“The Story of Civilization. Volume 5: The Renaissance”, by Will Durant

 

 

776 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671548001

 

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 5: The Renaissance was originally published in 1953, and covers the history of Italy from 1300 to the mid-16^th Century, focusing especially on the Italian Renaissance. Durant’s contribution to the Renaissance focuses on the art and the artists behind them, just like most histories of this era; AND, just like most histories of this era, this serves to rather slow everything down (although there are still fascinating thumbnails featuring the many often-wretched popes and princes that populated the era). But, if it is not too impertinent to ask: whence does great art come from, and does great art make a civilization great? Or the other way ‘round? Neither? The Renaissance that swept Italy did so during one of the most turbulent times the peninsula had ever suffered through, while (to quote Harry Lime), “in Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”. So, perhaps chaos is necessary for brilliant cultural ferment?

 

One cannot speak of the Renaissance without mentioning the Borgias, those Spanish interlopers who, in the persons of Rodrigo de Borja (Pope Alexander VI) and his son Cesare and daughter Lucrezia make for some…fascinating reading. All of the players are here, too, from Giuliano della Rovere (Pope Julius II) to King Charles VIII “the Affable” of France, and a score in-between, as well. Under both of these warlike Popes, artists such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael flourished and left behind some of the masterpieces of the Western canon, while death, plague and misery stalked the lands around them. The sections focusing on these artists are some of the best I have read on them, such as this:

 

[Michelangelo] divided the convex vault into over a hundred panels by picturing columns and moldings between them; and he enhanced the tridimensional illusion with lusty, youthful figures upholding the cornices or seated on capitals. In the major panels, running along the crest of the ceiling, Angelo painted scenes from Genesis: the initial act of creation separates light from darkness; the sun, moon, and planets come into being at the command of the Creator – a majestic figure stern of face, powerful of body, with beard and robes flying in the air; the Almighty, even finer in form than in the previous panel, extends His right arm to create Adam, while with his left arm He holds a very pretty Angel – this panel is Michelangelo’s pictorial masterpiece; God, now a much older and patriarchal deity, evokes Eve from Adam’s rib; Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, and are expelled from Eden; Noah and his sons prepare a sacrificial offering to God; the flood rises; Noah celebrates with too much wine. All in these panels is Old Testament, all is Hebraic; Michelangelo belongs to the prophets pronouncing doom, not to the evangelists expounding the gospel of love.

 

It’s a damn shame that Durant didn’t see fit to expand on their thought and write full-fledge biographies on them. But there are more Popes than these two sad examples, as the Medici Popes – they would be Giovanni de’ Medici (Pope Leo X) and Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) – and their inabilities to do anything about, respectively, either the Protestant Reformation or the Sack of Rome are described in all their patheticness. And of course, there is the perpetually misunderstood Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli and his contributions to political philosophy.

 

But wait! There’s more: the bleak career of Girolamo Savonarola; the rise and fall of the House of Medici; the history of the Visconti and the Sforza and their rule over Milan; the infuriatingly single-minded merchants of Venice; the artists Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore by Brunellesco, as well as Brunellesco’s many rivalries with other artists; Giotto’s breakthrough in painting; the perspective paintings of Masaccio; Guido di Pietro (Fra Angelico) and Fra Filippo Lippi and their lyrical paintings; the rise of humanism and, especially, the writings of Petrarch; Boccaccio’s Decameron; all ending with a section on Vasari and his architecture and paintings. All of this happening over the course of less than 300 years, and as Durant states

 

[I]t took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money – smelly bourgeois money:…of careful calculations, investments and loans, of interest and dividends accumulated until surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art. Money is the root of all civilization.

 

“Money is the root of all civilization” – don’t let a Lefty hear you say that. That all of this creative flowering took place in the blood-soaked soil of Italy says, perhaps, something we may not want to hear about ourselves, and we must ask in all seriousness what is more important to people who want to live, thrive and survive without harm from anyone: what is more important, The Last Supper, or the cuckoo clock?