This picture shows three of Florence’s major landmarks: the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge covered with jewelry stores (at the left); the Palazzo Vecchio, town hall (center); and the famous Il Duomo, S. Maria del Fiore (on the right). Il Duomo was completed in 1468; it is still the largest masonry dome in the world.
The early Renaissance floresced in Florence, where peace and prosperity, good governance (by the standards of the time) and secular classicism brought about a humanism that transformed the traditional culture. What world did the creators of the city’s great art live in?
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(Florence) was a highly competitive world, one whose standard of excellence was the long shadow of antiquity….Vasari, the mid-sixteenth-century biographer of the artists, attributed their extraordinary successes to industriousness and inventiveness, a desire for free inquiry and a passion for fame.
Glenn M. Andres, The Art of
Florence (1988) |
If you visit, some research beyond the guidebooks is well worthwhile.
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Florence should be taken on its own terms. But, we cannot resist a social science generalization on culture and democracy. In his noted study of democracy in Italy, Robert D. Putnam (1993) writes, “ The pre-eminent social issue of the Middle Ages, the sine qua non for all progress, was public order. Theft and plunder were common. Protection and refuge might be provided, as in the Norman kingdom, by an autocratic sovereign or the strongest local baron. Or security could be sought instead through interweaving pacts of mutual assistance among rough equals, the more complex strategy followed in the communal (elective) republics (mainly Florence *, Bologna, Venice, and Genoa by the 1300s).”
This pattern of social cooperation, allowing networks, associations **, and solidarities beyond the bonds of kinship, resulted in the mobilization of capital that enabled Florence to prosper as a major banking center, financing long-distance trade. “In this rich civic soil sprouted numerous innovations in business practice, which helped generate the affluence, public and private, of Renaissance Florence and her neighbors. (Putnam, 1993)” Capitalism grew out of the republican culture.
In the modern world, the process is the reverse, where the rationalities of economic development influence the local culture. But culture always matters. As Ronald Inglehart writes (Harrison and Huntington, 2000), “ (Economic) Development is linked with…predictable changes away from absolute social norms, toward increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and postmodern values…But culture is path dependent. The fact that a society was historically Protestant or Orthodox or Islamic or Confucian gives rise to cultural zones with highly distinctive value systems that persist…Distinctive cultural zones exist and they have major social and political consequences. ”
Particularly in politics, culture matters.
* This website is part of a rete civica, a civic network.
** The construction of Il Duomo was first financed by a common tax and then taken over by the Wool Merchants’ Guild.