Renaissance As Start of a Shopping Spree

By: Richard Bernstein

The New York Times, Monday, January 6, 1997

W

hen the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan undertook his fabled circumnavigation of the world on behalf of the King of Spain, one of the instruments he took with him was a globe made by a former German cloth merchant named Martin Behaim, who stole some of the precious information he needed to make it from a guarded cartographic archive in Lisbon. The globe, which had the latest information garnered from Portuguese explorations, was “copiously annotated, with inscriptions detailing the commodities and the nature of the business opportunities at various key commercial locations in the world.”

Behaim’s sphere, a beautiful object in itself, is an item of evidence in Lisa Jardine’s reinterpretation of that fabulous epoch in human affairs known as the Renaissance. The globe’s manufacture was aimed at insuring commercial success, and Ms. Jardine’s thesis in her glitteringly informational new book, “Worldly Goods,” is that the restless quest for wealth and material possessions was the essential ingredient in the rebirth of European civilization that took place in the mid-15th to mid-16th centuries.

Behaim’s globe was, in addition, the product of a kind of enterprise that involved not just a sea captain from Portugal and a mapmaker from Nuremberg but also the wider international exchanges that ignored conventional boundaries and systems of belief. It was, in this sense, an artifact that prefigured the world today, especially what Ms. Jardine calls “our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism.”

In establishing this thesis, Ms. Jardine, who is a professor of English at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, has written a fascinating book chock full of people, objects and events: often not the people, objects and events that are conventionally known about the Renaissance. Ms. Jardine’s interest is in what movie people might call the back story, the trends, especially the commercial and economic ones, that gave rise to the immortal works and the titanic figures from the world of art and architecture that are best remembered today.

If there is a fault in this approach, it is that Ms. Jardine piles up the evidence into such a large heap that each individual piece gets lost in the immensity of it all. There is a rambling, undifferentiated quality to this book, whose many actors are presented more for the function they fulfill in Ms. Jardine’s immense and seamless tableau than for their traits of character.

But “Worldly Goods” is nonetheless a notable achievement, less for Ms. Jardine’s reinterpretation, which is not startlingly original, than for the depth and richness of the historical panorama it presents. Her attention to the material side of things, to the profusion of goods that characterized the Renaissance and the varied energies expended in acquiring them, is an important explanatory complement to the many histories of the period that have dwelt on its sublime works of art.

Ms. Jardine establishes her theme from the beginning with a tour of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. Here are the paintings that emblemize the Renaissance as a “ ‘golden age restored,’ an age in which the characteristic mood was a kind of lofty self-confidence, spiritual arrogance and an associated antique ideal of Aryan virtue or manliness.” But, establishing her contrarian position, Ms. Jardine asks, “Why, then, do these paintings fail to live up to our expectations?”

Her answer relates to her overall vision of the Renaissance as a matter of avid materialism rather than sublime cultural achievement. By way of example, Ms. Jardine enumerates the expensive objects depicted in Carlo Crivelli’s monumental painting “The Annunciation With St. Emidius,” a supposedly religious work that in her view is actually a late Middle Age catalogue of “desirable material possessions from across the globe.” “The entrepreneurial and the spiritual rub shoulders in this early Renaissance world,” she says.

Annunciation, with Saint Emidius

Ms. Jardine’s subjects include the impetuous development of the international trade in luxury goods, a trade that involved so powerful a profit motive that merchants and kings acquiesced in the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, so long as trade with the East continued unabated (which it did). She writes of the early development of book publishing, which she ways was driven not so much by intellectuals interested in the dissemination of ideas but by hardheaded printers looking to make money in a developing new medium. She shows how technical innovation, including the making of new maps and instruments, was sponsored by profit-seeking princes and early capitalists.

Ms. Jardine, as she surveys the creation of 16th-century opulence, introduces us to an immense cast of characters whose very global wanderings illustrate the modern internationalist character of the time. A major figure for her was Cardinal Bessarion, a Byzantine Greek who moved to Rome after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, taking his fabulous library with him. Among his acolytes was Johann Müller, the German mathematician known as Regiomontanus, who, by studying the Greek works in Bessarion’s library, developed much of the modern mathematics used in cartography and navigational exploration. His mathematical tables, Ms. Jardine writes, were among the possessions that Christopher Columbus took with him on his journey to the West in 1492.

The artist Dürer makes his appearance in Ms. Jardine’s account, as do Martin Luther, Henry VIII and Erasmus of Rotterdam. So do the courtier Castiglione, the banker Jakob Fugger of Augsburg and Johann Eck, the German professor who in 1515 conducted public debates about the moral acceptability of earning interest on loans. Real history is in the details, the small stories, of which “Worldly Goods” is a treasure house of illustrations, especially of the triumph of materialism over spirituality.

There is the one, for example, about Cardinal Campeggio, the papal nuncio at the Nuremberg Diet in 1524, who took advantage of his presence in that city of technology to buy the latest mathematical books and globes from the printer Johann Schöner. Then, as Ms. Jardine reports the incident, he “refused to pay for his purchases, on the grounds that Schöner was a known Lutheran, and as the Pope’s representative he could not do business with heretics.”

Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance