Renaissance Fitness: Exercise Rediscovery

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In his book, On the Art of Exercise, the Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale writes in a way that makes you think that, just like Botticelli and Michelangelo had ‘rediscovered’ the art of ancient Greece in Renaissance Italy, he too had rediscovered a lost art, the art of exercise. But, was that true? Did people stop exercising with the fall of the Roman Empire? Was there a Renaissance of fitness in the 16th century, as it were? What does this book tell us about how people thought of the body and its health during the Renaissance?

Now, like many of you, I’m often bombarded on social media with influencers telling me all about the ‘best’ ways to exercise – is it pilates, running, weight-lifting? Whether I’m looking for advice or not. None of these questions whether exercise is good for you; they’re just arguing about how to exercise rather than whether to exercise at all. And most of us would agree that, unless you have a specific issue, exercise is usually good for you. That was not the case with Mercuriale, though. He writes as if he’s trying to persuade the reader of the value of exercise – which was not a given. Let’s go through how the ideas behind exercising had changed from antiquity through the medieval period and how it was ‘rediscovered’, or rather reinvented, in the Renaissance. Let’s talk about this ‘Renaissance’ of fitness Mercuriale was writing about. He makes some bold claims, for sure, but his book is one of the best sources to understand what people thought about exercise – and health – in the Renaissance. Plus, he has some advice that can still be helpful today. Let’s explore.

Part 1 – What is Exercise?

Ok, this may seem like a silly question; we all know what exercise is. Or do we? Trust me, this concept has changed a lot over time. For the Roman physician Galen (129-216 CE), who I seem to mention in every single text I make, exercise was vigorous movement, which caused breathing to increase. That makes sense, right? And this is how Mercuriale defined it some 14 centuries later, clearly influenced by Galen:

I’m not an athlete or anything, but I think this definition would work today. But there’s a big difference here from what Galen had written; not only is exercise about what happens in the human body, exercise is also about intent. You exercise with the goal of being healthy. This definition starts to explain why Mercuriale thought he was rediscovering something lost. I mean, just think about it. Most of us exercise all the time, whether we realise it or not. We may walk to pick up our children from school, climb the stairs in our house, cycle to work, lift objects around the house and whatnot. That is also true of people of the past. Although, of course, before industrialisation, indoor plumbing, and many later technologies that make our lives easier, such as cars, people used to do a lot more of this kind of exercise or movement. Just think of washerwomen and the work that went into cleaning clothes! So, taking care of your house and family and going from one place to another involved much more physical activity than today. Plus, many professions required physical effort, with working in the fields being perhaps the best example.

But, for Mercuriale, that wasn’t really exercise, even if it involved movement. I mean, it was ‘exercise in the common sense of the word’, as he wrote, and it had its benefits, but that’s not really what he was interested in. Think about this distinction. The idea is that if you’re rowing a boat to get across a river, you’re not exercising. Rowing is a form of transportation that requires you to use your body; but if you’re rowing a boat to make your back and arms stronger, then you are exercising. This is what Mercuriale wrote about digging: “If its purpose is to cultivate the soil and grow fruit, then undoubtedly [digging] should be called work and labour; but if its aim is health then it should be called exercise.” The same can be said for sports and games, both of which tend to involve competition, whether individually or in groups. Of course, you are exercising when playing tennis, but arguably the main goal is to win the match, with exercise being secondary to your main intent.

The word itself appeared in English in the 14th century, and it was used in connection to farm animals. It meant removing restraint, so there’s the idea of unrestrained activity and movement. But the person exercising wasn’t necessarily the one moving, as we’ll see. For instance, Ibn Sina (980-1037), or Avicenna, the Father of Medicine, wrote of ‘passive exercise’, which should be recommended for those who were ill or convalescing or had a frail constitution. But let’s explore how these ideas changed over time. Let’s talk about the Greeks.

