** Death by Detail **

What was the renaissance, and what caused it? Read something else if you want to find out. 4500 pages into the Story of Civilization, Durant departs from sweeping epochs to the comparatively tight focus on 100 years of Italian history. After *Age of Faith * which covered nearly 1000 years of history, I assumed that Durant’s specific focus in Italy implied specific import to the story of civilization. But like a meandering joke without a punchline, Durant never explained the context, origins, or uniqueness of the period. After countless vignettes, it seems the only thing special about the renaissance was the willingness of wealthy patrons to spend on art:

It took more than a revival of antiquity to make the renaissance, and first of all it took money. Smelly bourgeois money. The profits of skillful managers and underpaid labor, the hazardous voyages to the east and laborious crossings of the alps to buy goods cheap and sell them dear. To pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty and perfume a fortune to the breath of art. […] New freedom made [the Italian] creative for an amazing century 1434-1534 before it destroyed him with moral chaos, disintegrative individualism, and national chaos.

Because Italy was divided into city states with ceaseless internecine struggles, reading political vicissitudes was an exercise in drudgery. Gibbon’s critique of the Eastern Roman Empire kept coming to mind:

  • These annals must continue to repeat a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery; the natural connection of causes and events broken by frequent and hasty transitions, and a minute accumulation of circumstances must destroy the light and effect of those general pictures which compose the use and ornament of a remote history. *

In this case, the structure of the book, focusing on city states, followed by politics, followed by critique of individual art pieces, kept adding detail that confused the whole. By the time Durant started making references to events previous in the book I had already forgotten the specifics of the reference. Tuchman’s approach to a similar scope and time period in A Distant Mirror was much more illuminating.

Perhaps Durant is a better 4th or 5th book to read on a given time period (this was my first on renaissance Italy), perhaps the renaissance cannot be adequately described by a textual art critique, but this was tedious.

** 61st book of 2021. **