Italian Renaissance Studies

Abstract

We may take the central essays on the pattern of administration under the Medici,the Sforza and the Malatesta, with the Budget of the Roman Church, as being the most legitimate memorial to Dr. Ady, and the conspicuousevidenceof a tradition which she helped to found. It is interesting to note, as for example with Ludovico Sforza or the Malatesta, howmuch these patient studies from the archives contradict the simple thesis of Burckhardt on the RenascenceState as a Work of Art. For here it appears as a piecemeal jumble and survival, on top of which an individual or a family perches precariously. While these careful studies remain the staple, or foundation, of the volume it is probable that the reader's eye will be caught most by two that are concernedmore with the Italian Renascence than with Italian history in the time of the Renascence (the two being different entities). The first is Edgar Wind's Maccabean Histories in the Sistine Ceiling, linking the bronze medallionsthere both with the Book of Maccabeesand with the illustrations in the MalermiBible of 1493. By this means not only are they related with the Ten Commandments, but an explanation is found for the erasure of the onemedallionnow appearing blank. This is the most brilliant and definitive of the essays here included. Its neighbour, that by E. H. Gombrich on the Early Medici as Patrons of Art, is almost equally suggestive, though its tendency is rather to prune than to embroider. For here also reality is 'less tidy' than 'the legend that lives on': whether that ofVasari, or the French guide-book of the later nineteenth century, which has bequeathed to us the strong, erroneous, notion that Benozzo Gozzoli portrayed the boy Lorenzo, the Eastern Emperor and Patriarch in the Riccardi Chapel (thereby obscuringthe affinitieswith Gentileda Fabriano). Important too is the suggestion of the spirit of Cosimo in the architecture he inspired, the differentiation between his austerity and the sumptuous tastes of Piero, and the suggestion of a new line for Lorenzo.

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