Part 2 – From the Greco-Roman World to the Renaissance

Well, you knew I had to mention Hippocrates at some point in this text… So, here it is: Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE), the ‘Father of Medicine’, is known for many things, one of which was for emphasising the importance of maintaining what we would call a ‘healthy lifestyle’ to prevent illness – preventative medicine. In this period, and for centuries after that, the main framework through which Europeans understood medicine was the humoral theory. And I know I mention this in every single text, but stick with me, I’ll be quick. People had four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), and it was believed that their imbalance was responsible for illness. But humours were of course not the only factors in explaining whether someone was healthy or not. And, if there were remedies for treating the body, taking care of yourself to avoid becoming ill in the first place was just as vital. One of the most important things to consider to preserve health was what came to be known as the ‘non-naturals’, six non-natural things which could determine health or lack thereof: food/drink, air, sleep, evacuation, emotions, and exercise/rest. So, advice about these non-naturals appears in the Hippocratic corpus, and they were later further developed by Galen in the second century CE. For Hippocrates, “Eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also exercise […] For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.” So, to live a healthy life, one should be mindful of diet, exercise and rest, bathing and cleansing the body etc., following a regimen.

Still, when most of us think of exercise in the past, the first thought that comes to mind is often the Olympic Games, which epitomise the ancient culture of athleticism and exercising the body. In this context, the competition was connected to pre-Christian religious rituals. Sacrificing animals and dedicating them to the gods was a part of the rituals in these important occasions. But, thinking of everyday life, most towns in ancient Greece would have had a gymnasium, and the same can be said for the early days of the Roman Empire. But not everyone was welcome; it was reserved for elite men. Women usually weren’t even allowed to enter these gymnasia or gyms to watch, let alone exercise, nor were men from lower social strata. So, even though gymnasia were an important part of social life, they weren’t like a theatre or marketplace, in which different groups could potentially mix. So, when Plato wrote that women should exercise as well, he was very much talking about an ideal world, not something that would have happened in his day. And Mercuriale, writing in the Renaissance, is even more lukewarm about the issue. He isn’t for or against women exercising, he just writes that ‘here it is not the place to investigate’, using the line that academics would adopt from then on when questioned about something missing from their work: ‘it is beyond the scope of this study’. Oh well. 

But let me quickly tell you a little bit about these gymnasia. They tended to be public, in the sense that they were own by the town. They were staffed with trainers, servants, and slaves, and administrated by a gymnasiarch – the ruler of the gym. There were also some gymnasia owned privately, and people who trained there would pay fees, just like you might pay a gym membership today. The world of gymnasia, Olympic games, gladiatorial competitions, and all that we came to associate with exercise in the Greco-Roman world, wasn’t going to last much longer. With the rise of Christianity, gladiatorial games were increasingly criticised. Constantine the Great (272-337), the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianism, attempted to ban gladiatorial games in 325 CE, even though in practice they continued in many places. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Olympic Games were in decline too and by the time of Theodosius II (401-450), the Olympic Games were mostly a thing of the past. I think it would be too simplistic to say that cathedrals were replacing gymnasiums and that the focus of the sacred moved from the body to the soul with Christianity, even if that is partly true. There are many reasons for this shift besides the rise of Christianity, which I won’t go into here. And none of this happened overnight. But suffice it to say that a new era was beginning, one in which, although exercise was still largely considered beneficial to health, it arguably wasn’t as celebrated as it had once been, which is why Mercuriale wrote in the 16th century that this art was ‘now extinct’. 

Still, throughout the medieval period, guides for healthy living, regimens of health, continued to be an important part of medical literature, with advice written by physicians about what constituted a healthy lifestyle. And these guides relied on writings by the ancient authorities, plus medieval physicians, such as Ibn Sina. So, exercise was believed to have many benefits, such as:

• strengthening the limbs
• aiding in digestion (because it heated the body)
• improving the function of organs
• facilitating the distribution of nourishment around the body
• helping the body expel waste (through the opening of the pores and sweat)
• distributing bodily heat
• consuming superfluous matter and fluids in the body

But there was no consensus in the literature. If Galen had valued the importance of vigorous exercise that changed breathing (which makes sense when you remember he worked as a surgeon with gladiators at the beginning of his career), later physicians argued that moderation was superior. Ugo Benzi (1376-1439), a professor of medicine at the University of Padua wrote that people should exercise in moderation, avoiding what ‘induces heavy breathing and overheating’.

