Art

Question 1
The relationship between art, religion and banking in Renaissance Florence was essentially one where art and the Church relied on the banking industry and the guilds for financial support.  Powerful banking families like the Medicis were bankers to the popes and lenders to the European monarch and established mercantile colonies throughout major cities in Italy and Europe. The bankers used their significant wealth and influence to patronize artists who produced religious artworks (featuring the bankers in a positive light) for the Church. According to Turner, this was an attempt to reconcile these old beliefs traditional Christian beliefs and new forms of behavior an increasingly secular society.

The economic boom also led to the creation of guilds to organize the mercantile and manufacturing industry. Guilds were highly specialized associations of professionals working in a recognized commercial enterprise. A guild basically created and set standards for their industry. These associations of master craftsmen and tradesman controlled the Florentine economic system, basically making up the infrastructure of the economy. According to Turner there were seven major guilds (Arti Maggiori), and fourteen minor guilds (Arti Minori). Since only members of the former were eligible for elective civic office, membership was essential to any man who aspired to public office. The guilds controlled society financially and politically by making it impossible for a man to practice any trade or advance his career without the support of a guild. The guilds also took on financial responsibility for the major churches and hospitals in the city, actively participating in religious activity and charity work.

The sheer wealth of Renaissance Florence may have made it a successful city-state, but its true success lay in successfully cultivating the myth of being culturally, religiously and financially supreme. Public art helped establish this notion of cultural superiority. Financial superiority was established quickly, and by promoting Florences Roman republic origins, as well as superb artistry, Florentine merchants cemented the notion of Florence being the ultimately superior city-state. Although it may have just been good public relations, Florence in reality was not only the financial hub it was an artistic and religious hub as well its great wealth supported artists like Boccaccio, and Giotto, and literary giants like Dante and Petrarch. It was also the site of numerous religious relics (such as the two Madonnas with alleged healing powers), which gave it spiritual superiority. Giorgio Vasari the mid-sixteenth-century artist and biographer of the artists, elevated this idea of Florientine supremacy in the visual arts to the canonical status it would enjoy for centuriesthe message was clear better to be Tuscan than Italian, and better yet to be Florentine than Tuscan. This finely tuned relationship between the bankers, guilds, art and religion made Florence the most successful city-state.

Question 2
Boccaccio began the Decameron with the Proem that discusses compassion and gives a detailed account of the effects of the Plague on Florentine society. Boccaccio defines compassion as a necessary force of humanity, especially if compassion is showed to the sick (more specifically, by those who have been ill previously, or received help for their ill relatives). Tis humane to have compassion on the afflicted and as it shews well in all, so it is especially demanded of those who have had need of comfort and have found it in others. Boccaccio then launches into describing the Plague, and how, as it swept through Florence, the Plague decimated men and women indiscriminately, wiping out rich and poor with no regard to their social standing. Boccaccio uses this account to illustrate how the Plague breaks down society, In this extremity of our citys suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead or sick, or so hard bested for servants that they were unable to execute any office whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes. While some people retreat into religion, believing they will be saved by prayer, others lose all respect for the moral and social codes of conduct and indulge in any behavior they wish to, since they believe partying and pretending it does not exist will protect them from the Plague. 

Although the Proem is rather gory in its detail, the Decameron is dedicated to the entertainment of women of noble birth. Who will deny, that it should be given, for all that it may be worth, to gentle ladies much rather than to men Within their soft bosoms, betwixt fear and shame, they harbor secret fires of love, and how much of strength concealment adds to those fires, they know who have proved it. Moreover, restrained by the will, the caprice, the commandment of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, confined most part of their time within the narrow compass of their chambers, they live, so to say, a life of vacant ease, and, yearning and renouncing in the same moment, meditate divers matters which cannot all be cheerful. Because the women lacked the same outlets as men for their desires and dreams, Boccaccio dedicated this book to them as a way of sympathizing with their plight.

Boccaccio goes on to describe women as more compassionate than men in the introduction of the first day. He calls women more compassionate than men because they were willing to care for men regardless of their social standing or state of health,  it came to pass--a thing, perhaps, never before heard of--that no woman, however dainty, fair or well-born she might be, shrank, when stricken with the disease, from the ministrations of a man, no matter whether he were young or no, or scrupled to expose to him every part of her body, with no more shame than if he had been a woman, submitting of necessity to that which her malady required wherefrom, perchance, there resulted in after time some loss of modesty in such as recovered. Besides which many succumbed, who with proper attendance, would, perhaps, have escaped death so that, what with the virulence of the plague and the lack of due tendance of the sick, the multitude of the deaths, that daily and nightly took place in the city, was such that those who heard the tale--not to say witnessed the fact--were struck dumb with amazement. The story that best illustrates a lack of compassion is in the tenth novel of the Tenth Day the story of Griselda. This story details how Griselda, a patient and virtuous woman of lesser means, is continuously tortured by her nobleman husband, who continuously tests her for her goodness. The husband does everything from asking her to kill her children to pretending to divorce her for a younger, wealthier woman. After Griselda endures this trial by fire, her only request is that her husband treats his second wife better than she was treated. The utter lack of compassion on the part of the husband in shaming and dehumanizing his wife is never punished, and Griseldas compensation is to be declared the most discreet woman and have her children and social station returned to her.

Question 3
Boccaccios story of Three Rings is an important humanistic statement because it asserts the equality of all men and religions, despite people lacking the foresight to realize this. By relating a parable of two pagans a Muslim and a Jew interacting honorably, Boccaccio was showing his Christian audience how pagans were wise and capable of compassion. good sense will extricate the wise from extremity of peril, and establish them in complete and assured peace. The ending of the Three Rings may illustrate the humanistic take-home message of equality, Each of these peoples deems itself to have the true inheritance, the true law, the true commandments of God but which of them is justified in so believing, is a question which, like that of the rings, remains pendent, but it does not illustrate a strong pro- or anti- stance on organized religion, except possibly to poke fun at the attitudes of religious people who believe their religion superior.

While the message of the Three Rings may be equality and compassion, the story of the monk and abbot criticizes the Christian Church by showing an example of corruption within the allegedly chaste and noble clergy.  To summarize the story, a lusty monk breaks his vow of chastity by having sex with a beautiful woman he encounters outside of his cloisters. He realizes the abbot of the monastery has discovered him, and in order to prevent being persecuted, tricks the abbot, who also breaks his vows and sleeps with this girl. When the abbot discovers the monk is aware of his infidelity, the abbot cannot punish the monk, and they essentially sweep the whole thing under the rug. The abbot, who was a shrewd man, saw at once that the monk was not only more knowing than he, but had actually seen what he had done nor, conscience-stricken himself, could he for shame mete out to the monk a measure which he himself merited. So pardon given, with an injunction to bury what had been seen in silence, they decently conveyed the young girl out of the monastery, whither, it is to be believed, they now and again caused her to return. Although this tale depicts moral corruption in the Christian Church critically, there is no inflammatory anti-Christian message in this story, nor proof of Boccaccios religious stance. Boccaccio was careful to express his opinion, avoiding making anti- or pro-Christian statements in any of his stories, despite having stated his opinion snidely in relating such stories. It was generally a very bad idea to appear atheistic or agnostic in the deeply religious Florentine society, so Boccaccio wrote the stories, but did not present his opinion overtly, so as to avoid religious persecution.