The historian Catherine Fletcher has a well-deserved reputation as a specialist in 16th-century skulduggery and intrigue. In Our Man in Rome (2012) her subject was Gregorio Casali, a wily Italian fixer who served as Henry VIII’s ambassador at the papal court during the crisis of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. In The Black Prince of Florence (2017) she recounted the brief and lurid career of Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of a Medici duke and a Moorish maidservant, who jockeyed to power as the first hereditary ruler of Florence, married a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, and was murdered in the course of an adulterous liaison at the age of 26.
These are lively, well-researched books built round an interestingly dodgy central character. Her latest offering, The Beauty and the Terror, has a much larger canvas, covering a whole sweep of 16th-century Italian political and cultural history. She begins in the 1490s – an exciting but deeply turbulent decade: the “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the French invasion of Lombardy, Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper in Milan, the election of the libertine Borgia pope, Alexander VI.
The decades that followed were ones of almost continuous warfare. External military threats – French, Spanish, Ottoman – were counterpointed by endless internal squabbles among the principalities and city-states of the peninsular. Fletcher tracks through a complex and dismal story of alliances, betrayals, sacks, sieges, famines, assassinations and gruesomely ingenious tortures.
The conquest of the Romagna by the pope’s warlord son, Cesare Borgia, was swift and vicious. It was closely observed by a Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, who made it a case study in his book The Prince, written about 1512 and published posthumously 20 years later. This laconic breviary of amoral realpolitik – memorably described by Bertrand Russell as a “handbook for gangsters” – is the keynote text of these wartorn years. The impact of the Lutheran Reformation and the retrenchment of the Counter-Reformation add further dimensions of religious ideology to the conflicts.
Fletcher navigates this difficult terrain with great skill. She creates atmosphere and drama without any surrendering of clarity. Those with only a vague knowledge of the League of Cambrai or the Council of Trent will find them crisply explained and contextualised. She also has some trenchant chapters on the sexual politics of the era – as evidenced in the enforced seclusion of women in convents, and the glorification of rape in the pornographic poetry of Pietro Aretino and his followers.
This is a powerful book, but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory. The argument is signalled by Fletcher’s ambitious subtitle, which promises us an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. The orthodoxy she challenges is the view of the Renaissance as an unbroken vista of exquisite art and aspirational inventiveness: a new dawn that flooded the superstitious murk of medievalism with the bright light of reason. As she points out, this somewhat utopian view was essentially a 19th-century invention, formulated in works such as Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and endorsed by eloquent Victorian aesthetes such as Walter Pater. For the majority of those who actually lived and worked in this supposed golden age, the reality was grim: they knew it as a time of terror more than beauty. In his Art of War (1521) Machiavelli argued that the cultivation of courtly art was a weakness. Looking back to the first French invasion of 1494, he criticised the complacency – the “splendour and deceit” – of the Italian princes. “They were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever assaulted them,” he wrote, and from this arose “great terrors, sudden flights and miraculous losses”.
Burckhardt’s idealistic view of the Renaissance has long since been challenged – the Marxist historian Arnold Hauser dismissed it is an anachronistic attempt to “provide a genealogy” for 19th-century liberalism – but in Fletcher’s view it remains entrenched as a convenient cliche, and a whole lorryload of guidebooks to Italy could be cited to confirm she is right.
So the argument of her “alternative history” is that this celebratory rhetoric “masks the brutal realities” of war, corruption, oppression and misogyny that are the facts of life in Renaissance Italy. So far, so good. But is it also true, as she asserts, that the great artistic achievements of the period are in themselves complicit in these brutalities and injustices? Her key example, heavily flagged up in the publisher’s promotion, concerns that most iconic of Renaissance artworks, The Mona Lisa. Here is the pitch: the woman portrayed in the painting, Lisa Gherardini, “was married to a slave trader”.
This “backstory”, she believes, puts a new and very negative perspective “on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile”. Given the apparent gravity of this charge against Lisa’s husband, the silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, it is as well to state the facts behind it. Fletcher’s source is a recent discovery published in Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti’s Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting (2017). It shows that the archives of Florence cathedral record 11 baptisms sponsored by Francesco between 1487 and 1500. It is indeed likely that these people – 10 females and one 12-year-old boy – were slaves, being brought to the baptistry to be converted to Christianity: three of the women are described as “Moors” and another has an African-sounding name, Cumba. It is certainly significant that well-to-do households in Renaissance Italy had trafficked Africans among their servants; and it’s regrettable that Leonardo did not vet the moral purity of his clients more carefully. But to call Francesco a “slave trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite than a genuine argument.
In a similar vein she discusses the possibility that the Venetian courtesan Angela del Moro, AKA “La Zaffetta”, was the model for the languidly reclining nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino of c1534. She had earlier been the victim of a gang-rape, an episode lubriciously described in a poem by Lorenzo Venier, “Il Trentuno della Zaffetta” (1531). Thus, the argument might run: Titian’s Venus is implicated in the endemic sexual violence of the era, though as the identification of La Zaffetta as the model is highly speculative, this is once again a kind of special pleading. These notes of 21st-century disapproval – however justified – run counter to the clarity of historical vision that is otherwise a feature of this fine book.
• The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance by Catherine Fletcher is published by The Bodley Head (RRP £25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.