THE RENAISSANCE BAZAAR

From the Silk Road to Michelangelo

WWW

Jerry Brotton

OXJORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 INTRODUCTION

The Renaissance Bazaar describes the historical period starting in

the early i5th century when eastern and western societies vigor-
ously traded art, ideas, and luxury goods in a competitive but
amicable exchange that shaped what we now call the European
Renaissance. The eastern bazaar is a fitting metaphor for the
fluid transactions that occurred throughout the i5th and i6th
centuries, when Europe began to define itself by purchasing and
emulating the opulence and cultured sophistication of the cities,
merchants, scholars, and empires of the Ottomans, the Persians
and the Egyptian Mamluks. The flow of spices, silks, carpets,
porcelain, majolica, porphyry, glassware, lacquer, dyes, and pig-
ments from the eastern bazaars of Muslim Spain, Mamluk Egypt,
Ottoman Turkey, Persia, and the Silk Road between China and
Europe provided the inspiration and materials for the art and
architecture of Bellini, van Eyck, Dürer, and Alberti. The trans-
mission of Arabic understanding of astronomy, philosophy, and
medicine also profoundly influenced thinkers and scientists like
Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Vesalius, and Montaigne, whose
insights into the workings of the human mind and body, as well
as the individual's relationship to the wider world, are often still
seen as the foundation of modern science and philosophy. It
was the complex impact of these exchanges between east and
west that created the culture, art, and scholarship that have been
popularly associated with the Renaissance.
Since the nth-, i2th-, and 13th-century European Crusades in
the Holy Land, Christians and Muslims had openly traded and

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The Renaissance Bazaar

exchanged goods and ideas despite religious antagonism and

military conflict. Towards the end of the i3th century the Vene-
tian merchant Marco Polo had gone even further, travelling as far
as China in search of new commercial possibilities. By the i4th
century, the political and commercial worlds of both Europe and
Asia were undergoing profound changes. Europe found itself
trading on equal terms with powerful empires in Egypt, Persia,
and Turkey. Two examples of these exchanges set the tone of this
book, and capture the impact of the east upon i5th- and i6th-
century Europe. In 1487 the Egyptian Mamluk Sultan Qä'it Bay
sent a magnificent embassy to Florence in an attempt to establish
a commercial agreement intended to cut the rival Ottoman
Empire out of the Italian trade. The secretary to Florence's ruler
Lorenzo de' Medici recalled with astonishment that the Egyptian
retinue arrived with riches rarely seen in Italy. These included
balsam, musk, benzoin, aloeswood, ginger, muslin, thorough-
bred Arabian horses, and Chinese porcelain. The impact of these
luxurious objects upon Italian life was recorded in the paintings
and architectural details of Masaccio, Filarete, and Mantegna,
who all incorporated exotic animals, Islamic script, and the lustre
of lacquered wood, porphyry, patterned silk, and intricately
designed carpets into their paintings. Leonardo had already been
so impressed by Qä'it Bay's reputation that in 1484 he wrote a
series of reports to 'Kait-Bai' on scientific and architectural initia-
tives he proposed to undertake in Turkey. Leonardo clearly
believed that wealth, patronage, and political power lay in the
courts to the east of mainland Europe.
Nearly a century later, a very different exchange took place,
this time from the west to the east. In 1578 Queen Elizabeth I of
England sent a consignment of goods including lead for the

2
 Introduction

production of armaments to Sultan Murat III in Istanbul. Having

been excommunicated by the Pope eight years earlier, Elizabeth
had no scruples about agreeing to England's status as a vassal
state of the Ottoman Empire to stimulate trade and woo the
Ottomans as potential allies against Catholic Spain. England's
surprising alliance with the Ottomans had a direct impact upon
the drama and literature of Elizabethan England, including
Christopher Marlowe's plays Tamburlaine the Great (1587) and
The Jew of Malta (1590) and Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of
Venice (1603). Both these examples show that some of the great-
est products of European Renaissance culture emerged from
encounters and exchanges with the east. Although Europe was
publicly committed to military conflict and opposition to the
Islamic empires on its eastern borders, trade and exchange
usually continued regardless of ideological differences.
These stories are just part of a larger body of evidence that
confounds an increasingly moribund version of the Renaissance.
This account claims that from the late i4th century, European
culture rediscovered a lost Graeco-Roman intellectual tradition
that allowed scholars and artists based almost exclusively in Italy
to develop more cultured and civilized ways of thinking and act-
ing. This in turn created the conditions for the literature, art, and
philosophy of the likes of Petrarch, Michelangelo, and Ficino.
This approach also argued that the Renaissance formed the
enduring basis of modern European civilization.
This book suggests that once we begin to understand the
impact of eastern cultures upon mainland Europe £.1400-1600,
then this traditional understanding of the European Renaissance
collapses. It also suggests that there is no one single, unified
theory or vision of the European Renaissance. The impact of the

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The Renaissance Bazaar

east had a decisive effect upon the outlook of mainland Europe by

the 16th century, but there were other factors that also changed
European society within this period. The invention of printing in
Germany in the mid-15th century and Luther's Reformation in
the early i6th century were not influenced by the same factors
that inspired the Italian art of Bellini and Mantegna. In many
respects these northern European developments were deeply
hostile to the art, philosophy, and political culture of Italy that is
usually perceived to be quintessentially 'Renaissance'. The late
15th-century Iberian voyages of discovery produced cultures in
Portugal and Castile that had little in common with what was
happening in Germany or Italy. Profound regional differences in
politics, art, and society suggest that it has become impossible to
sustain a belief in one coherent attitude or 'spirit' driving forward
the European Renaissance.
However, The Renaissance Bazaar is not aimed at simply tak-
ing apart the myth of the European Renaissance. While the book
is sceptical about the validity of the grand claims to European
superiority often associated with the celebration of the Renais-
sance, it argues that an appreciation of regional differences and
the impact of the east enables scholars and readers to discover an
even more exciting moment in European history, which allows
different cultures into the picture. One of the arguments of this
book is that every generation creates a version of the European
Renaissance in its own image. In this respect, The Renaissance
Bazaar is no different. In a global climate where the dangers of
political and religious fundamentalism jostle with renewed pos-
sibilities for cultural exchange and cooperation, it is time to look
at the period known as the Renaissance as a moment that simi-
larly stood on the threshold of an expanding world where people

