Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Extract

The idea that certain periods and certain countries were outstanding in their contribution to civilization is as old as the writing of literary and art history. ‘All ages have produced heroes and politicians’, wrote Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV; ‘all peoples have experienced revolutions: all histories are practically equal for him who does not want to remember anything but facts. But whoever thinks and, what is rarer still, whoever has good taste, will count only four centuries in the history of the world.’ According to Voltaire, one needed to remember only the Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Rome of Caesar and Augustus, Medicean Italy, and France in the century of Louis XIV. Almost two hundred years earlier, Vasari had pointed to the same phenomenon in Italy. In the introduction to his Life of Michelangelo he says that God in his mercy had shown pity on the vain endeavours of man by sending down to earth a spirit who could work perfection in every art and profession, in painting, sculpture and architecture, no less than in moral philosophy and poetry. And since Florence was more deserving of this grace than all other cities, because of the great and marvellous achievements of Cimabue and Giotto, of Donatello, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, he wanted ‘to crown the perfection merited by all these achievements through one of her citizens’.