Discuss the social context to the emergence of the Renaissance in Italy.?10M

 Discuss the social context to the emergence of the Renaissance in Italy.?

Renaissance Italy had distinctive features. 

• Social mobility in Italy was higher than elsewhere in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual cases of upward mobility of peasants turned artists from Giotto to Beccafumi is striking.he rate of social mobility in Renaissance Italy, one could assert that it was relatively high in the cities of fifteenth-century Italy, such as Florence, with ‘new men’ coming in from the countryside and becoming citizens and holding office.
• The Italian society was by and large a highly urban one.It did not fit into the traditional model of a society divided into clergy, nobles and peasants. Renaissance Florence and other cities were populated with the bourgeois comprising merchants, professional men, craftsmen and shop-keepers. While rich merchants acted as patrons, the craftsmen sired the artists and the professional men sired the writers and humanists. The painter, the musician and the humanist found a place in the social structure even when they were not priest, warrior or peasant. It was in the cities of shopkeepers, particularly Florence, that the artist was accepted easily.
• The Italian city state thus formed a perfect house for the renaissance of art and literature  as it constituted a politically and economically mature community free with its patronage. As discussed earlier, there existed, in these cities, groups of intelligent men, lay rather than clerical, who were interested in classical literature and open to new ideas as they had been free to an increasing extent from clerical domination. The Italian towns, outside the Papal states, had taken some measures to bring their clergy under the control of the civil magistrate. Such societies had also gone far in rejecting or modifying the essential Christian teaching on renunciation and substituting a more distinctively secular criterion for action. 
• The Italian city states were also sufficient in developing a sense of self-consciousness and civic patriotism.  in Florence, the citizens developed a civic pride in which the city’s leading statesmen and writers, such as Coluccio Salutati, drew interesting parallels with the traditions of republican Rome, perhaps stimulated by the threat to their territory of the Visconti rulers of Milan. 
• The Medici family dominated the Florentine state and they and their contemporaries saw in the patronage of art and letters a means to their own glorification. Thus, art and literature which had once been employed primarily to serve the Church was now used to glorify the prince. Renaissance art became socially significant for portraying for posterity the merits of the class which patronised it. Having excellent taste, the Medici rulers, Cosimo and Lorenzo patronised both men of letters and the arts. What they did at Florence culturally was imitated by princes throughout Italy. It was a rich urban society far more sophisticated and intelligent than the baronial class it replaced that made possible the Renaissance in Italy.