BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI
(1313-1375). One of the three great Italian authors of the 14th century (along with Dante and Petrarch) who established the Tuscan dialect as Italy’s literary language. Born near Florence to a merchant employed by the Bardi bank and a woman whose name is unrecorded, Giovanni was legitimized and educated by his father, who sought to educate him as a banker and later as a canon lawyer. From an early age, however, the youth discovered his own interests in literature and classical studies. His father’s transfer to the Naples branch of the Bardi bank brought Giovanni into the literary circles of the royal court there. He also was able to study classical literature at the local university.
His own early writings reflect a combination of interests: in the medieval love poetry of the Neapolitan court, in the classical literature of ancient Rome, in the Bible, and in the encyclopedic compilations of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio wrote both verse romances (such as Filostrato, a source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde) and lengthy prose fiction (such as the Filocolo, a popular tale of love and adventure).
In 1341 his father’s employer recalled him to Florence. The son found the shift from an elegant royal court to an austere republic devoted to money-making difficult, but in time he became a Florentine patriot and strove to glorify its greatest literary figures, Dante and Petrarch. One of the most enduring and influential of Boccaccio’s early works was Fiametta (1343-1344), a prose tale sometmes called the first psychological novel. Contrary to custom, it had a female narrator. His masterpiece was the Decameron (1348-1351), a collection of prose tales supposedly told by ten wealthy young men and women who had fled Florence to escape the Black Death. Although many of the individual stories have become famous and influenced later writers, the work is not just a haphazard collection of tales but a unified book in which the character of the narrators and the interplay among members of the group are developed skillfully.
Boccaccio was also strongly drawn to the classical interests of his fellow humanists and produced additional works in Latin. In 1350 he finally met Petrarch, whose works he had long admired. Petrarch encouraged him to write more scholarly books. Boccaccio responded by continuing his series of Latin eclogues (Bucolicum carmen). But he did not share Petrarch’s disdain for popular literature. Where the two men agreed most fully was in defining the pursuit of literature as a goal worthy of a wise man’s life. Boccaccio composed three works reflecting his own classical studies: Genealogia deorum gentilium / Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (1350-1373), which became a standard work of reference on Roman and Greek mythology, and two biographical collections, De casibus virorum illustrium / Fates of Illustrious Men (1355-1373) and a counterpart for the biographies of famous women, De mulieribus claris (1361). In addition, he wrote biographical sketches of both Dante and Petrarch and late in life delivered a series of public lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
BOIARDO, MATTEO MARIA
(1441-1494). Italian humanist and poet, best known for his romance epic Orlando innamorato /Roland in Love. Boiardo was brought up at Ferrara and at a castle belonging to his grandfather. He lived at the court of Ferrara, where he was a close associate of Duke Ercole I and served the prince as a military commander and regional governor. His early poetry was in Latin, but he also wrote vernacular pastoral eclogues and a book of love poetry modelled on Petrarch. His famous epic merges two traditional romance themes, the Carolingian and the Arthurian, in an account of the love of the hero Orlando for a Saracen princess. It draws on Greek, Latin, French, and Italian material from several genres. It had great influence on epic poetry in the following generations and inspired many sequels; the Orlando furioso by Ariosto is the most famous of the latter.
BOLOGNA, CONCORDAT OF
(1516). Treaty between Pope Leo X and King Francis I of France, settling several disputes between the French church and the papacy. The kings and higher clergy of France had long upheld the principle of Gallicanism, which recognized the general authority of the pope but in most respects regarded the French church as an autonomous, self-governing religious community, particularly in matters of appointments to office and taxation. In 1438 this theory had been made part of French law by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The papacy had always condemned these "Gallican" ideas and the closely associated doctrines of 15th-century Conciliarism, which taught that a general council, not the pope, was the ultimate authority in the church. The predecessor of King Francis I, Louis XII, had convened an antipapal Council of Pisa in 1511 as part of his war with Pope Julius II, using the threat of deposition by the council as a means of bringing pressure on the pope. This effort had failed, for the "false council" of Pisa received little support outside of France. At first Francis continued this political conflict with the new pope, Leo X, and in 1515 scored a major military victory over an anti-French alliance that included the pope. After his victory, Francis found it advantageous to negotiate a deal with the pope in order to detach him from his allies. The Concordat of Bologna was the result.
