The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy
Focus Question:
What was humanism, and what effect did it have on philosophy, education, attitudes toward politics, and the writing of history?
Individualism and secularism, two important characteristics of the Italian Renaissance, were especially noticeable in intellectual and artistic life. Italian culture had become well developed by the fourteenth century. For the next two centuries, Italy was the cultural leader of Europe. This new Italian culture was mainly the product of a fairly wealthy, urban lay society.
(Side note: “Lay society” means people who were not members of the clergy, or Church officials.)
The most important literary movement connected to the Renaissance was humanism.
Italian Renaissance Humanism
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement based on studying the classical literary works of Greece and Rome. Humanists studied the studia humanitatis, or “studies of humanity.” These included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history, all based on the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors. These are the subjects we now call the humanities.
The importance of literature in Renaissance humanism can also be seen in the jobs humanists had. Some were teachers of the humanities in secondary schools and universities. They either gave occasional lectures or held permanent positions, often as professors of rhetoric. Others worked as secretaries in the governments of Italian city-states or at the courts of princes and popes. These jobs were mostly secular, and most humanists were laymen instead of members of the clergy.
The Emergence of Humanism
Petrarch (1304–1374) has often been called the father of Italian Renaissance humanism. Petrarch rejected his father's wish for him to become a lawyer and instead chose a career in literature. Although he lived in Avignon for a while, he spent most of his final decades in Italy as a guest of different princes and city governments.
Petrarch was not exactly modest about his importance. He once said that some of the greatest kings of his time loved him and wanted his friendship. He joked that when he was their guest, it was almost as if they were his guests instead.
Petrarch did more than anyone else in the fourteenth century to help develop Renaissance humanism. He was the first intellectual to describe the Middle Ages as a period of darkness, which helped create the mistaken idea that medieval culture had been ignorant of classical antiquity.
(Side note: “Classical antiquity” means the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome.)
Petrarch's interest in classical works led him to search for forgotten Latin manuscripts. This caused him to search through and remove writings from monastic libraries throughout Europe.
Because Petrarch was so focused on classical works and their secular ideas, he sometimes worried that he was not paying enough attention to his spiritual ideals. However, these worries did not stop him from beginning the humanist focus on using pure classical Latin. He made it popular for humanists to use Cicero as a model for prose and Virgil as a model for poetry.
As Petrarch said, “Christ is my God; Cicero is the prince of the language.”
Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy
In Florence, the humanist movement took a new direction at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It became closely connected to Florentine civic pride and spirit, creating what one modern scholar called civic humanism.
Fourteenth-century humanists such as Petrarch had described intellectual life as something that should be spent in solitude. They rejected family life and active participation in the community. However, in the busy civic world of Florence, intellectuals began to see their role differently.
The Roman statesman and intellectual Cicero became their model.
From this point on, Cicero inspired the Renaissance idea that intellectuals had a duty to live an active life serving their state. A person could only fully develop intellectually and morally through participating in the life of the state.
Civic humanism reflected the values of the urban society of Renaissance Italy. Humanists began to believe that their study of the humanities should be used to serve the state. It was therefore not surprising that humanists worked for the government as chancellors, council members, and advisers.
There was also a growing interest in classical Greek civilization during the first half of the fifteenth century. Bruni was one of the first Italian humanists to become highly knowledgeable about Greek. He became an enthusiastic student of the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, who taught in Florence from 1396 to 1400.
Humanists eagerly studied the works of Plato, as well as Greek poets, dramatists, historians, and orators such as Euripides, Sophocles, and Thucydides. The scholastics of the High Middle Ages had mostly ignored these writers because they believed they were not relevant to the theological questions they were studying.
(Side note: Scholastics were medieval scholars who focused heavily on using logic and philosophy to study Christian theology.)
By the fifteenth century, people had developed a stronger awareness of being humanists. This was especially clear in the career of Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457).
Valla grew up in Rome and was educated in both Latin and Greek. Eventually, he achieved his main goal of becoming a papal secretary.
Valla's major work, The Elegances of the Latin Language, tried to clean up medieval Latin and return Latin to its proper place above the vernacular languages. The book examined how classical Latin should properly be used and created a new literary standard.
Early humanists had generally considered any writer who lived before the seventh century C.E. to be a classical model, including Christian writers. Valla instead identified different stages in the development of Latin and accepted only the Latin from the last century of the Roman Republic and the first century of the Roman Empire as the best model.
