The Ugly Renaissance Read Online Free PDF Page B

urban liberty.Great public buildings such as Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio were constructed to reflect the grandeur of the republic and to testify to the stability and endurance of communal government. Art was commissioned for public spaces that glorified either theindependence of the city-states or the brilliance of the signori (lords). Grown rich on the profits of trade, business, too, contributed. Corporative organizations, such as guilds and lay fraternities, built grand edifices, such as Ognissanti, for their trade and funded public institutions, such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Wanting to celebrate their riches or to atone for the sins they had incurred in acquiring their wealth, the new urban merchant elite also eagerlypatronized the arts with a view to creating their own, very public image. Richly decorated family chapels proliferated, and fine palaces sprang up in their dozens.
    But Michelangelo’s walk was also a figurative journey through the social influences that shaped his life as both artist and man. A city is, after all, the ultimate stage of the social dramas of everyday life and is the cradle in which the artistic dreams of the Renaissance were born. It is where artists lived, worked, and died; it is where social habits, tastes, and conventions were formed and refashioned; it is where life and art coincided, interacted, and cross-fertilized. As he passed the churches, squares, palaces, markets, government buildings, and hospitals that constituted the stage of everyday life, Michelangelo’s walk mirrored the social, economic, religious, and political concerns that shaped his career as a painter and sculptor and that defined his values and priorities as a human being. The sights, sounds, and smells he would have encountered on this journey were part of the weft from which the tapestry of his life and work was woven. The urban landscape in which Michelangelo and his contemporaries worked, played, and fought was, however, much uglier than the landmarks of his journey might initially suggest.
    F LORENCE AND THE I LLUSION OF THE I DEAL
    Florence in 1491 was a thriving metropolis.
    From a population of around thirty thousand in ca. 1350, Florence had grown to become one of Europe’s largest cities.As early as 1338, as the chroniclerGiovanni Villani recorded, its inhabitants consumed more than seventy thousand quarts of wine each day, and around a hundred thousand sheep, goats, and pigs had to be slaughtered each year to keep pace with the city’s appetite. By the mid-sixteenth century, it boasted no fewer than fifty-nine thousand inhabitants and was rivaled in size only by Paris, Milan, Venice, and Naples.
    In 1491, Florence was an economic powerhouse. Despite its superficially unfavorable location—inland and at some distance from major trade routes—the city built on close links with thepapacy and thekingdom of Naples to develop powerful mercantile andbanking concerns, and succeeded in all but cornering the European cloth market. As Villani explained in 1338, around thirty thousand laborers were employedin cloth making, and the industry as a whole produced 1.2 million florins’ worth of cloth each year, most of it for export.In the same year, eighty banks or money-changing businesses and six hundred notaries were listed, while some three hundred citizens were recorded as being merchants who worked overseas.Although there were intermittent crises—such as the famines of the early fourteenth century, the collapse of theBardi, Peruzzi, andAcciaiuoli banks, and theBlack Death of 1348—Florence was nothing if not resilient, and its expansion into new sectors—such as thesilk industry—and the growth of the Medici and Strozzi banks contributed to the continuation of the city’s economic miracle.
    There was no doubt that the growth of wealth and the institutions of civic government had brought benefits. On the back of the emergence of humanism and the growth of a professional bureaucracy, standards of