Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents

Abstract

The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.

This paper, “Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents,” was prepared for the 2011 Tel-Aviv workshop and I would like to express my gratitude to Ronald Witt and the conference organizers for their comments on various drafts prior to and after the conference. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are my own. I thank Luc Deitz for his assistance with Neo-Latin translations.

Notes

1. On this background, see James Hankins, “Two Twentieth-Century Interpreters of Renaissance Humanism: Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller,” in Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, Volume 1: Humanism (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 573–90, and “Renaissance Humanism and Historiography Today,” in Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, ed. J. Woolfson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 73–96; Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 36–57; Riccardo Fubini, “Renaissance Humanism and Florentine Civic Culture,” in Renaissance Historiography, 118–38, esp. 118–22, and “L’umanesimo italiano: Problemi e studi di ieri e oggi,” Studi francesi 51 (2007): 504–15; Michele Ciliberto, “Una meditazione sulla condizione umana: Eugenio Garin interprete del Rinascimento,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 4 (2008): 653–92.

2. On Bourdieu, see Celenza, Lost Italian Renaissance, 76–78; and more generally Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 123–40; and Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher, Understanding Bourdieu (London: Sage, 2002), 21–44; on the “linguistic” and “philosophical” turn, see Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodern Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 61–66.

3. See Hankins, “Two Twentieth-Century Interpreters,” 587–89, and “Renaissance Humanism,” 78–80.

4. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, ed. W. Goetz (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1976), 3; revising the translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 3. On the inherent contradictions in postmodern theory, see the summary and analysis by Breisach, The Future of History, 54–56, 80–83, 193–202.

5. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 15–18.

6. For an overview of this change in Garin’s appraisal of Alberti, see Sebastiano Gentile, “In memoriam: Eugenio Garin (1909–2004) e Leon Battista Alberti,” Albertiana 9 (2006): 3–27.

7. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (The 1893 Text), ed. D. L. Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 186.

8. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Studienausgabe 9: Fragen der Gesellschaft / Ursprünge der Religion, ed. A. Mitsicherlich, A. Richards, and J. Strachey (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1997), 191–270, esp. 246–59; trans. J. Strachey as Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), esp. 76–96.

9. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xiii–xiv.

10. Eugenio Garin, Educazione umanistica in Italia (Rome: Laterza, 1975), 13: “Questa fu l’educazione umanistica: non, come a volte si crede, studio grammaticale e retorico fine a se stesso, bensì formazione di una coscienza davvero umana, aperta in ogni direzione, attraverso la consapevolezza storico-critica della tradizione culturale. … Quel che conta è una preparazione morale fatta non di precetti, ma della conquista effettiva di una consapevolezza critica della propria umana condizione. Quel che conta è l’avvìo al colloquio con coloro che espressero tipi perfetti di umanità, con i maestri veri.” I cite the translation in Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to Humanities, 25.

11. See Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), esp. 197–201; John Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 75–104, and A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 200–18.

12. James Hankins, “The ‘Baron Thesis’ after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 329–30. Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 450.

13. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. A. Greco (Florence: Istituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1976), 2.309–11: “[Piero] sendo figliuolo di meser Andrea et essendo giovane di bellisimo aspetto e dato molto a’ diletti e piaceri del mondo, alle lettere non pensava, sì perchó il padre era mercantante, et come fanno quegli che non hanno notitia nolle istimano, né pensava che il figliuolo vi dessi opera. … Nicolaio Nicoli, che era uno altro Socrate et uno altro Catone di continentia e di virtù… lo chiamò vedendo uno giovane di sì buono aspetto. … Domandollo quale era il suo exercicio. Rispuose, come fanno i giovani: attendo a darmi buono tempo. Nicolaio gli disse: “… egli è una vergogna che tu non ti dia imparare le lettere latine, che ti sarebbono uno grande ornamento, or se tu nolle impari, tu non sarai istimato nulla, passato il fiore della tua gioventù, ti troverai sanza virtù ignuna e non sarai istimato nulla da persona”; “Lasciò andare meser Piero infinite lascivie et voluttà alle quali era volto… et dettesi in tutto alle lettere… cominciò avere bonissima notitia delle lettere latine, delle quali egli aquistò grandissimo onore, et dettogli grandissima reputatione.”

14. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 198 (3.6).

15. Bisticci, Le vite 2.235–36.

16. In this regard, see the essay by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby in this volume.

17. Bisticci, Le vite 2.309–10, cited above, n. 13. His father Andrea de’ Pazzi (1372–1445), we should note, commissioned Brunelleschi in 1429–30 to construct the family chapel in Santa Croce: Elena Capretti, Brunelleschi (Florence: Giunti, 2003), 98.

