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T O P I C 34
POWER AND CULTURE
IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
T
he period in Western history known as the Renaissance (1300–1550) saw a remarkable flowering of artistic and literary genius. It was accompanied by the rise of a
new world view that placed a concern for the human condition at the center of intellectual life. The Renaissance began in Italy, the product of its unique social and economic development. Renaissance culture, urban and increasingly secular, flourished in
a land that had largely escaped feudalism. Moreover, the rebirth of Classical values
was tied closely both to the long tradition of secular learning in Italy and to the memory of ancient Roman civilization, the physical remains of which were scattered
throughout the peninsula.
Born in the Italian cities of the 14th century, humanism was a literary movement
that stressed the study of Classical texts, new philosophical approaches inspired by
Platonic ideas, and the historical sciences. These humanist values gave rise to a new
kind of intellectual who participated actively in a political culture inspired by ancient
ideals. Humanists regarded themselves as active citizens of their city-states and immersed themselves in the material affairs of their urban settings; they were not ivory
tower intellectuals removed from the everyday world. Precisely because they were an
educated elite, they believed they had responsibilities to their fellow citizens. This spirit
of civic humanism was one of the outstanding characteristics of the Renaissance.
The visual arts played a central role in the public life of the city-states of
Renaissance Italy, where political power and culture were inextricably linked. The
princes of Florence and Milan, the aristocratic families of Venice, and the popes of
Rome all were active and enthusiastic patrons of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Political leaders recognized the powerful role that the arts could have in forging popular consensus behind authority and instilling civic pride in citizens.
Although Renaissance culture represented a community of shared values, standards, and ideals, the political experience of Italy was far less unified. Because the
peninsula was divided among several highly competitive and often warring states, it
fell prey to more powerful foreign states. In response to their political divisiveness,
Italians developed the concept of balance-of-power politics and the new art of diplomacy. By the 16th century, the Florentine writer Machiavelli drew on his Classical
training as well as on the bitter political events of his times to fashion a new vision of
power removed from the moral codes of Christianity and rooted directly in the gritty realities of everyday experience.
TOPIC 34
S
I G N I F I C A N T
D A T E S
Renaissance Italy
1311–1447
1454
1407–1457
1450–1494
1463–1494
1494
1433–1499
1484–1519
1434–1494
Viscontis rule Milan
Peace of Lodi
Life of Lorenzo Valla
Sforzas rule Milan
Life of Pico della Mirandola
Charles VIII invades Italy
Life of Marsilio Ficino
Francesco Gonzaga rules Mantua
Medici rule Florence
POLITICS, CLASS, AND CIVIC
IDENTITY: THE ITALIAN-CITY
STATES
The political and social development of Italian Renaissance
cities followed a similar pattern. The remarkable economic
expansion that had occurred in Medieval Italy had caused
the rise of northern and central Italian cities such as
Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Florence. The merchants and
bankers who controlled this commercial revival accumulated great wealth. By the 11th century, they allied themselves with the local nobles in the countryside in order to
secure independence from the bishops who ruled their
cities. The communes came into being as a result of the
oaths that the burghers and the nobles took to fight for their
common rights. Once independence from the bishops was
achieved, the communes took over the municipal governments, often creating new institutions, and soon came to
control the hinterland around the cities. On this basis the
city-states of the Renaissance eventually emerged.
FROM COMMUNES TO THE SIGNORIE
Political institutions in the cities reflected evolving social
arrangements. Many of the rural nobles, attracted to the
possibilities of wealth to be gained in trade or by marriage
to rich burghers, moved into the cities, forming a new kind
of urban nobility connected to the merchants through economic and family ties. This ruling elite strictly limited
power and the rights of citizenship in the communes to people like themselves, who owned property and enjoyed high
social status. Most of the inhabitants, including males of the
middle and lower classes and all women, were excluded
from holding office.
The members of the middle class, the popolo, particularly resented their second-class status. In the 13th century
these alienated groups organized violent seizures of power
and replaced communes with republican governments in
such important cities as Florence, Siena, and Genoa.
Power and Culture in Renaissance Italy
3
Republican institutions were popular both because of their
connection to Roman tradition and because they allowed
for access to power by new elites. Once in power the popolo
sought to exclude the working classes below them—the
popolo minuto, or little people—from power. As a result, the
republican governments never achieved popular consensus
and found it difficult to maintain public order. In the early
1300s, republican governments collapsed and were replaced
by one of two kinds of new regimes: either group rule by
wealthy merchants (oligarchies) or individual despotisms
(signorie).
