The Renaissance in Italy
SUBJECT READER COMPILED BY CATHERINE KOVESI
WEEK 8
Art and Patronage 8.1_Bartlett.Sources Bartlett, Kenneth R. ‘Art and Architecture: Selected Sources’. In The Civilisation of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, edited by Kenneth R. Bartlett, 209-247. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992. 8.2_Alberti Alberti, Leon Battista. ‘On the Value of Contemporary Painting, 1435’. In Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith, 28-29. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995. 8.3_Najemy Najemy, J. ‘The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage’. In A History of Florence, 1200-1575, 307-340. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 8.4_Jenkins Jenkins, A.D. ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 162-170. 8.5_Martines Martines, L. ‘Art: An Alliance with Power’. In Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, 335-386. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.
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SECTION 1
Kenneth R. Bartlett, Art and Architecture: Sources Introduction The Renaissance is traditionally identified as one of the greatest moments in the history of art. Indeed, when asked to exemplify the Renaissance, most observes select an example from the world of art. The reason for this rests with the growing accessibility of Renaissance painting and sculpture, introducing a style in which nature is reproduced with greater accuracy, and flat canvases or walls are turned in apparently three-dimensional visions of a universe that relates clearly to the human experience of the observer. Human circumstances and experience are at the root of Renaissance art. Alberti, in his treatise on painting, discusses the importance of the storia, or narrative, of the picture. Individual human human being or small groups of men and women linked pictorially by family, religion, class, political allegiance, or other elements of daily experience dominate the subject. There is a movement away from the divine, supernatural, hieratic quality of medieval art toward one of earthly life and knowledge, even in religious subjects. Thus the value of human experience, so visible in every aspect of Renaissance life, is again central. Art reproduces what the eyes sees and makes individual human experience valid and worth recording. To accomplish this, Renaissance artists developed the mechanisms for reproducing what the eyes sees. Linear perspective (turning a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional plane) was developed at the beginning of the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi and Alberti to define rules by which depth might be accurately portrayed. Similarly, Renaissance artists engaged in the study of anatomy, botany, and other science to assist in reproducing nature as they perceived it. Naturalism, then, became one of the central elements in Renaissance art. Portraits came to be increasingly exact representations of the persons depicted, both in physiognomy and in character, and by the fifteenth century, fully rounded portrait busts and bronze equestrian statues were again created for the first time since classical antiquity. Landscapes were more and more real reproductions of specific places with identifiable plants and topography. As with other Renaissance phenomena, classical antiquity provided much of the inspiration. This is especially true of architecture and sculpture, because very little ancient painting had yet been discovered. Architects, such as Brunelleschi and Alberti, actually traveled to Rome to measure and draw ancient ruins to learn how they were constructed. The rediscovery of the Roman architect Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture gave a theoretical foundation to this research and provided Alberti with the model for his own text. Buildings in the Renaissance consequently absorbed the vocabulary of ancient structures. Their proportions were those of the human body, as Vitruvius taught, or were accessible and pleasing as mathematical qualities to the trained, rational mind of humanistically educated patrons and observers.
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Added to this was the highly developed artisan workshop tradition of the Italian city-state. Talented aspiring artists, sculptors, and architects entered the workshop of a master and learned his skill by practicing their art under the direction of the master. This workshop tradition was particularly important in Florence because the wealth of the city attracted many of the best practitioners looking for employment and because the relatively large size of the urban patriciate made competition for the best artists very acute. This, together with the civic tradition of public patronage (exemplified by the Baptistry Doors), made Florence a center for Renaissance artistic activity and innovation. Moreover, because of the gathering of so many of the finest craftsmen, the city itself became a repository of examples of the new style. With every new painting, fresco, sculpture, palace, or church created by the most skilled artists and architects, the reputation of Florence spread as the most significant place to study and practice the rapidly developing styles of the Renaissance. These elements of competition and patronage cannot be stressed strongly enough. Competition brought out the best of the talented men creating art in the Renaissance and gave them a livelihood in an appreciative environment where their work could serve as examples to othern. Equally, discriminating patrons, such as Isabella d'Este, could work closely with a talented artist to create objects of great beauty and profundity for personal or public use. This conjunction of learned patron and talented artist - despite the occasional tension-helped drive the art and architecture of the Renaissance to its heights of excellence. Filippo Brunelleschi Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) but was a Florentine architect originally trained as a goldsmith, but he turned almost completely to the practice of architecture and engineering after losing the competition to design the Baptistry doors to Ghiberti. He was greatly influenced by the building practices of ancient ancient Rome and even traveled to that city with the sculptor Donatello to study and measure ancient ruins to better understand their construction. It was Brunelleschi who designed the Foundling Hospital (Innocenti, 1419) and the dome on the cathedral of Florence (beginning in 1420), the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo (after 1421), the burial place of the Medici. He also designed or participated in the building of some of Florence’s most beautiful churches and chapels: the Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce, Santo Spirito (after 1436), San Lorenzo, and the unfinished Santa Maria degli Angeli (after 1434). The influence of classical models and of linear perspective is evident in all Brunelleschi’s work. His architectural vocabulary was that of ancient Rome, mixed with local Tuscan as well as Romanesque and Byzantine elements. Mariano Taccola Mariano di Jacopo Taccola (1382- c. 1454) was a Sienese engineer who designed machines for building large-scale bridges, port facilities, and similar majm civic construction. Also, he entered the service of the Emperor Sigismund, for whom he designed military machines, and he may have assisted Sigis-
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mund in his wars against the Turks. His Ten Books on Machines (1449) was very important and well known in the fifteenth century. A Speech by Brunelleschi Pippo Brunelleschi of the great and mighty city of Florence, a singularly honored man, famous in several arts, gifted by God especially in architecture, a most learned inventor of devices in mechanics, was kind enough to speak to me in Siena, using these words: Do not share your inventions with many, share them only with few who understand and love the sciences. To disclose too much of one's inventions and achievements is one and the same thing as to give up the fruit of one's ingenuity. Many are ready, when listening to the inventor, to belittle and deny his achievements, so that he will no longer be heard in honorable places, but after some months or a year they use the inventor's words, in speech or writing or design. They boldly call themselves the inventors of the things that they first condemned, and attribute the glory of another to themselves. There is also the great big ingenious fellow, who, having heard of some innovation or invention never known before, will find the inventor and his idea most surprising and ridiculous. He tells him: Go away, do me the favor and say no such things any moreyou will be esteemed a beast. Therefore the gifts given to us by God must not be relinquished to those who speak ill of them and who are moved by envy or ignorance. We must do that which wise men esteem to be the wisdom of the strong and ingenious: We must not show to all and sundry the secrets of the waters flowing in ocean and river, or the devices that work on these waters. Let there be convened a council of experts and masters in mechanical art to deliberate what is needed to compose and construct these works. Every person wishes to know of the proposals, the learned and the ignorant; the learned understands the work proposed-he understands at least something, partly or fully-but the ignorant and inexperienced understand nothing, not even when things are explained to them. Their ignorance moves them promptly to anger; they remain in their ignorance because they want to show themselves learned, which they are not, and they move the other ignorant crowd to insistence on its own poor ways and to scorn for those who know. Therefore the blockheads and ignorants are a great danger for the aqueducts, the means for forcing the waters, their ascending and descending both subterranean and terrestrial, and the building in water and over the water, be it salt or fresh. Those who know these things are much to be loved, but those who do not are even more to be avoided, and the headstrong ignorant should be sent to war. Only the wise should form a council, since they are the honor and glory of the republic. Amen. SOURCE: I. Hyman, ed., Brunelleschi in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 30-32.
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The Competition for the Baptistry Doors Lorenzo Ghiberti Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) was a Florentine sculptor much inspired by the bronzes of classical antiquity. In 1401 he won a competition to create the bronze doors of the Baptistry in Florence, defeating seven other sculptors, including his famous contemporary, Filippo Brunelleschi. This competition took up most of Ghiberti's life. He only completed the second pair of doors - those termed by Michelangelo to be worthy of the Gates of Paradise - in 1452. In my youth in the year of Christ 1400, I left Florence because the air was corrupt and the city in a bad state. I left in the company of a distinguished painter who had been summoned by the Lord Malatesta of Pesaro. He had had a room. made which we painted for him with the greatest diligence . . . . At this time however my friends in Florence wrote to me that the governors of the temple of S. Giovanni Battista were sending for skilled masters of whose work they wished to see proof. From all over Italy many skilled masters came to enter this trial and contest. I requested leave from the lord [Malatesta] and from my companion. When the lord [Malatesta] heard the situation he immediately granted me leave; together with other sculptors I went before the committee [of S. Giovanni Battista]. To each one were given four bronze tablets. As the trial piece the committee and the governors of that temple wanted each of us to make one narrative panel for the door. The story they selected was the Sacrifice of Isaac, and each of the contestants had to make the same story. The trial pieces were to be executed in one year and he who won would be given the prize. The contestants were these: Filippo di ser Brunellesco, Simone da Colle, Nicolo d'Arezzo, Jacopo della Quercia of Siena, Francesco di Valdambrina, Nicolo Lamberti. There were six(1) taking part in this contest, which was a demonstration of the various aspects of the art of sculpture. To me was conceded the palm of victory by all the experts and by all those who competed with me. Universally I was conceded the glory without exception. At that time it seemed to all, after great consultation and examination by the learned men, that I had surpassed all the others without any exception. The committee of the governors wanted the opinion of the experts written by their own hand. They were highly skilled men among painters, gold smiths, silversmiths, and marble sculptors. There were thirty-four judges from the city and other places nearby. From all came the declaration of the victory in my favor by the consuls and the committee and the entire body of the Merchants' Guild which is in charge of the temple of S. Giovanni. It was conceded to me and determined that I should make the bronze door for this temple. This I carried out with great diligence .... 1. Ghiberti neglected to include himself in the count; there were seven contestants.
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SOURCE: A. di Tuccio, The Life of Brnnelleschi, ed. by H. Saal, trans. by C. Engass (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), pp. 46, 48, 50. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
Antonio Manetti Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423-1497) was a Florentine architect and humanist who is most remembered for his biography of Brunelleschi (c. 1480), the first full-length life of an artist written in the Renaissance. In the year of Our Lord 1401 when [Brunelleschi-Ed.] was a young man of twentyfour, working at the goldsmith's art, the operai of the building of the temple of San Giovanni had to commission the making of the second bronze doors (which are today on the north facade) for the embel lishment of the aforesaid church. While considering the reputation of the masters of figure casting-including the Florentine masters-in order to assign them to the one who was best, they decided, after many discussions amongst themselves and after counsels with the citizens and artisans, that the two finest they could find were both Florentines and that neither in Florence or elsewhere did they know of anyone better. Those two were the aforementioned Filippo and Lorenzo di Bartolo. The latter's name is inscribed on the doors as Lorenzo di Cione Ghiberti as he was the son of Cione. At the outset of this affair of the doors Lorenzo was a young man also. He was in Rimini in the service of Signor Malatesta when he was called to Florence for this event. The following method was employed to choose the best one: they selected the shape of one of the compartments from the bronze doors that had been made by non-Florentine masters in the last century (although the design of the wax modeled figures was by the painter Giotto) containing the story of St. John. Each of them was given a scene to sculpt in bronze within such a form with the principal intention of commissioning the doors to the one who came out the best in the aforesaid test. They made those scenes and they have been preserved to this day. The one in the Audience Hall of the Guild of the Merchants is by Lorenzo and the one in the dossal of the sacristy altar of San Lorenzo in Florence is by Filippo. The subject of both is Abraham sacrificing his son. Filippo sculpted his scene in the way that still may be seen today. He made it quickly, as he had a powerful command of the art. Having cast, cleaned, and polished it completely he was not eager to talk about it with anyone, since, as I have said, he was not boastful. He waited for the time of confrontation. It was said that Lorenzo was rather apprehensive about Filippo's merit as [the latter] was very apparent. Since it did not seem to him that he possessed such mastery of the art, he worked slowly. Having been told something of the beauty of Filippo's work he had the idea, as he was a shrewd person, of proceeding by means of hard work and by humbling himself through seeking the counsel-so that his work would not fail at the 621
confrontation-of all the people he esteemed who, being goldsmiths, painters, sculptors, etc. and knowledgeable men, had to do the judging. While making [his scene] in wax he conferred and-humbling himself a great deal-asked for advice constantly of people of that sort and, insofar as he could, he tried to find out how Filippo's work was coming along. He unmade and remade the whole and sections of it without sparing effort, just as often as the majority of the experts in discussing it judged that he should. The operni and officials of the church were advised by the very people Lorenzo had singled out. They were in fact the best informed and had been around Lorenzo's work many times: perhaps there was no one else [to consult]. Since none of them had seen Filippo's model they all believed that Polycletus - not to mention Filippo - could not have done better [than Lorenzo]. Filippo's fame was not yet widespread as he was a young man and his mind was fixed on deeds rather than on appearances. However, when they saw his work they were all astonished and marveled at the problems that he had set himself: the attitude, the position of the finger under the chin, and the energy of Abraham; the clothing, bearing, and delicacy of the son's entire figure; the angel's robes, bearing, and gestures and the manner in which he grasps the hand; the attitude, bearing, and delicacy of the figure removing a thorn from his foot and the figure bending over to drink-how complex these figures are and how well they fulfill their functions (there is not a limb that is not alive); the types and the fineness of the animals as well as all the other elements and the composition of the scene as a whole. Those deputized to do the judging changed their opinion when they saw it. However, it seemed unfeasible to recant what they had said so persistently to anyone who would listen to them, though it now seemed laughable, even though they recognized the truth. Gathering together again they came to a decision and made the following report to the operai: both models were very beautiful and for their part, taking everything into consideration, they were unable to put one ahead of the other, and since it was a big undertaking requiring much time and expense they should commission it to both equally and they should be partners. When Filippo and Lorenzo were summoned and informed of the decision, Lorenzo remained silent while Filippo was unwilling to consent unless he was given entire charge of the work. On that point he was unyielding. The officials made the decision thinking that certainly they would in the end agree. Filippo, like one who unknowingly has been destined for some greater tasks by God, refused to budge. The officials threatened to assign it to Lorenzo if he did not change his mind: he answered that he wanted no part of it if he did not have complete control, and if they were unwilling to grant it they could give it to Lorenzo as far as he was concerned. With that they made their decision. Public opinion in the city was completely divided as a result. Those who took Filippo's side were very displeased that the commission for
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the whole work had not been given to him. However, that is what happened, and in view of what was awaiting Filippo experience proved that it was for the best. Giorgio Vasari For Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Florentine artist, architect, and art theorist and historian, see below, p. 406. In the year 1401, it was proposed to make the two bronze doors of the church and baptistery of S. Giovanni, sculpture having advanced so greatly, because from the time of the death of Andrea Pisano there had not been any masters capable of carrying them out. Accordingly this purpose was made known to the sculptors then in Tuscany, who were invited to come, provided with maintenance and set to prepare a panel. Among those thus invited were Filippo and Donato, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacopo della Fonte, Simone da Colle, Francesco di Valdambrina and Niccolo d'Arezzo. The panels were completed that same year, and when they came to be exhibited in competition they were all most beautiful, each different from the other. That of Donato was well designed and badly executed; that of Jacopo della Quercia was well designed and executed, but with faulty perspective of the figures; that of Francesco di Valdambrina had poor invention and tiny figures; the worst of all were those of Niccolo d'Arezzo and Simone da Colle; and the best that of Lorenzo di Ghiberti, combining design, diligence, invention and art, the figures being beautifully made. Not much inferior to his, however, was the panel of Filippo, on which he had represented Abraham sacrificing Isaac, with a servant extracting a thorn from his foot while waiting for Abraham, and an ass grazing, which merits considerable praise. When the scenes came to be exhibited, Filippo and Donato were only satisfied with that of Lorenzo, judging it to be better adapted to its peculiar purpose than those of the others. So they persuaded the Consuls with good arguments that the Work should be given to Lorenzo, showing that both public and private ends would be best served thereby. This was a true act of friendship, a virtue without envy, and a clear judgment of their own limitations, so that they deserve more praise than if they had completed that work themselves. Happy spirits who, While assisting each other, rejoice in praising the work of others. How unhappy are the men of our own times, who try to injure others, and burst With envy if they cannot vent their malice. Filippo was requested by the consuls to undertake the work together with Lorenzo, but he refused, as he preferred to be the first in another art, rather than be equal or second in that.
