The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, by Alexander Lee
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The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, by Alexander Lee
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The Ugly Renaissance is a delightfully debauched tour of the sordid, gritty reality behind some of the most celebrated artworks and cultural innovations of all time.Tourists today flock to Italy by the millions to admire the stunning achievements of the Renaissance—paintings, statues, and buildings that are the legacy of one of the greatest periods of cultural rebirth and artistic beauty the world has ever seen. But beneath the elegant surface lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption. In this meticulously researched and lively portrait, Renaissance scholar Alexander Lee illuminates the dark and titillating contradictions that existed alongside the enlightened spirit of the time: the scheming bankers, greedy politicians, bloody rivalries, murderous artists, religious conflicts, rampant disease, and indulgent excess without which many of the most beautiful monuments of the Renaissance would never have come into being.
The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, by Alexander Lee - Amazon Sales Rank: #101434 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-27
- Released on: 2015-10-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .98 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, by Alexander Lee Review
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year“Fascinating. . . . Explore[s] the dualities of creative brilliance and human baseness.” —The Spectator “An entertaining frolic buttressed by serious scholarship. . . . An illuminating look at how the flowering of human imagination celebrated in the Renaissance was fertilized by the excesses of human nature.” —Kirkus Reviews“Effortlessly combining scholarly depth with a highly accessible style. . . . Lee has given us a Renaissance that is . . . uglier, but infinitely more interesting.” —New Humanist
About the Author ALEXANDER LEE is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. A prize-winning specialist in the history of the Italian Renaissance, he holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, and has held posts at Oxford, Luxembourg, and Bergamo. He is the author of numerous academic works on the Renaissance, including, most recently, Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology and the Origins of the Renaissance of Italy, and is currently working on a new biography of Niccolò Machiavelli.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 Michelangelo's Nose One fine summer’s afternoon in 1491, the sixteen-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti was sitting sketching in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. With a stick of chalk between his fingers and a sheaf of paper on his knees, he was busy copying Masaccio’s celebrated frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel with “such judgement” that all those who saw his drawings were astonished. Even as an adolescent, Michelangelo had begun to grow used to such admiration. Despite his youth, he had already earned a degree of celebrity and had acquired a correspondingly high opinion of himself. Carrying a letter of recommendation from the artist Domenico Ghirlandaio, he had not only been accepted as a pupil of the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni at the artistic school that had recently been founded in the gardens of San Marco, but had even been welcomed into the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence’s de facto ruler. Enraptured by the young man, Lorenzo had ushered Michelangelo into the company of the city’s foremost intellectuals, including the humanists Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola. Michelangelo flourished. He nurtured those skills that were to characterize the art of the period. Studying anatomy with extreme care, he honed the naturalistic style that had been in continuous development since the innovations of Giotto di Bondone, two centuries earlier. And devoting himself to the emulation of classical sculpture, he set out on the path that later led Giorgio Vasari to claim that he had “surpassed and vanquished the ancients.” Following a suggestion made by Poliziano in this period, he carved a relief depicting the battle of the centaurs that was “so beautiful” it seemed to be “the work not of a young man, but of a great master with a wealth of study and experience behind him.” Michelangelo’s fame and self-confidence were growing by the day, but as he was about to discover, so was the envy of his schoolfellows. Sitting next to him in the Brancacci Chapel that day was Pietro Torrigiano. Although three years older than Michelangelo, Pietro was another of Bertoldo di Giovanni’s pupils and was also recognized as something of a rising star. Competition between the two was almost inevitable. Under Bertoldo’s tutelage, they had been encouraged to compete, and they strove to outdo each other in imitating and surpassing the works of masters like Masaccio. Michelangelo was, however, too brilliant and outspoken for the rivalry to be entirely