18. On Niccoli, see Martin C. Davies, “An Emperor Without Clothes? Niccolò Niccoli Under Attack,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 30 (1987): 95–148; Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 55–57. Perhaps the fullest portrait of Niccoli captured in primary sources is the correspondence preserved in Poggio’s epistolario. Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, vol. 1, ed. H. Harth (Florence: Olschki, 1984); Two Renaissance Bookhunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis, ed. and trans. P. W. G. Gordon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

19. Cf. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), 1.8 (Einleitung): “Fassen wir… die erzählenden Autoren ins Auge, so liegt hier das Lebendige und Bedeutsame so oft ganz sichtbarlich nicht in dem Ereignis, welches erzählt wird, sondern in der Art, wie, und in den geistigen Voraussetzungen, unter welchen es erzählt wird. Gleichviel, ob es wirklich geschehen, wir lernen den Hellenen und seinen äußern Gesichtskreis sowohl, als seine innere Denkweise daran kennen. [If we attend to... narrative writers, the dynamic and meaningful element inheres not so obviously in the event that is narrated as in the way how and in the intellectual preconditions by which it is narrated. Regardless of whether the event actually occurred, we become acquainted with the Greeks and with not only their outward field of vision but also with their inner ways of thinking.]” Emphasis in original.

20. MS Vat. lat. ott. 1677, c. 134v: “tum e nostris Nicolaum nicolum: qui tum praecipua morum gravitate ac severitate: tum inperquirendis veterum scriptis caeteris omnibus meo quidem iudicio diligentia solertiaque antecellit.”

21. Poggio, “Oratio,” in Opera omnia, ed. R. Fubini (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964), 1.273 and 271: “Tu [Niccolo] in primis viam ad humanitatis studia ostendisti …”; “Ad eam [virtutem] capessendam sentiebat maxime esse accommodata studia literarum, quae sola verum virtutis iter demonstrare et vitia compescere existimantur,” reading capessendam for capescendam.

22. Poggio Bracciolini, De vera nobilitate, ed. D. Canfora (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2002), §81: “Philosophos quoque et doctos viros, qui suis studiis et vigiliis vitam hominum varias per artas excoluerunt quique vel scriptis vel exemplo nobis ad nobilitandos mores et vitia propulsanda profuerunt, quantumvis abditi, non tantum nobiles, sed nobilissimos fuisse dixerim”; §75: “que sola nos ad sapientiam virtutumque omnium, quibus vita nostra servatur et colitur, cognitionem perducit.”

23. Pier Paolo Vergerio, De ingenuis moribus et liberalis adulescentiae liber (c.1402–3) in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 28–29 (§23): “Liberalia igitur studia vocamus, quae sunt homine libero digna: ea quibus virtus ac sapientia aut exercetur aut quaeritur”; Leonardo Bruni, Ad Petrum Paulum Istrum Dialogus, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Milan: Ricciardi, 1952), 96.

24. Leonardo Bruni, Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften, ed. Hans Baron (Wiesbaden: Martin Sändig, 1928), 21: “Quid enim pulchrius nobili viro et virtutum ab ipsa natura amatori et intelligentia rationeque praestanti, quam ea discere, per quae ad casum vivere desistat, suas ipse vias actusque discernat… Sed adversus hanc humani generis caecitatem et tenebras opem a philosophia petendum est, que, si forte nos dignata lumen suum admoverit, hanc omnem, quae nos turbat, caliginem dissipabit veramque vivendi viam a fallaci discernet.”

25. Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. James Hankins, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), preface 1: “Nam cum provecti aetate homines eo sapientiores habeantur, quo plura viderunt in vita, quanto magis historia nobis, si accurate legerimus, hanc praestare poterit sapientiam, in qua multarum aetatum facta consiliaque cernuntur, ut et quid sequare et quid vites faciliter sumas excellentiumque virorum gloria ad virtutem excitere.” I revise the translation by Witt, Footsteps, 448.

