3. The Universal Man in Renaissance Society.
Different as they may be in method and objectives,
humanism and empirical-mathematical thought are
alike in their departure from the Scholastic form of
medieval universality. For sheer comprehensiveness,
neither the studia humanitatis nor the sciences of
measurement embraced by an Alberti or a Leonardo
can compete with Roger Bacon's proposed encyclo-
paedia of knowledge or the Summa Theologiae of
Thomas Aquinas. The two forms of Renaissance learn-
ing are limited, first to the world of experience, then
to the domain of either physical or cultural and social
experience. But with this narrowing of scope came a
rational grounding of knowledge. The principles of
thought in the humanities and natural sciences are
positive; those of the Scholastic organization of knowl-
edge are metaphysical and theological. Roger Bacon
intended to unify the sciences of his encyclopaedia by
placing them in the service of theology; and the
Summa Theologiae, as its name declares, is a work of
metaphysics or philosophical theology which purports
to ground the knowledge of all things in “truths” pro-
vided by Sacred Doctrine.
The representatives of Renaissance universality
entertained no such systematic, metaphysical aim, nor
was their learning encyclopaedic. The defining charac-
teristic of their thought is not its generality, but rather
(as Burckhardt saw and Cassirer demonstrated) its
union of experience and reason, of practice and theory.
This basic feature is manifest in the many-sided nature
of the Renaissance man, as it is in the practical and
positive cast of his knowledge. The Schoolman's life
was purely contemplative and academic; the mode of
life of the Renaissance man includes practice of the
arts or crafts or some form of public involvement. The
Schoolman belonged to a religious order; the Renais-
sance man belongs to the lay world (even when, as
in the case of Alberti, he has taken Holy Orders). The
urban society of the time, not the cloister or the uni-
versity, fostered his development and supported him.
This social fact is basic to the revival and ready
acceptance of the humanistic ideal of encyklios paideia.
What made the educational ideas of antiquity vital
once more was their responsiveness to the needs of
Italian society, particularly those of its dominant class,
the urban patriciate. One such feature of classical
paideia was its public-spirited ethos stemming from the
Greco-Roman conviction that man, the complete man,
is a political animal. In fifteenth-century Florence, this
principle served both to elevate bourgeois life, and to
reconcile intellectuals to public and political concerns.
Moreover, the humanists found in the literary or
rhetorical learning of antiquity an educational ideal
that met the cultural aspirations of their society while
satisfying its practical needs. Humanistic learning
enhanced the dignity of despots, of the urban pa-
triciate, and of the humanists themselves by making
classical culture a sign of nobilitas, a nobility more
rational (and hence a matter of virtù) than that of the
old landed aristocracy which was an accident of birth,
of fortuna. It provided a general preparation for the
variety of practical and public positions that had to
be filled. And because the state of social and techno-
logical development reached by the Italian states in
the fifteenth century was comparable to that of classi-
cal civilization, Renaissance society could indeed profit
from knowledge of its political and practical arts.
The esteem won by the manual and practical arts
(such as painting and surveying) is also an index of their
usefulness to the ruling class of the Italian states. They,
too, enhanced the dignity of princes and patriciate and
they furthered their very real interests of wealth and
power. The methodical and practical spirit of Renais-
sance urban life is stamped upon the scientific achieve-
ments of the artistic-technical current of thought,
products of applied mathematics in almost every case:
cryptography, survey maps and scaled nautical charts,
machines and mechanical principles. In this cultural
domain, as in that of humanism, the kind of problems
considered and the way those problems were handled
depended in many ways upon the practical needs of
Italian society and the level of institutional and techni-
cal development it had achieved.
Both types of the Renaissance universal man, the
humanist and artist-scientist, grew out of the orderly,
practical, and confident urban world of fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Italy, and when the bourgeois basis
of that civilization collapsed, both they and the culture
they bore were overcome by hostile social forces. Three
major stages of social change were distinguished by
Alfred von Martin in the first sociological study of
Renaissance culture as a whole,
Soziologie der Renais-
sance (1932). It is useful to consider these stages here,
especially since the art historian, Arnold Hauser, has
already shown how the three periods of Renaissance
art to which Alberti, Leonardo, and Michelangelo
belong correspond to and reflect certain social features
of the “heroic age of capitalism,” the classical “age
of the rentier” which succeeded it (at least in Florence)
toward the end of the fifteenth century, and the courtly
society of sixteenth-century Italy dominated by Spain
and the Counter-Reformation Church. Many of the
features that characterize them as universal men have
their source in this changing social context, too.
Alberti belongs to the expansive and public-spirited
life of the first period whereas Leonardo belongs to
the second, when Florence yielded to the princely rule
of Lorenzo de' Medici and its culture came to be
shaped by Neo-Platonic ideas, and he lived well into
the time of the invasions that followed on the heels
of Lorenzo's death. Leonardo sank no roots in Medici
Florence (or in Medici Rome), nor did the republican
tradition and civic outlook of Florentine humanism
touch a vital chord in him. His patrons were great
princes and condottieri, and finally the King of France;
and as he passed from the service of one to the other,
he remained peculiarly detached from political events
and factions, peculiarly neutral. He served equally well
both the brutal and ruthless Cesare Borgia and the
Florentine Republic under Piero Soderini. When
Ludovico Sforza met his sorry fate after having been
Leonardo's patron at Milan from 1481 until 1499,
Leonardo redirected many of the ideas he had devel-
oped for a Sforza equestrian monument toward a mon-
ument for the very condottiere who defeated Ludovico
at the behest of the King of France.
