The Italian Renaissance (35 page)

A particularly elaborate political allegory can be seen in Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican for Julius II and Leo X.
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The
Expulsion of Heliodorus
has already been discussed. Another fresco deals with the
Repulse of Attila
. Italians of the period, including Julius himself, often called the foreigners who invaded Italy after 1494 the ‘barbarians’; this fresco elaborates the parallel between the two waves of barbarian invaders. Raphael went on to paint frescoes of Pope Leo III crowning Charlemagne as emperor in St Peter’s and Leo IV thanking God for a Christian victory over the Saracens. To reinforce the parallel with his own day, Raphael has given the two popes the features of their namesake Leo X.
²⁵
It would be a mistake to reduce these frescoes to a commentary on current events; even the political point they were making, as with Botticelli’s
Punishment of Korah
(above, p. 138), was essentially a more general one – a pictorial legitimation of papal authority. All the same, the topical references and, still more important, the habit of using topical references and historical parallels to legitimate political claims are worth bearing in mind. The relation between art and power, between systems of meaning and systems of domination, is at its most transparent in instances such as these.

If the political messages and the historical parallel inscribed in these frescoes do not strike us with enough force today, one reason is that most of us are not sufficiently familiar with early medieval papal history, with Maccabees, or even with Numbers. Were contemporaries much better off? Who in this period was able to decode the iconography and read the message of the works we have been considering?

We know all too little about contemporary readings and responses, but the range of variation between them is clear enough. Raphael could afford to be allusive; the Vatican was not open to the public, and his paintings were for the eyes of members of the papal court. It is no coincidence that some of the paintings which have given art historians most trouble since
they began to try to unravel their meanings, from Botticelli’s
Primavera
to Giorgione’s
Tempestà
, were made to hang in private houses and to be enjoyed by the patrons and their friends.
²⁶
Posterity looks at them through the keyhole. Even well-informed contemporaries might fail to read them. Vasari complained in his life of Giorgione that he could not understand some of his pictures – ‘nor have I, by asking around as I have done, ever found anyone who does’.

Most secular paintings were probably intelligible to a larger minority. Scenes from Greek and Roman history would not have been difficult to identify for anyone who had been to a grammar school. Ovid was also studied at grammar schools, and would have provided a key to most scenes from classical mythology. It is likely that the number of people able to understand these paintings rose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as humanist education spread. As for religious paintings, despite the difficulty of interpreting them today now that the legends of the saints are no longer part of the common culture, it is likely that they were generally easy to decode for anyone who heard sermons regularly or watched performances of religious plays – in other words, the majority of the urban population.

The attempt to discover which works of art and literature would have been intelligible to which groups, and the habits of mind with which they were interpreted, leads on to a wider question, that of the worldviews of Renaissance Italians. It will be investigated in the next chapter.

A
social group,
large or small, tends to share certain attitudes – views of God and the cosmos, of nature and human nature, of life and death, space and time, the good and the beautiful. These attitudes may be conscious or unconscious. In a period of controversy people may be extremely conscious of their attitudes to religion or the state, while remaining virtually unaware that they hold a particular conception of space or time, reason or necessity.

It is not easy to write the history of these attitudes. Historians have stalked their quarry from different directions. One group, the Marxists, have concerned themselves with ‘ideologies’. Aware of the need to explain as well as to describe ideas, they have sometimes ended by reducing them to weapons in the class struggle.
¹
Another group, the French historians of ‘collective mentalities’, study assumptions and feelings as well as conscious thoughts, but find it difficult to decide where one mentality ends and another begins.
²
In this chapter I shall employ the somewhat more neutral term of ‘worldview’, while attempting to include what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ and to avoid the risk inherent in this third approach of providing description without analysis, or remaining at the level of consciously formulated opinions.
³

In this chapter an attempt is made to move from the immediate environment of the art and literature of the Renaissance to the study of the surrounding society. The assumption behind it is that the relation between art and society is not direct but mediated through worldviews. More precisely, there are two assumptions behind the chapter, two
hypotheses which need to be tested: in the first place, that worldviews exist – in other words, that particular attitudes are associated with particular times, places and social groups, so that it is not misleading to refer, for example, to ‘Renaissance attitudes’, ‘Florentine attitudes’ or ‘clerical attitudes’; in the second place, that these worldviews find their most elaborate expression in art and literature.

These hypotheses are not easy to verify. The sources, which are predominantly literary, are richer for the sixteenth century than for the fifteenth, much richer for Tuscany than for other regions, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the views they express are those of males of what we would call the upper or upper-middle class (the social structure of the period will be discussed in
chapter 9
below). As in the case of the study of aesthetic taste, it pays to look not only at relatively formal literary works but also at documents produced in the course of daily life, such as official reports and private letters. To uncover unconscious attitudes the historian has to attempt to read between the lines, using changes in the frequency of certain keywords as evidence of a shift in values.
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This account will begin with a summary of some typical views of the cosmos, society, and human nature (needless to say, it will be extremely selective). It will end with an attempt to examine general features of the belief system and signs of change. The quotations will usually come from well-known writers of the period, but the passages have been chosen to illustrate attitudes they shared with their contemporaries.

Views of time and space are particularly revealing of the dominant attitudes of a particular culture, precisely because they are rarely conscious and because they are expressed in practice more often than in texts. In his famous study of the religion of Rabelais, the French historian Lucien Febvre emphasized the vague, task-orientated conceptions of time and space in sixteenth-century France, such as the habit of counting in ‘Aves’ – in other words, the amount of time it takes to say a ‘Hail Mary’. Febvre made the French appear, in these respects at least, almost as exotic as the Nuer of the Sudan, whose attitudes to space and time were described at much the same time in an equally classic work by the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
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Whatever
may have been the assumptions of the Italian peasants of this period, the evidence from the towns suggests that much more precise attitudes to time were widespread, like the mechanical clocks which both expressed and encouraged these new attitudes. From the late fourteenth century, mechanical clocks came into use; a famous one was constructed at Padua to the design of Giovanni Dondi, a physician–astronomer who was a friend of Petrarch, and completed in 1364. About 1450, a clock was made for the town hall at Bologna; in 1478, one for the Castello Sforzesco in Milan; in 1499, one for Piazza San Marco in Venice; and so on. By the late fifteenth century, portable clocks were coming in. In Filarete’s utopia, the schools for boys and girls had an alarm clock (
sveg-liatoio
) in each dormitory. This idea at least was not purely utopian, for in Milan in 1463 the astrologer Giacomo da Piacenza had an alarm clock by his bed.
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