Florentine Schizophrenia

Dante’s Vita Nuova, the autobiography of his young soul, was only the beginning of Florentine analysis; Petrarch, who was the introspective ‘first modern man’, was a Florentine born in exile; Ghiberti was the first artist to write an autobiography, Cellini wrote one of the most readable; Alberti invented art criticism; Vasari invented art history; Michelangelo’s personality, in his letters and sonnets, looms as large as his art.

In many ways Florence broke away from the medieval idea of community and invented the modern concept of the individual, most famously expressed by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s friend, Pico della Mirandola, whose Oration on the Dignity of Man tells us what the God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling was saying when he created Adam: