Authors: Eric Weiner
Horrible times, yes, but what does this have to do with the Renaissance?
Quite a lot. A mere two generations after the Black Death, as the outbreak of 1348 is now known, the Renaissance blossomed in Florence. These two facts are more than coincidence.
The plague, devastating as it was, shook up the established order. Social status was instantly shuffled. Doors previously closed were suddenly open because the person on the other side of the door was now dead. The plague produced one of the essential ingredients for a golden age: instability.
Once again, money rears its shiny head. The plague also created an “inheritance effect.” With more than half the population suddenly gone, the city’s money was now in fewer hands. People had to do something with that surplus cash. But what? Merchants were understandably reluctant to invest in new ventures. What they did, for reasons that remain something of a mystery, is invest in culture. Suddenly, great art and rare books became “the magic password which admitted a man or a nation to the elite group,” writes economic historian Robert Lopez. Culture was now the safe bet. The equivalent of putting your money into treasury notes.
Patrons and artists responded to this new reality by commissioning and creating art that centuries later still takes our breath away. Meanwhile, the Church, unable to prevent the spread of the disease, lost much of its moral legitimacy, creating space for the more secular-minded Humanists to fill. None of which would have happened without the Black Death. Nor would the Athenian golden age have happened had the Persians not first sacked Athens, burning it to the ground, and clearing the way for Pericles’s ambitious rebuilding. It is the law of unintended consequences on a grand scale.
The Medicis knew well how to exploit unexpected opportunities. They were skilled and prolific traders of every good imaginable—silk from China, spices from Africa. What they prized most, however, were the ancient manuscripts from Greece and Alexandria. Does the discovery of these lost classics help explain the genius that was Florence?
Places of genius always welcome new information, new ideas.
Florence, though, wasn’t the only Italian city-state with access to this information. Others had it, too, yet it didn’t inspire them the way it did the Florentines. Why? What did the Florentines see in these yellowed, crumbing scrolls that others did not?
To find answers, I decide to visit the source: the great Laurentian Library built for—who else?—the Medicis.
Designed by Michelangelo, it was, like most of his projects, a headache for all involved. With only one wall completed, he decamped to Rome, leaving it to his underlings to supervise the construction. Yet the building, replete with “boldness and grace,” as Vasari put it, is pure Michelangelo.
“It is madness. Nonsense. Art historians go crazy with this,” says the wild-eyed art historian Sheila Barker, who is waiting for me at the entrance.
“Good crazy or bad crazy?” I ask.
“Both.”
Sheila is, in appearance if not disposition, the exact opposite of Eugene: clothing properly pressed, hair strictly contained, advanced degrees efficiently obtained. I found her through a company called Context Travel, one of a handful of firms in Italy that promises a porthole to that foreign country known as the past.
Like Eugene, Sheila is a history nut, more comfortable in the past than in the present. The morning we meet, she’s brimming with excitement. The day before, while rummaging through some archives, she discovered a letter from Galileo. No other human being—besides the man himself and the recipient, a friend—had ever laid eyes on it.
Ever.
The letter was nothing extraordinary—Galileo’s telescope was broken, he informed his friend, so he couldn’t work that day—but that didn’t diminish the electric jolt of joy that had shot through Sheila when she’d stumbled across it. In fact, the ordinariness of the letter, its quotidian content, had rendered its discovery that much more precious. “If I live to be ninety-nine, I’ll never forget finding that letter,” she says, and I do not doubt her.
We step inside the library, and for a moment I think we’re in the wrong place. This looks more like a church. Then I spot the books, floppy manuscripts chained to rows of pews, just as they were in Michelangelo’s day.
Today, plenty of us adore books. We give them pride of place in our homes. We consider our books precious, but should we lose one or mistakenly lend one to an unreliable friend, we can always replace it or download it again to our Kindle. That wasn’t the case in the fifteenth century. Each book was one of a kind, hand-copied by bleary-eyed monks.
“How many cars do you own?” Sheila asks.
“What? What does that have to do with—”
“How many cars do you own?”
“One. Barely.”
