In the 400s, a phenomenon occurred in Italy that is still partially inexplicable today: an explosion of genius.
Try to think of a scientist, architect, painter, poet, inventor and mathematician of the early Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci? No, Leon Battista Alberti. And now think of an architect, painter, sculptor of the same era. Michelangelo? No, Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The two examples, chosen from among those many multifaceted minds who lived more than 500 years ago, demonstrate very well how the Leonardoian genius, in many ways elusive, is really only the tip of the iceberg of an era marked by the flowering of “multifaceted geniuses”.
UNIVERSAL MAN
Humanism and the Renaissance, that is to say the years that ran from the middle of the fourteenth century and throughout the following century, were a continuous explosion of “fireworks” of the mind, the fruit of the contribution of a veritable army of talents able to play simultaneously – and with often extraordinary results – on the table of the game of knowledge. Homo universalis, prepared in every field of knowledge and heir to that figure that the ancient Greeks called polymathes (“he who has learned much”), did not arise by chance: it was the ideal culmination of a vision of the world that, actualizing the words of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, saw man as the “unit of measurement of everything”, thus opposing a Middle Ages where everything revolved around God. In “The Book of the Courtesan,” Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529) even wrote a list of rules (among which was learning the art of conversation) to aspire to this privileged status.
Beyond the “recipes of genius”, the extraordinary boom of superior intellects in those 150 years of Italian history is difficult to explain. An enigma that even people of the era raised questions about. For example, Giorgio Vasari, artist and art historian who first used the term Renaissance for his time. In his book “Lives” he takes up the theory of “air” from the Greek Hippocrates, to explain that spring of minds with “air”, or more precisely climate and atmosphere.
Some modern explanations find the reason in the faster spread of information favored by the techniques of the Gutenberg printing press (1450); others in the period of relative political calm that followed the Peace of Lodi of 1454 between Milan and Venice, after a half-century of war; still others find the reason in secular thought and the re-dimensioned “leadership” of the Church (introduced into crisis by Lorenzo Vallas, who in 1440 demonstrated with the instruments of the nascent philology that the Donation of Constantine, which was the foundation of the supremacy of Rome over other churches, was in fact false). Others found the explanation in the rapid development of Italian cities.
However, if you look closely, none of these explanations are exhaustive: otherwise it would be difficult to understand why revolutions such as capitalism, secularization and the internet, along with relative peace, have not produced an equally outstanding series of geniuses in our era. In fact, historians explain, they were contributing causes, but none of them were sufficient to explain alone that flowering of brilliant intellects. Not only that. There are also less obvious, but perhaps more decisive, causes. For example, the spread of design, which paved the way for detailed designs of palaces and churches, but also extraordinary machines for the time like those of Leonardo, which were not the only ones.
According to Paolo Aldo Rossi, professor of the history of scientific thought at the University of Genoa, the “widespread genius” of the 400s also had a less noble and almost invisible cause: the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carrier of the black plague that between 1347 and 1352 brought about the death of more than a third of the population of the Old Continent (around 25 million people). “In Italy alone, it is estimated that around 100 artists and intellectuals died,” explains Rossi. “The population of Florence, for example, was halved. This led to a great renewal of the workshop in the 100 years that followed, with young artists moving from one laboratory to another and often replacing their teachers, in a climate of exchange and greater freedom of expression compared to the past.”
In this fertile ground the seeds of the rediscovery of classical texts were sown. Thanks to scholars like the Tuscan Poggio Bracciolini, texts that were considered lost finally emerged from the “prison” of monastery libraries. Almost 1500 years later, the architectural theories of Vitruvius and the ideas of Cicero, along with those of Greek philosophers, were dusted off. Research was financed by the families of the new rich, such as the Medici. Even a defeat, such as the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, was transformed into a golden opportunity: thanks to the immigration to the West of learned Byzantines fleeing the Ottomans, the first works translated from Greek arrived in Italy. Bota.al
THE PAGANS LIVED
It was not a matter of mere revision or imitation. “The return to classicism was only the starting point for formulating a new language, new artistic expressions, a new conception of man and nature,” explains Rossi. “One only needs to think of the pagan elements present in Botticelli’s painting, or the renaissance of mathematics spurred by the translation of Greek treatises from the Alexandrian era. This was the true innovation of the era, more than Arab science and culture, whose astronomical and philosophical studies had already been circulating since the Middle Ages.