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Il Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto) Il Pinturicchio (1454-1513) was born in Perugio but left for Rome, where he worked with Perugino on the Sistine Chapel and painted the Borgia Apartments for Pope Alexander VI. Subsequently, Pinturicchio accepted a commission from Cardinal Todeschini-Piccolomini, nephew of Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), in 1502 to fresco the Piccolomini Library in the Cathedral of Siena. His patron was elevated to the papacy himself in 1503 but died a few days after. Contract of Pinturicchio with Cardinal Francesco de’ Todeschini Piccolomini for Decorating the Library in Siena Cathedral, 29 June 1502. In the name of God, Amen Be it noted by whoever reads or sees the present writing how on this day 29 June 1502 the Very Reverend Lord Cardinal of Siena has contracted and commissioned Master Bernardino, called el Penturicchio, Perugian painter, to paint a Library in the cathedral of Siena, according to the conditions and agreements set out below: That during the time he is painting it, he may not undertake any other work of painting, whether a picture or a mural, in Siena or elsewhere, which may cause the decoration of the said Library to be postponed or retarded. Item, he is obliged to render the ceiling of the Library with fantasies and colors and small panels as lovely, beautiful and sumptuous as he judges best; all in good, fine, fast colors in the manner of design known today as grottesche, with different backgrounds as will be reckoned most lovely and beautiful. Item, if the arms of the Most Reverend Monsignor are not painted on the middle of the ceiling, he shall be obliged to make a rich and beautiful coat of arms of the size necessary to be in proportion to the roof. And if it is already painted, he shall renovate it, or if it is done in marble, he shall likewise be obliged to paint, gild or embellish it as above. Item, he is obliged, as well as doing the ceiling, to do ten stories in fresco, in which (as will be laid out in a memorandum) he is to paint the life of Pope Pius of holy memory, with fitting persons, events and apparel necessary and appropriate to illustrate it properly; with gold, ultramarine azure, green glazes and azures and other colors as are in accordance with the fee, the subject-matter, the place and his own convenience. Item, he is obliged to render in fresco as above, touch up in secco and finish in fine colors the said figures, nudes, garments, draperies, trees, landscapes, cities, air and sky, funeral scenes and friezes. Item, it is left to him to decide whether the half-lunette above each picture should Item, he is be obliged decorated with figures or filled with landscapes etc. 624
Items, he is obliged to render the pilasters which divide and enclose the panels in which the painted scenes will go, and the capitals, cornices, gilded bases and friezes contained within them all in good and fine colours, as are best and most beautiful. Item, he is obliged to do all the designs of the stories in his own hand on cartoon and on the wall; to do the heads all in fresco by his own hand, and to touch up in secco and finish them to perfection. Item, he is obliged to do a panel linking the pilasters under each scene, in which shall be an inscription or proper explanation of the scene painted above, and this can be written either in verse or prose; and at the base of these columns and pilasters the arms of the Most Reverend Monsignore shall be painted. And it has been agreed by the aforesaid Master Bernardino to do the ceiling according to the requisite standard of perfection, and the ten pictures as richly and finely as appropriate; and for his salary and reward the said Most Reverend Cardinal promises to give him 1000 gold ducats of Papal Chamber (de Camera) as follows: first, the said Cardinal will have 200 gold ducats de Camera paid to him in Venice to buy gold and necessary colors, and 100 more ducats will be paid to him at Perugia for his needs and for the transport of his equipment and assistants to Siena. For this initial payment of 300 ducats the said Master Bernardino shall be obliged to give suitable good security for his execution of the work. And should God so will it otherwise, he will do what is proper and restore all the money to the said Cardinal, saving a discount for whatever part of the work he has already done. The rest his sponsors shall be held to restore in entirety to the said Cardinal, without any exception whatsoever. Item, on completion of each panel, the said Cardinal will have 50 gold ducats de camera paid to him, and he will continue thus for each in turn. When all are entirely finished, he will pay him the 200 ducats outstanding. Item, the most Reverend Cardinal promises the said Master Bernardino that he will lend him a house near the cathedral church to live in free while he is in Sienna. Item, he will allow him wood to make the scaffolding, and also arrange for him to receive sufficient lime and sand. And because the said Master Bernardino needs corn, wine and oil while he is working on the Library, he shall be obliged to obtain these from the said Cardinal’s factor, at current prices, to be discounted from the payment for his work. And in security of the above, the contracting parties undertake the following: the most Reverend Monsignor personally pledges himself, his goods both moveable and nonmoveable, and his heirs, both present and future, to observe in entirety all the above-named clauses and agreements with Master Bernardino; and to pay him the said quantity of 1000 gold ducats de camera in the manner and times set forth above. 625
And the said Bernardino for his part promises and wholly pledges himself to observe what is detailed above with the most reverend Cardinal, and to give sufficient security for the 300 gold ducats that are .to be advanced to him; also pledging his goods moveable and nonmoveable, and his heirs, present and future, that in all and every part he will observe in entirety all the things agreed and promised above, understanding that all is in good faith and without any intent to defraud. And I, the above-mentioned Francesco Cardinal of Siena am content, and promise as above; and with faith in the truth have written these lines in my own hand, on the said day of the said month and year. And I, the above-mentioned Master Bernardino etc. Drawn up before me personally, public notary, with the below-named witnesses, the most Reverend Father in Christ and Lord Francesco dei Piccolomini, Lord Cardinal of Siena, and the discreet master Bernardino, alias Pinturicchio, of Perugia, painter ... Enacted at Siena in the house of the said Most Reverend Lord Cardinal situated near the church and in the parish of San Vigilio, Siena, in the presence of the venerable and worthy Lord Francesco Nanni, canon of Sateano and chaplain in Siena cathedral, and Luca Bartolomeo Cerini of Siena, familiars of the said Cardinal; and Fortino Lorenzo, Master Marco and Luca dei Vieri, citizens of Siena, witnesses. And I Francesco, son of Giacomo of Montalcino, public and imperial notary and judge ordinary of Siena, at present scriptor in the Archbishop's Court in Siena, have written, drawn up and registered these agreements. SOURCE: D. S. Chambers, ed., Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 25-29. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan, London and Basingstoke.
Isabella d’Este Born the daughter of Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara, Isabella d'Este (1474- 1539) enjoyed a wonderful humanist education at her father's court. At 16 she was married to Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, for whom she often ruled because of his long absences on military campaigns. She was a brilliant patron, having excellent taste, great wealth, and civilized advisers. She patronized Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Perugino, for whom in 1503 she designed an allegorical subject fm him to paint. Equally, she surrounded herself with men of letters, such as Castiglione and Pietro Bembo. Despite ha active humanist interests, Isabella remained a devout Catholic, founding religious houses and sustaining the Church in ha dominions, although she maintained a political wariness of the ambitions of the papacy.
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Pietro Vanucci Perugino Pietro Vanucci Perugino (1446-1523) was born near Perugia, but he went to Florence to study painting, working in the workshop of Verrocchio, where Leonardo da Vinci also was apprenticed. In 1481 Perugino was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to help in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. After 1492, however, he established his own workshop in Florence, producing many paintings to meet the demand his fame engendered. As a result, Perugino became rich and respected throughout Italy. Before the end of the century, he returned to accept a major civic commission in his home town of Perugia, completing the cycle of paintings in the College of the Banlzers by 1501, assisted by the young Raphael, who had entered his workshop. Around 1503 he returned to Florence, but left for Rome in 1507 to work for Pope Julius II at the Vatican. Instructions of Isabella d’Este to Perugino, 19 January 1503 Drawn up at Florence in the parish of Santa Maria in Campo in the below mentioned house, in the presence of Bernardo Antonio di Castiglione, Florentine citizen, and Fra Ambrogio, Prior of the Order of Jesuati, near Florence, witnesses. Lord Francesco de' Malatesta of Mantua, procurator of the Marchioness of Mantua, in the best manner he was able, commissioned from Master Perugino, painter, there present, the undertaking on his own behalf and that of his heirs to make a painting on canvas, 2 1/2 braccia high and 3 braccia wide, and the said Pietro, the contractor, is obliged to paint on it a certain work of Lasciviousness and Modesty (in conflict) with these and many other embellishments, transmitted in this instruction to the said Pietro by the said Marchioness of Mantua, the copy of which is as follows: Our poetic invention, which we greatly want to see painted by you, is a battle of Chastity against Lasciviousness, that is to say, Pallas and Diana fighting vigorously against Venus and Cupid. And Pallas should seem almost to have vanquished Cupid, having broken his golden arrow and cast his silver bow underfoot; with one hand she is holding him by the bandage which the blind boy has before his eyes, and with the other she is lifting her lance and about to kill him. By comparison Diana must seem to be having a closer fight with Venus for victory. Venus has been struck by Diana's arrow only on the surface of the body, on her crown and garland, or on a veil she may have around her; and part of Diana's raiment will have been singed by the torch of Venus, but nowhere else will either of them have been wounded. Beyond these four deities, the most chaste nymphs in the trains of Pallas and Diana, in whatever attitudes and ways you please, have to fight fiercely with a lascivious crowd of fauns, satyrs and several thousand cupids; and these cupids must be much smaller than the first [the god Cupid], and not bearing gold bows and silver arrows, but bows and arrows of some baser material such as wood or iron or what you please. And to give more expression and decoration to the picture, beside Pallas I want to have the olive tree sacred to her, with 627
a shield leaning against it bearing the head of Medusa, and with the owl, the bird peculiar to Pallas, perched among the branches. And beside Venus I want her favorite tree, the myrtle, to be placed. But to enhance the beauty a fount of water must be included, such as a river or the sea, where fauns, satyrs and more cupids will be seen, hastening to the help of Cupid, some swimming through the river, some flying, and some riding upon white swans, coming to join such an amorous battle. On the bank of the said river or sea stands Jupiter with other gods, as the enemy of Chastity, changed into the bull which carried off the fair Europa; and Mercury as an eagle circling above its prey, flies around one of Pallas' nymphs, called Glaucera, who carries a casket engraved with the sacred emblems of the goddess. Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, chases Galatea, and Phoebus chases Daphne, who has already turned into a laurel tree; Pluto, having seized Proserpina, is bearing her off to his kingdom of darkness, and Neptune has seized a nymph who has been turned almost entirely into a raven. I am sending you all these details in a small drawing, so that with both the written description and the drawing you will be able to consider my wishes in this matter. But if you think that perhaps there are too many figures in this for one picture, it is left to you to reduce them as you please, provided that you do not remove the principal basis, which consists of the four figures of Pallas, Diana, Venus and Cupid. If no inconvenience occurs I shall consider myself well satisfied; you are free to reduce them, but not to add anything else. Please be content with this arrangement. And to this manner and form the parties are referred. Master Pietro promised Lord Francesco to devote himself with his skill to achieving the said picture over a period from now until the end of next June, without any exception of law or deed; Lord Francesco promised, in the said names, to pay for the making of the said work a hundred gold florins, in large gold florins, to the said Lord [sic] Pietro, with the agreement that of the said sum twenty gold florins, in large gold florins, should be given at present to the said Lord Pietro, painter; which the said Lord Pietro in the presence of me, the notary, and of the witnesses written above, acknowledged he had received of the said Lord Francesco, and the remainder the said Lord Francesco promised to pay to the said Lord Pietro when the said Lord Pietro completes the said work to perfection and shall give it to Lord Francesco Malatesta of Mantua. And the said Lord Pietro is obliged to complete the said work himself, bearing all the expenses for the same; with an agreement that in the event of the death of the said Master Pietro, should it happen that the said work is not completed, the heirs of the said Master Pietro shall be obliged to restore the said sum of 20 large gold florins to the said Lord Francesco Malatesta, or however much more he has had; or else, in the event of the said work not being completed on account of the death of the said Lord Pietro, that the said Lord Francesco shall be obliged to receive the said work in the form and style so far devised for it, and
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the said work must be valued by two experienced painters and he must take it for the price they estimate. Letter of Perugino to Isabella d’Este, 10 December 1503 Most Excellent Madam Having learnt the story which Your Ladyship commissioned from me a short while ago, it seems to me that the drawing sent to me does not correspond very well with the size of the figures, which seem to me to be very small and the height of the picture seems too great in proportion to them. I want to know what is the size of the figures in the other stories which are to go beside it, because if the whole scheme is to turn out well all the measurements must agree, or there must be very little difference. Therefore please arrange for me to be sent this information, so that I can give satisfaction to Your Excellency as is my desire. Nothing else; I recommend myself humbly, praying God keeps you well. Florence, 10 December 1503 Your Excellency's faithful servant, Pietro Perugino Letter of Isabella d’Este to Perugino, 12 January 1504 Excellent friend The enclosed paper, and the thread wound round it together give the length of the largest figure on Master Andrea Mantegna's picture, beside which yours will hang. The other figures smaller than this can be as you please. You know how to arrange it. We beg you above all to hasten with the work; the sooner we have it, the more we shall be pleased. Letter to Perugino to Isabella d’Este, 24 January 1504 My most illustrious Lady, Marchioness of Mantua, greeting and infinite recommendations I sent a letter to you a month and a half ago and I have never had a reply to the said letter. I will repeat what it is about in this: I have drawn some of your figures, which come out very small; I would like Your Ladyship to send me the size of the other stories which are to accompany my story, so that they should conform; and so that the principal figures are all of one size, otherwise they will contradict each other a great deal, one being big and another small. So send me the measurements of the other figures in the other stories that you have had done, and I will at once show my diligence. Nothing further; I recommend myself to Your Ladyship. 24 January 1504 Your Pietro Perugino, painter in Florence 629
SOURCE: D. S. Chambers, ed., Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 135-139. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan, London and Basingstoke.
