Florence, Medici-ruled

The Medici become the leading family of Florence and foster and inspire the birth of the Italian Renaissance, along with other families of Italy, such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, the Este of Ferrara, and the Gonzaga of Mantua.

Greatest artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Giotto, Donatello, Titian and Raphael produce inspired works—their paintwork is more realistic-looking than had been created by Medieval artists and their marble statues rival and sometimes surpass those of Classical Antiquity.

Humanist historian Leonardo Bruni also splits the history in the antiquity, Middle Ages and modern period.

The ideas and ideals of the Renaissance soon spread into Northern Europe, France, England and much of Europe.

In the meantime, the discovery of the Americas, the new routes to Asia discovered by the Portuguese and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, all factors that erode the traditional Italian dominance in trade with the East, cause a long economic decline in the peninsula.

Northern-central Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is divided into a number of warring city-states, the rest of the peninsula being occupied by the larger Papal States and the Kingdom of Sicily, referred to here as Naples.

Though many of these city-states are often formally subordinate to foreign rulers, as in the case of the Duchy of Milan, which is officially a constituent state of the mainly Germanic Holy Roman Empire, the city-states generally manage to maintain de facto independence from the foreign sovereigns that had seized Italian lands following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The strongest among these city-states gradually absorbs the surrounding territories, giving birth to the Signorie, regional states often led by merchant families that found local dynasties.

War between the city-states is endemic, and primarily fought by armies of mercenaries known as condottieri, bands of soldiers drawn from around Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, led largely by Italian captains.

Decades of fighting eventually see Florence, Milan and Venice emerge as the dominant players who agree to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, which sees relative calm brought to the region for the first time in centuries.

This peace will hold for the next forty years.

The Renaissance, a period of vigorous revival of the arts and culture, originates in Italy thanks to a number of factors, as the great wealth accumulated by merchant cities, the patronage of its dominant families, and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Conquest of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

The Italian Renaissance peaks in the mid-sixteenth century as foreign invasions plunge the region into the turmoil of the Italian Wars.

Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici has inherited both his wealth and his flair for business from his father Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici.

Exiled in 1433 by Rinaldo degli Albizzi for challenging the ruling oligarchy of Florence, the forty-five-year-old Cosimo returns in 1434 to greatly influence the government of Florence and to lead by example for the rest of his long life.

His time in exile has instilled in him the need to quash the factionalism that had resulted in his exile in the first place.

In order to do this, Cosimo, with the help of favorable priors in the Signoria, instigates a series of constitutional changes to secure his power through influence.

Although Cosimo will rarely hold office in Florence's highest magistracy, the priorate, he soon manages to transform the government into a veiled despotism by ensuring that only his followers are eligible for important offices.

At the same time, he oversees Medici interests in banking, trade, and industry.

Paolo Uccello, commissioned in 1436 to paint a posthumous equestrian monument of the famous English mercenary soldier Sir John Hawkwood for Florence Cathedral, creates an extraordinary fresco portraying a monumental stone statue; the pedestal is seen from below, but the horse and rider are seen from the side.

Florence’s Gothic cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is consecrated in 1436.

The ideal church type of the age is based on the centralized plan, admired by architects and theoreticians for its geometrical purity and clarity (and thus to heavenly order), and directly exemplified by Florentine sculptor-architect Filippo Brunelleschi's remarkable 1434 design for the first centrally planned church of the Renaissance, Florence’s vast (and still unfinished) Santa Maria degli Angeli (also called the Duomo of Florence): a domed octagon with eight radiating chapels.

His centralized plan, formed by a ring of eight piers, becomes the ideal among his Florentine contemporaries and his followers in Rome.

In 1436, he begins the church of Santo Spirito, using such traditional Italian Romanesque elements as a basilican plan, round arches, and a flat ceiling, but combines these with a new sense of proportion, the use of Corinthian columns, and a dome over the crossing of nave and transepts.

Italian polymath Leone Battista Alberti had moved in 1434 to Florence, becoming a member of the inner circle of humanists in Tuscany, among them the sculptor Donatello, and has gained recognition as an authority on art and classical literature.

He has become especially interested in the work of Brunelleschi, to whom he dedicates the Italian edition of Della pittura (On Painting), a treatise on the theory and technique of painting published in 1436, in which the author sets forth all that is currently known on the subject.

(Alberti had dedicated the 1435 Latin edition to Gian Francesco Gonzaga of Milan.)

Cosimo de Medici grants the Jews of Florence the first formal charter for money lending activities in 1437.

The wealthy Humanist Niccolò Niccoli is one of the chief figures in the company of learned men who have gathered around Cosimo de' Medici, and his intellectual quarrels with other noted Humanists have created a sensation in the learned world.

His collections of ancient art objects and library of manuscripts of classical works have helped to shape a taste for the antique.

He has copied and collated ancient manuscripts, correcting the texts, introducing divisions into chapters, and making tables of contents.

Many of the most valuable manuscripts in the Laurentian Library in Florence are by his hand, among them those of Lucretius and of twelve comedies of Plautus.

Niccoli's private library is the largest and best in Florence, and he also possesses a small but significant collection of ancient works of art, coins and medals.

He is also an accomplished calligrapher whose slightly inclined antica corsiva script has influenced the development of italic type.

He dies on February 3 of this year.

Donatello continues to explore the possibilities of the new shallow carving technique known as schiacciato (“flattened out”) in his marble reliefs of the 1420s and early 1430s.

The most highly developed of these are “The Ascension, with Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter,” which is so delicately carved that its full beauty can be seen only in a strongly raking light; and the “Feast of Herod” (1433–35), with its perspective background.

The large stucco roundels with scenes from the life of St. John the Evangelist (about 1434–37), below the dome of the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, show the same technique but with color added for better legibility at a distance.

Lorenzo Ghiberti has by this time cast the reliefs for the second pair of doors for the Florence Baptistery.

(The work so closely complements Alberti's theories in his pioneering 1435 “Treatise on Painting,” that scholars have proposed him as Ghiberti's inspiration.)

Alberti in this year creates the earliest known peep shows: the perspective views said to have been painted in transparent colors on glass and lighted from behind for various effects, from sunshine to moonlight.

Florentine painter Fra Filippo Lippi, also called Lippo Lippi, an orphan who was raised in a Carmelite monastery, had become a monk at the age of fifteen, but, finding religious life unsuitable, had left the Carmelite order in about 1431 at the age of twenty-five, later marrying Lucrezia Buti.

Like the late Masaccio (who may have been his teacher)—Lippi achieves a sense of grandeur in his earliest datable work, a “Madonna Enthroned” painted in 1437, by using monumental figures, heavy draperies, and lighting designed to heighten the sculptural effect.

The detailed domestic scenery in the background implies the influence of the Flemish masters; he may also have looked to the relief sculptures of Donatello and Ghiberti for inspiration.

Lippi's synthesis of these influences enables him to bring new ideas to painting.

Fra Angelico’s Cortona “Annunciation” panel, painted in 1432-38, is among the finest of is large number of early paintings (and one that will prove greatly influential).

The accomplished Florentine painter Domenico Veneziano, asking a member of the Medici family for commissions in a letter written in 1438, acclaims Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi as the two most important Italian painters of the day.

Domenico, who spends much of his working life in Florence, here executes a group of frescoes (now lost) with the assistance of Piero della Francesca.

Described by sixteenth-century writer Giorgio Vasari as kindly and pleasure-loving, Domenico’s painting has nothing in common with the style of the Venetian school, although his name implies Venetian origin.

Two graceful Madonnas are among his  few surviving works. (Domenico is believed by Vasari to be among the earliest painters to work in oils.)

Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia, who had matriculated in 1432 in the guild of workers in stone and wood, is already an established artist when he produces his first major work, the “Cantoria” or “Singing Gallery,” a series of relief panels executed in 1431-38 for the Cathedral of Florence.

The lively expression of the performing musicians, together with the classical serenity with which Luca imbues the reliefs, displays the artist’s individualistic style.

In the late 1430s, Luca begins to employ enameled terra cotta as a coloristic accessory to marble sculpture.

He may have developed this form of sculpture in response to Brunelleschi’s new architectural ideal, compensating for Brunelleschi's relative bareness of color with further ornamentation.

Plague forces the council at Ferrara to move to Florence on January 10, 1439, and is thus known as the Council of Ferrara-Florence.

Here, the Council affirms the so-called Peterine theory, according to which Jesus Christ conferred the position of primacy in the church upon Peter alone, thus grounding his successors' claim to jurisdictional primacy in the church.

After protracted and difficult discussion of their theological differences, the Greeks agree to accept the Filioque and also the Latin statements on purgatory, the Eucharist, and papal primacy.

Isidore of Kiev has attended the council, first in Ferrara, then in Florence, at which he is one of six Greek spokesmen.

