Peter Burke - The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy

For Maria Lcia

T his book is a history of the culture of the Italian Renaissance in a period (roughly 14001550) in which contemporaries claimed that art and literature was reborn. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Renaissance movement was a systematic attempt to go forward by going back in other words, to break with medieval tradition by following an older model, that of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Hundreds if not thousands of studies have been devoted to this topic. The most famous of them remains The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Writing over a hundred and fifty years ago, Burckhardt viewed the Renaissance as a modern culture created by a modern society. Today, it looks rather more archaic. This shift in attitude is due in part to scholarly research on continuities between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but even more to changes in conceptions of the modern. Since 1860 the classical tradition has withered away, the tradition of representational art has been broken, and rural societies have become urban and industrial (if not post-industrial) on a scale that dwarfs fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cities and their handicrafts. Renaissance Italy now looks underdeveloped, in the sense that the majority of the population worked on the land, while many were illiterate and all of them were dependent on animate sources of power, especially horses and oxen. This perspective makes the many cultural innovations of the period even more remarkable than they seemed in Burckhardts time. To understand and explain these innovations, which came in the course of time to constitute a new tradition, is the aim of this book.

The aim of the present study is to write not only a cultural history but also a social history of the Renaissance movement, and in particular to Neither of the key terms is easy to define. By culture I mean essentially attitudes and values and their expressions and embodiments in artefacts (including texts) and practices (including performances). Culture is the realm of the imaginary and the symbolic, not distinct from everyday life but underlying it. As for society, the term is shorthand for economic, social and political structures, all of which reveal themselves in the social relationships characteristic of a particular place and time.

The central argument of this book is that we cannot understand the culture of the Italians in this period if we look only at the conscious intentions of the individuals who produced the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and philosophy that we continue to admire today. Understanding these individual intentions, so far as this remains possible after five hundred years hampered as we now are not only by gaps in the evidence but also by the differences between our categories, assumptions and values and theirs is certainly necessary, but it is not sufficient for the understanding of the movement in which these individuals participated.