Virginia Cox's Blog - Posts Tagged "renaissance-art"
Distilling the Italian Renaissance: a new challenge
This year saw the publication of my new book A Short History of the Italian Renaissance, for the London-based publisher I. B. Tauris. This is my first crossover book, intended for an audience made up not only of students and academics, but also of general readers. It was a new and interesting challenge for me, and I thought I’d take a moment now, as 2015 draws to a close, to reflect on the experience. This blog post draws on a talk I wrote for a book launch in New York in October, the full video of which may be seen on this site.
One difference between writing this general, introductory book and writing the kind of highly specialized scholarly work I am more used to writing is that this Short History was so open-ended. Normally, when I write an academic book or article, I know what I am going to say from the outset. I start from a body of material I have been researching or a text for which I want to offer a new reading; and the task of writing is simply about finding the most effective way I can to communicate my argument.
The Short History commission was a very different experience. No one can give a comprehensive account of the Italian Renaissance in 75,000 words—nor, indeed, in 750,000, or, very probably, 7.5 million! Any “short history” is going to be partial, by definition, and to offer a particular take on the subject. And the publisher was setting no constraints on what should or shouldn’t be included—in fact, that was one thing that attracted me to the commission in the first place. My editor at Tauris, Alex Wright, had been quite insistent that he didn’t want a dutiful, point-by-point survey, but something more distinctive and idiosyncratic: I want our books to be ‘introductions with an edge’ – to go beyond the predictable into new, possibly uncharted territory, and to make their readers think in novel and exciting and unexpected ways about the topics addressed.
So, this was a real “blank page” moment for me: both exciting and rather daunting. I had been researching and teaching the Italian Renaissance for more than a quarter of a century when I began the book in 2012, starting the count from the beginning of my PhD research in 1985. Here was the moment of reckoning. What had I discovered in that time? What was the Italian Renaissance? Why did it matter? Why should it continue to interest people today?
One thing I was certain about from the start: that this would be the first general-reader survey book on the Italian Renaissance to give equal weight—or almost equal—to men and to women. A staggering amount of research has been done in the last twenty years on women’s creative contribution in Renaissance Italy. It has been one of the most vibrant sub-fields in Renaissance Studies over this whole period, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it has uncovered a whole, lost world of cultural production and human experience. Steven Botterill, of Berkeley, captured this dynamic with a nice analogy in a review of my 2013 anthology Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance for Choice magazine:
The scholarly investigation of women’s writing in Italian vernacular during the early modern period … is coming more and more to resemble Schliemann’s celebrated excavation of Troy: as each new discovery is brought to light, another still more startling is laid bare beneath, and what looked at first like an unimpressive feature of the cultural landscape is revealed to have a scope and depth undreamed of by earlier investigators.
It has been extraordinarily exciting and a real privilege to participate in this “excavation”, and I loved the idea of being able to share some of these findings with a wider public. They really are quite remarkable, and they prove without doubt that, in Italy at least, women did have a “room of their own” well before the twentieth, or even the nineteenth or eighteenth, century—and not only as writers. Within music, art, acting, women enjoyed a prominence in Italy in the later sixteenth century that they would not have again for centuries to come. This is a story that deserves to be much better known.
A second thing I knew about the book right from the start was that it would have a different periodization from most guides to the Italian Renaissance, in that it would take the Renaissance right down to the end of the sixteenth century. That may not sound particularly revolutionary from an English point of view (we don’t have any problem in thinking of Shakespeare as a Renaissance dramatist), but the periodization of Italian literature and culture has always operated differently. A sharp transition is generally posited around the middle of the sixteenth century, with the Council of Trent and the coming of the Counter Reformation. The later 16thC is seen as post-Renaissance or even anti-Renaissance in some ways: a moment when Italian culture turned away from the open, questing, experimental spirit that had characterized the Renaissance and towards something much more dark and dour and oppressive. And as a result, the culture of the later Italian sixteenth century has been massively ignored. It is a virtual terra incognita, even for specialists, with all kinds of startling discoveries to be made.
