The Florentine Paradox, Idealism and Realism in the Heart of the Renaissance

“ He might handle his pike at Caprona or Campaldino one day, and be at home among his books the next. Then, again, the society was a cultivated and quick-witted one, with many interests. Arts and letters were in high esteem, and eminence in them as sure a road to fame as warlike prowess or political distinction. From all this it is clear that the Florentine of the thirteenth century had points of contact with life on every side; every gate of knowledge lay open to him, and he could explore, if he pleased, every one of its paths. ”

“ The primacy of the Florentines in literature, the fine arts, law, scholarship, philosophy, and science was acknowledged throughout Italy.
When the struggle for existence has been successfully terminated, and the mere instinct of self-preservation no longer absorbs the activities of a people, then the three chief motive forces of civilization begin to operate. These are cupidity, or the desire of wealth and all that it procures; curiosity, or the desire to discover new facts about the world and man; and the love of beauty, which is the parent of all art. ”

“ In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed ”

“ We must not let ourselves think that the Renaissance was a merely artistic movement. A few men are known to us, and we think of them as wandering about in artistic isolation, as if they were hermits in a Thebaid. But, in reality, only a slight fraction of even the deeper feelings and interests take artistic or literary form; the great majority are put into life. The celebrated Florentine artists of those days were merely representative of their fellows ”

“ Of all the legacies for which we have to thank Florence, none are so well known and so universally recognized as the treasures of art created by her sons, many of which yet remain within her walls, the marvel and delight of all who behold them. As the Florentines were ready to try experiments in politics, manufactures, and commerce, so also in all branches of the fine arts they tried experiments, left the old, beaten paths of their forefathers, and created something original, useful, and beautiful for themselves. ”

“ Not merely as a patron and a dilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, he proved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of his country. Penetrated with the passion for erudition which distinguished Florence in the fifteenth century, familiar with her painters and her sculptors, deeply read in the works of her great poets, he conceived the ideal of infusing the spirit of antique civility into modern life, and of effecting for society what the artists were performing in their own sphere. ”

“ Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom. The Church was the schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. Culture was the humanizing and refining influence of the Renaissance. ”

“ The proclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading or painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils. ”

“ But the public life is of larger value than the private, and sometimes one man must be crucified for a thousand. Despite all prejudice and make-belief, such a rule and practice has obtained from the Assemblies of Athens to the Parliaments of the twentieth century. But Machiavelli first candidly imparted it to the unwilling consciences and brains of men, and it is he who has been the chosen scape-goat to carry the sins of the people. ”

“ They are taken in by appearances. They follow the event. They easily become corrupted. Their will is weak. They know not how to be either thoroughly good or thoroughly bad; they vacillate between; they take middle paths, the worst of all. Men are a little breed. [2]
All this is not satire, it is not misanthropy; it is the student of the art of government, thinking over the material with which he has to deal. These judgments of Machiavelli have none of the wrath of Juvenal, none of the savage truculence of Swift. ”

“ And yet, let him not stand much upon it, though he incurre the infamie of those vices, without which he can very hardly save his State: for if all be throughly considerd, some thing we shall find which will have the colour and very face of Vertue, and following them, they will lead the to thy destruction; whereas some others that shall as much seeme vice, if we take the course they lead us, shall discover unto us the way to our safety and well-being. ”

“ When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children—when the need is far distant ”

“ And he who acts otherwise, either from timidity or from being badly advised, will be obliged ever to be sword in hand, and will never be able to rely upon his subjects, who in turn will not be able to rely upon him, because of the constant fresh wrongs committed by him. Cruelties should be committed all at once, as in that way each separate one is less felt, and gives less offence ”

“ Yet such is the perversity of men that, to gratify the desire of the moment, they shut their eyes to those ills which must speedily ensue and are no more moved by example in this matter than in all those others of which I have spoken; for were they moved by these examples they would see that the more disposed they are to deal generously with their neighbours, and the more averse they are to usurp authority over them, the readier will these be to throw themselves into their arms ”

“ Yet, as his whole life was an indefatigable and unremitting endeavour to secure for his native Florence a good and popular government, and as he lost his great office of Secretary to the Florentine Republic on account of his avowed liberal opinions, it is not only unjust but ridiculous to accuse him of helping tyrants to enslave the people. What he did was to show in the most deliberate and in the plainest way the arts by which free peoples were made slaves; and, had his words of advice been always heeded, no tyrant in Italy or elsewhere could have been successful in his policy. ”

“ License and Slavery peculiar defects in republican governments—Application of this reflection to the state of Florence—Giovanni di Bicci di' Medici re-establishes the authority of his family—Filippo Visconti, duke of Milan, endeavors to make amicable arrangements with the Florentines—Their jealousy of him—Precautionary measures against him—War declared—The Florentines are routed by the ducal forces.
Republican governments, more especially those imperfectly organized, frequently change their rulers and the form of their institutions ”