Another hallmark of Renaissance people was eclecticism: Leonardo and others were interested in everything, exploring the world by jumping from one field of knowledge to another. This was also possible only at that particular moment, when modern science, divided into disciplines, did not yet exist.
“The Renaissance was a pre-scientific environment. Only the first signs of the ‘revolution’ that erupted in the 1600s with Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Newton had appeared”, explains Rossi. “Leonardo himself has sometimes been overrated as an engineer: many of his findings were very embryonic and some of his studies (those on optics for example) showed a kind of fear”. In other words, the virgin territory was very large and, as a result, the explorer was able to discover a lot, but without methods.
FREE
The (positive) flip side of the coin was the behavior driven by a curiosity towards everything, that total openness that stimulates experimentation in all directions. In a figure like Girolamo Cardano we find, for example, the doctor who first described typhoid fever, the mathematician who advanced algebra, and the engineer united. “Today’s hyper-specialized science is tied to specific market results, while that of that time was free: the mathematician or astronomer developed their theories without much interest in their practical application. In the same way, the engineer and the architect carried out speculative research and studies, although they knew that in order to make a living they had to design fortifications and war machines.” The modern cliché of the single-minded researcher was very far from the “forma mentis” of scientists who were often also painters, writers or poets, who were also lawyers, like Angelo Poliziano. “Leonardo wrote fairy tales and Michelangelo left very beautiful sonnets,” Rossi adds.
THE ARRIVAL OF WOMEN
The female contribution was also important. “Poets like Gaspara Stampa in the 500s and, at the end of the Renaissance, painters like Artemisia Gentileschi were highly valued for their knowledge, in addition to the art they produced,” the historian continues. “This common thread of the Renaissance, to tell the truth, goes back to the Middle Ages, an era considered dark, but when there were exceptions: the famous medical school of Salerno produced, at least since the XNUMXs, true professionals.”
ILLUMINATED SPONSORS
Even five centuries ago, science and culture could not have progressed much without money. Such an abundance of genius would not be explained without the figure of the patron, who in the years 400-500 also took on unique features. The prince-protector of the arts and sciences was first and foremost a politician and a powerful man. But, in many cases, also an intellectual willing to invest in the pursuit of knowledge and beauty. Dedication to a treatise on astronomy or the decoration of the city with statues and monuments were certainly demonstrations of dynastic supremacy and forms of propaganda. But not only that: the gentlemen of the Renaissance had to know and not just appear. For this reason, Florence itself became the greatest cultural pole of the time: the turning point came when Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici supported the study of ancient texts, because they really wanted to read the original works for which they paid to translate.
The court also changed style: a group of learned people, who loved to dine together listening to Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso or Angelo Poliziano while reading excerpts from their works, took the place of armed companions at the side of the warrior lord. “Culture was much less widespread than today, but its privileged patrons were swept up in an unparalleled enthusiasm,” explains Rossi. “In settings like the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Milan or Venice, this atmosphere prevailed.”
Even Rome and the religious environment seem to have accepted the centrality of man, and at the beginning of the 300th century Pope Pius II was a great humanist, while many of his successors were devoted to the arts. Of course, at that time Copernicus’ heliocentric theory was called heresy, but the fact that he was a religious man did not prevent Fra Luca Pacioli from laying the mathematical foundations of his secular studies on the “golden section”: the proportions of beauty were determined by numbers, taking human measurements as a model. “The image of Leonardo himself sneaking around the cemeteries at night, looking for corpses to open, contrary to religion, is a romantic legend: the Church tolerated this practice since the XNUMXs,” concludes Rossi.
So, was protection from princes and powerful people the decisive factor? Perhaps. And yet, for Vasari, the explosion of that boom was, and is, simple and more “humanistic”: “It is a habit of nature, when she makes a person excellent in a certain profession, she does not leave him alone, but at the same time, and next to him, she creates another, to make him a competitor.”