Cultural Renaissance in Italy

Author: Jacob Burckhardt
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1979-07-01
Features: In the spring of 1853, Burckhardt revisited Italy and began writing The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, aiming to introduce readers to the profound "enjoyment" of art he had experienced during his numerous travels to Italy. The book is rich in personal emotion in its descriptions of Italy, particularly Rome. On the very next page, the reader is led to the sea, with the shimmering surface visible through the colonnade of the Temple of Neptune. On the last page, the author discusses his own "nostalgia," longing for the "unforgettable" Rome. This nostalgia occasionally falls into a dormant state but never disappears. The book records his direct impressions of everything he saw, from classical antiquity to 18th-century art. When describing these works, he deliberately avoids discussing their historical context to preserve the pleasure of appreciating art. He believed, for example, that when early Christian art, we must judge it purely by the standard of artistic quality and reject the "pessimistic impression" that arises from the prejudice that the Church used products of completely different civilizations (pagan) in these works, and that "in our imagination, we unconsciously envision the Church surrounded by a mysterious aura." When discussing the Ducal Palace of Venice, Burckhardt explicitly pointed out that if we could forget the "various historical and poetic prejudices that occupy our imagination," we would have to admit that the proportions of the entire palace are unsatisfactory, apart from the beauty of its superstructure. However, as Professor Haskell has demonstrated, while Burckhardt successfully wrote The Art of Italy in the Renaissance as a book that appreciates the essence of art, his insights into art became the fundamental ideas of his masterpiece, The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy. In other words, he transformed the concepts of the art realm into the realms of politics and culture. In The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, although Burckhardt avoided discussing art, he often mentioned Vasari in the notes. This indicates that in his attitude toward the 15th century, Burckhardt inherited more from the tradition of Vasari. Before Burckhardt planned to write The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, the painting of 15th-century Italy had already attracted admiration. But to a large extent, this was a rebellion against traditional value standards. Traditionally, as Michelangelo firmly believed, Renaissance works of the 16th century were the pinnacle of European art. However, Leo, Pausinian, and Ruskin found that some paintings from 15th-century Italy exhibited a childlike innocence and an ardent spiritual value, qualities that were still visible in the early works of Raphael. After the 15th century, as art succumbed to the pedantry, corruption, and materialism of academies, this precious quality disappeared. Burckhardt's view was unique. Rather than admiring 15th-century painting, he adopted Vasari's theory that it was a stage leading to the more perfect creations of the 16th century. This perfection was ultimately embodied in the late masterpieces of Raphael. Thus, Burckhardt's attitude was more indebted to Vasari than to his modern predecessors and contemporaries. We can almost interpret Burckhardt's artistic concepts in relation to his Renaissance concepts. In The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, Burckhardt wrote that in the early 15th century, a new spirit emerged. Painting, though still primarily serving the Church, had "transcended the Church's demands" and presented "a picture of the real world. Artists became devoted to studying and reproducing the external forms of things, gradually taking over the aspects of figures and their environments (realism)." The conceptual treatment of facial expressions and clothing had given way to accurate and naturalistic representation. Beauty, which had long been regarded as the primary attribute of divinity, disappeared in the pursuit of accuracy and evolved into a form of beauty that belonged solely to this world. In this sense, art gave less to the Church than it demanded, because only with absolute control could the religious elements in art flourish and survive: any concession to the secular, even the smallest, such as observing the structure of clothing or showing interest in the correct spatial arrangement of figures, would inevitably break the spell of religion. Here, Burckhardt implied that the rise of naturalism was the result of the Church relaxing its control over artists, which gave artists the opportunity to realize personal ambitions and express individuality. Clearly, this conclusion became the basic view of Burckhardt's analysis of the political situation of the Italian Renaissance. We remember that at the beginning of The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt emphasized that it was precisely because the emperors and popes were weak—that is, they had lost the ability to monopolize power—that Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries gave rise to those tyrants. Similar to the political situation, Florence was the first to be impacted by the new artistic trends. Perugino, Raphael's teacher, was originally part of the Florentine school. Later, under the pressure of competition, he returned to his hometown of Perugia, abandoning what he had learned in Florence. To meet public religious demands, he produced countless repetitive and mechanical images. However, when his student Raphael was commissioned to complete his teacher's works, he did not seek inspiration from Perugino's more pious early works. He never rested on his achievements but pursued novelty and higher artistic expression throughout his life, driven by a moral spirit. "This moral quality would certainly remain with him until his old age. If we consider his extraordinary creativity in his last few years, we can imagine how much irreparable loss his early death brought us." In his study of architecture, Burckhardt's views were also unconventional. Kugler and German historians had always disparaged Renaissance architecture of the 15th and 16th centuries, believing that it lacked the "organic style" of ancient Greece, especially German architecture; it was merely a hodgepodge of classical styles and offered no useful reference for contemporary designers. Burckhardt was initially deeply influenced by such prejudices but later overcame them through multiple visits to Italy and on-site research, reassessing Renaissance architecture with new eyes. He acknowledged that the architecture of this period had not yet reached an "organic" level but had established excellent models. However, eclecticism was not its defining feature. He wrote: "We can distinguish two true periods of the Renaissance. period is from 1420 to 1500, which we call the exploratory period. The second period begins in 1540, the golden age of modern architecture, where in its greatest buildings, fundamental forms and decorations achieve a special harmony between strict adherence to true proportions and decorative elements." Here, Burckhardt's views clash again with Michelangelo. We remember that Michelangelo regarded Brunelleschi as an isolated genius without