THE STATES OF RENAISSANCE ITALY
By the opening of the 15th century, five major states had so
expanded their territorial base that they exercised virtual
hegemony over the Italian peninsula: Venice and Milan in
the north, Florence in north-central Italy, the Papal States
in the center, and the Kingdom of Naples in the south.
Venice, at the head of the Adriatic Sea, had dominated the
commercial revival of the High Middle Ages. Tremendous
wealth poured into the city from its galleys and its overseas
outposts. The Venetians had also conquered a mainland
empire in Italy in order to have steady access to food and to
protect themselves from the ambitious Milanese. Behind its
long-established republican institutions, some 200 of
Venice’s merchant nobles ruled one of the most powerful
states in Europe.
In Milan, the principal city of the region known as
Lombardy, the Visconti family had ruled as tyrants since
1322. In 1395 Gian Galeazzo Visconti (ruled 1395–1402)
transformed his rule into a hereditary duchy. By the time of
his death, his armies had overrun all of Lombardy and were
at the gates of Florence. In 1447, when the last of the
Visconti died, Francesco Sforza (ruled 1450–1466), a soldier
of fortune in the pay of the Milanese, turned against his
masters and conquered the city. The Sforza family governed
Milan with a strong hand and dominated the lesser cities of
northern Italy.
The republic of Florence had long been controlled by
representatives of the trade guilds, and from 1434 to 1492
the Medici, one of the most powerful and wealthy of the
guild families, controlled the city. The Medici, who first
made their money in banking, ruled behind the city’s republican façade for more than half a century, turning
Florence into a center of international power and cultural
brilliance. Cosimo de’ Medici (ruled 1434–1464), the great
patron of civic humanists and artists, was a cultivated man
of letters. On Cosimo’s death, his son Piero (ruled
1464–1469) assumed the position of de facto ruler of
Florence. Piero’s era was marked by continuing artistic
achievement and much political turmoil. He died after only
five years in power and was succeeded in turn by his son
Lorenzo de’ Medici (ruled 1469–1492). Known as Lorenzo
the Magnificent, he was the most distinguished of the
Medici rulers of Florence. In his youth he was tutored by the
humanist scholar Marsilio Ficino, who instilled in him a
great love for learning and poetry. He continued the family’s
PART VIII
The Contemporary Era
©Christie’s Images
4
Museo di Firenze Com’era/Scala/Art Resource
Painting of Venice. 18th century. The main building, center-right, is the Doges’ Palace, built 1345–1438, during the city’s first great commercial expansion. The open arches on the lower level and the pink stone used for the upper part give the huge building a sense of lightness. To
the left is visible the Basilica of St. Mark’s, with its tall bell-tower, and to the right the Palace is connected to the Prison of Venice by the
“Bridge of Sighs.”
Painting of Florence, c. 1490. The city is divided into two unequal parts by the river Arno and surrounded by a wall with watchtowers, most
of which was demolished in the 19th century. In the center of the left-hand section are the Duomo (Cathedral) and towered Palazzo Vecchio
(Old Palace), which is still the center of city government. The main building across the river is the Pitti Palace, residence of the Medici.
tradition of patronage for the scholars and artists who
worked in Florence during Cosimo’s day.
Lorenzo’s reign was challenged in 1478 when the socalled Pazzi Conspiracy erupted. This complicated plot was
fomented by the prominent Pazzi family, who resented
Medici rule. Lorenzo succeeded in foiling the conspiracy
and imposing an even more firm control on the city. The
last years of Lorenzo’s life were again marked by turmoil,
this time surrounding the career of the Dominican preacher
Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498). Savonarola in-
Power and Culture in Renaissance Italy
5
Ad
ig e
R iv e r
TOPIC 34
Milan
o
Venice
er
Riv
MANTUA
FERRARA
Tana
r
Turin
Parma
GENOA
MODENA
Lucca
Florence
A
Ti
be r
Ligurian
Sea
Bologna
R iv e r
SIENA
dr
ia
Corsica
ti
c
Se
a
Rome
Naples
Sardinia
Otranto
Ty r r h e n i a n
Sea
Palermo
Ionian
Sea
Sicily
(to 1458)
Duchy of Milan
Republic of Venice
0
100
200 Miles
Republic of Florence
Papal States
Kingdom of Naples
0
100
200 Kilometers
Map 34.1 Italy, c. 1450. Italy refers, of course, to a geographic area and not a political entity. It remained divided into separate states until the 19th century. The leading economic centers were Milan,
Venice, and Florence; Siena, soon to pass under Florentine control, had lost its commercial supremacy
at the time of the Black Death (1348). Rome had recently regained the prestige of housing the papacy
but had little in the way of commerce.
