InstitutionClaim Cited
Renaissance Italy
Florence's Baptistery doors and cathedral dome were not produced by solitary genius: merchant guilds, civic boards, workshops, contracts, archives, supply networks, and thousands of acts converted rivalry into public work. The French entry into Florence in 1494 and sack of Rome in 1527 exposed the other side of Italy's plural ecology: cities could organize extraordinary projects without creating security strong enough to protect the people and workshops that made them.
How did competition among small polities, firms, courts, and patrons generate unusual creative capacity without stable common security?