CHAPTER V

Renaissance and Mannerism
C. 142O-C. I6OO
} i IHE Gothic style was created for Suger, Abbot of St. Denis,
X councillor of two kings of France, the Renaissance for the
merchants of Florence, bankers to the kings of Europe. It
is in the atmosphere of the most prosperous of Southern trading
republics that about 1420 the new style emerged. A firm such as that
of the Medici had its representatives in London, in Bruges and Ghent,
in Lyons and Avignon, in Milan and Venice. A Medici had been
Mayor of Florence in 1296, another in 1376, yet another in 1421. In
1429 Cosimo Medici became senior partner of the firm. Just over
one hundred years later another Medici was created the first Duke
of Tuscany. But Cosimo, whom they called in Florence the Father
of the Fatherland, and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, were
only citizens, not even, by any official tide, the first of their city.
To these and to the other princely merchants, the Pitti, the Rucellai,
the Strozzi, it is due that the Renaissance was at once wholeheartedly
accepted in Florence and developed with a wonderful unanimity of
purpose for thirty or forty years, before other cities of Italy, let alone
foreign countries, had grown to understand its meaning.
This predisposition of Tuscany cannot be explained by social con-
ditions alone. The cities of Flanders in the I5th century were socially
of quite a comparable structure; so up to a point was the City of
London. Yet the style in the Netherlands was a flamboyant Late
Gothic; in England it was Perpendicular. In Florence what happened
was that a particular social situation coincided with a particular
nature of country and people, and a particular historical tradition.
The geographical and national character of the Tuscans had found
its earliest expression in Etruscan art. They were again clearly
noticeable in the nth century in the crisp and graceful facade of
S. Miniato (pi. xxra) and in the I4th in die spacious, happily airy
Gothic churches of S. Croce, S. Maria Novella and the cathedral of
S. Maria del Fiore (pi. XLVI). Now a flourishing trading republic
will tend to worldly ideals, not to the transcendental; to the active,
not to meditation; to clarity, not to the obscure. And since the
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