Leon Battista Alberti On Painting and on Sculpture 19. Up to now we have explained everything related to the power of sight and the understanding of the intersection. But as it is relevant to know, not simply what the intersection is and what it consists in, but also how it can be constructed, we must now explain the art of expressing the intersection in painting. Let me tell you what I do when I am painting. First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen; and I decide how large I wish the human figures in the painting to be. I divide the height of this man into three parts, which will be proportional to the measure commonly called a braccio; for, as may be seen from the relationship of his limbs, three braccia is just about the average height of a man's body. With this measure I divide the bottom line of my rectangle into as many parts as it will hold; and this bottom line of the rectangle is for me proportional to the next transverse equidistant quantity seen on the pavement. Then I establish a point in the rectangle wherever I wish; and as it occupies the place where the centric ray strikes, I shall call this the centric point. The suitable position for this centric point is no higher from the base line than the height of the man to be represented in the painting, for in this way both the viewers and the objects in the painting will seem to be on the same plane. Having placed the centric point, I draw straight lines from it to each of the divisions on the base line. These lines show me how successive transverse quantities visually change to an almost infinite distance. At this stage some would draw a line across the rectangle equidistant from the divided line, and then divide the space between these two lines into three parts. Then, to that second equidistant line they would add another above, following the rule that the space which is divided into three parts between the first divided (base) line and the second equidistant one, shall exceed by one of its parts the space between the second and third lines; and they would go on to add other lines in such a way that each succeeding space between them would always be to the one preceding it in the relationship, in mathematical terminology, of superbipartiens. That would be their way of proceeding, and although people say they are following an excellent method of painting, I believe they are not a little mistaken, because, having placed the first equidistant line at random, even though the other equidistant lines follow with some system and reason, nonetheless they do not know where the fixed position of the vertex of the pyramid is for correct viewing. For this reason quite serious mistakes oc630
cur in painting. What is more, the method of such people would be completely faulty, where the centric point were higher or lower than the height of a man in the picture. Besides, no learned person will deny that no objects in a painting can appear like real objects, unless they stand to each other in a determined relationship. We will explain the theory behind this if ever we write about the demonstrations of painting, which our friends marveled at when we did them, and called them "miracles of painting"; for the things I have said are extremely relevant to this aspect of the subject. Let us return, therefore, to what we were saying. 20. With regard to the question outlined above, I discovered the following excellent method. I follow in all other respects the same procedure I mentioned above about placing the centric point, dividing the base line and drawing lines from that point to each of the divisions of the base line. But as regards the successive transverse quantities I observe the following method. I have a drawing surface on which I describe a single straight line, and this I divide into parts like those into which the base line of the rectangle is divided. Then I place a point above this line, directly over one end of it, at the same height as the centric point is from the base line of the rectangle, and from this point I draw lines to each of the divisions of the line. Then I determine the distance I want between the eye of the spectator and the painting, and having established the position of the intersection at this distance, I effect the intersection with what mathematicians call a perpendicular. A perpendicular is a line which at the intersection with another straight line makes right angles on all sides. This perpendicular will give me, at the places it cuts the other lines, the measure of what the distance should be in each case between the transverse equidistant lines of the pavement. In this way I have all the parallels of the pavement drawn. A parallel is the space between two equidistant lines, of which we spoke at some length above. A proof of whether they are correctly drawn will be if a single straight line forms a diameter of connected quadrangles in the pavement. The diameter of a quadrangle for mathematicians is the straight line drawn from one angle to the angle opposite it, which divides the quadrangle into two parts so as to create two triangles from it. When I have carefully done these things, I draw a line across, equidistant from the other lines below, which cuts the two upright sides of the large rectangle and passes through the centric point. This line is for me a limit or boundary, which no quantity exceeds that is not higher than the eye of the spectator. As it passes through the centric point, this line may be called the centric line. This is why men depicted standing in the parallel furthest away are a great deal smaller than those in the nearer ones-a phenomenon which is clearly demonstrated by nature herself, for in churches we see the heads of men walking about, moving at more or less the same height, while the feet of those further away may correspond to the knee-level of those in front.
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21. This method of dividing up the pavement pertains especially to that part of painting which, when we come to it, we shall call composition; and it is such that I fear it may be little understood by readers on account of the novelty of the subject and the brevity of our description. As we can easily judge from the works of former ages, this matter probably remained completely unknown to our ancestors because of its obscurity and difficulty. You will hardly find any "historia" of theirs properly composed either in painting or modeling or sculpture. 22. I have set out the foregoing briefly and, I believe, in a not altogether obscure fashion, but I realize the content is such that, while I can claim no praise for eloquence in exposition, the reader who does not understand at first acquaintance, will probably never grasp it however hard he tries. To intelligent minds that are well disposed to painting, those things are simple and splendid, however presented, which are disagreeable to gross intellects little disposed to these noble arts, even if expounded by the most eloquent writers. As they have been explained by me briefly and without eloquence, they will probably not be read without some distaste. Yet I crave indulgence if, in my desire above all to be understood, I saw to it that my exposition should be clear rather than elegant and ornate. What follows will, I hope, be less disagreeable to the reader. 23. I have set out whatever seemed necessary to say about triangles, the pyramid and the intersection. I used to demonstrate these things at greater length to my friends with some geometrical explanation. I considered it best to omit this from these books for reasons of brevity. I have outlined here, as a painter speaking to painters, only the first rudiments of the art of painting. And I have called them rudiments, because they lay the first foundations of the art for unlearned painters. They are such that whoever has grasped them properly will see they are of considerable benefit, not only to his own talent and to understanding the definition of painting, but also to the appreciation of what we are going to say later on. Let no one doubt that the man who does not perfectly understand what he is attempting to do when painting, will never be a good painter. It is useless to draw the bow, unless you have a target to aim the arrow at. I want us to be convinced that he alone will be an excellent painter who has learned thoroughly to understand the outlines and all the properties of surfaces. On the other hand, I believe that he who has not diligently mastered all we have said, will never be a good artist. 24. These remarks on surfaces and intersection were, therefore, essential for our purposes. We will now go on to instruct the painter how he can represent with his hand what he has understood with his mind. 25. As the effort of learning may perhaps seem to the young too laborious, I think I should explain here how painting is worthy of all our attention and study. Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say 632
of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist. Plutarch tells us that Cassandrus, one of Alexander's commanders, trem bled all over at the sight of a portrait of the deceased Alexander, in which he recognized the majesty of his king. He also tells us how Agesilaus the Lacedaemonian, realizing that he was very ugly, refused to allow his likeness to be known to posterity, and so would not be painted or modeled by anyone. Through painting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time. We should also consider it a very great gift to men that painting has represented the gods they worship, for painting has contributed considerably to the piety which binds us to the gods, and to filling our minds with sound religious beliefs. It is said that Phidias made a statue of Jove in Elis, whose beauty added not a little to the received religion. How much painting contributes to the honest pleasures of the mind, and to the beauty of things, may be seen in various ways but especially in the fact that you will find nothing so precious which association with painting does not render far more valuable and highly prized. Ivory, gems, and all other similar precious things are made more valuable by the hand of the painter. Gold too, when embellished by the art of painting, is equal in value to a far larger quantity of gold. Even lead, the basest of metals, if it were formed into some image by the hand of Phidias or Praxiteles, would probably be regarded as more precious than rough unworked silver. The painter Zeuxis began to give his works away, because, as he said, they could not be bought for money. He did not believe any price could be found to recompense the man who, in modeling or painting living things behaved like a god among mortals. 26. The virtues of painting, therefore, are that its masters see their works admired and feel themselves to be almost like the Creator. Is it not true that painting is the mistress of all the arts or their principal ornament? If I am not mistaken, the architect took from the painter architraves, capitals, bases, columns and pediments, and all the other fine features of buildings. The stonemason, the sculptor and all the workshops and crafts of artificers are guided by the rule and art of the painter. Indeed, hardly any art, except the very meanest, can be found that does not somehow pertain to painting. So I would venture to assert that whatever beauty there is in things has been derived from painting. Painting was honoured by our ancestors with this special distinction that, whereas all other artists were called craftsmen, the painter alone was not counted among their number. Consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool? Quintilian believed that the earliest painters used to draw around shadows made by the sun, and the art eventually grew by a process of additions. Some say that an Egyptian Philocles and a certain Cleanthes were among the first inventors of this art. The Egyptians 633
say painting was practiced in their country six thousand years before it was brought over into Greece. Our writers say it came from Greece to Italy after the victories of Marcellus in Sicily. But it is of little concern to us to discover the first painters or the inventors of the art, since we are not writing a history of painting like Pliny, but treating of the art in an entirely new way. On this subject there exist today none of the writings of the ancients, as far as I have seen, although they say that Euphranor the Isthmian wrote something about symmetry and colors, that Antigonus and Xenocrates set down some works about paintings, and that Apelles wrote on painting to Perseus. Diogenes Laertius tells us that the philosopher Demetrius also wrote about painting. Since all the other liberal arts were committed to writing by our ancestors, I believe that painting too was not neglected by our authors of Italy, for the ancient Etruscans were the most expert of all in Italy in the art of painting. 27. The ancient writer Trismegistus believes that sculpture and painting originated together with religion. He addresses Asclepius with these words: "Man, mindful of his nature and origin, represented the gods in his own likeness." Yet who will deny that painting has assumed the most honored part in all things both public and private, profane and religious, to such an extent that no art, I find, has been so highly valued universally among men? Almost incredible prices are quoted for painted panels. The Theban Aristides sold one painting alone for a hundred talents. They say that Rhodes was not burned down by King Demetrius lest a painting by Protogenes be destroyed. So we can say that Rhodes was redeemed from the enemy by a single picture. Many other similar tales were collected by writers, from which you can clearly see that good painters always and everywhere were held in the highest esteem and honor, so that even the most noble and distinguished citizens and philosophers and kings took great pleasure not only in seeing and possessing paintings, but also in painting themselves. L. Manilius, a Roman citizen, and the nobleman Fabius were painters. Turpilius, a Roman knight, painted at Verona. Site dius, praetor and proconsul, acquired fame in painting. Pacuvius, the tragedian, nephew of the poet Ennius, painted Hercules in the forum. The philosophers Socrates, Plato, Metrodorus and Pyrrho achieved distinction in painting. The emperors Nero, Valentinianus and Alexander Severus were very devoted to painting. It would be a long story to tell how many princes or kings have devoted themselves to this most noble art. Besides, it is not appropriate to review all the multitude of ancient painters. Its size may be understood from the fact that for Demetrius of Phalerum, son of Phanostratus, three hundred and sixty statues were completed within four hundred days, some on horseback and some in chariots. In a city in which there was so large a number of sculptors, shall we not believe there were also many painters? Painting and sculpture are cognate arts, nurtured by the same genius. But I shall always prefer the genius of the painter, as it attempts by far the most difficult task. Let us return to what we were saying. 634
28. The number of painters and sculptors was enormous in those days, when princes and people, and learned and unlearned alike delighted in painting, and statues and pictures were displayed in the theatres among the chief spoils brought from the provinces. Eventually Paulus Aemilius and many other Roman citizens taught their sons painting among the liberal arts in the pursuit of the good and happy life. The excellent custom was especially observed among the Greeks that free-born and liberally educated young people were also taught the art of painting together with letters, geometry and music. Indeed the skill of painting was a mark of honor also in women. Martia, Varro's daughter, is celebrated by writers for her painting. The art was held in such high esteem and honor that it was forbidden by law among the Greeks for slaves to learn to paint; and quite rightly so, for the art of painting is indeed worthy of free minds and noble intellects. I have always regarded it as a mark of an excellent and superior mind in any person whom I saw take great delight in painting. Although, this art alone is equally pleasing to both learned and unlearned; and it rarely happens in any other art that what pleases the knowledgeable also attracts the ignorant. You will not easily find anyone who does not earnestly desire to be accomplished in painting. Indeed it is evident that Nature herself delights in painting, for we observe she often fashions in marble hippocentaurs and bearded faces of kings. It is also said that in a gem owned by Pyrrhus the nine Muses were clearly depicted by Nature, complete with their insignia. Furthermore, there is no other art in whose study and practice all ages of learned and unlearned alike may engage with such pleasure. Let me speak of my own experience. Whenever I devote myself to painting for pleasure, which I very often do when I have leisure from other affairs, I persevere with such pleasure in finishing my work that I can hardly believe later on that three or even four hours have gone by. 29. This art, then, brings pleasure while you practice it, and praise, riches and endless fame when you have cultivated it well. Therefore, as painting is the finest and most ancient ornament of things, worthy of free men and pleasing to learned and unlearned alike, I earnestly beseech young students to devote themselves to painting as much as they can. Next, I would advise those who are devoted to painting to go on to master with every effort and care this perfect art of painting. You who strive to excel in painting, should cultivate above all the fame and reputation which you see the ancients attained, and in so doing it will be a good thing to remember that avarice was always the enemy of renown and virtue. A mind intent on gain will rarely obtain the reward of fame with posterity. I have seen many in the very flower, as it were, of learning, descend to gain and thereafter obtain neither riches nor distinction, who if they had improved their talent with application, would easily have risen to fame and there received both wealth and the satisfaction of renown. But we have said enough on these matters. +++
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51. Several things, which I do not think should be omitted from these books, still remain to complete the instruction of the painter, so that he may attain all the praiseworthy objects of which we have spoken. Let me now explain them very briefly. 52. The function of the painter is to draw with lines and paint in colors on a surface any given bodies in such a way that, at a fixed distance and with a certain determined position of the centric ray, what you see represented appears to be in relief and just like those bodies. The aim of the painter is to obtain praise, favor and good-will for his work much more than riches. The painter will achieve this if his painting holds and charms the eyes and minds of spectators. We explained how this may be done when talking above about composition and the reception of light. But in order that he may attain all these things, I would have the painter first of all be a good man, well versed in the liberal arts. Everyone knows how much more effective uprightness of character is in securing people's favor than any amount of admiration for someone's industry and art. And no one doubts that the favor of many people is very useful to the artist for acquiring reputation and wealth. It so happens that, as rich men are often moved by kindness more than by expert knowledge of art, they will give money to one man who is especially modest and good, and spurn another who is more skilled but perhaps intemperate. For this reason it behoves the artist to be particularly attentive to his morals, especially to good manners and amiability, whereby he may obtain both the good-will of others, which is a firm protection against poverty, and money, which is an excellent aid to the perfection of his art. 53. I want the painter, as far as he is able, to be learned in all the liberal arts, but I wish him above all to have a good knowledge of geometry. I agree with the ancient and famous painter Pamphilus, from whom young nobles first learned painting; for he used to say that no one could be a good painter who did not know geometry. Our rudiments, from which the complete and perfect art of painting may be drawn, can easily be understood by a geometer, whereas I think that neither the rudiments nor any principles of painting can be understood by those who are ignorant of geometry. Therefore, I believe that painters should study the art of geometry. Next, it will be of advantage if they take pleasure in poets and orators, for these have many ornaments in common with the painter. Literary men, who are full of information about many subjects, will be of great assistance in preparing the composition of a "historia," and the great virtue of this consists primarily in its invention. Indeed, invention is such that even by itself and without pictorial representation it can give pleasure. The description that Lucian gives of Calumny painted by Apelles, excites our admiration when we read it. I do not think it is inappropriate to tell it here, so that painters may be advised of the need to take particular care in creating inventions of this kind. In the painting there was a man with enormous ears sticking out, attended on each side by two women, Ignorance and Suspicion; from one side Calumny was approaching in the form of an attractive 636
woman, but whose face seemed too well versed in cunning, and she was holding in her left hand a lighted torch, while with her right she was dragging by the hair a youth with his arms outstretched towards heaven. Leading her was another man, pale, ugly and fierce to look upon, whom you would rightly compare to those exhausted by long service in the field. They identified him correctly as Envy. There are two other women attendant on Calumny and busy arranging their mistress's dress; they are Treachery and Deceit. Behind them comes Repentance clad in mourning and rending her hair, and in her train chaste and modest Truth. If this "historia" seizes the imagination when described in words, how much beauty and pleasure do you think it presented in the actual painting of that excellent artist? 54. What shall we say too about those three young sisters, whom Hesiod called Egle, Euphronesis and Thalia? The ancients represented them dressed in loose transparent robes, with smiling faces and hands intertwined; they thereby wished to signify liberality, for one of the sisters gives, another receives and the third returns the favor, all of which degrees should be present in every act of perfect liberality. You can appreciate how inventions of this kind bring great repute to the artist. I therefore advise the studious painter to make himself familiar with poets and orators and other men of letters, for he will not only obtain excellent ornaments from such learned minds, but he will also be assisted in those very inventions which in painting may gain him the greatest praise. The eminent painter Phidias used to say that he had learned from Homer how best to represent the majesty of Jupiter. I believe that we too may be richer and better painters from reading our poets, provided we are more attentive to learning than to financial gain. 55. Very often, however, ignorance of the way to learn, more than the effort of learning itself, breaks the spirit of men who are both studious and anxious to do so. So let us explain how we should become learned in this art. The fundamental principle will be that all the steps of learning should be sought from Nature: the means of perfecting our art will be found in diligence, study and application. I would have those who begin to learn the art of painting do what I see practised by teachers of writing. They first teach all the signs of the alphabet separately, and then how to put syllables together, and then whole words. Our students should follow this method with painting. First they should learn the outlines of surfaces, then the way in which surfaces are joined together, and after that the forms of all the members individually; and they should commit to memory all the differences that can exist in those members, for they are neither few nor insignificant. Some people will have a crook-backed nose; others will have flat, turned-back, open nostrils; some are full around the mouth, while others are graced with slender lips, and so on: every part has some thing particular which considerably alters the whole member when it is present in greater or lesser degree. Indeed we see that those same members which in our boyhood were rounded, and, one might say, 637
