When I first began studying Renaissance history, almost two decades ago, I did so in part because I wanted a change from the world of present-day politics. I always found parallels, of course: I would laugh over sixteenth-century letters that unwittingly foreshadowed the voices of politicians I knew, but I was firm in my mind that the past was a foreign country. When I made jokes comparing those supranational centres of Europe - fifteenth-century Rome and twenty-first century Brussels - they got a laugh but I was sure I was being flippant. As I went on, however, the past seemed to become less foreign. I would read 'tech revolution' stories and think about the history of printing; read about the election of Pope Francis and think about the global sixteenth-century Catholic Church; read about the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and think about the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain. This is not to say that nothing has changed: as we will see, there are many differences between that society and our own. But precisely because the legacy of this Renaissance (or Age of Reform, or Age of Exploration, if we prefer) has become so important in Western culture, in defining who 'we' are (and who 'we' are not), it is worth getting to know it better.
This is all the more important because the popular story of the Renaissance - like many versions of modern Western history - tends to focus on the genius and the glory at the expense of the atrocities. Machiavelli's ideas about power, for example, become a set of timeless aphorisms rather than emerging, as in fact they did, from a specific setting. The fact that all these people coexisted with the early European voyages to the Americas, to which some of them had personal connections, and that Italians provided personnel, finance and write-ups of the subsequent colonisation, is not unknown. The bloody side of the Renaissance has always been part of the period's fascination. It is more often told, however, in the fashion of TV's 'The Borgias' as the glamorous, sexy violence of the rich-and-famous murdering one another in pursuit of power (the viewer consoling herself that most of them deserve their fate), and far less the violence of war, exile, and colonisation, nor yet domestic abuse. This is the narrative that makes the Medici a family of mafia godfathers, and it is about as connected to the reality of Florence in the sixteenth-century as gangster movies are to actual life in a town run by organised crime today. I have no objection to people enjoying a bloody tale of vendetta: I’ve told the gory story of the Baglioni wedding in Perugia in 1500 to tour groups myself. Yet too much of this masks the brutal realities beyond Renaissance works of art. Take the 'Mona Lisa': Lisa Gherardini, the woman of the mysterious smile, was married to a slave-trader. One possible model for the 'Venus of Urbino' - Angela Zaffetta - was gang-raped. The Florentine Republic that commissioned and was symbolised by Michelangelo's 'David' came to a brutal end with a sack of 'unheard-of cruelty' in which thousands of men were massacred in just a few hours.
As I was finishing this book in March 2019, forty-nine people were killed in a gun attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The perpetrator, a right-wing extremist, posted on social media numerous precedents for his actions, including notable Christian victories against Muslim forces. One was the 1571 Battle of Lepranto, the subject of my final chapter. Sixteenth-century history has rarely been so explicitly appropriated by the far-right as have, say, the Crusades or the myth of the all-white medieval West. More commonly, Renaissance history has played a more subtle, if no less pernicious role, the mythologies of its great men reinforcing ideas about European and Christian and white superiority without ever being so vulgar as to say outright. That is not to say it is wrong to appreciate or enjoy the artistic innovation of sixteenth-century Europe: there is plenty to wonder at. And by exploring how people of this world thought about their own media revolution, or considered questions of gender and sexuality, or responded to changing weapons technology, we can better understand our own world too, and the ways in which then as now brilliant cultural innovation can exist alongside - indeed, is often intertwined with - all manner of atrocity.
- The introduction of Catherine Fletcher’s book The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance
