The area around
Firenze (Florence), called Tuscany, was the center of Italian culture
throughout the high middle ages. The most significant writers of the high
middle ages and the Renaissance were Tuscans, including Dante, Boccaccio, and
Machiavelli. So important is this area for Italian culture that after the
unification of Italy in the nineteenth, the Tuscan language eventually became
the official and widespread language of Italy.
While all of the
city-states made significant contribution to Renaissance culture, the center
of the Renaissance was Firenze or Florence in English. It was
primarily in Florence that the rulers sought to glorify their wealth and power
by subsidizing literature, philosophy, science, architecture, and the
arts.
The phenomenal growth of
wealth in these small city-states was directly responsible for the flowering
of literature, scholarship and the other arts during the Italian Renaissance
as the aristocracy and the powerful sought to praise and legitimate their
power by patronizing the arts and scholarship.
The city-states of Italy in the
fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were places of constant
uncertainty, both economically and politically. The extreme volatility of the
situation provided the material for new intellectual, cultural, and social
experiments that shaped a new European identity, one focused on humanistic
studies, science, and the arts. This historical background is surprisingly
volatile; you would expect that political stability and economic security are
prerequisites for intellectual and cultural experimentation, but some of the
most radical and far-reaching cultural work in the Renaissance was done in the
periods of greatest insecurity.
How to cover the Renaissance? Rather
than try a potted history of the Renaissance, let me draw your attention to
European painting around the year 1450.
