The Italian Renaissance (40 page)

The universe was ‘moralized’ in the sense that its different characteristics were not treated as neutral in the manner of modern scientists. Warmth, for example, was considered to be better in itself than cold, because the warm is ‘active and productive’. It was better to be unchangeable (like the heavens) than mutable (like the earth); better to be at rest than to move; better to be a tree than a stone. Another way of making some of these points is to say that the universe was seen to be organized in a hierarchical manner, thus resembling (and also justifying or ‘legitimating’) the social structure. Filarete compared three social groups – the nobles, the citizens and the peasants – to three kinds of stone – precious, semi-precious and common. In this hierarchical universe it is hardly surprising to find that genres of writing and painting were also graded, with epics and ‘histories’ at the top and comedies and landscapes towards the bottom. However, more than hierarchy was involved on occasion. ‘Prodigies’ or ‘monsters’ – in other words, extraordinary phenomena – from the birth of deformed children to the appearance of comets in the sky, were interpreted as ‘portents’, as signs of coming disaster.
⁹¹

The different parts of the universe were related to one another not so much causally, as in the modern world picture, as symbolically, according to what were called ‘correspondences’. The most famous of these correspondences was between the ‘macrocosm’, the universe in general, and the ‘microcosm’, the little world of man. Astrological medicine depended on these correspondences, between the right eye and the Sun, the left eye and the Moon, and so on. Numerology played a great part here. The fact that there were seven planets, seven metals and seven days of the week was taken to prove correspondences between them. This elaborate system of correspondences had great advantages for artists and writers. It meant that images and symbols were not ‘mere’ images and symbols but expressions of the language of the universe and of God its creator.

Historical events or individuals might also correspond to one another, since the historical process was often believed to move in cycles rather than to ‘progress’ steadily in one direction. Charles VIII of France was viewed by Savonarola as a ‘Second Charlemagne’ and as a ‘New Cyrus’ – more than the equivalent, almost the reincarnation, of the great ruler of Persia.
⁹²
The emperor Charles V was also hailed as the ‘Second Charlemagne’. The Florentine poets who wrote of the return of the golden age under Medici rule may well have been doing something more than turn a decoratively flattering or flatteringly decorative phrase. The idea of the Renaissance itself depends on the assumption that history moves in cycles and employs the organic language of ‘birth’.

This ‘organic mentality’, as we may call it, so pervasive was it, met a direct challenge only in the seventeenth century from Descartes, Galileo, Newton and other ‘natural philosophers’. The organic model of the cosmos remained dominant in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. All the same, a few individuals, at least on occasion, did make use of an alternative model – the mechanical one – which is hardly surprising in a culture which produced engineers such as Mariano Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and, of course, Leonardo.
⁹³
Giovanni Fontana, who wrote on water-clocks, among other subjects, once referred to the universe as this ‘noble clock’, an image that was to become commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Again, Leonardo da Vinci, whose comparison of the microscosm and the macrocosm has already been quoted, makes regular use of the mechanical model. He described the tendons of the human body as ‘mechanical instruments’ and the heart too as a ‘marvellous instrument’. He also wrote that ‘the bird is an instrument operating by mathematical law’, a
principle underlying his attempts to construct flying-machines.
⁹⁴
Machiavelli and Guicciardini saw politics in terms of the balance of power. In the twentieth chapter of
The Prince
, Machiavelli refers to the time when Italy was ‘in a way in equilibrium’ (
in un certo modo bilanciata
), while Guicciardini makes the same point at the beginning of his
History of Italy
, observing that, at the death of Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘Italian affairs were in a sort of equilibrium’ (
le cose d’Italia in modo bilanciate si mantenessino
). The widespread concern with the precise measurement of time and space, discussed earlier in this chapter, fits in better with this mechanical worldview than with the traditional organic one. The mechanization of the world picture was really the work of the seventeenth century, but in Italy, at least, the process had begun.
⁹⁵

There would seem to be a case for talking about the pluralism of worldviews in Renaissance Italy, a pluralism which may well have been a stimulus to intellectual innovation. Such a coexistence of competing views naturally raises the question of their association with different social groups. The mechanical world picture has sometimes been described as ‘bourgeois’.
⁹⁶
Was it in fact associated with the bourgeoisie? It will be easier to answer this question after discussing both what the bourgeoisie were and the general shape of the social structure in Renaissance Italy. This is the task of the following chapter.