friendly.As they sketched alongside one another in the chapel, Michelangelo and Pietro appear to have begun discussing who was better placed to take up Masaccio’s mantle as Florence’s finest painter. Given their sur- roundings, it was a natural subject. Despite being acclaimed as an artist of genius in his own lifetime, Masaccio had died before he could com- plete the frescoes in the chapel. His work had been completed by Filippino Lippi, although how successfully was a matter of personal opinion. Perhaps Michelangelo, who had spent many months studying the frescoes, observed that Lippi had been unable to match Masaccio’s talent and that he himself was the only person capable of attaining—if not exceeding—the master’s standards. He may simply have spoken derisively of Pietro’s sketches, as was apparently his habit. Whatever the case, Michelangelo managed to enrage his friend. Talented but hardly brilliant, Pietro couldn’t stand Michelangelo’s ribbing. “Jealous [at] seeing him more honoured than himself and more able in his work,” Pietro began mocking Michelangelo. If his behavior in later years is anything to go by, Michelangelo might simply have laughed. Whatever the case, Pietro was furious. Clenching his fists, he punched Michelangelo squarely in the face. The blow was so hard that it “almost tore off the cartilage of [the] nose.” Michelangelo slumped unconscious to the floor, his nose “broken and crushed” and his torso covered with blood. Michelangelo was hurriedly carried back to his home in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, where he is said to have been lying “as if dead.” It did not take Lorenzo de’ Medici long to learn of his plight. Storming into the room in which his stricken protégé lay, he flew into a towering rage and hurled every imaginable insult at the “bestial” Pietro. At once, Pietro saw the magnitude of his mistake: he had no option but to leave Florence.* * * Unwittingly, the barely conscious Michelangelo was caught up in a moment that captured perfectly an important dimension of the world of late Renaissance art and that represented the fulfillment of what has become known as the “rise of the artist.” Although he was only sixteen years old, he had already begun to hone that unique combination of talents that contemporaries would later describe as “divine.” Skilled in sculpture and drawing, he was also devoted to Dante, learned in the Italian classics, a fine poet, and a friend to the finest humanist minds. Without any sense of irony intended, he was what we might now call a Renaissance man. What’s more, he was recognized as such. Despite his age, Michelangelo had been feted by Florence’s social and intellectual elite, and his ability had been honored with patronage and respect. The son of a comparatively modest bureaucrat from an obscure little town, he had earned the affection of the most powerful family in Florence because of his artistic skill. Lorenzo “the Magnificent”—himself a noted poet, connoisseur, and collector—treated him “like a son.” Indeed, Lorenzo’s son Giovanni and Giovanni’s illegitimate cousin Giulio—each of whom would later become pope (as Leo X and Clem- ent VII, respectively) —would address him as their “brother” ever after. Two hundred years earlier, it would have been unthinkable for any artist to have been honored in such a way. In the eyes of most contemporaries, a late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century artist was not a creator but a craftsman. The practitioner of a merely mechanical art, he was largely restricted to the confines of a provincial bottega (workshop) that was subject to the often draconian regulations of guilds. Regardless of his ability, the artist’s social status was not high. Although some early Renaissance artists occasionally occupied positions in communal government or came from magnate families, they were the exceptions rather than the rule. Most came from fairly humble backgrounds, as can be gauged from how little we know about their parents. Later biographers, like the snobbish Vasari, often skip over such details, and their silence suggests that carpenters, innkeepers, farmers, and even unskilled laborers may have sired some of the great names of early Renaissance art. What evidence we have seems to confirm this impression. Some artists were from very modest backgrounds and came from families engaged in the lowliest crafts. Giotto di Bondone, for example, was rumored to have been raised as a poor shepherd boy but was most probably the son of a Florentine blacksmith. For others, art—like carpentry—was a family business. Three of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s sons became painters, and Simone Martini’s brother and two brothers-in-law were all artists. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, however, the social world of art and the artist had gradually undergone a series of radical changes. In step with the growing popularity of classical themes and the naturalistic style, artists were progressively recognized as autonomous creative agents endowed with learning and skill that set them apart from mere mechanics. When Giotto was made capomaestro of the Duomo in 1334, the priors of Florence acknowledged not only his fame but also his “knowledge and learning,” terms that clearly distinguished the artist from mere craftsmen. Similarly, writing in his De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus (ca. 1380–81), the Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani felt able to compare painters not with mere mechanics but with the masters of the liberal arts. Although still reliant on the favor of patrons and bound by contractual agreements, painters and sculptors had seen their social position improve dramatically by the mid-fifteenth century. With art coming to be seen as a status symbol, artists themselves attained a higher status. Now it was not merely those from families of craftsmen who became artists. Although some continued to come from humble stock—such as Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)—artists were increasingly the sons (and, in very rare cases, the daughters) of skilled tradesmen, affluent merchants, and well-educated notaries. Even those who could lay claim to noble origins—such as Michelangelo—could take up the brush or chisel without undue shame. Their social standing was measured not against their birth but against their ability. They could treat with their patrons on the basis of mutual respect, if not always with perfect equality. And their achievements could be celebrated by historians like Vasari in a manner previously reserved only for statesmen. Indeed, so high had artists risen that Pope Paul III is reported to have remarked that artists like Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71) should “not be subjected to the law.” But if Michelangelo embodied both the stylistic transformations and the social changes that had come to characterize the art of the period, he also exemplified another important dimension of the life of the Renaissance artist. Though the “rise of the artist” had improved both the esteem in which the visual arts were held and the social status of artists, it had not elevated artists themselves to a higher and more refined plane of existence. Artists like Michelangelo still had feet of clay. He had, after all, just had his nose broken in a childish brawl prompted by envy and exacerbated by arrogant boasting. It was typical of his life. Entirely at home in the reception rooms of the mighty, he could be kind, sensitive, courteous, and funny. But he was also proud, touchy, scornful, and sharp-tongued. He was a frequenter of inns and no stranger to fights. Indeed, despite being a friend to popes and princes, he was no refined gentleman. As his biographer Paolo Giovio recorded, he was notoriously slovenly in his appearance and seemed almost to rejoice in living in the most squalid conditions. Scarcely ever changing his clothes, he was constantly accompanied by the noxious smell of the unwashed and seldom, if ever, combed his hair or cut his beard. He was a man of undoubted piety, but his passionate nature inclined him toward relations with both sexes. Although he later enjoyed a long and apparently romantic relationship with Vittoria Colonna, marchesa of Pescara, his surviving poems also address homoerotic themes. One of the many poems addressed to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, for example, begins with a striking and faintly blasphemous verse: Here in your lovely face I see, my lord, what in this life no words could ever tell; with that, although still clothed in flesh, my soul has often already risen up to God. As arrogant as he was talented, he was a dirty, disorganized, and tormented individual who was as easily embroiled in fights as he was bound to the will of popes, and as susceptible to Neoplatonic homoeroticism as he was to the reassurances of the Church and the blandish- ments of a cultured and elegant lady. Michelangelo was not unusual in this respect. A devotee of illicit magic, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomizing a well-known gigolo named Jacopo Saltarelli on April 9, 1476. Benvenuto Cellini was convicted of the same offense twice (in 1523 and 1557) and was only narrowly saved from a lengthy prison sentence thanks to the intervention of the Medici; on top of this, he killed at least two men and was also accused of stealing the papal jewels. So, too, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)—often described as the father of Renaissance humanism—fathered at least two children while in minor orders, and the music of the aristocratic composer Carlo Gesualdo reached its most sublime heights only after he had murdered his wife, her lover, and possibly also his son. When its implications are unpacked, therefore, Michelangelo’s broken nose appears to present something of a challenge. Superficially, it seems difficult to reconcile the idea of Michelangelo as the paradigmatically “Renaissance” artist with the image of Michelangelo the cocky and arrogant kid fighting in church. There is no doubt that these represent two sides of the same man, but the question is, how should the peculiar and apparently contradictory nature of Michelangelo’s character be understood? How could the same personality create such innovative, elevated art and indulge such base habits? How, indeed, can Michelangelo’s broken nose be reconciled with familiar conceptions of the Renaissance itself?