veighed against what he saw as the degeneration of life and
culture in Florence and gathered a large and enthusiastic
following, including some of the most talented artists of the
city. He wanted a restoration of the Florentine republic
based on Christian morality. In 1496 he staged a huge bonfire in the city in which gambling paraphernalia, cosmetics,
and other symbols of decadence were burned. Savonarola
eventually came into conflict with the papacy, which had
him executed for heresy.
The Papal States, stretching across the peninsula from
the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian seas, were ruled by the popes
from Rome. During the papal residency at Avignon, however,
several noble families had grown influential in Rome.
Moreover, in the course of the 14th century, secular lords had
achieved independence in Ferrara, Urbino, and other cities
of the Papal States. With the return of the pope to Rome in
1417, the papacy became increasingly more secular and involved in Italian politics. Some of the most famous
Renaissance popes illustrated the temporal attitudes of the
papacy: Pope Sixtus IV (ruled 1471–1484) became embroiled
in the Pazzi Conspiracy; Alexander VI (ruled 1492–1503)
and his sinister son Cesare Borgia schemed in the diplomatic
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PART VIII
The Contemporary Era
intrigues of the day; and Julius II (ruled 1503–1513), the
“warrior pope,” personally led his armies in battle.
South of the Papal States lay the Kingdom of Naples,
including the island of Sicily. After the death of Frederick
of Hohenstaufen in the 13th century, the kingdom had
fallen prey to the competing ambitions of the rulers of
Aragon and France. In 1435, Naples and Sicily came under
Aragonese domination and in 1504 were annexed to the
Spanish crown.
The Italian cities were able to develop into sovereign
territorial states primarily because Italy, like Germany, possessed no powerful central monarchy such as those that
emerged in France and England. In this world of small
Italian Renaissance states, ruled by despots and oligarchies,
the elite learned to derive significant power from the sponsorship of culture. Out of this age of Renaissance humanism, when one neighbor was pitted against another in endless cycles of wars and alliances, a new conception of power
politics was born.
THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD
OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE
In the 14th century, Petrarch introduced the notion of the
self-conscious artist in search of personal fame (see Topic
32). The following generation of scholars advanced the notion of humanism further, with the arrival of Byzantine intellectuals who fled westward after the fall of
Constantinople in 1453. Under constant external danger
from other city-states, especially Milan, Florentine intellectuals turned to the Classical past to find inspiration. Among
their models was Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman
statesman and writer, whose orations, letters, and essays
stressed that the educated upper classes should provide
leadership for society (see Topic 14). In 15th-century
Florence, the civic humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444)
wrote a biography of Cicero that portrayed him as the
model of the Renaissance ideal of the scholar-activist. Bruni
was part of a circle of scholars around Coluccio Salutati
who collected and studied ancient manuscripts; the greatest
collector of ancient manuscripts was Poggio Bracciolini
(1380–1459), a longtime papal secretary. These and other
scholars perceived civic activism not only as a duty but also
as a stimulant to intellectual creativity.
HUMANISTS AND NEOPLATONISTS
Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) was the epitome of the civic humanist. Raised and educated in Rome, Valla studied both
the Latin and the Greek classics, as Bruni had done.
Humanists admired virtually all Latin writers before the 7th
century, but Valla’s studies—especially his Elegances of the
Latin Language—revealed distinct periods in the development of Latin. He most admired the style of the late
Republic and early Empire (1st century B.C.–1st century
A.D.). Valla devoted much of his energy to close textual
analysis of ancient manuscripts. His discovery that the document known as the Donation of Constantine was a fake,
actually written in the 8th century, brought him much attention; the Donation, which claimed that the Emperor
Constantine had actually given political authority over the
West to the church in 313, had long been used by popes to
assert their temporal rule.
By the middle of the 15th century, humanism had become widely diffused; its basic tenets and methods were accepted; and many of the key Classical texts were known.
Humanists now shifted their attention to philosophy, especially as it was influenced by the Greek philosophers, chief
among them Plato. The Florentine humanists flourished
under the patronage of the city’s de facto ruler, the highly
cultivated banker Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo invested
much of his wealth in the search for and copying of
Classical manuscripts and in supporting the discussion
group that came to be known as the Platonic Academy.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), one of the circle’s most gifted
intellectuals, was taken under Cosimo’s protection as a
child. Ficino received a regular income and access to the library at the Medici villa, and the Neoplatonists gathered
here for their discussions.
