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The Christian Renaissance (15th–16th Century)

Between 1400 and 1530, humanist popes, believing artists and philologist-theologians reshaped Catholic culture: the Vatican Library, the Sistine Chapel, St Peter's Basilica, the Christian humanism of Erasmus and Thomas More — the matrix of the future Council of Trent.

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The Christian Renaissance denotes the great cultural, artistic and spiritual recomposition that swept through the Catholic Church in the 15th and early 16th century, chiefly in Italy, before radiating across the whole of Latin Europe. Far from being a pagan revival set against the faith, this movement was carried by popes, cardinals, religious orders, Catholic humanists and believing artists who sought to recover the purity of Christian sources — Scripture, the Greek and Latin Fathers, the ancient liturgy, Platonic philosophy read as an evangelical preparation — while entrusting visible beauty with a new theological role[1].

The French word renaissance imposed itself late, popularised in the 19th century by Jules Michelet and then Jacob Burckhardt in La Civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie (Basel, 1860)[2]. Contemporaries spoke instead of rinascita (Vasari, 1550), restauratio, renovatio or aetas aurea — the rebirth of letters and arts belonged, for them, within a religious perspective: restoring the vetera (the ancient things) the better to serve the faith, in the line of Saint Augustine reading the pagan philosophers as spoliatio Aegyptiorum, a lawful spoil placed at the disposal of the people of God[3].

This Catholic rebirth had a cost and a darker side. Pontifical patronage entailed heavier ecclesiastical taxation, cardinalatial nepotism peaked under Alexander VI Borgia, and the pursuit of financial magnificence ended in the sale of indulgences that would serve as Luther's detonator in 1517. Recent Catholic historiography — Hubert Jedin, John W. O'Malley, Massimo Firpo, Adriano Prosperi, Charles Stinger — has nevertheless shown that the Roman Renaissance is not a pagan parenthesis in the history of the Church, but the doctrinal and institutional matrix from which would emerge the Catholic reform, the Council of Trent, the new missionary congregations and Ignatian spirituality[4].

The article that follows retraces this history, starting from its definition, its Italian centres, its great pontifical, humanist and artistic figures, the crises that shook it — Savonarola, the Borgias, the Sack of Rome — and the way in which it directly prepared the Tridentine turning point and the modern Catholic mission.

What is the Christian Renaissance?

An ecclesial definition, not merely an aesthetic one

For the general public, the Renaissance first evokes the masterpieces of Italian painting and Florentine villas. This aesthetic reduction betrays the depth of the phenomenon. To understand what it was within the Church, three levels must be held together[5]:

  1. A cultural level: the rediscovery of the studia humanitatis — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy — and of ancient authors recovered in Greek and classical Latin.
  2. An artistic level: the birth of a new visual language — perspective, anatomy, proportion — placed at the service of overwhelmingly religious subjects.
  3. A religious level: an effort to return to the sources (ad fontes) — the Fathers of the Church, Scripture in its original languages, patristic liturgy — carried by popes, bishops and theologians, and directly preparing the great Catholic reform of the 16th century.

Historians speak of Christian humanism to designate the convergence of these three levels. Charles Stinger describes the Vatican of the period as the moment when the papacy, despite its contradictions, attempted to ground its legitimacy in a renewed culture capable of answering the humanists, the conciliarists and the princes — the Roman Renaissance thus being no profane parenthesis between Avignon and Trent[6].

Medieval roots

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (San Marco, Florence, c. 1442). Painted for the cell of a Dominican friar, the work embodies the Gothic-Renaissance continuity of a faith that structures the entire visual language. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Contrary to a tenacious cliché, the Renaissance is not the opposite of the Middle Ages. It extends medieval dynamics already under way in the mendicant orders, in the universities, in the Rhenish and Flemish Devotio moderna, and in the patristic frequentation encouraged since the 12th century by Cistercian, Victorine and Dominican schools. Jacques Le Goff, in Un long Moyen Âge (Tallandier, 2004), even disputes Michelet's abrupt dividing line: for him the Renaissance is but one rebirth among others — after the Carolingian, Ottonian and 12th-century rebirths — the last sub-period of a long Middle Ages extending into the 18th century[7].

The continuity is visible in the first great artists of the Quattrocento: Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455), a Dominican at the convent of San Marco in Florence, painted for his brethren bare cells in which each fresco serves meditation. Beatified by John Paul II on 3 October 1982, then proclaimed patron of artists on 18 February 1984[8], he embodies the perfect junction between medieval iconography and Filippo Brunelleschi's new science of perspective.

