Key Dates
- 59 BC – Julius Caesar founds Florentia
- 1100–1400 – Florence grows rich and powerful on textiles and banking
- 1434–1737 – Medici family in power
- 1449–1492 – Life of Lorenzo de Medici
- 1504 – Michelangelo’s David
- 1737–1799 – Florence ruled by Austrian Habsburgs
- 1799–1814 – Napoleon occupies Florence
- 1865 – Unification of Italy; Florence is capital for 5 years
- 1966 – Great Arno flood
Overview
Florence was famously the cradle of the Renaissance. This was a period of dynamic creativity and innovation in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, scholarship and the sciences, which lasted, roughly, from the late 1300s to the mid 1500s. During this period, Florence was Europe’s cutting edge as far as new developments in taste and culture were concerned (see Arts).
Wealthy patrons were essential to this creativity. Florence had become rich during the Middle Ages, first on its textile industry and then from banking. Florentine banks were the first, and for a long time, among the most important in Europe. The Medici were the most powerful of the Florentine banking families and ruled the city for almost 300 years (see History).
Artists like Michelangelo pursued the Renaissance interest in the classical past. Their patrons identified with the glory of Ancient Rome and wanted to inject their own time with some of its magnificence and cultural excellence. So artists studied classical sculpture; architects borrowed from ancient building methods and styles; scholars rediscovered classical philosophers and writers. With these studies came great Renaissance cultural achievements: in painting and sculpture, humanist literature, and enormous leaps in scientific understanding (see Science).
By the mid-16th century, Florence’s artistic and economic importance was on the wane. The last Medici died in the early 18th century. Florence was then ruled by the House of Lorraine, with a short Napoleonic interlude, until 1865, when it was briefly the capital of the newly unified Italian nation.
History
Florence, originally a Roman colony, emerged as an important and powerful city during the Middle Ages. Its textile industry – weaving and dyeing fine wool and silk cloth which was then exported all over Europe – brought great prosperity. The profits formed the basis for a new and even more lucrative industry, banking, which was virtually invented in Florence.
Banks
The first gold florin, displaying the lily of Florence, was minted in 1235. It soon became Europe’s most trustworthy and standard currency. Kings and Popes borrowed from Florentine banking families, who set up branches across Italy and Europe and grew extremely rich from the interest payable on loans. In Florence, moneychangers and lenders sat behind a bench-like counter, banca (hence bank), covered with a precious carpet, a symbol of wealth. A lender in financial difficulty displayed a banca rotta (a broken counter); hence the term bankrupt.
Further Reading
- Rise and Fall of the House of Medici and Florence, Christopher Hibbert
- Atlas of the Renaissance, Black et al.
- The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy
- Leonardo da Vinci, Kenneth Clark
- The Penguin Book of the Renaissance, J. H. Plumb
- Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari
- The Merchant of Prato, Iris Origo
- Florence, Cadogan Guides
Know Our Crenellations
Guelph crenellations are square. Ghibelline ones are swallowtail-shaped. You can spot these all over central and northern Italy. Look out for Florence’s Palazzo Pubblico, which has square crenellations, while its bell tower sports swallowtails – clear evidence of a changeover in power.
In 1300, Florence had 100,000 citizens and was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe. But city life was far from smooth. Rival noble families feuded violently and involved themselves in Guelph–Ghibelline power struggles. These were particularly bad in Florence, and the fabric of the city suffered as revenge and punishments were exacted. Eventually the Guelphs came out ahead, only to split themselves into warring Black and White factions. The Black Death then wiped out almost half the population.
Guelphs and Ghibellines
Medieval Italian city-states were riven with internal power struggles and kept themselves busy outside the city walls by attacking neighbouring towns. In the early 13th century, rival groups found a larger cause, lining up behind either the Holy Roman Emperor or his bitter enemy, the Pope. HRE supporters were Ghibellines; the Pope’s men, Guelphs (the names came from two ruling houses of Dark Ages Germany). Most cities had families from both camps; for example Verona, with Romeo and Juliet’s families divided by Guelph–Ghibelline hatred.
