Renaissance Florence

I've been reading diligently through Richard Goldthwaite's Summa, "The Economy of Renaissance Florence."

I use the word "Summa" with care. Goldthwaite has spent a long and distinguished academic career studying this fascinating subject, so what he says over the course of these 600-plus pages deserves our careful attention.

And his expansive vocabulary is a wonder in itself. But to that I devoted an entry in my other blog at an earlier stage in my reading.

Today I'd like to address your attention to a nugget I found on page 390. It seems that the art critic and biographer Giorgio Vasari was "one of the very first writers in the Italian language to use the word 'competition,' especially in its economic sense."

The Italian for "competition" is concorrenza, and competing is "concorrente."

Vasari used both words repeatedly, notably in his introduction to his life of Perugino.

Why? Because the idea of competition was essential to Vasari's conception of why Florence possessed its eminence as a center of the arts. The artists of Florence are lean and hungry, he said, driven by "the need to be industrious ... to know how to make a living." In this context, he called concorrenza "one of the nourishments that maintain them."

Words to heed, I think.