"Pagan" Renaissance and Christian Renaissance

One part of the older historiography, inherited from Burckhardt and still more from the anticlerical 19th century, opposed a pagan Renaissance (humanists admiring the Ancients, worldly patron popes) to a Christian Renaissance (Fra Angelico, Savonarola, Erasmus). This opposition is contested by several historians of pontifical Rome and the Italian Reformation — notably John W. O'Malley in Trent (2013), Massimo Firpo in his work on the Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés (2015), and Charles Stinger in The Renaissance in Rome (1985)[9][10][11].

Three facts demonstrate this:

  • The humanists massively edited the Fathers of the Church: modern patrology was born in the Renaissance, with the editions of Origen, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Basil and Saint Jerome produced by Erasmus and his circle.
  • The patron popes, even the least exemplary morally, commissioned overwhelmingly religious art: the Sistine Chapel, the Pietà and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament are not antique subjects but theological manifestos.
  • The most brilliant lay humanists — Marsilio Ficino a priest in Florence, Pico della Mirandola a disciple of Savonarola, Saint Thomas More a martyr of the faith, Vittoria Colonna a friend of Michelangelo — were convinced Christians, whose quest for ancient wisdom was conceived as a propaedeutic to the Gospel.

Who were the Renaissance popes?

The papacy played a decisive role in the movement. Between Martin V (1417–1431), who closed the Great Western Schism at the Council of Constance, and Leo X (1513–1521), who helplessly witnessed the outbreak of the Lutheran Reformation, some ten successive pontiffs embodied to varying degrees the "Renaissance" identity of the Roman Church[12].

#PopePontificateMajor contribution to the Christian Renaissance
1Martin V1417–1431Return of the papacy to Rome (28 September 1420), restoration of the Papal States
2Eugene IV1431–1447Council of Florence, union with the Greeks (6 July 1439)
3Nicholas V1447–1455Refounding of the Vatican Library (1451), commission to Fra Angelico for the Niccoline Chapel
4Pius II1458–1464Bull Execrabilis (18 January 1460), attempted crusade after the fall of Constantinople
5Sixtus IV1471–1484Building of the Sistine Chapel (1473–1481), bull Cum praeexcelsa (28 February 1476) on the Immaculate Conception
6Alexander VI1492–1503Bull Inter caetera (4 May 1493), division of the Indies; artistic patronage and personal excesses (see the Borgia decadence)
7Julius II1503–1513Foundation stone of the new St Peter's Basilica (18 April 1506), commissions to Michelangelo (Sistine 1508–1512) and Raphael (Stanze 1508–1517)
8Leo X1513–1521Completion of Raphael's Stanze, but publication of the indulgences for St Peter's triggering the Lutheran crisis (1517)
9Adrian VI1522–1523Austere reforming pope, rejected the lavish Renaissance — died after 20 months
10Clement VII1523–1534Endured the Sack of Rome (6 May 1527), refused Henry VIII's annulment (1533)

Three figures sum up the movement.

Nicholas V (1447–1455) and the Vatican Library

Nicholas V (Tomaso Parentucelli, 1397–1455), humanist, refounder of the Vatican Library in 1451. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Tomaso Parentucelli (1397–1455), elected pope as Nicholas V on 6 March 1447, was the first fully humanist pope. A former librarian to Cardinal Niccolò Niccoli in Florence and friend of Cosimo de' Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, he personally knew the finest flower of the Italian studia humanitatis.

From 1451 onwards, he refounded at the Vatican a public library of encyclopaedic scope, whose statutes would be definitively fixed by his bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae of 15 June 1475 — that is, under Sixtus IV, who consolidated the institution[13]. At Nicholas V's death, the collection already numbered some 1,200 Greek and Latin manuscripts, making it the largest Christian collection in the West.

His purpose was explicitly theological. Vespasiano da Bisticci, the Florentine bookseller who personally supplied the pope with manuscripts, reports his design: to gather in one safe and accessible place the best Greek and Latin books, for the common use of scholars and the benefit of the faith[14].

It was he who tasked Fra Angelico with frescoing the Vatican's private chapel (the Cappella Niccolina, 1448–1450) with the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence. He also commissioned Lorenzo Valla for the Latin translation of Thucydides and Herodotus, and counted among his intimates Cardinal Bessarion — a Greek who had come over to Rome and would defend Plato against George of Trebizond in his In calumniatorem Platonis (1469).

Julius II (1503–1513), the builder pope

Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere) painted by Raphael (c. 1511–1512). National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Giuliano della Rovere (1443–1513), nephew of Sixtus IV, became pope as Julius II on 1 November 1503. Of warlike temperament, he militarily reconquered the Papal States, founded the Swiss Guard (22 January 1506) and convened the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512.

But he was above all a builder pope. On 18 April 1506, he laid the foundation stone of the new St Peter's Basilica, designed by Donato Bramante on a Greek-cross plan (Michelangelo would later return to the centred Greek-cross plan; it was Carlo Maderno, in the early 17th century, who lengthened it into a Latin cross). He ordered the demolition of the old Constantinian basilica, a gesture debated by the humanists — Erasmus, in his posthumous Julius exclusus, would reproach him for building a monument to his own glory rather than to Peter's[15].

He summoned to Rome Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) for his tomb, a project that would drag on until 1545; above all he entrusted him with the vault of the Sistine Chapel (1508–1512), 480 m² of frescoes of unequalled theological intensity. In that same year 1508, he summoned Raphael (1483–1520) to decorate the Stanza della Segnatura (completed in 1511), where four frescoes stand side by side summing up the intellectual vision of the Christian Renaissance: Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (theology), The School of Athens (philosophy), The Parnassus (poetry), Cardinal and Theological Virtues (law)[16].

Leo X (1513–1521) and the Lutheran crisis

Giovanni de' Medici (1475–1521), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was elected pope on 11 March 1513 at the age of 37, after having been made cardinal-deacon at 13. The famous formula tradition attributes to him — "God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it" — attested by a contemporary Venetian ambassador and debated by historians since Pastor, sums up the cultural and lavish dimension of his pontificate[17].

Under him, Raphael's Stanze were unveiled, the first phase of St Peter's completed, the Vatican Library enlarged and a chair of Greek created at the Roman Studium. But it was also under him that the need to finance St Peter's led to the preaching of plenary indulgences in the Empire: granted by Leo X and entrusted for the province of Magdeburg to Albert of Mainz, they were preached notably by Tetzel from the spring of 1517 — the preaching against which Martin Luther drafted his 95 Theses, traditionally dated 31 October 1517[18][19]. The bull of condemnation Exsurge Domine of 15 June 1520, promulgated by Leo X, opened the Protestant rupture. The Roman Renaissance then entered its irreversible crisis.

Christian humanism: back to the Fathers and the Scriptures

The Platonic Academy of Florence

Alongside the popes, the decisive centre of the Christian Renaissance was Florence, under the political rule of the Medici. Cosimo the Elder (1389–1464), then his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492), welcomed to the villa of Careggi a circle of humanists organised as a Platonic Academy[20].

Its master was Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a priest, the complete Latin translator of Plato (1484) and Plotinus (1492), and author of the Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum (1474). His cardinal thesis: Plato's philosophy is not the adversary of Christianity but its praeparatio, in the line of Eusebius of Caesarea and Saint Augustine — Platonic wisdom, ordered to God and to the beauty of the soul, prepares the intellect to receive the Gospel[21][22].

The Academy does not say that Plato equals Christ — it says that Plato prepares us to understand Christ. It is the same attitude as Saint Justin Martyr's towards the philosophers in the 2nd century.

Pico della Mirandola and the dignity of man

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), pupil of Marsilio Ficino, author of the Oration on the Dignity of Man. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was Ficino's most brilliant disciple. At twenty-three, he published his 900 philosophical, cabbalistic and theological conclusions which he offered to defend publicly in Rome in early 1487. The Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate) that was to serve as its introduction became a manifesto of the Christian philosophy of man: God places man at the centre of the cosmos not to enclose him but so that he may freely choose his rank, whether towards the beasts or towards the angels[23].

Thirteen of his 900 theses were condemned by a commission appointed by Innocent VIII in early 1487. Pico retracted them in his Apologia (1487), then drew close to Savonarola, becoming his friend and admirer in Florence, and died at thirty-one on 17 November 1494 — perhaps poisoned: his skeleton exhumed in 2007 bore traces of arsenic[24]. He is said to have asked to die in the Dominican habit.

Erasmus of Rotterdam: the prince of Catholic humanists

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536) painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1523). The “prince of humanists” was a Catholic priest and remained loyal to Rome against Luther. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), Catholic priest and universal humanist, was without doubt the most influential figure in the learned Europe of the years 1500–1530. His Novum Instrumentum omne (Basel, March 1516) was the first printed edition of the New Testament in Greek, accompanied by a reworked Latin translation and philological annotations: it is the matrix of all modern textual criticism[25].

