• (In Francis King, A Literary Companion to
  Florence, Penguin, 1991 repr. 2001, 225-226.)
  
• The Renaissance lends itself quite easily to
  hyperbole. My hope is that this course has
  allowed you to penetrate behind some of those
  stereotypes and cliches, and to think how people
  in this period constructed their lives and their
  own identities.
• (Clockwise, from top right Brunelleschis
  crucifix (1412-3) Borgo Allegri, Florence
  Michelangelos self-portrait Fra Bartolommeos
  portrait of Girolamo Savonarola

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Giottos Belltower