The Renaissance

Start with the word, because the word is already an argument. Renaissance is French for rebirth, and nobody living through the period used it of themselves in that form. The Italian painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, spoke of a rinascita — a rebirth of the arts after centuries of decline. But the grand capital-R Renaissance, the one that reaches school textbooks as a single glorious epoch, was largely built in the nineteenth century, above all by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose study of Italian civilisation appeared in 1860. It was Burckhardt who taught Europe to see this period as the moment the modern individual was born. The label stuck, and it has been quietly distorting the picture ever since, because a word meaning rebirth smuggles in a claim: that something had first died.

What supposedly died was the Middle Ages, and here scholarship has spent the past century pushing back hard. Medieval Europe was not a blank. Its universities — Bologna, Paris, Oxford — were founded well before any Florentine painter picked up a brush, and were serious centres of learning. Classical texts had been recovered before, more than once: a great wave of translation ran through the twelfth century, much of it from Arabic, as Aristotle's philosophy and the mathematics, medicine and astronomy of the Islamic world reached the Latin West through Spain and Sicily. Historians now speak, only half-jokingly, of a renaissance of the twelfth century. Gothic cathedrals were an engineering triumph. The idea of a thousand years of darkness followed by a sudden dawn is a story told by the people who came afterwards and wanted to look new.

So what did change, and where? From around the fourteenth century, and most intensely in northern Italy, a particular set of conditions came together. Italy was not a country but a scatter of competing city-states, and several of them were extraordinarily rich. Florence had banking and wool. Venice had a maritime empire and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean. Milan had arms, land and a ruthless ducal court; later Rome had the returning wealth of the papacy. This prosperity mattered less because it bought marble than because of what it bought marble for. Merchant families with new money and no ancient titles needed to prove they belonged, and they competed for prestige through display: chapels, palaces, libraries, façades. Patronage became a form of politics. The Medici of Florence are the outstanding example, and over the course of three generations they turned the funding of art into an instrument of power.

A Renaissance painting was not, in the main, an act of free self-expression. It was a job. A guild, a brotherhood, a banking family or a pope issued a commission, and the contract might specify the subject, the size, the delivery date and the quantity of gold and costly blue pigment. The Church remained by far the largest patron of all, and that fact complicates the tidy story of a suddenly secular age. Paintings were made in workshops, not studios. A boy entered at twelve or thirteen as an apprentice, ground pigments, prepared panels, learned to draw by copying, and only gradually was allowed to paint the parts that mattered. Leonardo trained in the Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, as did others whose names we still know. Genius here was something a trade produced.

What that trade acquired, over the course of a few decades, was a set of tools that changed what a picture could do. The most famous is linear perspective, worked out in Florence in the early fifteenth century and associated with the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who is said to have demonstrated it with a painted panel and a mirror no later than the mid-1420s. A few years afterwards Leon Battista Alberti codified the method in a treatise on painting, turning a workshop trick into a teachable geometry. Painters began to study anatomy, sometimes by dissection, to understand the body they drew. Oil paint, handled with astonishing subtlety by Netherlandish painters such as Jan van Eyck, spread south and allowed slow, glowing, layered depth. The flat gold ground of the medieval altarpiece gave way to rooms you seem able to walk into, and to portraits of particular, imperfect human faces.

The same city produced an engineering answer to a problem it had left itself. Florence's cathedral had been begun in the late thirteenth century with a hole at its centre nobody yet knew how to roof; Brunelleschi's vast brick dome, raised without conventional scaffolding, was structurally complete by 1436. Meanwhile the recovery of the classics accelerated. Humanists — the word comes from the studia humanitatis, the humanities — hunted lost Latin manuscripts in monastery libraries, Petrarch prominent among them from around the mid-fourteenth century. Greek learning arrived with Byzantine scholars, under way before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and much strengthened by it. Then printing multiplied everything, and by the late fifteenth century printed books were sold across Europe. This revival of ancient scholarship shifted attention towards human experience, civic duty and individual achievement — a secular emphasis, not an irreligious one. Erasmus and Thomas More, the great northern humanists, were devout Christians who wanted the Church reformed, not abolished.

None of this stayed in Italy. What is called the Northern Renaissance had its own character and partly its own timing: Van Eyck in the Low Countries had been painting with unmatched precision from around the 1430s, and Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg later travelled to Italy, absorbed its theory of proportion, and used the press to carry his engravings across Europe. In the north the movement ran into religious reform and merged with it. Erasmus produced a new Greek edition of the New Testament in 1516; Luther's protest followed within a year or two, and humanist scholarship — the insistence on returning to a text's original words — became a weapon in a fight that would tear Latin Christendom apart. Science moved on a similar current. Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of his system in a book published in the year of his death, 1543; Vesalius, that same year, published his great study of the human body based on dissection. Galileo's telescope came later, well into the next century.

Set beside this is what the golden-age version leaves out. It was a violent period. The Italian Wars, which began in 1494 when a French army marched south, dragged foreign armies across the peninsula for decades, and Rome itself was sacked in 1527 by mutinous imperial troops. Plague returned again and again. In Florence the preacher Girolamo Savonarola briefly dominated the city and had luxuries, mirrors, cosmetics and books piled up and burned in the famous bonfires of the vanities — before he was himself executed and burned in 1498. Mediterranean commerce ran on slavery, and enslaved domestic servants were present in wealthy Italian households. Women were, with few exceptions, shut out of the workshops and the universities. And for the great majority of Europeans — peasants who never entered a city, never held a printed book and never saw a painting with a vanishing point — daily life went on much as always, governed by harvests and weather rather than geometry.

The echoes, though, are everywhere. The phrase "Renaissance man" still marks our idea of the person who can do everything — an ideal formulated, note, by people selling themselves to patrons. The habits formed in princely and papal collections produced the modern museum and the art market, in which a picture is an asset. Above all we inherited the periodisation itself: the confidence with which we cut the past into blocks, name them, and let the names do our thinking — a confidence now under attack. Scholars ask whether a Renaissance so brilliantly staged has led us to undervalue the medieval world it dismissed, and to forget how much of its recovered learning came through Byzantine, Arabic, Persian and Jewish hands. What we call a period, it turns out, decides what we can see in it.