His Adages, his Colloquies, his Praise of Folly (1511) — dedicated to Thomas More, whose guest he was in London —, his Methodus and his Enchiridion militis christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier, 1503) spread throughout Europe an ideal of humanitas christiana: return to Scripture in its original languages, return to the Fathers, liturgical stripping back, social charity, peace among Christian princes. It is the spirit of the philosophia Christi, an expression he coined.

When Luther broke with Rome, Erasmus refused to follow him. His polemical reply De libero arbitrio (Basel, September 1524) frontally attacked the Lutheran thesis of the bound will. Luther answered with De servo arbitrio (December 1525), breaking definitively[26]. Erasmus died in Basel on 12 July 1536, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, after refusing to sign the Protestant confessions — even when the city he lived in had become Reformed.

Thomas More: humanist, chancellor, canonised martyr

Saint Thomas More (1478–1535), Lord Chancellor of England, painted by Holbein in 1527. Beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. Canonised by Pius XI in 1935. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) is the English incarnation of Christian humanism. An intimate friend of Erasmus, author of Utopia (Louvain, 1516), barrister in London, judge, then Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532, he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the Act of Supremacy (3 November 1534) by which Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the Church of England. Imprisoned in the Tower of London on 17 April 1534 and tried for high treason on 1 July 1535, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535.

His last words as reported by the chroniclers — "I die the King's good servant, but God's first" — became the motto of English Catholics under persecution[27]. Pius XI canonised him on 19 May 1935 (four hundred years after his martyrdom); John Paul II proclaimed him patron of statesmen and politicians on 31 October 2000[28].

Renaissance art as visible theology

The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo's vault (1508–1512)

The vault of the Sistine Chapel is probably the best-known work of the Christian Renaissance — and one of the most misunderstood. Michelangelo Buonarroti painted there, on Julius II's commission, nine central scenes from the Book of Genesis (from the Separation of Light from Darkness to the Sacrifice of Noah), framed by seven prophets of Israel and five pagan sibyls, plus the ancestors of Christ in the lunettes and four Old Testament episodes in the pendentives.

The iconography is no fancy of the artist's. Marcia Hall demonstrated that it follows an explicit Augustinian theology, probably programmed by the Dominican theologian Egidio da Viterbo, future cardinal and author of a Historia XX saeculorum: the narrative follows the expectation of salvation, from the primal chaos to the promise of the Messiah culminating above the altar in the Creation of Adam — figure of the incarnate Word to come[29].

Michelangelo, The Pietà (1498–1499). Sculpted at 24 for Cardinal Jean de Bilhères. St Peter's Basilica, Rome. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The Last Judgment on the altar wall, commissioned by Clement VII and completed under Paul III in 1541, is thirty years later than the vault: it belongs to another climate, that of the Sack of Rome, of the Council of Trent in gestation and of the more dramatic spirituality of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo's spiritual friend to whom he dedicated his religious sonnets[30].

Michelangelo was no secularised artist. His Rime, his sonnets and his correspondence reveal a tormented believer who devoted the last years of his life to the St Peter's building site[31]: for him, good painting as good sculpture has as its end to make God known and to lead the beholder towards heaven, as he explains in substance to his nephew Leonardo in his Roman letters[32].

Raphael and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509–1511). This fresco of pagan philosophy faces, in the same room, the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (theology). The Roman Renaissance sets the two orders in dialogue, not in opposition. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520) unfolds the intellectual programme of the Roman Renaissance in four frescoes. On the south wall, the Disputa del Sacramento (in reality Disputatio: the theological disputation on the Eucharist, completed in 1509) shows, in the celestial register, the Trinity and the Church triumphant; in the earthly register, the Fathers of the Church (Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory) and the doctors (Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus) surround the monstrance. It is a theological synthesis in paint, a spatial catechesis of the Real Presence on the eve of the Protestant controversies of 1517[33].

Opposite, on the north wall, the famous School of Athens (1509–1511) gathers the ancient philosophers around Plato (pointing to heaven) and Aristotle (pointing to earth). These two frescoes face each other: for Julius II and his theologian, ancient philosophy and Christian theology converse without rivalry. It is Marsilio Ficino's thesis materialised across nearly 40 m².

Leonardo da Vinci and religious perspective

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) offers a more ambivalent face: while his great Christian subjects — the Last Supper (Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, 1495–1498), which captures the precise instant when Jesus announces "one of you will betray me" (Mt 26:21) as a theological drama of human faithfulness before the Passion — testify to an intense meditation on the Gospel, his personal notebooks also mix philosophical and naturalistic questionings, so that historians remain divided over his personal faith. His Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre / National Gallery), his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre) and his Madonna with a Carnation (Munich) are nonetheless rigorous Marian meditations.

