Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Ewan Fernie

Jerry Brotton. 2002. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 256 pp. ISBN 0-19-280268-2. £28.99 (hb) / ISBN 0-19-280265-8. £16.99 (pb).

In not much more than two hundred pages Jerry Brotton's admirable new book manages to offer both a general cultural history of the Renaissance which covers all the bases and a distinctive new view of the period. Here in all their glorious profusion are humanism, the voyages of discovery, the Reformation, double-entry book-keeping, perspective, the printing-press, anatomy, Erasmus, David, Machiavelli, the Arnolfinis, The Ambassadors, Ficino, Shakespeare and some recently resurrected women, such as the groundbreaking French poet Louise Labé. But Brotton also straightaway sets out his own stall, describing what 'we now call the European Renaissance' as an epoch of energetic commerce in 'ideas, art and luxury goods' between east and west (1). Thereafter, an absorbing vision unfurls of an epoch of Nietzschean proto-capitalism in which great talents threw themselves into the multifarious opportunities for self-advancement which this great cultural exchange offered and generated the great achievements of the Renaissance in the process.
Brotton's thesis of the interpenetration of east and west is vindicated by its magnificent fertility in The Renaissance Bazaar. The book affords elegant vignettes of, for instance, Süleyman prowling provocatively around the walls of Vienna in a dazzling Venetian crown and Leonardo in enthusiastic correspondence with another Ottoman emperor. It reminds us of the provenance of Arabic numerals, that Elizabeth I entered into a surprising cross-cultural alliance with the Turks, and of how much Venice looks like Aleppo. One of its many beguiling illustrations, of an 'Afro-Portuguese salt cellar', designed by Portuguese travellers and carved by African craftsmen, provides a wonderfully concrete touchstone of cultural fusion and hybridity (59-60).
Brotton's treatment of humanism is distinguished by his unmisgiving identification of a 'hard core of pragmatism' at its heart (91). This leads him to write, for instance, of 'Erasmus' astute manipulation of his intellectual career' (82). Such emphasis on the energetic self-interest of humanists is often revealing, though some readers may find the effort to describe the death of Sir Thomas More in terms of this motive gone wrong too single-minded.
But if some of the interest is lost in Brotton's treatment of More, his scepticism is more usually remarkable for not being in the least disenchanting. That his alertness to operations of power entails no loss of aesthetic sensitivity can be seen, for instance, in his description of 'the graceful dynamism of the scenes' on the Sistine ceiling and of how 'the powerful, straining musculature of its characters [. . .] idealise the power and potential wrath of the Roman church if questioned' (119-20). Regarded with Brotton's kind of political realism, the Renaissance looks more darkly ambivalent but no less beautiful, as is also evident from his lucid new reading of Holbein's Ambassadors at the beginning of the book and in his chapter dedicated to Renaissance art, as well as in his loving attention to exquisite maps and other material objects.
The objectivity and multicultural breadth of The Renaissance Bazaar bears fruit in an ecclesiastical history of the period of refreshing originality. Brotton points out that though the Council of Florence may have failed as a religious summit, it was a shot in the arm for the Renaissance culturally, bringing east and west together to the especial benefit of late-fifteenth-century Italian culture. He also intriguingly draws attention to the political possibility in the Renaissance of an entente between Islam and Protestantism based on their mutual theology of the book and hostility to idolatry.
The story of greed, cultural imperialism and mass death following the voyages of discovery to the west has often been rehearsed particularly by recent New-Historicist writers, and it is vividly and sympathetically retold here. But Brotton gives as much emphasis to the typically occluded Portuguese voyages to the east – around Africa, to India, Brazil, Malacca, Hormuz, China and Japan. He brings out the positive as well as the negative results of European encounters with other civilizations and makes it clear that, whatever their rights and wrongs, they emphatically changed the world. In his impressively global panorama, the moment in 1565 when a Spanish galleon with a cargo of cinnamon connected the two spheres of eastern and western trade and exploration by sailing from Manila to Mexico takes on a new epochal significance.
Brotton's exhilaratingly wide-ranging final chapter, 'Experiments, dreams and performances' – which among other things shows how scientific advances shouldn't be separated from the artistic exertions of the period and brilliantly diagnoses the nostalgic and politically wishful quality common to the three major Renaissance epic poems, Orlando Furioso, The Lusiads and The Faerie Queene – concludes by drawing attention to Shakespeare's version of the Renaissance Bazaar in The Comedy of Errors and the east-west element of The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. It's a bold gesture to end a bold book and one that really nails the presence of the east in the middle of the western heritage which The Renaissance Bazaar has revealed, a presence which has such important ethical/political potential in our own historical moment of strife between east and west. And yet, given his clear-eyed and fascinated dramatization of the frenetic, glorious and wicked excesses of his period, Brotton's achievement here is perhaps more intriguingly suggestive of globalized Ben Jonson than the Bard.

EWAN FERNIE
ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON