Renaissance Humanism Part 2
Humanist History as Moral Philosophy and the Secular Immortality of Fame
(also see my more general essay on Humanism)
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in 1990 and is revised annually.)
Humanist History as Moral Philosophy
From its start in the mid-fourteenth century, humanists placed new value on history as a worthy subject in modern education. In part, they were inspired by the rich historical writing of classical antiquity including Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Caesar, Curtius, Livy, Suetonius, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Tacitus, among many others. More importantly, they were inspired by the focus of classical historians on politics, morality, and broad social issues, the very focus of humanist culture.
From the late fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the most common rationale advanced for studying history was the examination of a "universal" human nature with respect to morality and politics. Humanist history was largely moral and political philosophy extending itself through time and geared toward the exercise of moral and political virtue in the present. Historical knowledge would allow urban elites, from republican citizens to lofty princes, to govern with greater wisdom and prudence. As the civic humanist and historian, Bruni, noted, in his essay on education,
First amongst such studies I place History; a subject which must not on any account be neglected by one who aspires to true cultivation. For it is our duty to understand the origins of our own history and its development; and the achievements of Peoples and of Kings.
For the careful study of the past enlarges our foresight in contemporary affairs and affords to citizens and to monarchs lessons of incitement or warning in the ordering of public policy. From History, also, we draw our store of examples of moral precepts. [1]
With its focus on living figures from the past, humanist history claimed for itself a "natural" truth, that is, a wisdom grounded in the study of human nature. Since humanism defined human nature as universal and unchanging, the moral and political lessons from the classical past were directly applicable to modern problems and circumstances. In his Discourses on Livy (III.43), a commentary on Livy's history of Rome, the great Florentine civic humanist and republican statesman, Machiavelli, described this universal human nature and used it to justify the study of history in a chapter entitled, "That Men Born in One Province Display Almost the Same Nature in Every Age".
Prudent men are in the habit of saying, neither by chance nor without reason, that anyone wishing to see what is to be must consider what has been: all the things of this world in every era have their counterparts in ancient times. This occurs since these actions are carried out by men who have and have always had the same passions, which, of necessity, must give rise to the same results. It is true that their actions are more effective at one time in this province than in that, and at another, in that rather than this one, according to the form of the education from which these peoples have derived their way of living. Understanding future affairs through past ones is also facilitated by observing how a nation over a lengthy period of time keeps the same customs, being either continuously avaricious or continuously deceitful, or having some other similar vice or virtue. ... [2]
Repeated in discussions of history through the eighteenth century, [3] this view explains the common features shared by history and more imaginary forms of literature such as tragedy.
For Renaissance humanists, and thus, for most educated elites in Italy after 1400, history offered a school of life, a moral guidebook, a grand series of "true" lessons, a rich compendia of "living" heroes and villains to be emulated and shunned like the figures in Plutarch’s Lives of the Illustrious Greeks and Romans. The pictorial equivalent of these histories of great men and women were Renaissance cycles of paintings of heroes and a few heroines such as those painted by Castagno (Villa Carducci), Perugino (Cambio), Joos de Ghent (for Fegerico da Montefeltro), Ghirlandaio (Palazzo Vecchio), and Mantegna, (Roman emperors in the Camera degli Sposi). [4]
History also offered Renaissance civic and courtly patrons new ways to celebrate themselves, to define roots in a glorious antiquity, and to define political and ethnic geographies such as empires, kingdoms, and "nations" or "peoples". Imperial, monarchical, and aristocratic patrons commissioned histories imbedding themselves in a glorious imperial past of one kind or another with special reference to the Roman empire or the Hellenic empire of Alexander the Great. By 1475, most Italian Renaissance princes were celebrated in these humanist histories and epic poems (historical poetry).
Republican patrons, magistrates, and historians, in turn, invented republican classical traditions, historical parallels, and ancestors for modern republics and republican heroes. One example was the Roman republican history developed for Florence in Bruni's Panegyric on Florence. Bruni's successor as chancellor of Florence, Poggio, wrote a long history of Florence in the 1440s. "National" histories began appearing in the sixteenth century. In his Oration in Praise of Germany (1501) given to the emperor, Maximilian I, the German humanist, Bebel, praised Maximilian as an historian writing a glorious history of Germany and compared him to Julius Caesar as a patron of arts and letters. [5] In 1561, the Florentine historian and political philosopher, Francesco Guicciardini, published a bestselling History of Italy. Its frequent reprintings between 1561-1600 with editions in every major European language shows how humanist historical culture spread rapidly across sixteenth-century Europe.