This detachment from political and moral issues in
matters of patronage also marks Leonardo's view of
knowledge. Alberti, who never engaged in military
engineering, could still bind his technical-scientific
endeavors to his humanistic ethic, seeing that they
served in fact some constructive social purpose. No
such optimistic outlook was possible for Leonardo who
advertised himself to Ludovico Sforza as a master of
artillery, fortifications, and the advanced weaponry of
the day. Yet for all the violent and destructive ends
to which his science was immediately put, Leonardo
adopted toward it a Faustian attitude of limitless ex-
pansion. The pursuit of physical knowledge which was
checked and directed by ethical considerations in
Alberti became for Leonardo an autonomous intellec-
tual endeavor: “The acquisition of any knowledge
whatsoever is always useful to the intellect, because
it will be able to banish the useless things and retain
those which are good. For nothing can be either loved
or hated unless it is first known” (Notebooks..., ed.
MacCurdy, p. 95). Like Machiavelli, who was very
much his counterpart, Leonardo sounds the keynote
of the modern European ethos of ethically-indifferent
scientific inquiry.
In Leonardo we see most clearly the separation of
humanism and the artistic-technical current of thought
as their distinctive methods were clarified and as the
civic ethic, which bound the two for Alberti, dissolved.
By the time Castiglione's Courtier (Il cortigiano) was
published in 1528, the humanistic ideal of the complete
man had shaken off its republican, bourgeois origins
to attach itself to the courtly principles which were
to dominate Italy and Europe in the succeeding age,
and science and technology, severed from social con-
siderations, began their autonomous career. The ra-
tional spirit of Renaissance civilization survived in the
literary-historical and empirical-mathematical sciences
it founded, but its once integral conception of man
and the world had begun to pull apart. Then, in the
following decades of the sixteenth century, as the
combined forces of Spanish-Imperial arms and the
Counter-Reformation Church dealt the death blow to
the social institutions of Renaissance Italy, the classical
culture which those institutions supported was utterly
transformed. Michelangelo confronts us with a totally
different outlook. Hailed by his contemporary Vasari
as “the perfect exemplar in life, work, and behavior,”
the “divine” Michelangelo renounced the rational
principles fundamental to Renaissance universality.
Painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, Michelangelo
drew little from and contributed less to the two posi-
tive currents of Renaissance thought. His literary in-
terests were centered in Dante and the Bible, not
classical antiquity; and his moral, aesthetic, and
cosmological conceptions were nourished by
Savonarola and Florentine Neo-Platonism, not by
humanism and the empirical-mathematical mode of
thought. Michelangelo's genius, which felt constrained
by man and matter, produced its gigantic works in
isolation and out of an inner wrestling of the soul with
its personal angels and demons. The public life of the
Renaissance had been destroyed: “I keep to myself,”
he wrote to his nephew in 1548, in response to his
warning not to associate in Rome with Florentines who
had been banished from their (and his) native city. “I
go about little, and I speak to nobody—least of all to
Florentines. If a man salute me in the street I cannot
do otherwise than answer him with fair words: then
I pass on. If I could know which of them were exiles
I would pass by with no reply whatever...”
(
Michelangelo, ed. Carden, p. 232). To this witness of
the cataclysmic changes of the sixteenth century—an
age in which Rome was sacked by Imperial armies
(1527), Florence besieged and her republic subverted
for all time by the Medici and by Imperial forces
(1529-30), and Italy subject to direct or indirect
Spanish rule—the order of the world had again become
incomprehensible and providential. Neither humanism
nor science entered the circle of Michelangelo's inter-
ests. Art was his society and his world, and the Maker
himself had become his patron: “... there are many
who believe—myself among them—that it was God
who laid this charge [the construction of St. Peter's]
upon me” (ibid., p. 308).
It was Michelangelo who first detached art from the
scientific preoccupations of the classical period. In
Michelangelo the moral life came to be conceived in
theological terms once again. Impelled by a religious
longing for release and regeneration, this late embodi-
ment of the Renaissance universal man unloosed the
human spirit from its rational bonds to physical and
social experience, and in so doing brought about the
final dissolution of the Renaissance view of man and
the world.
Art, science, and literary humanism henceforth
pursued their own independent careers. The cohesion
of Renaissance universality was gone, and it was not
to be restored any more than were the peculiar social
conditions which had once favored its rise. But the
ideal of a rational unification of knowledge persisted;
it passed from humanism and empirical-mathematical
thought, which did not of themselves issue in a system-
atic ordering of knowledge, to philosophy which did.
Renaissance universality holds a logical, as well as a
chronological, place between the theological syntheses
of medieval learning and the modern philosophical
syntheses of rational knowledge. Neither the studia
humanitatis nor the sciences of measurement could
embrace the entire globus intellectualis, since neither
is a system of philosophy; but they both prepared the
way for the modern unifications of learning which,
from the time of Francis Bacon and René Descartes,
have regarded as “knowledge” only that which is
grounded in experience and reason. The achievement
of Renaissance thought is positive knowledge, the dual
tradition of the cultural and the empirical-math-
ematical sciences. And it is this scientific tradition
which has provided the cumulatively changing con-
tents for the modern syntheses of knowledge from
Francis Bacon to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and
d'Alembert, from Leibniz to the twentieth-century
philosophy of culture of Ernst Cassirer.