The Renaissance and the spread of the Word

The printing press at the Church's service

The first book printed by Johannes Gutenberg at Mainz in 1455 was a Bible — the 42-line Bible, of which some fifty copies have come down to us — some twenty of them complete[34]. This is no detail: by the end of the 15th century, religious works — Bibles, books of hours, missals, Fathers of the Church, sermonaries, spiritual treatises — occupied a considerable place in press output[35].

The printing press enabled the Church:

  • to spread the Bible as never before — biblical editions multiplied across Europe from the earliest decades of printing;
  • to edit the Fathers with new philological precision (Origen edited by Erasmus in 1536, Saint Jerome in 1516, Saint Augustine by the Maurists in the following century);
  • to standardise the Roman liturgy in the 16th century, preparing the great Tridentine reform of the Missale Romanum (1570).

The Complutensian Polyglot Bible

The most impressive exegetical work of the Catholic Renaissance is the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (Biblia Complutensis), produced at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain under the direction of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo. Printed in six volumes between 1514 and 1517 and authorised by Leo X on 22 March 1520, it presents on the same page Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and the Latin Vulgate[36].

It is a monument of Catholic philological scholarship: 600 printed copies, more than fifteen years of labour by converted Jewish, Hellenic and Latinist scholars, based on manuscripts lent by the pope himself. When Erasmus published his Novum Instrumentum in March 1516, he knew that the Greek New Testament of Alcalá had already been printed since 1514 (though not yet published) — he hastened his own into print so as not to be forestalled.

The crisis at the heart of the Renaissance

Savonarola, tragic prophet of Florence

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), Dominican, painted by Fra Bartolomeo (c. 1498). The tragic preacher of Florence denounced the excesses of the worldly Renaissance. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), a Ferrarese Dominican and prior of the convent of San Marco in Florence from 1491, denounced with prophetic violence the worldliness of the Medici, the Florentine bankers and Pope Alexander VI. Excommunicated on 12 May 1497 and condemned by a mixed civil and ecclesiastical tribunal, he was hanged then burned in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498[37].

His is a complex figure. Pico della Mirandola was his friend, Botticelli his disciple (said to have burned some profane paintings in the bonfires of the vanities), and Michelangelo was marked by his sermons to the end. No cause for beatification has succeeded, but Fr Innocenzo Venchi OP, General Postulator of the Dominican Order, undertook steps in the 1990s towards a beatification cause[38].

The Borgias: the dark underside of pontifical patronage

The election of Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) on 11 August 1492 marks the gravest drift of pontifical patronage. While Alexander VI pursued the cultural policy of his predecessors — summoning Pinturicchio for the frescoes of the Borgia Apartment (1492–1494), welcoming the humanists, supporting the Iberian missions with the bull Inter caetera of 4 May 1493 — his scandalous private life, his acknowledged children (Cesare, Lucrezia, Jofré), outrageous nepotism for his family's benefit, and his ambiguous role in several suspicious deaths are attested by the Venetian ambassadors and the Diarium of Johann Burchard, his master of ceremonies[39].

The specialised article The Decadence of the Borgia Popes retraces in detail the pontificate of Alexander VI and the repercussions of his family down to the Sack of Rome of 1527.

The Sack of Rome (6 May 1527): the symbolic end

Under Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici, 1523–1534), the imperial troops of Charles V — mostly German Lutheran Landsknechte and Spanish mercenaries — besieged Rome. On 6 May 1527, the city was taken and given over to a sack lasting several days, one of the most brutal in modern history[40].

The pope took refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo, then in Orvieto. According to the chroniclers, several thousand Romans were killed, churches pillaged, relics profaned, nuns violated, and the manuscripts of the Vatican Library ransacked. For the surviving humanists — Pietro Aretino, Pietro Bembo, Pole, Sadolet — it was the end of an era.

André Chastel saw in it the moment when the Roman Renaissance dream collided brutally with the biblical judgment of Babylon: for him, the sack closed the Renaissance even more than the pontificate of Clement VII, shattering a humanist confidence that neither Paul III nor the Council of Trent would ever restore as it was[41].

The Renaissance, antechamber of the Council of Trent

A Church awakening to the need for reform

Far from being a failure, the Catholic Renaissance directly prepared the great movement of Catholic reform in the 16th century. Three lines must be distinguished[42]:

  • the institutional reform willed by the humanists — pastoral visitations, formation of the clergy, residence of bishops — already advocated by Gasparo Contarini in the Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia delivered to Paul III on 9 March 1537;
  • the spiritual reform carried by the new orders — Theatines (1524), Capuchins (1525), Barnabites (1530), Ursulines (1535), Jesuits (approved on 27 September 1540 by Paul III);
  • the doctrinal reform ratified by the Council of Trent (13 December 1545 — 4 December 1563).

