RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE AND ROMAN CLASSICISM: REPUBLICANCITYSTATES AND PRINCELY EMPIRES

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

(This essay was written in 1997 and has been revised periodically since then.In February, 2010, I added the section A Banker’s Chapel in a Franciscan Cloister. In February, 2011, I fine-tuned the history of republican Florence.)

Brunelleschi is credited for inventing a new language of "Renaissance" architecture based loosely on the classical Roman architecture he studied on trips to Rome. While true enough, this does not explain why a new "Roman" style of architecture suddenly appealed to elites in early fifteenth-century Italy and why it replaced late Gothic architecture within fifty years. As always with questions of changing artistic style, the answer lies with broader cultural, social, political, and economic changes. As in other areas of the arts, new architectural forms arose to give material expression to new values and social ideals. To some extent, these values were already present to allow new artistic forms to resonate with larger audiences. On the other hand, the circulation of new artistic possibilities contributed to the larger changes they reflected, reshaping the material fabric of the city from the microcosmic level of household furnishings to the larger and more enduring world of architecture.

Florence as a Roman Republic

In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a number of leading civic humanists including Salutati and Bruni was elected to the high office of chancellor. Each used his office to patronize the new humanist curriculum in the city’s schools, to redefine the life of the mind away from traditional medieval monastic retreat toward a new civic engagement in the active life of politics, work, and family, and to mentor a generation of younger Florentine humanists. At a time when education was restricted to social elites, the humanist cultural revolution transformed the values of nobles and wealthy burghers and gave them a new, elevated discourse sanctioning and legitimizing their worldly lives.

The slow rise of the city in the later Middle Ages allowed the emergence of an increasingly powerful urban commercial class, dominated by wealthy merchants and bankers. This group was particularly powerful in Florence which emerged as the largest city in Europe by the mid-thirteenth century and one of the richest. To consolidate their power, Florentine burghers put aside fierce family competition, overthrew the nobility, and established the Republic of Florence in 1197. [1] Thereafter, the city was plagued by internal political division between the Ghibellines, who favored aristocratic interests, and the Guelphs, a populist party of commercial elites and artisans who allied with the papacy to check feudal power. After the Ghibellines took power in a bloody civil war in 1260, power flowed back to the Guelphs within a decade and Florence entered a new period of prosperity, building the largest town hall of any Italian city at that time.

By the early fifteenth century, all of Europe was a series of monarchies and feudal regimes except a handful of burgher republics in Italy. Among these, the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful was Florence. As such, it was eyed by the leading feudal states, above all, the Visconti Duchy of Milan, which launched a number of unsuccessful campaigns to take the city between 1375 and 1440. Needless to say, burgher republican thinking developed elaborate contrasts between republican liberty, civic involvement, moderation, and sobriety and the supposedly corrupt and decadent world of courtly “tyrannies” and monarchies.

In particular, Florentine humanists developed extensive comparisons between ancient republican Rome (ca. 300 BC to 20 AD) and modern Florence. They took special pride in the city’s founding by Julius Ceasar in 59 BC during the Roman republican period and fashioned a largely mythical history of the city rooted in an idealized Roman republican past. This Florentine humanist celebration of the city and its history stressed the justice of its political system, the impressiveness of its buildings and literary culture, the sober moral character of its citizens (moderation, simplicity, austerity, temperance, and public service), the prosperity of its hard-working merchants, and the strength of its armies. Drawing on ancient historians, Florentine humanists updated the many contrasts in classical writing between the virtues of a republican Rome and the vices which befell Rome under the later imperial period (ca. 50 AD-313 AD) when Rome was often ruled by corrupt and tyrannical emperors. Borrowing this Roman republican rhetoric for their own historical narratives, Florentine humanists contrasted the virtues of a modern, republican Florence to the vices of modern princely city-states, above all the threatening princely regime of the Visconti family in Milan.

By the early fifteenth century, an intensely "Roman" humanist civic culture circulated through a wide range of Florentine codes, ritual practices, and cultural forms *including laws, festivals, processions, speeches, sermons, historical, moral and political writing, and works of art. One of the most striking literary expressions of this Florentine civic humanism was Bruni's Panegyric on Florence (c. 1404). In typical civic humanist fashion, Bruni hailed the city’s Roman republican founding and its rebirth in the city’s recent history. For Bruni, the city's republican institutions underlay its political justice, civic virtue, social order, and triumphant military power over contemporary Italian tyrannies, especially the court of Milan. In the passage below, Bruni moves from politics to history, language, and material culture such as architecture. For Florentine elites like Chancellor Bruni, cultural forms made visible the city's superior "Roman" freedoms, virtues, and strength. Conversely, Bruni linked cultural flowering (architecture and literature) to political freedoms as if the strengthening of Florentine republican values had inspired a similar rebirth of humanist art and culture. Here was the beginning of a Renaissance mythology of cultural revival and rebirth (renaissance) which fifteenth-century Florentine humanists, artists, and patrons later developed into a more elaborate socio-political discourse on the Golden Age.

What, therefore, was the stock of these Florentines? Who were their progenitors? By what mortals was this outstanding city founded? Recognize, men of Florence, recognize your race and your forebears. Consider that you are, of all races, the most renowned. ... But your founder is the Roman people - the lord and conqueror of the entire world. Immortal God, you have conferred so many good things on this one city so that everything - no matter where it happens or for what purpose it was ordained - seems to redound for Florence's benefit.

For the fact that the Florentine race arose from the Roman people is of utmost importance. What nation in the entire world was ever more distinguished, more powerful, more outstanding in every sort of excellence than the Roman people? Their deeds are so illustrious that the greatest feats done by other men seems like child's play when compared to the deeds of the Romans. Their dominion was equal to the entire world, and they governed with the greatest competence for many centuries, so that from a single city comes more examples of virtue than all other nations have been able to produce until now. In Rome there have been innumerable men so outstanding in every kind of virtue that no other nation on earth has been equal to it. ... Indeed, if you are seeking nobility in a founder you will never find any people nobler in the entire world than the Roman people; if you are seeking wealth, none more opulent; if you want grandeur and magnificence, none more outstanding and glorious; if you seek extent of dominion, there was no people on this side of the ocean that had not been subdued and brought under Rome's power by force of arms. Therefore, to you, also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominion over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy. From this it follows that all wars that are waged by the Florentine people are most just, and this people can never lack justice in its wars since it necessarily wages war for the defense or recovery of its own territory. Indeed, these are the sorts of just wars that are permitted by all laws and legal systems. Now, if the glory, nobility, virtue, grandeur, and magnificence of the parents can also make the sons outstanding, no people in the entire world can be as worthy of dignity as are the Florentines, for they are born from such parents who surpass by a long way all mortals in every sort of glory. ...

Accordingly, this very noble Roman colony was established at the very moment when the dominion of the Roman people flourished greatly and when very powerful kings and warlike nations were being conquered by the skill of Roman arms and by virtue. ... Moreover, the Caesars, the Antonines, the Tiberiuses, the Neros [corrupt emperors from the later imperial period] - these plagues and destroyers of the RomanRepublic - had not yet deprived the people of their liberty. Rather, still growing there was that sacred and untrampled freedom that, soon after the founding of the colony of Florence, was to be stolen by those vilest of thieves. For this reason I think something has been true and is true in this city more than in any other; the men of Florence especially enjoy perfect freedom and are the greatest enemies of tyrants. So I believe that from its very founding Florence conceived such a hatred for the destroyers of the Roman state and underminers of the RomanRepublic that it has never forgotten to this very day. If any trace of or even the names of those corrupters of Rome have survived to the present, they are hated and scorned in Florence.

Now this interest in republicanism is not new to the Florentine people, nor did it begin (as some people think) only a short time since. Rather, this struggle against tyranny was begun a long time ago when certain evil men [emperors] undertook the worst crime of all - the destruction of the liberty, honor, and dignity of the Roman people. At that time, fired by a desire for freedom, the Florentines adopted their penchant for fighting and their zeal for the republican side and this attitude has persisted down to the present day. ...

Since Florence had as its founders those who were obeyed everywhere by everyone and dominated by their skill and military prowess, and since it was founded when a free and unconquered Roman people flourished in power, nobility, virtues, and genius, it cannot be doubted at all that this one city only stands out in its beauty, architecture, and appropriateness of site (as we have seen), but that Florence also greatly excels beyond all other cities in the dignity and nobility of its origin.

