How the Renaissance Began

this program is brought to you by the Stanford Humanities Center for more information please visit us at SH C dot stanford.edu you I'm patty Lundberg I'm executive director humanities West I welcome you on behalf of the board of directors of humanities West everything we do is a team effort and nothing can be done without you our longtime patrons and now I hope some new patrons who are coming to see our unique programs exploring history and celebrating the Arts before I get into any details I really want to introduce to you our co-sponsors for the evening which includes the Consulate General of Italy the Italian Cultural Institute The DaVinci society and the history department of Stanford but I don't want to delay another minute to introduce to you Paul of Finland who has been here several times before who is a great patron of humanities West and she is the parati chair of Italian history at Stanford and chair of history she's been chair and not chair and now she's chair again and she has you know great experience with medieval history with the dawn of the Renaissance with digital humanities and also with a great love of the humanities for the public so please welcome with me Paul of Finland thank you so much it is always such a treat for me to be here at humanity's west eye I never cease to be enthralled by people who will come out at the end of a long day to talk about the past which of course is what I'm also here to do as well so what I'm gonna try to do tonight is to offer a bit of an overview about some of the issues that we'll explore in greater detail in the rest of the program you know between today and tomorrow and at the center of the program today is exactly this paradox right how in the late medieval world did the Renaissance begin we often view these things retrospectively and what I want to do is to start with what it is surely the most canonical moment that people were point to repeatedly when trying to identify a moment where we see the Renaissance emerging but I'm hoping by the end of this talk tonight to give you a version of this Renaissance in a somewhat different way so let me begin here with a particular date I do this in honor of the professor who taught the first class I ever took on the Renaissance because he actually did say that the Renaissance began on this day and I've never I've never forgotten that it was Easter Sunday of 1341 so let me try and set the scene and intrigue you with why this moment has been so symbolically meaningful for generations of Medieval and Renaissance historians in trying to identify not the moment that the Renaissance began but to try to identify clear and compelling expressions of what the transformation of medieval society into something that we have subsequently called the Renaissance might have looked like all right so let's let's cast this Sunday April 8th 1341 this Easter on this day a 36 year old Tuscan who'd only been to Rome once before and had spent most of his life outs of the Italian peninsula found himself on the world stage wearing a purple gown he walked from the ancient campus martius past the ancient circuses and theaters lying in ruins around the palatine across the ancient roman forum and finally to the steps of the capital the ancient nucleus right of that long dead roman republic what was he there to do some of you already knew the answer of course and the answer is so famous that people have ever since tried to depict it as well as to describe it on that particular Easter Sunday a young tuscan poet who also saw him as itself as a philosopher in the making named Petrarch or for those who like the Italian Francesco Petrarca was crowned poet laureate by the King of Naples on the Campidoglio on the Capitoline hill so here we see this moment depicted many centuries later right a light is shined on Petrarch behind him lies the king Petrarch in fact had not gone first to rome he had gone to Naples to be sure that he might be worthy of what the Roman citizens had offered him in sending him a letter with this possibility that he would become poet laureate the King of Naples thought that he was a very good candidate and said great I'll come along with you let's do this job and so they did that this particular moment has been iconic ever since in the history of the origins of the Renaissance because it is a moment in which Petrarch is made a Roman citizen in its ancient and modern which is to say 14th century sense Petrarch was enormous ly proud of this moment it was the pinnacle of everything he had hoped and dreamed about up to that point in his life and it would be indeed a decisive moment for the way he saw himself in the coming years and here I want to give you a sense of what this scene looked like if you go to the the capital nowadays what you have to do is look back through what is no longer there because the capital that we see today was redesigned by Michelangelo in the 16th century to have that beautiful geometric pattern not to mention the statue of Marcus Aurelius that lies at its exact center right the buildings around it also to have long and complicated histories the Museum of famous Roman antiquities that's there nowadays was created in the 18th century and has a nucleus of statues that began with papal gifts in the 15th century so this was a very different capitolio this indeed was the Campidoglio that had not been restored had not been given its Renaissance this was not a Renaissance