The Italian Renaissance (4 page)

Today, the rise of global history makes the Renaissance appear smaller than it used to do, thus ‘provincializing Europe’, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s memorable phrase.
³⁰
Like Arnold Toynbee in the 1950s, some scholars now speak of ‘renaissances’ in the plural, using the term to refer to a family of movements of revival.
³¹
A whole series of both Byzantine and Islamic renaissances have been identified. In architecture, for instance, the late classical tradition exemplified in the church of Santa Sophia was followed in many respects in the Ottoman Empire, successor to the Byzantine Empire, in a series of mosques built in Istanbul, Edirne and elsewhere. Turning to renaissances of non-classical traditions, one thinks of the Confucian revival in the age of Zhu Xi in what Westerners call the twelfth century. Just as Pico and Ficino are known as ‘neo-Platonist’ philosophers, Zhu Xi is generally described as a ‘neo-Confucian’.

The Italian Renaissance may still be regarded as ‘the Big One’ in two senses: in the sense that it was unusually protracted (lasting for some three hundred years) and also in the sense that it was unusually influential, with a posthumous career of another three hundred and fifty years.
³²
However, what the movement owes to cultures other than ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval West deserves attention.
³³
Some of these debts to other cultures have long been recognized, notably what was owed to the learned culture of Byzantium and (in the natural sciences at least) to that of the Islamic world.
³⁴
Aby Warburg discovered an Indian astrological image in the Renaissance frescoes in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, an image transmitted to Italy via the Arab scholar Abu Ma’asar, known in the West as ‘Albumazar’.
³⁵
On the other hand, the contribution of Jewish scholars to the Renaissance, notably to the revival of Hebrew
studies, for example the ways in which the Renaissance affected communities of Jews in Italy, has been studied only relatively recently.
³⁶

Turning to material culture, objects from the world beyond Europe were appreciated in Renaissance Italy. Lorenzo de’Medici received a piece of Chinese porcelain as a present in 1487, while some blue and white Chinese bowls are recognizable in Giovanni Bellini’s
Feast of the Gods
. By the sixteenth century, Genoese craftsmen were producing imitations of Ming porcelain. Grand Duke Cosimo de’Medici owned objects from Africa such as forks, spoons, salt-cellars and ivory horns made in what is now known as an ‘Afro-Portuguese’ style. As for the New World, Mexican artefacts ranging from mosaic masks to pictographic codices circulated in the circle of the Medici.
³⁷

However, the culture from which both artists and humanists appropriated the most was the Islamic world. Venetian merchants lived in Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul, while some visited Persia and India. Some artists also travelled eastwards, among them Gentile Bellini.
³⁸
Conversely, the Muslim geographer al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, better known in the West as Leo Africanus, lived for some time in Rome and wrote his description of Africa there.
³⁹
In the case of literature, there is a remarkable parallel between the lyrics of Petrarch and his followers and Arab
ghazals
, evoking the sweet pain of love, the cruelty of the beloved, and so on, a tradition that was transmitted to Petrarch via Sicily or the troubadours of Provence, who were in touch with Muslim Spain.
⁴⁰

Among the Italian humanists, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was particularly open to ideas from different cultures. In his famous oration on the dignity of humanity, Pico quoted a remark by ‘Abdala the Saracen’, as he called the scholar best known as ‘Abd Allah Ibn Qutayba, to the effect that that nothing is more wonderful than man.
⁴¹
The commentary on Aristotle’s
Poetics
by the Muslim humanist Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’) was published in Latin translation in Venice in 1481, while the physician Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’) was studied in Italian universities in the Renaissance as he had been in the later Middle Ages.
⁴²
It was recently argued that Filippo Brunelleschi was in debt, for his famous discovery of
the laws of perspective, to the writings of another medieval Muslim scholar, Ibn al-Haytham (‘Alhazen’).
⁴³

In the case of architecture, it is clear that the famous fifteenth-century hospitals of Florence and Milan followed the design of hospitals in Damascus and Cairo. It has also been suggested that Piazza San Marco was inspired by the courtyard of the Great Mosque at Damascus, while the Doge’s Palace drew on Mamluk architecture.
⁴⁴
Again, the façade of the palace of Ca’ Zen in Venice, built between 1533 and 1553, includes oriental arches, doubtless an allusion to the economic and political involvement of the Zen family in the affairs of the Middle East.
⁴⁵

The fashion for collecting Turkish objects, such as carpets from Anatolia and ceramics from Iznik, reveals that the Ottoman world was a source of attraction as well as anxiety at this time. Indeed, some Venetian craftsmen produced imitations of Turkish products such as leather shields.
⁴⁶
Perhaps the biggest debt of Renaissance artists to Islamic culture was to the repertoire of decorative motifs that we still describe as ‘arabesques’, employed in printed ornaments, book-bindings, metalwork and elsewhere. These arabesques became fashionable in Venice around the year 1500, but the designs soon spread more widely. Cellini, for instance, attempted to emulate the decoration on Turkish daggers.
⁴⁷
It is possible that Western culture had been more open to exotic influences in the Middle Ages than it became in the Renaissance, especially the ‘High’ Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, in which humanists and artists were impressed by the rules for good writing and good building formulated by the ancient Romans Cicero and Vitruvius. In the less dignified domain of the decorative arts, however, the obstacles to eclecticism were less powerful.

The challenge of a new edition is to take account of new research by hundreds of scholars and to offer readers a synthesis despite the centrifugal tendencies of research on this large topic. After more than forty years, two changes of name and much revision, the book is beginning to resemble the famous ship of the Argonauts, in which one plank after another was replaced in the course of a long voyage. Whether or not
The Italian Renaissance
remains the same book, I am very happy that Polity has decided to launch it once again.

Cambridge, February 2013