Galen had listed in De sanitate tuenda as examples of strenuous activities such as racing, hunting, wrestling, ball games and even work-related activities such as ploughing and ship-building. Later, in the 11th century, Ibn Sina stressed that this activity should be ‘undertaken for its own sake’ and it should be voluntary, which would enhance its benefits. So, he drew a line between physically demanding activities and exercise, whether undertaken for medical, athletic, or recreational reasons. And it’s this idea that Mercuriale will come back to in the Renaissance.

In any case, exercise should be adapted to each person’s needs and constitution, like most recommendations in a regimen. Things like season, age, the time of day, and how often the person bathed should all be considered. This exercise could be active – such as swimming or walking – but it could also be passive movement, as I mentioned earlier in Ibn Sina’s writings. Being transported in a carriage or boat was therefore considered ‘exercise’. So, there were many alternatives to attain similar results for your health if you couldn’t go for a run, including baths and massages. And that sounds much nicer, doesn’t it? Arguably, in many medical texts of the Renaissance, exercise seems to be integrated into everyday activities, and moderation seems to be the key. Physicians worried about the detrimental effects of excessive exercise, which could overheat the body and even accelerate ageing, believe it or not, as it could weaken the body. So, vigorous exercise tended to only be recommended to boys and men between 14 and 21 years old. 

In any case, when Mercuriale sat down to write his book on exercise in 16th-century Italy, gymnasia following the Greco-Roman model were long gone, as were the games for which athletes had so meticulously prepared. These buildings were abandoned and in ruins (and perhaps the Baths of Caracalla are the best example of this) and, while people could lead very physically demanding lives and physicians did write about exercise and recommended it to their patients, Mercuriale felt that this was not enough. Just like artists had rediscovered Greco-Roman sculpture, architecture, and paintings, it was time for the lost art of exercise to be celebrated once more.

Part 3 – The ‘Rediscovery’ of Exercise

But how did it happen that Mercuriale would set out on this project? Well, first things first. Girolamo Mercuriale was born in Forli, in what is today the Romagna region in Italy. Following in the footsteps of his father, he went on to study medicine, in places such as Bologna, Venice and Padua – by the way, that’s where Andreas Vesalius, who revolutionised anatomy, had taught. Mercuriale was clearly an ambitious man, and he started writing medical texts, including one on babies children (Nomothelasmus), in which he criticised wet nurses and advocated for mothers to breastfeed their own children. Wet nursing, or hiring someone to breastfeed your children, was a common practice in this period, so that goes to show how Mercuriale wasn’t afraid of controversy. And he was just 22 years old.

He went back to his hometown and, in a diplomatic trip to Rome in the 1560s, Mercuriale met Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589), a grandson of the late Pope Paul III. The Cardinal came from a powerful and wealthy family and could open many doors for the young doctor. But, and that’s one of my favourite things about him, what Mercuriale wanted was access to books. He read the classics in the Vatican Library, especially books on medicine, plus he explored the private library of the Farnese family.  It was during this time that he seems to have fallen in love with the Greco-Roman world. If classical philosophy and art were the pinnacle of what the human mind could achieve, why wouldn’t it be the same for the body? Why shouldn’t humanists also celebrate exercise as a core principle of this glorious past?

