The Italian Renaissance (41 page)

T
his
chapter continues the process of moving outward from the art and literature of the Renaissance, the milieux in which they were produced and the worldviews they expressed. It is concerned essentially with organizations, formal and informal, and their relationship to Renaissance culture. It deals in the first place with an institution which existed to propagate a worldview, the Church; next with political institutions; then with the social structure; and, finally, at the very base of society, with the economy.

If modern Christians could visit Renaissance Italy, they would probably be very much surprised, not to say shocked, by what they would find going on in church, and even an Italian Catholic might raise an eyebrow.
¹
The Venetian cardinal Gasparo Contarini described men walking through a church ‘talking among themselves about trade, about wars, and very often even about love’. Walking through churches, especially during Mass, was frequently forbidden (at Modena in 1463, for example, and at Milan in 1530), frequently enough for us to conclude that it must have happened all the time. One might expect to find beggars in church, or horses, or gamblers, or a schoolmaster giving lessons, or a political meeting in progress. The parishioners ate, drank and danced in the church to celebrate major festivals such as that of the patron saint. Churches might be used as storehouses for grain or wood. A visitation of the diocese of Mantua in 1535 reported on a church in which ‘the chaplain has a kitchen, beds and other things which are not very appropriate for a holy place; but … he may be excused because his dwelling is very small.’
²
Valuables might be kept in the sacristy; there were, after all, few other safe places.

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s remark that, in the Middle Ages, people were inclined ‘to treat the sacred with a familiarity that did not exclude respect’ remains true for the Renaissance, with the proviso that their familiarity did not necessarily include respect either.
³
The distinction between the sacred and profane was not drawn in quite the same place and it was not drawn as sharply as it would be in the later sixteenth century after the Council of Trent. Nor was it drawn by everyone. As late as 1580, Montaigne, who was visiting Verona, was surprised to see men standing and talking during Mass, their hats on their heads and their backs to the altar.
⁴

There was a similar lack of sharp distinction between clergy and laity. The Roman census of 1526 records a friar working as a mason (
il frate muratore
). The clergy lacked a special kind of education until seminaries were set up after the Council of Trent. ‘How many’, asked a participant in the Lateran Council of 1514, ‘do not wear clothes laid down by the sacred canons, keep concubines, are simoniacal and ambitious? How many carry weapons like soldiers? How many go to the altar with their own children around them? How many hunt and shoot with crossbows and guns?’
⁵
It does not seem possible to answer his rhetorical questions, or even to say how many clergy there were – a question complicated by the existence of marginal cases, men in minor orders, including such famous names as Poliziano and Ariosto. All that the evidence allows is an estimate of their number in particular cities in particular years. In Florence in 1427, for example, a city of some 38,000 people, there were about 300 secular priests but over 1,100 monks, friars and nuns.
⁶
By 1550 the total population had risen to nearly 60,000, but the proportion of clergy had climbed still more steeply, to just over 5,000, or nearly 9 per cent. In Venice in 1581, a city of about 135,000 people, there were nearly 600 secular priests, but the friars and nuns brought the clerical total to more than 4,000.
⁷

The clergy were very far from being a homogeneous body, either culturally or socially. It is necessary to distinguish at least three groups: the bishops, the rank-and-file secular clergy and the members of religious orders.

Bishops, of whom there were nearly three hundred in Italy, were generally
nobles. Some sees were virtually hereditary in particular families, the dynasty being perpetuated by the practice of uncles resigning in favour of their nephews. The other main avenue to a bishopric was the patron– client system. A young doctor of canon law would enter the household of a cardinal, serve him as secretary or in some other capacity, and obtain a bishopric through his influence. In Italy as elsewhere in Europe, bishops generally knew their law – better, in fact, than their theology.
⁸

Parish priests also depended on patronage, since the right to appoint to a particular benefice often belonged to a particular family. Some rectors or holders of benefices did not do the work themselves but hired a deputy or ‘vicar’ to do it for them, often for a small proportion of the income. In the early sixteenth century, some chaplains in the diocese of Milan had an income of only 40
lire
a year, less than that of an unskilled labourer. Some priests were active as horse or cattle dealers as a way of making ends meet. Whether rectors or vicars, parish priests had little formal training. They learned what they had to do by what has been called ‘apprenticeship’ – in other words, by helping and watching. Stories of their ignorance were common and may well have been exaggerated for effect, but diocesan visitations regularly revealed priests who lacked breviaries, or who could be described in laconic but devastating terms such as ‘he knows nothing’ or ‘he is illiterate’.
⁹

Finally, there were the religious orders. There were monks, notably the Benedictines, among them the poet Teofilo Folengo, and the particularly strict Order of Camaldoli, one of whose members was the fifteenthcentury humanist Ambrogio Traversari, a friend of Niccolò de Niccoli and Cosimo de’Medici and translator of some of the Greek Fathers of the Church.
¹⁰
There were five mendicant orders. The Servites, devoted to the Blessed Virgin, had been founded at Florence. The Augustinians included Luigi Marsigli, a friend of Niccoli and the humanist Coluccio Salutati. Among the Carmelites, devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, were Fra Lippo Lippi and the Latin poet Giovanni Battista Spagnolo, better known as ‘the Mantuan’. The Dominicans included the painter Fra Angelico and the preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola. The Franciscans had several leading preachers, among them San Bernardino of Siena. If they did not produce a major artist, they certainly had a great influence on the arts from the thirteenth century onwards.
¹¹

It was
the friars who made sermons important in Italian religious life, in the towns at least, at a time when many of the parish clergy seem to have been ‘dumb dogs that will not bark’, as reformers liked to describe their English equivalents. San Bernardino even told his congregation that, if they had a choice between Mass and a sermon, they should choose the sermon. Enthusiasts took his sermons down in shorthand, and legal proceedings were sometimes postponed so that everyone could go and listen.
¹²
Some preachers had little to learn from actors. One is said to have read to his congregation a letter from Christ, while another, Fra Roberto da Lecce, entered the pulpit to preach a crusade wearing a full suit of armour. If sermons receive no more than a brief mention in this study, it is not because they were unimportant in the cultural life of the time, but because they belong to late medieval tradition rather than to Renaissance innovation, and because the printed collections which survive are a highly abbreviated and incomplete record and no firm basis for the reconstruction of actual performances.
¹³

Religious festivals were another kind of performance which it is hard to reconstruct but which meant a great deal to Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The feast of Corpus Christi, for example, was growing in importance in the fifteenth century. It was celebrated with special magnificence at Viterbo in 1462 by Pius II and his cardinals, as the pope records in his memoirs; the decorations included a fountain which ran with water and wine and ‘a youth impersonating the Saviour, who sweated blood, and filled a cup with a healing stream from a wound in his side’.
¹⁴
A famous painting by Gentile Bellini represents the Corpus Christi procession in Venice as it went through Piazza San Marco. In the sixteenth century,
tableaux vivants
became an important element of Venetian Corpus Christi processions.
¹⁵
Religious plays were another important element in these festivals – performances within the performance. Corpus Christi was one great occasion for plays; another, in Florence at least, was the feast of the Epiphany, when the plays represented the three wise men, or kings, Jasper, Baltasar and Melchior, bringing their gifts to the infant Christ. In Rome, a Passion play was performed every year at the Colosseum. As a fifteenth-century German visitor recorded, ‘This was acted by living people, even the scourging, the crucifixion, and how Judas hanged himself. They were all the children of wealthy people, and it was therefore done orderly and richly.’
¹⁶