Ficino’s numerous translations from Greek into Latin
included the Corpus Hermeticum, a series of Hermetic essays
prepared at Cosimo’s request. Among the subjects covered
in the Corpus were the supposed secrets of the pagan world,
including alchemy, astrology, and magic. The Hermeticists
held that although human beings had been created as divine creatures, they had elected to be part of the material
world. According to this view, humans could reattain their
divine state by becoming sages. These magi, as they were
known in the Renaissance, were endowed with knowledge
of God and of the powers of nature, which they could use to
help humans.
KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION
Among the best-known of those regarded as magi in the
15th century was Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a
churchman who had studied with Ficino and was perhaps the most brilliant of the Florentine humanists—he
once boasted that he had read every book in Italy.
Believing that it was possible to organize human learning to reveal basic truth, Pico set out to master all
knowledge. He learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Arabic, as well as philosophy. When he was 20 years
old he claimed to have summed up knowledge in 900
theses, which he described in a treatise called Oration on
the Dignity of Man.
To the Renaissance mind, education was crucial to the
intelligent and proper conduct of public affairs because humanism placed humans at the center of historical development. The authors of medieval chronicles had attributed
events in human affairs to divine inspiration or direct intervention by God. The humanists, so taken with the
search for texts and the analysis of sources, looked to documents rather than miracles for explanations of historical
TOPIC 34
Power and Culture in Renaissance Italy
7
ISABELLA D’ESTE AND
FRANCESCO GONZAGA
Along with the Medici
in Florence and the
Sforza in Milan, Italy’s
smaller city-states were also
centers of art and learning.
Among the most brilliant of these smaller
Renaissance courts was that of Francesco Gonzaga
(ruled 1484–1519) of Mantua and his wife, Isabella
d’Este (1474–1539).
Like many of his contemporaries, Francesco
Gonzaga was first and foremost a warrior-prince. A
short, ugly man without serious education, he seems
not to have inherited the cultural interests that had
long been a tradition at Mantua; while courting his future wife, he sent her poems that he had commissioned but pretended were his own. In 1490, he married Isabella, the 16-year-old daughter of Ercole d’Este,
ruler of Ferrara, and Eleonora of Aragon. From that
moment, Isabella overshadowed her husband in virtually all matters of domestic state policy and made
Mantua a major center of Renaissance culture.
Isabella and her sister, Beatrice, two of the most
remarkable women of the Renaissance, grew up in
the rarified atmosphere of the Este court at Ferrara.
The sisters were both competitive and different, for
while Beatrice enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, Isabella
was more serious and mastered both Greek and
Latin. Their arranged marriages resulted in major
political alliances: while Isabella went to Mantua,
Beatrice married Ludovico Sforza of Milan.
events. Similarly, they saw individual motives behind political developments. The most accomplished of the new secular historians of the Renaissance was Francesco Guicciardini
(1483–1540), who had considerable experience as a diplomat and government official. His History of Italy, the first
Gallerie degli Uffizi/Tosi/INDEX, Florence
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
PUBLIC FIGURES AND PRIVATE LIVES
Because Francesco spent much time away from
Mantua, the self-assured Isabella, who exhibited
considerable skill at diplomacy and matters of
state, often assumed the reins of government.
Isabella’s fame, however, rests on her role as an astute and sophisticated patron of arts and letters.
Her cultural tastes were broad, ranging from painting, music, and architecture to philosophy, literature, and astrology. She competed for the talents of
some of the greatest artists and writers of the era.
Titian and Leonardo da Vinci painted portraits of
her; Mantegna decorated her private rooms in the
ducal palace; and Correggio called her “the first lady
of the world.”