Capitol right this was instead what was left in the Middle Ages right of this ancient and symbolic center of the city nonetheless Petrarch was very proud to stand in the midst of these ruins and he said to himself in many many different ways and he said to the entire world for ever after something more or less like this which I've translated of course from the Latin so what did Petrarch to offer this moment we often stop here and we just say ok he read his poem he thanked everybody profusely publicly etc but I want to follow a little bit further this itinerary through Roman 1341 on this Easter because the point is that it was Easter Sunday he had arrived in the capital on Good Friday right so the timing of this was also not uninteresting after Petrarch descends from the capital he made his way via the via sacra to the palace near Castel Sant'Angelo or Hadrian's mausoleum for those of you who want to give it its older name and then went in procession with a large crowd large and admiring crowd to the ancient Basilica of Saint Peters which again we have to see in our imagination right the st. Peters that we see today as many of you know if you've studied the history of that is is of course again a product of the Renaissance with its Piazza being a famously a product of Bernini's Rome right of a different era so we need to imagine a very different st. Peter's in which Petrarch strode down the long nave of this ancient Basilica past all of its twenty-two columns and as the story was told he took his laurel off his head that he had received for his poetry that people admired so much that he thought he was a living Roman and he laid it on the altar he laid it on an abandoned altar because the Pope was not in Rome the King of Naples was in Rome the Romans at least enough of them were in Rome Petrarch was in Rome but the Pope was certainly not Pope instead was in Avignon in southern France and I will talk about this a little further in just a second so the question we have today is what did Petrarch done to deserve this kind of recognition we often take it for granted in light in retrospect of his enormous literary corpus his poetry his letters an imitation of Cicero his letters to the living and the dead right whether they be his contemporaries who engaged in long and interesting conversations or people like Livy Cicero other other other dead authors who became alive to him through the reading of them to such a degree that he wished to write them we think of this enormity of tetrarch's corpus of many different kinds of poetry and prose both in Latin and in his Tuscan vernacular but what we often forget when we talk about him this way is that actually was not the Petrarch of 1341 what had this 36 year-old done at this point he published very little he'd written a few poems he had discovered a few manuscripts an unknown aeration for instance by Cicero that he found in the French town of Liege in 1333 but he not yet made many of his greatest manuscript discoveries of the lost letters of Cicero for instance that he would find in Verona in 1345 he had however in his early 20s reassembled from various manuscripts Livy's history of Rome he was so proud of this accomplishment that later after he had been crowned poet laureate he wrote Livia letter to tell him how proud he was of putting Livy back together reassembling the corpus but the bottom line is that Petrarch had not yet done a lot in fact the thing that he specifically was in the midst of that had catalyzed this invitation to be crowned poet laureate was a vast epic poem called Africa that was unfinished in 1341 and would remain unfinished at the time of his death he would continue to try write about the exploits of Skippy o africanus and his defeat of Hannibal in the second Punic War for his entire life right he could never quite conquer this story or the genre he had chosen as it turned out but nonetheless this incomplete corpus was enough to earn this particular glory Dante had not been crowned poet laureate nor had anyone else in Rome at least prior to this particular moment and so again what we need to think about is why is Petrarch deserving of the claim to be the best Roman that the world could offer in the middle of the 14th century so what I want to do for the rest of this talk is to give you a sense of Petrarch swirled a Petrarch experience of his world of what he took away from the world how he came to terms with it and how all of that helps us to understand Patrick as famously the man who coined the term Dark Ages to describe not the past but his own time as a historical epic he would rather forget as I said earlier Petrarch is especially distinguished by the fact that he spent an awful lot of his life outside of Italy but in this he was typical of many Italians in this period from a number of the different medieval Italian states from Genoa from Venice from the Tuscan States cities Florence Prato Pisa etc all of them on the move in this period sumit enormous distances but many of them in Patrick's immediate world with one specific goal in mind which was to be in the realm of tetrarch's day that was not in Rome but was in the town of Avignon the papacy in its relationship to the Roman city and those who attempted to control it was in a kind of awful situation at the beginning of the 14th century at the beginning of Petrarch lifetime so one of the salient facts about tetrarch's lifetime is he spent pretty much his entire life observing a papacy that could never get back to Rome in fact would not permanently return to Rome until 1420 this affected his family life and the choices they made about where they would live and where they could not live and it also very much shaped his perspective on the world when he observed the ruins of Rome the ruin of the old Basilica of st. Peters the ruin of the Lateran Palace right the papal palace in Rome he Krotz rested this inevitably as many many others did to the papal palace that had arisen in the 14th century in Avignon and again I've translated from the Latin so that we all know what Patrick's talking about here but you can see this in the size and scale of this papal palace so this is where tetrarch's spent his youth and would return repeatedly for most of his early adult life until 1353 when finally he left Avignon behind but Avignon is formative to him he was in the midst of his experiences of Avignon as the center of the medieval papacy and many of his ideas and access to the kind of history and culture that informed his understanding of the value of antiquity right this core theme of Renaissance humanism came from what he learned in Avignon Avignon played a very interesting role in facilitating the emergence of what we think of as Renaissance society and culture in Italy right the absence of a papacy created opportunities for others whether they use them well or not right in the absence of larger authorities the Italian peninsula in this period had many many opportunities to experiment with different ways to rule the city states that dotted this peninsula the results were often chaotic and violent and unstable in many instances but at the same time they also created prosperous opportunities especially for the Italian merchants and for those who worked for them and her for those who survived the ups and downs of various political regimes Italian civic culture thrived in the late Middle Ages like almost no other period people would look back with nostalgia at the age of the Italian Communist for instance Italian merchants thrived of course in Avignon along with many other places there were literally hundreds or thousands of these merchant families installed in communities that replicated the political organization of the Italian states right so important was it to work for the papacy now Petra came to detest this other room he detested many many things about Avignon but he also was able to see the world very very broadly from there it was his first and least loved Rome and it also was the place where he first encountered many of the manuscripts of the ancient authors that he treasured right a great library also formed at this papal Court and in the vicinity whose papal Court in the minister is the access to northern european libraries that Petrarch and others had in part because of the papacy in Avignon in part because of the large scale long distance commerce of this period was quite crucial for them when they wanted to reassemble antiquity now let me take a little bit deeper into the stories you can think about Patrick's relationship to different parts of Italy and what this looked like Patrick was born in a red so he was born from a Florentine family in exile they would stay there for a few years then moved to Pisa and from Pisa moved to Avignon when he was nine years old he would end his life not in Avignon not back in his native tuscany but instead in the venetian republic where he lived intermittently from 1362 just 1374 for the last 12 or 13 years of his life he lives in a few other places as well but primarily in different towns and his tomb in Ottawa is of course the great monument at the end of his life a tomb on the scale of the great emperors the great medieval professors the great minds of the Middle Ages had tombs like this and so did Petrarch but the point that I want to make is that Patrick's world even though it happens in many places really does indeed start in Florence so let me start a bit with the story we often don't think about which is Patrick's father Serra pathetical this is Petrarch original name right he's sariputta Rocco's son separate Rocco was a Tuscan notary he belonged to the same world that Dante belonged to in fact quite literally he was exiled in 1302 from Florence when he fell out with the current political regime just a few months after Dante had been kicked out so in many ways we can see someone like Patrick go through the lens of Dante the value of the vernacular the value of literacy the importance of the new men of the late medieval Italian cities writing contracts producing documents producing legislation right for the many political regimes that came and went producing the mountains of paper in this period and displaying a new and fundamental kind of literacy that we see embody for instance in the work of pizza Rocco is friend and Dante's mentor Bruno Latini who's depicted here in these images these are images brutality knee when he publishes in the late 13th century and here I'd given you an example of one of his notarial documents because he's another Tuscan notary right from this the same world earlier on from the earlier generation than Dante so he not only as a mentor to Dante and as a kind of early example of the literary figures working in the vernacular in this period but with a love of translating aspects of the ancient world right out of ancient literary culture that they've come into counter with but he also depicts himself in many