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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Kenneth Clark's Civilisation 

Chapter 5 

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The scene has changed from Florence to Rome, from the city of hard heads, sharp wits, light feet, graceful movement, to a city of weight, a city that is like a huge compost-heap of human hopes and ambitions, despoiled of its ornament, almost indecipherable, a wilderness of imperial splendour, with only one ancient emperor, Marcus Aurelius, above ground in the sunshine through the centuries.

The scale has changed. I am standing in the courtyard of the Vatican, at the end of which the architect Bramante has built a sun-trap, known as the Belvedere, from which the Pope could enjoy the view of the ancient city. It is in the form of a niche, but instead of being designed to hold a life-size statue it is enormous -- in fact it has always been known as il nicchione, 'the monster niche'.

• It is the outward and visible sign of the great change that overcame the civilisation of the Renaissance in about the year 1500.

This is no longer a world of free and active men, but a world of giants and heroes...

... the huge buildings of antiquity were there [in Rome] -- and very much more of them than we have today. Even after three centuries in which they were used as quarries, and in which our sense of scale has expanded, they still are surprisingly big. In the Middle Ages men had been crushed by this gigantic scale.

• They said that these buildings must be the work of demons, or at best they treated them simply as natural phenomena -- like mountains -- and built their huts in them...

Rome was a city of cowherds and stray goats in which nothing was built except a few fortified towers from which the ancient families carried out their pointless and interminable feuds -- literally interminable, because they are still quarrelling today.

But by 1500 the Romans had begun to realise that they had been built by men. The lively and intelligent individuals who created the Renaissance, bursting with vitality and confidence, were not in a mood to be crushed by antiquity.

• They meant to absorb it, to equal it, to master it. They were going to produce their own race of giants and heroes.

The scene has changed to Rome also for political reasons. After years of exile and adversity, the sovereign pontiff has returned to his seat of temporal power. In what is commonly described as the decadence of the papacy, the Popes were men of unusual ability who used their international contacts, their great civil service and their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation...

In 1501 Michelangelo returned to Florence. I said that the gigantic and the heroic spirit of the High Renaissance belongs to Rome. But there was a sort of prelude in Florence. The Medici, who had been the rulers of Florence for the last sixty years, had been kicked out in 1494, and the Florentines, under the influence of Savonarola, had established a republic, with all the noble, puritanical sentiments which pre-Marxist revolutionaries used to dig up out of Plutarch and Livy. To symbolise their achievement, the republic commissioned various works of art on heroic-patriotic themes. One of them was for a gigantic figure of David, the tyrant-slayer.

The commission was given to the alarming young man who had just returned from Rome. Only twenty-five years separate Michelangelo's marble hero from the dapper little figure, which had been the last word in Medician elegance, the David of Verrocchio:

• and one sees that there really has been a turning-point in the human spirit.

The Verrocchio is light, nimble, smiling -- and clothed. The Michelangelo is vast, defiant and nude. It's rather the same as the progression that we shall find in music between Mozart and Beethoven.

Seen by itself the David's body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity;

• it is only when we come to the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew.

I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not a part of most people's idea of civilisation. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilised life. It is the enemy of happiness.

And yet we recognise that to despise material obstacles, and even

• to defy the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilisation depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man...

... People sometimes wonder why the Renaissance Italians, with their intelligent curiosity, didn't make more of a contribution to the history of thought. The reason is that

• the most profound thought of the time was not expressed in words, but in visual imagery.

... Leonardo da Vinci. Historians used to speak of him as a typical Renaissance man. This is a mistake. If Leonardo belongs in any epoch it is in the later seventeenth century; but in fact he belongs to no epoch, he fits into no category,
and the more you know about him, the more mysterious he becomes.

Of course, he had certain Renaissance characteristics. He loved beauty and graceful movement. He shared or even anticipated the megalomania of the early sixteenth century: the horse that he modelled as a memorial to
Francesco Sforza was to be twenty-six feet high; he made schemes for diverting the River Arno that even modern technology could not accomplish.

And then, of course, he had, to a supreme degree, the gift of his time for recording and condensing whatever took his eye.

• But all these gifts were dominated by one ruling passion which was not a Renaissance characteristic -- curiosity. He was the most relentlessly curious man in history.

Everything he saw made him ask why and how. Why does one find sea-shells in the mountains? How do they build locks in Flanders? How does a bird fly? What accounts for cracks in walls? What is the origin of wind and clouds? How does one stream of water deflect another?

• Find out; write it down; if you can see it, draw it. Copy it out. Ask the same question again and again and again.

Leonardo's curiosity was matched by an incredible mental energy. Reading the thousands of words in Leonardo's note-books, one is absolutely worn out by this energy.

• He won't take yes for an answer.

He can't leave anything alone -- he worries it, re-states it, answers imaginary antagonists. Of all these questions, the one he asks most
insistently is about man: not the man of Alberti's invocation, with 'wit, reason and memory like an immortal God', but man as a mechanism.

How does he walk? He describes how to draw a foot in ten ways, each of which should reveal some different components in its structure. How does the heart pump blood? What happens when he yawns and sneezes? How does a child live in the womb? Finally, why does he die of old age?

Leonardo discovered a centenarian in a hospital in Florence, and waited gleefully for his
demise so that he could examine his veins. Every question demanded dissection and every dissection was drawn with marvellous precision.

• At the end, what does he find? That man, although remarkable as a mechanism, is not at all like an immortal god.

He is not only cruel and superstitious, but
feeble compared to the forces of nature. If Michelangelo's defiance of fate was superb, there is something almost more heroic in the way that Leonardo, that great hero of the intellect, confronts the inexplicable, ungovernable
forces of nature...

The golden moment is almost over. But while it lasted man achieved a stature that he has hardly ever achieved before or since.

• To the humanist virtues of intelligence was added the quality of heroic will.

For a few years it seemed that there was nothing which the human mind could not master and harmonise.