The great council was the magisterial answer the Renaissance alone had been unable to produce. It defined the biblical canon, fixed the doctrine of justification (Session VI, 13 January 1547), clarified the sacraments, reformed the clergy, required the residence of bishops and the creation of seminaries. But it extended rather than repudiated the Renaissance: Trent cites Augustine, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas — exactly the authors edited by the humanists — and used the new philological skills to fix the Vulgate (Session IV, 8 April 1546).

A worldwide diffusion

St Peter's Basilica, Rome. Foundation stone laid by Julius II on 18 April 1506, completed under Urban VIII in 1626. The new St Peter's is the architectural culmination of the Christian Renaissance. Wikimedia Commons, photograph under a free licence.

The Christian Renaissance spread the Catholic faith worldwide. The same movement that restored the Vatican Library sent Franciscan missionaries to Mexico (1524), Dominicans to South America, Jesuits to Japan (Saint Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima on 15 August 1549), to China (Matteo Ricci entered Beijing in 1601), to Vietnam and India.

The Portuguese and Spanish royal patronage — governed by the Padroado and the Patronato real confirmed by Borgia's bulls Inter caetera (1493) and Eximiae devotionis (1493) — made the Renaissance the first Christian globalisation. St Peter's Basilica, rebuilt from 1506, was no vanity: it is the central altar of a Church become truly universal in the geographical sense of the term.

The Renaissance as continuation, not rupture

To sum up in one sentence what recent Catholic historical research has established (Hubert Jedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, 4 vols., 1949–1981; John O'Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council, 2013; Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 1985; Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, 2015):

"The Renaissance is not the pagan antechamber of an inevitable Protestant Reformation. It is the Catholic matrix of an intra-ecclesial reform whose result is the Council of Trent. Without Lorenzo Valla's philology, without Erasmus's Greek, without the Augustinian iconography of the Sistine, without the Alcalá Bible, without the new reforming orders, Trent would have had no tools." — Synthesis of contemporary ecclesial historiography[43][44][45]

What makes the Christian Renaissance theologically interesting is neither the magnificence of the frescoes, nor the brilliance of the academies, nor the grandeur of the builder popes. It is that it posed, in image and in book, the central question modernity would then ask indefinitely: how can the Catholic Church speak its eternal message in men's changing culture? To this question it answered — not perfectly, sometimes badly, but really — with Erasmus's Greek Gospel, with the critical Vulgate of Alcalá, with Michelangelo's theological vault, with the Marian Pietà of the Vatican, and with the missions to the ends of the earth. It is this inheritance, and not the Borgia scandals alone, that serious ecclesial historiography retains.

To go further

Notes and References

  1. Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, Batsford, London, 1972 (American edition: Scribner, New York); revised and expanded edition under the title The Italian Renaissance — Culture and Society in Italy, 3rd revised ed., Polity, Cambridge, 2014 (American distribution: Princeton University Press), ISBN 978-0691162409. See also Peter Burke, The European Renaissance — Centres and Peripheries, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998 — a classic synthesis of the cultural and religious dimensions of the European Renaissance.

    1

  2. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, Schweighauser, Basel, 1860; English translation The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, Macmillan, 1878; current edition: Penguin Classics, 1990. Founding work of Renaissance historiography, to which we owe the idea of an "individuation" characteristic of the period, since debated by all ecclesial and cultural historiography.

    2

  3. William Barry, article The Renaissance, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XII, Robert Appleton Company, New York, 1911. Text available at newadvent.org/cathen/12765b.htm. Classic presentation of the Renaissance in its dual humanist and Christian dimension. The formula of the "spoils of the Egyptians" (spoliatio Aegyptiorum) comes from Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II, 40, 60.

    3

  4. John W. O'Malley (S.J.), Trent — What Happened at the Council, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2013, ISBN 978-0674066977. Reference study by an American Jesuit historian. See also John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press, 1993, on the genesis of the Society of Jesus as the institutional culmination of the Catholic Renaissance.

    4 9 42 43

  5. Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985, reprint 1998, ISBN 978-0253213273. Exhaustive study (446 pp.) of the humanist pontificate in Rome from 1417 to 1527, based on the Vatican archives.