“ Every citizen received a liberal education. Poets and philosophers sat in the councils of the republic. Philosophy, metaphysics, and the restoration of ancient learning occupied the minds and diminished the revenues of its greater and inferior burghers. In this respect, the Medici, and their abetters of the fifteenth century, discharged a portion of the debt which they had incurred to humanity. They robbed Italy of her freedom, but they gave her back the philosophy of Plato. They reduced the generality of Florentine citizens, who were once omnipotent, to a nullity ”

“ Thus, in accumulating riches and power, Florence was only multiplying the causes of her approaching and unavoidable decline. The Commune seemed increasingly incapable of giving birth to the modern State, and accordingly, when its chief support, commerce, began to decay, the strength of the burghers was sapped, and the oppressed multitude, now a formidable majority, speedily looked to monarchical rule for their relief. Thus the Medici were enabled to attain supremacy in the name of freedom, and with the support of people and populace. ”

“ If we turn from men to cities, and seek to define the parts played by the several communities in this work of creating an Italian literature, we shall find that Florence fixes the standard of language, and dominates the nation by the fame of her three poets of the fourteenth century. Florence, moreover, gives birth to Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the political theorists who form a group around them. Florentine wit and humor lend a certain pungency to all the products of the golden age. ”

“ For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught, one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife within, or war without--of tumult, riot, revolution, disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the very different conditions of mediæval life. ”

“ He has also to relate how these rich merchants founded modern poetry with their Dante, painting with their Giotto; how with the aid of their Arnolfo and Brunellesco, and of their Michelangelo, who was poet, painter, sculptor, and architect in one, they raised the stupendous buildings which the world will lastingly admire. The first and subtlest of European diplomatists were Florentines; political science and civil history were born in Florence with Machiavelli. Towards the end of the Middle Ages this narrow township seems a small point of fire shedding light over the whole world. ”

“ For the fine arts, being the offspring of liberty and morality, could not long survive their parent forces.
It should be also observed that no great modern writer has yet produced any work specially devoted to the political and constitutional history of Florence.4 It must be confessed that more than by any modern pen was achieved to this effect by the elder and younger Ammirato, who, although writers of the seventeenth century, already began to ransack State papers, and composed a work that was new and remarkable at that period. ”

“ The infuriated populace sacked their houses, destroyed and burned the greater part of their palaces and towers. The long struggle between grandi and popolani was thus ended at last. "This was the cause," says Machiavelli, "that Florence was stripped not only of all martial skill, but also of all generosity." The government was again reformed, and the minor arts admitted to a larger share; between the popolo grosso and them, between burghers and populace, lay the struggle now, which was to end in the Medicean rule. ”

“ At this time the world began to perceive what results the subtle craft of the Florentines was capable of achieving. The art of secretly becoming masters of the State, that, at a later period, gave Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici such triumphant supremacy in the Republic, enabling them to hold sovereign rule while remaining private citizens in the eyes of the law, this art was now discovered by the nobles. It consisted in leaving republican institutions untouched, and showing no desire488 to be concerned in them, yet contriving that none save personal adherents should be admitted to power. ”

“ Most significant of all, however, is the influence which wealth has enabled one family to attain; for the power of the Medici is, in its essentials, the power of gold. It is a power wielded deftly in the hands of prominent [11] representatives of the family; a power that seems to make for the good of the city. Under Lorenzo the Magnificent every form of art is patronised and cultivated, and Florence easily maintains its supremacy as the culture centre of Italy. ”

“ Their pictures, according to the usage of the age, full of portraits, perpetually presented to the people likenesses of the Medici, and often in the characters of the Magi royally robed, the sceptre firmly held in the gripe of the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually for what it was soon to witness, the firm establishment of sovereignty in that House. The competition of rival citizens, and still more the wide-extended influence of religion, diffused Taste and beckoned Talent to Florence as to [172] its centre, from every part of Italy. ”

“ Here the whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the social and political condition of the State, and as incessantly describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above all other States in the world, the home of historical representation in the modern sense of the phrase. ”

“ Both gave back truth to man, and man to nature, at the expense of temporary moral uncertainty and ruthless destruction. The Renaissance reinstated the individual in his human dignity, as a thinking, feeling, and acting being; the Eighteenth Century reconstructed society as a homogeneous free existence ”

“ Moreover the spirit of the Renaissance, itself the intellectual side of the very movement which he strove against, was strong in him, and doubtless helped to create his Utopia by means of the contrast which it put before his eyes of the ideal free nations of the ancients, and the sordid welter of the struggle for power in the days of dying feudalism, of which he himself was a witness. This Renaissance enthusiasm has supplanted in him the chivalry feeling of the age just passing away. ”

“ In truth in his fashion he was but a tyrant too—a tyrant, and a poor one, and therefore the more dangerous, the more disastrous. To the Medici we owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence—the loveliest work of Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of Michelangelo, and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless collection of books and MSS. as this. Is, then, the work of Marsilio Ficino nothing, the labours of a thousand forgotten humanists? What do we owe to Savonarola? ”