The spiritual life in Italy in the 15th century

Particularly clear, the new nationalist attitudes stand out in the Italian culture of the 15th century - the centuries, during which the cities of northern Italy developed particularly dynamically. In the course of this century, after most of them were conquered by Spain, they gradually became the principalities in which the ruling princes endorsed the authoritarian management strategy that would reach its apogee in the later (XVI-XVII century) Western Europe is "absolute monarchies." Due to the authoritarian governmental strategy of the ruling princes, the civic engagement of the Italian humanists is still locked up in a noble intellectual choice, and so Italian society is deprived of its natural leaders. All major revolutions, including intellectuals, have a price..

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In the second half of the 15th century, among the Italian intellectuals, the piety to the culture of ancient Greece was imposed as a dominant attitude. The conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 ended the invasion and imposed the triumph of the Hellenistic spirit in Italian culture. In prestigious Italian universities, competitions are organized to host Hellenists such as John Argiropoulos, Demetrius Calconillas and Constantine Lascaris. In 1454, the five major Italian cities signed a peace treaty in Lodi, after which they quickly are strengthened in economic terms and create conditions for cultural upsurge. According to Juliano Prochachi, the artistic and intellectual panorama of Italy in the second half of the 15th century is characterized by a great variety and vitality of appearances and experiments. Padre Andrea Manteña, who works mostly in Mantua, is a more interesting artist than Benotso Gozoli, who draws frescoes in the chapel of the Palace of the Medici with a lot of fantasy, and perhaps - to the extent that similar comparisons have some meaning - is more interesting than the famous Sandro Botticelli, with his little artificial beauty. Rather, the provincial muse of Matteo Maria Boyardo, a nobleman who descends from his castle in the Emilian Apennines in the courtyard of the Duke of D'Este in Ferrara to entertain him with his little stunned stories in his epic poem The Loving Roland, of course, the expressive clarity and perfection of the poet, Principe Policiano, who gives the greatest literary glamor to the Medici yard; but he certainly has more originality and poetic veracity than Lorenzo Magnificent, who has the pleasure of writing rural poems with the typical aristocrat, the search for closeness to the people, unnatural sound. According to Prokaci, the greatest discovery of Humanism - the discovery of the impartial and pure nature of the study - applies to any form of human knowledge.). Nothing is more foreign to the humanists than the view of the world inspired by religious integrationism, he writes. They condemn the superstition of narrow-mindedness and the corruption of the Church just as much as the inertia and fanaticism of the heretics.

The rapid economic development of Venice in the 15th century has a beneficial impact on Venetian architecture and art that are so receptive to the Continental and Northern European Gothic lessons as they were previously receptive to the Oriental style. The palace of Ca 'd'Oro, the most prominent example of the Venetian Gothic, was built in 1421-1440. The "Marchana Library", the original fund of which was a donation made in his will by one of the greatest humanists of the epoch, Cardinal Vissarion. The same library keeps the books that Francesco Petralka left to the Republic of Venice. "We should not be surprised that Lorenzo the Magnificent, the lord of Florence, has magnified his native language as a common language for all of Italy and that Policiano praises the Tuscan language as blessed and extremely pure. It is true that in the 15th century there was a true diaspora of the Florentine artists in the cities and rulers of the Apennine peninsula. One of the enterprising merchants in Florence, Vespasiano Bistuchi (1421-1498), left us in his work Biographies a testimony of the respect and admiration he experiences for his scholarly clients and the sense of responsibility with which he exercises his profession. In the same city, the humanist Nikolo Nikoli / 1364 - 1437 / creates the library of the monastery "San Marco", which also stores the personal books of Bocaccio. In the culture of Florence, perhaps the most accomplished personality of Italian humanism - the one born in Genoa Leon Batista Alberti (1404 - 1472), also fits in. He comes from a family whom the Medici have driven from Florence, he studied in Bologna, and in 1492 he managed to return to his hometown. But it did not remain for a long time there: in the period 1431-1441, the Papal Curia followed in its movement through the cities that had been the seat of the Basel Council for many years, and then resided in Rome, Bologna, Florence, Ferrara where he befriends duke Leonel d'Este. Before completing his laborious life in 1472, Albert travels and lives elsewhere for the glory he has earned as an architect. Among his greatest works are Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, "Tempest Malatestiano" in Rimini, Sant'Andrea Church in Mantua. In his treatise on Painting, Leon Batista Alberti writes that until his return from exile to Florence, he was convinced that the "exhausted" human nature would never succeed in catching the "unsurpassed ancient masters" in creative fertility and power. But when he returned to his hometown and saw the works of the architect Philippo Brunelleski (Pippo), Donatello, Masaccio and the contemporaries surpassed the ancients, if we, without teachers, without any examples, find the arts and sciences unseen and unheard. It is hardly possible to find a more eloquent illustration of the intellectual evolution of Humanism.