The Italian Renaissance (50 page)

Music was also written for the court. Duke Philip the Good made Binchois his chaplain and appointed Dufay music tutor to his son Charles the Bold, who learned to sing, play the harp and compose chansons and motets. When he became duke he employed Busnois, and he took his musicians with him even on campaign. The importance of this court patronage is suggested by the fact that, after Charles’s death in 1477, the leading composers Isaac and Josquin left the Netherlands.

The court had, of course, to be paid for. The Feast of the Pheasant, a Burgundian banquet held in 1454 at which musicians played a prominent part, cost so much that even a courtier who took part in it, Olivier de la Marche, commented in his chronicle on what he called the ‘outrageous and unreasonable expense’. It was the good fortune of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold that their dominions took in towns such as Ghent and Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp, with rich merchants who could provide large sums in taxation. The court, like the Church, depended ultimately on trade.

In Japan over a century later, there was a cluster of cultural achievements and innovations at least as remarkable as the cases of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands.
¹⁰
The height of the period was the Genroku era, from 1688 to 1703. The great figures include the poet Matsuo Basho (best known for his
haiku
), Ihara Saikaku, a writer of prose fiction, the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the philosopher Ogyu Sorai and the artist Moronobu. Among the new genres were the coloured woodblock print; ‘kana books’, written not in Chinese characters but in a simple syllabic script; and two new kinds of drama, the
kabuki
and the
jōruri
(in which the roles were taken by puppets). It was at this time that the samisen was introduced into Japanese music and used to accompany dramatic performances.

As in the case of Italy and the Netherlands, one important trend in the arts in Japan at this period was their secularization. In philosophy, the Japanese Confucians of the period, like the humanists of the fifteenth century, shifted their emphasis from knowing heaven to knowing man.
¹¹
The dominant form of drama before 1600, the
Nō
, was religious, but
jōruri
and
kabuki
theatres played historical dramas or scenes from domestic life. Traditional Japanese painting, like sculpture, was mainly Buddhist in inspiration, but after 1600 secular works become more common, among them painted screens, statues to ornament private houses, and woodblock prints, which usually represented landscapes, actors or scenes from everyday life.

At once an illustration and a symbol of this process of secularization is the term
ukiyo
, ‘floating world’. Originally a Buddhist term for the transience of all worldly things, it took on hedonist overtones in the seventeenth century and came to mean ‘living for the moment’, particularly if that kind of living took place in the pleasure-quarters of the three great cities of Edō (now Tokyo), Kyōto and Ō saka. The ‘floating trade’ was prostitution. The entertainment industry (actors, courtesans, wrestlers, etc.) was often represented in the woodblock prints, which came to be called ‘pictures of the floating world’ (
ukiyo-e
). The secularization of Buddhist values had its parallel in the fiction of the period, which was sometimes known as ‘notes from the floating world’ (
ukiyo-zōshi
). Iharu Saikaku’s most famous story,
The Life of an Amorous Woman
, is an adaptation to secular purposes of a religious genre, Buddhist confession literature. It resembles that genre about as closely in form and about as little in spirit as Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
resembles Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding
.

Another characteristic to be found in several arts and genres in Genroku Japan was realism, particularly domestic realism (above, p. 23). The equivalent Japanese term,
sewamono
, was applied to
kabuki
plays about contemporary life as opposed to historical events. Just as Hishikawa Moronobu made prints of street scenes in the Yoshiwara (the pleasure-quarter of Edo), so Monzaemon Chikamatsu and Iharu Saikaku took scenes from everyday life and turned them into literature, without even changing the names and addresses. There is a story that Chikamatsu was in a restaurant when he was told that there had been a love suicide at Amijima, and was asked to write a puppet-play on the subject immediately. What he produced for performance two days later is one of his most famous pieces. Saikaku was fascinated, like Defoe, by true-to-life details of clothes and prices, and incorporated them into his stories to give them a greater air of verisimilitude.

Whether or not this is an illusion on the part of a European observing from a distance and missing the finer detail, I have the impression that these changes in Japanese culture were more obviously and more closely related to social changes than their equivalents in Italy or the Netherlands.

The sixteenth century had been a period of civil war in Japan. Towards the end of the century, peace was established by a succession of
three strong rulers, the third of whom, Tokugawa Ieyasu, founded a dynasty of effective rulers or
shōguns
. Peace was followed by a rise in population, an improvement in communications and a rapid growth of towns. Three cities in particular expanded: the old capital, Kyōto, which had 410,000 inhabitants in 1634; Ō saka, which had 280,000 in 1625; and Edō, which was no more than a village before Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it for his capital, but rose to half a million people by 1721.
¹²

The Tokugawa regime was not sympathetic to artisans and merchants (the
chōnin
), which it regarded as inferior to peasants as well as to
samurai
. However, these
chōnin
prospered as never before, while many
samurai
, whose contempt for trade equalled that of seventeenth-century Spanish noblemen, found themselves in economic difficulties.
¹³
As for the values of the period, they seem to be reflected in Saikaku’s
Family Storehouse
, a series of success stories in business which would be reminiscent of Samuel Smiles if they did not antedate him by a century and a half (Smiles’s
Self-Help
(1859) was in fact translated into Japanese only a few years after publication).

