Late Middle Ages

The Origins of the Italian Renaissance

Any account of the Italian Renaissance has to begin in a very specific place: the city-republics of northern and central Italy in the two generations after the Black Death, and above all in Florence, where the wealth of the wool and banking trades, the political competition of leading families, and the recovery of classical Latin literature together produced a culture of unprecedented self-consciousness about the present as a “new age.” The three articles in this section treat that origin story from three complementary angles — the figure of Petrarch, the patronage of the Medici, and the city of Florence itself as the social and physical cradle of the movement.

Florence and the world of the Italian city-states

The third article in this section, Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance, sets the social and physical stage. It traces the Florentine economy — the Arte della Lana wool guild, the great banking houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the long-distance trade that brought Florentine capital to the papal curia at Avignon and to the Bruges wool market — and the urban fabric in which the new art was made: the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore with Brunelleschi’s dome (completed 1436), the baptistery of San Giovanni, the church of San Lorenzo, the new Palazzo Medici (begun 1444) and the Palazzo Strozzi (1489). The article also takes up the political history of the republic: the Ordinamenti di giustizia of 1293, the Ciompi revolt of 1378, the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 and the long transition from commune to principate. Richard Goldthwaite’s The Building of Renaissance Florence (1980) and his later work on the material culture of the period have done more than any single scholar to make the social and economic history of the city central to the historiography of the Renaissance.

Petrarch and the birth of humanism

The first article, Petrarch: father of Renaissance humanism, is the intellectual heart of the section. Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) — crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341 on the Capitol — gave the new movement its self-understanding. His discovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in Verona in 1345, his laborious ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336, his vernacular Canzoniere and his unfinished Latin epic the Africa, and above all the autobiographical dialogue Secretum in which he stages his own moral crisis together with an imaginary Augustine mark the moment when a medieval moralist consciously turned himself into a “new man,” reading the classics not as authorities to be reconciled with Christian truth but as guides to a renovated inner life. The historiographical debate about the scope and timing of “humanism” was opened by Paul Oskar Kristeller’s 1944–45 essay and is still active; Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955) argued that the experience of Florentine republican politics in the years around 1400 — the threat from Giangaleazzo Visconti and the subsequent civic humanism — gave the humanist programme its distinctive turn, a thesis that has been refined but not overturned.

The Medici and the patronage of the new learning

The second article, The patronage of the Medici family, follows the other essential strand: the money. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) — pater patriae, the dominant figure of mid-Quattrocento Florence — and his grandson Lorenzo “il Magnifico” (1449–1492) bankrolled the humanist programme directly: Ficino’s translation of Plato at the villa in Careggi, the rebuilding of San Lorenzo and the convent of San Marco, Brunelleschi’s dome, Donatello’s bronze David (c. 1440s), the young Michelangelo’s time in the Medici sculpture garden. The article also takes the Medici story in two harder directions: Lorenzo’s political management of the fragile post-1453 Italian balance after the fall of Constantinople, and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494 and their return in 1512 — events that shaped Machiavelli’s Il Principe (written 1513, printed 1532). Nicolai Rubinstein’s decades of work on Florentine constitutional history and on the Medici palace in Via Larga remain the standard scholarly reference for this material.

Articles in this section

Articles in this chapter