Humanism and Philosophy
During the second half of the fifteenth century, interest in the works of Plato increased dramatically. This was especially noticeable among members of an informal discussion group called the Florentine Platonic Academy.
Cosimo de' Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence, encouraged this interest by paying Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), one of the academy's leaders, to translate Plato's dialogues.
Ficino dedicated his life to translating Plato and explaining the Platonic philosophy known as Neoplatonism.
(Side note: Neoplatonism was a Renaissance version of Plato's ideas that tried to connect them with Christianity.)
In two major works, Ficino tried to combine Christianity and Platonism into one system.
His Neoplatonism was based on two main ideas: the Neoplatonic hierarchy of substances and a theory of spiritual love.
The hierarchy of substances, also called the great chain of being, described everything as existing in levels, starting with the lowest form of physical matter, such as plants, and going all the way up to the purest spirit, God.
Humans were placed in the middle. Humans connected the material world through their bodies with the spiritual world through their souls. Their highest duty was to move upward toward union with God, which was considered the true purpose of human existence.
Ficino's theory of spiritual or Platonic love said that just as all people are connected through their shared humanity and love, all parts of the universe are also connected by bonds of sympathetic love.
Renaissance Hermeticism
Hermeticism was another product of the intellectual environment of Florence during the late fifteenth century.
At Cosimo de' Medici's request, Ficino translated a Greek work called the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin.
The Hermetic manuscripts contained two main types of writings. One focused on occult sciences, especially astrology, alchemy, and magic. The other focused on theological and philosophical ideas.
Some Hermetic writings supported pantheism, the belief that divinity exists throughout all parts of nature, including the stars, planets, and things on Earth.
(Side note: Pantheism = the belief that God/divinity is present throughout everything in nature.)
One of the most important sixteenth-century Hermeticists, Giordano Bruno, expressed this idea by saying that God exists in all things.
For Renaissance intellectuals, the revival of Hermeticism created a new view of humanity. They believed that humans had originally been created as divine beings with divine creative power, but had freely chosen to enter the material world, or nature.
Humans could regain their divinity through a process of regeneration or purification of the soul. Once purified, they became what the Renaissance called sages or magi, people who had knowledge of God and truth.
By regaining their original divinity, humans could also regain a deep knowledge of nature and the ability to use the powers of nature for beneficial purposes.
In Italy, the most important magi of the late fifteenth century were Ficino and his friend and student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494).
Pico wrote one of the most famous works of the Renaissance, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. He carefully studied the works of philosophers from many different backgrounds, looking for common “nuggets of universal truth” that he believed were all part of God's revelation to humanity.
In the Oration, Pico strongly argued for the unlimited potential of human beings. Like Ficino, Pico was very interested in Hermetic philosophy and accepted it as the “science of the Divine,” which involved deeply studying the most hidden parts of nature.
The works of Ficino and Pico show that Italian Renaissance humanism was not simply a secular movement. It also had a strong spiritual side. Their works tried to explain the relationship between humans and God and described humans as not only physical beings but also beings inspired by God.
Petrarch: Mountain Climbing and the Search for Spiritual Contentment
Petrarch has long been considered the father of Italian Renaissance humanism.
One of his major literary works was The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, which describes his attempt to climb a mountain in Provence in southern France and look out at the world from the top.
However, Petrarch's main purpose was not simply to describe climbing a mountain. He used the climb as an allegory for his soul's struggle to reach a higher spiritual state.
(Side note: An allegory is a story or event that represents a deeper idea. Here, climbing the mountain represents Petrarch trying to improve his soul and get closer to God.)
The work was written to a professor of theology in Paris who had originally encouraged Petrarch to read Augustine. Augustine had experienced a major conversion to Christianity almost one thousand years earlier.
Petrarch, The Ascent of Mount Ventoux
Today I climbed the highest mountain in this region, which they call the Windy Peak, and there is a good reason for that name.
The only reason I made this journey was because I wanted to see its impressive height. I had wanted to make this trip for many years.
You know that ever since I was young, as fate has moved people's lives around, I have also been moved around these areas. This mountain can be seen from far away and has always been visible to me. Finally, I felt the strong desire to accomplish what I had always wanted to do.
[After several unsuccessful attempts, Petrarch finally reaches the top of Mount Ventoux.]
I was happy with how far I had gotten, but I cried over my own imperfections and felt sad about how changeable and uncertain human actions are.
In this way, I almost forgot where I had come and why I had come there. Then I was reminded to put those sad thoughts aside because there would be a better place for them.
