The Italian Renaissance (46 page)

The natural changes in worldly affairs make poverty succeed riches … the man who first acquires a fortune takes a greater care of it, having known how to make his money, he also knows how to keep it … his heirs are less attached to a fortune they have made no effort to acquire. They have been brought up to riches and have never learned the art of earning them. Is it any wonder that they let it slip through their fingers?

Guicciardini,
Maxims and Reflections
, no. 33

T
he focus of this book has been the description and analysis of social and cultural ‘structures’ – that is, factors which remain fairly constant over a century or two. They were not static, but it makes for clarity to treat them as if they were. Artistic, ideological, political and economic factors have so far been treated in relative isolation. Such a procedure has its advantages if the aim is to analyse as well as describe. It is obvious, however, that what contemporaries experienced was the combination or conjuncture of all these factors, and that this conjuncture was constantly changing. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to draw together the themes of different sections and to concentrate on the historian’s traditional business – the study of change over time.

It is in practice useful to distinguish different kinds of change, as Braudel did in his famous study of the Mediterranean.
¹
There is short-term change, the time of events, of which contemporaries are well aware, and there is long-term change, almost impossible to notice at the time but visible to historical hindsight. There are times when it is useful to distinguish the long term from the very long term, as Braudel does, but not in the case of a study concerned, as this one is, with a mere two centuries.

In the
study of short-term changes, a useful and attractive concept is that of ‘generation’. The concept is attractive because it seems to grow out of experience, that of identifying oneself with one group and distancing oneself from others. It helps in finding links between the history of events and the history of structures, the area where Braudel’s study is at its weakest. The concept of generation would seem to be particularly useful in the case of a group as self-conscious as the artists and writers of the Renaissance. It was in fact when discussing Mannerism that the art historian Walter Friedländer formulated his ‘grandfather law’, arguing that ‘A generation with deliberate disregard for the views and feelings of the generation of its fathers and direct teachers skips back to the preceding period and takes up the very tendencies against which its fathers had so zealously struggled, albeit in a new sense.’
²

It is often said that a generation lasts about thirty years, the period between maturity and retirement. However, the average length of adult life varies over time, and so does the age distance between parents and children.
³
In any case, generations are not objective facts; they are cultural constructs. As in the case of social classes, the consciousness of belonging to a generation is a crucial part of the experience. Characteristic of generations as of social classes is what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called ‘a common location in the social and historical process’, which encourages certain kinds of behaviour and inhibits others.
⁴

If generation-consciousness is created by the historical process itself, generations will not be equally long or divided equally sharply from their predecessors. Momentous events are likely to bind the members of an age-group together more closely than is normal. The Spanish writers known as the ‘generation of 1898’, for example, from Miguel de Unamuno to José Ortega y Gasset, were bound together by the realization, following the loss of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, that Spain was no longer a great power.
⁵
It may well be that such acute generation-consciousness is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon (the result of accelerating political, social and cultural change after 1789), a phenomenon that we must beware of projecting onto an earlier past. It is, however, at least worth attempting to see whether major events in Renaissance Italy made certain age-groups aware
of their common location in history, and whether this awareness affected the arts.

The importance of political events in the early fifteenth century in creating a generation has been emphasized by a number of scholars, notably Hans Baron (above, p. 41), in his study of what he calls the ‘crisis of the early Italian Renaissance’.
⁶
Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan from 1395 to 1402, built up an empire by seizing Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and then Pisa, Perugia, Siena and Bologna. The Florentines, virtually encircled, might well have thought that their turn was next. However, they were able to defend themselves until the duke was carried off by the plague.