4
 Introduction

exchanged ideas and things often regardless of political and

religious ideology.
The vast literature on the subject means that The Renaissance
Bazaar offers a considered and selective account of the Renais-
sance, much of which will be familiar to general readers, but
some of which will hopefully be new and surprising. As the
book's title suggests, trade and exchange with the east is a dom-
inating motif: this forms the basis of the first chapter, which
draws on Europe's encounters and exchanges with the Ottoman
Empire, Africa, and Southeast Asia to offer a more global
perspective on the period. In the Renaissance bazaar different
cultures confronted each other with bewilderment and suspicion,
but often delight and fascination as well. They exchanged objects
and ideas that went against religious and political proscriptions
that stressed cultural separation and mutual antagonism.
In trying to understand how the idea of the Renaissance
has evolved, the book begins with a critical history of the evolu-
tion of the term. Having established the shape and scope of the
Renaissance, it then looks more closely at interactions between
east and west throughout the i5th and i6th centuries. It goes on
to examine what has been considered one of the most important,
but also controversial achievements of the Renaissance: the
scholarly practice of humanism. The focus then broadens again
to explore the religious and political conflicts that defined the
period, from the papal schism in Italy in the late i3th century to
the northern European Reformation of the i6th century and the
part that the Ottoman Empire played in the imperial conflicts
of the time. Chapter 4 surveys general developments in art
and architecture, before examining more specifically east-west
artistic exchanges, and the centrality of art and building in the

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The Renaissance Bazaar

creation of political power. Central to any discussion of the

Renaissance is the so-called Age of Discovery, the great overseas
voyages of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan that took place
between 1480 and 1540. The penultimate chapter explores these
voyages in the light of the desire to reach the markets of the east,
and follows their development and consequences through the
rise of maps and charts. Finally, the book addresses develop-
ments in i5th- and early loth-century science and philosophy,
and the ways in which their insights were developed in literature
from Dante to Shakespeare.
This book does not claim to offer a comprehensive survey of
the Renaissance. There is little here on antiquity, music, law,
witchcraft, and rural life. To cover every possible historical topic
is not only impossible, but runs the risk of turning the book into
a social history of Europe between 1400 and 1600. The idea of
the Renaissance is an elite concept, based on the cultural ideals
of a very small stratum of society. While this book aims to
broaden the focus and include figures usually marginalized in
traditional accounts of the Renaissance, any understanding of
the concept involves an examination of its established cultural
brokers, from Leonardo and Machiavelli to Luther and Shake-
speare. The book begins by explaining both traditional and
alternative perspectives on the Renaissance through an examina-
tion of one of its most iconic images: Hans Holbein's painting
The Ambassadors.

An Old Master
In 1997 the National Gallery in London launched an exhibition
entitled 'Making and Meaning' based exclusively on one of the

6
 Introduction

most famous works of art in its collection—Holbein's The

Ambassadors, dated 1533 (Plate i). The success of the exhibition
was due to the fact that for many people Holbein's painting is an
abiding image of the European Renaissance. To visit an exhib-
ition that promised to unravel the painting's mysteries, its
innovative composition, the identity of its two central figures,
and the meaning of its various artefacts, was to begin to under-
stand the very idea of 'the Renaissance'. In what follows, I use
this painting to define the broad outlines of the Renaissance,
touching on some of the key ideas and concepts that are central
to an understanding of what is meant when this contentious
term is used.
What is it that makes Holbein's painting so quintessentially
'Renaissance'? To begin with, its medium represents for many
people the most enduring dimension of the Renaissance: the
painting of artists like Botticelli, Dürer, Leonardo, and
Michelangelo. Traditionally, critics have argued that the Renais-
sance is defined by the birth of a modern type of individuality, or
what the igth-century historian Jules Michelet called 'the dis-
covery of the world and of man'. According to this argument,
from the i4th century onwards an increasingly enquiring, psy-
chological, and reflective form of personal individuality emerged,
that began to question and explore what it means to be human
and the place of humanity within a wider world. The supreme
manifestation of this development is the art of the period that
culminated in the paintings of artists like Holbein. In The Ambas-
sadors can be seen the detailed, precise reproduction of the world
of two Renaissance men, who stare back at the viewer with a
confident, but also questioning self-awareness that has arguably
not been seen before in painting. Medieval art may seem much

7
The Renaissance Bazaar

more alien, as it lacks this powerfully self-conscious creation of

individuality. Even if it is difficult to grasp the motivation for the
range of emotions expressed in paintings like Holbein's, it is
still possible to identify with these emotions as recognizably
'modern'. In other words, when we look at paintings like The
Ambassadors, we are witnessing the birth of modern man.
This is a useful start in trying to understand Holbein's paint-
ing as an artistic manifestation of the Renaissance. But some
rather vague terms are beginning to accumulate that need some
explanation. What is the 'modern world'? Isn't this as slippery a
term as 'Renaissance'? Similarly, should medieval art be defined
(and effectively dismissed) so simply? And what of'Renaissance
Man'? Is it feasible to talk about 'Renaissance Woman'? Hol-
bein's painting can be used to explore a whole different set of
ideas about what characterized the Renaissance and which will
form the basis for many of the discussions in this book.

