ancient cities

654 Renaissance City
For fourteenth- through sixteenth-century
humanists, the Renaissance city was more than
simply a classical revival of Greek and Roman
architectural styles, cast in the new one-point perspective
space; it was an embodiment of civic virtues,
ideals of public life, of good government, a
“refoundation” of city life itself. Modern economic
historians recognized that the Renaissance city of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was based on
the commercial revolution (i.e., revival of trade,
cities, merchant-class values) in Europe and the
Mediterranean world from the tenth and eleventh
centuries. The crisis of the fourteenth century began
with bank failures during the Hundred Years’ War
between England and France in the 1330s, followed
by the devastating Black Death (bubonic
plague), which swept through Europe during the
summer of 1348, almost halving its population.
What once brought wealth and splendor along the
caravan silk and maritime spice routes from China,
Malaysia, and India, the source of Eurasian luxury
trade and urban revival, now brought pandemic
apocalypse from Asia, arriving in the West on trading
Genoese galleons from the Black Sea, described
in the macabre opening pages of Boccaccio’s
Decamerone of Florentine pestilence and suburban
retreat to redemptive paradisal cloister garden for
pious and lustful storytelling.
Renaissance World System
Salutati’s humanist tribute to Florence of 1403 was
as much about the Renaissance city as a revival of
the late medieval city as the ancient city, part of a
much larger global development. What Pirenne
and Braudel called the Roman Mediterranean lake
(mare nostrum, a sea of cultural interchange rather
than barrier or border), more recent economic historians
have envisioned as part of a global history
of cultural interchange between Asia and the
Mediterranean world, with Islamic trade and science
as crucial intermediaries in this worldwide
transformation. The Renaissance city of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries played a crucial
role in a worldwide network of imperial trading
cities and cultural–economic–political–religious
interchange.
The Renaissance city began the modern world
in global relations, an epic urban plotting of mathematical
grid on geographical natural space, a
nascent panoptic global space. The Renaissance
Age of Discovery began our modern global society,
and the Renaissance city was pivotal to this cultural
urban redefinition of space and time. In Italy,
the classic touchstone for this Renaissance (i.e.,
early modern) redefinition of space in the European
tradition, there were feudal courts and commercial
republics, following Aristotle’s (Politics, Bk. 3)
classic distinction between monarchy, oligarchy,
and demos (rule of the people). Duke Federico da
Montefeltro and Duchess Battista Sforza ruled
Urbino, “jewel of Renaissance courts,” from their
medieval to Renaissance church and palace complex
on the hill.
Dynastic portraits by Flemish court artist Joos
van Gent and Italian artist–perspective theorist
Piero della Francesca celebrated the duke and
duchess as Roman imperial (emblematic) profile
portraits, remote, facing each other, in front of a
panoramic framed window view landscape or
within courtly artistic–scientific “cabinets of wonder,”
exempla of virtue and triumph over world.
The Palazzo Ducale represented the two interpenetrating
faces, public and private, of the Renaissance
prince, celebrated by Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Life
of Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1480s) through
Machiavelli’s The Prince of 1513 and Castiglione’s
The Courtier of 1528, a humanist portrait dialogue
on princely virtues and courtly manners,
governed embodiments in the politics of appearance,
set in Urbino of the early sixteenth century—
theater for European early modern. Prince, palace,
city, and landscape became one and the same,
while projected urban views balanced classical and
Christian monuments and civic virtues in ideal
one-point perspective space, imagined utopian
Renaissance city types. The Renaissance made the
state a work of art, a prelude to the early modern
state; and the Renaissance city imagined this art of
governing.
In Renaissance Florence, the city became a
work of art through humanist description and
visual representation. The Florentine goldsmith,
sculptor, and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi,
painted two demonstration panels about 1419,
setting out the new one-point perspective system
of spatial representation and panoptic control
over and within the medieval city, with a central
vanishing point, receding orthogonal, and transversal
lines of spatial diminution and proportional