The king abandoned the moribund council. He abandoned the principles of "Gallican liberties" and acknowledged papal supremacy over the Gallican Church. In return, he gained control over the appointment of nearly all high-ranking clergymen, subject only to a nominal right of the pope to reject a nominee he found unqualified. This provision enabled Francis to strengthen his political position in France by using ecclesiastical patronage to buy the loyalty of powerful families in the French aristocracy. For the French clergy, the Concordat betrayed the traditional French support for Conciliarism and undermined Gallican liberties. Both the supreme judicial court, the Parlement of Paris, which had to register treaties, and the University of Paris resisted, but the king ruthlessly employed his constitutional supremacy to override their opposition and silence protests.
BOLOGNA, UNIVERSITY OF
The older of the two greatest universities of medieval and Renaissance Italy, known especially for the study of law but also possessing a highly regarded faculty of medicine. The university came into being by natural growth, beginning in the late 11th century, and like its northern counterpart, Paris, it worked out its institutional structures gradually in the middle decades of the 12th century. The city government granted financial support based on a tax on goods imported for sale; it appointed a commission that chose professors, set salaries, made regulations, and defined the privileges and exemptions of students and faculty. In practice, however, the students constituted the heart of the institution. The univer-sitas or association of students was the university, and though the professors provided professional expertise and certified students for degrees, in many respects they were employees of the student guild. This type of organization, a university of students, was typical of universities in Italy and Mediterranean Europe, unlike the structure of northern universities like Paris, which originated as an association of teachers.
Because Bologna was essentially a school of law and medicine, its students entered at a more advanced educational level and at a more mature age than in the north. Italian students matriculated in their late teens, while most students at Paris and other northern universities entered at about age 13. This difference in age of students probably was a major reason why Italian students played a more powerful role in university governance than was true of northern institutions. In the 15 th century, students of law outnumbered students of the combined faculty of arts and medicine, but during the 16th century, medicine became the largest branch of the university. Bologna had no theological faculty at all until the late 15th century, another respect in which it was typical of Italian universities and unlike the northern ones. The fame of Bologna spread across the Alps, and nearly a third of the students were non-Italians. Germans were the most numerous foreign group, but the reputation of Bologna spread everywhere: a doctorate in law from Bologna was the most desirable degree in the profession, just as a medical doctorate from Padua had the highest prestige in that field.
Since the city of Bologna was legally a part of the Papal States and experienced repeated attempts by the Bentivoglio dynasty and the popes to establish control, local political life was unstable and often violent. The university was so highly regarded, however, that it prospered in spite of the unstable political situation.
BORGIA
Spanish noble family, originally named Borja. The election of Alfonso de Borja as Pope Calixtus III (1455-1458), the first Spanish pope, made the family’s fortune and attracted its leading members to Italy since Pope Calixtus relied on his kinsmen and his Spanish advisers to help him administer the papacy. His nephew Rodrigo became a cardinal and papal vice-chancellor and was enriched by many ecclesiastical benefices, eventually winning election as Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Alexander earned the reputation of being the most corrupt pope of the Italian Renaissance. Two of Alexander’s several children became important historical figures in their own right. The first of these was Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), who became a cardinal and commander of the papal army under his father. Cesare received many valuable ecclesiastical appointments but was never ordained as a priest and was later permitted to marry a French princess. He also received the French duchy of Valentinois and is often referred to by contemporaries (Niccolo Machiavelli, for example) as Duke Valentino. In the opening years of the 16th century, backed by his father’s authority and assisted by a French army, Cesare set out to create a hereditary Borgia principality in the province of Romagna, which was nominally a part of the Papal States. Ruthless in his use of violence and deceit, Cesare eliminated potential rivals by military conquest and murder. The unexpected death of his father in 1503 caught him at a vulnerable moment, and the election of the anti-Borgia Pope Julius II caused his enterprise to collapse. Cesare was arrested and sent to Spain by order of King Ferdinand of Spain. Although he managed to escape in 1506, he was killed in a minor skirmish the following year.
The younger sister of Cesare and daughter of Pope Alexander, Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519) became infamous for her own political ambitions and, like her brother, was reputed to have poisoned those who stood in her way. Rumors of incest with her father and brother seem to be a fabrication of the family’s enemies. In reality, she was more the pawn of her ambitious kinsmen than an independent political force. At age 12 she was married to the ruler of a minor principality, the lord of Pesaro. When a more advantageous opportunity arose in 1497, the pope annulled her first marriage and married her to an illegitimate son of the king of Naples. When this second husband became a political liability, Cesare had him murdered. A third marriage followed in 1501, by far the most splendid, to Alfonso d’Este, who became duke of Ferrara in 1505. At Ferrara, Lucrezia became the head of a brilliant court that included figures such as the poet Ariosto, the scholar-printer Aldus Manutius, the painter Titian, and the humanist Pietro Bembo, who became her lover and dedicated his first major work to her. Her charitable activities as duchess gained her the love of the people. She gave birth to seven children and died in 1519 at the birth of the last one.