An educated Renaissance
In the painting what catches the eye as much as the gaze of both
sitters is the table in the middle of the composition and the
objects scattered across its upper and lower tiers. On the lower
shelf are two books (a hymn book and a merchant's arithmetic
book), a lute, a terrestrial globe, a case of flutes, a set square, and
a pair of dividers. The upper shelf contains a celestial globe, and
several extremely specialized scientific instruments: quadrants,
sundials, and a torquetum (a timepiece and navigational aid).
These objects represent the seven liberal arts that provided the
basis of a Renaissance education. The three basic arts—gram-
mar, logic, and rhetoric—were known as the trivium. They can be

8
 Introduction

loosely related to the display of books and the activities of the two
sitters. They are ambassadors, trained in the use of texts, but
above all skilled in the art of logical argument and rhetorical
persuasion. The quadrivium referred to arithmetic, music, geom-
etry, and astronomy, all of which are clearly represented in Hol-
bein's precise depiction of the arithmetic book, the lute, and the
scientific instruments.
These academic subjects formed the basis of the studia
humanitatis, the course of study followed by most young men of
the period. This was the basis of what has become known as
humanism. Humanism represented a significant new develop-
ment in late i4th- and 15th-century Europe that involved the
recovery of the classical texts of Greek and Roman language,
culture, politics, and philosophy. The highly flexible nature of the
studia humanitatis encouraged the study of a variety of new dis-
ciplines, such as classical philology, literature, history, and moral
philosophy.
Holbein is showing that his sitters are themselves 'New
Men', scholarly, worldly figures, utilizing their learning in pur-
suit of fame and ambition. The figure on the right is Jean de
Dinteville, the French ambassador to the English court of Henry
VIII. On the left is his close friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of
Lavaur, who visited Dinteville in London in 1533. The objects on
the table are carefully chosen to suggest that their position in the
worlds of politics and religion are closely connected to their
understanding of humanist thinking. The painting implies that
knowledge of the disciplines represented by these objects is
crucial to worldly ambition and success.

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The Renaissance Bazaar

The darker side of the Renaissance

If we look even more closely at the objects in Holbein's painting,
they lead us into a darker and less familiar vision of the Renais-
sance. Consider the objects portrayed on the lower shelf. One of
the strings on the lute is broken, a deliberate symbol of discord.
Next to the lute is an open hymn book, identifiable as the work of
the great religious reformer Martin Luther. On the very right-
hand edge of the painting, the curtain is slightly pulled back to
reveal a silver crucifix. These objects draw our attention to the
pervasive importance of religious debate and discord in the
Renaissance. At the time the painting was commissioned,
Luther's Protestant ideas were sweeping through Europe, defying
the established authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The
broken lute is a powerful symbol of the religious conflict that
characterized the Renaissance period, graphically captured by
Holbein in his juxtaposition of Lutheran hymn book and Catholic
crucifix.
Holbein's Lutheran hymn book is quite clearly a printed
book. The invention of printing in the latter half of the i5th cen-
tury revolutionized the creation, distribution, and understanding
of information and knowledge. Compared to the laborious and
often inaccurate copying of manuscripts, printed books could be
circulated with a speed and accuracy and in quantities previously
unimaginable. Luther's radical new ideas would have foundered
without the aid of the printing press. However, as Luther's
example also suggests, many of the greatest cultural and techno-
logical achievements of the Renaissance provoked instability,
uncertainty, and anxiety, and the ethos of the period can be
defined as struggling with this dilemma.

10
 Introduction

Next to Holbein's Lutheran hymn book sits another printed

book, which at first seems more mundane, but which offers
another telling dimension of the Renaissance. The book is an
instruction manual for merchants in how to calculate profit and
loss. Its presence alongside the more 'cultural' objects in the
painting shows that the Renaissance was itself as much about
business and finance as culture and art. While the book alludes to
the quadrivium of Renaissance humanist learning, it also points
towards an awareness that the cultural achievements of the
Renaissance were invariably built on the success of the spheres of
trade and finance. As the world grew in size and complexity, new
mechanisms for understanding the increasingly invisible circula-
tion of money and goods were required to maximize profit and
minimize loss. The result was a renewed interest in disciplines
like mathematics as a way of understanding the economics of a
progressively global Renaissance world picture.
The terrestrial globe behind the merchant's arithmetic book
confirms the expansion of trade and finance as a defining feature
of the Renaissance. The globe is one of the most important
objects in the painting, both for Holbein's apprehension about
his own time and our own contemporary understanding of why
the Renaissance remains important today. Travel, exploration,
and discovery were dynamic and controversial features during
the Renaissance, and Holbein's globe tells us this in its remark-
ably up-to-date representation of the world as it was perceived in
1533. Europe is labelled 'Europa'. This is itself significant, as the
i5th and i6th centuries were the point at which Europe began to
be defined as possessing a common political and cultural iden-
tity. Prior to this people rarely called themselves 'European'. Hol-
bein also portrays the recent discoveries made through voyages

ii
The Renaissance Bazaar

in Africa and Asia, as well as in the 'New World7 voyages of

Christopher Columbus, begun in 1492, and on the first ever cir-
cumnavigation of the globe, successfully completed by Ferdinand
Magellan's expedition in 1522. These discoveries transformed
Europe's understanding of its place in a world that was bigger
than had previously been believed. With such discoveries came
encounters and exchanges with other cultures whose complex
legacy still remains today.
As with the impact of the printing press, and the upheavals
in religion, this global expansion bequeathed a double-edged
legacy. One of the outcomes was the destruction of indigenous
cultures and communities through war and disease, because they
were unprepared for or uninterested in adopting European
beliefs and ways of living. As some critics argue, Columbus did
not 'discover' America—he invaded it. Along with the cultural,
scientific, and technological achievements of the period came
religious intolerance, political ignorance, slavery, and massive
inequalities in wealth and status—what has been called 'the
darker side of the Renaissance'.

