(Florence): En route to Kyiv, I am in Florence for a conference of Americans who work on civic and democratic reform in the USA. It happens that I studied in Florence many decades ago–an experience that helped form my lifelong commitment to republican self-government. I am not truly an expert on the Florentine republic, but I can venture some thoughts about its relevance to our time:
- For renaissance Florentines, civility (civiltá) meant the kinds of discourse and behavior that benefited self-governance. To determine what counted as civility, one first asked what the republic needed. Their answer was discourse that was frank, plain-spoken, and direct, in contrast to the talk of courtiers, which was deferential and artificial. For the Renaissance historian Giovanni Cambi, a true citizen was a man who refused to doff his hat or call any one “padrone” (boss), and Cambi named that virtue civiltá. Today, we can also ask which kinds of discourse benefit or harm our republic, and it’s unlikely that “civility” (in this sense) should mean politeness.
- The Florentines invented many mechanisms to avoid domination. For instance, they tended to elect slates of potential leaders, and then select the actual officer-holders by lot. To prevent military coups, they hired mercenaries as their generals and banned them from entering the city. Most importantly, the city consisted of hundreds of guilds, enterprises, and vigorously competitive religious orders, making its public sphere vastly “polycentric.”
- Republican values inspired one of the world’s greatest cultural movements. The Renaissance means the “rebirth” of classical culture, and Florentines recovered Greco-Roman culture because they saw themselves as republicans in the tradition of their early Roman forebears. In short, they created renaissance art to celebrate self-rule. However, the same cultural innovations that they launched for that purpose could also promote Caesarsism. My group stopped to admire the facade of Santa Maria Novella, which Leon Batista Alberti designed on behalf of his city. But, as Ingrid Rowland notes in a review of a new book by Indra Kagis McEwen, Alberti spent most of his career serving dictators in “Italy’s hothouse courts” outside Florence. These patrons also purported to embody “ancient Roman virtues” — but “no longer the republican virtues heralded by Cicero but virtues adapted to the conditions of empire.” Later, when the Medici smashed the republic and installed themselves as rulers, they continued the fluorescence of renaissance art, but in the interest of monarchy. In short, the republic’s cultural legacy was subject to capture.
- The leader of the Medici bank and family for most of the 15th century, Cosimo the Elder, cannily avoided holding any official offices in order to preserve the rules of the republic that benefited him. He ran the city as a political machine. His descendants acted more like rulers, and they provoked a republican movement that was also an anti-Medicean faction. The downfall of the republic was simply its military destruction at the hands of the Medici, who had transmuted economic power into monarchical power. Their wealth was the root cause of the republic’s defeat.
See also: civility as equality; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?; the coincidences in Romola