Humanist World History: Cosmic Cycles and Linear Time
Classical writers generally saw time in circular terms in conjunction with the cycles of the planets and stars, the seasons, and the alternation of night and day. At times, they described human history as a cycle of four progressive or declining ages which tended to revert back to the beginning. The four stages were wilderness, pastoral, agriculture, and city. In primitivist histories, mankind declined from a perfect, wilderness existence to a modern world of urban corruption and alienation from nature. The best example of this appears in the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses where the modern emperor Augustus brings back the lost Golden Age. In progressivist accounts, the stages advance from a savage wilderness to one of urban civilization, technological mastery, and high culture. Progessivist histories also followed cyclical patterns with their warnings of civilizations foundering and collapsing in corruption and returning to the first stage. See, for example, Polybius'Rise of the Roman Empire where he generalizes political history as a series of cycles imbedded in larger cosmic or natural time. [6]
In sharp contrast, early Christian writers defined time as strictly linear, moving forward in an unbroken line from Creation until the end of human existence in Apocalypse, Last Judgment, and the eternities of heaven and hell. History and time were strictly subordinated to a Christian deity. Even when medieval writers divided human time into ages, they used a Christian scheme of three periods: life before Christ (the Jewish and pagan world), life during the time of Christ (New Testament), and life after Christ (the age of organized Christianity).
While this medieval Christian "historical" thinking continued in Renaissance church culture, it was largely supplanted elsewhere by a new humanist history geared not toward Christ but towards a new terrestrial sense of time. For humanists, history divided into three very different periods unrelated to religion: a classical period of light and civilization which declined in later antiquity, a medieval period of supposed darkness and ignorance, and a modern humanist period of renewed civilization.
Classical cyclical and progressive linear time both reappeared in Renaissance humanism. In part, cyclical ideas of history were necessary for Renaissance humanists to justify humanism as a whole. After all, humanism extolled classical civilization as an exemplary "Golden Age" useful for guiding the modern age. This was already clear in the critique of medieval linear time late advanced by the late fourteenth-century Florentine civic humanist, Salutati.
… You would not, I am sure, deny that very many of the processes of Nature move in periodic cycles. The fourfold change of the twelve months follows the course of every year. We see first the beginnings of new birth renewed in the germinating earth; then with various changes we see these beginnings, warmed by the summer heat, shaping themselves into the abundance of the coming fruit; then, when they are ripe for the birth they give each its fruit in due season, and, by as much as they were warmed by the summer's heat, they are tempered by the autumn coolness; finally, in the depth of winter they are all drawn up into the bosom of the all-producing earth to return once more to their beginnings when the frost gives way to the warmth of spring.
The same thing is plainly to be seen in the course of human affairs if one turns carefully the page of history; for, though nothing returns in precisely the same form, yet we see daily some image of the past renewed. ... [7]
Cyclical history also appealed to humanists for other reasons. By imbedding the rise and fall of regimes and changes in social morality within the larger cycles of nature, humanists struggled to order the chaotic power struggles and reversals of fortune which plagued Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. One of the most influential statements of this thinking came at the beginning of book five of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories.
Usually provinces go most of the time, in the changes they make, from order to disorder and then pass again from disorder to order, for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still. As soon as they reach their ultimate perfection, having no further to rise, they must descend, and similarly, once they have descended and through their disorders arrived at the ultimate depth, since they cannot descend further, of necessity they must rise. Thus they are always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good. For virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born, from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune. Whence it has been observed by the prudent that letters come after arms and that, in provinces and cities, captains arise before philosophers. For as good and ordered armies give birth to victories and victories to quiet, the strength of well-armed spirits cannot be corrupted by a more honorable leisure than that of letters, nor can leisure enter into well-instituted cities with a greater and more dangerous deceit than this one. This was best understood by Cato when the philosophers Diogenes and Carneades, sent by Athens as spokesmen to the Senate, came to Rome. When he saw how the Roman youth was beginning to follow them about with admiration, and since he recognized the evil that could result to the fatherland from this honorable leisure, he saw to it that no philosopher could be accepted in Rome. Thus, provinces comes by these means to ruin; when they have arrived there and men have become wise from their afflictions, they return, as was said, to order unless they remain suffocated by an extraordinary force. These causes, first through the ancient Tuscans and then the Romans, have made Italy sometimes happy, sometimes wretched. [8]
The appeal of circular time in no way diminished the appeal of linear time for Renaissance humanists. But here too, we see an important shift from medieval notions of linear time. Drawing on more optimistic classical notions of linear time as human progress and improvement, Renaissance humanists refashioned medieval linear time from an Augustinian sacred history moving from Creation to Last Judgment to a more terrestrial view of history where the past culminated triumphantly in modern knowledge and virtue and continued to move into a glowing future. [9] Humanism even managed to imbed linear time in nature by comparing the rise of civilizations to the linear stages of organic growth in trees, animals, and human life.