I think this conventional periodization is a distortion. When you look at the culture of the later sixteenth century, it’s clear that there are very strong continuities with the earlier period; it’s the same culture, though evolving and with different inflections. And there are all kinds of cultural-historical narratives that started in the earlier Renaissance that reach their climax in this later period. I became very aware of that with my work on women. If you have a cut-off point of 1550 or 1560, you only get half the story. The same goes for the story of the way in which the invention and diffusion of print affected Italian culture.
The third thing I knew about my Short History at the moment I began writing it was that I planned to embed some new, primary research within the book—primary in the sense of work on original sources which has not been published before. I don’t think it is particularly common to embed primary research within a general-reader book, but one of the best survey books on the Italian Renaissance does just that: the social historian Peter Burke’s The Italian Renaissance (3rd edition, Princeton University Press, 2014), which incorporates a very interesting analysis of the social backgrounds of artists and writers in this period. I thought that was an interesting choice, and it’s one reason why Burke’s book is so good. It’s generous in academic terms, since we academics generally like to hoard our research findings and publish them first in a strictly “research” context, only then, if at all, summarizing them for a general public. I liked the idea of embedding a piece of new research in my survey.
The research I chose for this experiment was something I had been thinking of working on for a while. I had become quite intrigued by the writings of practitioners of the ephemeral court arts of the sixteenth century, such as cooks, dancing instructors, horse trainers, stewards, virtuoso carvers. The virtuoso carvers, or trincianti, are my favorites of these artists, trained to carve meat “aerially” at table on a fork so that slices showered down on the plate in a kind of culinary ballet—a fabulous example of the Italian Renaissance capacity to convert almost any aspect of daily life into a work of art!
The writings of these minor court artists interestingly mirror the writings produced by the people we now think of as artists (painters, sculptors, musicians), but they haven’t been particularly well studied, or not by scholars outside the various specialist fields they relate to (historians of food or of dance or of horsemanship). I liked the idea of reconstructing the mental and social world of these “other” artists of the court, and hence of getting back to a more period-appropriate, globalizing notion of the creative arts, incorporating many things we now tend to think of as crafts.
So those were the three novel ingredients I had in mind when I began writing the book—the things that I thought would help my book stand out from the very many competing introductory books that already exist on the subject. Of course, in introducing these new elements into the mix, I didn’t want to short-change the more traditional elements people think about when they think of the Italian Renaissance: the remarkable artistic novelties of the age; the passionate re-engagement with classical culture that underlies so many of the period’s cultural and intellectual innovations; the expansion of horizons that the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt captured in his formula of “the rediscovery of the world and of man.” I wanted to write a book that could give space both to the grand old men of Renaissance culture—poets like Petrarch and Ariosto; artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian; thinkers like Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino; patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici and Pope Julius II—and also to quirkier, less well known figures such as the Venetian courtesan poet Veronica Franco, the actress, singer, and playwright Isabella Andreini, the early feminist thinker Moderata Fonte, the street poet Giulio Cesare Croce.
By a happy alchemy, as I found as the book began to take shape, my three novel ingredients (the injection of women’s history; the new periodization; the research on technical treatises on the court arts) fused well together and gave a distinctive flavor to the book. The story of women’s gradual emergence as creative artists in various fields has a clear democratizing trajectory (in that the first secular women writers are aristocrats; then we see the practice spreading outwards more widely in society, facilitated by the dynamics of print.) The story of the diffusion of courtly manners and courtly ways of crafting identity that I wanted to trace through the technical manuals by the lesser artists of the courts is also one of democratization: it is possible there to see men of lower birth status successfully appropriating modes of self-fashioning and self-presentation that evolved within aristocratic circles, and using them to engineer themselves an enhanced social status. And both these stories are stories that can only be told if the periodization of the Renaissance is altered so that the later sixteenth century begins to come into play. Otherwise, they are cut off and don’t even appear significant phenomena.
So, that ended up being the theme of the book, not really one I had entirely seen from the beginning—one of the gradual diffusion, dissemination, and democratization of the originally elite classicizing culture of the Renaissance. By the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to the democratizing effects of print (really the great hero of my book), classical art, philosophy, and literature were not the preserve of an aristocratic elite, but were rather available to a much broader urban elite of professionals, large and small merchants, and skilled artisans, incorporating women to a far larger extent than has ever previously been acknowledged. This is a Renaissance with a strong appeal to a modern readership; yet I am not distorting the historical evidence in any way when I narrate the Renaissance in this manner. The facts were there, hiding in plain sight.
