Many cultural currents converged to encourage Florentines to develop three-dimensional perspective in the 15th century. Yesterday’s article examined several and we’ll explore more here. Several types of experiences converge to create culture’s way of ordering reality.
In the 1390s Milan’s large and aggressive inland empire became even more fearsome. The Visconti family ruled it as aristocratic dukes rather than republican citizens (as in Florence), and they had already established a new standard of ruthless ambition. The brothers Bernabo and Galeazzo were said to have designed a 40-day sequence of tortures for their prisoners. The wheel, the rack, flaying, eye-gouging, and the severing of limbs and parts of the face alternated with a day of rest to maximize victims’ agony. Everyone knew not to pique the Visconti brothers.
Galeazzo’s son, Gian Galeazzo, murdered his uncle Bernabo and seized power. He then expanded Milan southwards and onto Florentine soil. The duke and his vast army reached Florence’s walls, but he suddenly contracted a fever and died in 1402. Though the outcome seemed miraculous to Florentines, the war had been traumatic and it highlighted the perils of an unrestrained autocracy.
Florence’s chancellor from 1375 to 1406, Coluccio Salutati, spread the appreciation of ancient Roman literature that focused on civilized urban life, including Cicero’s praise of republican freedom. Salutati gathered a circle of younger men around him who shared his passion for antiquity, and they contrasted Florence’s values of liberty and good living with Milan’s power mongering.
They spearheaded a major change in literary taste by preferring eloquence and style over metaphysics and logic chopping, which the university men in those Gothic cathedrals in the cold North admired. The Florentines’ values were more urbane.
They believed that a person should become a complete human being by being generally well-read, civic-minded, articulate, and well-acquainted with other worldly people. Salutati brought ancient writings about cultivated secular life into polite circles in the decades before the sculpture on Orsanmichele took form.
Salutati and his friends admired Cicero for defending civic freedom. He used Cicero’s literary style for political correspondence. According to an often-told story, even Gian Galeazzo Visconti said that one letter from Salutati was as powerful as 1,000 lances on the battlefield.
Salutati’s eloquence came from an already ancient tradition. Ancient Roman literature was fundamental in European schools throughout the Middle Ages. Generations of students learned Latin by studying grammars with passages from some of Rome’s most famous writers, including Horace, Livy, Ovid, and Cicero. Roman law became more widely studied in the 11th century as Europe’s towns grew again, and this made people more aware of ancient Rome’s political history as their cities grew. They proudly used Rome’s heritage for their own standards of thinking and writing.
Florentines became acutely conscious of a difference between classical and Gothic architecture. The monuments from ancient Rome’s past, which included proportioned colonnades, victory arches, friezes of historical events, and open spaces which encouraged worldly discourse, became models of well-being.
Leading Florentines began a craze for collecting antiquities and sent men to comb the ruins of Rome for sculptures to bring back to their gardens. Brunelleschi went there to measure and sketch its remains before he designed Florence’s cathedral’s dome.
This humanist movement received a bonanza from the beleaguered Byzantine Empire. The Ottoman Turks had already reduced it to a small area around its capital, Constantinople, which they would take in 1453. Exiles reached Florence with their books and they began to teach Greek. One of the most famous professors, Manuel Chrysoloras, mentored several Florentine students who later became teachers. They became the first generation of classical Greek scholars in Western Europe since antiquity.
The teaching methods Chrysoloras used reinforced Salutati’s. He stressed the all-around education (enkyklios paideia) that many ancient Greeks did by mixing a broad academic curriculum with sports, music, and moral training. Both believed that becoming a complete person enables one to be a good civic leader.
Two powerful images were thus emerging just before Brunelleschi and Alberti articulated three-dimensional perspective, and they helped ingrain it into ways people perceived the world and thought. One was the open civic plaza lined with proportioned classical architecture.
The other was the community of free people interacting with each other within this space. Both became models of liberty. Folks dealt with each other directly rather than under Gothic arches or within a palace. Each was his own node, and they were all related to each other like points linked by straight lines.