By 1400, things were calmer in the city. Outside the city walls, Florence was almost constantly at war, against major rivals like Milan and smaller cities it coveted, such as Pisa, conquered in 1406. Florence’s power and importance, both among the Italian city-states and in the European financial market, meant it wanted to look as good as it felt. Magnificently designed and decorated public buildings and spaces, such as the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria, developed in the 15th century, and splendid private palaces clearly signified Florentine wealth and political confidence to others. These buildings acted as unmistakable signs of success and superiority. The considerable wealth of Florentine trade guilds and noble families was essential to the city’s role as a centre of cultural sophistication; artists and scholars naturally gravitated to a place where so much interesting and well-paid work was to be had. This created, particularly during the 15th and early 16th centuries, a hothouse climate of astonishing creativity and artistic and intellectual development, which has become known as the Renaissance.
Defining the Renaissance
Renaissance means rebirth. Florence’s period as the centre of cutting-edge developments in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and scientific and philosophical studies was given the name Renaissance by the 19th-century French historian Michelet. It implies a cultural and artistic reawakening, in the service of secular as well as religious patrons, in contrast to the Middle Ages, when most art was made only for the Church. It also points to a rediscovery of classical art, architecture and learning, which was central to Renaissance culture.
Basic Renaissance Formula
- Civic and family pride
- Financial patronage
- The best artists train and work in Florence
- All of which together create the Renaissance
Renaissance Thinking
Together with the rediscovery of classical art and learning, Renaissance philosophy put a new emphasis on the place of man at the centre of the universe. A 15th-century writer, Pico della Mirandola, imagined God saying to Adam in the creation scene: “like a free and able sculptor and painter of yourself, you may mould yourself entirely in the form of your choice.”
The Renaissance idea was that people were now the shapers of their own destiny, able to improve both themselves and the world around them. This was very different from medieval thinking, in which God alone controlled one’s fate. It did not mean that Renaissance thinkers rejected religious faith; they believed people owed their existence, and position at the centre of things, to God. Religious art and architecture therefore continued to be produced during the Renaissance, as it had been in the Middle Ages, for churches, monasteries and private chapels in the homes of the wealthy.
Why Rediscover the Classical Past?
This new focus on man himself came partly from rereading ancient philosophers. Pythagoras wrote “man is the measure of all things.” This is the spirit behind Renaissance artists’ concentration on the human body and their idealisation of it – Michelangelo’s David, for instance. The classical past informed artists’ work in a more concrete way, too. They spent a lot of time studying and copying ancient art, mostly sculpture, as Roman painting was not rediscovered until the excavation of Pompeii in the 18th century. Artists were able to see and work from ancient sculpture in new, rapidly expanding collections such as those of the Medici family in Florence or the Pope in Rome.
Classical buildings were also closely studied, and their structure and decorative styles were used and reinterpreted by Renaissance architects. The classical past represented not only a period of outstanding cultural achievement but also a time when Italy was unarguably the most important power in the Western world. Renaissance Florence felt successful and powerful and identified with the confidence and civic pride of ancient Rome. Reinterpreting its art, architecture and thinking for their own world lent Florence a piece of the glory that was ancient Rome, which it liked to think it paralleled with its own success.
The Medici Family
The most important people in Renaissance Florence were the Medicis, who ruled almost without a break for 300 years. In the early 15th century, theirs was the biggest bank, with branches all over Europe and for a while even the Pope’s private account. Wealth brought them political power in 1434, when Cosimo de Medici began his 35 years as ruler of the city.
The Medici Shield
Get your group to look for it all over Florence – on fountains, statues, corners of buildings and over windows, on tapestries, on floors in the Uffizi and the Duomo. It is decorated with six circles. The Medicis claimed these represented dents in their noble ancestor’s shield as he fought giants for Charlemagne. More probably, they are either pills (the Medici started off hawking medicines, as their name suggests) or coins, alluding to the source of Medici wealth.
Cosimo de Medici
As well as being an astute businessman and political leader, Cosimo de Medici was an important patron of art and scholarship. His library of rare and valuable books and manuscripts was envied and emulated by contemporaries, including the Pope. The artists he employed included the sculptor Donatello, the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Filippo Lippi, who upset his patron by having a son by a young nun he had used as a model for the Virgin Mary.