Francesco Gonzaga’s fame rests on his victory at
the Battle of Fornovo in 1495, where he led the military forces of the Italian League (including Venice,
Milan, and the Papal States) against the invading
army of Charles VIII of France. Later, however, he
continuously switched sides, and in 1509 he was
captured and held prisoner for a year by the
Venetians. During that time, Isabella not only made
important military decisions and directed the defenses of Mantua but also founded the city’s lucrative
cloth industry. When he was finally liberated, a humiliated Francesco felt resentful of his talented consort’s achievements. “We are ashamed,” he wrote to
her, “that it is our fate to have as a wife a woman who
is always ruled by her head.” Increasingly estranged
from Francesco because of his repeated infidelities,
she spent many of her last years at the papal court in
Rome. After her husband died in 1519, Isabella acted
as regent and adviser to her son Federigo II and was
able to have her younger son, Ercole, made a cardinal. She died a much revered and respected figure,
and very much a woman of the Renaissance.
work of history since antiquity based on original documents,
provided detailed comparative analysis of political affairs in
the city-states and decried the lack of unity in Italy. Most of
all, Guicciardini saw the need for wise rulers endowed with
learning and experience. These and other humanist values
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PART VIII
The Contemporary Era
remained the core of upper-class education in the West for
centuries.
PATRONAGE AND STATECRAFT
IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
It was no accident that the cities of the Italian Renaissance
were centers of both political power and culture because art
served as a medium of education and as propaganda. The
church, of course, had always been a great patron of the arts,
using architecture, painting, and sculpture to promote worship and respect for religious institutions. In the
Renaissance, just as artistic themes became increasingly secular, so laymen emerged as active and generous patrons of
the arts.
THE NATURE OF RENAISSANCE
PATRONAGE
Following in the tradition of the Middle Ages, guilds and
religious organizations commissioned artists to create works
of sculpture and paintings that reflected their wealth and
influence. In Florence, the cloth merchants hired Filippo
Brunelleschi to design and erect the stunning dome of the
city’s duomo (cathedral).
Individual rulers and nobles also came to recognize the
power of culture and patronized art and scholarship to show
off their wealth and status. Many tried to trace their ancestry back to Roman times and deliberately imitated the
lifestyles of the ancient patricians. In their zeal to identify
with Classical civilization, princes poured money into excavating archaeological sites and locating lost manuscripts.
Wealthy families spent lavishly to build and decorate tombs
and chapels in the principal churches of their cities.
Princes used the creative talents they supported to
strengthen and legitimize their rule. They brought poets and
essayists to their palaces, and hired architects and artists to
plan and decorate their public rooms and erect statues and
monuments to their achievements. As the social status of
the artists grew during the Renaissance, patrons competed to
hire the best-known painters and sculptors because the fame
of the artist enhanced the prestige of the patron.
ITALY AND EUROPE: POWER
POLITICS AND THE ART
OF DIPLOMACY
In 1454, the Italian states established a precarious balance
of power through the Peace of Lodi. The agreement between Venice and Milan, which conceded Milan to
Francesco Sforza and restored Venetian holdings in northern Italy, brought peace to Italy for many years. The Italian
states were exhausted by the continuous warfare and agreed
to observe the terms of the peace and to join an Italian
League for mutual defense.
The Peace of Lodi collapsed in 1494, when Lodovico
Sforza of Milan asked for the military support of Charles VIII
of France in the midst of rising tensions with Florence and
Naples. The French invasion of Italy began a long series of
disastrous wars that revealed the inability of relatively weak
city-states to withstand the power of centralized nationstates. Italy became a battleground of larger European dynastic interests as the houses of Hapsburg, Valois, and Aragon
jockeyed for hegemony. Charles pushed the Medici out of
Florence (they returned in 1512), the Hapsburg Emperor
Charles V seized Milan, and Ferdinand of Aragon took
Naples. When the wars finally ended in 1559, the Hapsburgs
were masters of the peninsula, with only Venice and the
Papal States remaining independent. Although the memory
of Italy’s great cultural legacy lingered, its political subservience to foreign powers would not end for three centuries.
DIPLOMACY AND POWER POLITICS
As political life in Europe grew more complex, states began
to develop new and more formal ways of relating to each
other. The advantages of economic and cultural cooperation,
as well as of finding alternatives to war, became increasingly
evident to the great powers. Nowhere was the need for organized international relations greater than in Italy, where in
the process of creating a balance of power the Italians had invented the art of diplomacy. During the Italian wars that
erupted at the end of the 15th century, the Italian style of
managing foreign policy was copied by other European states.
The most important novelty devised by Italian diplomats was the use of resident ambassadors. In the place of
roving envoys who traveled to accomplish specific missions,
states now maintained permanent ambassadors in foreign
capitals. The advantages were obvious: Resident ambassadors could not only collect intelligence about conditions
and attitudes in their host country, but they also developed
personal relationships that could be used to represent the
interests of their sovereign more quickly and efficiently.