ways that starts to model what we see Petrarch doing for instance so we see in these images that come from one of his principal writings we see an image of of brunette doe talking to Ovid right you know Ovid is his authority sitting on you know when we look at this and then he changes gears and instead he shows himself now sitting in the authoritative position with his podium talking to one of his ideal readers this kind of image of a world of books is a special possession is exactly one of the things that Petrarch takes away and chews on relentlessly he constantly berate the world he lives it for being overly material overly concerned with possessions but he always singles out books as a different and special kind of possession worth investing in books speak to us he write they advise us they touch us in our inner core in the very fiber of our being books are special and there's something to cultivate here we see not only Petrarch as the product of a culture that was described in its own time as a region in which everyone had a pen in hand right literacy was so high but we also see Petrarch the origins of Petrarch who would build one of the greatest private libraries of classical literature of his generation or perhaps any generation and certainly the first one that we can point to where we have documentation right of the scale of his efforts to reassemble ancient literature the Italy that Patrick knew was of course more than just Florence in fact he spent very little time in Tuscany and not simply because he was an exile but very much by choice so I want to give you kind of a sense of what he would have observed in the broader world of this period and again I just want to kind of show you in these little vignettes here this image of Dante virtual and Brunetto Latini all together right this is from one of the Dante manuscripts of this period right again kind of showing you this world of you know vernacular authors that Petrarch is looking at we can start by seeing a little bit of the Italy that Patrick knew by looking at one of the early 14th century portolan maps that were created first by the Genoese then by the Venetians and ultimately by everybody else who aspired to long-distance travel if you look at this map there are a lot of things you can observe including the profusion of words for all the ports that you might stop in as well as places in between but the main thing I want to point out to you is the large size of Genoa and Venice at the top of this map in relationship to the size of Rome Petrarch described Genoa and Venice as the two torches of Italy and when he said this he was not describing them necessarily as centers of this kind of ancient Roman as I'm talking about there light came from their commercial prosperity and the way in which they created productive and functioning societies in contrast to the dysfunctionality he saw in so many other places including his native Tuscany so again just to sort of think about what's going on in these two particular worlds right when Petrarch first encounters them at the beginning of his life the Venetians are heading east famously Marco Polo has returned and in a Genoese prison with a peon will produce his account of his travels the book of the marvels of the world right isn't the midst of being written in those years right before Petrarch is born the year before Petrarch goes to Rome the doges palace starts to be built their government is forming they're reshaping their ancient medieval center as a sign of a society at the height of its empire in the eastern Mediterranean in this same period the Genoese are busy mapping the world even as their empire declines increasingly leaving the eastern Mediterranean reluctantly mostly pushed out by the Venetians I should add and anyone else who cared to push them but especially the Venetians and increasingly looking westward this is the world of course that will produce Christopher Columbus in a different century the Genoese are in the midst of inventing maritime insurance Bills of exchange and again as I'm showing you here portolan maps and here I'm showing you different ones not only the image of the map most famous Genoese map maker of this period of Serra Visconti but also images of the maps produced in this particular world that are maps not only say of the adriatic in the case of the farthest map I put here away from the map maker but the one in the middle is instead a map of the North Atlantic world and so here we see the Genoese constantly reaching outward this is what Petrarch observes and admires he only goes to Genoa to my knowledge once in 1350 but he certainly saw and observed the Genoese over and over again especially in Avignon but now let me return to Tuscany and what Tuscany looks like at the beginning of Patrick's lifetime cities like Florence and Siena were also emerging in this period many of the great building projects that become signature features of the center of these cities begin right before 1300 the Duomo in 1296 the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1299 the public palace in Siena just a couple of years earlier Petrarch throughout his life professed to dislike Florentines on the whole he was very reluctant to go to Florence he eschewed opportunities to move there even when invited late in life he described his parents as exiled Florentines who were as he put it almost poor Florence in his view had never been kind to any of them this perhaps was an