Instead, I decided I should look around and see what I had originally come there to see.
Like a man waking up from sleep, I turned around and looked toward the west. I could clearly see the mountains of the province of Lyons on the right. On the left, I could see the sea near Marseilles and the waves breaking against Aigues-Mortes. The Rhône River was directly below us.
I admired every part of the view. Sometimes I enjoyed the beauty of the physical world, and other times I raised my thoughts toward higher spiritual things, just as my body had climbed higher up the mountain.
I decided to look at a copy of Augustine's Confessions, which I had received because of your kindness and always kept with me.
I opened the book intending to read whatever passage I happened to find first. By chance, I opened to the tenth book of the work.
When I first looked at the page, I read that people go to admire the high mountains, the huge oceans and rivers, and the movement of the stars—but they forget to look at themselves.
I was shocked by this. I told my brother, who had come with me and wanted to hear more, to leave me alone. I closed the book, angry with myself because I was still so focused on admiring earthly things.
I should have learned long ago, even from pagan philosophers, that nothing is more worthy of admiration than the human soul, and compared with its greatness, nothing else is truly great.
I was now satisfied with everything I had seen on the mountain and turned my attention inward toward myself.
From that moment until we reached the bottom, I did not say a word. The words I had read were enough to occupy my thoughts.
I could not believe that I had happened to read those words by accident. I became convinced that what I had read had been meant specifically for me.
I remembered that Augustine had once felt something similar when he was reading the Apostolic Epistles. The first passage he came across seemed to him to be a personal message as well.
Pico della Mirandola and the Dignity of Man
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was one of the most important intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance.
Pico claimed that he had studied all the different schools of philosophy. He tried to prove this by creating nine hundred theses for a public debate when he was only twenty-four years old.
As an introduction to his theses, he wrote his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. In it, he argued for the unlimited potential of human beings.
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
Finally, God, the greatest creator, decided that humans should be given a special nature unlike all other creatures.
God made humans with an undetermined nature and placed them in the middle of the world. He then told Adam that He had not given humans one fixed home, one specific physical form, or one specific purpose.
Instead, humans could choose their own home, form, and purpose according to their desires and judgment.
All other creatures have limited natures and are controlled by laws that God has given them. But humans are not limited in the same way. Through free will, humans can decide what kind of person they will become.
God placed humans at the center of the world so they could more easily observe everything around them.
Humans were made neither completely heavenly nor completely earthly, neither mortal nor immortal. Because of their freedom and honor, humans have the ability to shape themselves into whatever form they choose.
Humans have the power to fall down into lower, animal-like forms of life, but they also have the ability to rise toward higher forms of existence.
(Side note: This is one of the biggest Renaissance ideas: humans have a lot of freedom and potential, and they can shape who they become through their own choices.)
The Impact of Printing
The Renaissance saw the invention of printing, one of the most important technological developments in Western civilization.
Printing immediately affected European intellectual life and thought.
Printing from hand-carved wooden blocks had already existed in the West since the twelfth century and in China even earlier. What was new in fifteenth-century Europe was printing with movable metal type.
The development of movable type happened gradually and was completed around 1445–1450. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz played an important role in finishing the process.
Gutenberg's Bible, completed in 1455 or 1456, was the first true book in the West produced using movable type.
The new printing technology spread quickly throughout Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. Printing presses were established throughout the Holy Roman Empire during the 1460s, and within ten years they had spread to both western and eastern Europe.
Venice became one of the most famous printing centers. By 1500, it had almost one hundred printers who had produced almost 2 million volumes.
By 1500, there were more than 1,000 printers in Europe who had published almost 40,000 different titles, totaling between 8 and 10 million copies.
About 50 percent of these books were religious works, including Bibles, biblical commentaries, devotional books, and sermons.
The next most common works were the Latin and Greek classics, medieval grammar books, legal handbooks, philosophical works, and an increasing number of popular romances.
Printing became one of Europe's largest industries, and its effects quickly spread into many parts of European life.
Printing encouraged scholarly research and increased people's desire to gain knowledge. It also made it easier for scholars to cooperate with each other and helped create standardized and reliable versions of texts.
Printing also encouraged the growth of a larger lay reading public, which had a huge effect on European society.
Most importantly, without the printing press, the new religious ideas of the Reformation would not have spread nearly as quickly as they did during the sixteenth century.
The Artistic Renaissance
Focus Question:
What were the chief characteristics of Renaissance art, and how did it differ in Italy and northern Europe?