And so, Mercuriale wrote De arte gymnastica in 1569, which was re-edited four years later to include illustrations and extra material. This wasn’t a regimen, but an overview of exercise in ancient Greece and Rome. The book was dedicated to – who else? – Cardinal Farnese, and it set out to be an atlas, a reference book of a ‘forgotten’ classical art as well as a plea for restoring this lost art to its ‘pristine splendour and ancient dignity’, as Mercuriale termed it. So, this was going to be a Renaissance update of a Greco-Roman guide to health and fitness; an encyclopaedia of exercises dating back to antiquity, with balance and moderation at its core. It’s important to say that, despite his bold claims of reinventing or rediscovering this ‘lost’ art, another book had already been published on this matter, over a decade earlier. (And I’m not even thinking of manuscripts here, just printed books.) Still, the 1553 Libro del Exercicio, by the Spanish physician Cristobal Méndez, was much shorter and didn’t have nearly as much impact. Mercuriale was made famous by his book, in part perhaps because of the way it is written. He argues passionately in favour of exercise throughout the six parts of the book, covering some activities we would easily classify as exercise, and others which might be a bit more puzzling. Here are some of them: walking (he was a big fan of walking), wrestling, jumping, running, boxing, swimming, running. So far, so good, right? But there’s more. Laughing and crying are listed too – perhaps they could work your abs? I don’t know. Plus, holding your breath. I guess that would be useful training for other activities, such as diving? I’m not sure. But the way the book is organised is very compelling. There’s a statement with examples, backed by ancient writers – Mercuriale’s favourite seems to have been Galen, whom he quotes over 40 times in just the first pages of the book.

And Mercuriale has his moments of sounding like a gym bro and giving his readers some tough love: ‘[Exercise] can sometimes be hard and, when it is being performed, unpleasant. But good health is not incompatible with some discomfort.’ I love that, I think spin instructors everywhere should take notes. But readers shouldn’t be intimidated. He writes “Everyone should begin with a relaxed and gentle exercise, […] increasing its intensity gradually.” Very reasonable. There were three kinds of exercise according to Mercuriale: preliminary (kind of like a warm-up), simple (the main activity), and terminal (kind of like a cooldown). But before all that, you should ‘clean the body, comb the hair, wash the hands and face, [and] dress appropriately’, meaning wearing clothes that allow movement yet keep the body protected from the air and excessive temperatures. Of course, this advice reminds us that, regardless of Mercuriale’s love for ancient Greece, we’re not in an ancient gymnasium anymore, where athletes would train naked – I mean, gymnastics translates as exercising in the nude, and that was the standard for centuries. But this is the 16th century.

Having said that, Mercuriale wrote with admiration of these gymnasia, as large public buildings with outdoor space in a specific part of the city, writing of their size that ‘The capacity of these places was so large, their area so great in extent, that it was possible to carry out without any hindrance innumerable exercises of diverse types, of both body and mind.’ Yes, he reminds us that philosophy and athleticism weren’t incompatible but complementary; Plato and Aristotle debated philosophical matters in these gymnasia. Mercuriale was probably inspired by the text De architetura, or on architecture, written around 25 BCE by the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius. Vitruvius described what a proper gym should be like, including, beyond an area for exercising, a place for relaxation and contemplation, plus bathing. But, if Mercuriale believed exercise should be restored to its former glory, he maintained that the main goal of exercise should be health. It wasn’t about vanity or appearance – even though we know that these things tend to be connected, including in the Renaissance. He wrote “strength is very different from good health”. People who worried excessively about developing strength and toning their muscles ‘produced minds and senses that were dull, torpid, and slow’. Mercuriale didn’t hold back, writing that focusing on the body’s appearance was ‘perverting’ the very art he sought to restore. 

Even to aspire to such a body would be a “perversion” of the art of gymnastics. Basically, you shouldn’t exercise to enhance your beauty, but your health: “Those who exercise moderately and appropriately can lead a healthy life that does not depend on any remedies, but those who do so without proper care are racked by perpetual ill health and require constant medication”. Coming back to 21st-century influencers inundating our feeds with tricks and tips to narrow our waists and define our legs, I find reading Mercuriale refreshing. Maybe he was onto something, even if he thought including women in this conversation was somewhat irrelevant. It’s also likely that, because he was writing about exercise in general, focusing on men would have made more sense to him, as men were seen as the ‘default’. We don’t even get any insights into his own personal diet or exercise routines, as he’s establishing universal principles rather than talking about any specifics.