    5 6 11 45

  6. Jacques Le Goff, Un long Moyen Âge, Tallandier, Paris, 2004, ISBN 978-2847341227. See also Jacques Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l'histoire en tranches ?, Seuil, Paris, 2014, in which he extends his thesis of an essential Middle Ages / Renaissance continuity. English translation of the latter: Must We Divide History Into Periods?, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise, Columbia University Press, 2015.

    7

  7. Saint John Paul II, homily in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, 18 February 1984 — "proclamo il Beato Angelico patrono presso Dio degli artisti, specialmente dei pittori" ; beatification on 3 October 1982. Text on vatican.va, stable URL: vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/homilies/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19840218_giubileo-artisti.html.

    8

  8. Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdés and the Italian Reformation, Routledge, 2015, ISBN 978-1472432551; see also Massimo Firpo, La presa di potere dell'Inquisizione romana 1550-1553, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2014. On the fluidity of the frontier between the Italian Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

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  9. Ludwig von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 16 vols., Herder, Freiburg, 1886–1933; English translation The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Ralph Francis Kerr, 40 vols., Kegan Paul / Herder, London, 1891–1953. Major Catholic reference for the pontificate from Martin V to Pius VI. For the Renaissance: vols. I–VIII (Martin V to Adrian VI). Partial reprint available digitally on archive.org.

    12 13

  10. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV, manuscript composed between 1480 and 1498; English translation: Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates — The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century, trans. William George and Emily Waters, Harper & Row, New York, 1963. First-hand testimony of the Florentine bookseller-publisher who personally supplied Nicholas V with manuscripts.

    14

  11. Erasmus of Rotterdam (debated authorship, traditionally recognised attribution per Erika Rummel), Iulius exclusus e coelis, Basel, 1517 (post-mortem of Julius II, died 21 February 1513). Critical edition: Erika Rummel (ed. and English trans.), Julius Excluded from Heaven, a Dialogue, by Desiderius Erasmus, University of Toronto Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0802089236. Erasmus's satire against Julius II refused entry to heaven by Saint Peter.

    15

  12. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, 1st edition Florence, 1550; 2nd enlarged edition Florence, 1568. English translation: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, 10 vols., Macmillan / Medici Society, London, 1912–1915; current selection: The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford World's Classics, 1998. Founding source of art historiography.

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  13. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. VIII: Leo X, English ed. Kerr, Kegan Paul, London, 1908. The phrase "godiamoci il papato" attributed to Leo X is transmitted by contemporary Venetian dispatches, then taken up in Francesco Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia, book XIV (Florence, 1561 posthumous). Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. VI, § 56, gives the English version — "Let us enjoy the papacy, for God has given it to us" — from the testimony of the Venetian ambassador Marino Giorgi, and notes that Pastor himself discusses its import.

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  14. Leo X, bull Exsurge Domine, 15 June 1520, condemning 41 propositions of Martin Luther. Canonical text reproduced in Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, nos. 1451–1492; English edition Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, ed. Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash, Ignatius Press, 2012. See also Hubert Jedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, vol. I, Morcelliana, Brescia, 1949, on the genesis of the rupture.

    19

  15. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, Columbia University Press, 1943, reprint Peter Smith, Gloucester (MA), 1964. See also James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Brill, Leiden, 1990, ISBN 978-9004087662. Reference studies on the Florentine Academy.

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  16. Marsilio Ficino, Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum, Florence, 1474. Critical bilingual Latin / English edition: Michael J.B. Allen and James Hankins (eds.), Platonic Theology, 6 vols., I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001–2006, ISBN 978-0674003453.

    21

  17. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de hominis dignitate, manuscript of 1486, first posthumous printed edition, Opera omnia, Bologna, 1496. Recent critical edition: Francesco Bausi (ed.), Discorso sulla dignità dell'uomo, Guanda, Parma, 2003; English translation by Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, On the Dignity of Man, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953, reprint Hackett, 2012, ISBN 978-0872209552; French translation by Yves Hersant, Œuvres philosophiques, PUF, Paris, 1993, ISBN 978-2130456193.

    23

  18. Exhumation of the bodies of Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano at San Marco in Florence in 2007, under the direction of Prof. Giorgio Gruppioni (University of Bologna): high concentrations of arsenic found in the bones suggest poisoning. Results announced in February 2008 (dispatches picked up by The Telegraph; secondary reports consulted: phys.org, "Renaissance mystery solved", February 2008; Italy Magazine, "500-Year-Old murder investigation confirms poison"; Italy On This Day, entry Giovanni Pico della Mirandola). The exact reference to The Lancet having proved unverifiable, it is not included here.