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest Italian Renaissance artists, explained that painters would create less impressive artwork if they copied other artists. Instead, they should study nature itself.
Renaissance artists believed that copying nature was their main goal. Their search for naturalism became an important goal by itself: they wanted viewers to believe that the people, objects, and events in their artwork were real.
At the same time, these new artistic standards showed a new way of thinking in which human beings became the main focus of attention, or the “center and measure of all things.”
Art in the Early Renaissance
Leonardo and other Italian artists believed that Giotto, who lived in the fourteenth century, had started the movement toward copying nature.
However, Giotto's ideas were not seriously continued until the work of Masaccio (1401–1428) in Florence.
Masaccio's series of frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel has long been considered the first masterpiece of Early Renaissance art.
Through his use of large, monumental figures, more realistic relationships between people and landscapes, and the visual use of the laws of perspective, Masaccio created a new realistic style of painting.
Viewers could see a realistic world that seemed like a continuation of their own world.
Masaccio's large, three-dimensional human figures became a model for later generations of Florentine artists.
One example is Tribute Money. It was one of several frescoes Masaccio painted in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.
In Tribute Money, Masaccio showed the biblical story of Jesus being confronted by a tax collector at the entrance to the town of Capernaum.
Jesus sent Peter to get a coin from the mouth of a fish in Lake Galilee. Peter then used the coin to pay the tax collector.
Masaccio used a logical system of perspective to make the people and their background look realistically connected. The figures themselves were also painted realistically.
Because of this, one Renaissance observer said that paintings before Masaccio could be called simply “painted,” while Masaccio's works seemed alive, real, and natural.
During the fifteenth century, other Florentine painters copied and changed this new Renaissance style.
One important development was an experimental trend that went in two different directions.
One direction focused on the mathematical side of painting, especially working out the rules of perspective and organizing outdoor space and light using geometry and perspective.
Renaissance Architecture
Brunelleschi took a lot of inspiration from the buildings of ancient Rome. When he returned to Florence, he used what he had learned to create a new style of architecture.
His first major project was building a dome for the unfinished cathedral of Florence, called the Duomo.
The cathedral had been started in 1296, but Brunelleschi created new building techniques and machines that allowed him to construct the dome between 1420 and 1436. The dome covered an opening that was 140 feet wide.
Brunelleschi had first been asked to design the dome in 1417, but construction did not begin until 1420.
He would have preferred to build the dome in the Roman hemispheric style, but practical problems forced him to raise the center of the dome and reduce its weight.
He did this by creating a thin double shell around a structure supported by twenty-four ribs.
Another excellent example of Brunelleschi's Renaissance architectural style was the Church of San Lorenzo.
When the Medici family hired him to design the church, Brunelleschi used Roman ideas to create an interior that looked very different from the huge medieval Gothic cathedrals.
San Lorenzo's classical columns, rounded arches, and coffered ceiling created a space that did not overwhelm people physically or psychologically like Gothic cathedrals could.
Instead, it was designed around human measurements rather than divine measurements.
Like painters and sculptors, Renaissance architects wanted their buildings to reflect a human-centered world.
Cosimo de' Medici spent a huge amount of money rebuilding San Lorenzo.
Brunelleschi's designs were based on the basilica plan, which early Christians had borrowed from ancient pagan Rome.
The simplicity of San Lorenzo, especially its rows of thin Corinthian columns, created a space centered around human beings.
The Renaissance's new focus on human individuality could also be seen in the increased importance of portraiture.
Important people began appearing in the corners of religious paintings. Large tombs and portrait statues honored many important citizens of Florence.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, artists were accurately showing people's facial features while also trying to show their personalities and inner qualities.
The portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca are good examples. They accurately show what the rulers looked like while also showing their power and wealth.
The Artistic High Renaissance
By the end of the fifteenth century, Italian painters, sculptors, and architects had created a completely new artistic environment.
Many artists had mastered new techniques for scientifically observing the world around them and were ready to move toward more individual forms of creative expression.
This final stage of Renaissance art, which flourished from about 1480 to 1520, is called the High Renaissance.
The move into the High Renaissance was connected to the growing importance of Rome as a new cultural center of the Italian Renaissance.
The High Renaissance was dominated by three great artists:
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Raphael (1483–1520)
Michelangelo (1475–1564)
Leonardo was a transitional figure between earlier Renaissance art and High Renaissance ideas.
