The End of the Renaissance 79an anxious inscription: “I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year
1500 in the troubles of Italy.” Botticelli thereafter became preoccupied with
suffering and the Passion of Christ, reflecting the fact that the High Renais
sance was more closely tied to ecclesiastical influence. The deteriorating po
litical situation, combined with the expansion of Spanish influence after
1530, made it more difficult for artists to find patronage in the Italian city
states.
Soon in Italy only Venice, the city of Titian, remained a center of artistic
life. Machiavelli, who died in 1527, the year Charles V’s troops pillaged
Rome, sensed that the humiliation of the Italian city-states by foreign
armies brought to a close a truly unique period in not only the history of
Italy but in Western civilization. Of the great figures of the High Renais
sance, only Michelangelo and Titian lived past 1530.
Impulses Elsewhere
The cultural glories of the Renaissance ebbed even as different kinds of dis
coveries by Europeans opened up new possibilities for mankind. Columbus’s
transatlantic voyages were signs that the economic and cultural vitality of
Europe was shifting away from the Mediterranean to Spain and, to a lesser
extent, England. The economic interests of these states would increasingly
be across the Atlantic Ocean. The mood of optimism associated with the Re
naissance seemed to have moved to central and northern Europe as Italy
lapsed into a considerably less happy period. Many humanists and artists
began to emigrate north of the Alps to lands considered by most cultured
Italians to have been barbarian only a century earlier. Now new universities
in northern Europe beckoned them.
Other dramatic changes had already begun to occur across the Alps.
Relentless calls for reform of the Catholic Church led to a schism within
Christendom: the Reformation. In northern Europe, the Dutch monk and
humanist Erasmus expressed the exhilaration many men of learning felt
when he wrote, “The world is coming to its senses as if awakening out of a
deep Sleep.”