One difference between writing this general, introductory book and writing the kind of highly specialized scholarly work I am more used to writing is that this Short History was so open-ended. Normally, when I write an academic book or article, I know what I am going to say from the outset. I start from a body of material I have been researching or a text for which I want to offer a new reading; and the task of writing is simply about finding the most effective way I can to communicate my argument.
The Short History commission was a very different experience. No one can give a comprehensive account of the Italian Renaissance in 75,000 words—nor, indeed, in 750,000, or, very probably, 7.5 million! Any “short history” is going to be partial, by definition, and to offer a particular take on the subject. And the publisher was setting no constraints on what should or shouldn’t be included—in fact, that was one thing that attracted me to the commission in the first place. My editor at Tauris, Alex Wright, had been quite insistent that he didn’t want a dutiful, point-by-point survey, but something more distinctive and idiosyncratic: I want our books to be ‘introductions with an edge’ – to go beyond the predictable into new, possibly uncharted territory, and to make their readers think in novel and exciting and unexpected ways about the topics addressed.
So, this was a real “blank page” moment for me: both exciting and rather daunting. I had been researching and teaching the Italian Renaissance for more than a quarter of a century when I began the book in 2012, starting the count from the beginning of my PhD research in 1985. Here was the moment of reckoning. What had I discovered in that time? What was the Italian Renaissance? Why did it matter? Why should it continue to interest people today?
One thing I was certain about from the start: that this would be the first general-reader survey book on the Italian Renaissance to give equal weight—or almost equal—to men and to women. A staggering amount of research has been done in the last twenty years on women’s creative contribution in Renaissance Italy. It has been one of the most vibrant sub-fields in Renaissance Studies over this whole period, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it has uncovered a whole, lost world of cultural production and human experience. Steven Botterill, of Berkeley, captured this dynamic with a nice analogy in a review of my 2013 anthology Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance for Choice magazine:
The scholarly investigation of women’s writing in Italian vernacular during the early modern period … is coming more and more to resemble Schliemann’s celebrated excavation of Troy: as each new discovery is brought to light, another still more startling is laid bare beneath, and what looked at first like an unimpressive feature of the cultural landscape is revealed to have a scope and depth undreamed of by earlier investigators.
It has been extraordinarily exciting and a real privilege to participate in this “excavation”, and I loved the idea of being able to share some of these findings with a wider public. They really are quite remarkable, and they prove without doubt that, in Italy at least, women did have a “room of their own” well before the twentieth, or even the nineteenth or eighteenth, century—and not only as writers. Within music, art, acting, women enjoyed a prominence in Italy in the later sixteenth century that they would not have again for centuries to come. This is a story that deserves to be much better known.
A second thing I knew about the book right from the start was that it would have a different periodization from most guides to the Italian Renaissance, in that it would take the Renaissance right down to the end of the sixteenth century. That may not sound particularly revolutionary from an English point of view (we don’t have any problem in thinking of Shakespeare as a Renaissance dramatist), but the periodization of Italian literature and culture has always operated differently. A sharp transition is generally posited around the middle of the sixteenth century, with the Council of Trent and the coming of the Counter Reformation. The later 16thC is seen as post-Renaissance or even anti-Renaissance in some ways: a moment when Italian culture turned away from the open, questing, experimental spirit that had characterized the Renaissance and towards something much more dark and dour and oppressive. And as a result, the culture of the later Italian sixteenth century has been massively ignored. It is a virtual terra incognita, even for specialists, with all kinds of startling discoveries to be made.
I think this conventional periodization is a distortion. When you look at the culture of the later sixteenth century, it’s clear that there are very strong continuities with the earlier period; it’s the same culture, though evolving and with different inflections. And there are all kinds of cultural-historical narratives that started in the earlier Renaissance that reach their climax in this later period. I became very aware of that with my work on women. If you have a cut-off point of 1550 or 1560, you only get half the story. The same goes for the story of the way in which the invention and diffusion of print affected Italian culture.