Gothic cathedrals also emphasize lines, but they lead to the altar and up to the heavens, as in the Bourges Cathedral (below).
Florentines opened linear relationships into the lateral dimension so that interactions between people in the world are as important in the order of things.
However the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy saw darkness in the abstract lines that Florentines focused on and described it in The Stones of Florence. She thought violence made people long for an ordered world of static lines and shapes as an escape from their blood-splattered streets. She said that family feuds were endemic to the city and that lineages often aligned behind polarized political parties.
One of the main fracases had roots in that old conflict between the pope and the most honored ruler in Germany. The 11th-century tussle between Pope Gregory VII and King Henry IV hardly ended when the German waited in the snow for forgiveness. Not content with enlarging Speyer’s cathedral, he spearheaded an invasion of Italy in which his troops reached Rome and pillaged it. Henry V invaded Rome in the 1110s to enforce his own ability to choose German bishops, and he imprisoned the pope. Many German emperors considered Italy to be their inheritance from Charlemagne’s early ninth century empire.
Some Italians supported the pope against the barbarian king who claimed sovereignty over their land, and they were called Guelphs. Others found the pope meddlesome and supported the northern emperor as the liberator from his restrictions, and they were known as Guibellines. The dividing line between both became especially firm and ferocious in Florence. Families sided with and against each other along it even when they weren’t disagreeing over that specific political issue. It structured many quarrels so that people were forced to decide which side of the line they stood on. McCarthy said that Florence’s murderous conflicts were shaped into this either/or choice. Each party had its own ways of cutting fruit, choosing drinking goblets, speaking, and walking, and infringements often provoked heated arguments. Many experiences thus highlighted this thick division between people, which often turned violent at the drop of a glove.
Florentine men often married late in order to save money for a nest egg, so it was common for husbands to be ten to fifteen years older than their wives. Richard C. Trexler, in Public Life in Renaissance Florence, wrote that the average age of males who married in 1427–8 was thirty-four. Many fathers thus died before their sons grew up. Florence’s streets teemed with adolescents and young men ready to punch and stab as soon as they were annoyed because they lacked a mature male role model to restrain them.
McCarthy thought that the black lines that demarcate the baptistery’s handsome rectangles and semicircles represented ways in which Florentines habitually saw issues. Instead of Thai flows that harmonize many perspectives, people thought in terms of sharp political differences and often drew blood over them. McCarthy felt that Brunelleschi’s perfectly balanced architecture reconciled the oppositions and put them in a peaceful equilibrium. Patricia Lee Rubin, in Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence, wrote that Florentines associated order with status, political grouping, cosmic hierarchy, and the painter’s craft, and that they saw chaos, disintegration, and the horrors of Dante’s hell as opposites of order. The simple, cultured shapes on the baptistery must have appealed in many ways to citizens.
People built soaring stone tower-houses before a 13th century law limited their height to a little less than 100 feet. Some were higher than 200 feet—the family with the tallest home could drop boulders and burning pitch on rivals.
Streets and piazzas often erupted into brawls and knife fights. The ordered public spaces that Brunelleschi created sharply contrasted with the mayhem that they were supposed to replace.
Life in the ordered spaces was sometimes terrifying too. Lorenzo de’ Medici established himself as Florence’s political leader in the late 15th century, but the Pazzi family resented his prestige. They hired assassins to attack him and his brother Giuliano while they were worshipping under Brunelleschi’s dome. The killers chose the most sacred moment in the Mass (the raising of the host) as the signal to draw their daggers and plunge them into the two men. They killed Giuliano, but Lorenzo escaped into the sacristy with a minor injury. The Medicis’ supporters rounded up scores of suspects and hung many of them. They first cut off some men’s noses and ears. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a man who had been hanged. His detached view of the limp body and vacant eyes suggests that he was used to seeing such horrors.