exaggeration but it was certainly the way Petrarch perceived this world not productive in the way that he saw in places like Genoa and yet nonetheless part of his life well one of the famous images right of this particular world that we think of is inside the Palazzo publico in Siena famous famous allegory right of what a medieval city looks like in Italy in this period some of you may have even seen this if you've ever visited there right you go inside the room of the nine the seat of the government in this period and we see that in the very years just before Petrarch takes his famous second trip to Rome to be crowned poet laude it Ambrosio Lauren's ad produces what is most popularly described there are different titles for its most popularly described as the allegory of good and bad government right so this is this image of a well-ordered city in which everything functions people are getting married they're dancing in the streets they're you know they're buying and selling at the bonky right in in in the center of the city they're bringing goods in and out from city to countryside all of this looks absolutely pristine and perfect and yet what does Petrarch have to say about cities leave the city to the merchants the lawyers the brokers the users the bidders the doctors the insatiable do-nothings always sniffing out the smell of the market well spending a lot of time in cities he constantly told us that this vision of the city was not for him and it in part was not for him because it embodied the market that he especially loathed and also the failed contrast of his present to live up to the Roman ideals that he cherished because right next to this image of the secure city on the other wall was a reminder perhaps of the other half of this reality right of bad government of tyranny in the form of a horn devil by the early 14th century siena which at its height had been the largest city in Italy around 120,000 people at its height in the 13th century had declined to around 30,000 people roughly about the same size as Rome in this period also which was also a very small city relative to the city of a million at its height in the ancient world it was no longer able to defeat Florence even though it built a very big bell tower to compete with the florentine company lay etc it instead was the kind of place that led Petrarch to say things like this I'm alive now yet I would have rather been born in some other timing he often said clearly that he would only have been born in the past but he wouldn't mind being born in some future yet to come right so here we see Petrarch thinking about the uses of the past to define some sort of other present Patrick's first concrete adult experience of Italy came from when he studied in Bologna his father had decided he would study law he studied a bit in maan pa and then he went to Bologna for six years where he studied civil law and well he admired the great medieval lawyers who had made this medieval university famous right the most ancient of the universities in this part of Italy he admired the antiquity and the revival of Roman law at the center of the kind of knowledge that they represented but he concluded that he could never be a lawyer because it's practice in the real world of the medieval Italian cities was to corrupt a profession for what he had in mind I like to think that in many ways it was his experience of Bologna that led him to say I never liked this present age and this by the way is a little model reconstruction of what Bologna looked like some of you may know the story of the towers that are knocked down in many towns Siena had around 200 my colleague at English who's here with Carol Lansing was reminding me last night at dinner and bolonia had around 180 so imagine being a university student what basically is not just simply an armed worrying encampment of people fighting but of factions that have physically shaped the city around these relationships right of powerful families who are all retreating you know into their fortresses no wonder why he didn't like his present in 1326 Patrick's father dies and he returns to Avignon in Avignon he begins to work for modern Romans members of the Colonna family that in fact will produce the Pope martin v who brings the papacy back to rome in 1420 and to read intensively ancient romans so back in Avignon he dreamed of Rome his utopia a world of philosophers and poets he felt who lived more or less on something like Mount Olympus later in life he would be quite distressed when he read more of Cicero as he discovered Cicero's manuscripts to realize that ancient Rome was perhaps as complicated as his own modern world but the dream remained right the dream remained and influenced many ways that he thought about what he ought to do he retreated more and more from Avignon and as he retreated some of you will already know the story he famously decides at one point after he's found this kind of pastoral Enclave in the Ville clothes right in this this rural community that he will climb Mont Ventoux and so allegedly we don't know if he actually climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336 or whether he just chose that date because he was the same age as his ancient Christian hero who loved the Romans Agustin when he made this great personal voyage with his younger brother who later on became a monk but what he got to the top of month on - through this wonderful allegory right of different ways to go through a path and if the direct and hard path right the spiritual like his brother the indirect and complicated path the temporal path that he was taking he nonetheless at the table thought once again of Italy turned towards Italy he also said that at the top he ceased to think of place which he had thought of intensely along this arduous voyage and began to think of time and he longed once again to go to Rome and again of course translating from the Latin I realized that he also was hoping that he would win the Tour de France but it was not to be because in 1336 I think Lance Armstrong was his first victory or something like that but Mike my husband's an avid cyclist so I couldn't resist that so month on to inspires him to turn towards Italy to think of Rome to think of time and in the next year he makes his first trip at last I came to Rome he writes to see the city to see the ruins right of the old Basilica of st. Peters and if you read his letter that pretty much is what he says in many ways but he also then tries to reassemble it according to the history of the monuments that have remained the question for Petrarch from this moment on is as he develops his knowledge of the ancient world is how best to use it he continues to think about this in various ways ten years later he has his first and most disappointing opportunity Rome in 1347 this is no Easter Sunday in Rome of 1347 the son of a Roman tavern keeper who like Petrarch loved the classics and saw himself as a reincarnation of an ancient Roman named Khalid even so stood on the Capitol and more or less proclaimed himself Tribune of Liberty peace and justice all these words that are in Lorenzetti is fresco about good government within a matter of months he was deposed and while he lingered on the horizon for a few more years he turned out to be a disappointing and failed example of an attempt to revive the Roman Republic Petrarch was enormous ly optimistic in 1347 if the Pope's wouldn't return to Rome perhaps the Romans would reclaim their city and he pinned great hopes immediately on Khalid ienzo as an example of this return of the Romans it was Kola who declared that time had changed when he dated one of the letters he wrote to Petrarch year one this was political rebirth or perhaps a kind of vision that has lingered ever since in the minds of people like Napoleon and Mussolini and Hitler and a few others yes this restarting of the clock of course turned out to be a broken machine call a quickly dissolution Petrarch he realized that rome was far better as a state of mind it was better to dream about Rome Republican virtues he continued to wonder might not work in the real world finally in the middle of this life right to paraphrase Dante Petrarch finally visited Florence 13:50 Jubilee year he had to go to Rome for the Jubilee on the way he stopped in Genoa stopped in a few other places and in October he finally reached Florence where he was met outside the city the gates of the city by one of the most famous Florentines of this period giovani book hot show a banker turned literary scholar who also did the books for the Florentine government Boccaccio put him up he introduced him to all of his literary friends in Florence so Petrarch could see that there was indeed a thriving literary culture Petrarch in turn encouraged them to think about a Florentine rediscovery of the Latin classics which would actually take root in the next generation in many ways they began to exchange manuscripts because they too were manuscript hunters shortly after this encounter when Petrarch had moved on and was then in Padua in the Venetian Republic the Florentines sent Boccaccio to patch with to ask Petrarch whether he would return and take a job in Florence at their university at the Florentine studium Petrarch returned to Avignon shortly thereafter in return the Florentines decided that they would not restore the family properties that his father had lost when the family had gone into exile when Petrarch returned to Italy two years later in 1353 he decided instead to live in Milan not a center of Republican but Liberty to say the least but certainly with none of these complicated reminders of the difficulties of being from a Florentine family now this brings me to the last part of this talk right how to think about all these different ingredients in Petrarch slive is something like a road to the renaissance at one moment in his great unfinished piece of epic poetry his Africa Petrarch wrote when the darkness breaks the generations to come may manage to find their way back to the clear splendor of the ancient past he knew that they were still groping in the dark these metaphors of light and darkness and Petrarch are one of the primary reasons that we often think of him as a kind of founding father right of what we would describe as the Renaissance because well he never used the term Renaissance or rebirth right in either Italian or Latin so much of his other language about a world of darkness right and a world of light and the relationship between darkness and light in the cycles of history ultimately became the road map for those who did invent these terms retrospectively citing people like Petrarch and Boccaccio as their heroes where did Patrick see this rebirth given how disappointing Rome turned out to be how frustrating Florence was and the fact that Genoa and Venice however wonderful were primarily commercial overseas republics even as they supported