“Well, in the fifteenth century a book cost as much as a car does today, in relative terms. So you can imagine what it meant to have a library, a collection of, say, one hundred books. It was like owning one hundred cars today. When someone in the Renaissance had a hundred books, they became known as a scholar.”
“Just by owning the books?”
“Just by virtue of owning the books. Because to acquire them, to make that decision of ‘Which one should I acquire next?,’ you had to know something about the value.”
Now I understand why the books were chained. The Humanists believed they contained nothing less than the secret of life, and the arrival of a new manuscript was greeted with the same enthusiasm that we extend to the arrival of the latest version of the iPhone.
Cosimo de’ Medici was, if not the world’s first book collector, certainly the most ambitious. He modeled his library after the Vatican Library, and when it came to expanding his collection he stopped at nothing. Why go to such trouble and expense?
Sheila answers that question by handing me a sheaf of paper. It’s not thick, perhaps five or six sheets. Yet these pages changed the world. It is called
The Oration on the Dignity of Man.
This one document, more than anything else, articulates the underlying idea that drove the Renaissance. It was the era’s manifesto.
Written by the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, the
Oration
begins tamely enough. Pico lays out the hierarchy of living creatures. God is at the top, followed by angels. Animals and plants are at the bottom. Angels,
being so close to God, have primo access. Pigs and earthworms? Not so much. As for man, Pico continues, God gave him no assigned seat. Theologically speaking, man finds himself in a Southwest Airlines situation: a free-for-all that might result in extra legroom—or the dreaded middle seat.
“Man can either sink to great depths or rise to great heights,” says Sheila, channeling Pico. “When he becomes evil, he’s really, really evil. But when he becomes magnified in his greatness and in his knowledge and in his purity, he becomes better than the angels and—this is the dangerous part of the text—he can become godlike. Like God.”
“I could be mistaken, but isn’t that a sacrilege?”
“Yes, it is. This should be burning in your hands.”
“Actually, it does feel a bit hot.”
Ignoring my lame joke, Sheila continues, “Florence was able to say, ‘Now, you know, the son has surpassed the father. We are now taking the place of Rome. We have the power to direct the world, to influence the world, to be the guiding light.’ ”
Heady stuff. None of which would have come to fruition had the Florentines not seen the value in those musty old books from far away and then multiplied that value.
We’re about to leave the library, but something has been nagging at me, something that doesn’t quite seem right. The Italians were so innovative, and in so many ways, but not when it came to technology. Sure, they brought us the parachute and increasingly sophisticated means of navigation, but the breakthrough technology of the day, the movable-type printing press, was invented by a German blacksmith, not a Florentine. Why?
The Florentines didn’t care for technology for technology’s sake, any more than the Athenians did. They saw technology as more ephemeral than art, and therefore less valuable. Any invention, however ingenious, can always be supplanted by something newer and better. The 2.0 version.
I suggest to Sheila—and here I realize I am engaging in my own heresy—that the same might be true of art. Perhaps, I suggest delicately, someone might come along with a newer and better
David. David 2.0.
“That’s not possible,” retorts Sheila, not angrily but, rather, with
the same tone of voice one uses when addressing a fifth grader who just doesn’t get it. “Never in the history of art have we seen anything like the
David
. It was the most perfect expression of what it is supposed to be. The Florentines immediately recognized this. They knew that the
David
was the first work of art that had surpassed the ancients, and they saw the ancients as the apex. No, there will never be another
David.
”
Maybe that is the best definition of a work of genius: something that renders silly and futile any thought of an upgrade.
Sufficiently chastised, I switch topics and ask Sheila the time-travel question. If she could travel back to Renaissance times, for one hour, whom would she want to meet? She bites her lip, a sign, I’ve learned, that she’s thinking.
“Not Michelangelo,” she says definitively. Brilliant artist but too crotchety. “Maybe Lorenzo.” I can see in her eyes that she has departed for the fifteenth century. “I wouldn’t turn down Lorenzo. Lorenzo was the dude.”
No, I’m about to say, Socrates was the Dude, but Sheila has already moved on.