Politics and empire

This leads to other crucial dimensions of the Renaissance
addressed in Holbein's painting, and which define both its sitters
and the objects: power, politics, and empire. To understand the
importance of these issues and how they emerge in the painting,
we need to know some more about its subjects. In January 1533
King Henry VIII had secretly married Anne Boleyn and was
pressing the pope for a divorce from his first wife. The pope
refused. The French King Francis I negotiated between Henry

12
 Introduction

and the pope in a vain attempt to prevent Henry's decision to

split with Rome, and form the independent Church of England.
Dinteville and Selve were there to act as Francis's intermediaries
in these negotiations. While this painting, like much of the his-
tory of the Renaissance, is very much about relations between
men, it is noticeable that at the heart of this image is a dispute
over a woman who is absent, but whose presence is powerfully
felt in its objects and surroundings. The insistent attempts by
men to silence women only drew more attention to their compli-
cated status within a patriarchal society: women were denied the
benefits of many of the cultural and social developments of the
Renaissance, but were key to its functioning as the bearers of
male heirs to perpetuate its male-dominated culture.
It has often been thought that the primary motivation for the
painting was the religious crisis of Henry's imminent split with
Rome. But Dinteville and Selve were also in London to broker a
new political alliance between Henry, Francis, and the Ottoman
Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, the other great power in Euro-
pean power politics of the time. The sumptuous rug that covers
the upper shelf of the table in Holbein's painting is of Turkish
design and manufacture, emphasizing that the Ottomans and
their territories to the east were also part of the cultural, com-
mercial, and political landscape of the Renaissance. Selve and
Dinteville's attempt to draw Henry VIII into an alliance with
Francis and Süleyman was motivated by their fear of the growing
strength of that other great Renaissance imperial power, the
Hapsburg empire of Charles V. By comparison England and
France were eager but minor imperial players: the terrestrial
globe in the painting says as much. It shows the European
empires beginning to carve up the newly discovered world.

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The Renaissance Bazaar

Holbein's globe reproduces the line of demarcation established

by the empires of Spain and Portugal in 1494, in the aftermath of
Columbus' 'discovery' of America in 1492. With the agreement
of the pope, they divided up the globe by splitting it right down
the middle. Portugal claimed all undiscovered lands to the east of
the Atlantic, while Spain claimed everything to the west.
This division was made in response to a dispute over territor-
ies in the Far East. Both Spain and Portugal were struggling for
possession of the remote but highly lucrative spice-producing
islands of the Indonesian Archipelago, the Moluccas. In the
Renaissance, Europe placed itself at the centre of the terrestrial
globe, but its gaze was focused on the wealth of the east, from the
textiles and silks of the Ottoman Empire to the spices and pepper
of the Indonesian Archipelago. Many of the objects in Holbein's
painting have an eastern origin, from the silk and velvet worn by
its subjects to the textiles and designs that decorate the room.
The painting is a triumphant image of northern European power,
but it is also a magnificent display of the desire for and acquisi-
tion of eastern luxury that reached Europe via the Silk Road and
the bazaars of Central Asia and the Far East.
The objects in the bottom section of Holbein's painting
reveal various facets of the Renaissance central to the argu-
ment of this book—humanism and learning, religion, printing,
trade, travel and exploration, politics and empire, and the endur-
ing presence of the wealth and knowledge of the east. The objects
on the upper shelf deal with much more abstract and philo-
sophical issues. The celestial globe is an astronomical instru-
ment used to measure the stars and the nature of the universe.
Next to the globe is a collection of dials, which were used to tell
the time with the aid of the sun's rays. The two larger objects are

14
 Introduction

a quadrant and a torquetum, both used at sea as navigational

instruments to work out a ship's position in both time and space.
Most of these instruments were invented by medieval Arab and
Jewish astronomers and came westwards as European travellers
required navigational expertise for long-distance voyages. They
reflect an intensified interest within the Renaissance to under-
stand and master the natural world. As Renaissance philosophers
debated the nature of their world, navigators, instrument-
makers, and scientists began to channel these philosophical
debates into practical solutions to natural problems. The results
were objects such as those in Holbein's painting. In addition,
there were other equally profound developments in areas such
as firearms and ballistics, mechanics, shipbuilding, mining,
distillation, and anatomy, to name but a few.
Finally, consider the strange, oblique image that slashes
across the bottom of the painting. Viewed straight on, it is impos-
sible to make out the meaning of this distorted shape. However,
if the viewer stands at an angle to the painting, the distorted
image metamorphoses into a perfectly drawn skull. This was a
fashionable perspective trick known as anamorphosis used by
several Renaissance artists, but nowhere more brilliantly than in
Holbein's painting. Art historians have argued that this is a vani-
tas image, a chilling reminder that in the midst of all this wealth,
power, and learning, death comes to us all. But the skull also
appears to represent Holbein's own artistic initiative, regardless
of the requirements of his patron. He begins to break free of his
identity as skilled artisan and asserts the growing power and
autonomy of the painter as an artist to experiment with new
techniques and theories such as optics and geometry in creating
innovative painted images. This development, glimpsed in

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The Renaissance Bazaar

Holbein's painting, anticipates the contemporary freedom of the

artist to create.

Rude when nude

Traditionally, the personification of this autonomous artistic
spirit has been located in Italy, in the art of masters like
Michelangelo Buonarroti and creations such as his statue of
David preparing to fight Goliath (Fig. i). For many, Michelan-
gelo's David has become an iconic image of what the Renais-
sance is all about, the face (or body) that launched a thousand
fridge magnets, and one of the most instantly recognizable art
objects in the world.
Every year visitors crowd into Florence's Galleria dell'Acca-
demia to look at Michelangelo's statue and be told that it is a
timeless image of the perfection of the human form. Uniting
classical antiquity with contemporary observation of anatomy, the
statue captures David at a pregnant, contemplative moment prior
to a dramatic scene of violence. Admiration for both the sculp-
ture and its creator is heightened by the oft-quoted story that
Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the statue in 1501 from
a block of marble over five metres high which had been ruined by
another sculptor nearly 40 years earlier.
The contemporary power of the statue has increased as David
has been appropriated as a gay icon, a beautiful muscular naked
boy about to get his man. The sensuously erotic nature of the
sculpture also seems to confirm Michelangelo's stature as a great
artist who also happened to be gay. This suggests that con-
temporary culture desires the Renaissance as a place where it
can project its own hopes, fears, and preoccupations. If the

16
 Introduction

1.
Michelangelo's
David: syrnboi of
classical perfection
or Renaissance
rude boy?

Renaissance is supposed to be the origin of all civilized life, then

one way of validating how we live our lives today is to find evidence
of it in this period. However, this often bunds us to what actually
motivated the creation of the art and culture of the Renaissance,
and Michelangelo's David is no different in this respect.

17
The Renaissance Bazaar

The sculpture is in fact a highly coercive political object. The

Republic of Florence commissioned the work as a symbol of pol-
itical liberty triumphing over tyranny (many Florentines saw
David's defeat over Goliath as an allegory of Florence's victory
over similarly tyrannical foes such as Milan and the Medici fam-
ily). A commission was drawn up in 1504 to decide where the
completed statue should be publicly displayed to maximize its
political impact. Michelangelo seized the sensitive commission
as an opportunity to make a political and artistic name for him-
self. He also used the statue to confirm his status as a rather
risqué artist. Previous sculptures of David had depicted the boy
fully clothed, Michelangelo maximized the public impact of his
towering sculpture by making his David naked, and justifying it
through classical precedent (until recently some textbooks even
placed a discrete fig-leaf over David's genitals). Michelangelo had
little interest in the politics of the statue. By the time it was
erected he had left Florence for more lucrative commissions in
Rome. Later in his career he was similarly wooed by the Ottoman
sultans to work on the architecture and decoration of the palaces
and bazaars of Istanbul, another example of the opportunism
that defined the activity of even the greatest Renaissance artists.

The wider Renaissance world

This brief consideration of Michelangelo is designed to acknow-
ledge the cultural achievements of Italy, but this book revises the
traditional focus on Italy as the exclusive origin of the Renais-
sance. Italy's undoubted importance has too often overshadowed
the development of new ideas in northern Europe, the Iberian
peninsula, the Islamic world, Southeast Asia, and Africa. In

18
 Introduction

offering a more global perspective on the nature of the Renais-

sance, this book suggests that it would be more accurate to refer
to a series of'Renaissances' throughout these regions, each with
their own highly specific and separate characteristics. These
other Renaissances often overlapped and exchanged influences
with the more classical and traditionally understood Renaissance
centred on Italy. The Renaissance was also a remarkably inter-
national, fluid, and mobile phenomenon. Michelangelo's career
captures something of this internationalism, with his links to
Rome, Florence, and Istanbul. Holbein is an even better example
of this cultural and geographical mobility. Born in Germany, he
worked first in Basle, then in England as a court painter, and
was heavily influenced by Italian art. The objects in his painting
indicate that he absorbed cultural, political, and intellectual
influences that were remarkably global. This made his painting
strikingly hybrid, and very different from many of his Italian
contemporaries. But this does not make him any less a Renais-
sance painter. If anything, his cultural mobility precisely defines
his 'Renaissance' qualities.
Holbein's painting represents just some of the discoveries
and achievements that took place during this period, which have
now become synonymous with the term 'Renaissance'. These
include oil painting, a relatively new technique that transformed
the world of art; the invention of printing that revolutionized
perceptions of knowledge and information; scientific invention
and adaptation from the east, visible in the development of
instruments such as the compass and the astrolabe, that trans-
formed travel as well as ways of representing the world; new ways
of doing business, often learnt from Arabic culture, such as
paper money, deposit banking, and double entry bookkeeping

J
9
The Renaissance Bazaar

that anticipated the dynamics of modern global capitalism; the

development of geography that produced the first known terres-
trial globe towards the end of the i5th century and which gave
shape to so many of the complex transactions that took place
across the globe; and the importing of new dyes and materials
from the east, as in Dinteville's sumptuous clothes and the Turk-
ish rug on the table, that transformed people's everyday domestic
behaviour.

When was the Renaissance?

Today, there is a popular consensus that the term 'European
Renaissance' refers to a profound and enduring upheaval and
transformation in culture, politics, art, and society in Europe
between the years 1400 and 1600. Different scholars offer alter-
native versions of this time span. Some focus on the importance
of the i5th century, others see the quintessential manifestation of
the Renaissance in the loth century. However, in what follows it
becomes clear that the disputes about dating the Renaissance
have become so intense that the validity of the term is now in
doubt. Does it have any meaning at all any more? Is it really
possible to separate the Renaissance from the Middle Ages that
preceded it, and the modern world that came after it? Does it have
an objective identity or is it the projection of particular readings?
Has it been invented to establish a convincing myth of European
cultural superiority? To answer these questions, we need to
understand how the term 'Renaissance' itself came into being.
No loth-century audience would have recognized the term
'Renaissance'. The Italian word 'rinascita' ('rebirth') was often
used in the i6th century to refer to the revival of classical culture.

20
 Introduction

But the specific French word 'Renaissance' was not used as a

descriptive historical phrase until the middle of the igth century.
The first person to use the term was the French historian Jules
Michelet, a French nationalist and republican deeply committed
to the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution. Between
1833 and 1862 Michelet worked on his greatest project, the
multi-volume History of France. He was vociferous in his con-
demnation of both the aristocracy and the church, and wrote the
History of the French Revolution in support of the revolutionary
ferment. With the ultimate failure of the 1848 revolution,
Michelet fell into political disfavour. In 1855 he published his
seventh volume of the History, entitled La Renaissance. For him
the Renaissance meant:
.. . the discovery of the world and the discovery of man. The sixteenth
century . .. went from Columbus to Copernicus, from Copernicus to
Galileo, from the discovery of the earth to that of the heavens. Man
refound himself.
The scientific discoveries of explorers and thinkers like
Columbus, Copernicus, and Galileo went hand in hand with the
more philosophical understanding of what it meant to be an
individual which Michelet identified in the writings of Rabelais,
Montaigne, and Shakespeare. This new spirit was contrasted
with what Michelet viewed as the 'bizarre and monstrous' quality
of the Middle Ages. To him the Renaissance represented a pro-
gressive, democratic condition that celebrated the great virtues
he valued—Reason, Truth, Art, and Beauty. According to
Michelet, the Renaissance 'recognized itself as identical at heart
with the modern age'.
Michelet was the first thinker to define the Renaissance as a
decisive historical period in European culture that represented a

21
The Renaissance Bazaar

crucial break with the Middle Ages, and which created a modern
understanding of humanity and its place in the world. He also
promoted the Renaissance as representing a certain spirit or atti-
tude, as much as it referred to a specific historical period.
Michelet's characterization of what the Renaissance represented
sounds familiar to us today, but his understanding of when the
Renaissance occurred is slightly less recognizable. Michelet's
Renaissance does not happen in Italy in the i4th and i5th centur-
ies, as we have come to expect. Instead, his Renaissance takes
place in France in the i6th century. As a French nationalist,
Michelet was eager to claim the Renaissance as a French phenom-
enon. As a republican he also rejected what he saw as 14th-century
Italy's admiration for church and political tyranny as deeply
undemocratic, and hence not part of the spirit of the Renaissance.
While Michelet's story of the Renaissance was and remains
seductive, it was also affected as much by his own igth-century
circumstances as it was by the influence of the i6th century. In
fact, the values of Michelet's Renaissance sound strikingly close
to those of his cherished French Revolution: espousing the values
of freedom, reason, and democracy, rejecting political and
religious tyranny, and enshrining the spirit of freedom and the
dignity of'man'. Disappointed in the failure of the revolution of
1848, Michelet went back in time to find a moment where the
values of liberty and egalitarianism triumphed and promised a
modern world free of tyranny.

Swiss Renaissance
If Michelet invented the idea of the Renaissance, it was the Swiss
academic Jacob Burckhardt who created the definitive portrait of

22
 Introduction

the Renaissance as an Italian, predominantly 15th-century phe-

nomenon. In 1860 Burckhardt published The Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy. He argued that the peculiarities of political
life in late i4th- and 15th-century Italy led to the creation of a
recognizably modern individuality. The revival of classical
antiquity, the discovery of the wider world, and the growing
unease with organized religion, meant 'man became a spiritual
individuar. Burckhardt deliberately contrasted this new devel-
opment with the lack of individual awareness that for him
defined the Middle Ages. Here, 'Man was conscious of himself
only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation'.
In other words, prior to the i5th century, people lacked a powerful
sense of their individual identity. For Burckhardt, 15th-century
Italy gave birth to 'Renaissance Man', what he called 'the first-
born among the sons of modern Europe'. The result was what
has become the now familiar account of the Renaissance: the
birthplace of the modern world, created by Dante, Petrarch,
Alberti, and Leonardo, characterized by the revival of classical
culture, and over by the middle of the i6th century.
There are many flaws and omissions in Burckhardt's version
of the Renaissance. Most noticeably, for a period celebrated for its
visual art, Burckhardt says very little about Renaissance art or
economic changes, and over-estimates what he sees as the scep-
tical, even 'pagan' approach to religion of the day. His focus is
exclusively on Italy; he makes no attempt to see the Renaissance
in relation to other cultures. His understanding of the terms
'individuality' and 'modern' also remain extremely vague. Like
Michelet, Burckhardt's vision of the Renaissance reads like a ver-
sion of his own personal circumstances. Burckhardt was an intel-
lectual aristocrat, proud of his Protestant and republican Swiss

23
The Renaissance Bazaar

individualism. While he hated the rise of igth-century German

imperial political power, he also feared the growth of industrial
democracy and what he saw as its destruction of artistic beauty
and taste. His subsequent vision of the Renaissance as a period
where art and life were united, republicanism was celebrated
but limited, and religion was tempered by the state, sounds like
an idealized vision of his beloved Basle. Nevertheless, in argu-
ing that the Renaissance is the foundation of modern life,
Burckhardt's book has remained at the heart of Renaissance
studies ever since; often criticized, but never completely
dismissed.
Michelet and Burckhardt's celebrations of art and individual-
ity as defining features of the Renaissance found their logical
conclusion in England in Walter Pater's study The Renaissance,
first published in 1873. Pater was an Oxford-educated don and
aesthete, who used his study of the Renaissance as a vehicle for
his belief in 'the love of art for its own sake'. Pater rejected the
political, scientific, and economic aspects of the Renaissance as
irrelevant, and saw 'a spirit of rebellion and revolt against the
moral and religious ideas of the time' in the art of 15th-century
painters like Botticelli, Leonardo, and Giorgione. This was not a
democratic, political rebellion, but an aesthetic, hedonistic, even
pagan celebration of what Pater called 'the pleasures of the
senses and the imagination'. But what he called 'the spirit of the
Renaissance' was not specific to the i5th century. He found traces
of this 'love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for
their own sake' as early as the i2th and as late as the iyth century.
Many were scandalized by what they saw as Pater's decadent and
irreligious book, but his views shaped the English-speaking
world's view of the Renaissance for decades.

