The Renaissance

Summary

The Renaissance, published in 1953, is the fifth volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization and carries the subtitle A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304 to 1576 A.D. The two dates are the birth of Petrarch and the death of Titian, and the choice tells the reader what kind of history follows: an account of an age defined by its poets, scholars and painters more than by its wars. Durant opens with Petrarch and Boccaccio, the popes at Avignon, and Cola di Rienzo's brief attempt to revive the Roman republic, and he treats the recovery of classical Latin and Greek letters as the seed from which the rest grew. The heart of the book is Florence under the Medici. Cosimo's patronage, Lorenzo the Magnificent's circle of poets and Platonists, the architecture of Brunelleschi, the sculpture of Donatello, the painting of Masaccio and Botticelli all appear as fruits of a commercial city that spent its banking fortunes on beauty. Savonarola's preaching, the bonfire of vanities and his execution in 1498 close the Florentine story with a moral crisis. Durant then tours the other centers of Italian life: Milan under the Sforza, where Leonardo worked; Venice and its painters from the Bellini to Giorgione and Titian; the courts of Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, home of Ariosto, Isabella d'Este and Castiglione; and Naples. A long section on Rome follows the popes from Nicholas V, founder of the Vatican Library, through Sixtus IV, Alexander VI and the Borgias, to Julius II and Leo X, whose patronage brought Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo to the city. Durant does not soften the violence, sexual license, poisoning and simony he finds in the period, and he devotes a frank survey to its morals. The final movement records the French invasion of 1494, the political analysis of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527, the long old age of Michelangelo, and the stricter climate of the Catholic reform and the Council of Trent. Durant's interpretation is that the Italian Renaissance was a rebirth of the classical and secular spirit, joined to an intense love of beauty and to a loosening of medieval moral restraint, and that the same freedom produced both its genius and its disorder. He writes with evident delight in the art and with the skeptical humanism he then held, and Christian readers will want to weigh his sympathy for the age's pagan revival against the evidence of genuine piety in figures such as Fra Angelico, Vittoria Colonna and the older Michelangelo. As a guide for students, the volume is an inviting map of Italian art and politics to be read beside Petrarch, Machiavelli, Vasari and Cellini.

Plot or Argument

• Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Avignon years

  The fourteenth-century prelude introduces the humanist recovery of antiquity, the plague of 1348 as the backdrop to Boccaccio's Decameron, the papacy's residence at Avignon, and Cola di Rienzo's revolution in Rome.

• Florence under the Medici

  Banking wealth, civic rivalry and Medici patronage support the humanists Ficino, Pico and Poliziano and the artists Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, until Savonarola's reforming sermons and fall.

• The courts and cities of Italy

  A survey of Milan, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino and Naples shows the variety of Renaissance political life and patronage, with Leonardo in Milan, the Venetian colorists, and Castiglione's ideal courtier at Urbino.

• The Renaissance papacy

  From Nicholas V to Leo X, the popes rebuild Rome, gather manuscripts, and commission Saint Peter's, the Sistine ceiling and the Vatican stanze, while nepotism, warfare and the Borgia scandals damage the Church's moral authority.

• Manners and morals

  Durant pauses the narrative for a candid survey of violence, sexual conduct, religion, education, the place of women and daily life, arguing that the freeing of the intellect and the decay of moral discipline advanced together.

• Invasion, sack and decline

  The French and Spanish wars from 1494, Machiavelli's political realism, the sack of Rome in 1527, the waning of Italian independence, the Counter-Reformation's stricter discipline, and the deaths of Michelangelo in 1564 and Titian in 1576 bring the volume to its end.

Characters

• Will Durant, author and narrator-historian

  Former Catholic seminarian turned secular humanist whose delight in Renaissance art and wariness of ecclesiastical power both shape the book.

• Petrarch, poet and humanist (1304-1374)

  Collector of classical manuscripts and author of the Canzoniere, whose birth year opens the volume.

• Boccaccio, storyteller and scholar

  Author of the Decameron, framed by the Florentine plague of 1348, and an early promoter of Greek studies.

• Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence (1469-1492)

  Poet, patron and political manager of the Florentine republic, presented as the embodiment of the Medici Renaissance.

• Girolamo Savonarola, Dominican preacher

  Reformer who dominated Florence after 1494 and was hanged and burned in 1498; Durant treats him with mixed respect and criticism.

• Leonardo da Vinci, painter, engineer and anatomist

  Universal investigator whose notebooks and anatomical drawings Durant treats as a high point of Renaissance curiosity.

• Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia, pope (1492-1503) and his son

  Father and son whose ambitions and crimes made the Borgia name a byword; Durant weighs the legends against the evidence.

• Julius II, pope (1503-1513)

  Warrior pope who began the new Saint Peter's and set Michelangelo to the Sistine ceiling.

• Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect and poet

  The dominant artistic personality of the book, followed from Florence to Rome and into a devout old age.

• Raphael, painter

  Painter of the Vatican stanze whose serene classicism Durant sets against Michelangelo's turbulence.

• Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine secretary and political writer

  Author of The Prince and the Discourses, presented as the analyst of Italian political failure.

• Titian, Venetian painter (died 1576)

  Master of color whose long career and death close the volume.

Lessons

• Beauty bought with banking fortunes

  Durant shows Florentine art rising from the profits of wool, cloth and banking, and he treats Medici patronage as both generosity and political strategy. Students can ask what it means that so much lasting sacred art was paid for by merchants seeking prestige, and whether the motive of a patron changes the worth of the work.

  • What sources of wealth does Durant identify behind the art of Florence and Venice?
  • How did Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici use patronage to secure power, according to the book?
  • Can a work of sacred art be truly devout if the patron's motives were mixed?

• Savonarola and the bonfire

  The Dominican friar who preached repentance to Florence, burned luxuries and paintings in 1497, and died on the gallows in 1498 is one of the book's most contested figures. Durant gives him a sympathetic hearing as a moral reformer while criticizing his political methods. Students should weigh what Savonarola rightly condemned, what he wrongly destroyed, and why the city turned on him.

  • What did Savonarola condemn in Florentine life and in the papal court?
  • Was the bonfire of vanities an act of repentance, of zeal without wisdom, or both?
  • Why did Florence first follow Savonarola and then abandon him?

• The papacy as patron and prince

  Durant's Roman chapters show popes acting as Italian princes, building armies, enriching relatives and commissioning masterpieces. He neither hides the scandals of Alexander VI nor ignores the cultural achievements of Nicholas V and Julius II. Students can trace how the worldliness Durant describes prepared the ground for the protest he narrates in his next volume.

  • Which popes does Durant praise, which does he condemn, and on what grounds?
  • How did the papacy's role as an Italian state affect its spiritual authority?
  • What would a reformer north of the Alps have seen in the Rome of Leo X?

• Freedom of mind and loosening of conscience

  The book's central claim is that the Renaissance released intellect and art from medieval restraint and also released violence, sensuality and cynicism. Durant presents this as a single movement. Students should test whether the evidence supports linking the two, and consider the counterexamples of devout humanists and artists in the same pages.

  • What does Durant mean by calling the Renaissance a revival of the pagan or classical spirit?
  • Which figures in the book combine humanist learning with sincere Christian faith?
  • Is creative freedom necessarily bound to moral license, or is Durant's connection a historian's assumption?

Context

Durant wrote The Renaissance in the decade after the Second World War, when Italy was rebuilding and American interest in Italian art and travel was growing. His account follows the interpretation made famous by Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), which saw the period as the birth of the modern individual and a revival of antiquity, although by 1953 medievalists were already arguing that the break with the Middle Ages had been exaggerated. Durant, who had trained for the Catholic priesthood before leaving the Church in his youth, brings to the Renaissance popes a mixture of fascination and critique.

Composition

Published by Simon & Schuster in 1953 as Volume V of The Story of Civilization, following The Age of Faith (1950). Will Durant is the sole credited author; Ariel Durant was first named co-author on Volume VII (1961). The book remains in print and was reissued as an ebook in 2011.