Cosimo also built himself a new palace (still visitable near San Lorenzo, the Medici church) and rebuilt the convent of San Marco (visitable opposite the Accademia, full of excellent Fra Angelico frescoes). The architect for both projects was Michelozzo. At San Marco, Cosimo reserved a monk’s cell for private retreat and religious reflection. “Never shall I be able to give God enough to set him down in my books as a debtor,” he wrote. In 1464, Cosimo died. His son Piero took over as ruler but followed him into the San Lorenzo crypt five years later, leaving his own son, Lorenzo, as head of the family and of Florence.
Lorenzo the Magnificent
Lorenzo de Medici (1449–1492) has become known as one of the greatest Renaissance art patrons. Contemporary and later eulogies hailed him as “il Magnifico.” He was lucky enough to rule Florence during the height of its Renaissance and at a relatively peaceful and prosperous time, which was looked back on as a golden age. He had extremely cultured and sophisticated interests and was an important patron to many of the most famous Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo. He was also a great collector of antique statues and medals, wrote poetry, was knowledgeable about art, architecture, music, philosophy, the sciences and classical literature, and was a shrewd politician.
In other words, he was the prototype Renaissance prince, able to turn his hand to any branch of civilised human endeavour. His example was followed throughout 15th- and 16th-century Europe. Figures such as Francis I of France aspired to the ideal of the cultured prince-patron. During the last years of his life, Lorenzo became patron to the young Michelangelo, thus assuring his reputation in history as a key supporter and promoter of Renaissance art.
The Pazzi Conspiracy
Political troubles sometimes impinged on Lorenzo’s gilded life. His family had been careful to marry him into a Roman noble family, the Orsini. This cleverly gave the Medicis a foothold in Rome (which paid off; Lorenzo’s son became Pope Leo X) and avoided having to choose from the many Florentine noble families jealous of their power. One family in particular, the Pazzi, hated the Medicis and wanted to relieve them of rulership. Murder seemed the only sure option.
In April 1478, Francesco de Pazzi, having hired two priests whose robes concealed daggers, attended Mass in the Duomo with Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano. As the brothers knelt at the altar, the priests drew their daggers. Giuliano was killed, his skull split almost in half, but Lorenzo leapt over the altar rail and ran for safety into the Sacristy. The affair did the Pazzis no good at all. Lorenzo emerged more powerful than ever, as Florentines rallied behind their leader. Francesco and the priests’ bodies were left hanging in the Piazza della Signoria as a reminder to everyone to mind their manners around the Medicis.
Savonarola
In 1492, Lorenzo died. His politically ineffectual son took over as ruler of Florence, only to be exiled soon thereafter. The severe and fanatical monk Savonarola gained popularity in the sudden turmoil into which the city had been plunged. He preached hellfire against what he saw as the luxury and corruption of the city and held a massive “bonfire of the vanities” – pictures, books, musical instruments, fine clothes and more – in the Piazza della Signoria in 1497. A year later, Florentines watched Savonarola burn in the same spot.
Medici Grand Dukes
16th- and 17th-century Florence saw some troubled times, especially in 1529, when the Emperor Charles V laid siege to the city on the way back from sacking Rome. The Medicis, having previously governed as private citizens, albeit extremely rich and powerful ones, became Grand Dukes of Tuscany. They established royal connections, marrying into the Spanish and French royal families (both Henry II and Henry IV of France had Medici queens; so there are a few drops of Medici blood in most modern European royal families, including the Windsors).
Florence After the Medicis
The last Medici, Gian Gastone, died in 1737. Florence was then ruled by the House of Lorraine, with a Napoleonic interlude, until 1859. In the 18th century, Florence began its new life as a cultural mecca for Grand Tourists from northern Europe and America, and hotels and picture collections were opened up all over the city. It was also a haven for writers fleeing debt or social disapproval in England, such as Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot.
Florence became part of the newly unified Italy, of which it was capital from 1865–1870.
The Arts
Renaissance Florence had an unusually high number of artists’ workshops (see Vasari’s Lives of the Artists). The wealth of the city and its banking families, intent on making their public buildings and their own palazzi splendid, meant plenty of interesting commissions. This concentration of creativity made Florence a place of dynamic innovation in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts.
Big Names and Their Greatest Hits
- 1265–1321 – Dante, Divine Comedy
- 1469–1527 – Machiavelli, The Prince
- 1511–1574 – Vasari, Lives of the Artists
- 1452–1519 – Leonardo: Mona Lisa (Louvre); Last Supper (Milan); inventions (including a submarine)
- 1475–1564 – Michelangelo: Pietà (St Peter’s); David (Accademia, Florence); Sistine Chapel (Vatican)
- 1483–1520 – Raphael: Sistine Madonna (Vienna); School of Athens (Raphael Rooms, Vatican)
Painting and Sculpture
Renaissance culture focused on the classical past for inspiration and guidance (see History). For artists, this meant studying and learning from pieces of ancient art. They would not have been able to see much Roman painting – apart from a few fragments on Nero’s palace ceiling, discovered by Raphael in Rome in the early 1500s, Roman wall-paintings were not rediscovered until the excavation of Pompeii in the mid-18th century. Roman sculpture, however, was much more available: statues of people, animals and mythological figures, portrait busts and tomb chests, medals and cameos carved with portraits and scenes from Roman life. These were all being excavated during the Renaissance and collected by people like the Medicis, who usually allowed artists to study and copy from their collections.
From their studies, Renaissance artists learned how to make their paintings and sculpture look more real. Roman artists, following in Greek footsteps, had clearly used models to achieve the degree of realism they wanted in their sculpture. Renaissance artists started doing likewise, which was a new idea. Medieval artists’ representations of the world were heavily stylised and iconic; they had other concerns than realism in their art. Classical artists also sought to idealise and perfect the human body in their sculpture, and so generally did Renaissance artists. This approach – drawing and making copies of antique sculpture, using studio models and combining this visual knowledge with an intellectual desire to idealise – was behind Renaissance masterpieces such as Ghiberti’s Baptistry Doors and Michelangelo’s David.
Painting also benefited from lessons learned from classical art. Renaissance painters saw that Roman relief sculpture looked real because it created shadows, making the figures and objects depicted look rounded and three-dimensional. Looking at the real world also told them that shadows give definition, so realistic shading started to appear in paintings in the 14th century, with artists like Giotto (frescoes in Assisi Basilica and paintings in the Uffizi).
Renaissance painters were also extremely interested in the related problem of perspective – the realistic representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. They solved it through a rational, mathematical approach, discovering that the illusion of spatial depth could be produced by working within a mathematically derived framework, with lines of perspective leading back to established vanishing points. Uccello (famous for the monument to the mercenary soldier on horseback, Sir John Hawkwood, inside the Duomo) worked all his life on perspectival techniques and, according to Vasari, “loved perspective better than he loved his wife.”
Studying the real world and understanding perspective was what made great Renaissance paintings look convincing. Leonardo’s landscapes contain identifiable trees and plants and look as if you could actually walk down the misty river to the mountains at the back, whereas medieval landscapes look flat, with awkward transitions into distance. Raphael’s Madonnas look like 15th-century women holding real playing babies, rather than the stylised tiny old men held by enormous, iconic women in medieval paintings. Michelangelo’s figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling have realistic muscles and poses, and the shadows on their clothes make them flow and drape convincingly.
Another Renaissance artistic innovation was in subject matter. The new emphasis on human life and achievement, as opposed to the medieval focus on the Church, meant it was far more acceptable to commission secular art, including portraits, which became very popular. Patrons like the Medicis also commissioned paintings and sculptures with subjects from classical mythology (such as Botticelli’s Primavera). These were often complicated allegories, usually referring to the patron and his virtues in some way. The format of the painting was dictated to the artist by scholars working for the patron, who would then disentangle the meaning amongst friends, to the intellectual satisfaction of all.
Architecture
Renaissance architects, too, reinterpreted elements from the classical past. By studying buildings such as the Pantheon in Rome, and the remains of Roman temples, palaces and arenas, they learned many valuable building and engineering techniques that had been lost since Roman times. Brunelleschi, for instance, discovered how to make a dome large enough for the Duomo by looking at the way the Pantheon’s builders had tackled the problem – a double-shell construction.
