Patrick Curry

For over four hundred years, Niccolò Machiavelli has been a byword for cynicism, immorality and cruelty in politics.

The golden age of Florence was in the 15th century. Florence’s wealth became legendary. Its coin, the florin, was respected everywhere, and its merchants conducted business far and wide, first in the wool industry and then in silk and trade with the East.

This combination of commerce, culture and enlightened despotism made Florence the Renaissance equivalent of Athens in classical antiquity, another turning point in European culture and civilization.

Thanks to the patronage of wealthy merchant families like the Medici, in a time of almost unprecedented creativity and optimism, Florence became the principal centre for Western arts and sciences.

As a movement, it can be said to have started with the 14th-century poet Petrarch, the son of a Florentine exile.

Renaissance humanism was not anti-Christian: it perceived a universal harmony underlying both classical pagan philosophy (especially that of Plato, Plotinus and their followers) and Christianity.

At the centre of the humanist world was not God, however, but the human being (in some versions a divine humanity); not the next world but this; not the ineffable individual soul but public and social life.

There was faith, but mainly in the idea that with wisdom, skill and effort the world could be changed: “virtu vince fortuna” (ability wins over fortune).

trivium (logic, rhetoric and grammar)

the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music)