Reinventing Heroes in Renaissance Italy

Reinventing Heroes in Renaissance Italy Renaissance Italy saw one of the great bursts of heroic image-making in the history of public art. The patriotic icon, the portrait cycle of culture heroes, and the equestrian monument all emerged in their characteristic post-classical Western forms in this context. More exactly, they emerged with what can be understood as the reinvention of the male figure as a primary host, talisman, and exemplar of strategic social and political interests. This process of recovery and appropriation cuts across the usual classification of works of art by different media and genres; it also suggests connections and continuities where historians, if they refer to art at all, tend to see discrete situations and particular cases.1 The Italian city-states came relatively late to their uneasy independence, with few incontrovertible heroes of their own. Sanctity, chivalry, and scholastic learning defined the highest values long after the textbook triumphs of the new civic culture, and the authority of popes, emperors, and kings was admitted to be superior. By these standards these civic communes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and even later regimes, with their highly developed republican or princely institutions, remained technically provisional, notoriously open to political change, and without clearly defined standing either among themselves or in their relations with outside powers. Burckhardt took this illegitimacy to be a driving force in the development of Italian Renaissance culture-in those areas where the Italians were lacking, they