26. Cicero, De off. 1.14: “honestum, quod etiamsi nobilitatum non sit, tamen honestum sit, quodque vere dicimus, etiamsi a nullo laudetur, natura esse laudabile.” On Cicero’s translation of to kalon, see Hans-Joachim Hartung, “Ciceros Methode bei der Übersetzung griechischer philosophischer Termini” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Hamburg, 1970), 158–60. Bruni, Schriften, 26: “Honestum autem est, quod bene et laudabiliter et ex virtute fit.” See also 29: “ab his [virtutibus] enim honestas voluptasque vera exsistet.” In addition, see Poggio’s “Oratio funebris in obitu Leonardo Arretini,” his funeral oration for Bruni in 1444 in Leonardo Bruni, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. L. Mehus (Florence: Paperini, 1741), 1.cxvi: “Itaque cum cetera vitae commoda nobis quaerenda sunt, tum vero maxime virtutis ratio omni conatu appetenda, cum tanta illius cultoribus tum vivis, tum mortuis sint honoris praemia constituta [Since of course we ought to pursue other good things in life, so much more so should we strive to obtain virtue with all our efforts, since it alone bestows the marks of honor to those who cultivate it both during their lifetimes and after their death].”

27. On the importance of oratory in the early Quattrocento, see Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 338–91. On the humanist cultural program, see my Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 35–82.

28. Aspects of Poggio and Bruni’s orientation can be found in the De vera nobilitate and the Isagogicon; see also Giannozzo Manetti, Dialogus consolatorius, ed. A. de Petris (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983); Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. M. Lorch and K. Hieatt (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 3.4–5, 8–12. On Valla’s work, see Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularism from Petrarch to Valla, trans. Martha King (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 146–48, and L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali – critica moderna (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2001), 40 and 131–32; and W. Scott Blanchard, “The Negative Dialectic of Lorenzo Valla: A Study in the Pathology of Oppression,” Renaissance Studies 14 (2000): 149–89.

29. The outstanding vernacular ethical treatise of the period is Matteo Palmieri’s Vita civile, written in the mid-1430s: Vita civile, ed. G. Belloni (Florence: Sansoni, 1982).

30. Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence [Della famiglia], trans. R. N. Watkins (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 276 (modified); Opere volgari (henceforth OV), ed. C. Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960–73), 1.295.33–34: “in queste lettere non tanto erudito, ma dotto dalla natura.” For Lionardo, The Family, 280 (modified); OV 1.299.21–24; 300.15–16: “nostri, quali io troppo approvava, libri e discipline scolastiche”; 300.15–16: “utilissima e ne’ nostri libri da me non prima intesa.” See also Adovardo’s comment, after mentioning the treatises by Seneca, Cicero, Aristotle, and Lucian: “Né puossi bene averne dottrina sola da’ libri muti e oziosi. Conviensi in mezzo alle piazze, entro a’ teatri e fra e’ privati ridutti averne altra essercitazione e manifesta esperienza [One cannot learn only from mute and inert books. It is necessary to have another training and clear experience in the public squares, and within the theatres and private houses]” (287.19–22). On these passages see my Living Well, 195–205.

31. Alberti, Theogenius, OV 2.82.11–16: “le iterate mie calamità… offirmorono in me uno animo tale, che dova prima per troppa molezie io non potea udire la voce e ammonizione de’ sapientissimi filosofi, ora essercitato da’ casi avversi diligente gli ascoltai, e intesile essere ragioni e documenti ottime e santissime.” See my Living Well, 134–37.

32. Leon Battista Alberti, Opusculi inediti: Musca, Vita S. Potiti, ed. Cecil Grayson (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2005), 63–88. Grayson states that the work “esprime, pur rifiutandoli, principi di virtù e di vita attiva, cari (altrove) a lui e ad altri umanisti dell’epoca [expresses, if only to refute them, the principles of virtue and the active life dear (elsewhere) to him and other humanists of the time]” (38). See also Eugenio Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal xiv al xviii secolo (Rome: Laterza, 1990), 188–89, and “Il pensiero di Leon Battista Alberti: Caratteri e contrasti,” Rinascimento, 2nd series, 12 (1972): 13. For a fuller discussion, see my Living Well, 24–33.

33. Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, ed. and trans. Sarah Knight and Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 152–55 (2.74): “fronte corporisque habitu ad omnem veterem morem et honestatem quadam scaenica superstitione composito.”

34. Alberti, Momus, 156–57 (2.77): “Hos per contiones vagari solitos, nihil sibi assumentes certi atque constantis quod affirment, praesertim apud eos qui usu et exercitatione rerum sapere videantur”; “non tam multitudinis sensum atque cogitationes flectendo et diducendo, quam ad multitudinis nutum sua omnia instituta vertendo in dies et immutando.”

35. Alberti, Momus, 168–69 (2.91): “omnem scelestissimam familiam litteratorum… quo philosophos omnes totis cum gymnasiis et libris et bibliotecis absumerent.”

36. Alberti, Momus, 170–71 (2.93): “Quid illi mortales possint eloquentia ex Momo perspicue licet intelligere, qui tam exquisite excogitataque suadendi ratione instructus de mortalium gymnasiis ad superos rediit.” 174–75 (2.97): “tuo dicendi artificio et verborum ambagibus.”

37. Alberti Momus, 268–71 (3.71–72), slightly amending the translation: “Et bonis artibus excultum ingenium minime improbum et plurimum diligendum arbitrabar”; “istos plus satis eruditus minime esse probus quam par est. ... Nam alios facto et re se habent quam fronte et gestu videantur... et illic ubi se probos et simplicissimos videri student, illic maxime fallunt dolo et improbitate.” See my Living Well, 225–56.

38. Alberti, Momus, 316–17 (4.55): “Vestros… mortalium personatos et fictos mores odi!”

39. Alberti, On the Family, 274; OV 1.294.20–21: “Ma chi può dire qual sia varietà maggiore ne’ visi degli uomini, o pur ne’ loro animi?” 

40. Alberti, OV 1.302.26–28: “E sono gli studiosi di lettere come cupidi di acquisitare fama e nome, così certo prontissimi porgersi a qualunque degno, facile e liberale ad amicizia.”

41. Alberti, Momus, 308–11 (4.45).

42. Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces, trans. D. Marsh (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 34, with slight revision; Intercenales (Latin-Italian), ed. and trans. F. Bacchelli and L. D’Ascia (Bologna: Pedragon, 2003), 84: “Quod etsi fortassis fit his nostris intercenalibus, ut aures multitudinis offendantur, non tamen est cur nolim hoc pacto potius dicendo, quam tacendo id eniti, ut me docti tuque in primis hac etate litterarum princeps, Leonarde, studiosum esse intelligas atque iccirco vehementius diligas. Namque, ut Sostratum ad Arrium philosophum dixisse ferunt, docti quidem doctos servabunt, si docti erunt.” See my Living Well, 63–67.

43. Alberti, Intercenales, 222–24.

44. Cicero, De senectute/De amicitia/De divinatione, ed. and trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), §98. The motto esse quam videri, derived from this phrase, has been adopted by places as diverse as Royal Holloway, University of London, and the state of North Carolina. Alberti’s copy of the De amicitia is presently part of Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS Lat.VI 205 (3086).

45. Poggio Bracciolini, Contra hypocritas (ca. 1448), ed. D. Canfora (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008), e.g. 12.

46. See Petrarch, Canzoniere 32, 144, 168, 176, 183, 218, 262. For a recent treatment of the meaning of parere as seeming and appearing in Boccaccio’s work, see my essay “Movement, Moment, and Mission in the Opening Day of the Decameron,” Annali d’Italianistica 31 (2013): 101–29.

47. Leon Battista Alberti, “L’autobiografia di Leon Battista Alberti,” ed. R. Fubini and A. Menci Gallorini, Rinascimento, 2nd series 12 (1972): 71: “Itaque voluit omni in vita, omni gestu, omni sermone et esse et videri dignus bonorum benevolentia” (my emphasis). This elocution, “esse et videri,” is to my knowledge rare, and perhaps a Neo-Latin turn of phrase. I have found it in one other passage, in the dedication by Giovanni Aurispa to Nicholas V of his translation of the commentaries of Hierocles on the “golden verses” of Pythagoras: “Mirabar saepe et quidnam causae fuisset mecum ipse dubitabam q[uare] neque in litteris: neque in aedificiis haec nostra aetas maioribus responderet: sed quae scribebantur aut aedificabantur: multo deteriora antiquis illis et essent et viderentur [I often used to wonder and to ask myself why neither in literature nor in architecture did our time equal that of our forebears, since those things being written or constructed both are and seem very much inferior to the achievements of the ancients].” Commentarius in aurea Pythagoreorum carmina, trans. G. Aurispa (Padua: Bartholomaeus de Valdezoccho, 1474), c. 1r.

48. Alberti, OV 1.282.1–18; 330.10; 302.23–25; 296.33–34; 335.33–336.2.

49. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 57 (revised). OV 3.38–39 (1.19) ): “E sappi che cosa niuna dipinta mai parrà

pari alle vere, dove non sia certa distanza a vederle.” / “Tum etiam pictas res nulla veris

rebus pares, nisi certa ratione distent, videri posse nemo doctus negabit.”