well turned and smoothed, are become rough and angular with the advance of age. All these things, therefore, the student of painting will take from Nature, and assiduously meditate upon the appearance of each part; and he will persist continually in such enquiry with both eye and mind. In a seated figure he will observe the lap, and how the legs hang gently down. In a standing person he will note the whole appearance and posture, and there will be no part whose function and symmetry, as the Greeks call it, he will not know. But, considering all these parts, he should be attentive not only to the likeness of things but also and especially to beauty, for in painting beauty is as pleasing as it is necessary. The early painter Demetrius failed to obtain the highest praise because he was more devoted to representing the likeness of things than to beauty. Therefore, excellent parts should all be selected from the most beautiful bodies, and every effort should be made to perceive, understand and express beauty. Although this is the most difficult thing of all, because the merits of beauty are not all to be found in one place, but are dispersed here and there in many, every endeavor should nonetheless be made to investigate and understand it thoroughly. The man who has learned to grasp and handle more serious matters, will in my view easily manage the less troublesome, and there is nothing so difficult that cannot be overcome by application and persistent effort. 56. Yet, in order that our effort shall not be vain and futile, we must avoid the habit of those who strive for distinction in painting by the light of their own intelligence without having before their eyes or in their mind any form of beauty taken from Nature to follow. They do not learn to paint properly, but simply make habits of their mistakes. The idea of beauty, which the most expert have difficulty in discerning, eludes the ignorant. Zeuxis, the most eminent, learned and skilled painter of all, when about to paint a panel to be publicly dedicated in the temple of Lucina at Croton, did not set about his work trusting rashly in his own talent like all painters do now; but, because he believed that all the things he desired to achieve beauty not only could not be found by his own intuition, but were not to be discovered even in Nature in one body alone, he chose from all the youth of the city five outstandingly beautiful girls, so that he might represent in his painting whatever feature of feminine beauty was most praiseworthy in each of them. He acted wisely, for to painters with no model before them to follow, who strive by the light of their own talent alone to capture the qualities of beauty, it easily happens that they do not by their efforts achieve the beauty they seek or ought to create; they simply fall into bad habits of painting, which they have great difficulty in relinquishing even if they wish. But the painter who has accustomed himself to taking everything from Nature, will so train his hand that anything he attempts will echo Nature. We can see how desirable this is in painting when the figure of some well-known person is present in a "historia," for although others executed with greater skill may be conspicuous in the picture, the face that is known draws the eyes of all spectators, so 638
great is the power and attraction of something taken from Nature. So, let us always take from Nature whatever we are about to paint, and let us always choose those things that are most beautiful and worthy. SOURCE: Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. and ed. by C. Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 53-67, 95-99. Reprinted by permission of C. Grayson. ON ARCHITECTURE A Prudent Architect will proceed in the Method which we have been just laying down. He will never set about his Work without proper Caution and Advice. He will study the Nature and Strength of the Soil where he is to build, and observe, as well from a Survey of Structures in the Neighborhood, as from the Practice and Use of the Inhabitants, what Materials, what Sort of Stone, Sand, Lime or Timber, whether found on the Place, or brought from other Parts, will best stand against the Injuries of the Weather. He will set out the exact Breadth and Depth of the Foundations, and of the Basement of the whole Wall, and take an Account of every Thing that is necessary for the Building, whether for the outward Coat or the filling up, for the Ligatures, the Ribs, or the Apertures, the Roof, the Incrustation, for Pavements abroad, or Floors within; he will direct which Way, and by what Method every thing superfluous, noxious or offensive shall be carried off by Drains for conveying away the rain Water, and keeping the Foundations dry, and by proper Defenses against any moist Vapors, or even against any unexpected Floods or Violence from Winds or Storms. In a Word, he will give Directions for every single Part, and not suffer any thing to escape his Notice and Decree. And tho' all these Particulars seem chiefly to relate to Convenience and Stability, yet they carry this along with them, that if neglected they destroy all the Beauty and Ornament of the Edifice. Now the Rules which give the Ornaments themselves their main Excellence, are as follows. First all your Ornaments must be exactly regular, and perfectly distinct, and without Confusion: Your Embellishments must not be too much crowded together or scattered as it were under Foot, or thrown on in Heaps, but so aptly and neatly distributed, that whoever should go about to alter their Situation, should be sensible that he destroyed the whole Beauty and Delicacy of the Work. There is no Part whatsoever but what the Artist ought to adorn; but there is no Occasion that all should be adorned equally, or that every thing should be enriched with equal Expense; for indeed I would not have the Merit of the Work consist so much in Plenty as in Variety. Let the Builder fix his richest Ornaments in the principal Places; those of a middling Sort, in Places of less Nate, and the meanest in the meanest. And here he should be particularly careful, not to mix what is rich with any thing trifling, nothing little with what is great, nor to set any thing too large or high in narrow or 639
close Places; tho' things which are not equal to each other in Dignity, nor alike even in Species, may very well be placed together, so it be done artfully and ingeniously, and in such a Manner, that as the one appears solemn and majestick, the other may shew chearful and pleasant, and that they may not only unite their different Beauties for the Embellishment of the Structure, but also seem as if the one without the other had been imperfect; nor may it be amiss in some certain Places to intermix somewhat even of a coarse Sort, that what is noble may receive a yet further Addition from the Comparison: Always be sure never to make a Confusion of the Orders, which will happen if you mix the Doric Members with the Corinthian, as I observed before, or the Corinthian with the Ionic, or the like. Let every Order have its own regular Members, and those all in their proper Places, that nothing may appear perplexed or broken. Let such Ornaments as are proper to the Middle be placed in the Middle, and let those which are equal Distances on each Side, be proportioned exactly alike. In short, let every thing be measured, and put together with the greatest Exactness of Lines and Angles, that the Beholder's Eye may have a clear and distinct View along the Cornices, between the Columns on the Inside and without, receiving every Moment fresh Delight from the Variety he meets with, insomuch, that after the most careful and even repeated Views, he shall not be able to depart without once more turning back to take another Look, nor, upon the most critical Examination, be able in any Part of the whole Structure to find one Thing unequal, incongruous, out of Proportion, or not conducive to the general Beauty of the Whole. All these Particulars you must provide for by means of your Model; and from thence¡ too you should before-hand consider not only what the Building is that you are to erect, but also get together all the Materials you shall want for the Execution, that when you have begun your Work you may not be at a Loss, or change or supersede your Design: but having before-hand made Provision of every Thing that you shall want, you may be able to keep your Workmen constantly supplied with all their Materials. These are the Things which the Architect is to take care of with the greatest Diligence and Judgment. The Errors which may happen in the manual Execution of the Work, need not be repeated here; but only the Workmen should be well looked after, to see that they work exactly by their Square, Level and Plumb-line; that they do their Business at the proper Seasons, take proper Seasons to let their Work rest, and at proper Seasons go to it again; that they use good Stuff, found, unmixed, solid, strong, and suitable to the Work, and that they use it in proper Places, and finish every Thing according to their Model. But to the Intent that the Architect may come off worthily and honorably in preparing, ordering and accomplishing all these Things, there are some necessary Admonitions, which he should by no means neglect. And first he ought to consider well what Weight he is going to take upon his Shoulders, what it is that he professes, what Manner of Man he would be thought, how great a Business he undertakes, how much Applause, 640
Profit, Favor and Fame among Posterity he will gain when he executes his Work as he ought, and on the contrary, if he goes about any thing ignorantly, unadvisedly, or inconsiderately, to how much Disgrace, to how much Indignation he exposes himself, what a clear, manifest and everlasting Testimony he gives Mankind of his Folly and Indiscretion. Doubtless Architecture is a very noble Science, not fit for every Head. He ought to be a Man of a fine Genius, of a great Application, of the best Education, of thorough Experience, and especially of strong Sense and sound Judgment, that presumes to declare himself an Architect. It is the Business of Architecture, and indeed its highest Praise, to judge rightly what is fit and decent: For though Building is a Matter of Necessity, yet convenient Building is both of Necessity and Utility too: But to build in such a Manner, that the Generous shall commend you, and the Frugal not blame you, is the Work only of a prudent, wise and learned Architect. To run up any thing that is immediately necessary for any particular Purpose, and about which there is no doubt of what Sort it should be, or of the Ability of the Owner to afford it; is not so much the Business of an Architect, as of a common Workman: But to raise an Edifice which is to be complete in every Part, and to consider and provide before-hand every Thing necessary for such a Work, is the Business only of that extensive Genius which I have described above: For indeed his Invention must be owing to his Wit, his Knowledge, to Experience, his Choice to Judgment, his Com position to Study, and the Completion of his Work to his Perfection in his Art; of all which Qualifications I take the Foundation to be Prudence and mature Deliberation. As to the other Virtues, Humanity, Benevolence, Modesty, Probity; I do not require them more in the Architect, than I do in every other Man, let him profess what Art he will: For indeed without them I do not think any one worthy to be deemed a Man: But above all Things he should avoid Levity, Obstinacy, Ostentation, Intemperance, and all those other Vices which may lose him the good Will of his Fellow- . Citizens, and make him odious to the World. Lastly, in the Study of his Art I would have him follow the Example of those that apply themselves to Letters: For no Man thinks himself sufficiently learned in any Science, unless he has read and examined all the Authors, as well bad as good that have wrote in that Science which he is pursuing. In the same Manner I would have the Architect diligently consider all the Buildings that have any tolerable Reputation; and not only so, but take them down in Lines and Numbers, nay, make Designs and Models of them, and by means of those, consider and examine the Order, Situation, Sort and Number of every Part which others have employed, especially such as have done any thing very great and excellent, whom we may reasonably suppose to have been Men of very great Note, when they were intrusted with the Direction of so great an Expense. Not that I would have him admire a Structure merely for being huge, and imagine that to be a sufficient Beauty; but let him principally enquire in every Building what there is particularly artful and excellent for Contrivance or Invention, and gain a Habit of being 641
pleased with nothing but what is really elegant and praise-worthy for the Design: And where-ever he finds any thing noble, let him make use of it, or imitate it in his own Performances; and when he sees any thing well done, that is capable of being still further improved and made delicate, let him study to bring it to Perfection in his own Works; and when he meets with any Design that is only not absolutely bad, let him try in his own Things to work it if possible into something excellent. Thus by a continued and nice Examination of the best Productions, still considering what Improvements might be made in every thing that he sees, he may so exercise and sharpen his own Invention, as to collect into his own Works not only all the Beauties which are dispersed up and down in those of other Men, but even those which lie in a Manner concealed in the most hidden Recesses of Nature, to his own immortal Reputation. Not satisfied with this, he should also have an Ambition to produce something admirable, which may be entirely of his own Invention; like him, for Instance, who built a Temple without using one iron Tool in it; or him that brought the Colossus to Rome, suspended all the Way upright, in which Work we may just mention that he employed no less than four-andtwenty Elephants; or like an Artist that in only seemingly working a common Quarry of Stone, should cut it out into a Labyrinth, a Temple, or some other useful Structure, to the Surprise of all Mankind. We are told that Nero used to employ miraculous Architects, who never thought of any Invention, but what it was almost impossible for the Skill of Man to reduce to practice. Such Geniuses I can by no means approve of; for, indeed, I would have the Architect always appear to have consulted Necessity and Convenience in the first Place, even tho' at the very same Time his principal Care has been Ornament. If he can make a handsome Mixture of the noble Orders of the Ancients, with any of the new Inventions of the Moderns, he may deserve Commendation. In this Manner he should be continually improving his Genius by Use and Exercise in such Things as may conduce to make him Excellent in this Science; and indeed, he should think it becomes him to have not only that Knowledge, without which he would not really be what he professed himself; but he should also adorn his Mind with such a Tincture of all the liberal Arts, as may be of Service to make him more ready and ingenious at his own, and that he may never be at a Loss for any Helps in it which Learning can furnish him with. In short, he ought still to be persevering in his Study and Application, till he finds himself equal to those great Men, whose Praises are capable of no further Addition: Nor let him ever be satisfied with himself, if there is that Thing any where that can possibly be of Use to him, and that can be obtained either by Diligence or Thought, which he is not thoroughly Master of, till he is arrived at the Summit of Perfection in the Art which he professes. The Arts which are useful, and indeed absolutely necessary to the Architect, are Painting and Mathematics. I do not require him to be deeply learned in the rest; for I think it ridiculous, like a certain Author, to expect that an Architect should be a profound Lawyer, in order to know the Right of con642
veying Water or placing Limits between Neighbors, and to avoid falling into Controversies and Lawsuits as in Building is often the Case: Nor need he be a perfect Astronomer, to know that Libraries ought to be situated to the North, and Stoves to the South; nor a very great Musician, to place the Vases of Copper or Brass in a Theater for assisting the Voice: Neither do I require that he should be an Orator, in order to be able to display to any Person that would employ him, the Services which he is capable of doing him; for Knowledge, Experience and perfect Mastery in what he is to speak of, will never fail to help him to Words to explain his Sense sufficiently, which indeed is the first and main End of Eloquence. Not that I would have him Tongue-tied, or so deficient in his Ears, as to have no Taste for Harmony: It may suffice if he does not build a private Man's House upon the public Ground, or upon another Man's: If he does not annoy the Neighbors, either by his Lights, his Spouts, his Gutters, his Drains, or by obstructing their Passage contrary to Law: If he knows the several Winds that blow from the different Points of the Compass, and their Names; in all which Sciences there is no Harm indeed in his being more expert; but Painting and Mathematics are what he can no more be without, than a Poet can be without the Knowledge of Feet and Syllables; neither do I know whether it be enough for him to be only moderately tinctured with them. This I can say of myself, that I have often started in my Mind Ideas of Buildings, which have given me wonderful Delight: Wherein when I have come to reduce them into Lines, I have found in those very Parts which most pleased me, many gross Errors that required great Correction; and upon a second Review of such a Draught, and measuring every Part by Numbers, I have been sensible and ashamed of my own Inaccuracy. Lastly, when I have made my Draught into a Model, and then proceeded to examine the several Parts over again, I have sometimes found myself mistaken, even in my Numbers. Not that I expected my Architect to be a Zeuxis in Painting, nor a Nicomachus at Numbers, nor an Archimedes in the Knowledge of mixed Lines and Angles: It may serve his Purpose if he is a thorough Master of those Elements of Painting which I have wrote; and if he is skilled in so much practical Mathematics, and in such a Knowledge of mixed Lines, Angles and Numbers, as is necessary for the Measuring of Weights, Superficies and Solids, which Part of Geometry the Greeks call Podismata and Emboda. With these Arts, joined to Study and Application, the Architect may be sure to obtain Favor and Riches, and to deliver his Name with Reputation down to Posterity. There is one Thing that I must not omit here, which relates personally to the Architect. It is, that you should not immediately run and offer your Service to every Man that gives out he is going to build; a Fault which the inconsiderate and vain-glorious are too apt to be guilty of. I know not whether you ought not to wait till you are more than once importuned to be concerned. Certainly they ought to repose a free and voluntary Confidence in you, that want to make use of your Labors and Advice. Why should I of643
fer those Inventions which have cost me so much Study and Pains, to gain perhaps no other Recompense, but the Confidence of a few Persons of no Taste or Skill? If by my Advice in the Execution of your intended Work, I either save you from an unnecessary Expense, or procure you some great Convenience or Pleasure; surely such a Service deserves a suitable Recompence. For this Reason a prudent Man should take care to maintain his Reputation; and certainly it is enough if you give honest Advice, and correct Draughts to such as apply themselves to you. If afterwards you undertake to supervise and complete the Work, you will find it very difficult to avoid being made answerable for all the Faults and Mistakes committed either by the Ignorance or Negligence of other Men: Upon which Account you must take care to have the Assistance of honest, diligent, and severe Overseers to look after the Workmen under you. I would also have you, if possible, concern yourself for none but Persons of the highest Rank and Quality, and those too such as are truly Lovers of these Arts: Because your Work loses of its Dignity by being done for mean Persons. Do you not see what Weight the Authority of great Men is to advance the Reputation of those who are employed by them? And, indeed, I insist the more upon this Piece of Advice, not only because the World has generally a higher Opinion of the Taste and Judgment of great Men, than for the most Part they deserve, but also because I would have the Architect always readily and plentifully supplied with every thing that is necessary for completing his Edifice; which those of lower Degree are commonly not so able, and therefore not so willing to do: to which add, what we find very frequent Instances of, that where the Design and Invention has been perfectly equal in two different Works, one has been much more esteemed than the other, for the Sake of the Superiority of the Materials. Lastly, I advise you not to be so far carried away by the Desire of Glory, as rashly to attempt any thing entirely new and unusual: Therefore be sure to examine and consider thoroughly what you are going to undertake, even in its minutest Parts; and remember how difficult it is to find Workmen that shall exactly execute any extraordinary Idea which you may form, and with how much Grudging and Unwillingness People will spend their Money in making Trial of your Fancies. Lastly, beware of that very common Fault, by means of which there are so few great Structures but what have some unpardonable Blemishes. We always find People very ready to criticize, and fond of being thought Counselors and Directors. Now as, by reason of the Shortness of Man's Life, few great Works are completed by the first Undertaker, we that succeed him, either out of Envy or Officiousness, are vain of making some Alteration in his original Design. By this means what was well begun is spoiled in the finishing. For this Reason I think we should adhere to the original Design of the Inventor, who we are to suppose had maturely weighed and considered it. It is possible he might have some wise Inducement to do what he did, which upon a more diligent and attentive Examination, you may at length discover yourself. If however you do make any Alteration, never do it without the Ad644
vice, or rather absolute Direction of the most approved and experienced Masters: By which means you will both provide for the Necessities of the Structure, and secure yourself against the Malice of envious Tongues. We have now treated of public Buildings, and of private; of sacred, and of profane; of those which relate to Dignity, and those of Pleasure. What remains is to show how any Defects in an Edifice, which have arisen either from Ignorance or Negligence, from the Violence of Men or Times, or from unfortunate and unforeseen Accidents, may be repaired and amended: Still hoping that these Arts will meet with the Favor and Protection of the Learned. SOURCE: Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by J. Leoni (London: Alec Tiranti, 1965), pp. 192-208. Reprinted by permission of Academy Editions, London.
Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 near Florence, the natural son of a Florentine notary. He was sent to Florence as an apprentice in the workshop of the painter and sculptor Andrea Verrocchio, where he was to remain until 1477, although he was admitted as a master in the painters' guild in 1472. In 1482-1483 he left for Milan to enter the court of Duke Lodovico Sforza. He was to work in Milan until forced to flee during the French invasions. Returning to Florence, he worked on important civic commissions for the Republic, such as the now lost frescos decorating the Palazzo della Signoria. Leonardo was the ideal genius of the Italian Renaissance. His almost unsurpassed sl<ill in so many areas is truly remarkable: painting, architecture, sculpture, drawing, and many aspects of scientific observation and experimentation, including anatomy, hydraulics, mathematics, and botany. He recorded his original thoughts and observations in his note books, a large collection of his personal notes designed for his own use. They are written in his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, in which the letters were formed backwards and in reverse, requiring a mirror to read them now, although Leonardo himself could write naturally and quickly in this manner and read it with ease. Containing thousands of drawings and preliminary sketches for many known pictures and some wonderful ideas for machines such as aircraft and tanks, these notebooks also record Leonardo's unequaled talent for observing and reproducing plants, ani mals, rushing water, and human anatomy. The writings in his notebooks are a sample of his wide-ranging mind and boundless curiosity about every aspect of human experience and the natural world. On his return to Milan in 1506, he was appointed royal painter and engineer by King Francis I of France. In 1517, he left Italy for France, where the King had given him a chateau at Cloux. It was there he died in 1519. Selections from the Notebooks Two weaknesses leaning together create a strength. Therefore the half of the world leaning against the other half becomes firm. While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. 645
Every part of an element separated from its mass desires to return to it by the shortest way. Nothingness has no center, and its boundaries are nothingness. My opponent says that nothingness and a vacuum are one and the same thing, having indeed two separate names by which they are called, but not existing separately in nature. The reply is that whenever there exists a vacuum there will also be the space which surrounds it, but nothingness exists apart from occupation of space; it follows that nothingness and a vacuum are not the same, for the one is divisible to infinity,and nothingness cannot be divided because nothing can be less than it is; and if you were to take part from it this part would be equal to the whole, and the whole to the part. Aristotle in the Third [Book] of the Ethics: man is worthy of praise and blame solely in respect of such actions as it is within his power to do or to abstain from. He who expects from experience what she does not possess takes leave of reason. For what reason do such animals as sow their seed sow with pleasure and the one who awaits receives with pleasure and brings forth with pain? Intellectual passion drives out sensuality. The knowledge of past time and of the position of the earth is the adornment and the food of human minds. Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest. This dwells in time, and stretches its limbs into the past and the future, and with these takes to itself all works that are past and those that are to come, both of nature and of the animals, and possesses nothing of the indivisible present. It does not however extend to the essence of anything .... Therefore O students study mathematics and do not build without foundations. Mental things which have not passed through the understanding are vain and give birth to no truth other than what is harmful. And because such discourses spring from poverty of intellect those who make them are always poor, and if they have been born rich they shall die poor in their old age. For nature, as it would seem, takes vengeance on such as would work miracles and they come to have less than other men who are more quiet. And those who wish to grow rich in a day shall live a long time in great poverty, as happens and will to all eternity happen to the alchemists, the would-be creators of gold and silver, and to the engineers who think to make dead water stir itself into life with perpetual motion, and to those supreme fools, the necromancer and the enchanter.
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[The Certainty of Mathematics] He who blames the supreme certainty of mathematics feeds on confusion, and will never impose silence upon the contradictions of the sophistical sciences, which occasion a perpetual clamor. The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love, for love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in proportion as knowledge is more certain; and this certainty springs from a thorough knowledge of all those parts which united compose the whole of that thing which ought to be loved. Of what use, pray, is he who in order to abridge the part of the things of which he professes to give complete information leaves out the greater part of the matters of which the whole is composed? True it is that impatience, the mother of folly, is she who praises brevity; as though such folk had not a span of life that would suffice to acquire complete knowledge of one particular subject such as the human body. And then they think to comprehend the mind of God which embraces the whole universe, weighing and dissecting it as though they were making an anatomy. O human stupidity! Do you not perceive that you have spent your whole life with yourself and yet are not aware of that which you have most in evidence, and that is your own foolishness? And so with the crowd of sophists you think to deceive yourself and others, despising the mathematical sciences in which is contained true informa tion about the subjects of which they treat! Or you would fain range among the miracles and give your views upon those subjects which the human mind is incapable of comprehending and which cannot be demonstrated by any natural instance. And it seems to you that you have performed miracles when you have spoiled the work of some ingenious mind, and you do not perceive that you are falling into the same error as does he who strips a tree of its adornment of branches laden with leaves intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruits, in order to demonstrate the suitability of the tree for making planks. Even as did Justinus, maker of an epitome of the histories of Trogus Pompeius, who had written an elaborate account of all the great deeds of his ancestors which lent themselves to picturesque description, for by so doing he composed a bald work fit only for such impatient minds as conceive themselves to be wasting time when they spend it usefully in study of the works of nature and of human things. Let such as these remain in the company of the beasts, and let their courtiers be dogs and other animals eager for prey and let them keep company with them; ever pursuing whatever takes flight from them, they follow after the inoffensive animals who in the season of the snow drifts are impelled by hunger to approach your doors to beg alms from you as from a guardian.
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If you are as you have described yourself, the king of the animals-it would be better for you to call yourself king of the beasts since you are the greatest of them all!-why do you not help them so that they may presently be able to give you their young in order to gratify your palate, for the sake of which you have tried to make yourself a tomb for all the animals? Even more I might say if to speak the entire truth were permitted me. But do not let us quit this subject without referring to one supreme form of wickedness which hardly exists among the animals, among whom are none that devour their own species except for lack of reason (for there are insane among them as among human beings though not in such great numbers). Nor does this happen except among the voracious animals as in the lion species and among leopards, panthers, lynxes, cats, and creatures like these, which sometimes eat their young. But not only do you eat your children, but you eat father, mother, brothers, and friends; and this even not sufficing you, you make raids on foreign islands and capture men of other races and then, after mutilating them in a shameful manner, you fatten them up and cram then down your gullet. Say does not nature bring forth a sufficiency of simple things to produce satiety? Or if you cannot content yourself with simple things can you not by blending these together make an infinite number of compounds as did Platina and other authors who have written for epicures? And if any be found virtuous and good drive them not away from you but do them honor lest they flee from you and take refuge in hermitages and caves or other solitary places in order to escape from your deceits. If any such be found, pay him reverence, for as these are as gods upon the earth they deserve statues, images, and honors. But I would impress upon you that their images are not to be eaten by you, as happens in a certain district of India; for there, when in the judgment of the priests these images have worked some miracle, they cut them in pieces being of wood and distribute them to all the people of the locality-not without payment. And each of them then grates his portion very fine and spreads it over the first food he eats; and so they consider that symbolically by faith they have eaten their saint, and they believe that he will then guard them from all dangers. What think you Man! of your species? Are you as wise as you set yourself up to be? Are acts such as these things that men should do, Justinus? Let no one read me who is not a mathematician in my beginnings. Every action of nature is made along the shortest possible way. Thou, O God, dost sell unto us all good things at the price of labor. ... Comparison of the Arts If you know how to describe and write down the appearance of the forms, the painter can make them so that they appear enlivened with lights and shadows which create the 648
very expression of the faces; herein you cannot attain with the pen where he attains with the brush. How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains: The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, inasmuch as it acquires its importance from the fact that it hears the things which the eye has seen. If you historians, or poets, or mathematicians had never seen things with your eyes you would be ill able to describe them in your writings. And if you, O poet, represent a story by depicting it with your pen, the painter with his brush will so render it as to be more easily satisfying and less tedious to understand. If you call painting "dumb poetry," then the painter may say of the poet that his art is "blind painting." Consider then which is the more grievous affliction, to be blind or to be dumb! Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to mankind as do paintings, for while poetry attempts to represent forms, actions, and scenes with words, the painter employs the exact images of these forms in order to reproduce them. Consider, then, which is more fundamental to man, the name of man or his image? The name changes with change of country; the form is unchanged except by death. And if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense. I will only cite as an instance of this how if a good painter represents the fury of a battle and a poet also describes one, and the two descriptions are shown together to the public, you will soon see which will draw most of the spectators, and where there will be most discussion, to which most praise will be given, and which will satisfy the more. There is no doubt that the painting, which is by far the more useful and beautiful, will give the greater pleasure. Inscribe in any place the name of God and set opposite to it His image, you will see which will be held in greater reverence! Since painting embraces within itself all the forms of nature, you have omitted nothing except the names, and these are not universal like the forms. If you have the results of her processes we have the processes of her results. Take the case of a poet describing the beauties of a lady to her lover and that of a painter who makes a portrait of her; you will see whither nature will the more incline the enamoured judge. Surely the proof of the matter ought to rest upon the verdict of experience! You have set painting among the mechanical arts! Truly, were painters as ready equipped as you are to praise their own works in writing, I doubt whether it would en649
dure the reproach of so vile a name. If you call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands represent what the imagination creates, your writers are setting down with the pen by manual work what originates in the mind. If you call it mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error-if indeed it can be called an error-more than you yourselves? If you lecture for the schools do you not go to whoever pays you the most? Do you do any work without some reward? And yet I do not say this in order to censure such opinions, for every labor looks for its reward. And if the poet should say, "I will create a fiction which shall express great things," so likewise will the painter also, for even so Apelles made the Calumny. If you should say that poetry is the more enduring-to this I would reply that the works of a coppersmith are more enduring still, since time preserves them longer than either your works or ours; nevertheless they show but little imagination; and painting, if it be done upon copper in enamel colors, can be made far more enduring. In Art we may be said to be grandsons unto God. If poetry treats of moral philosophy, painting has to do with natural philosophy; if the one describes the workings of the mind, the other considers what the mind effects by movements of the body; if the one dismays folk by hellish fictions, the other does the like by showing the same things in action. Suppose the poet sets himself to represent some image of beauty or terror, something vile and foul, or some monstrous thing, in contest with the painter, and suppose in his own way he makes a change of forms at his pleasure, will not the painter still satisfy the more? Have we not seen pictures which bear so close a resemblance to the actual thing that they have deceived both men and beasts? If you know how to describe and write down the appearance of the forms, the painter can make them so that they appear enlivened with lights and shadows which create the very expression of the faces; herein you cannot attain with the pen where he attains with the brush. How he who despises painting has no love for the philosophy of nature: If you despise painting, which is the sole imitator of all the visible works of nature, it is certain that you will be despising a subtle invention which with philosophical and ingenious speculation takes as its theme all the various kinds of forms, airs and scenes, plants, animals, grasses and flowers, which are surrounded by light and shade. And this truly is a science and the true-born daughter of nature, since painting is the offspring of nature. But in order to speak more correctly we may call it the grand child of nature; for all visible things derive their existence from nature, and from these same things is born painting. So therefore we may justly speak of it as the grandchild of nature and as related to God himself. That sculpture is less intellectual than painting, and lacks many of its natural parts:
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As practicing myself the art of sculpture no less than that of painting, and doing both the one and the other in the same degree, it seems to me that without suspicion of unfairness I may venture to give an opinion as to which of the two is the more intellectual, and of the greater difficulty and perfection. In the first place, sculpture is dependent on certain lights, "namely those from above, while a picture carries everywhere with it its own light and shade; light and shade therefore are essential to sculpture. In this respect, the sculptor is aided by the nature of the relief, which produces these of its own accord, but the painter artificially creates them by his art in places where nature would normally do the like. The sculptor cannot render the difference in the varying natures of the colors of objects; painting does not fail to do so in any particular. The lines of perspective of sculptors do not seem in any way true; those of painters may appear to extend a hundred miles beyond the work itself. The effects of aerial perspective are outside the scope of sculptors' work; they can neither represent transparent bodies nor luminous bodies nor angles of reflection nor shining bodies such as mirrors and like things of glittering surface, nor mists, nor dull weather, nor an infinite number of things which I forbear to mention lest they should prove wearisome. The one advantage which sculpture has is that of offering greater resistance to time; yet painting offers a like resistance if it is done upon thick copper covered with white enamel and then painted upon with enamel colors and placed in a fire and fused. In degree of permanence it then surpasses even sculpture. It may be urged that if a mistake is made it is not easy to set it right, but it is a poor line of argument to attempt to prove that the fact of a mistake being irremediable makes the work more noble. I should say indeed that it is more difficult to correct the mind of the master who makes such mistakes than the work which he has spoiled. We know very well that a good experienced painter will not make such mistakes; on the contrary, following sound rules he will proceed by removing so little at a time that his work will progress well. The sculptor also if he is working in clay or wax can either take away from it or add to it, and when the model is completed it is easy to cast it in bronze; and this is the last process and it is the most enduring form of sculpture, since that which is only in marble is liable to be destroyed, but not when done in bronze. But painting done upon copper, which by the methods in use in paint ing may be either taken from or altered, is like the bronze, for when you have first made the model for this in wax it can still be either reduced or altered. While the sculpture in bronze is imperishable this painting upon copper and enameling is absolutely eternal; and while bronze remains dark and rough, this is full of an infinite variety of varied and lovely colors, of which I have already made mention. But if you would have me speak only of panel painting I am content to give an opinion between it and sculpture by saying that 651