In any case, his book was a success and it was probably partly why Mercuriale had been offered a position as personal physician to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II. This was a time in which medicine was quickly changing. Anatomy, especially thanks to Vesalius, was increasingly popular as a branch of study. Medical reformers, such as the Swiss physician Paracelsus, were arguing for a new kind of medicine, in which chemistry was central. Still, while there were forward-looking trends like these, there was also a humanist interest in rediscovering and rethinking the classical tradition, focusing on Galen and Hippocrates. Mercuriale would translate Hippocratic texts, and teach medicine at the University of Padua and Bologna. He would write many other books in his lifetime, including on cosmetics, diseases of women, skin conditions and the plague (after his disastrous handling of an outbreak earlier – apparently, he had learned something from the experience), before dying in Forli, at 76.

Final Thoughts

Did people really stop exercising with the fall of the Roman Empire, and did they start exercising again in the Renaissance, thanks to Mercuriale’s ‘rediscovery’ of this ‘lost art’? Of course not. Nor was his book written in isolation but as a part of a broader conversation within medicine. There’s much more that could be said about the relationship between exercise and health, especially in this period. But Mercuriale had a big impact on the way people thought about the body and health. In the 1581 book ‘Positions Concerning the Training up of Children’, by an English headmaster, Richard Mulcaster, Mulcaster advocated for exercise to be a part of the school curriculum – essentially, for pupils to receive physical education, citing Mercuriale’s work. Mulcaster was a part of Queen Elizabeth I’s circle and he may have known Shakespeare (in fact, it is said that the schoolmaster in Love’s Labour’s Lost is based on him, but don’t quote me on that). (By the way, you didn’t think that I would make a text without mentioning Shakespeare, did you?!) In any case, that just goes to show how influential Mercuriale’s writing was.

Mercuriale advocated for the importance of exercise to the body’s health and, although it’s clear reading him that he didn’t have women in mind – nor people from the lower rungs of society (it’s not a very inclusive book to be sure) – his aim of restoring exercise to its former, Greco-Roman glory, is often left out of narratives about the Renaissance. We tend to remember Michelangelo and Da Vinci, Botticelli and Donatello. But there were other sides to the Renaissance, too. Mercuriale laid down the foundation for sports medicine, for physical therapy, for physical education in schools. His structure of warm-up, workout, cool-down is still how most of us exercise today and, if some of his advice is outdated and based on older ideas about the body, some of it stands the test of time, such as the idea of adapting exercise to your own body and doing things in moderation. Maybe some influencers should take note.

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References:

Everard Digby, De arte natandi (1595).

Francis Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica, or, A Treatise Concerning the Power of Exercise (1705).

Galen, Selected Works, translated by P. N. Singer (1997).

Galen, De sanitate tuenda: A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (1951).

Hippocrates, The Medical Works of Hippocrates, translated by J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann (1950).

Cristobal Méndez, Libro del Exercicio (1553).

Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica (1569).

Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica, translated by V. Nutton (1999).

Ibn Sina, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna (1930).

Melchisedech Thevenot, L’Art de nager (1696).

Further Reading:

Alessandro Arcangeli and Vivian Nutton (eds.) Girolamo Mercuriale: Medicina e cultura nell’Europa del cinquecento (2008). 

Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (2013).

Paul Christensen and Donald Kyle (eds.), A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity (2014).

Lawrence Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC – 1800 AD (1995).

Bill Hayes, Sweat: A History of Exercise (2022).

John McClelland, Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (2007).

Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985)

Sofie Remijsen, The End of Greek Athletics in Late Antiquity (2015).

Earle Zeigler, History of Physical Education and Sport (1988).