He continued the fifteenth-century tradition of experimenting and studying everything. He even dissected human bodies to better understand how nature worked.
However, Leonardo believed artists needed to go beyond simply copying reality. He helped begin the High Renaissance focus on the idealization of nature.
(Side note: Idealization of nature means starting with realistic people or objects but making them into a more perfect or ideal version.)
Leonardo's Last Supper, painted in Milan, is an excellent example of fifteenth-century Renaissance techniques. It uses organized space and perspective to make subjects appear three-dimensional even though the painting itself is on a flat surface.
But the painting goes beyond realism.
The figure of Philip is idealized, and the painting has deep psychological meaning.
When Jesus says that one of the apostles will betray him, each apostle reacts differently, showing his own personality and relationship with Jesus.
Through gestures and movement, Leonardo tried to show the inner life and personality of each person.
Leonardo was one of the main reasons for the High Renaissance focus on idealizing nature. He moved from simply showing the human body realistically toward showing an idealized human form.
In The Last Supper, he used people's gestures and movements to show their character and inner nature.
Unfortunately, Leonardo used an experimental technique when creating the fresco, and this caused the painting to begin physically deteriorating soon afterward.
The Artistic High Renaissance — Continued
Raphael
Raphael was famous for his many paintings of the Madonna, in which he tried to create an ideal of beauty that went far beyond normal human standards. He was also well known for his frescoes in the Vatican Palace.
His School of Athens shows a world of balance, harmony, and order. These were important ideas in the art of ancient Greece and Rome.
Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and began painting a series of frescoes ordered by Pope Julius II for the papal apartments in the Vatican.
In School of Athens, painted in 1510 or 1511, Raphael created an imaginary gathering of ancient philosophers. In the center are Plato and Aristotle. On the left is Pythagoras, showing his system of proportions on a slate. On the right is Ptolemy, holding a globe showing the heavens.
(Side note: A fresco is a painting made directly onto wet plaster. “Papal apartments” were the living and working rooms of the pope.)
Michelangelo
Michelangelo was another giant of the High Renaissance. He was an accomplished painter, sculptor, and architect. He was strongly driven by his desire to create and worked with great passion and energy on many different projects.
Michelangelo was influenced by Neoplatonism, which is especially clear in the figures he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
In 1508, Pope Julius II called Michelangelo to Rome and hired him to decorate the chapel ceiling. This huge project was not finished until 1512.
Michelangelo tried to tell the story of the Fall of Man by painting nine scenes from the biblical book of Genesis.
In his Creation of Adam, the well-proportioned figure of Adam waits for the divine spark. Adam, like the other muscular figures on the ceiling, represents an ideal type of human being with perfect proportions.
In keeping with Neoplatonic ideas, the beauty of these figures was meant to reflect divine beauty. The more beautiful the body was, the more God-like the person was supposed to appear.
(Side note: This connects back to Neoplatonism. The idea was that physical beauty could reflect a person's spiritual or divine beauty.)
Another example of Michelangelo's search for ideal beauty was his David, a huge marble statue commissioned by the Florentine government in 1501 and completed in 1504.
Michelangelo believed that the form of a statue was already inside the uncarved stone. His job was basically to remove the extra stone and reveal the statue that was already there.
Using a piece of marble that had been sitting unused for fifty years, Michelangelo created a 14-foot-high figure, the largest sculpture in Italy since the time of ancient Rome.
The statue of David is an impressive hero that proudly shows the beauty of the human body and the greatness of human beings.
The statue, which was cut from an 18-foot-high piece of marble, celebrates the beauty of the human body and is a good symbol of the Italian Renaissance's belief in human power.
After it was completed in 1504, Florentine officials moved David to a special location in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, which was the center of the Florentine government.
(Side note: David was a biblical hero who defeated Goliath. The Florentines saw the statue as a symbol of strength and courage.)
High Renaissance Architecture
The High Renaissance also appeared in architecture, especially in the work of Donato Bramante (1444–1514).
Bramante came from Urbino but moved to Rome. There, he designed a small temple on the supposed site where Saint Peter had been martyred.
This building, called the Tempietto, or “little temple,” had Doric columns surrounding a sanctuary that was covered by a dome.
The Tempietto summarized the main architectural ideas of the High Renaissance. Its columns, dome, and sanctuary created one large, balanced, and harmonious whole.
Inspired by ancient architecture, Bramante had brought back the grandeur of ancient Rome.
