Was Renaissance Virtue Politics a Failure?
- patricklewisbaker
- Jan 1, 2024
- 1 min read
The teaching of virtue in the Renaissance was certainly more generic and more bookish. The texts taught in humanist schools were pretty much standard: Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Xenophon’s Hiero, Isocrates’s Cyprian Orations, and Cicero’s De officiis and De legibus were the ones most important for politics. Most Renaissance educators did not work out special curricula for different regimes, though they did produce them for different professions, like artists (Leon Battista Alberti), military officers (Roberto Valturio) or musicians (Johannes Tinctoris). The greatest teachers took in students from all over Italy and Europe, young men who had careers before them in kingdoms and republics, the Church and the Empire. The kind of education famous schoolmasters like Guarino of Verona or Vittorino da Feltre gave could not be regime-specific. However, the movement I’ve called virtue politics was not merely bookish, confined to men and women of letters. The chief theorists of virtue politics, apart from Petrarch, were not retired literary men or teachers in philosophical schools (like Plato and Aristotle and the scholastics) but high-level officials and diplomats like the Florentine chancellors Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, papal secretaries like Biondo Flavio, and even major political figures such as Giovanni Pontano, prime minister of the kings of Naples…