Morning in Florence
The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Back- ground. By Denys Hay. (C.U.P., 30s.)
THE immediate reaction to this fine book must be to admire the author's courage. Professor Hay has accepted a challenge from which generations of scholars have flinched: to de- scribe and explain for an English audience the basic attitudes to life in Renaissance Italy. And he has done it with a brevity (the book is based on the Wiles lectures given in Belfast last year) which comes near to turning courage into bravado. When the index and the excellent bibliography have been peeled away, together with the preface and a final chapter on the reception of the Renaissance in the north, there is left a core of some 170 pages which deal with Italy herself, from Dante to Ariosto, from Giotto to Michelangelo, from Boniface VIII to Leo X.
Current Renaissance scholarship does not make for the bold, definite gesture. On the one hand the term Renaissance serves as a sort of union card for the thousands of university teachers who specialise in the period, subscribe to the trade journal Renaissance News and listen to one another at frequent Renaissance con- ferences. On the other hand there is consider- able embarrassment about the word itself. 'Dante stood with one foot firmly planted in the middle ages while with the other he saluted the rising star of the Renaissance' expresses the dilemma of an amateur, but the professionals, too, have an anguished time deciding just how much difference there was between the thir- teenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; some have even been tempted to use the archly self- conscious phrase 'so-called Renaissance.' Neither the flood of publications nor suspicion of the word itself makes it easy to attempt a work of this kind.
For Professor Hay is quite sure that there was a Renaissance and that it can be explained and fairly accurately dated. His book is a plea that a truce should be called to such nervous circumlocutions as 'late mediaeval and early modern' and that the Renaissance should be taken for granted as a period between medieval and modern times. This point of view is all the more congenial in that it has become clear that the pace-making Italians of the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio were themselves quite sure that they were living in a new age. Coming to regard antiquity 'as a fountain of living example' they deplored the dark centuries which had rejected Rome. They were confident that in learning from Roman law, letters and art they could restore ancient values in a modern con- text; and as the picture of reconstructed Roman life became clearer, and increasingly showed the ancients as political animals who placed the active life of the citizen above the selfish serenity of the recluse, the society first of Florence, then of Italy, came to endorse anti- quity's embracing of the physical and the prac- tical, and to play down such precepts as `love not the things that are of this world.'
This confidence was only shaken by the series of French and Spanish invasions which reduced much of Italy to servitude by the middle of the sixteenth century—the point at which Vasari saw the arts, too, approaching an inevitable decline after the work of Michelangelo's maturity. After that (though intellectual life in Italy retained a vitality for which it has never been given enough credit) interest is diverted to the thrusting powers of the north, and to the Italianising there of so many things, from school curricula to for- tifications. Basically this is the Renaissance as the nineteenth century saw it, but what was then suggested—at least in part--by aesthetic insight, and justified by emotional response, is here objectified, made less vulnerable to shifts in taste.
In achieving this, Professor Hay accepts all the difficulties. He goes out of his way to stress the political and social complexity of Italy: his story has a place for Savoy as well as for Milan. But it has, none the less, a hero-State, Florence, and a hero-teacher, Petrarch, and through the thickets of detail and controversy he zestfully drives on his main themes: the period up to 1370 when a few outstanding figures re- appraise the human situation; the following period when these ideas are elaborated and acted on, chiefly by Florentines; the next century, from about 1450 to 1550, when the Florentine example infects the rest of Italy, and concepts which had a republican background are natural- ised in princely settings and thus become access- ible to the aristocratic north. His book is not a history of Italy during the Renaissance. The essential political, economic and religious infor- mation is there, but only in so far as it helps to explain the creation and condition the ac- ceptance of specific values. ft is a history of culture, but, unlike most such histories, it is firmly pegged to material circumstance.
It is not possible to repeat the creative achieve- ment of Burckhardt, and the present work does not try to. It is a personal book and is written with a warmth of style which will ap- peal to the intelligent general reader, but as its acknowledgments, its indications of desiderata, its exemplary footnotes make clear, it is above all the work of a professional teaching historian, concerned to produce a balanced synthesis of the most recent scholarly opinion. It is the best book of its kind and it will long provide an indispensable introduction to any study of the period.
JOHN HALE
`It's like this all the way to Camelot, there days.'
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