The third thing I knew about my Short History at the moment I began writing it was that I planned to embed some new, primary research within the book—primary in the sense of work on original sources which has not been published before. I don’t think it is particularly common to embed primary research within a general-reader book, but one of the best survey books on the Italian Renaissance does just that: the social historian Peter Burke’s The Italian Renaissance (3rd edition, Princeton University Press, 2014), which incorporates a very interesting analysis of the social backgrounds of artists and writers in this period. I thought that was an interesting choice, and it’s one reason why Burke’s book is so good. It’s generous in academic terms, since we academics generally like to hoard our research findings and publish them first in a strictly “research” context, only then, if at all, summarizing them for a general public. I liked the idea of embedding a piece of new research in my survey.
The research I chose for this experiment was something I had been thinking of working on for a while. I had become quite intrigued by the writings of practitioners of the ephemeral court arts of the sixteenth century, such as cooks, dancing instructors, horse trainers, stewards, virtuoso carvers. The virtuoso carvers, or trincianti, are my favorites of these artists, trained to carve meat “aerially” at table on a fork so that slices showered down on the plate in a kind of culinary ballet—a fabulous example of the Italian Renaissance capacity to convert almost any aspect of daily life into a work of art!
The writings of these minor court artists interestingly mirror the writings produced by the people we now think of as artists (painters, sculptors, musicians), but they haven’t been particularly well studied, or not by scholars outside the various specialist fields they relate to (historians of food or of dance or of horsemanship). I liked the idea of reconstructing the mental and social world of these “other” artists of the court, and hence of getting back to a more period-appropriate, globalizing notion of the creative arts, incorporating many things we now tend to think of as crafts.
So those were the three novel ingredients I had in mind when I began writing the book—the things that I thought would help my book stand out from the very many competing introductory books that already exist on the subject. Of course, in introducing these new elements into the mix, I didn’t want to short-change the more traditional elements people think about when they think of the Italian Renaissance: the remarkable artistic novelties of the age; the passionate re-engagement with classical culture that underlies so many of the period’s cultural and intellectual innovations; the expansion of horizons that the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt captured in his formula of “the rediscovery of the world and of man.” I wanted to write a book that could give space both to the grand old men of Renaissance culture—poets like Petrarch and Ariosto; artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian; thinkers like Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino; patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici and Pope Julius II—and also to quirkier, less well known figures such as the Venetian courtesan poet Veronica Franco, the actress, singer, and playwright Isabella Andreini, the early feminist thinker Moderata Fonte, the street poet Giulio Cesare Croce.
By a happy alchemy, as I found as the book began to take shape, my three novel ingredients (the injection of women’s history; the new periodization; the research on technical treatises on the court arts) fused well together and gave a distinctive flavor to the book. The story of women’s gradual emergence as creative artists in various fields has a clear democratizing trajectory (in that the first secular women writers are aristocrats; then we see the practice spreading outwards more widely in society, facilitated by the dynamics of print.) The story of the diffusion of courtly manners and courtly ways of crafting identity that I wanted to trace through the technical manuals by the lesser artists of the courts is also one of democratization: it is possible there to see men of lower birth status successfully appropriating modes of self-fashioning and self-presentation that evolved within aristocratic circles, and using them to engineer themselves an enhanced social status. And both these stories are stories that can only be told if the periodization of the Renaissance is altered so that the later sixteenth century begins to come into play. Otherwise, they are cut off and don’t even appear significant phenomena.
So, that ended up being the theme of the book, not really one I had entirely seen from the beginning—one of the gradual diffusion, dissemination, and democratization of the originally elite classicizing culture of the Renaissance. By the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to the democratizing effects of print (really the great hero of my book), classical art, philosophy, and literature were not the preserve of an aristocratic elite, but were rather available to a much broader urban elite of professionals, large and small merchants, and skilled artisans, incorporating women to a far larger extent than has ever previously been acknowledged. This is a Renaissance with a strong appeal to a modern readership; yet I am not distorting the historical evidence in any way when I narrate the Renaissance in this manner. The facts were there, hiding in plain sight.