painting is more beautiful, more imaginative, and richer in resource, while sculpture is more enduring, but excels in nothing else. Sculpture reveals what it is with little effort; painting seems a thing miraculous, making things intangible appear tangible, presenting in relief things which are flat, in distance things near at hand. In fact, painting is adorned with infinite possibilities of which sculp ture can make no use. One of the chief proofs of skill of the painter is that his picture should seem in relief, and this is not the case with the sculptor, for in this respect he is aided by nature. [Of Poetry and Painting] When the poet ceases to represent in words what exists in nature, he then ceases to be the equal of the painter; for if the poet, leaving such representation, were to describe the polished and persuasive words of one whom he wishes to represent as speaking, he would be becoming an orator and be no more a poet or a painter. And if he were to describe the heavens he makes himself an astrologer, and a philosopher or theologian when speak ing of the things of nature or of God. But if he returns to the representation of some definite thing he would become the equal of the painter if he could satisfy the eye with words as the painter does with brush and color, [for with these he creates] a harmony to the eye, even as music does in an instant to the ear. Painting and Sculpture Why the picture seen with two eyes will not be an example of such relief as the relief seen with two eyes; this is because the picture seen with one eye will place itself in relief like the actual relief, having the same qualities of light and shade .... How from age to age the art of painting continually declines and deteriorates when painters have no other standard than work already done: The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard; but if he will apply himself to learn from the objects of nature he will produce good results. This we see was the case with the painters who came after the time of the Romans, for they continually imitated each other, and from age to age their art steadily declined. After these came Giotto the Florentine, and he-reared in mountain solitudes, inhabited only by goats and such like beasts-turning straight from nature to his art, began to draw on the rocks the movements of the goats which he was tending, and so began to draw the figures of all the animals which were to be found in the country, in such a way that after much study he not only surpassed the masters of his own time but all those of many preceding centuries. After him art again declined, because all were imitating paintings already done; and so for centuries it continued to decline until such time as Tommaso the Florentine, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by the perfection of his work how those 652
who took as their standard anything other than nature, the supreme guide of all the masters, were wearying themselves in vain. Similarly I would say about these mathematical subjects, that those who study only the authorities and not the works of nature are in art the grandsons and not the sons of nature, which is the supreme guide of the good authorities. Mark the supreme folly of those who censure such as learn from nature, leaving uncensured the authorities who were themselves the disciples of this same nature! SOURCE: Excerpts from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. by Edward MacCurdy (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 57-59, 61-66, 81-85, 852-856, 902-903.
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SECTION 2
Leon Battista Alberti, On the Value of Contemporary Painting (1435) I used to marvel and at the same time grieve that so many excellent and superior arts and sciences from our most vigorous antique past could now seem lacking and almost wholly lost. We know from [remaining] works and through references to them that they were once widespread. Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometricians, rhetoricians, seers and similar noble and amazing intellects are very rarely found today and there are few to praise them. Thus I believed, as many said, that Nature, the mistress of things, had grown old and tired. She no longer produced either geniuses or giants which in her more youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvellously and abundantly. Since then, I have been brought back here [to Florence]-from the long exile in which we Alberti have grown old-into this our city, adorned above all others. I have come to understand that in many men, but especially in you, Filippo [Brunelleschi], and in our close friend Donat[ell]o the sculptor and in others like Nencio, Luca and Masaccio, there is a genius for [accomplishing] every praiseworthy thing. For this they should not be slighted in favour of anyone famous in antiquity in these arts. Therefore, I believe the power of acquiring wide fame in any art or science lies in our industry and diligence more than in the times or in the gifts of nature. It must be admitted that it was less difficult for the Ancients-because they had models to imitate and from which they could learn-to come to a knowledge of those su preme arts which today are most difficult for us. Our fame ought to be much greater, then, if we discover unheard-of and never-before-seen arts and sciences without teachers or without any model whatsoever. Who could ever be hard or envious enough to fail to praise Pippo the architect on seeing here such a large structure, rising above the skies, ample to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan people, and constructed seems and of to your me unthought impossible by fame, their without of deeds. of the of among execution virtues the aid the of of Ancients. in our centering our Donato, time, But or ifl and there great judge of will quantity the rightly, be others other of it was wood? who places, probably are Since Filippo, most unknown this pleasing to work tell As you work from day to day, you persevere in discovering things through which your extraordinary genius acquires perpetual fame. If you find the leisure, it would please me if you should look again at this my little work On Painting which I set into 654
Tuscan for your renown. You will see three books; the first, all mathematics, concerning the roots in nature which are the source of this delightful and most noble art. The second book puts the art in the hand of the artist, distinguishing its parts and demonstrating all. The third introduces the artist to the means and the end, the ability and the desire of acquiring perfect skill and knowledge in painting. May it please you, then, to read me with diligence. If anything here seems to you to need emending, correct me. There was never a writer so learned to whom erudite friends were not useful. I in particular desire to be corrected by you in order not to be pecked at by detractors .... "Alberti on Painting" by Leon Battista Alberti from On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti, trans. by Jonathan Spencer, pp. 39-40. CopyrightŠ 1966 Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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SECTION 3
Najemy, The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage Poverty and Wealth Florence's changing economy had demographic consequences. Its reduced fifteenthcentury population was of course in large part the consequence of recurrent epidemics, but another cause of persistent demographic stagnation lies in the contraction of the woolen cloth industry. After the expansion of the 1360s and early 1370s, annual production slipped to 20,000 bolts in 1380, 12,000-14,000 in the 1390s, and under 10,000 in the 1420s. In 1380 the guild had 283 registered firms, but only 132 were reported in the 1427 Catasto. In 1379 a third of household heads with occupations specified in the estimo worked in some phase of woolen manufactures, and 31% still did in 1404; but by 1427 only 18% were so employed. Because total population also declined from 55,000 in 1379 to only 37,000 in 1427, the loss of jobs was even greater than these percentages suggest.(1) Among the causes of the decline were increasing competition and the difficulty of securing sufficient supplies of English wool, partly because of interruptions in trade, but also because cloth manufactures were expanding in England and elsewhere. After mid-century the industry recovered, as producers abandoned their former concentration on luxury cloths and converted to lower quality, cheaper cloths from Mediterranean wool, for which they found profitable markets especially in the Ottoman Empire.(2) Benedetto Dei counted 2 70 wool shops in 1472.(3) Investors continued to come from both the elite (e.g., Albizzi, Altoviti, Capponi, Corbinelli, Velluti, Rucellai) and the popolo, and woolens continued to be exported throughout the Mediterranean, but not in the same quantities as in the 1360s and far fewer than before 1340. Although woolworkers still outnumbered silkworkers 4:1 in 1427, silk had begun its slow rise. An independent association of producers of silk cloth had existed in the thirteenth century before joining the cloth retailers of Por Santa Maria, but they were mainly artisans, not merchant entrepreneurs, and remained a small and weak minority in the guild until the early fifteenth century. In 1427, 33 firms were producing silk cloth for export, 50 in 1461, and 44 in 1480; total value of production went from 230,000 florins in the 1430s to 300,000 in the early 1460s and 400,000 in 1490.(4) Even with the tripling of raw silk produced in the Florentine dominions between 1440 and the midsixteenth century;(5) silk had to be imported to meet the needs of manufacturers, who were now increasingly merchant-entrepreneurs producing for export to foreign mar656
kets. Among the earliest were merchants from the popolo: Francesco Della Luna, Benedetto Ghini, Parente di Michele Parenti (Marco's father), and Andrea Banchi, who sold his silks all over Italy and beyond, in Geneva and Constantinople.(6) By midcentury elite families and merchant-bankers began investing in silk production and using their international connections to good advantage to market their products. In the 1430s the Medici formed a partnership in a silk company, and by the 1460s several Pitti and an Antinori also did so. But the industry remained mostly in the hands of new families, some of which, like the Serristori and Cambini, accumulated big fortunes in a combination of banking, trade, and silk exports. As with woolens, silk cloth was manufactured in a series of decentralized stages by artisans working in their homes or shops. But because the steps were fewer than for wool, and especially because initial cleaning and combing were not needed as with raw wool, manufacturing silk cloth did not require a large force of unskilled workers. Thus the rise of this new textile industry could not replenish the population loss caused by the decline of wool production. Because silk cloth required fewer workers (and despite the fact that many were highly skilled and well paid artisans), the proportion in production costs of labor to materials was the inverse of that in woolen cloth production: in woolens, labor represented 60-65% of costs and raw wool and other materials 35-40%, whereas in the silk industry, despite higher remuneration per worker, labor accounted for 30-35% and the expensive raw silk and other materials 65-70%.(7) Silk was a luxury product in which success depended on quality, and in turn on the refined skills of dyers, loom warpers, weavers, and the goldbeaters who produced the gold thread woven into brocades. With the relative decline of the labor-intensive wool industry and the rise of silk and other forms of skilled artisan labor, Florence's economy underwent a major shift. Unlike the fourteenth century, in which a huge amount of wealth was paid out in wages to a large working class, in the fifteenth century, although skilled artisans were in great demand and enjoyed rising incomes, the declining demand for unskilled labor meant stagnating wages for what was still the bulk of the working population. Despite the demographic contraction (which ought to have raised wages in a structurally unchanged economy, and initially did so after 1348), wages and piece-rates held steady or even declined in both the building and woolen cloth industries in the fifteenth century.(8) Fortunately for workers, long-term price trends also remained remarkably steady until the end of the century. But short-term price fluctuations or periods of unemployment could throw households into chronic indebtedness, which further depressed real wages. For unskilled workers to afford basic necessities they needed steady and low prices, modest indirect taxes, and a favorable ratio of household size to incomes. An unskilled worker employed full time earned enough to support himself and one other person, but families of three or four with a single income could not make ends meet even with stable prices. Living costs in families of four or more also ex657
ceeded the incomes of skilled workers with higher earnings. Of 909 household heads identified in the 1427 Catasto as workers in the wool industry, 53% were deemed miserabiles, too poor to pay any tax, and they included 57% of wage-earners, 64% of unskilled Ciompi, and 43 % of artisans (but fully 78% of weavers and spinners who worked at home).(9) Stagnant wages in the building and woolen cloth industries almost certainly depressed other workers' incomes as well, and when prices began their slow steady rise toward the end of the century the erosion of real wages created endemic poverty within the working class. Serious impoverishment prevailed in the subject territories. Heavy direct taxation of the dominion was gradually transferring wealth from the contado and district communities to feed the city's public debt (whose interest-bearing shares were owned almost entirely by Florentine citizens). Except for a few cities like Prato, which continued to be a major center of woolen cloth manufactures, and Pescia, where the silk industry flourished, protectionist measures were destroying the ability of producers in the territories to compete with Florentine industries. Most of the smaller cities lost wealth and population in the fifteenth century, as the spread of sharecropping (or mezzadria) slowed demand and economic growth in rural areas. Wealthy Florentines bought land from former freeholders, whose incomes had shrunk because of low prices and high taxes, and entered into sharecropping arrangements that gave half of each farm's annual production to the owner and half to the sharecropper, leaving the latter little incentive to specialize and produce surpluses for sale. Weakened productivity kept sharecroppers in depressed economic conditions, when, here too, lower population ought to have had the reverse effect. All these factors reduced incomes and demand in rural areas.(10) Weak consumer demand in the bulk of the city and dominion population also drove the development of luxury industries. With handsome profits more likely in luxury goods than in labor-intensive industries that produced for the lower classes, investors naturally turned toward the former. Growing investment in luxury products also shaped elite tastes and increased demand for these products. Here was the paradox of Florence's fifteenth-century economy: on the one hand, ever greater displays of opulence and conspicuous consumption among the wealthy; on the other, working and rural classes unable to spend much beyond subsistence. Renaissance Florence's brilliant material culture did not have deep economic foundations: it did not spread wealth significantly beyond the skilled artisans who produced for the elite and the merchantbankers who sold these products throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Hence the severely unbalanced distribution of wealth: the wealthiest 100 Florentine households, each with at least 8,600 florins of net taxable wealth (1% of the city's nearly 10,000 households and less than two-tenths of 1% of all households in the city and do658
minion), controlled 26.5%, of the city's wealth and 17% of that of city and dominion combined. The 202 households with 5,000 or more florins owned 36% of the city's wealth, and the 339 households with 3,000 or more florins controlled 45%. More than half the city's wealth was in the hands of about 6% of households.(11) Because large elite lineages often had several among the richest households, wealth was concentrated in a considerably smaller number of lineages than households. In the Catasto of 1458 the highest assessment of tax owed, that of Cosimo de' Medici (and his nephew Pierfrancesco), was in a league of its own at 576 florins. Two other assessments exceeded 100 florins: 132 for the heirs of Giovanni de' Benci, the Medici bank's former general manager, and Giovanni Rucellai's 102. Eight more households were assessed between 50 and 98 florins (including Jacopo Pazzi and Gino Capponi). Of the remaining 7,625 households that owed any tax (excluding the miserabiles), 49% owed less than 5 soldi (when 1 florin was worth 108 soldi) and 64% owed 10 soldi or less. If an estimated 3,000 households of miserabiles are added to the total, 63% of city households owed from zero to 5 soldi and 74% from zero to 10. (12) Despite its uneven distribution, this was still an economy that offered opportunities for new wealth. Some large new fortunes were made in the fifteenth century, mainly by merchant families who enjoyed Medici favor. Niccolo Cambini, son of a minor guildsman and linen-cloth dealer, began working in the Naples branch of the Medici bank and his brother Andrea apprenticed with Florentine merchants in Lisbon. In 1420 they formed a merchant-banking partnership with Adovardo Giachinotti and members of the elite Guadagni, who were allies of the Albizzi. Fortunately for the Cambini brothers, the Guadagni partnership ended some years later, and they astutely joined the ranks of the Medici party under whose protection their business flourished. They were also neighbors of the Medici, and in the early 1440s Niccolo acquired a family chapel in San Lorenzo, a sign both of his success and of Medici favor. Like other merchant-banks, the Cambini accepted deposits (on which they returned 7-8 % interest) and used the capital to export Florentine woolen and silk cloths to Rome and elsewhere in Italy and throughout the western Mediterranean, in particular the Iberian peninsula where Lisbon became the center of their operations. They also imported raw materials, including silk, wool, dyes, leather, and furs for the Florentine textile and clothing industries. By 1458, after Niccolo's death, his sons jointly declared gross assets of almost 9,000 florins, thus ranking them among the 62 wealthiest households, and purchased a family palazzo for 3,600 florins. Cambini fortunes increased in the 1460s, as they expanded their silk business, extended trading operations to the eastern Mediterranean, accepted still more deposits, and began making profitable but risky loans. In 1467 Francesco di Niccolo Cambini was appointed one of eight Officials of the Bank and thus became a trusted creditor of the commune together with Giovanni Rucellai and Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici banking empire. It was the pin659