24
 Introduction

Michelet, Burckhardt, and Pater created a igth-century idea

of the Renaissance as more of a spirit than a historical period. The
achievements of art and culture revealed a new attitude towards
individuality and what it meant to be 'civilized'. The problem
with this way of defining the Renaissance was that rather than
offering an accurate historical account of what took place from
the i5th century onwards it looked more like an ideal of
igth-century European society. These critics celebrated limited
democracy, scepticism towards the church, the power of art and
literature, and the triumph of European civilization over all
others. These values underpinned igth-century European
imperialism. At a point in history that Europe was aggressively
asserting its authority over most of the Americas, Africa, and
Asia, people like Pater were creating a vision of the Renaissance
that seemed to offer both an origin and a justification for
European dominance over the rest of the globe.

Twentieth-century Renaissance
Twentieth-century understanding of the Renaissance in Europe
and the United States remained very much in the shadow of
Burckhardt. However, a more ambivalent view of the Renais-
sance increasingly defined these conceptions. One of the earliest
challenges to Burckhardt, and to the idea of the Renaissance as a
category in its own right, came in 1919, with the publication of
Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages. Huizinga's book
tried to address the ways in which northern European culture
and society had been neglected in previous definitions of the
Renaissance. It also challenged Burckhardt's period division
between 'Middle Ages' and 'Renaissance'. Rather than seeing the

2
5
The Renaissance Bazaar

Middle Ages as the opposite of the Renaissance, Huizinga argued

that the style and attitude that Burckhardt identified as 'Renais-
sance' was in fact the waning or declining spirit of the Middle
Ages. Huizinga offered as an example the 15th-century Flemish
art of Jan van Eyck:
Both in form and in idea it is a product of the waning Middle Ages. If
certain historians of art have discovered Renaissance elements in it, it
is because they have confounded, very wrongly, realism and Renais-
sance. Now this scrupulous realism, this aspiration to render exactly
all natural details, is the characteristic feature of the spirit of the
expiring Middle Ages.

The detailed visual realism of van Eyck's Arnolfini Double

Portrait (1434) (Fig. 18), or Holbein's Ambassadors, represents for
Huizinga the end of a medieval tradition, not the birth of a
Renaissance spirit of heightened artistic expression. While Huiz-
inga did not reject the use of the term 'Renaissance', there
remained little left of the idea that he did not see emanating from
the Middle Ages. Huizinga's book offered a very pessimistic view
of the ideal of the Renaissance celebrated by his igth-centuiy
predecessors. Written in the midst of the First World War, it is
hardly surprising that it could summon little enthusiasm for the
idea of the Renaissance as the flowering of the superiority of
European individuality and 'civilization'.
Huizinga's book did not demolish Burckhardt's vision of the
Renaissance. Its focus on the literature and art of the i4th and
i5th centuries strengthened an increasingly powerful tradition
that placed intellectual possession of the Renaissance primarily
in the hands of art historians. The most influential approach in
this tradition was the iconological study of the Renaissance,
developed by a German Jewish academic, Erwin Panofsky. Forced

26
 Introduction

to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he took

up a series of academic positions in New York. Panofsky agreed
with Burckhardt that the revival of classical learning in Italy in
the i5th century led to a 'respect for moral values' and learning
and urbanity7. These were principles that Panofsky implied were
worth fighting for in the face of the horrors of global warfare and
the Holocaust that cast such a long shadow over the 2Oth century.
As a result he formulated a more scientific approach to the art
that held the key to the civilized values of the Renaissance, which
he called 'Iconology'.
Panofsky argued that to understand any piece of Renaissance
art it was necessary to understand its subject matter: images,
stories, allegories. He termed this understanding iconographical
analysis. He emphasized that this required a vast knowledge of the
literary, philosophical, and political sources that went into the
creation of the particular art object. Once this had been achieved,
the critic could move towards 'Iconological interpretation'. This
established the intrinsic, or symbolic, meaning of the work of art.
Panofsky claimed that this scientific approach would 'reveal the
basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or
philosophical persuasion—qualified by one personality and
condensed into one work'. Iconology offered a science for under-
standing the essence, or 'attitude', of humanity, which could be
revealed in art. Life could be most profoundly understood
through art, with Renaissance art and its intense humanity form-
ing the summit of this tradition. In his classic book Studies in
Iconology (1939) Panofsky argued that Iconology is comparable to
ethnology, which refers to 'a science of human races'. He con-
cluded that the study and interpretation of art is a sign of how
humane we are. For him, Renaissance art is the pinnacle of this

27
The Renaissance Bazaar

humanity, as it marked the moment when mankind came to

understand itself as humane and hence modern.
Panofsky illustrated, his argument by comparing a 14th-
century medieval image of a classical story with a late 15th-
century picture of the same scene, Panofsky sees the medieval
miniature showing ¡ove abducting Europa as lifeless and unable
'to visualize animal passions*. However, in Albrecht Dürer's
drawing of the same scene (Fig. 2), completed around 1495,
Panofsky finds 'the emotional vitality which was absent in the
medieval representation'. It is a dynamic reworking of a classical
story, vividly expressed and full of psychological intensity and
emotion. Panofsky concludes that Dürer's drawing represents 'a
humanistic but also a humane occurrence'. Here Renaissance

2,
Europe emerges:
Álbrecht Dürer's
drawing 'The Rape
of Europa' (£.1495).

