January 5, 1997The Cult of Magnificence By ALAN RYDER WORLDLY GOODS
A New History of the Renaissance.
By Lisa Jardine.
Illustrated. 470 pp. New York:
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $32.50.
he absence of a bibliography, footnotes and any discussion of the subject's vast historiography suggests that this book is not intended primarily for an academic audience. It offers, rather, to the general reader ''a new history of the Renaissance'' written with engaging verve, and it is generously illustrated. As the millennium ends there is certainly need for a fundamental revision of the history of those centuries lying at its heart that have long been labeled the Renaissance by the Western world. The classic Italianate Renaissance edifice erected by Jacob Burckhardt in 1860 has suffered grievous dilapidation at the hands of succeeding generations of scholars, yet still it dominates the historical landscape. Now well may be the moment, despite understandable affection for so familiar and imposing a monument, to demolish it entirely and build anew. In her ''project of redefining the achievements of the European Renaissance,'' Lisa Jardine, a professor of English at the University of London, may have had such a goal in mind. Her design appears, at first sight, very different from the classic structure: no longer the emergence of the state as a work of art, the discovery of the world and man, and so forth; instead, the planting of the seeds ''of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism'' -- hallmarks of Western society in the late 20th century.In execution, unfortunately, this challenging program of reconstruction has become little more than a lick of new paint on the familiar pile. The Renaissance presented in ''Worldly Goods'' is a very old-fashioned one indeed, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 standing first among ''conditions for change,'' leading on to such familiar landmarks as the revival of learning, voyages of discovery, Reformation and the rest. To explore the roots of multiculturalism through European intercourse with Islam, Judaism and Byzantium, would it not be necessary to go back to earlier exchanges brought about by the Norman conquest of Sicily, the Crusades and the centuries-long coexistence of Moor, Jew and Christian in Spain? The century after 1453, by contrast, when the Catholic kings and their Hapsburg successors in Spain, the dominant power in Europe, set their faces dogmatically against cultural diversity, witnessed scant progress toward a more open society. (The author makes curiously little of the cultural effects of European contacts with Africa, Asia and the New World.) Nor is it plausible to maintain that, with the flight of some Greek scholars to the West before the Turkish advance, ''the center of Western scholarly erudition and artistic accomplishment shifted permanently away from the Byzantine Empire . . . to Western Europe.'' For centuries Latin Christendom had been nurturing its own art and learning to peaks of achievement that owed little to the Orthodox world. The study of bravura consumerism itself, the center of this book, would benefit from a larger time frame: the merchants and bankers of the West, especially those of Italy, had perfected their crafts well before the 15th century, including such devices as the bill of exchange, company trading and devices to circumvent ecclesiastical prohibition on usury and commerce with the infidel.
From the 15th century onward a handful of princes and super-rich subjects certainly flaunted wealth and worldly possessions to a degree not witnessed in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. The great palaces of Mehmed II and Charles V; the gorgeous damask robes of the Venetian Doge; the 500 gems, intaglios and cameos collected by Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga; and the 15,000 Flemish pounds paid by Charles V for 12 tapestry panels celebrating his fleeting victory at Tunis are among the numerous illustrations offered of that phenomenon. An expanding economy allied to greater sophistication in financial and administrative practices enabled them to indulge in what Ms. Jardine rightly characterizes as a cult of magnificence. Even so, a consciousness of the need for pomp and lavish display was not something new among rulers and the aristocracy; only the means had changed dramatically in scale. To argue further, as Ms. Jardine sometimes does, that the dictates of commerce began to override all other policy considerations, can lead to serious distortions of history, as when she asserts, for example, that the struggle between the Hapsburgs and Ottomans for control of Hungary had as its ''root cause the desire for ready access to the Hungarian copper mines,'' or that Francis I of France defended two biblical scholars, Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples and Erasmus, against ''the hard-line religious censors'' because of his ''financial interests in supporting the mushrooming market in humanistic books.'' Nor can we possibly know that when Giovanni Arnolfini and his fellow merchants contemplate his wedding portrait, ''admiration . . . becomes here a mental response in which sensual delight is strenuously linked with an appreciation of the market value of the goods and the urge to acquire.'' Evidence simply cannot be manufactured in this manner.
How did a passion for luxuries among the rich seed itself in the population at large? Did those humble folk who gazed in church at paintings celebrating material possessions (and most paintings, it should be noted, did not) ''long for the touch and the smell of the luxuries which fill these panels''? According to the author they were indeed fired by the spirit of acquisitiveness. But had they not been accustomed through the ages to contemplate in places of worship the figures of their faith endowed with whatever props of majesty the local culture afforded? And, whatever their desires, these novel splendors were beyond the reach of all but a tiny minority.
One commodity, however, the Renaissance did offer to all but the poorest in unprecedented abundance: the written word in the shape of the printed book. Much the most convincing part of the argument in this book is devoted to the triumph of the printed word in manifold fields of human enterprise. Here mass production scored its first and most long-lasting victory by bringing together three spirits of the age: ''the worlds of the scholar, the technical engineer and the merchant were in practice inseparable.''
If this book cannot be recommended as a history of the Renaissance, it deserves unstinted praise as an exuberant study of the mercantile spirit in that era. The reach exceeds the grasp, but that's what books are for.
Alan Ryder teaches history at the University of Bristol in England. His most recent book is ''Alfonso the Magnanimous.''
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