Resident ambassadors gave rise to elaborate embassies
staffed by military and commercial experts and using sophisticated reporting procedures. Diplomatic staffs lived in
foreign countries with immunity from local laws and
adopted both fixed procedures and formal styles of protocol
to govern diplomatic relations. These procedures evolved
under the impact of the Italian wars because rulers throughout Europe were drawn into the intricate dynastic struggles
that marked the struggles for power there. It gradually became clear that the general interests of all states required a
balance in which no one power dominated the others.
The collapse of the independence of the Italian citystates, together with the emergence of centralized monarchies elsewhere in Europe, attracted the attention of political analysts, who now began to study diplomacy, politics,
and the nature of power from a more practical and secular
point of view. The Italians, anxious to understand why their
independence had disappeared so completely, were in the
TOPIC 34
Power and Culture in Renaissance Italy
9
Scala/Art Resource
The Departure of the Ambassadors, painting by Carpaccio, c. 1496–1498. 9 feet 2
inches by 8 feet 8 inches (2.80 by 2.53 m).
The painting comes from a cycle depicting the
Legend of St. Ursula and shows the king of
Brittany receiving ambassadors from England.
In fact, however, it represents Italian diplomatic
practice of the Early Renaissance, and the interior walls decorated with colored stone are typical of Venetian architecture.
forefront of this new approach to the study of political
power. The historian Guicciardini, for example, had examined the histories of the Italian states comparatively and
concluded that the lack of unity in the peninsula had enabled foreign powers to crush them. It was, however, the
Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) who epitomized the new politics of the age (see Topic 36).
Many contemporaries were shocked by Machiavelli’s
advocacy of the amoral manipulation of power, and the
term “Machiavellian” became a label for unscrupulousness
and evil. The 16th century was perhaps not yet ready to accept this new approach to the use of state power, but the realities of the day pointed to a different direction in political affairs.
Putting Renaissance Italy in Perspective
The Renaissance was the product of Europe’s cultural and social vitality, and it set
the tone for the modern age. The humanist concerns with Classical virtues and learning, the strength and beauty of Michelangelo’s David, the raw pragmatism of
Machiavelli’s advice to the prince, all bespoke a new viewpoint freed from superstition and focused on the human condition. The secular and urban values of
Renaissance culture emerged first in Italy, where a combination of history, social development, and economic factors encouraged its flowering. Conditions there first
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PART VIII
The Contemporary Era
stimulated the growth of humanism, which in turn nurtured the sense of civic virtue
and responsibility that marked the public life of the Renaissance city-states.
As in earlier epochs, rulers of the Renaissance period appreciated and used painting, sculpture, and architecture to enhance their prestige and legitimize their power.
Political leaders recognized the powerful role that the arts could have in forging popular consensus behind authority and instilling civic pride in citizens. The experience of
numerous city-states vying with each other to control the peninsula had resulted in the
invention of important political techniques, although Machiavelli, the most jarringly
objective observer of his times, recognized in that lesson that the realities of power
were working against the Italians. For all their wisdom and skill in developing effective political systems, Italian rulers were unable to forge unity or to maintain the integrity of their own states against the military power of the newly emerging national
monarchies. The Italians, it seemed, had chosen culture over power.
Questions for Further Study
1. What forms did “civic identity” take in Renaissance
Italy?
2. With what issues were early Renaissance intellectuals
concerned?
3. Why did Italian Renaissance rulers and merchants act
as patrons of the arts?
4. What conditions in Italy led to the invention of
“diplomacy” in the modern sense?
Suggestions for Further Reading
Brucker, Gene A. Renaissance Florence, rev. ed. New York, 1983.
Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy,
rev ed. Princeton, NJ, 1999.
D’Amico, John F. Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome.
Baltimore, 1983.
Godman, Peter. From Poliziano to Macchiavelli: Florentine
Humanism in the High Renaissance. Princeton, NJ, 1998.
Hale, J.R. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. New York,
1995.
Hay, Denys, and J. Law. Italy in the Age of the Renaissance.
London, 1989.
Holmes, George. Florence, Rome and the Origins of the
Renaissance. Oxford, 1986.
Johnson, P. The Renaissance. New York, 2000.
King, Margaret L. Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician
Dominance. Princeton, NJ, 1986.
Rubinstein, Nicolai. The Government of Florence under the Medici
(1434-1494). New York, 1997.
Stephens, J. The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and
Artistic Change Before the Reformation. New York, 1990.
Trinkaus, Charles E. The Scope of Renaissance Humanism. Ann
Arbor, MI, 1983.
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