Turning away from medieval sacred time and drawing on a variety of classical ideas, Renaissance humanism managed to combine circular and linear time. For example, the return to the beginning - classical antiquity - was also a historical step forward out of the "dark ages" toward a glorious, unfolding future. And when humanists hailed princes for restoring a lost golden age of civilization, peace, and prosperity, they usually praised a golden age which surpassed its predecessors.
Painting as History: Image Cycles of Great Men
From the early fifteenth century, humanist princes and magistrates in Italy began commissioning cycles of paintings and tapestries on the great historical figures of classical antiquity. Princely patrons favored rulers and world conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine. A Dutch artist painted a series of portraits of famous men for the study of the humanist duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro while Mantegna painted a cycle of busts of Roman emperors on the ceiling of the main reception room of the Duke of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga. Burgher patrons and the magistrates of republican city states like Florence commissioned cycles of republican heroes who stood up to princely tyranny. One such example was Ghirlandaio's cycle in the town hall of Florence, the Palazzo Vecchio.
By the mid-sixteenth century, classical political history became an important new subject in European art at the highest levels of court and civic patronage. Other cycles of famous people from classical history focused on intellectuals like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and Homer. Among these was Raphael's famous School of Athens and Parnassus painted around 1508-1510 on the walls of the private library of Pope Julius II. Such cycles of great thinkers continued into the seventeenth century and included, among many examples, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.
Renaissance patrons also commissioned cycles of paintings and tapestries on figures who occupied a place in history and myth, in that exalted realm of early history where heroes interacted with the gods and realized glorious destinies guided by divine providence. Of these, none was more important than the story of the Trojan prince, Aeneas. According to Roman legend, Aeneas was the grandson of Venus. When the Greeks destroyed Troy at the end of the Trojan war, Aeneas fled the burning city carrying his old father, Anchises, on his back, and accompanied by his son. After a series of maritime adventures sailing the Trojan fleet around the Mediterranean, Aeneas started a new settlement at the mouth of the TiberRiver in what is now Italy. Marrying into the local Latin tribe, the Trojans took on a new identity. His descendants included Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars, who grew up to found Rome and led that town to early political power in central Italy.
In this mythical history, Troy was more then just an ancestor kingdom for Rome in a universal court history of great kingdoms and empires linked by Divine Providence. In some sense, Troy was an early version of Rome before it became Rome, with bloodlines flowing directly from Trojan kings to later Roman kings and emperors, all descended from the Gods through Aeneas (and Romulus, the son of Mars). In the universal or world histories favored by rulers and Catholic church officials since the Renaissance, the decline of the kingdom of Troy was less a disaster than a divinely ordained prelude necessary for the rise of Rome as the greatest empire in history and the touchstone of all later Western kingdoms, empires, and nations aspiring to greatness. If this was already true to some extent in the Middle Ages, the story of Aeneas and the Troy-Rome narrative remained the most important foundation story for European monarchs, emperors, and popes from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. [10] Needless to say, it enjoyed special favor in the cultural patronage of high nobles and church officials in Renaissance and Baroque Rome.
The Renaissance revival of classical historical values also gave new life to other classical heroes who founded great cities or empires such as Hercules and Alexander the Great. Every cycle of tapestries, paintings, or prints celebrating the great historical figures of classical antiquity had its own moral and political lessons, its own targeted audiences, and its own particular agenda grounded in local politics. Yet they all shared in the new humanist culture of history and fame. For all their backward looking imagery, they were geared toward defining the virtues of modern patrons, families, institutions, states, and cities and to "writing" them into a permanent and glorious place in a new historical culture.