The Artist and Social Status
Early Renaissance artists usually began their careers as apprentices to masters in craft guilds. Apprentices who showed unusual talent could eventually become masters themselves and run their own workshops.
Just as during the Middle Ages, artists were still mostly viewed as artisans, or skilled workers who made things.
Because guilds depended on commissions for their projects, patrons played an important role in Early Renaissance art. Wealthy upper-class people decided what the paintings and sculptures they paid for would be about and what purpose they would serve.
(Side note: A patron was a wealthy person or organization that paid an artist to create a work.)
By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the position of the artist had changed.
Especially talented people such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo were no longer seen simply as artisans. Instead, they were viewed as artistic geniuses whose creative abilities were almost like those of God.
Artists became heroes who were praised more for their creativity than simply for their skill as craftspeople.
Michelangelo, for example, was often called “Il Divino,” meaning “The Divine One.”
As society began to accept their unusual personalities and valued their creative genius, High Renaissance artists became the first people to represent the modern idea of the artist.
As respect for artists increased, they also gained more opportunities to make money from their work and move higher in society.
Artists were now welcomed as equals into the circles of the upper classes. They spent time with the political and intellectual elites of their society and became more familiar with new intellectual ideas, which they then included in their artwork.
The Platonic Academy and Renaissance Neoplatonism had an especially strong influence on Florentine painters.
The Genius of Michelangelo
During the Renaissance, artists increasingly came to be viewed as creative geniuses with almost divine abilities.
One person who helped create this image was himself a painter: Giorgio Vasari. Vasari greatly admired Italy's famous artists and wrote a series of short biographies about them.
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Michelangelo was naturally very talented and passionate about art. He had a natural ability for the visual arts, and even difficult things seemed to come easily to him.
To become as skilled as possible, he repeatedly studied human anatomy. He dissected human bodies so that he could better understand how the body was built, including the bones, muscles, veins, and nerves. He also studied how the human body moved and the different positions it could take.
He did not only study humans. He also studied animals, especially horses.
Michelangelo wanted to understand the basic rules and principles of all these things so he could use that knowledge in his art. He showed this knowledge so clearly in his work that even people who studied these subjects specifically could not understand them better than he did.
Whether he painted with a brush or sculpted with a chisel, Michelangelo created works that were almost impossible to copy.
He gave his works so much beauty and grace that Vasari believed he had even surpassed the ancient artists.
Michelangelo could handle extremely difficult artistic challenges so easily that his work looked effortless, even though other artists found it very difficult to imitate him.
Michelangelo's genius was recognized while he was still alive, rather than only after his death like many other artists.
Several popes wanted him to work for them. Other powerful rulers also wanted his services, including Suleiman, emperor of the Turks; Francis of Valois, king of France; Emperor Charles V; the government of Venice; and Duke Cosimo de' Medici.
All of them offered Michelangelo high salaries because they wanted to benefit from his great artistic genius.
Music in the Renaissance
For much of the fifteenth century, an amazing cultural environment developed in the lands controlled by the dukes of Burgundy in northern Europe.
The dukes' court attracted some of the best artists and musicians of the time.
One of them was Guillaume Dufay (about 1400–1474), who was probably the most important composer of his time.
Dufay was born in northern France and lived in Italy for several years. Because of this, he was able to combine the late medieval musical style of France with the early Renaissance style of Italy.
One of Dufay's most important contributions was changing the way the Mass was composed.
He was the first composer to use secular tunes instead of Gregorian chants as the fixed melody that served as the foundation of the Mass.
(Side note: Gregorian chant was a type of religious singing traditionally used by the Catholic Church. A secular tune is music that is not specifically religious.)
Dufay also composed several secular songs. This is important because during the Renaissance, music stopped being used mainly for the service of God and increasingly moved into the secular world of courts and cities.
In Italy and France, the main form of secular music was the madrigal.
The Renaissance madrigal was a poem that was set to music. It originally developed in the Italian courts during the fourteenth century.
The lyrics were usually twelve-line poems written in the vernacular, and their main subject was emotional or romantic love.
(Side note: “Vernacular” means the everyday language people actually spoke, rather than Latin.)
By the middle of the sixteenth century, most madrigals were written for five or six voices and used a technique called text painting.
Text painting was when the music tried to show the literal meaning of the words being sung.
For example, the melody might rise when the singer said the word “heaven,” or the music might move in a wave-like way when the word “water” was sung.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, the madrigal had also spread to England. The most popular English form was known for its “fa-la-la” refrain, like the one found in the English carol Deck the Halls.