The most famous improvised lines in the history of the movies are the ones Orson Welles came up with while playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949): “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.”
That statement should have been the epigraph for this somewhat overheated but illuminating book on the dark side of the Renaissance. Alexander Lee, a lecturer in early modern history at Oxford, has written the book to dispel the conventional view that the Renaissance was all ethereal beauty and high-minded cultural aspiration. The problem is that nobody holds the conventional view. In much of the book, he sounds less like Welles than Claude Rains in Casablanca—he’s shocked, shocked, to discover that assorted vices and felonies were occurring on the premises. Actually, he’s just trying to goad his readers into a state of shock: The great cultural achievements of the period “coexisted with dark, dirty, even diabolical realities,” he whispers in our ears in the introduction, like a tout in front of a carnival sideshow. At the end, he makes the same point: “Far from being an age of unalloyed wonder, it was a period of sex, scandal, and suffering.”
It would be an unalloyed wonder if Lee could actually find someone who had been under the impression that Renaissance Italy, notoriously dominated by cutthroat clans and tyrants who were connoisseurs of poisons as much as paintings, was an age of unalloyed goodness or unalloyed anything. The chiaroscuro wasn’t confined to the paintings. The whole place was, as Welles pointed out, a blend of light and appalling dark. A century ago, it’s true, T. S. Eliot’s proper ladies (In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo) were not going to be talking of the great artist’s fistfights, his scatological sketches, his rarely changed, disheveled, smelly clothes, or his affairs with both sexes—all recounted in meticulous detail by Lee. Maybe they would have been surprised to hear that the Renaissance wasn’t all sweetness and light. Today, they’d be watching The Borgias on TV.
But once you’ve discounted Lee’s premise (or maybe just his selling point) you will find this book absorbing and, yes, mildly shocking. Even if you’ve read Vasari’s gossipy 16th-century Lives of the Artists (an obvious source here) or Benvenuto Cellini’s once-scandalous Autobiography, you will be taken farther into the pungent back alleys of the period than most historians will take you.
The Ugly Renaissance begins by letting us see Florence through the eyes of Michelangelo circa 1491, when the artist, only 16 but already a favorite of the ruling Medici, had just had his nose broken in the Brancacci Chapel—an envious fellow teenage artist having clocked him during some argument over the Masaccio frescoes there. We follow him on an imaginary walk through the wide paved streets and handsome squares lined with magnificent new palaces, civic buildings, churches, and crowded markets, evidence that Florence, with its population of 59,000 and its flourishing banking and weaving industries, had become one of the largest cities in Europe and the most prosperous. But then we get to the grittier districts, where narrow, muddy lanes carry a rank odor of garbage and animal and human excrement, while prostitutes and deformed beggars jostle with one another for space at every corner. The contrasts were all the more dramatic for their proximity. Rich and poor often lived literally on top of one another. Even the imposing palazzo of one of the Medici had “six little shops” on the ground floor that were rented out to prostitutes.
Political unrest and violence were always just around the corner. There were frequent bloody conspiracies against the Medici, but then their rule under Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent was little more than government by conspiracy, punctuated by poisonings. And all respectable Florentine families had to keep weapons by the door to hold off the frequent rampaging mobs.
Rome, where Michelangelo ended up, could be even more dangerous; robbery and rape were routine. And the Renaissance popes, culminating in the ruthless Borgia pope Alexander VI, had the sprawling Papal States to rule. They became virtually indistinguishable from the other Italian petty despots, more interested in military prowess or in bestowing lucrative benefices on family members—including their own illegitimate kids—or in display, luxury, and what H. L. Mencken used to call non-Euclidean sex than in religion.
Lee devotes a chapter to the most thuggish of the Renaissance scoundrels, the mercenary soldiers known as condottieri, who ended up seizing power in several cities, at which point they usually became, as we would say today, “supporters of the arts.” Lee repeatedly compares them to Mafia consiglieri. There was, for instance, Sigismondo Malatesta (“the Wolf of Rimini”), who put that city-state—now a charmingly sleepy, out-of-the-way little town near the Adriatic—on the Renaissance map through outstanding depravity: general mayhem, the probable poisoning of two wives, alleged incest with his daughters. But he also commissioned a church designed by the archetypal Renaissance Man, Leon Battista Alberti, and frescoes by the master of austere quietude, Piero della Francesca.
The most seductive chapter, naturally, is the one on sex; it could have been subtitled “The Real Housewives of Florence.” The reader ends up thinking that the “sexual revolution” happened 500 years earlier than it’s usually dated. Lust was in the Renaissance air: It pervaded the art and it crossed class and ecclesiastical lines, freely encompassing both sexes, same sexes, and seemingly every momentary opportunity. Lee detours into intellectual and literary history to trace the transition from the ideal of chaste love and otherworldly aspiration maintained by Dante and Petrarch to the more naturalistic, hedonistic attitudes, sometimes fortified by the new Neo-platonic philosophers and their theories of beauty, which they could quickly put into practice. Pico della Mirandola, perhaps the most brilliant of them, was poisoned after an affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cousins.
But Lee’s chapter on Renaissance prejudice seems to have been written with a wary eye on his more doctrinaire postcolonialist colleagues. It’s dense with markers of political self-congratulation such as “alterity” and “Islamophobia.” His account actually shows the Italians of the time to have been, as usual, a study in stark contrasts: They could be tolerant and curious; they could revert to hostile stereotypes. Islam drew the most consistent antagonism, bolstered by the polemics of humanist scholars as well as the proclamations of popes. But in 1480, the town of Otranto, near Naples, had been conquered by Ottoman Turkish forces who beheaded 800 citizens (including women and children) for refusing to convert to Islam, sawed the presiding bishop in half, and enslaved thousands of others; a planned march on Rome was averted only by the sudden death of the sultan. Therefore, a little phobia where Islam was concerned seems appropriate.
Alexander Lee isn’t a writer to be savored for style, like earlier generations of British historians, and I finally quit noticing phrases like “never-ending whirl of activity,” “truly breathtaking series of paintings,” and “everyone who was anyone,” plus clumsy constructions like “however tempting it may be to succumb to the temptation. . .” But if his own prose is artless, at least he never throws the art of the Renaissance out with the bathwater. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the academic-industrial complex, Lee doesn’t tar and feather artists for being alive at the wrong time, against a backdrop of original Western sin. On the contrary, he offers his own version of the moral paradox Orson Welles seized on: “It would have been all but impossible for the greatest monuments of the Renaissance to have come into being had its foremost artists, writers, and philosophers not been mired in every kind of depravity and degradation.”
Great art, as Welles noticed, rarely appears in peaceful, pastoral societies, whether Switzerland, Lapland, or some tropical island paradise. It tends to turn up in wealthy, multifaceted, and tumultuous urban societies such as 15th-century northern Italy. Their usual accompaniment of high ambition, greed, steep social hierarchies, crimes of passion and calculation, and political and amorous intrigues provide either the subject matter for the art or the motivation to escape and transcend them through form, color, and harmony.
Great art is alchemy, extracting sublimity out of dark, devious realities. And as Lee points out, we could use some of that ourselves.
Lawrence Klepp is a writer in New York.
