Literary Sources II

Renaissance Research Project HI274Powerpoint is on the website

“In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness … lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossessions, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air…man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such.” [Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy]

Causes?

• Literacy, record-keeping, printing• Humanism? Shifting social terrain?

Confession? Black Death? Religious division?

Chronicles

• Patriotism and civic pride• Giovanni Villani (c. 1276-1348) • Chronological• Statistics • Lack of narrative & literary style• vernacular • Little interest in causation• Myths and legends

Villani: “it seems fitting to mention other important features of our city so that our successors in later times can be aware of any rise or decline in the condition and power of our city, and so that the wise and worthy citizens who rule in future times can advance its condition and power through the record and example of this chronicle”

Venetian Chronicles

• Written by patricians

• Founding of the city

• Progress of doges

• Chronicle of Doge Andrea

Dandolo (1306-54)

The Diary of Marin Sanudo (1466-36)

• 40,000 pages, 1496-1533

• Political information• Venetian dialect• Print, manuscript and

oral sources• Official diarist but not

historian

Broadsheet of a monstrous birth in Florence, pasted into Sanudo’s diary

Histories

• Leonardo Bruni (c.1370-1444), History of the Florentine People

• Classical models like Livy• More coherent narrative• Elegant literary genre in

Latin• Examples, esp. of oratory• Use of sources

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), author of a History of Venice

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540)

Ricordanze

• Domestic diaries/account books

• Property; Birth, deaths, marriages; Political offices

• Intertwining of public and private

• Buonaccorso Pitti (1354-1432) and Gregorio Dati (1362-1435)

• Family identity and audienceDomenico Ghirlandaio, A Grandfather and his grandson (c. 1490)

• Grubb: “Why Venetians didn’t keep ricordanze”?

• Less need for legitimacy• More stable political system

Paolo Veronese, A father and son (C16th)

Biographies

• Group biographies• Saints’ lives• ancient models: Plutarch (ca. 46-120AD) and

Suetonius (ca. 69-122AD)• Petrarch and Boccaccio: Lives of Famous Men

(and Women)

Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-98), Lives of Illustrious Men

“As it chanced that I myself am of this

same age, and that from time to time

I have met many illustrious men,

whom I have come to know well, I

have set down a record of these in the

form of a short commentary to

preserve their memory … that their

fame may not perish”

Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (first

published 1550; expanded in 1568)

Autobiographies

• Petrarch (1304-74): The Secret, Letter to Posterity

• Proliferation of autobiography (see Amelang)

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71), My Life

• “All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand”

• An example of “Renaissance Self-Fashioning”? (see Greenblatt)

Cellini, Perseus, 1554