O incredible magnificence and excellence of Florence! O Roman people and race of Romulus! Who would not now esteem the name of Florence with great honor on account of the excellence of its spirit and the vast dimensions of its deeds? What greater thing, what more outstanding feat could this city accomplish, or in what way could it better prove that the virtue of its forebears was still alive than by liberating the whole of Italy, by its own efforts and resources, from the threat of servitude? As a result of this feat, Florence daily receives congratulations, praises, and thanks from all nations. But all these accomplishments have been credited by Florence to the will of Almighty God. Always possessing a certain modesty, Florence has preferred to credit its deeds to divine intervention rather than claim them on account of its own virtue. Consequently, Florence has never become inflated in its successes, nor have its victories been accompanied by retribution against those states that Florence could, by right, have hated. ...

As Florence is admirable in foreign affairs, so it has outstanding civil institutions and laws. Nowhere else do you find such internal order, such neatness, and such harmonious cooperation. ... There is nothing here that is ill proportioned, everything occupies its proper place, which is not only clearly defined but also in right relation to all other elements. Here are outstanding officials, outstanding magistrates, an outstanding judiciary, and outstanding social classes. These parts are so distinct so as to serve the supreme power of Florence, just as the Roman tribunes used to serve the empire.

Now, first of all, great care is taken so that justice is held most sacred in the city, for without justice there can be no city. Next there is provision for freedom, without which this great people would not even consider that life was worth living. These two principles are joined (almost as a stamp or goal) to all the institutions and statutes that the Florentine government has created. ...

Now what shall I say of the persuasiveness of their speech and the elegance of their discourse? Indeed, in this category the Florentines are the unquestioned leaders. All of Italy believes that this city alone possesses the clearest and purist speech. All who wish to speak well and correctly follow the example of the Florentine manner of speech, for this city possesses men who are so expert in their use of the common vernacular language that all others seem like children compared to them. The study of literature - and I don't mean simply mercantile and vile writings but that which is especially worthy of free men - which always flourishes among every great people, grows in this city in full vigor. [2]

Bruni's text is a classic of Renaissance burgher civic humanism and its selective use of classical culture to define, justify, and celebrate new, modern values. Though written fifteen years before Brunelleschi's innovations in Renaissance architecture (1419-), Bruni's speech shows how Florentine elites had already projected a Roman republican civic pride onto the city's late Gothic architecture. Once we comprehend the centrality of "ancient Roman" republican values to early fifteenth-century Florentine identity, it is easy to see why the new, conspicuously Roman architectural language of Brunelleschi caught on so rapidly. Prepared by the widespread circulation of new values in texts, speeches, laws, and other forms of culture, a "Roman" architectural language was irresistible once it appeared.

Through the patronage of Brunelleschi's new "Roman" or Renaissance architecture, Florentine institutions, officials, and ambitious patrons such as the Medici and Pazzi could proclaim a new civic humanist identity for the city and for themselves as leading "citizens". Through a new architecture, Florence could grandly announce its "Roman" republican freedoms, military power, divine favor, political and moral virtues, and cultural superiority.

Public Spending in an Age of Burgher Republics and Renaissance Humanism

With an ongoing building boom in both private and public architecture in the fifteenth century, it didn't take long for the new "Roman" manner to catch on and transform the city. This transformation included a town square - the first of its kind since antiquity - which Brunelleschi designed in 1419 around a city orphanage and an important church. Here, Brunelleschi gave the city its first "Roman" civic space where citizens could proudly experience their republican freedoms and virtues. With financing from the Medici patriarch at that time, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Brunelleschi also built the church of San Lorenzo in the new "Roman" manner between 1421-28 (finished in 1469).

While it was unprecedented for a private burgher family to pay for the rebuilding of a large parish church, the Medici had amassed tremendous wealth as the leading banking family in Italy and major players in the Florentine textile industry. Giovanni di Bicci de Medici agreed to fund the church for a variety of reasons. It was his parish church and he could command the preeminent burial place for himself and his family directly below the dome in the old sacristy, a separate, smaller building off the north transept. As a gift to God, the church of San Lorenzo would ensure salvation for his family. St. Laurence, to whom the church was dedicated, was also one of the Medici family patron saints. The gift ensured his special intercession for the Medici family’s salvation. As a parish church serving a large neighborhood in Florence, San Lorenzo allowed private wealth to commit itself grandly to public expenditures and, more particularly, to a Florentine public culture of the city as a powerful, godly republic. Here is how one Florentine humanist described it in his biography of Cosimo de’ Medici, the eldest son of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici and the man who took over the project of San Lorenzo at his father’s death in 142x . The patronage described here also mentions other churches and monasteries built by Cosimo de’ Medici including the Dominican monastery of San Marco and the Badia church in nearby Fiesole.