In The Italian Renaissance J. H. Plumb

Following a half-century of a congenerly stable balance of power among the major cities, the french kings invaded Italy in 1494 and the worst wars yet consumed the peninsula until the Emperor won in 1527. It was amid this constant violence, and in contrast to it, that the ideals of the Renaissance were developed.

Both full-grown and small Italian cities had the unusual experience of "a equal democracy in the midst of feudalism" (23). In the expanding rescue of the cities, informal forms of government called communes were established by the members of the craft guilds. work and trade directed the growth of the cities where there was a relative absence of central power. But the nobles of the surrounding countryside were often indispensable for wars with rival cities and most communes gradually came under the despotic reckon of particular families or ruling cliques. The bubonic plague, which killed thousands in the mid-fourteenth century, beef up the need for organized control of the towns. Even the Papal States were playing field to this kind of disorder because central authority disappeared when the popes moved themselves to Avignon from 1309 to 1378. The go on of the despots only increased warfare among the cities, yet their rule finally contributed to the advances that were made by Italian civilization.

Plumb describes Perugia, with its constant crashing(a) fighting between the Baglioni and Oddi factions, as an example

Venice was one of the most remarkable successes of all the Italian cities and Plumb, the reader feels, would like to expand on the subject at much greater length. Venice took the period's genius for economic success to its superlative height. The Republic of Venice was the only truly cosmopolitan power in Italy, other than the Papacy (which followed a different set of rules). Venice make up an empire through the power of its merchant fleet. The urban center also developed industries such as glass devising and the production of jewelry which assured their predominance in the concoct of luxury goods from the materials they imported from the east.

The most interesting aspect of Venice's tarradiddle in this era was its development of an oligarchic state that operated altogether with the economic interests of the state in mind. Venice under the doges and the Council of Ten became a powerhouse because every other consideration took second power to the commercial success on which the city depended. Yet, as H. R. Trevor-Roper's story of Francesco Foscari shows, even when the doges were intent on pursuing the interests of the state the sexual quarrels that characterized all forms of city government could bring them down and purloin the city from it main purpose.

Observation and learning from authoritative refinement were just as important in the arts as they were in politics. Around 1400 two Florentine artists, the sculptor Donatello and the fashion designer Brunelleschi, changed the course of art with their new interest in perspective, in human nature, and in "reality as they saw it . . . outright and clear-sightedly" (42). This sense of discovery led the Italian artists to take the classical example far beyond mere imitation. In Michelangelo, the superlative of the classicizing artists, works such as the Pieta created what Kenneth Clark calls an impossible achievement, "a accurate fusion of Gothic and Classic art" (197). In painting the classical influence was important -- as with t
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