It seems plausible to argue that the rise of the
chōnin
– not to say ‘middle class’ – and the cultural innovations of the period are connected. Of the major writers and artists, Moronobu was the son of an embroiderer; Saikaku the son of an Ō saka merchant; Kiseki, the best-known of Saikaku’s followers, the son of a Kyōto shop-keeper. The
Nō
plays had been for
samurai
only. On the other hand,
samurai
were forbidden to go to performances of
kabuki
and
jōruri
, which were for the
chōnin
, and not infrequently dealt with their lives. As for the stories of Saikaku and others, they were printed in the simple
kana
script and so reached an audience (female as well as male) that was much wider than that of traditional literati. In the seventeenth century, bookselling was good business; there were fifty bookshops in Ō saka in 1626. Adapting Defoe’s remark about England, we may say that writing was becoming ‘a very considerable part of the Japanese commerce’. So were images. Woodblock prints could be mass-produced cheaply, so that they were within the means of craftsmen. One of their functions was commercial – to advertise the skills and charms of the actors and courtesans they so frequently portrayed. In Japan as in Europe we see the rise of what we might call an art market and the commercialization of art and literature.

There are two qualifications to make to this picture of townspeople’s culture. The first is to point out that it was associated with merchants who were no longer accumulating but indulging in conspicuous consumption.
The second is to emphasize that Genroku culture was not for merchants and craftsmen alone. Edō was a capital with a court and a traditional culture associated with it. All that is being argued here is that new genres were created primarily for new social groups (or groups that were newly rich, numerous or literate). Even these new genres drew on aristocratic traditions, from
Nō
plays to the eleventh-century
Tale of Genji
, though it is not easy to say whether they are examples of imitation, of parody or of an ambiguous and unstable mixture of the two.

This brief comparison of Italy with the Netherlands and Japan contains obvious gaps. The available secondary literature does not permit a discussion of the merchant ethos in Flanders or the milieu of Japanese artists. In any case, these examples are not the only ones that could have been chosen. Yet they do suggest the existence of recurrent patterns of cultural and social change, and they bring us back to a problem which has appeared many times in this study (sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background): the problem of the cultural role of the bourgeoisie.

I began work on this book, in the later 1960s, with the idea of juxtaposing the ideas of Jacob Burckhardt and those of Karl Marx, criticizing and rejecting where criticism and rejection were needed and attempting a synthesis. Burckhardt is not, of course, the only interesting interpreter of the Renaissance, and a good many of his successors – Baron, Baxandall, Gombrich, Lopez, etc. – have contributed ideas as well as information to this study. Nor is Marx the only important social theorist, or the only one whose ideas are relevant to this period and this problem. It is a stimulating intellectual exercise (but more than just an exercise) to imagine how Max Weber might have discussed the Renaissance (emphasizing secularization, calculation, abstraction); how Emile Durkheim might have discussed it (stressing the division of labour and its effect on collective representations); how Norbert Elias might view it (as part of the civilizing process); Erving Goffman (focusing on the presentation of self); Pierre Bourdieu (attending to ‘cultural capital’, ‘distinction’ and strategies for ‘symbolic dominance’); or Clifford Geertz (considering the relation between order and meaning). I have learned something from each of these thinkers, and others, and made use of them all in this book.

The central problem of this study, however, remains that of the relationship between cultural and social structures and change, and the apparent detour via the Netherlands and Japan has revealed this centrality even more clearly. The link between realism and the bourgeoisie, for example, is not as simple as some Marxists (Antal, for instance) have argued or assumed, because (as we have seen) there is more than one type of
realism, more than one kind of bourgeoisie and more than one possible relationship between society and culture.

Refining the concepts, however, does not dissolve the problem. There do seem to be affinities between social groups and artistic genres (if not styles). If bourgeoisies are divided into merchants and craftsmen, their contributions to the arts may be distinguished as follows. The milieu from which most artists come is urban and dominated by craftsmen, so that it can be argued (above, p. 52) that it is in craft-industrial towns that the abilities of potential artists are least likely to be frustrated. Merchants, on the other hand, are especially important as patrons, and often quick to take up new genres. They are, after all, professionally adaptable and need to be able to adapt to new situations if they are to survive economically. The emphasis on novelty is important here. The argument is not that rulers, nobility (mandarins,
samurai
) and the Church (or its Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim equivalents) are unimportant patrons; this is clearly false. The focus of this study, however, has been on cultural innovation, and the Flemish and Japanese examples, no less than the Italian ones, suggest that innovations need the support, initially at least, of new kinds of patron. In culture as in economic life, there are rentiers and there are entrepreneurs.