The Italian Renaissance (45 page)

Despite the growing importance of grain imports, this elaborate urban structure rested on the foundation of Italian agriculture.
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Particularly fertile was the Po valley, one of the great plains of Europe. It owed this fertility partly to nature – a well-distributed rainfall – and partly to human activity. In the course of the fifteenth century several canals were dug in Lombardy, and irrigation schemes allowed formerly waste land to be brought under the plough. By the year 1500, some 85 per cent of the
land between Pavia and Cremona was under cultivation, an extremely high proportion for the period when marshes and woods were much more widespread than they are today. Dairy farming was becoming important.
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South of the Po valley the picture was less rosy. In Tuscany, although the hilly terrain restricted agriculture, the interior valleys were fertile. The Valdarno was best known for grain, the Valdichiana for wine, the Mugello for fruit, and the area around Lucca for olives. However, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century land was going out of cultivation in Tuscany, and 10 per cent of the villages disappeared altogether.
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Further south, the rocky terrain and the low rainfall in the growing season have always been obstacles to cultivation, and, despite pockets of prosperity around Naples and elsewhere, southern agriculture was in decline. There was a gradual shift from arable to pasture, accompanied by a fall in population. As in Thomas More’s England, the sheep were eating up the men.

To maintain Italy’s high urban population, it was necessary for many farmers to produce for the market. For example, the concentration in Venice of some 160,000 people who did not grow their own food led to the commercialization of agriculture not only in the Veneto but as far afield as Mantua, the Marches and even, perhaps, Apulia. The Italian cloth industry encouraged the growing of woad in Lombardy and the keeping of sheep in the Roman Campagna and in the south, as well as in Tuscany.

This brief description of the Italian economy is intended as no more than an introduction to the question of its links with the Renaissance. Before discussing these links, however, it is necessary to tackle one major problem. Was the economy ‘capitalist’? Capitalism has been defined in many different ways, but it may be useful to emphasize two features of this mode of production: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few entrepreneurs and the institutionalization of a rational, calculating approach to economic problems. It may also be useful to draw distinctions between commercial, financial and industrial capitalism.
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It is not difficult to find spectacular examples in this period of rich entrepreneurs, such as Averardo di Bicci de’Medici (the grandfather of Cosimo), who left a fortune of 180,000 florins in 1428. It was possible for entrepreneurs to accumulate capital in this way because in some leading industries many of the workers were no longer independent craftsmen.
Cloth-making was the industry in which the division of labour was most highly developed; contemporaries distinguished some twenty-five or more steps in the process of turning a fleece into a piece of finished cloth, and most of these stages involved a specialized occupation. In Florence, several of these jobs, such as beating, sorting and combing the wool, were carried out in large workshops, which it is tempting to regard as ‘factories’, by men who were paid by the day. Much of the spinning was done by women living at home, but they might still be dependent on the entrepreneur who supplied them with the raw material. In Genoa and Lucca, the silk merchants provided not only the raw material but also spinning machines and workshops, which they hired out to spinners who worked for them, as they hired looms out to weavers.
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This system is very different from industrial capitalism in the nineteenth-century sense of large-scale organization and direct control by the manufacturer, but it is clear that the entrepreneur played a central role and that he exercised considerable control by indirect means.

The numerate mentality of Italian townsmen has already been discussed (above, p. 209). What needs emphasis here is the existence of institutions which both expressed and encouraged this mode of thought and the existence of a complex credit structure which depended on abstraction and calculation and included banks, a public debt, commercial companies and even maritime insurance. As we have seen, banking was something of an Italian speciality in this period. Besides banks, there were also communal pawnshops (
Monti di Pietà
), which spread in the later fifteenth century with the encouragement of the Church. These
Monti
borrowed money as well as lending it, and paid regular interest. They were modelled on the public debt, the
Monte commune
, which had been set up in Florence in the middle of the fourteenth century, thus making the citizens into investors in the state. Florence also had a ‘Dowry fund’ (
Monte delle doti
), in which the investor received his money back with interest at the marriage of his daughter.
⁸⁸
Commercial companies existed, and it was possible to invest in them without taking part in their management and with only a limited liability in the case of the company’s failure. It was also possible to insure against the loss of ships – Venice was the great centre of marine insurance – while, in Genoa, husbands could even insure against the risk of their wives dying in childbirth.
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In many ways, economic organization remained traditional. The small
workshop and the family business were the most common forms of industry and trade. Many peasants paid their rent in kind. However, the new forms of organization were unusually well developed in Italy, particularly in large cities such as Florence, Rome and Venice, where so much of what we call the Renaissance was taking place. It is natural to look for links between the state of economy and the state of the culture, more particularly the material culture, the visual arts.

These links are not difficult to find, but they are not easy to describe without falling into a narrow precision or its opposite, a grandiose vagueness. To begin with the detail, we may observe that art and ideas often followed the trade routes.
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Books followed the route from Venice to Vienna, for example. Venice imported decorative motifs as well as spices from Damascus and Aleppo, and exported art and artists as well as spices to Central Europe. Titian and Paris Bordone went to Augsburg and Jacopo de’Barbari to Nuremberg (just as Dürer arrived in Venice from Nuremberg). Sebastiano del Piombo left Venice for Rome at the invitation of the banker Agostino Chigi; thanks to his business connections, Chigi had come to be well acquainted with the Venetian artistic scene. Tuscan artists also followed the trade routes – Rosso and Leonardo to France and Torrigiani to England (in his case, it is known that Florentine merchants with English contacts arranged this visit). Pictures travelled in both directions. Florentine paintings were shipped to France for the collection of Francis I, but the famous Portinari altarpiece now in the Uffizi was brought to Florence by the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank.

Precise information of this kind has its interest, but it does not take us very far towards a historical explanation of the Renaissance – why the movement took place in this particular society at this time. Was wealth the key factor? Did Italy have a Renaissance because she could afford it? The problem here is that the dates do not fit. An economic recession followed the devastating plague of 1348–9, and recovery was slow. As we have seen, the economic historian Roberto Lopez has argued that this recession was just what was needed for the Renaissance, that merchants spent their money on the arts at times when there were fewer profitable ways of placing their money than usual – ‘hard times and investment in culture’.
⁹¹
However, the study of patronage (above, pp. 133ff.) suggests that merchants did not think in terms of investment when they commissioned works of art but rather of piety, pride or pleasure.

A
social factor, style of life, has to be inserted between trends in the economy and trends in culture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florentines and Venetians were coming to value conspicuous consumption more than before. It may be that this change in lifestyle can itself be explained in economic terms, that the shift from entrepreneurs to rentiers was an adaptation to economic recession – a case of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’, a kind of sour grapes effect. It has also been suggested that the Italian economic structure was unusually favourable to the development of a luxury market, thanks not only to the accumulation of wealth but also to its wide distribution among a constantly changing group of urban consumers.
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In these circumstances, competition for status thrived so that building magnificently became a strategy for distinguishing some families from others.
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It would be unhistorical to treat Renaissance art as no more than a set of status symbols, forgetting the piety that underlay the patronage of sacred images or the pleasures of a private collection. Yet it would be equally unhistorical to treat the art of this period as if it had no connections with conspicuous consumption at all. The strength of the connections was subject to change over time. To examine the links between cultural and social change is the purpose of the following chapter.