In Spring 2017, the university’s Special Collections Research Center exhibit space hosted an exhibit on “Tensions in Renaissance Cities” curated by a team of University of Chicago graduate students and other program associates. Led by Ada Palmer (History faculty) and graduate student co-curators Hillary Barker and Margo Weitzman (Art History), the eighteen-member exhibit team explored major Renaissance capitals from Constantinople to Mexico City, and the tensions which characterized them, ranging from religious and confessional conflict, to city rivalries, to gender norms.

Newberry Library Renaissance curator Paul Gehl visits our exhibit.

Together, the team published a print catalog of the exhibit, and hosted a visiting reception for attendees at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, which took place here in Chicago. Participants included Rose Malloy and Michael Hosler-Lancaster (History) who whose case examined Venice’s view of Constantinople/Istanbul, John-Paul Heil (History) who examined humanist magic in Florence, Tali Winkler (History) who examined Jewish humanist, Nora Lambert (Art History) who looked at the transformation of Constantinople to an Islamic city, Eufemia Baldassare (Romance Languages) who looked at patronage and power in Florence and Rome, Cosette Bruhns (Romance Languages) who examined Petrarch’s impact on Florence’s urban space, Elizabeth Tavella (Romance Languages) who examined male efforts to define the lives of urban woman, Aimee González (Musicology) who examined editions of the Psalms from Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva, Nicholas Bellinson (Committee on Social Thought) and Caryn O’Connell (English) who looked at London’s relationship with its countryside and its identity as an intellectual center, Lucia Deliani (Northwestern Rhetoric Program) who examined confraternities in Renaissance republics, Stuart McManus (SIFK Postdoctoral Researcher) who examined Mexico City’s relationships with Roman and Mesoamerican antiquities, while co-curator Hilary Barker examined Roman Ruins, Margo Weitzman examined Florentine humanism, and Undergraduate Research Fellow Julia Tomasson (History and Philosophy of Science) edited the print catalog.

Exhibit Introduction: Great and Wretched Cities

Lavish courts and towering cathedrals, entrancing polyphony and artistic masterpieces—our romantic fascination with the cultural glories of the Renaissance often eclipses one truth, recorded by astute observers of the age like Machiavelli, that the era of Michelangelo and Shakespeare was, in many ways, darker than the “Dark Ages” which it named.  The crisis had one unexpected cause: progress.  In the centuries after the Black Death, regenerating urban centers, strengthened by financial and commercial innovations, linked together to form an increasingly interconnected society.  Soon English wool was no longer finished at home, but exported to be woven and dyed in Italy, before shipping out across trade networks which stretched from the Middle East deep into the New World.  As Europe’s economic bloodstream strengthened, the same increase in trade and travel which let architects build with exotic stones and scholars recover lost Greek manuscripts also transmitted diseases with unprecedented speed and ferocity, while larger, denser cities were richer breeding grounds for violence and contagions.  As wealth and power flowed in, richer states could muster larger armies, innovative weaponry could shed blood on unprecedented scales, and ambitious rising families could hire mercenary forces larger than frail governments could withstand.

This exhibit lays out a geography of tensions which characterized Renaissance cities.  In a world still plagued by war and banditry, urban growth often meant density rather than sprawl, as swelling populations jockeyed for space within the circumferences of city walls.  Crowded and wealthy cities became powder kegs, where old tensions—between men and women, citizens and visitors, Jews and Christians, religious and secular authorities—channeled the energies of new and increasing factional and economic rivalries.  Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets are fictitious portraits of a real phenomenon, and such violence often brought ruin on far more than just two houses. Great families led patronage networks which included hundreds of clients from many social classes, whose members lived only a few blocks from their bitterest rivals, and whose alliances reached out into dozens of neighboring towns and distant capitals.  Tensions between cities intensified as well, as economic interdependence, and printing which enabled the faster circulation of news and new ideas, allowed tumults in one city to bring strife to another half a world away.  Cities competed to frame their political identities, claiming uniqueness and dignity by presenting themselves as the capitals of particular trades, religious movements, cultural innovations, or political structures, often in ways which contradicted or challenged the identities claimed by their neighbors.  Art, literature, and culture recorded these tensions and also relieved them, offering bloodless avenues for competition, and a release valve for the pressure that kept Renaissance cities forever on the edge of violence.

Exhibit Highlights:

Machiavelli survived many Florentine tumults: the death of Lorenzo de Medici, the French Invasion, the expulsion of the Medici, and the rise and fall of Savonarola.  He worked tirelessly for the republican government that ruled Florence after Savonarola’s execution, but was banished after the Medici recaptured the city.  Machiavelli wrote this satirical comedy The Mandrake during his exile, and packed it with criticisms of religion, politics, and society, depicting lustful conspirators, a corrupt and greedy friar, and a mother who urges her married daughter to commit adultery.  The play’s shocking ending, in which adultery works out well for all involved, starkly reverses the moralizing lessons which usually shaped Renaissance drama.