I enjoy comparing McCarthy’s and Kenneth Clark’s ideas of what inspired Florentine art. The latter, a stately old Englishman from Oxford and a career museum curator, ogled over the generation of great men who brought classical literature to the city. Clark thought it was heroic to slice through the puffed up metaphysical ideas from the Middle Ages and see the essential forms of things.
McCarthy had a knack for portraying maladaptive personalities and dysfunctional families, and she seems to have enjoyed deflating male egos. She saw the violent conflicts between men as some of Florence’s biggest artistic inspirations.
I think each saw a different part of the picture. The enjoyment of simple proportioned forms and the fear of violent death were two common experiences in Florence. Both converged to make three-dimensional perspectives seem real and compelling. They dominated Florentine life in different times. The historian Gene A. Brucker said that the tower-houses and brawls characterized life during Dante’s time (the late 13th and early 14th century) and that streets became tamer in the early 15th century, when classical sculpture, painting, architecture, and literature were spreading.
The facade of the wool trader and banker Giovanni Rucellai’s 15th-century palace graces the above photo. A person entering the Strozzi family’s 15th-century palace (below) was immediately surrounded by classical elegance.
If Brucker was right, the deadly conflicts that were structured around either/or choices probably helped shape Florentine thought in the earlier period. Then the men that Clark praised refined the forms in many media, and this encouraged more civilized living. Instead of tower-houses, the wealthy were now building palaces with classical forms.
Michelangelo’s David came to life for me when I was walking from Dante’s reconstructed house to the main piazza and heard horns blowing. When I reached the piazza, I joined the crowd that had gathered there, and groups of uniformed men were jogging into it and stopping in front of the governors’ palace. Some wore black, others were in green and khaki camouflage, and all sported hats with black and green tail feathers from pheasants. Some carried red banners and others ported Italian flags.
Several men then formed a line in front of the palace, next to Michelangelo’s David.
Policemen in black uniforms and horn blowers in long white gowns and red caps joined them. One of them, a man with a full head of grey hair, in a dark blue suit, spoke about an alliance between Florence and Turin, declaring that it would benefit all of Italy. But I found the crowd more interesting than the political rhetoric.
Nobody seemed to be as interested in listening to the speaker as they were in being with each other. A portly old man and woman next to me each held a toddler. A bald fifty-something man in front of us turned around and caressed one of the kid’s cheeks. Several uniformed people started to assemble for group photos. Most were elderly men, but one was a roughly twenty-year-old woman who was about five-foot-ten, with long wavy brown hair, large sparkling eyes, and an ebullient smile. The older men took her picture, and two were poking a young man and smiling, encouraging him to flirt with her. Thin, plain-looking, and pallid, he didn’t follow their advice, and I wondered if he felt that she was out of his league. A Chinese couple came over and snapped a picture of the group, and one of the seniors said, “Xie Xie!” A middle-aged woman carried a grey and white striped tabby cat that looked apprehensive in the noisy crowd. Someone then fired a gun into the air when the speeches ended.
Public gatherings like this in piazzas were regular events in Florence and other Italian towns during the Renaissance. Some were violent—people fought, and militias from all neighborhoods gathered before marching to the battlefield. But many, like the one I enjoyed, mixed politics, fun, and family. Religious processions were also regular in the piazzas, and wardrobes of priests and costumes of people dramatizing biblical stories and saints’ lives were even more colorful than the garb I saw. Piazzas housed all these events and framed them with colonnades, linear rows of windows, and statues that glorified the body. These spaces weren’t just abstract; they were full of life which included the violence that McCarthy emphasized, the stately men that Clark admired, and many vivacious festivals. All these experiences together confirmed the Euclidean lines and planes and the realistic statues that surrounded them as the world’s main ordering principles by reinforcing them every day.
The ideas that people assume to be most basic are not just thought of. They’re lived, and they’re experienced through emotions and many media. A culture’s emphasis on an idea is holistic; many aspects of experience converge to make it seem basic. You can read about more in the West in the development of its focus on distinct objects. People in other cultures have emphasized other ideas as more basic than the abstract line, including India, China, and Thailand.