Aurelio Lippo Brandolini’s Republics and Kingdoms Compared and the Paradoxes of Humanist Monarchism

Abstract

HANS BARON ’S SEMINAL THESIS on Florentine civic humanism has engendered several fruitful historical and theoretical debates. By now one of Baron’s claims, namely, that fifteenth-century humanists affirmed the vivere civile, has been almost universally accepted. However, most scholars of humanism have rejected Baron’s key argument about the intrinsic relationship between this commitment to active citizenship and the republican political ideology that he attributed to the civic humanists. Studies on humanism in its various political contexts seem to have conclusively disproved Baron’s argument concerning republicanism. They have demonstrated that humanists in aristocratic Venice, despotic Milan, theocratic Rome, and monarchical Naples (to name only the most important humanist centers in quattrocento Italy) strongly favored public activity while propagating the dominant political ideology of their given polity.