Reception

Like its predecessors the volume found a broad readership and is often remembered as one of the most enjoyable in the series. Historians have regarded its Burckhardtian framework and its treatment of Renaissance morals as dated, and subsequent research on Renaissance religion, economics and the lives of ordinary Italians has added nuance to its portraits. Its descriptions of individual works of art remain a frequent entry point for general readers.

Comparisons

• The Canzoniere (Sonnets and Canzoni), with the Triumphs

  Durant opens with Petrarch as the first humanist; the sonnets to Laura show the inward, self-examining voice that Durant and Burckhardt treat as a sign of a new age.

• Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1)

  Vasari's biographies of Giotto, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo supply much of Durant's material on artists' lives, including anecdotes later historians question.

• The Prince

  Durant reads Machiavelli as the clear-eyed analyst of a divided Italy; The Prince lets students judge whether his summary captures the book's counsel on cruelty, fortune and the founding of states.

• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

  Cellini's boastful memoir is one of Durant's witnesses to Renaissance violence, artistic rivalry and the sack of Rome, and its unreliability is part of its lesson.

• The Divine Comedy

  Dante, who died in 1321, stands just before Durant's starting date; comparing his ordered medieval cosmos with the humanist world of Petrarch shows what Durant believes changed.

• The Praise of Folly

  Erasmus visited Italy in 1506-09 and satirized the warrior pope and the worldly clergy that Durant describes in his Roman chapters.

• The Age of Faith

  The preceding volume ends with Dante and the medieval synthesis; read together, the two show how Durant sets up the contrast between medieval faith and Renaissance humanism.

• The Reformation

  The next volume returns to 1300 and follows the religious revolt north of the Alps, so the Roman worldliness portrayed here becomes the occasion for Luther's protest.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The subtitle's dates. Ask why Durant measures an age by the birth of a poet and the death of a painter.
• Money in Florence. Note every time a guild, bank or merchant family pays for a building, statue or painting.
• Savonarola. Watch how Durant's tone shifts between admiration for the preacher's courage and criticism of his methods.
• The Borgia chapters. Distinguish what Durant presents as established fact from what he labels rumor or legend.
• Michelangelo's old age. Notice the change in his art and poetry and what Durant makes of his late devotion.

Key terms and names

Humanism

The study of classical Latin and Greek literature, history and moral philosophy as the basis of education and eloquence.

Patronage

The commissioning and support of artists and scholars by wealthy families, guilds, cities and churchmen.

Condottiere

A hired military captain who fought for Italian states under contract.

Nepotism

The favoring of relatives, especially by popes appointing nephews and sons to offices and estates.

Simony

Buying or selling church offices or spiritual goods.

Sack of Rome (1527)

The plundering of Rome by mutinous imperial troops, which Durant treats as the end of the high Renaissance in the city.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What events or lives do the years 1304 and 1576 mark in the book's subtitle?
2. Comprehension Name three artists who worked for the Medici and one work by each that Durant describes.
3. Comprehension What happened in Rome in 1527, and why does Durant treat it as a turning point?
4. Interpretation Does Durant present Savonarola as a hero, a fanatic or something more complex, and what evidence decides your answer?
5. Interpretation How does Durant explain the worldliness of the Renaissance popes, and what consequences does he foresee?
6. Interpretation Why does Durant contrast Raphael and Michelangelo, and which artist does he seem to prefer?
7. Big Question If great art can come from flawed patrons and artists, how should a Christian receive and judge it?

Faith Connections

• Exodus 31:1-11 (Scripture)

  Bezalel is filled with the Spirit of God for craftsmanship in the tabernacle, a scriptural ground for honoring the artistic skill Durant celebrates in the Florentine workshops.

• Jonah 3 (Scripture)

  Nineveh repenting at a prophet's warning is the kind of civic repentance Savonarola urged on Florence, and the chapter helps students ask what his brief reform of the city did and did not achieve.

