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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapters on the French invasions after 1494

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

• Chapter on Leonardo da Vinci

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

• 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.

• Chapters on Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia

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