BOSCÁN, JUAN
(ca. 1490-1542). Catalan poet and humanist. He received a humanistic education at the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon and tutored the future Spanish general and governor of the Netherlands, the Duke of Alva. In 1526 his encounter with the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero, a noted humanist and poet, awakened his interest in imitating Italian poetry in his own language, and he and his close associate Garcilaso de Vega pioneered the introduction of Petrarchan themes and Italian verse forms into Spanish literature. He is also known as the translator of the famous Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione, a book that shaped the ideas and manners of the Spanish court for the rest of the century.
BOSCH, HIERONYMUS
(ca. 1450-1516). Dutch painter, born at ‘s Hertogenbosch. The son of a painter, he seems to have spent his whole life in ‘s Hertogenbosch, though some art historians find evidence of a trip to Italy. Details of his life are scarce. Even his date of birth is little more than a guess; he was reputed to be an old man when he died in 1516. Much of his work continues the "Flemish style" of late Gothic painting that flourished in the southern Netherlands and northern France throughout the 15th century. His talent was recognized in his own lifetime, and he attracted the patronage of aristocrats and higher clergy and became a wealthy man. Many of his works treat the life of Christ and the saints or present moral allegories, for example Christ Carrying the Cross and St. John on Patmos.
But Bosch’s subsequent fame rested on other paintings that presented moral allegories in an irrational and hallucinatory form, deeply laden with sensual and sexual images that seem to depict human beings as enslaved to their bodily appetites and offer no hint of redemption. The images are so strange that some art historians interpret them as evidence of his membership in a secret heretical sect. In any case, there is a jarring discord between the beauty of the works and the strange monsters and repulsive actions depicted. Two famous examples of this genre of painting are The Last Judgment and The Garden of Earthly Delights. Their meaning remains uncertain, but his work attracted attention and found a market. In the late 16 th century, both Philip II of Spain and his cousin the Emperor Rudolf II admired and collected Bosch’s works.
BOTTICELLI, SANDRO
(1444/5-1510). Florentine painter most closely associated with the intellectual circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the later 15th century. A pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi, in his own time he was renowned for his draftsmanship and for the beauty of his paintings. His works were influenced by contemporaries like Andrea Verocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, but he developed a style distinctly his own, marked by shallow modelling of figures and lack of concern with deep space that seem to represent a deliberate rejection of the solidly three-dimensional pictures of earlier Renaissance painters. Botticelli painted many traditional religious scenes, such as the early The Adoration of the Magi, which reflects the influence of Lippi, and The Coronation of the Virgin, as well as a series of paintings executed at Rome in 1480-1482 as part of the original decoration of the Sistine Chapel. But he is best known for allegorical paintings depicting themes from classical mythology for the Medici circle, such as Primavera (ca. 1478) and The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485). The latter was perhaps the first depiction of a nude goddess since ancient times. These works were by no means intended to glorify ancient paganism but are allegories in which the figures embody the abstractions of the Neoplatonic philosophy fashionable in the Medicean circle. Especially as he became a "court painter" to Lorenzo, Botticelli’s works took on some of the ethereal, otherworldly look of late-medieval court painting, yet they also bear clear traces of the influence of other Renaissance art. These allegorical works were created for an elite audience of insiders and if they had been put on public display would not have been meaningful to most Florentines.
Botticelli’s later paintings, however, done after the fall of the Medici from power in 1494 and after the artist had become attracted to the anti-Renaissance preaching of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, moved away from the ethereal mood of the allegories and also away from non-Christian themes. Eventually, Botticelli destroyed some of his worldly paintings and from about 1501 stopped painting altogether. By the early 16th century, Botticelli’s work had lost its earlier popularity, and he was virtually forgotten until art historians in the 19 th century rediscovered his work.
BOUTS, DIERCK
(ca. 1415-1475). Netherlandish painter, born and probably trained in Haarlem but located for most of his career in Louvain, where he married into a wealthy family and became a prosperous citizen. Outstanding among his works is the triptych The Holy Family, in the church of St. Peter in Louvain. In this and other works, theologians from the university advised him on the iconography. Several of his paintings were sold abroad and played a role in popularizing the Netherlandish style in Italy and elsewhere.
