A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (7 page)

For the nineteenth-century Swiss art historian, Jacob Burckhardt, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the birth of modern man. That may be largely true, but, if the Renaissance did one thing, it was to place mankind firmly centre stage. Instead of being merely God’s playthings, victims of the snakes and ladders of misfortune, people now
felt the desire to analyse and understand how the universe worked and, by so doing, to establish some control over their fate.

The Renaissance cultivated a revival of learning derived from classical sources. Thinkers scoured monastic libraries for obscure classical texts, writers began to use the vernacular in their work and this, in combination with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing
press in Mainz in Germany in 1440, made books available and accessible to many more people. There was a fascination with classical art because it managed to reproduce the beauty of the human form three-dimensionally. The classical statue of
Laocoön and His Sons
being dragged under water by a sea serpent would be unearthed in 1506 and significantly influence Italian Renaissance art. Moreover, the
fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought an influx of Greek scholars to Florence. These experts introduced the Florentines to Aristotle and Plato and the philosophy of Neoplatonism was created to merge Plato’s ideas with Christian teachings.

Although it is impossible to say exactly when the Renaissance began, many pinpoint the poetry and songs of the Italian scholar Petrarch (1304–74) as the starting
point. Petrarch, a master of the sonnet form in poetry, was one of the earliest humanists. His work often deals with real people with personalities and human emotions, a striking change from literature that had gone before. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), meanwhile, wrote the
Decameron
, a collection of stories of people living during the Black Death that satirised the Church, priests and religious
belief. What was different about his writing was that it dealt with people’s responses to the plague and not God’s reason for inflicting it on people.

In art, painters such as Cimabue (c. 1240–c. 1302) and Giotto (c. 1267–1337) pioneered a new approach to artistic representation, eschewing the formal, stiff, Byzantine style and turning, instead, to nature for inspiration. Giotto, in particular,
created figures that had solidity and the scenes he depicted were filled with passion and imagination. The great sixteenth-century art biographer, Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) wrote of him:

He made a decisive break with the… Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for
more than two hundred years.

(Giorgio Vasari,
Lives of the Artists
, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics, 1965)

Pioneers in other fields included the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), who created the magnificent dome of Florence Cathedral, the sculptor Donatello (c. 1386–1466), the most influential artist of the fifteenth century, whose naturalistic statue of
David
created
a sensation, and the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), whose cynical view of power and politics, as expounded in works such as
The Prince
, has remained contentious ever since.

People began to think more about their lives on earth rather than their spiritual life and the afterlife. Humanists like Gianozzo Manetti could assert ‘the genius of man… the unique and extraordinary
ability of the human mind’. The humanist approach to life and learning is characterised by this mode of thought, and amongst its exponents were political philosophers such as Thomas More (1478–1535) who depicted a perfect society created by Christian humanist ideals in his novel
Utopia
. Humanist theologians like the Dutchman Erasmus (1466–1536) and the German Martin Luther (1483–1546) seriously
challenged current religious thinking and practice.

The Peace of Lodi in 1454 brought a forty-year hiatus in the fighting between Milan, Florence and Naples. Other Italian states joined them in an Italian League designed to keep foreigners out and the stability, prosperity and peacefulness of the period encouraged the writers and artists alive and working during this time to achieve great things.

The development of linear perspective in painting was one of the most important elements of Renaissance art. Giotto, working in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was amongst the first to take an interest in the technique of creating a representation of realistic distance, using devices and arranging his figures in a manner that often make his paintings resemble stage sets. However,
the real credit for perspective went to Brunelleschi who invented the Construzione Legittima that formalised the rules of perspective. The analysis of light and shadow and, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), human anatomy, added to the trend for more realistic painting. Amongst the artists who wielded most influence were Leonardo (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael (1483–1520).

In the north, too, there was a flowering of the representational arts and the paintings of Dutch artists Hugo van der Goes (c. 1440–83) and Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) even influenced some of the Italian masters. Van Eyck’s use of oils was so innovative and striking that it led Vasari, wrongly, to credit him with the invention of oil painting. The Dutch brought a refreshing naturalism to their
work that was appreciated and assimilated by their fellow artists. Elsewhere, talented artists such as painter and printmaker, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), working in Germany, also explored the techniques and aesthetics developed first in Italy.

Renaissance architecture was very much influenced by the remains of classical buildings, with Roman columns often being used. Technique was
also enhanced by developments in the science of mathematics. Furthermore, the discovery in 1414 of
De Architectura
, a book on architecture by the first century BCE Roman architect, Vitruvius, provided Renaissance practitioners with technical knowledge that had been lost for many centuries.

Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the greatest of all Renaissance architects. The dome of Florence Cathedral,
completed in 1436, was a technical marvel that drew on the construction techniques used for the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, built in 125 CE. In general, the architecture of the Renaissance displayed an emphasis on symmetry, proportion, geometry and a formal regularity that can be found in works of classical antiquity, especially in those of Rome. Its precepts quickly spread to other parts of
Europe.

The Renaissance brought significant developments in many fields of science and the way the universe was viewed. Amongst the most important of these was the focus on empirical evidence to provide proof of theories and discoveries. Coupled with this was the rediscovery of ancient texts, accelerated by the influx into Western Europe of many Byzantine scholars following the fall of
Constantinople. Furthermore, the invention of printing made many scientific texts and theories more widely available. Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) benefited from the availability of material and sensationally postulated that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa. Some decades later his book containing the theory,
De Revolutionibus
, was placed on the Vatican’s list of banned books.

The French were the first to pick up on what had been going on in Italy. They brought back the ideas and innovations of the Italian Renaissance after Charles VIII’s (ruled 1483–98) invasion of Italy in 1494. Francis I (1515–47) is considered to be France’s first Renaissance monarch and he was responsible for bringing Leonardo to France where the great artist spent his
last years. The influence of the Renaissance can be felt in the works of great writers such as François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). By the sixteenth century, the Renaissance had spread to the Low Countries, Germany and, in the late sixteenth century, to Scandinavia, Central Europe and England. In England it was marked by some of literature’s
greatest exponents – dramatists William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) and the poet Edmund Spenser. Composers such as Thomas Tallis (1505–85), John Taverner (c. 1490–1545) and William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) also espoused the spirit of the age. Meanwhile, in the Iberian Peninsula, the novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) and playwright Lope de Vega (c. 1562–1635) were
working.

Renaissance art reached its highpoint in the extraordinary period known as the High Renaissance which began towards the end of the fifteenth century and lasted well into the sixteenth. This period saw an explosion of creative genius characterised by the work of such masters as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Tintoretto (1518–94), Titian (1485–1576) and Veronese
(1528–88). Never before had such technical accomplishment, rich imagination and mastery of composition come together in such a brilliant and controlled way.

Many of the artists had learned their art in Florence in a remarkable, simultaneous flowering of extraordinary talent, but the activities of the fanatical Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola, in that city persuaded many artists and writers
to flee. Savonarola led a moral crusade in which he burned books and destroyed paintings that he considered immoral. In 1497, he supervised what became known as ‘the bonfire of the vanities’, the burning of a huge number of works of art and other items that he considered contrary to his moral code. Savonarola’s heyday, however, was short. In the following year, he was excommunicated and executed.
Florentine-trained artists, many of them driven into exile during Savonarola’s brief reign of terror, plied their craft in other parts of Italy, especially in Rome where a series of ambitious and high-spending popes provided many opportunities. Sadly, by about 1525, the great art of the High Renaissance was becoming a thing of the past as it evolved into the sophisticated, but less ground-breaking
style known as Mannerism.

Possibly the most dramatic change to the world in the centuries following the medieval period was the discovery of new lands during the so-called Age of Discovery. This would alter everything – people’s prosperity, their very view of the world and their relation to it; even their eating habits.

Europeans had already developed a taste for the exotic.
The Orient had long been known and visited and Europeans developed a hunger for its untold wealth, its jewels, its precious metals and its spices. Stories spread of the fantastic people and creatures that inhabited distant lands, in particular the legend of Prester John, a Christian patriarch and king who supposedly ruled a fabulously wealthy nation somewhere in the Orient. The tales of the Venetian,
Marco Polo (1254–1324), who, at the end of the thirteenth century, had visited the court of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan (ruled 1260–94), had become a fourteenth century bestseller.

The first explorers of the new age were Spanish and Portuguese or were sailing under their flags. Men such as Bartolomeu Diaz (c. 1450–1500), Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Vasco da Gama (1460 or 1469–1524)
and Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) set out on fantastic voyages of discovery that opened the world to all and brought phenomenal wealth to them, their masters and, ultimately, much of Europe. The changes in society – the migration from the countryside to the towns, the growth of the population and an economic crisis that had blighted the fourteenth century – all made it necessary for Europeans to
look elsewhere for their requirements. Greater productivity and a sizeable increase in farmland would help to put meat and vegetables on the European table. Sugar and spices had also become necessities, as had the need to find a source of the precious metals that paid for everything. As ever, religion was also a factor; the Catholic Church was always in the market for more souls to be saved and the
New World was teeming with people ripe for conversion.

Portugal was first into the fray. It was Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), third son of King John I (ruled 1385–1433), who launched the Portuguese programme of exploration. He firstly persuaded his father in 1415 to invade and conquer the Muslim port of Ceuta on the coast of North Africa. The objectives were both strategic and financial.
Ceuta guarded the Straits of Gibraltar across the Mediterranean from the Iberian Peninsula, but it was also the lucrative terminus for the Saharan trade routes. Henry’s fascination with Africa led to voyages of exploration along the Mauretanian coast that also netted African slaves and goods. He employed cartographers and established a maritime academy at Sagres that taught navigation and was
important in the development of shipbuilding technology and instrumentation.

Undoubtedly the most important development was the Portuguese creation of two new ship designs – the carrack and the caravel. The carrack was the first real ocean-going ship in Europe. With its high, rounded stern, an aftcastle and a forecastle, it was roomy enough to store provisions for long voyages and to provide
quarters for the comfort of the crew. Caravels had the advantage over carracks of being smaller and more manoeuvrable, much more suitable for precision sailing along coasts in uncharted waters. Between 1418 and 1425, the Portuguese occupied the Madeiran archipelago and, in 1427, the Azores, which had been known in the fourteenth century but were rediscovered by one of Henry’s ships. They were colonised
in the 1430s. In 1434, one of his sailors, Gil Eanes, took his ship close to the end of the known world, passing Cape Bojador, a headland on the West African coast. Before long, Henry’s ships had passed the southern edge of the Sahara, rendering the trade route redundant, and began shipping slaves and gold back home. In 1490, thirty years after Henry’s death, Bartolomeu Diaz reached the Cape
of Good Hope and it became possible to circumnavigate the continent of Africa. Eight years later, Vasco da Gama captained the first ship to sail from Portugal to India, a remarkable achievement and one that promised prosperity for Portugal.