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.
