The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance
by Catherine Fletcher Bodley Head, 432 pages, £25
In The Third Man (1949), Graham Greene’s enigmatic anti-hero Harry Lime famously exclaimed that “in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Tyranny, violence and warfare have always been understood as driving the artistic creativity of the European Renaissance ever since the term was first used by 19th-century intellectuals Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt.
It is therefore rather surprising to learn that Catherine Fletcher’s book is billed as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance” that tries to revise the “focus on the genius and glory at the expense of the atrocities”. This approach – of using ‘history from below’ to address individuals including women, workers, slaves and others – has been ongoing since the 1970s at least, and much (though not all) of it is acknowledged in Fletcher’s footnotes.
The result is a book that cannot quite decide whether it is offering a polemic ‘decolonising’ of the traditional ideal of the Renaissance, or a sketch of events that took place in the Italian peninsula between 1492 and 1571. Even this date range is up for debate. It leaves out all but eight years of the Quattrocento, or 15th century, and with it so much of the art, philosophy and politics that defines the Italian Renaissance. And it ends with the battle of Lepanto, by which time the power of the Italian peninsula had been decisively eclipsed.
Fletcher’s impulse to acknowledge the stories and characters not usually associated with the Italian Renaissance is commendable, but if anything, her account does not go far enough. We hear stories of women as rulers, writers and courtesans, and the role of Venice’s Jewish ghetto in financing Italian trade, the development of handguns and even pornography. Yet this material sits uneasily alongside what is otherwise a standard retelling of the elite grand narrative of emperors and popes, wars, treaties and great art. Despite being promised detailed accounts of sex workers, farmers and citizens who lived
We hear stories of women rulers, the role of Venice’s Jewish ghetto in
PCPEKPI +VCNKCP VTCFG VJG FGXGNQROGPV QH JCPFIWPU CPF GXGP RQTPQITCRJ[ the Renaissance every day, they only appear in passing. Fletcher is understandably keen to point to the ‘darker side’ of the Renaissance (a phrase invented by Walter Mignolo 25 years ago but not mentioned by Fletcher, even in chapters on the impact of the New World discoveries), but the results are often mixed. The man she believes commissioned Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was only “very likely” to have been a slave trader. Although the chapters on what is called “the battlefield of culture” show how patronage shaped much of the great art of the period, new light is rarely cast on Leonardo or Titian beyond a retelling of the bare outlines of their lives and careers.
Fletcher previously wrote a terrific book on Alessandro de’ Medici, The Black Prince of Florence, but the subject and scale of this new book has sadly defeated her.
She should not feel too bad: many of us have tried but failed to capture the ambivalent spirit of the Italian Renaissance.
Jerry Brotton’s books include (Oxford, 2006)