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33 of 39 people found the following review helpful. Good book marred by a silly premise By Thomas B. Gross I hesitated to order this book because I was put off by its apparent premise: that the Italian Renaissance was not all sweetness and light but had a "dark side" - hardly a revelation to anyone, but I decided to read it anyway because I am fascinated by descriptions of daily life in 15th and 16th Century Florence - my favorite part of Ross King's "Brunelleschi's Dome" was the description of herds of sheep within the city walls and I figured it would be entertaining to read about the sex lives of Renaissance Men (and Women).I haven't read Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" since my first visit to Florence 40 years ago this month - I don't remember much of it but I remember loving the stories, and the best of "The Ugly Renaissance" is reminiscent of Vasari if not directly sourced from it.There's a lot of interesting information here - enough for perhaps three shorter books. The first book would be a description of Florence at the time that Michelangelo carved the David - it would be very much like "Brunelleschi's Dome". Some of this is really great, like when he describes Michelangelo's father giving his son a hard time for being a painter and not a banker. The second book would be about the Medici family, and the third book would be a description of Florence during the "Age of Discovery" (which is remarkable because Florentines don't appear to have been interested at all in the discovery of America). These three sections make up the entire "Ugly Renaissance" book somehow bound together by the idea that not everything in Renaissance Florence was beautiful or enlightened.The notion that the Italian Renaissance produced objects of great beauty out of a dark and squalid and smelly time is hardly new and I doubt many people will find this surprising or even interesting in itself. After all, Irving Stone's popular novel about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel is the "Agony and the Ecstacy" not "Peace, Love and Understanding". I got the feeling that the author or the publisher felt that this book needed some kind of "hook" or gimmick to make it appeal to more readers, and I personally found the constant harping on this point a distraction from what is otherwise a pretty good book.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful. Did Corruption and Evil Fuel Renaissance Art and Creativity? By Reader from Washington, DC The depravity of the Renaissance era is no secret -- within the last few decades at least two gaudy television series about one of the most evil Popes, Alexander Borgia and his equally icky illegitimate children, have been produced. Many novels and much poetry about Renaissance Italy, filled to the brim with murder and adultery, have been published in the last three centuries.But historian Alexander Lee believes that modern admirers of the art and literature of the Renaissance tend to romanticize the era, seeing only the beautiful altarpieces and statues like Michelangelo's David in isolation from the horrific society which produced them. He argues that moderns tend to believe that people who paid for and produced art and poetry that beautiful couldn't have been bigots, murderers and rapists, and must instead be close to moderns in their thinking. Lee's book tries to break up the sanitized picture of the Renaissance as a wonderful time of intellectual discovery and show its seamy underside.In "The Ugly Renaissance," Lee describes how many of the altarpieces, with pictures of the art patrons painted into them, were given to churches to alleviate the guilt that the wealthy merchants, violent soldiers and corrupt church officials felt about their sin-stained lives. Huge libraries were built by merchants fearing that they would spend eternity in purgatory or hell for ruthless acts of usury.Lee writes in an engaging style as he takes the reader on tours of breathtaking crimes and atrocities, followed by commissions to Raphael or Fra Lippi that were intended as atonement for the crimes. Even readers who are not convinced that the public has a sanitized view of Renaissance Italy can learn much from this fascinating book.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Very disappointing By A reader The author starts off with an interesting premiss: that most histories of the Italian Renaissance concerned with the marvelous art of the period tend to white-wash the ugly social and political realities of the period. Fair enough-- this is often true. But then the author does the same thing, in reverse: he ignores every favorable aspect and concentrates so totally on the negative aspects, and exaggerates the negative so often, that he presents an equally if not more distorted picture of the era.Much of the negative evidence presented is old news to historians and art historians, although some of it may come as a shock to less informed readers. Yes, Renaissance cities were dirty and noisy; there were a lot of desperately poor people and a great deal of violent crime; beggars were a common sight, and rapes were frequent. In other words, not so different from many of the world’s cities today.The author is right that most Renaissance art patrons were wealthy men who commissioned lavish works of religious art for “atonement”-- as a way of getting back into God’s good graces, as well as to advertise their power and social status. Some of those patrons were decidedly unsavory characters: corrupt bankers, violent mercenary generals, decadent noblemen, unholy popes. These are valid (if obvious) points, but then the author feels compelled to exaggerate. Nobody ever claimed Cosimo de’ Medici was a saint, but Lee’s characterization of him as “little more than a money-grubbing, power-hungry megalomaniac who achieved his position of ascendancy through a combination of corruption, violence and brutality,” is so over-stated that it’s ludicrous. The author further equates Cosimo with Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, claiming that both were “among the most ghastly people” of their time. Sforza was a certifiable madman-- a sadistic and murderous psychotic who bears no resemblance in personality or behavior to Cosimo de’ Medici.The last section of the book skewers Renaissance people for their religious and ethnic prejudices. Such prejudices against Jews, Moslems and black Africans certainly did exist during the era, but it’s difficult to see them as any worse than the prejudices and hostilities that have always beset human societies. They’re not so different from the prejudices against “outsiders” such as immigrants, people of color and Jews that still exist today. In my opinion the author particularly exaggerates the extent of hostility against Jews in the Renaissance. Scholars of Jewish history judge the Italian Renaissance as one of the more tolerant periods in Western history, but Lee presents Renaissance Florence as a hotbed of anti-Semitism.In discussing the possible homosexual relationships among Renaissance intellectuals, the author claims that the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was buried in the same grave as his (possible) lover, the scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano. No-- Pico is buried in the same tomb as his close friend (and possible lover) Girolamo Benivieni-- a most unusual arrangement normally reserved for a husband and wife. Poliziano’s grave is located in a wall tomb just below that of Pico and Benivieni. A small error, but one that makes me wonder if the author ever bothered to visit the church of S. Marco in Florence to view these tombs.Historians often complain that art historians over-simplify history or get their historical facts wrong, but in this book the situation is reversed. The author tries to make use of works of art to support his contentions about the “ugliness” of the Renaissance era, but he commits a bunch of errors concerning works of art, some minor but several of them really egregious.Lee identifies the clothed figure of a woman rushing forward with a cloak to cover the naked figure of Venus in Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” as “Horae, goddess of the seasons.” There’s no such goddess. “Horae” is a Greek plural that means hours of the day or seasons of the year; the clothed woman is sometimes identified by art historians as one of the Horae, but her exact identity remains uncertain.The author claims that Michelozzo “re-designed” the Medici Palace for Cosimo de’ Medici, when in fact Michelozzo built the palace from the ground up, on a site where Cosimo had spent years having pre-existing structures demolished. Lee also claims that Renaissance palaces were “intended to house a single nucleated family.” Nucleated? Few Renaissance families were nuclear, but were more often extended clans with several generations living under one roof, sometimes with the addition of adult brothers of the paterfamilias and their families, as well as illegitimate children, the orphaned children of relatives or friends and perhaps some miscellaneous other relations.The author commits two gross art historical errors.In writing about the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, he claims that the patron of Filippino Lippi (the artist who completed the decoration of the chapel in the 1480s) was Felice di Michele Brancacci. But that particular Brancacci was the original patron of the project, the man who commissioned Masaccio and Masolino to decorate the chapel in the 1420s. Felice had died in exile long before Filippino Lippi ever set foot in the chapel. There’s a remote possibility that the later patron bore the same name as the earlier one, but this looks like a major error to me.Even more serious, the author mixes up the Villa Farnesina in Rome with the Palazzo Farnese in the same city. One is a smallish villa of the early 1500s on what used to be the outskirts of Rome, filled with intimate and romantic frescoes by Raphael and his assistants. The other is a huge, imposing palazzo of the mid-1500s that lords it over its own piazza on the opposite side of the Tiber, and is filled with grandiose decorations glorifying the Farnese family. Granted, the names are similar, but even an undergrad in a class on Italian Renaissance art would be able to distinguish them.What’s happened to the practice of publishers sending out book manuscripts to expert external readers prior to publication? Any competent historian or art historian could have caught these exaggerations and errors and saved the author the embarrassment of revealing his carelessness and/or lack of expertise.
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The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, by Alexander Lee
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