men of learning he was one of the early people to see aspects of this rebirth of this light in the paintings for instance of a very interesting earlier Tuscan painter who he would have known in his youth Giotto in his 1370 will Petrarch wrote that one of his most cherished possessions was a jot Oh Madonna his friend boccaccio said of Giotto that he brought back the light of an art buried for many centuries that is almost as close to the term Renaissance as we might get in the middle of the 14th century Petric died in 1374 and if we look forward now to think about the world that he helped to create what is it that we see I of course want to turn to Florence here as an example of Italy around 1400 in the first year of the 15th century more or less Leonardo Bruni who is an example of the third generation of these Florentine houmous inspired by what Petrarch and his contemporaries had done wrote this famous panegyric in the midst of their introducing struggles with Milan right about who would control territory and the effect on each of these states and he wrote Oh incredible magnificence and courage of Florence Oh true Roman people in descendants of Romulus who would not now praise the florentine name with the highest praise for its outstanding resilience and the greatness of its history in this classic description of Florence circa 1400 we see the Florentine humanists who saw themselves as heirs to Petrarch improving upon patriarchs project including his Latin which they made fun of by then because it was to medieval reclaiming also the Roman ideal of Republican Liberty as something that had succeeded not in Rome with Khalid ienzo and not only in the mind of Petrarch but in their view in their City the new Rome of the beginning of the 15th century we might argue that this is a fairly perverse view given what actually happened to Florentine politics the heyday of popular rule or communal government was basically over but myths and realities have always been part of how we think about the Renaissance is really one of the greatest historical allegories ever written by many many hands what did Florence look like in this period the Duomo was still unfinished begun in the late 13th century right begun in the 12 90s the nave was finally completed by 1380 and in 1418 famously the arte de kalamata would have a competition for the dome that was missing on this building in many respects of course it looked no different than the Basilica of st. Peters if you think about it other than the fact that the bricks were a bit newer the baptistry door competition just across the other side of the piazza just a step away right from the main door would open in 1401 these were examples of the world yet to come up the completion of medieval projects that lay at the core of this Renaissance City I want to end now with of course the most famous of Florentine citizens in the heyday of the Renaissance the Medici family but much like hetrick I want to kind of offer you a slightly different view for just a couple of minutes to think with because of course we think of the Medici as the people who controlled and ruled the city but this was not inevitable so who were they at the end of patrick's day in the late 14th century no one expected a single family let alone the Medici to control this city let alone a family that was not particularly prominent and certainly not prosperous Cosimo de Medici who would be the beginning of this powerful political lineage was a young distant relative of a Florentine banker who decided to open up a branch in Rome in the Rome that the Pope's were not but where their money flowed the wealth of that Roman bad branch of this Florentine bank would become the nucleus of the wealth of the Medici and in 1397 after his older relative had died and he has worked his way up through the ranks starting as a young apprentice and becoming a junior and then a senior partner Cosima's father Giovanni to be Tschida Medici would transfer the Medici bank from Rome to Florence while still maintaining the branch down there which produced more than half of the Medici wealth most of the Medici could not hold office Cosimo could but would decide that it was not a good idea he would instead build an empire on the ground that in many ways had many of the ingredients of the empire that Petrarch had built in his mind and on paper and after he died he would become so well known not just as a man who had been a very successful and savvy banker as a man who in reinvented an entirely new style of politics learn my language Cosimo said one time famously when someone didn't understand how he did things but he would also become one of the greatest patrons of the kind of learning and art that Patrick valued he too would build a great library but he would do this while successfully engaging in business and politics and those very practices human practices that Petrarch eschewed when he died in 1464 he was soon thereafter called potter patriae father of his country it was Cosimo more than anyone who fulfilled Patrick's prophecy that a new Rome would rise and a renaissance would begin thank you very much this program is brought to you by the Stanford Humanities Center for more information please visit us at SH C dot stanford.edu

Channel: Stanford

Views: 41,617

Keywords: Paula Findlen, Middle Ages, Machiavelli, Humanities West, Italian

Id: sY7ZpGriNZA

Length: 46min 24sec (2784 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2015