Ralph Roeder - Renaissance Lawgivers: Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione and Aretino

Originally published in 1933 by Viking Press

Published 2012 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Roeder, Ralph, 18901969.
[Man of the Renaissance.]
Renaissance lawgivers : Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Aretino / Ralph Roeder.
p. cm.
Originally published under title: The man of the Renaissance. New York : Viking, 1933. With new introd.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1824-7 (alk. paper)
1. Renaissance--Italy. 2. Savonarola, Girolamo, 14521498. 3. Machiavelli, Niccolr, 14691527. 4. Castiglione, Baldassarre, conte, 14781529 5. Aretino, Pietro, 14921556. I. Title.
DG533.R6 2011
945.050922--dc22

2011000424

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1824-7 (pbk)

THE four figures that follow illustrate four phases of the moral life of their age and, taken together, they compose the man of the Renaissance. The usual picture of that period is one of exuberant energy and positive achievement, and we are apt to forget that it was also one of mortal travail and misery. Its triumphs are preserved in art, its reverses in its spiritual story, and both were the result of the same causeits supreme vitality. In the broadest sense the Renaissance might be described as one of those recurring crises in the annals of the race when a ferment of new life, like a rising sap, bursts the accepted codes of morality and men revert to Nature and the free play of instinct and experience in its conduct. But such revolutions are not accomplished without resistance or completed without reaction. In Italy the struggle was peculiarly acute because of the high civilization of the race, on the one hand, and its intense individualism, on the other. The Italian was a born individualist and the ferment of new life quickened his craving for unfettered self-expression; but he was also a civilized man who cherished humanity, and he was torn between the claims of Nature and human nature. Thus it was that in art his self-expression found full and free play, for there it was independent of consequences; but in life he could not emancipate himself from them and the result was spiritual turmoil and confusion. The force that created was the force that destroyed, and it was no coincidence perhaps that the artistic glories and the moral miseries of the age came to a climax together.

The Italian Renaissance culminated between the years 1494 and 1530; that span marked the apogee of its artistic development and the crisis of its religious, political, and social disintegration. No thinking man who lived through those four brief momentous decades was the same when they were over. In the lives of the four protagonists of the period it is possible to trace this development; they focus and foreshorten it, and they complement one another with a logical continuity. Together they loom like so many lawgivers, raised by the age to answer its perplexities. In the lawlessness of Nature the Renaissance man found the retribution of its freedom; he was at the mercy of chance; and the word which resounds down the age, the obscure power which dominated and haunted his life, was Fortune. The futility of destiny made faith a necessity; and the search for it produced the prophets who proposed and passed on the torch in turn from one to another. Seeking successively to master life by spirit, by intelligence, by refinement, and by instinct, they found, each according to the truth of his temperament, their vital principles in religion, in patriotism, in society, and in self-satisfaction; and between them they exhausted the alternatives. Their lives embodied the adventures of the basic ideas that men live by; and they developed them with such transparent simplicity and extreme consistency that they live on for posterity as types. The ascetic virtue of Savonarola, the expedient virtue of Machiavelli, the convivial virtue of Castiglione, the animal virtue of Aminowhat are these but the final solutions of those who fear life, those who accept it, those who compromise with it, and those who succumb to it? With the passage of time the ideas which they stated and lived with such force have become so familiar as to be commonplace; but they are commonplaces which the centuries cannot stale; if they are elementary, they are also fundamental. The lawgivers lie with their laws, but it was a man of the Renaissance who wrote: Only the countenances of men change and the extrinsic colours, the same things always return, and nothing that we suffer but has happened to others before us. The obsolete is always reborn.

The Man of the Renaissance, first published in 1933, was a Book of the Month Club selection, and therefore judged appropriate for a large general audience. Its impossible to imagine that a large general audience would find this wonderful book equally attractive today, nor, for that matter, would I expect a more specialized academic readership for it. As William Anthony Hay wrote in the Wall Street Journal on July 16, 2011, the connection between academics and the wider publichas been almost severed.

Its a pity, because history, well told, has a great capacity to enrich our understanding of the world, to give us a greater and more accurate perspective on issues of contemporary urgency, and to foresee the consequences of actions, whether our own or our leaders. You are to be congratulated and envied for reading this volume, because few studies of the Italian Renaissance are so rich in detail, so ambitious in scope, so challenging in interpretation, and so dramatic in presentation. Ralph Roeder tells his story in four chapters, each revolving around one of the major figures of the high Renaissance: Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, and the divine Aretino. Mix them together, and youve got Renaissance Man.

Why these four? First, because they were contemporaries in the period Roeder calls the culmination of the Italian Renaissance: 14941530, so they truly define the spirit of the age. Second, because they are the embodiment of the basic ideas that men live by.

The ascetic virtue of Savonarola, the expedient virtue of Machiavelli, the convivial virtue of Castiglione, the animal virtue of Aretinowhat are these but the final solutions of those who fear life, those who accept it, those who compromise it, and those who succumb to it?

Roeder tells the story, which is far more than a series of biographical portraits and analyses. Roeder takes us on a detailed visit to the courts, cities, and battlefields of Italy at a melodramatic moment when some of the greatest men and women (for there were many virile women in key positions of command and influence in those years) were struggling to establish some sort of durable identity for Italy. At the same moment others, equally great and energetic, worked to undermine any hope of the creation of an Italian nation state. All of this occurred against the background of the revival of ancient learning, thanks to the arrival of Greek and Roman texts from the Middle East.