The Italian Renaissance (42 page)

Among the
most important festivals were those of the patron saints of cities: St Ambrose in Milan, St Mark in Venice, St John the Baptist in Florence, and so on.
¹⁷
Such feasts were events on which civic prestige depended and on which communal values were solemnly reaffirmed. In Florence, for example, the feast of St John was celebrated with races, jousts and bull-fights. The subject towns of the Florentine empire sent deputations to the capital, there was a banquet for the Signoria (the town council), and there were the usual floats, races, cavalcades, hunts, jugglers, tight-rope walkers and giants (impersonated by men on stilts).
¹⁸

Central to the organization of these plays and festivals were religious fraternities (
compagnie
,
scuole
). These voluntary associations of the laity were widespread in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when at least 420 of them were found in north and central Italy alone. Their main role may be described as the imitation of Christ: this underlay their frequent practice of flagellation, their banquets (a ritual of solidarity modelled on the Last Supper), their washing of the feet of the poor on special occasions, and their concern with what were known as the seven works of temporal mercy: visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, helping prisoners, burying the dead and giving lodging to pilgrims. Some specialized in a particular function. The fraternity of St Martin (
Buonomini di San Martino
) was founded in Florence in 1442 to aid the poor, especially the genteel poor, and named after the saint who had divided his cloak with a beggar. Others comforted condemned criminals, like the Roman fraternity of St John Beheaded (
San Giovanni Decollato
), of which Michelangelo was a member.
¹⁹

The significance of the fraternities as the patrons of art has already been discussed (above, p. 96). They played an important part in religious festivals, walking in procession and performing in pageants and plays. It was, for example, the Fraternity of the Magi in Florence which performed the pageant of the three kings.
²⁰
The Fraternity of St John, also in Florence, performed Lorenzo de’Medici’s play
Saints John and Paul
. The Fraternity of the Gonfalon in Rome staged the regular Good Friday Passion play at the Colosseum (the painter Antoniazzo Romano was a member and he painted the scenery). Fraternities often sang hymns in praise of the Virgin and the saints, in their processions and in church, and these
hymns (
laude
) were sometimes distinguished examples of religious poetry and might be set to music by leading composers such as Guillaume Dufay.
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Fraternities also listened to special sermons, which might be delivered by laymen. It is curious to think of Machiavelli in the pulpit, but it is still possible to read the ‘exhortation to penitence’ he delivered to the Florentine Fraternity of Piety. It has been argued that the Platonic Academy of Florence owes as much to these fraternities as to Plato’s original Academy.
²²

A distinctive feature of the political organization of Renaissance Italy was the importance of city-states and in particular of republics. Around the year 1200, ‘some two or three hundred units existed which deserve to be described as city-states.’
²³
By the fifteenth century, most of them had lost their independence, but not the Renaissance cities
par excellence
, Florence and Venice. Their constitutions make a study in contrasts.

If ever there were a state apparently well suited to the functional analysis which dominated sociology and social anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, it is surely Venice. The Venetian constitution was celebrated for its stability and balance, thanks to the mixture of elements from the three main types of government, with the doge representing monarchy, the Senate aristocracy, and the Great Council democracy. In practice the monarchical element was a weak one. Despite the outward honours paid to the doge, whose head appeared on coins, he had little real power. The Venetians had already developed the distinction, best known from Walter Bagehot’s famous description of the British constitution in the nineteenth century, between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system. The Great Council, by contrast, did participate in decision-making, but this council of nobles was not exactly democratic. As for conflicts, they were not absent but hidden behind the fiction of consensus.

Like the idea of the mixed constitution, Venetian stability or ‘harmony’ was not a neutral descriptive term. It was part of an ideology, part of the ‘myth of Venice’, as historians call it today – in other words, the idealized view of Venice held by Venetians from the ruling class, such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, whose
Commonwealth and Government of Venice
(1543)
did much to propagate it.
²⁴
Relatively speaking, however, there was a kernel of truth in the idea of Venetian stability. The political system did not change very much during the period. If Venice was ruled by the few, the few were unusually numerous. All adult patricians were members of the Great Council (
Maggior Consiglio
) – over 2,500 of them in the early sixteenth century
²⁵
– hence the size of the Hall of the Great Council and the need for large paintings to fill it.

Florence, by contrast, had an unstable political system, compared by Dante in his
Divine Comedy
– which exile gave him the leisure to write – to a sick woman twisting and turning in bed, uncomfortable in every position (
Vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma / Che non può trovar pose in su le piume / Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma
).
²⁶
As a sixteenth-century Venetian observer put it, ‘They have never been content with their constitution, they are never quiet, and it seems that this city always desires a change of constitution, so that no particular form of government has ever lasted more than fifteen years.’ He commented, rather smugly, that this was God’s punishment for the sins of the Florentines.
²⁷
It may have had rather more to do with the fact that Florentines enjoyed political rights at the age of fourteen, while Venetians were not considered politically adult till they were twenty-five and had to be old men before their ideas were taken seriously. The average age of a doge of Venice on his election was seventy-two.
²⁸

For whatever reason, change was the norm in Florence. In 1434, Cosimo de’Medici returned from exile and took over the state. In 1458, a Council of Two Hundred was set up. In 1480, this was replaced by a Council of Seventy. In 1494, the Medici were driven out, and a Great Council was set up on the Venetian model. In 1502, a kind of doge was created, the ‘gonfaloniere for life’. In 1512, the Medici returned in the baggage of a foreign army. In 1527, they were driven out again, and in 1530 returned once more. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that there is some link, however difficult it may be to specify it, between the political culture and the artistic culture of the Florentines and the propensity to innovate in these two spheres. By contrast, the less unstable Venetians were slower to welcome the Renaissance. Apart from this tendency to structural change, Florence differed from Venice in that offices rotated more rapidly; the chief magistrates, or Signoria, were in office for only
two months at a time. The minority of Florentines involved in politics was much larger than that in Venice, with more than 6,000 citizens (craftsmen and shopkeepers as well as patricians) eligible for the chief magistracies alone.
²⁹