• 1 Peter 5:1-4 (Scripture)

  Peter's charge to elders to shepherd without greed or domineering is the standard against which Durant's portraits of nepotistic and warlike popes may be measured.

• Dante, Inferno XIX (Great Conversation)

  Dante places simoniac popes head-down in the rock, a medieval judgment on the same abuses Durant later finds flourishing in Renaissance Rome.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy, commercial wealth, rival city-states and an ambitious papacy financed the recovery of classical learning and an outburst of art; this revival loosened medieval restraints on thought and conduct, so that intellectual and artistic freedom grew together with violence, sensuality and political disorder; divided Italy then fell to foreign invasion and a stricter Catholic reform; therefore the Renaissance was a brilliant but unstable liberation whose genius and disorder had a common source.

Rhetorical device: ekphrasis. Durant pauses repeatedly to describe individual paintings, statues and buildings in close visual detail, so that works such as the Sistine ceiling or Titian's portraits become events in the narrative.

Debate: Resolved: The patronage of the Renaissance popes did more good than harm to the Church.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Durant argues that the Renaissance revived the classical spirit and weakened Christian moral restraint. Test this claim against two figures from the book whose lives seem to contradict it, and argue whether his thesis needs revision.

Comparison with Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1): Read Vasari's life of Michelangelo beside Durant's chapters on the same artist. Identify what Durant takes from Vasari, what he questions, and which account better explains Michelangelo's late religious art.

Medical Lens

Medicine is a recurring strand rather than a subject in its own right. The book begins in the shadow of the Black Death of 1348, which frames Boccaccio's Decameron and, by tradition, took Petrarch's Laura. The French invasion of 1494-95 coincides with the first well-documented European outbreak of the disease later named syphilis after Fracastoro's poem of 1530, and its spread through the armies and courts of Italy enters Durant's narrative of the wars. Leonardo's anatomical drawings and the medical faculties of Padua and Bologna show Renaissance curiosity turning toward the human body, preparing the work of Vesalius. Poison, real and rumored, colors the stories of the Borgias. Titian died in Venice in 1576 during a plague epidemic, though the cause of his death is not certain. Medical and epidemiological claims are Durant's synthesis of mid-century scholarship and should be checked before citation; retrospective identification of historical epidemics is interpretive.

• Opening chapters on Petrarch and Boccaccio

  The plague of 1348 in Florence and Avignon as the setting of the Decameron and of Petrarch's grief for Laura.

  Plague Epidemic Grief Death Dying
• Chapters on the French invasions after 1494

  The appearance of the 'French disease' in Italian armies and cities and its later naming by Fracastoro.

  Syphilis Venereal
• Chapter on Leonardo da Vinci

  Leonardo's dissections and anatomical notebooks as part of his inquiry into nature.

  Anatomy Dissection
• Section on science, medicine and learning in Renaissance Italy

  Physicians, university medical faculties and the beginnings of a more observational anatomy in Padua and Bologna.

  Physicians Doctors Anatomy Dissection
• Chapters on Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia

  Contemporary accusations and later legends of poisoning, which Durant weighs against the evidence.

  Pharmacology Poisons

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Imagine Savonarola and Lorenzo de' Medici meeting in 1492, shortly before Lorenzo's death, and write their conversation about beauty, wealth, Florence and the state of their souls.

• Essay

  Durant links the artistic brilliance of the Renaissance with its moral disorder. Choose one artist and one ruler from the book and argue whether their lives support or weaken his connection.

• Classroom

  Build a gallery walk of eight works Durant describes, from Ghiberti's doors to Titian's late paintings, and have students write one sentence on each telling who paid for it and why.

• Fiction

  Write a day in the life of an apprentice in a Florentine workshop who grinds pigments, prepares a panel and watches the master at work, using Durant's account of guilds and studios.

Further Reading

• The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt

  The 1860 interpretation that shaped Durant's view of the period.

• Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, Paul Oskar Kristeller

• The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli

• Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari

• The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French