Money Into Marble: How Trade, Patronage, and the Classics Made the Renaissance

The idea

The exam gives the Renaissance one band with the Reformation, and the anchor's chapter explains the first half as a chain from money to marble. Start with why Italy: no Hundred Years' War, popes away at Avignon, twenty-three cities over twenty thousand people, and a place at the center of trade between Europe and the Middle East. Add the method: Italians learned double-entry bookkeeping, partnerships, bills of exchange and Arabic numerals from the Arab world, defied the usury ban, and turned wool into cloth and cloth into gold. Add the politics: weak feudalism let cities rule themselves under the popoli grossi, honor and vendetta gave way to competition by commission, and the Peace of Lodi in fourteen fifty-four gave forty years of quiet, with Milan a despotism, Venice a merchant oligarchy, and Florence a republic run by the Medici. Now the conversion. Banking wealth became patronage, patronage became public art, and art meant the classics reborn: Petrarch's Cicero, Dante's Virgil, humanist schools teaching rhetoric and history for civic life, the Renaissance man's virtues beside his piety. Brunelleschi raised the dome in fourteen thirty-six and reinvented perspective; Botticelli painted the Medici as Magi and Venus from the sea; Leonardo drew what he dissected; Michelangelo carved David and painted a pope's ceiling and became a genius instead of an artisan. Print, from Mainz in fourteen fifty-five, carried it all, and made censorship necessary. Then the chain crossed the Alps: Erasmus corrected the Bible, More imagined Utopia, Dürer engraved, and humanist education, carried by bureaucrats and wars, entrenched itself in every court by the sixteenth century. Machiavelli, watching the French invade in fourteen ninety-four, wrote down what power had become.