November 24, 2015

Preview: The Day the Renaissance Was Saved

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The Day The RenissanceNiccolò Capponi’s The Day the Renaissance Was Saved is more than just an histoire bataille (though it does bring to life an extraordinary 15th century battle in which Italy’s principal powers came to a ferocious head) and more than an account of a Da Vinci masterpiece that spent centuries hiding in plain sight (though it’s got that, too)—it’s also a panorama of a pivotal moment in Western history, and the cultural, political, and religious forces that ushered in the age of the Renaissance. The Day the Renaissance Was Saved is out today—here are the opening pages of Capponi’s brilliant introduction.


 

‘For the sake of a nail the shoe was lost . . .’ This is how a poem by the English poet George Herbert begins, which I learned as a little boy alongside a host of other nursery rhymes. Starting with the loss of a nail, then the horse, the knight and the battle, the ditty ends with the downfall of a kingdom. Following this sequence of single but interconnected events, Herbert’s poem is seemingly deterministic, but it actually opens up an endless range of alternate conclusions which were far from unavoidable: the loss of a single nail doesn’t necessarily entail the loss of that horseshoe, just like losing a battle wouldn’t automatically lead to the downfall of a state. In fact, Herbert focuses on a precise sequence of factual events, and doesn’t account for the different outcomes the events in question might have led to.

The events . . . as far as many historians are concerned, these are the domain of dilettantes or journalists, the ‘pornographers of history’, who exhibit a morbid curiosity for the most striking facts, but are nevertheless incapable of understanding the profound dynamics of Clio’s world: ‘the crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’, according to Fernand Braudel’s celebrated definition. However, all historians—whether they are providentialists, structuralists, postmodernists, or devout, agnostic or atheistic—must nevertheless reckon with the events, be it to confirm, contradict, or distort them, perhaps even going so far as to deny they ever occurred in the first place. Yet however true it remains that history and events are intimately intertwined, it’s equally true that historians must routinely deal with substantial gaps in the narratives.

Despite what one might assume, there is still much we don’t know even when it comes to the great figures of the past, which we should in theory know everything about. Yet this is perfectly logical if we consider, for example, all the coffee bills which we diligently consign to our trash bins, which, taken together, could tell us a great many things about our habits, revealing information that could prove of the utmost importance to historians if considered alongside other documents. To these we must add our daily actions, which are often forgotten by posterity, even when they involve other people, and simply because nobody—all too rightly—thinks it useful to write them down. These days, only a select few keep diaries, and this certainly won’t be of help to the work of future scholars.

As a matter of fact, the real problem for historians doesn’t lie in the abundance of documents, or lack thereof, but rather in how to interpret what we actually have. This is why it is crucially important to focus on events that almost definitely happened in the past, even if we cannot verify them beyond the shadow of a doubt. The memory of a particular event may have been transcribed by a single individual, and naturally, even if this person had been the most honest person who ever lived, his or her account would not only be constrained by this person’s hierarchy of values and priorities, but it would also reflect a limited perspective—the direct result of the impossibility of omniscience. For example, let’s consider a hypothetical conversation between two friends in a room: each of them will have only a limited view of their surroundings and will primarily concentrate on a few words to describe what really sparked their interest. If these friends later transcribed their meeting, a relatively slow-witted reader might find apparently irreconcilable contradictions in both their accounts: the shape of the room could be described as either a square or a rectangle; one of the friends might have noticed that the other often picked his nose, which the other person of course wouldn’t have mentioned. Fanatical devotees of deconstruction might then conclude that neither of them was telling the truth, whereas it would simply mean that each friend had merely stated a part of the whole truth. Hence, the historian must seek to find the common elements in both accounts, which will allow him to reconstruct the scene with the greatest possibly accuracy.

However, and keeping in mind the notion of the horseshoe nail, events are never isolated, but rather are links in a causal chain. Some of these links are larger than others and are more immediately evident: these are the pivotal turning points of history. The only example of this in Herbert’s poem is the loss of the horse, and consequently that of the knight: the missing nail doesn’t necessarily lead to the horseshoe falling off, just as the loss of said shoe doesn’t trigger the horse’s fall, and one cannot take it for granted that a single individual could alter the outcome of a battle, which might also end inconclusively in any case. Indeed, the very concept of a ‘decisive’ battle is often rejected by modern historians, also because stability and continuity are more easily dealt with. In spite of this, some clashes exercise a mysterious fascination over us that no historical analysis will be able to dispel: for instance, the battles of Salamis, Hastings, Waterloo, Gettysburg or Stalingrad—just to mention a few—are seen as moments that altered the course of history, and this ultimately leads to the following question: what would have happened if the Persians, the Saxons, the French, the Confederates or the Germans hadn’t been defeated?

‘You can’t reason about history with ifs and buts’ is a mantra that is often cited, especially by contemporary historians, all of whom for that matter—and for a whole host of reasons—experience a kind of revulsion towards what has been called ‘counterfactual history’, or to put it another way, ‘futuristic history’. However, examining the alternative outcomes of certain events in our past could serve to facilitate our understanding of said events and perhaps even suggest different interpretations to those that have become generally accepted. Logically, this approach isn’t entirely unproblematic, given that there’s always a risk of falling into the trap of historical relativism—not to mention the fact that debunking myths or acquired certainties could lead one to be burned in effigy (or sometimes even literally) by those self-styled gatekeepers of knowledge.

The story of the battle of Anghiari belongs to this former category insofar as the examination of the facts reveals an extraordinary variety of alternative outcomes which might have transpired all too easily. These days, it’s difficult to accept that up until the second half of the fifteenth century, what we call the Renaissance had barely gotten on its feet, and wasn’t the mass artistic, cultural and intellectual movement we like to think it was. In fact, the Renaissance only truly got underway in Florence after 1434, due to internal factors; and even then, given the sudden political changes that were so common in fifteenth-century Italy, there was no certainty that the Renaissance would last. Whether we like it or not (and my friends from Siena certainly don’t like this notion) the Renaissance was an exclusively Florentine phenomenon at its very start, but its survival ultimately depended on the patronage of the wealthy. Any crisis, even one of limited proportions, might have led to the drying up of funding for the arts. In this respect, given what had taken place before and what transpired afterwards, the outcome of the battle of Anghiari played an all-encompassing role in shaping Italian history. The nail was hammered back into the horseshoe.

The Day the Renaissance Was Saved by Niccolò Capponi, translated by André Naffis-Sahely
ISBN: 9781612194608
Page count: 240
Format: Hardcover 
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Taylor Sperry is an editor at Melville House.

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