The other three major powers in Italy were effectively monarchies, two hereditary (Milan and Naples) and one elective (the Papal States). Here, as in smaller states such as Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, the key institution was the court. So many major works of Renaissance art and literature, from Mantegna’s
Camera degli sposi
to Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
, were produced in this milieu that it is important to understand what kind of place it was. This task has become easier thanks to a number of specialized studies produced in the wake of Norbert Elias’s pioneering sociology (or anthropology) of court society.
³⁰

Courts numbered hundreds of people. In 1527 the papal court, for example, was about seven hundred strong. From this point of view, the small circle surrounding Lorenzo de’Medici, the first citizen of a republic, does not qualify for the title of ‘court’ at all.
³¹
This court population was extremely heterogeneous and ran from great nobles, holding offices such as constable, chamberlain, steward or master of the horse, through lesser courtiers such as gentlemen of the bedchamber, secretaries and pages, down to servants such as trumpeters, falconers, cooks, barbers and stable boys. Harder to place in the hierarchy (indeed, professional outsiders), but commonly in attendance to entertain the prince, were his fools and midgets. The position of his poets and musicians may not have been so very different.

A crucial feature of the court was that it served two functions which were becoming more and more divergent: the private and the public; the household of the prince and the administration of the state. The prince generally ate with his courtiers. When he moved, most of the court moved with him, despite the logistic problems of transporting, feeding and accommodating a group equivalent to the population of a small town. When Duke Ludovico Sforza decided to go from Milan to his favourite country residence, Vigevano, or to his other castles and hunting lodges, it took five hundred horses and mules to transport the court and its belongings.
³²
Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, was
similarly mobile much of the time, visiting different parts of an empire which included Catalonia, Sicily and Sardinia. His officials were forced to follow his example, indeed to follow him in a quite literal sense. In December 1451, for instance, Alfonso summoned his council to Capua, where he happened to be hunting, in order to decide his dispute with the city of Barcelona.
³³

The cultural importance of the court as an institution was that it brought together a number of gentlemen – and ladies – of leisure. It was crucial to what Elias calls ‘the civilizing process’. Like elegant manners, an interest in art and literature helped show the difference between the nobility and ordinary people. As in the salons of seventeenth-century Paris, the presence of ladies stimulated conversation, music and poetry. We must, of course, beware of idealizing the Renaissance court. Castiglione’s famous
Courtier
must not be taken too literally. It was planned as a courtly equivalent of Plato’s treatise on the ideal republic, and it should also be regarded (as the history of the revisions to the text demonstrates) as an exercise in public relations, from the defence of the threatened duchy of Urbino in the first draft to the censorship of anticlerical remarks in the final version, when the author was launching himself on a second, ecclesiastical career.
³⁴
It is likely that courtiers often found time hanging heavily on their hands. Even in the pages of Castiglione we find them turning to practical jokes as well as to parlour games in order to alleviate boredom. One of the speakers in the dialogue describes courts where the nobles throw food at one another or make bets about eating the most revolting things: so much for ‘civilization’.

A good corrective to the generally idealized portrait painted by Castiglione is the little book produced by the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini in 1444, fourteen years before he became pope as Pius II. The
Miseries of Courtiers
, as it is called, is doubtless something of a caricature, and it draws on a tradition of literary and moral commonplaces, but it adds a few sharp personal observations. If a man seeks pleasure at court, writes Enea, he will be disappointed. There is music at court, it is true, but it is when the prince wants it, not when you want it, and perhaps just when you had been hoping to sleep. In any case you cannot sleep comfortably because the bedclothes are dirty, there are several other people in the same bed (which was normal in the fifteenth century), your neighbour coughs all night and pulls the bedclothes off you, or perhaps you have to sleep in the stables. The servants never bring the food on time, and they whisk the plates away before you have finished. You never know when the court is going to move; you make ready to leave, only to find
that the prince has changed his mind. Solitude and quiet are impossible. Whether the prince stands or sits, the courtier always has to be on his feet. These do not sound like the conditions most likely to stimulate creativity, but they are the conditions in which poets such as Ariosto, to take only the most famous example, must have worked.

Courts existed all over Europe, and there were city-states, in practice if not always in strict political theory, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland and in Germany. It is worth asking whether Italian forms of political organization were distinctive in this period and, if so, whether this distinctiveness encouraged the cultural movement we call the Renaissance. As the Italian historian Federico Chabod asked, ‘Was there a Renaissance state?’

Chabod’s answer was a qualified ‘yes’, not so much on the grounds of the political consciousness of which Jacob Burckhardt made so much as of the rise of bureaucracy.
³⁵
‘Bureaucracy’ is a term with many meanings. It will make for clarity if we follow the precise definitions of the German sociologist Max Weber and distinguish two political systems, the patrimonial and the bureaucratic, on six criteria in particular.

Patrimonial government is essentially personal, but bureaucratic government is impersonal (the public sphere is separated from the private, and it is the holder of the office rather than the individual whom one obeys). Patrimonial government is carried out by amateurs, bureaucratic government by professionals, trained for the job, with appointment by merit rather than favour, a fixed salary, and an ethos of their own. Patrimonial government is informal, while bureaucrats put everything on record in writing. Patrimonial government is unspecialized, but in the bureaucratic system the officials practise an elaborate division of labour and are careful to define the frontiers of their political territories. Patrimonial government appeals to tradition, bureaucratic government to reason and to the law.
³⁶