28
 Introduction

humanism as a way of thinking comes to define no less than

what it means to be human.

Renaissance or early modern?

In the aftermath of the Second World War and the social and
political upheavals of the 19608, particularly the politicization of
the humanities and the rise of feminism, the Renaissance was
subjected to a profound reappraisal. One particularly influential
response came from the United States. In 1980 the literary
scholar Stephen Greenblatt published his book Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. The book built on Burck-
hardt's view of the Renaissance as the point at which modern
man was born. Drawing on new ways of thinking about sub-
jectivity developed in psychoanalysis, anthropology, and social
history, Greenblatt argued that the i6th century witnessed 'an
increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human
identity'. Men (and on occasion women) learned to manipulate
or 'fashion' their identities according to their circumstances.
Like Burckhardt, Greenblatt saw this as the beginnings of a
peculiarly modern phenomenon. As a critic of literature,
Greenblatt saw Renaissance self-fashioning developing in the
16th century and continuing as late as the iyth century. For
Greenblatt, the literature of the great writers of loth-century
England—Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William
Shakespeare—produced fictional characters like Faustus and
Hamlet that began to self-consciously reflect on and shape their
own identities. In this respect they started to look and sound
like modern men. The painting that Greenblatt used to intro-
duce his theory of self-fashioning, and which adorned the

29
The Renaissance Bazaar

cover of his book, was none other than Hans Holbein's The
Ambassadors.
Greenblatt concluded that in the Renaissance 'the human
subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological
product of the relations of power in a particular society'. Green-
blatt's Renaissance was much more ambivalent than Burckhardt
and Panofsky's versions. Writing as an American of Jewish des-
cent, Greenblatt has subsequently explored both his admiration
for the achievements of the Renaissance and his horror at its
darker side, most specifically for him the rapacious colonization
of the New World and the violent acts of anti-Semitism that took
place throughout the loth century.
Despite the title of Greenblatt's book, he, along with others,
began to use the expression 'the early modern period' to define
the Renaissance. The term came from social history and pro-
posed a more sceptical relationship between the Renaissance and
the modern world than the vague and idealistic accounts of
Michelet and Burckhardt. It also turned the idea of the Renais-
sance into a period of history, rather than the cultural 'spirit'
proposed by igth-century writers. The term 'early modern' still
suggested that what took place between 1400 and 1600 deeply
influenced and affected the modern world. It also retained a
politically progressive belief that an understanding of the past
can help to understand and transform the present. Instead of
focusing on how the Renaissance itself looked back to the clas-
sical world, 'early modern' suggests that the period involved a
forward-looking attitude that prefigured our own modern world.
The concept of the early modern period also enabled an
exploration of topics and subjects not previously thought fit for
consideration in relation to the Renaissance. Scholars like

30
 Introduction

Greenblatt and Natalie Zemon Davis in her book Society and

Culture in Early Modern France (1975) explored the social roles of
peasants, artisans, transvestites, and 'unruly' women. Most sig-
nificant was the analysis of the role of women in the history of the
Renaissance, heavily influenced by the publication in 1977 of
Joan Kelly-Gadol's article 'Did Women Have a Renaissance?'.
Critics began to realize that categories like 'Jew', 'Muslim7,
'Black', or even 'Woman' changed through time and across his-
tory. Identity was not fixed and unchangeable, as Burckhardt had
implied in his celebration of'modern' man: it was fluid and con-
tingent. This allowed writers to understand that if identity had
been different in the past, then it could also change in the future.

1492: looking east and west

1992 marked the quincentenary of Columbus' first landfall in
America, and led to a spate of conferences, exhibitions, and
books reflecting on the complex legacy of the Genoese naviga-
tor's voyage. However, rather than turning into a celebration of
Columbus' achievements, the anniversary became the occasion
for a radical reassessment of the role of the Renaissance in global
history. The National Gallery of Art in Washington organized an
international exhibition entitled 'Circa 1492: Art in the Age of
Exploration', which viewed Columbus' voyages in the context of
wider events in 15th-century Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Far
East. Drawing on more sceptical approaches to the Renaissance,
the exhibition and accompanying catalogue examined the intel-
lectual and scientific achievements of the period alongside its
more baleful consequences: colonization, slavery, religious
conflict, and the rise of European imperialism.

3i
The Renaissance Bazaar

The anniversary of Columbus' first voyage led a new gener-

ation of scholars to think about how Europe's discovery of the
New World to the west was based upon an understanding of the
Old World to the east. 1492 was also the year that Columbus'
royal patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled both the Jewish
and Arabic communities from Spain. In the account of his first
voyage, dedicated to Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus wrote:
'having expelled all the Jews from your domains in that same
month of January, your Highnesses commanded me to go with
an adequate fleet to these parts of India [the Americas] . . . I
departed from the city of Granada on Saturday 12 May and went
to the port of Palos, where I prepared three ships.' Columbus
understood his voyage to the New World as a mission to conquer
and convert the people he found there, in the same way that
Ferdinand and Isabella aimed to conquer the Jewish and Muslim
communities of Spain. This was a much more sinister version of
the voyages of discovery than the one provided by Michelet and
Burckhardt. It also showed that, until the end of the i5th century,
Christians, Muslims, and Jews had amicably exchanged ideas
and objects, despite their religious differences.
Today scholars are beginning to realize that, despite Ferdinand
and Isabella's attempt to eradicate the Renaissance bazaars of
Spain at the end of the i5th century, the spirit of mutual exchange
between east and west continued throughout the i6th century.
These connections were responsible for some of the greatest cre-
ations of what we today call the European Renaissance. While the
discovery of America to the west profoundly transformed how
Europeans understood their place in an expanding world, the
ongoing encounters with the east were also crucial to how Europe
began to define itself regionally, both politically and creatively.

12