Brunelleschi and other Renaissance architects also re-used many stylistic elements of classical architecture in their own designs. Triumphal arches are a particular example, appearing in the Renaissance not as stand-alone arches but woven into larger designs, such as palace or church facades. All over Florence, there are arcades of round-topped arches supported by columns: the Loggia in the Piazza della Signoria; Piazza SS Annunziata (decorated by the della Robbia foundling baby roundels); the courtyard of the Medici Palace. These recall arcades in Roman houses or those stacked up around the outside of Roman arenas like the Colosseum.
Literature
Writers of the Florentine Renaissance were also extremely innovative and influential. In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, Dante revolutionised Italian literature by producing his Divine Comedy in Italian. This made it much more accessible than the Latin in which most previous literature had been written. The Divine Comedy also draws on classical imagery and figures. Dante traces his journey, accompanied by the Roman poet Virgil, through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise, in search of goodness and truth (Dante was exiled from Florence in 1302 over his support for the White faction; see Guelphs and Ghibellines).
In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Lorenzo de Medici and Michelangelo wrote polished poetry, expressing the aspiration of the Renaissance soul to attain an ideal. In the 16th century, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was the first ever piece of art history. And Machiavelli set down, in his book The Prince, thoughts on the moral and political processes of state and government and famously advocated ruthlessness in the face of necessity: “the end justifies the means.”
Science
The Renaissance was a period of great progress in science as well as in the arts. Florentine wealth, together with the city’s atmosphere of energy and innovation during the Renaissance, made scientific experimentation and discovery an important part of its cultural pre-eminence. Also, the Medici endowment of universities under Florentine control, such as that at Pisa, meant they attracted teachers and scholars and fostered new developments in learning.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo (1452–1519) was a true Renaissance man, who could turn his hand to many things. As well as his artistic achievements, he designed buildings and fortifications and explored many avenues of learning connected with natural science, engineering and machinery. After leaving Florence, where he trained, Leonardo went to work for the court at Milan. There, he planned cannons and engines of war, central heating systems (which had not been seen since Roman times) and also designed for the court theatre – not only scenery, but stage machinery as well.
Leonardo’s experiments, whether carried out or confined to his notebooks, were informed by his close and constant studies of the natural world. He made incredibly detailed drawings of different species of plants, of the human body and its interior and exterior structure, and of animals’ bodies and ways of moving. He used this information in his paintings, but it also sparked ideas in his mind for new inventions. His study of birds’ flight led him to invent parachutes and a kind of helicopter. Investigation of underwater creatures resulted in a prototype submarine. These were principally paper inventions, which lived only in his notebooks.
Above all, Leonardo’s exacting attitude towards investigating and recording the structure and functions of plants and living organisms made him a pioneer of modern scientific method. This separated him from most scientists of his day, who believed they could subvert the laws of nature to those of man, and from contemporary doctors, whose theories were not always based on solid research.
Galileo Galilei
Late 15th- and 16th-century astrologers generally believed that the world was a globe at the centre of a spherical universe. They had inherited this view from the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers and Ptolemy of Egypt. But during the 16th and 17th centuries, attempts to plot the movements of the stars with greater accuracy led to the revolutionary discovery, published by Copernicus in his influential On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres of 1543, that the sun was actually the centre of things.
Galileo (1564–1642) built on this discovery. He came from Pisa, where he was appointed professor of mathematics as a young man. Galileo, like Leonardo a century earlier, learnt by studying nature. He proved air had weight by weighing a pig’s bladder full of air, then puncturing it and weighing it again, and dropped heavy and light balls off the Leaning Tower to prove they would reach the ground at the same time. In 1609, he invented his own telescope, and was thus the first man to see the surface of the moon and the moons of Jupiter, and to discover the Milky Way was made of countless stars. In The Starry Messenger of 1610, he suggested the universe might be infinite. This publication brought success: he was made Grand Ducal mathematician and philosopher by the Medicis and feted in Rome.
Galileo followed Copernicus in believing the earth revolved round the sun. But theologians decided this went against too many biblical teachings, and Copernicus’s writings were proscribed by the Vatican. Galileo’s next book, in Italian rather than Latin and therefore much more accessible, discussed the various theories about the universe, promoting Copernicus’s as the right one. This was too much for the Pope, who put Galileo on trial and made him recant even his belief that the earth moved. Galileo was under house arrest for the rest of his life, but nevertheless managed to produce The Two New Sciences (1638), an examination of motion and the strength of materials, which became the basis for the modern study of physics.