“I’ve got it! Georgius Gemistus.”
“Who?”
Georgius Gemistus was a Greek scholar who, at the invitation of the Medicis, traveled to Florence. The Byzantine Empire was crumbling, and suddenly a lot of Greek scholars were out of work (much like today, come to think of it). The Medicis lured the best of them to Florence, in yet another opportunistic move.
They didn’t get any better than Gemistus. A bearded, colorful character, he called himself the new Plato. He was, in Sheila’s mind, a full-blown expression of the Renaissance notion of pursuing truth at all costs. He did crazy, reckless things. He crashed a meeting of Church leaders and lectured them on the virtues of Plato. Not exactly prudent, but that is precisely what Sheila admires about him.
“He had a kind of fearlessness,” she says, further confirmation that risk, more than money, is what was honored at the time. Not so for us, says Sheila. “These days, you don’t have risk. Not real risk. You can always
file for bankruptcy and start over. Social institutions protect us. In Renaissance Florence, there was nothing,
nothing.
You could starve to death if you failed. You destroyed yourself, you destroyed your family for generations.”
“That doesn’t sound so appealing. But what if you succeeded?”
“If you succeeded, your success was said to be legendary. And the ambition was not just to get rich or be happy for one day. The goal was eternal glory, to be in the books with Julius Caesar, with Cicero. With Plato. The Medicis were shooting for eternal glory, in proportions we can’t even imagine.”
Silently, I wonder what we are shooting for. What do we consider the ultimate manifestation of the human spirit? What would we risk it all for?
As Sheila and I step out of the Laurentian Library and onto the rain-splattered piazza, I am saddened by the answer that springs to mind: the IPO. Surely, I think, reaching for my umbrella, we can do better than that.
One day, toward the end of my stay in Florence, Eugene and I are wandering the halls of yet another museum when I’m overcome with a sort of Renaissance vertigo. So much art, so much
good
art. It’s too much.
I’m not worthy.
I feel dizzy.
Breathe, says Eugene, sounding more like a yoga instructor than an art historian. I breathe, and the world rights itself.
A while later, we’re admiring one more
David
, or perhaps a
Madonna
, I can’t recall, when Eugene mentions, almost as an aside, “the lingering presence of these people.” He’s right. They do linger. The ghosts of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Botticelli and all the rest hang in the air, like San Francisco fog. You’d think it would have burned off by now, five hundred years later, but it hasn’t. The half-life of true genius is inexhaustible.
I wonder what it’s like for today’s artists of Florence. Do they suffer the same fate as the modern philosophers of Athens? Does all this beauty, all this genius, inspire—or intimidate?
A few days later, I have a chance to ask them myself. I’ve been invited to a dinner party, and the guests, all artists, have spent years living in
Florence. When I arrive, everyone is already lounging in the small living room, sipping Prosecco, nibbling on antipasti, and in general enjoying enjoying. I mention the tourist season and everyone stiffens, as if they were deer and I had mentioned hunting season. “It’s an invasion,” says one woman. Everyone nods in silent agreement. More Prosecco is poured.
“So,” I say, treading carefully, “what’s it like being an artist in Florence?”
“The past,” says another woman, “it is like a weight on our shoulders,” and as she says this, her shoulders visibly slump. Everyone nods again. Someone bemoans the lack of a single modern art museum in Florence. More nodding. More Prosecco.
“I do not like Michelangelo,” says a gray-haired architect, elongating his words, savoring the delicious blasphemy that only a native Florentine could get away with, just as only a Greek philosopher can declare his contempt for Plato.
The consensus is clear. It’s no easier being an artist in modern Florence than it is a philosopher in modern Athens. The past can educate and inspire. It can also imprison.
A few days later, I’m talking to a young creative type named Felix. We’re walking down via Bergossi. It’s a brilliant day. The Tuscan sun has finally come out of hiding, and the light is glistening off the Arno. With a sweep of his hand, Felix takes in the tableau and asks, “What do you see?”
“Well, I see some nice architecture, and the Ponte Vecchio and—”