Together with the Greek cardinal John Bessarion, he draws up the document of unification, Laetentur Caeli, under which the two churches are formally reunited on July 6, 1439, Constantinople agreeing to submit to the authority of Rome.

The Orthodox leaders will have trouble, however, winning approval from the clergy at home.

The council also negotiates reunion with several smaller eastern churches, such as the Armenian church, Nestorian church, Jacobite church, and Eastern Rite churches, and challenges the conciliar theory enunciated at the councils of Constance and Basel.

Cosimo de' Medici and Pope Eugene IV had requisitioned the decaying convent of San Marco in 1436 and invited the Dominicans to build and decorate a new monastery.

In collaboration with the architect Michelozzo, Fra Angelico and his assistants have frescoed numerous scenes from the life of Christ in the forty-four monks' dormitory cells and connecting corridors.

Angelico has designed each of these clearly drawn frescoes, such as the San Marco “Annunciation,” to enhance the contemplative, religious setting.

In the (now overcleaned) altarpiece for San Marco, painted by Angelico in 1438-39 and entitled “Madonna and Saints in a Sacred Conversation” (he has created the form called “Sacra Conversazione”), the artist employs natural light and Alberti's systematic perspective to produce a remarkable rendering of the human figure.

The versatile Alberti, better known as an architect, publishes a lengthy treatise, “On the Family,” written from 1433 to 1439; its wisdom and rationality mirror the abiding concern of Italian letters with social and ethical topics.

Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay, highly respected not only for his music but also for his learning, has attained influential appointments in the church, taking part in the Council of Basel as a delegate from Cambrai.

He had remained a member of the papal choir in Rome until 1434 when, because of a crisis in the finances of the papal choir, and to escape the turbulence and uncertainty during the struggle between the papacy and the Council of Basel, he had entered the service of Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy for a year.

In 1435 he was again in the service of the papal chapel, but this time it was in Florence.

In 1436, Dufay had composed the festive motet Nuper rosarum flores, one of his most famous compositions, which is sung at the dedication of Brunelleschi's dome of the cathedral in Florence, where Eugenius lives in exile.

During this period Dufay also begins his long association with the d'Este family in Ferrara, some of the most important musical patrons of the Renaissance, and with which he probably had become acquainted during the days of his association with the Malatesta family; Rimini and Ferrara are not only geographically close, but the two families are related by marriage, and Dufay composes at least one ballade for Niccolò III, Marquis of Ferrara.

In 1437, Dufay had visited the town.

The struggle between the papacy and the rump Council of Basel has continued: when the rump council had suspended Eugenius, he had excommunicated its members.

The council, with only seven bishops present, had declared Eugenius deposed and in 1439 elects as his successor a layman, Duke Amadeus himself, who takes the name Pope Felix V.

Guillaume Dufay Returns to Cambrai (1439)

By late 1439, the renowned Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay, sensing the instability posed by the intensifying papal conflicts in Italy, decided to leave his prestigious position at the Council of Florence and return to his homeland. He arrived back in Cambrai by December of that year, where he sought to consolidate his position as a canon—an ecclesiastical appointment requiring formal academic credentials.

Anticipating this requirement, Dufay had obtained a law degree in 1437, potentially studying at the University of Turin around 1436. His careful preparation for ecclesiastical office underscores both his political acumen and his adaptability amid the shifting religious and political circumstances of mid-15th-century Europe.

Dufay’s return to Cambrai, strategically timed, allowed him to secure a stable and influential position within the church hierarchy, ensuring continued patronage and protection at a time when Italian conflicts threatened the security of artists and intellectuals associated with the papacy. This move not only safeguarded Dufay’s career but also positioned him to exert substantial influence on the musical culture of Atlantic West Europe, further enhancing Cambrai's reputation as an important center for ecclesiastical music and liturgical innovation.

Brunelleschi in 1441 initiates the construction of an addition to the late thirteenth-century Florentine church of Santa Croce, the elegant Pazzi Chapel in the fourteenth century-cloister, for which funds had first been assembled in 1429 by Andrea Pazzi, head of the Pazzi family, whose wealth was second only to the Medici.

Brunelleschi decorates the interior with dark pilasters and moldings that contrast with the white walls, showcasing the chapel’s precise, mathematical design.

With each building, Brunelleschi has further refined his style, designing the details is successively purer and more delicate form, and organizing ever more tightly and consistently the modular planning and internal order.