BRACCIOLINI, POGGIO
(1380-1459). Florentine humanist. A provincial by birth, he settled in Florence shortly before 1400 and became a professional notary. He is commonly regarded as the principal creator of the elegant humanistic script that became the common hand for classical manuscripts in the Renaissance and later was the model for all typographical fonts known as roman. Between 1404 and 1453, Poggio was employed at the papal curia in Rome, eventually rising to the influential position of apostolic secretary. He always regarded himself as a Florentine, however, and he was known to contemporaries as Poggius Florentinus. In 1453 he became chancellor of the Florentine republic, a position previously held by such prominent humanists as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni.
During his attendance at the Council of Constance, Poggio visited many northern monastic libraries in search of unknown classical works and made a number of important discoveries, including the Familiar Letters and several orations by Cicero, nine comedies of Plau-tus, the De rerum natura of Lucretius, and the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian. Quintilian’s Institutio had a great influence on subsequent humanistic conceptions of Latin style, rhetoric, and education. Poggio was probably the most successful of all the Italian humanists of his time in finding lost works of Latin literature.
He also produced original works, including many letters to humanist friends (notably a sympathetic account of the execution of the Hussite leader Jerome of Prague at the Council of Constance), and a collection of humorous tales, the Facetiae, often cynical and anticlerical in tone. Though it scandalized many people, this collection circulated widely. He also wrote an influential description of the city of Rome and a history of Florence, continuing the work of Leonardo Bruni. Although Poggio wrote a literate, supple, and correct Latin style, it did not measure up to the more rigorously classical standards of the mid-15th century. In later life he found his literary reputation and his scholarly standards challenged by ambitious younger rivals. This generational rivalry led to a number of bitter literary conflicts, notably with Lorenzo Valla.
BRAHE, TYCHO
(1546-1601). Danish astronomer, known primarily for his fresh and highly accurate observations of the orbits of the planets. After study at Copenhagen and several German universities, he settled in an isolated castle belonging to his family and devoted himself to scientific work. His earliest major achievement was his careful tracking of a "new star" (a supernova) never previously observed. This object caused great excitement among astronomers; it was bright enough to be seen even by day and remained clearly visible for more than a year. His observations clearly established that it was beyond the moon, thus challenging the prevailing belief that the superlunary universe was perfect and unchanging. His book (1573) reporting these observations caught the attention of astronomers throughout Europe. Other observations by Brahe also challenged traditional astronomy, including his demonstration that the comet of 1577 did not follow the circular orbit required by current theory and cut across several planetary orbits. Brahe’s observations also noted many discrepancies between the actual location of planets and their locations as predicted in current planetary tables.
Although these discoveries confirmed the widespread uneasiness of 16th-century astronomers about traditional astronomy, Brahe found the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus too radical and devised an alternative theory (the "Tychonic system") that tried to account for his discoveries without removing the earth from the center of the universe. According to this theory, the other planets revolve about the sun rather than the earth, but the sun and planets still revolve about the earth. Brahe was the last major astronomer to reject the Copernican system, and also the last to function without the assistance of the telescope. Brahe also had elaborate apparatus for alchemical experiments, but little is known about this work. He was a painstaking mathematician, carrying out intricate calculations by lengthy arithmetical procedures since his generation still lacked the mathematical discoveries (logarithms, for example) made in the following century. Because he was compiling fresh experimental data unmatched by any contemporary, the brilliant German mathematician Johannes Kepler accepted his invitation to join him in Denmark and entered his service again when Brahe moved to the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Although Kepler disagreed with Brahe’s rejection of Copernican astronomy, Brahe bequeathed all of his papers to him when he died in 1601, thus putting into the younger man’s hands the vast body of fresh experimental data that became one of the foundations of his books supporting the Copernican hypothesis.
BRAMANTE, DONATO
(1443/4-1514). Italian artist, known principally as an architect. He originally worked at Urbino and Milan as a painter, but his service to the duke of Milan led to involvement in architectural work, beginning perhaps with paintings and drawings of buildings. By the early 1480s he had become an architect for the ruler’s building projects. After the collapse of Sforza rule at Milan, he entered papal service at Rome, where his design of the small structure known as the Tempietto (1502) marked his emergence as the leading architect of the High Renaissance style. Bramante was also influenced by the architectural drawings of his friend Leonardo da Vinci.