successors, who had futilely broken through the medieval fortress to bring the Renaissance to Italy. Burckhardt disagreed with this view, believing that "what Brunelleschi pioneered was continued by Michelozzo. Without his Riccardi Palace, Rosellino and Benvenuto would not have been able to build their palaces." Indeed, in talent, these architects could not be compared to Brunelleschi, but their buildings demonstrated that at least in its stage, the Renaissance was an achievement of the 15th century, created by many people with different talents, and Brunelleschi happened to be one of the most outstanding among them. Of course, Burckhardt did not deny the defects in Renaissance architecture, but unlike Michelangelo, he did not attribute them to the 15th century, believing that these defects had existed long before. Fortunately, they were merely temporary obstacles on the path to the Renaissance. In 1846, during his visit to Florence, he first encountered Donatello's Magdalene, whose extreme naturalism repelled him. In 1853, when he revisited Florence, his earlier aversion turned into fear and hatred, which was Burckhardt's reaction to all of Donatello's works. He described the St. John the Baptist (now identified as an early work by Sansovino, created more than half a century after Donatello's death) with this sense of fear: "Too terrible! Like a rough skeleton, leaning forward, if it were loosened, it would fall to the right. The limbs are as if skinned." What was even more terrifying was that Donatello's works monopolized all the elements of the new art: it often happens in the history of art that a new stylistic tendency concentrates all the extreme forms in one artist, thereby mercilessly challenging earlier styles. However, in this stylistic shift, the novelty and the spirit of rebellion against the past were so completely and unilaterally embodied in one artist as Donatello—that was rare. In some of Donatello's late sculptures, the shadows of ancient sarcophagi and other antiquities can still be faintly seen, but those "characteristic features" that terrified Burckhardt "strangely protrude among other features," he wrote. Donatello was a great naturalist with a talent for sculpture, who did not recognize any limits to his art. The very fact that things exist, the fact that things have an autonomous nature, enabled him to represent everything in sculpture. For him, the ultimate goal was to give this quality the most severe, rough, and sometimes (if the subject allowed) powerful and magnificent life. In writing The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, Burckhardt's language was naturally more controlled, but his reaction to Donatello was of great significance to his later explanation of Italian society. When he described those "horrible" condottieri in The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt must have recalled the impression Donatello's sculptures left on him. Donatello ignored artistic conventions, and those condottieri were "the earliest deliberate negation of all moral constraints," their character being "a witness to original sin," while "this sin was also the condition for their greatness—that is, extreme individualism." Throughout The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, we can read Burckhardt's skeptical attitude toward various forms of power. This attitude was closely tied to his view of Michelangelo. Burckhardt almost detested Michelangelo's works, and even in The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, his comments on the artist read like an accusation of the sins of the Renaissance: he was the embodiment of the future fate of art; his works, the success they enjoyed, contained all the elements needed to define the basic nature of modern art. Three centuries of art were characterized by subjectivity, which appeared in the person of Michelangelo, disguised as creativity that broke free of all external constraints, just as in so many great spiritual movements of the 16th century, this subjectivity did not emerge reluctantly or unconsciously but with significant intention. Here, we should also note that Burckhardt's reactions to Donatello and Michelangelo both revealed how he benefited from Vasari and how he completely rejected Vasari's judgments. For example, it was Vasari who first made the comment that the angels in the lunette of Santa Croce were huddled together out of fear. Burckhardt seized on this. But Vasari praised Donatello with unreserved enthusiasm, extolling his works as "beautiful, thoughtful, and outstanding," qualities that not only placed him on par with the ancients but, combined with his naturalism, enabled him to inspire Florentine artists to take the decisive step toward the perfection of Michelangelo. While acknowledging Donatello's "great influence," Burckhardt always felt that this influence was somewhat dangerous: "If it were not for the inner tendency toward beauty, the driving force that repeatedly leads art beyond bare naturalism and superficial imitation of classical antiquity—that is, if it were not for the great spirit of 15th-century Italy, then the principle of admiring Donatello would be a fatal fashion." Here, Burckhardt seemed to acknowledge the role of Hegel's spiritual movement, because he had already treated the "tendency toward beauty" as something almost independent of the will and ability of specific artists. Therefore, he implied that Donatello, this unruly sculptor, was not a central figure in the Renaissance process but an marginal one. He said, yes, Donatello "was not lacking in a sense of beauty, but this sense must yield to character when necessary, and that 'great Civitale' had 'overcome Donatello's harsh edges,' so that in the angels of the Church of San Luca, he could combine the most noble style of the 15th-century style that had emerged since the time of Ghiberti with a noble beauty full of fervent piety and youthful vitality." In The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt made a similar comparison between the rich individuality developed in Florence and the individuality of the tyrants in other parts of Italy, but he did not explicitly tell us which one was the characteristic of the Renaissance. As for the origins of the Renaissance, Burckhardt rejected the traditional view that the rebirth of classical antiquity created the Renaissance, a conclusion that also stemmed from his early Italian art studies. In The Art of Italy in the Renaissance, although he agreed with Vasari's view that Brunelleschi was the "first to revitalize the life of classical antiquity in architecture," he did not delve deeply into this aspect. When discussing Donatello, he deliberately emphasized his anti-classical features. This was not accidental. In The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt explicitly stated that the influence of classical antiquity was only one aspect, and without it, the Renaissance would still have occurred. This conclusion naturally came from his keen observations and extensive research on 15th-century Italian architecture, sculpture, and painting. This book discusses Italian nations and individuals, the revival of classical culture, the discovery of the world and the discovery of humanity, social life and festivals, morality and religion, among other aspects, covering the culture of Italy from the late 13th century to the mid-16th century.