North Italian economy
We can measure the economic driver of the Renaissance by comparing the 15th century
Venetian
economy with other economies of the time. A Venetian document conveniently offers us a list of
European budgets in the early fifteenth century.
Whereas receipts for the city of Venice alone were between 750,000 and 800,000 ducats,
the
entire kingdom of France (in a parlous state at the time it is true) could assemble a mere million
ducats; Venice's budget was equal to that of Spain (though quite what 'Spain' means in this
context is disputed), almost equal to that of England, and far exceeded those of the other Italian
cities deemed to be her peers: Milan, Florence and Genoa. It is true that the figures for the budget
of Genoa do not mean much, since private interest had commandeered a huge slice of public
revenue for itself.
And so far, we have only been talking about Venice and the Dogado. To
the revenue of the Signoria
(750,000 ducats) we should add those of the hinterland, Terraferma (464,000) and of the empire
-
the Mar or sea as it was called (376,000). The total (1,615,000 ducats) sets the Venetian budget
in
the front rank of budgets in Europe - and even this is not quite the whole story. For if the population
of the entire Venetian complex (city, Terraferma and empire) is estimated at about one and a
half
million maximum, and that of France under Charles VI as fifteen million (for the purposes of a very
rough and ready calculation), then the latter, with ten times as many inhabitants, ought to have had
a budget ten times that of Venice - viz. 16 million ducats.
The paltry size of the French budget, one million, serves to underline the overwhelming
superiority
of the city-states compared to the 'territorial' economies and allows one to imagine what this early
concentration of capital must have signified for a single city - when all is said and done a mere
handful of men. To suggest a further interesting if not conclusive comparison: the same document
reveals that budgets had shrunk in the fifteenth century, but unfortunately without indicating the
year in which the decline began. Compared to the former level, the English budget had apparently
fallen by 65%, that of Spain (again what 'Spain'?) by 73%, but that of Venice by only 2.7%.
The second test we can apply, defines the beginnings of consumerism. It is the celebrated
speech
of the doge Mocenigo, a combination of last will and testament, statistical survey and political
invective. On the point of death, the old doge made a desperate attempt to prevent the succession
of Francesco Foscari, of the war party (who did in fact succeed him on 14 April 1423, and presided
over Venice's destiny until his deposition on 2.3 October 1457). The old doge explained to his
listeners the advantages of peace if the fortunes of the state and its citizens were to be preserved.
If you elect Foscari, he said:
'you will soon be
at war. The man who has 10,000 ducats now will be left with a thousand,
he who has ten houses will have only one, he who has ten garments will hardly have one,
those with ten petticoats or pairs of hose or shirts will hardly have one left and so it will be
with everything'. If on the contrary, the peace is kept, 'if you follow my advice, you will find
that you are the masters of the gold of Christendom'.
The Renaissance
It was the Venetian monopoly of world trade that kick- started the Renaissance and
all that
paraphernalia of the modern world that stemmed from it. The economic drivers were merchants
who aspired to control their own destinies and their wealth bought the latest fashions and their
patronage of craftsment and artists bought the materials and thinking time for the likes of Giotto
and Michelangelo to progress the visual arts..The founder of Renaissance humanism is said to be
Petrarch (1304- 74), an Italian poet and man of letters who attempted to apply the values and
lessons of antiquity to questions of Christian faith and morals in his own day.
The Renaissance is a milestone in the fifteenth century,
a turning point in art and attitudes to art, in
learning, in science; a new vision of the individual and his worth; a 'rebirth'; the beginning of a
new
world. This view is commonplace and hardly to be overturned—it is in fact how men of the late
Renaissance, such as Vasari in Italy and Rabelais in France, have themselves advertised what
they and their like have been doing; and we have continued to listen to their testimony and still use
the very suggestive name they have put into circulation.
Yet we recognize it to have been a tendentious name.
It focuses our attention on a particular range
of their concerns; it disregards the discovery of a New World (named after a Florentine); it
bypasses a European transformation which many would judge of central importance (the Protestant
Reformation); it crowds out Copernicus's revolution in astronomy and actually obscures the
process by which modern science slowly begins to emerge from ancient beliefs. Its claim for
novelty, even, in recovering the ancient world and through it so many occasions for pride, is
disproved by history; there is not one Renaissance, there have been numerous earlier occasions
on
which a cultural 'rebirth' has been sparked off by partial returns to antiquity. The century
immediately preceding the great fifteenth century refulgence in Florence is, in particular, an age of
'Renaissance', with Petrarch at the centre of a quickening of attention to ancient Rome; while in the
sequel there spreads out from Florence a whole ripple of 'Renaissances' of various degrees of
deliberateness, in other lands, lasting well into the 1530s and even beyond. In short, we no longer
see the world as Rabelais did.
For all that, the Renaissance, if not an absolute novelty, yet forms part of a set
of changes so
striking in their outcomes as to warrant our attention, and our retention of the name—if
not quite in
the sense propagated by its sixteenth-century adherents. Above all there is a new mental attitude
towards understanding the environment. The world and our place in it was subjected to human
analysis by a process of framing, that is to say, deciding where to place the boundaries between
clusters of objects and ideas. This is a fundamental apect of human behaviour which led to the
framing of living beings and the physical world as a gallery of interacting and interdependent
entities.
