Renaissance City

In panoramic praise of his native city, Coluccio Salutati, the Florentine humanist chancellor, asked the rhetorical question: “What city, not merely in Italy, but in all the world, is more securely placed within its circle of walls, more proud in its palazzi, more bedecked with churches, more beautiful in its architecture, more imposing in its gates, richer in piazzas, happier in its wide streets, greater in its people, more glorious in its citizenry, more inexhaustible in wealth, more fertile in its fields?”

[Page 654]For fourteenth- through sixteenth-century humanists, the Renaissance city was more than simply a classical revival of Greek and Roman architectural styles, cast in the new one-point perspective space; it was an embodiment of civic virtues, ideals of public life, of good government, a “refoundation” of city life itself. Modern economic historians recognized that the Renaissance city of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was based on the commercial revolution (i.e., revival of trade, cities, merchant-class values) in Europe and the Mediterranean world from the tenth and eleventh centuries. The crisis of the fourteenth century began with bank failures during the Hundred Years' War between England and France in the 1330s, followed by the devastating Black Death (bubonic plague), which swept through Europe during the summer of 1348, almost halving its population. What once brought wealth and splendor along the caravan silk and maritime spice routes from China, Malaysia, and India, the source of Eurasian luxury trade and urban revival, now brought pandemic apocalypse from Asia, arriving in the West on trading Genoese galleons from the Black Sea, described in the macabre opening pages of Boccaccio's Decamerone of Florentine pestilence and suburban retreat to redemptive paradisal cloister garden for pious and lustful storytelling.