His success with the Tempietto led to his appointment as chief architect to Pope Julius II. His first project was a plan for the extensive remodeling of the papal palace, but the most significant assignment of his career was to design the new St. Peter’s basilica. In 1506 Bramante proposed a gigantic centrally planned building topped by a great dome on pendentives, with four identical façades. It was inspired not only by ancient Roman architectural theory but also by the ancient Roman Pantheon and by the sixth-century basilica of Haghia Sophia at Constantinople. Later papal architects, especially Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno, greatly modified his plan. Yet the mature Renaissance architectural style was created by Bramante, and later Renaissance architectural theorists, such as Giorgio Vasari, referred to him when they wanted to demonstrate architectural perfection.
BRANT, SEBASTIAN
(1457-1521). German humanist and poet, a native of Strasbourg, educated in liberal arts and law at Basel. After graduation he taught there in both of these faculties and in 1496 received a professorship of civil and canon law. He also worked as an editor for several Basel. In 1498 he published a collection of Latin poems. His lasting fame, however, depends on his vernacular Narrenschiff / Ship of Fools (1494), which humorously criticized various social classes and professions and was soon translated into Latin, French, Dutch, and English. In 1501 Brant moved back to Strasbourg, first as a legal adviser to the city government and then as the city’s secretary. The Emperor Maximilian I appointed him an imperial councillor, and he served on several diplomatic missions.
BRONZINO, AGNOLO
(1503-1572). Florentine painter of the late sixteenth century, court painter to Duke Cosimo I de’Medici. He also had a reputation as a poet. Classed among the Italian mannerist artists by modern art historians, he is best known for his portraits, such as the portrait of Duchess Eleanora of Toledo and her son Giovanni, wife and son of his patron Duke Cosimo.
BRUEGHEL, PIETER
(the Elder, ca. 1525-1569). The principal Dutch painter of the 16th century. Though highly educated, closely linked to leading humanists, and patronized by the Habsburg rulers, he concentrated many of his paintings on the life and customs of the lower classes. A trip to Rome and Naples in 1552-1553 left him not with the usual northern artist’s interest in contemporary Italian art but with an interest in landscape, perhaps derived from Venetian landscape paintings but in his case vividly expressed in the background of depictions of peasant groups (for example, The Return of the Hunters, The Blind Leading the Blind, and Peasant Wedding) which present an un-romanticized view of the life of ordinary folk. Though his work continues traditional Flemish realism, there are also many signs of the influence of the fantastic and psychologically disturbing works of Hieronymus Bosch. He also painted religious and allegorical scenes, but his own religious beliefs remain elusive, perhaps a reflection of the religious tensions of a society undergoing spiritual upheaval and living on the brink of civil war. Nevertheless, the Habsburg rulers found his work appealing, so that many of his finest works are now in Vienna. The family artistic tradition continued with his sons, Pieter the Younger (1564-1638) and Jan the Elder (1568-1625), for at least two additional generations.
BRUNELLESCHI, FILIPPO
(1377-1446). Florentine artist, initially active as a sculptor but known principally as the creator of the early Italian Renaissance architectural style. According to a story told by two later Renaissance authors, after he was defeated by Lorenzo Ghiberti in 1401 in a competition for design of new bronze doors for the Florentine baptistery, he and his friend the sculptor Donatello travelled to Rome and studied the monuments of ancient Rome. This study enabled Brunelleschi to define the mathematical principles and proportions on which the ancient classical style was based. Whether this story is literally true or not, he seems to have been the first person to understand the mathematical principles of linear perspective.
Back in Florence by 1417, Brunelleschi again competed against Ghiberti for the daunting task of designing the huge dome called for by the original architect of the cathedral but left unbuilt because no one could contrive a design for such a gigantic dome. This time Brunelleschi won the competition, largely because in addition to his familiarity with ancient Roman architecture, he had become a skilled mathematician and structural engineer. His dome won because of an ingenious design that not only called for a lighter, less stress-intensive structure but also would be much cheaper and faster to build. This success led the wealthy Medici family to choose him to design the sacristy (the family’s burial chapel) of the church of San Lorenzo and then to rebuild the entire church. Though the new structure is reminiscent of the traditional Tuscan Romanesque style, it reflected classical architectural practice in its elegant and harmonious proportions. On a much smaller scale, strongly redolent of elements drawn from Roman architecture and yet representing a clearly modern design, was the Pazzi Chapel, commissioned by another wealthy Florentine family. Brunelleschi’s subsequent works included the churches of Santo Spirito and Santa Maria degli Angeli. The latter was the earliest domed, central-plan church of the Renaissance. The engineering skills that Brunelleschi applied to designing the cathedral dome were also put to use in improving the design of the organ in the cathedral, designing a new type of river boat, designing an aqueduct, building stage machinery, and designing fortifications.