    24

  19. Erasmus of Rotterdam, Novum Instrumentum omne, Basel, Froben, March 1516. First printed edition of the New Testament in Greek, with revised Latin translation and annotations. Digitised facsimile: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, shelfmark 2 A.gr.b. 25. For the philological context: Erika Rummel, Erasmus' Annotations on the New Testament, University of Toronto Press, 1986.

    25

  20. Erasmus of Rotterdam, De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, Basel, Froben, September 1524; Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, Wittenberg, December 1525. Commented bilingual edition of both texts in English: Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, Westminster Press, 1969. The rupture between Erasmus and Luther is fully documented there.

    26

  21. Reginald Pole (cardinal), Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, Rome, 1538, book III. Critical re-edition: Reginald Pole, Defense of the Unity of the Church, trans. Joseph G. Dwyer, Newman Press, 1965. Cardinal Pole, a distant cousin of Henry VIII and future Archbishop of Canterbury under Mary Tudor, reports More's last words. See also Richard Marius, Thomas More — A Biography, Knopf, New York, 1984.

    27

  22. Saint John Paul II, apostolic letter motu proprio E sancti Thomae Mori, 31 October 2000, proclaiming Saint Thomas More heavenly patron of statesmen and politicians. Full text on vatican.va, stable URL: vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_jp-ii_motu-proprio_20001031_thomas-more.html.

    28

  23. Marcia B. Hall (ed.), Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0521783644; and Marcia B. Hall, Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, Abrams, New York, 2002. See also John Shearman, The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decorations, Oxford University Press, 1972, on Egidio da Viterbo's theological programme.

    29

  24. Vittoria Colonna, Rime spirituali, first edition Parma, 1538; recent critical edition: Alan Bullock (ed.), Rime, Laterza, Bari, 1982. On her spiritual relationship with Michelangelo: Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation, Ashgate, 2008, ISBN 978-0754655954.

    30

  25. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Carteggio, letter to Leonardo Buonarroti, Rome, 22 June 1556. Critical edition in five volumes: Giovanni Poggi, Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (eds.), Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, Sansoni then SPES, Florence, 1965–1983.

    32

  26. Stephan Füssel, Gutenberg und seine Wirkung, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt, 1999; English translation Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing, Ashgate, 2003. On the fifty or so surviving copies of the 42-line Bible (1455), some twenty of them complete: see the census of the Gutenberg-Gesellschaft at Mainz.

    34

  27. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books — Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Stanford University Press, 1994. Original French edition: L'Ordre des livres, Alinea, Aix-en-Provence, 1992. On the scale of the corpus: the British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue lists online nearly 30,000 15th-century editions, with no published breakdown by subject that would allow a precise percentage of religious works to be established.

    35

  28. Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros — On the Threshold of Spain's Golden Age, Tempe (AZ), Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999, ISBN 978-0866982351; Adrian Schenker, The Polyglot Bibles of Antwerp, Paris and London 1568–1657, in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, vol. II, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2008. The Biblia Complutensis is fully digitised by the Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla of the Complutense University of Madrid.

    36

  29. Massimo Firpo, Storia di Savonarola, Carocci, Rome, 2018 (with Fabrizio Biferali); see also Donald Weinstein, Savonarola — The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, Yale University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0300111934. On the trial and execution: the trial records are kept at the Archivio di Stato in Florence and were edited by Roberto Ridolfi.

    37

  30. Innocenzo Venchi OP, "Iniziative dell'Ordine Domenicano per promuovere la causa di beatificazione del Ven. fra Girolamo Savonarola O.P.", in Studi Savonaroliani. Verso il V centenario, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini, Florence, 1996, pp. 93–97; see also "(Girolamo) Savonarola: a saint after all?", article presenting Fr Venchi as promoter of Savonarola's cause (reproduced on thefreelibrary.com). Fr Venchi was General Postulator of the Order of Preachers from 1976 to 2003. No cause has succeeded to this day.

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  31. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. V: Alexander VI, English ed. Kerr, Kegan Paul, London, 1898; see also Johann Burchard, Liber notarum, journal of the pontifical master of ceremonies from 1483 to 1506. Critical edition: Enrico Celani, Liber notarum, 2 vols., Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Città di Castello, 1907–1942. Essential primary source for the Borgia pontificate.

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  32. André Chastel, Le Sac de Rome 1527 — Du premier maniérisme à la Contre-Réforme, Gallimard, Paris, 1984, ISBN 978-2070702770. English translation: The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer, Princeton University Press, 1983. Classic study of the event, its contemporary witnesses (Bembo, Sadolet, Vettori) and its effects on Italian and European culture.

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