nacle of Cambini success. But the risks finally caught up with them: bankruptcy struck in 1482, and, after lengthy legal proceedings, they sold off property, including the palace acquired thirty years earlier, to satisfy creditors.(13) The Della Casa similarly rose from humble origins to wealth and status with a banking operation under Medici protection. Two sons of the notary Lodovico della Casa, Antonio and Ruggieri, also began with the Medici, the former as an employee, partner, and then director of the Rome branch in 1435-8, the latter as director of the Geneva branch for many years until 1447. In 1439 Antonio founded his own company with Jacopo Donati and entered the profitable business of papal banking. He soon created two more companies, including one in Geneva where he sold Florentine silks.(14) Another brother, Giovanni, now famous as the lover of Lusanna,(15) directed the family's Rome company after Antonio's death in 1454 and married the daughter of an elite Medici ally, Marietta di Piero Rucellai. In the 1458 Catasto he and a fourth brother, Jacopo, declared gross assets of almost 8,700 florins.(16) Although the Spinelli had been on the outer edges of the elite since the 1320s under the Alberti umbrella, in the fifteenth century Tommaso Spinelli took his branch of the family to new economic heights in pa pal banking and silks.(17) And the Riccardi rose from obscurity to make, lose, and regain notable wealth.(18) Perhaps the greatest success story among fifteenth-century "new" families is that of the Serristori, who not only made a huge fortune but also used it and Medici connections to enter the city's social elite. They descended, as their name implies, from a notary, ser Ristoro di ser Jacopo, who emigrated to Florence in the mid-fourteenth century from Figline in the upper Valdarno. While practicing the notarial profession, ser Ristoro bought property (much of it in Figline), invested in a wool shop in which he set up two of his sons, and left a considerable fortune to a third son, Giovanni, whom he sent to law school in Bologna and who alone among the brothers survived the plague of 1400. Messer Giovanni went into the merchant-banking business, and when he died in 1414, without male heirs, his nephews divided the estate whose business investments alone were worth 37,000 florins. Relations with the Medici must already have been well established, because one of two mediators they appointed to arbitrate the settlement was Cosimo's cousin Averardo, whose daughter Costanza was already the wife of one of the nephews, Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro (the patronymic had still not been definitively converted to a surname). Under Antonio the family business prospered. In 1427 be declared gross assets of almost 35,000 florins and net taxable wealth of over 28,000 (second highest in Santa Croce and fourteenth overall). Almost half bis fortune was in Monte shares, a quarter in a merchant-banking operation, and a quarter in real estate, mostly in Figline. In 1430-2 Antonio served three times among the Officials of the Bank and made loans to the commune totaling over 26,000 florins. In 1433 Cosimo, anticipating the political storm that was about to break, deposited the assets of the local branch of his bank into Antonio's company for protection during the 660
exile. Having gained Cosimo's trust, Antonio went on to serve on many balle and as an accoppiatore. Although he declared significantly reduced taxable assets in 1431 and 1433, the company accumulated ever larger working capital from deposits with which it exported textiles and imported wool, dyes, silver, and everything from soap to sugar to alum. Antonio's sons married into the elite Capponi, Pazzi, and Strozzi families. In the 1450s they divided his estate but went into the silk business together and built a huge company whose capital investments rose from 6,400 florins in 1470 to 24,000 fiorini larghi (the new florin that was worth 20% more than the old, hence 29,000 old florins). Between 1471 and 1492 the Serristori manufactured and sold 40,000 kilos of silk cloth with sales of 355,000 fiorini larghi and total net profits over twenty-one years of 57,688 florins. They went on to be one of the pillars of the nobility under the principate.(19) Despite these examples of new wealth, the old elite still controlled the lion's share. Of twenty-eight households with 20,000 or more florins of taxable wealth in 1427, half came from very old elite families (including the Alberti, Barbadori, Bardi, Medici, Panciatichi, Pazzi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, and Tornabuoni), and only six from really new families (including the Serristori).(20) In 1458 the old elite was even more prominently represented among the very wealthy, with seventeen of the twenty-four households declaring 10,000 or more florins of assets (e.g., Alessandri, Baroncelli, Canigiani, Capponi, Medici, Pazzi, Pitti, Rucellai, and Salviati), and two others that had joined the elite on Medici coattails (Benci and Dietisalvi-Neroni).(21) The indefatigable list-maker Benedetto Dei begins his roster of richest Florentines in 1472 with three Medici, two Rucellai, three Pitti, four Pazzi, and nine Capponi before including six members of the "new" Martelli. Besides the many new families, the rest of the list includes (in this order) one or more Canigiani, Tornabuoni, Soderini, Gianfigliazzi, Nerli, Guicciardini, Salviati, Portinari, Ridolfi, Antinori, Velluti, Frescobaldi, Albizzi, Vettori, Adimari, Cavalcanti, Corsini, Corbinelli, Peruzzi, Castellani, and Alessandri. 22 Giovanni Rucellai famously advised his sons to continue his merchant-banking business only if they attended to it personally, to keep up the appearance of "merchants" while in fact conducting themselves as "shopkeepers," and to avoid the risks of deposit banking and investing other people's money.(23) While this no doubt reflected his cautious awareness of the precariousness of wealth after setbacks toward the end of his life, he had nonetheless accumulated one of the city's great fortunes with the usual combination of economic ventures (and without any help from the Medici). As he reminisced in 1473, "In the trading and banking business I have been very fortunate, through God's grace, and careful and diligent. I began in this profession as a boy, indeed as an infant, and I have acquired great credit and trust. I founded several banking companies with various partners and had operations in many places outside Florence, including Venice, Genoa, Naples, and Pisa. I was a partner in seven woolshops in Florence at different times and 661
with different partners. And in these businesses I made a lot of money."(24) Even political disaster did not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit of elite families. The Alberti commercial and banking empire prospered in exile. And Filippo Strozzi (1428-91) began the process of converting his father Matteo's modest estate into the greatest fortune of the age while he was still an exile in Naples. Introduced by relatives to international commerce and banking, and financed in part by his mother Alessandra's dowry and the sale of family property, he began businesses in Palermo and Naples. After he returned to Florence, the Strozzi bank, still based in Naples, made fabulous profits that increased Filippo's fortune from 32,000 (1orini larghi in 1471 to 112,000 in 1483 and 116,000 by his death in 1491 (and this does not include Monte holdings): 86 percent of his income of 90,000 florins between 1471 and 1483 came from the Naples company. So vast was Strozzi's wealth that, even with the huge expenditures on the palazzo he began building in 1489, he hardly knew what to do with it all: after his death, over 52,000 florins in cash was found in sacks stored in his house!(25) GALLERY 8.1
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Public and Private Patronage Florence's vibrant artistic culture was shaped by its luxury economy. Artistic production reflected the social, economic, and contractual contexts of interactions between producers and consumers, who came from different classes, as well as the religious and aesthetic dimensions of consumer demand. Artists were mostly artisans formed by the guild traditions in which highly specialized skills were learned, perfected, practiced, and transmitted through training and apprenticeships. Like other cities with strong guild and artisan traditions, Florence had long been noted for the quality of its dyed cloth, furs, clothes, jewelry, furniture, woodworking, sculpting, and myriad products whose value lay in both high-quality materials and the talents of artisan-artists who crafted prized and admired objects from those materials. Skilled sculptors, painters, and master builders that we call artists and architects worked in shops they owned or rented, hired assistants, trained apprentices, signed contracts that stipulated, usually in meticulous detail, what they were to do, how much they were to be paid, what materials to use and who paid for them, and by when the work was to be completed. Surviving contracts show that artists were, and needed to be, good businessmen and negotiators who knew how to keep careful accounts, calculate costs, and make ends meet. Most of their paintings and sculptures were produced on commission; works produced without specific commissions and offered to the market were generally popular and less expensive products, such as terra-cotta reliefs, birth trays, and small devotional paintings. But big, expensive, and artistically innovative works were always the result of commissions, whether from institutions or individual patrons who paid for works produced in conformity with their wishes. This had long been the legal and economic framework of artistic production, and it did not substantially change after 1400.(26) New factors nonetheless emerged from Florence's luxury economy and changing class relations to affect the production of art in the fifteenth century. The same socioeconomic context that turned the silk industry into a showcase for the talents of skilled weavers and goldbeaters and the clothing industry into the same for tailors,(27) and made them both arenas of conspicuous consumption, also shaped the demand for art and thus the status of artists.(28) Growing demand for luxury goods that enhanced the prestige of consumers was a crucial factor behind perhaps the biggest difference between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art patronage: a gradual shift from a balance between public (or institutional) and private (or individual) patrons to a preponderance of private patronage. After about 1400 the transformation of class relations heightened individual patrons' desire to display their (and their families') status, honor, and "social identity."(29) With the elite having assimilated the civic and economic ethos of the popolo and, after 1434, lost political power to the Medici, and with families from the popolo continuing to make new fortunes in trade and banking, many in the elite felt the 663
need for new cultural spaces in which to exhibit their superior social status. Conspicuous consumption of artworks, luxury clothing, great private palaces, but also of literary culture and humanism, met this need. Families of new wealth emulated the elite and also invested in culture to advertise their social rise and aspirations, making cultural patronage an arena of competition and mimetic rivalry both among elite families and between the classes. Although this patronage was private in the sense that wealthy individuals hired and paid artists and builders, the fact that so much of it was placed conspicuously on display to promote the patrons' "greatness" made it at the same time very public. Contrasts between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries should not however be overdrawn. Fourteenth-century private individuals and families also paid for a good deal of art, chiefly in churches, where citizens vied to establish their families' rights in chapels and sacristies in which they buried their dead and preserved family memory with artworks that included vestments, chalices, altarpieces, frescoes, tomb sculptures, and sculpted coats of arms. But fourteenth-century chapel patronage was conditioned less by the patrons' aesthetic and religious preferences than by the devotional and theological traditions of churches and religious orders. Here too, of course, "private" chapels were quite public in that they were meant to be seen by neighbors and visitors and thus to publicize family piety and wealth. Everyone knew that this or that splendidly decorated chapel belonged to a notable family, but, except for the occasional coat of arms (often not allowed) or tomb, there was little or nothing that identified the family, much less the individual, who endowed a fourteenth-century chapel or paid for its wall paintings. But by the fifteenth century, family patronage in ecclesiastical settings increasingly reflected the devotional and/or aesthetic choices of individuals who paid for this art, hired the artists of their choice, and, while putting the honor of their lineages on display, now also increasingly left their own distinctive imprint on what they commissioned. Civic and public art flourished in the fourteenth century and into the first third of the fifteenth and then declined, in part because the biggest projects were by then completed. It continued thereafter in less monumental manifestations, such as the artistic commissions of confraternities. Like "private" patronage, the concept of "public" patronage requires care. Supervision of civic and ecclesiastical building projects was typically entrusted to citizen works committees, called "opere," vested with responsibility for spending funds assigned to them, keeping accounts, and selecting, hiring, and paying builders, sculptors, woodworkers, painters, and others artisans. They decided on specific building plans and sculptural programs and were thus involved in aesthetic and engineering decisions as well as administrative matters. Opere typically consisted of four, six, or eight "operai" appointed, or elected by scrutiny and sortition, for four- or 664
six-month terms, and then replaced by new committees. With so many projects and short terms of office, scores of citizens served on opere at any given time, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, over the course of decades and generations. Although laymen without specialized training in the techniques of sculpture or the complex engineering of large-scale building, many developed recognized expertise and were regularly reappointed or elected to different opere.(30) They also served as judges in competitions for commissions. Public projects were not supervised by faceless government bureaucracies. Citizens assumed myriad responsibilities in a system of collective participatory patronage in which they significantly contributed, alongside builders and sculptors, to the creation of works of art. The construction, decoration, and renovation of the palace of the priors always remained under communal supervision. Because the original structure was complete by 1315, operai were subsequently appointed by the Signoria only as needed until around 1470 when the Medici regime made the "palace operai" a permanent office.(31) For other projects the government assigned responsibility to the guilds or Parte Guelfa, which in turn elected the operai. At the cathedral, construction began under joint communal-ecclesiastical supervision, then briefly rotated among the five major commercial guilds, and in 1331 was definitively entrusted to the Wool guild. From as early as the twelfth century, the Calimala supervised the baptistery works and the church of San Miniato al Monte; it also acquired responsibility for two hospitals, and later the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. Por Santa Maria administered works projects at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova from the thirteenth century and subsequently had responsibility for the convent of San Marco and the construction of the Innocenti Hospital. In the 1330s it was also assigned the rebuilding of Orsanmichele, the communal granary that became a site of popular devotion to a miracle-working image of the Virgin. After Orsanmichele became an oratory, the image and the great tabernacle built by Orcagna to house it came under the care of the captains of the confraternity of Orsanmichele. The popular government of 1378-82 authorized the minor guilds to have images of their patron saints painted on the interior piers of the oratory. In the fifteenth century the bankers' guild administered two hospitals, and the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai had responsibility for a hospital, a church, and a convent.(32) Many confraternities controlled chapels or oratories in which they commissioned works of art.(33) Duccio's Rucellai Madonna, so called because it was for a long time in the Rucellai family chapel at Santa Maria Novella, was actually commissioned by a laudesi confraternity, the Compagnia di Santa Maria. Corporate supervision and patronage pervaded every corner of Florence's ecclesiastical and civic architecture and sculpture. Particularly intriguing is the history of citizen participation in the well documented administration of the cathedral project by the Wool guild's operai.(34) For a generation 665
after the guild's assumption of responsibility, attention shifted from the cathedral to the bell tower under the supervision of Giotto, who was appointed "magister et gubernator" of the combined works in 1334. In the mid-1350s, with the bell tower nearly finished, the operai oversaw crucial debates regarding the cathedral. An original plan, which had guided the early construction, was challenged by the proponents of a different design calling for three huge bays in the nave instead of five smaller ones and requiring major readjustments in what had already gone up; the operai presented both proposals to a meeting of a hundred citizens and held thirty-eight other meetings with experts and advisers. A decade later yet another plan was put forward, and the operai requested advice from a large committee of goldsmiths, painters, and masons, led by the builder Neri di Fioravante. Their proposal (known as the plan of the "maestri e dipintori") was for a dramatic enlargement of the church with the addition of a fourth nave bay, a huge increase in the size of the crossing and thus of the space eventually to be covered by a dome, and the addition of a drum to elevate the dome to what seemed to many an impossible height. A large meeting of eighty citizens (including Salvestro de' Medici and Uguccione de' Ricci), together with the operai, guild consuls, master builders, and various experts, discussed the audacious plan and recommended that another committee of eight be appointed to evaluate its feasibility and safety. These eight, all laymen, included a Salviati, a Peruzzi, a Rucellai, a Bardi, an Albizzi, and Uguccione de' Ricci. Discussions continued throughout the next year concerning the drum and the projected cupola, and the construction site was kept open on Sundays to allow any and all citizens to inspect two large models of the rival plans. Although the operai and guild consuls had already decided for the plan of the "maestri e dipintori," they went to great lengths to mold public opinion in support of an idea that was risky and in a sense incomplete, because no one had any idea how to build a dome large enough to cover the immense space created by the plan, or whether the walls and piers could even bear its weight. On October 26-27, 1367, more than four hundred citizens filed in to have a look: elite, popolo, minor guildsmen, and artisans. Whether there really was near unanimity (only one person, Jacopo Alberti, is recorded as expressing doubts about the new plan), or whether the notary ignored a few more dissenting voices, the operai succeeded in winning widespread approval for an enlarged cathedral. Only after still more meetings of experts and prominent citizens did they definitively commit the opera, and communal funds, to the astonishingly bold plan.(35) Early fifteenth-century public patronage displays both continuity and change in the relationship between artist-artisans and corporate patrons. As in the deliberations over the cathedral design in the 1360s, so also (if Lorenzo Ghiberti's later account in the autobiographical section of his Commentarii is accurate) in the famous competition announced in 1401 by the Calimala for the baptistery's second set of bronze doors, in which contenders were required to cast panels depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, the 666
decision-making process involved large numbers of citizens: Ghiberti claims he was declared the winner by a jury of thirty-four, whose judgment was confirmed by the baptistery operai, Calimala consuls, and then the entire guild.(36) But Antonio Manetti's (still later) Life of Brunelleschi asserts that the decision was actually for a joint commission, which, although unlikely, is not altogether implausible in view of what happened when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi faced off again over how to build the cupola. In 1418 the Cathedral Opera announced an open competition for design-models, with a 200-florin prize for the winner, and created a separate committee of overseers for the project. Brunelleschi astonished everyone by proposing that a dome could be built without centering or supporting scaffolding, a plan favored by some but derided by others as the height of folly (see Plate 2). Again meetings and extensive consultations followed, and the public was invited to view the Brunelleschi model. In the end, the consuls, operai, and cupola officials approved his bold plan, but they nonetheless appointed Brunelleschi and Ghiberti as co-supervisors of the project in a gesture of compromise perhaps intended to co-opt potential opposition.(37) The third great locus of civic patronage of these years was Orsanmichele (see Plate 6), where responsibility was shared among the confraternity, the guilds, and the Parte Guelfa. In 1339 Por Santa Maria petitioned the Signoria to require each of the twelve major guilds to commission paintings or statues of their patron saints in the external piers of the granary whose reconstruction the guild was then overseeing. At the time only the Wool guild complied with a statue of St. Stephen by Andrea Pisano, and subsequently a few other guilds did so as well. But for a long time little happened until, in 1399, the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai commissioned a statue of the Virgin and Child; two years later the guild of Jurists and Notaries initiated discussions for the replacement (completed in 1406) of its old statue of St. Luke. Perhaps encouraged by these signs of reviving interest, in the same year the Signoria required all the other guilds with assigned niches in the external piers to commission statues of their saints and have them in place within ten years or risk having the niche reassigned. Over the next twenty years a dozen monumental sculptures were erected at Orsanmichele, including three each by Nanni di Banco, Ghiberti, and Donatello. Nanni di Banco, who had been producing large sculptures for the cathedral, sculpted St. Philip for the guild of shoemakers, the Four Crowned Saints for the stonemasons and carpenters; and St. Eligius for the blacksmiths, all in marble.(38) The Calimala turned of course to Ghiberti and commissioned a bronze St. John the Baptist, and the Cambio and Lana also engaged him to cast bronze statues of, respectively, St. Matthew and (a new) St. Stephen. And Donatello, who had also worked on the sculptural program for the cathedral facade, did the St. George for the guild of armorers and the St. Mark for the guild of linen manufacturers and used-cloth dealers, both in marble. The Parte Guelfa had the most prominent niche at Orsanmichele, at the center of the east side of the build667
ing overlooking the ceremonial route of via Calzaiuoli that connected the cathedral complex to the north and the palace and piazza of the priors to the south. For that prestigious location they commissioned Donatello to do a bronze statue of St. Louis of Toulouse, brother of Robert of Naples and a Franciscan Spiritual revered in the Guelf tradition. Orsanmichele's sculptures were the result of a remarkable collaboration of guilds, government, confraternity, and Parte Guelfa, and every work emerged from discussion and debate among the members of these civic bodies.(39) A register of deliberations kept by the Arte del Cambio detailing every decision involved in the commission of the St. Matthew from Ghiberti, and listing the names of guild members who served as operai and on the various sub-committees related to the project, is eloquent testimony to the participatory dimension of corporate patronage.(40) But in these same decades traditions of corporate patronage were being challenged by both artists and patrons. Neither Ghiberti nor Brunelleschi was in the mold of the relatively self-effacing supervisors of building projects of the fourteenth century. Legends grew up around the competition for the baptistery door project, as memory of the event was shaped by Ghiberti's own recollections and by Manetti's partisan biography of Brunelleschi. This alone tells us that artisan-artists were redefining their relationship to patrons and the public (or having it redefined for them). Their own self-fashioning and the "thirst" for artist-heroes - a demand, even among corporate patrons, for the "best" artists - raised Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello from artisan status and gave them greater autonomy. Ghiberti worked almost exclusively for corporate patrons: the Calimala (for the two sets of baptistery doors); the Lana, through their cathedral operai (among other things, for the St. Zenobius shrine in the east tribune of the cathedral); and both these guilds and the Cambio at Orsanmichele. While working on the second set of baptistery doors, he signed a contract in 1432 with the cathedral operai for the Zenobius shrine but did so little on it for the next five years that they terminated the agreement. Instead of turning to someone else, however, two years later they again asked Ghiberti to undertake the project, and this time he completed it. Brunelleschi's reputation as a rebel against convention may have been exaggerated by Manetti, but it was not completely invented. Manetti says that he simply walked away from the joint commission awarded for the baptistery doors and that years later his outbursts in heated meetings about the cupola caused him to be carried out of the room more than once. In 1420 he was unhappy about the co-supervisory collaboration with Ghiberti for the cupola but was not about to turn his back on that project. Manetti recounts that he pretended to be ill, forced Ghiberti to carry out on his own a technical procedure that he allegedly mishandled, and gradually forced his rival to retreat from the role of equal supervisor. True or not (as with the elaborate trick Brunelleschi allegedly played on the woodworker Grasso to rob him of his identity, as recounted in the Novella def
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Grasso Legnaiuolo, also written by Manetti), this was the kind of reputation Brunelleschi not only acquired but apparently encouraged about himself. Competition for prized artists was beginning to undercut the traditions of collective supervision, consensus, and corporate control of both projects and artisan-artists. Even artists whose careers unfolded primarily within the framework of corporate and civic patronage began to be drawn in different directions by private patrons. The always busy Ghiberti found time to make a bronze reliquary for the Medici. In the case of Brunelleschi, 1419-20 was a particularly significant moment in this transition. Within the space of two years, in addition to the cupola, he also accepted the commission from Por Santa Maria to design the Innocenti Hospital and commissions for three private chapels: one from Giovanni de' Medici to redesign the sacristy at San Lorenzo (where Giovanni and his wife are buried), and two others from elite members of the Wool guild, Tommaso Barbadori, who served on the Opera de! Duomo in 1418, and Schiatta Ridolfi, a consul of the guild in the same year. According to Manetti, Brunelleschi was trying to convince the operai and consuls that he could build a dome without centering, and knowing that Ridolfi wanted to rebuild a family chapel with a dome in the church of San Jacopo sopr' Arno he offered to demonstrate on a smaller scale that it was possible. The Barbadori chapel in Santa Felicita and the sacristy in San Lorenzo also have domes,(41) and the three projects demonstrate that the fame Brunelleschi already enjoyed as the ingenious designer of the controversial project for the cupola was stimulating the private demand for art that was becoming a symbol of status for elite families. Family Commemoration and Self-Fashioning Endowments of family chapels, often as burial sites, went back to the end of the thirteenth century.(42) Evidence from testamentary bequests suggests that they became more numerous after the Black Death, and particularly after the 1363 plague, and by the early fifteenth century sometimes involved sizeable investments: compared with the average 200-florin bequest for fourteenth-century chapels throughout central Italy, after 1400 some Florentines were leaving as much as 500 or l,000 florins for chapels in which they sought long-term patronage rights. Spending for chapel decorations also increased. Some fourteenth-century bequests for large narrative cycles reached 250-300 florins, but more common and smaller devotional paintings, usually for chapels but sometimes for domestic use, were much less expensive. Following the plagues, more testators wanted images of themselves included in the paintings they commissioned. After about 1400, bequests for art became larger, if not necessarily more numerous, than those of a generation earlier: the average bequest for all artworks (including paintings) increased fourfold, from 70 to 270 florins, as commissions became more imposing and more conspicuously linked to family commemoration.(43) 669
Neighborhood churches were a focus of competition to enhance family prestige by endowing and decorating chapels. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella had chapels endowed by the Rucellai, Bardi, Guidalotti, and Strozzi, while patronage rights in the choir behind the main altar were claimed by the Ricci and Tornaquinci.(44) In the 1350s Tommaso Strozzi commissioned for the elevated chapel in the left transept (see Plate 7) the magnificent altarpiece by Orcagna in which Christ gives the keys to Peter and the laws to Thomas Aquinas. On the surrounding walls Orcagna's brother Nardo di Cione painted images of the Last Judgment, Hell, and Paradise, in which a man and a woman, possibly (but not clearly identified as) the donor and his wife, are twice depicted being welcomed among the blessed. Strozzi probably intended to honor Aquinas, the Dominican theologian (d. 1274) canonized in 1323 whose name he shared, but any representation of Aquinas certainly required the approval of the Dominicans. Sums were also left for the decoration of sacristies, chapter-houses (meeting rooms), and cloisters in which it was not possible to establish patronage rights as in chapels. In 1355 Buonamico di Lapo Guidalotti left money to the Dominican friars for "ornamenting and painting" the chapter-house (now called the Spanish chapel), which Andrea Bonaiuti decorated a decade later with monumental frescoes including the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate representation of the history of philosophy and theology and Aquinas's doctrinal victories over heresiarchs like Arius and Averroes. Even more obviously than the Strozzi altarpiece, this was the result of an iconographical program devised by one or more Dominican theologians and motivated by pride in their new saint. In 1348 Turino Baldesi left over 300 florins to Santa Maria Novella for the depiction (executed by Paolo Uccello almost a century later in the Chiostro Verde) of the "entire" Old Testament "from beginning to end," with program and precise location left up to the Dominican preacher and theologian Jacopo Passavanti.(45) In all these examples, the works brought the patrons glory as well as greater assurance of salvation, but it was the Dominicans who decided what got painted where. Santa Croce, the Franciscan basilica on the other side of town, was perhaps the city's most crowded site of family commemoration. The Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Cavalcanti, Tolosini, Cerchi, Velluti, Castellani, Rinuccini, Ricasoli, Alberti, Machiavelli, and several other families all had chapels here, and at least two branches of the Bardi had a total of four. An entire chapter in the early history of Florentine wall painting took place in these chapels between 1310 and 1330. Giotto or his assistants painted the (now largely lost) scenes from the life of the Virgin in the Tolosini chapel to the left of the choir, and Giotto himself painted most of the scenes of the life of Francis in the chapel founded by the banker Ridolfo de' Bardi to the right of the choir and the lives of John the Evangelist and the Baptist in the Peruzzi chapel next to the Bardi chapel. In the 1330s Taddeo Gaddi decorated the sumptuous Baroncelli chapel at the southern 670
end of the transept with stories of the life of the Virgin, while at its northern end Maso di Banco painted the life of St. Sylvester in the Bardi di Vernio chapel. Around 138090 Agnolo Gaddi painted the legend of the True Cross (for which Santa Croce was named) in the choir, where the Alberti had patronage rights. Whatever influence patrons had in the production of these works was contained within the doctrinal requirements of the order. As with the Orcagna altarpiece and the chapter-house frescoes at Santa Maria Novella, the history, theology, and representational traditions of the order dominated the choice, placement, and interpretation of themes and protagonists. The Franciscan order was deeply divided between the Spirituals, with their insistence on the literal observance of the rule of poverty, and the Conventuals, who accepted a nominal poverty by which they used, but did not legally own, buildings, books, and other goods. Francis's memory and image were contested terrain, and the disputes culminated, in the very years in which Giotto was painting the Bardi chapel, in papal condemnation of the Spirituals' doctrine of apostolic poverty. A great merchant family like the Bardi would not in any event have wished to promote the uncompromising views of the Spirituals, for whom salvation depended on renunciation of all wealth and material goods, and the Francis of the Bardi chapel is indeed the obedient son of the church described in Bonaventure's official biography.(46) Fourteenth-century painters were no doubt selected for their skills and styles, but these in turn were shaped by the nature of the commissions and the religious ideologies behind them. Powerful families spent considerable sums to build and decorate chapels, but in the fourteenth century the paintings they commissioned said more about the religious orders than about the families. Salvation and family commemoration remained the overriding motives, but fifteenth-century patrons were more involved in, and exerted more influence over, what they paid for. Among the first of these new patrons was the immensely wealthy Palla Strozzi. From at least the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the Strozzi held patronage rights in a chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, as did the Gianfigliazzi, Davizzi, Bartolini-Salimbeni, Ardinghelli, Scali, Spini, Davanzati, and, among so many elite names, the Compagni, in whose chapel Dino is buried. But one chapel was evidently not enough for the Strozzi. Fulfilling the terms of a bequest made decades earlier by his father Nofri for a new sacristy with adjoining chapel, Palla assumed direct control of the project after Nofri's death in 1418, hired his own builders, and introduced significant modifications. He is a good example of a private patron who already had considerable experience in artistic matters from his participation in civic and corporate projects. He had served on the Calimala committee that supervised Ghiberti's first set of baptistery doors and later sought the sculptor's advice on various projects (paying him for "several designs and services"), possibly including the Santa Trinita sacristy. Strozzi was also on the committee that decided the placement in the baptistery of Donatello's and Michelozzo's tomb for Pope Cossa, John XXIII. As a private patron his most nota671
ble commission was to the painter Gentile da Fabriano in 1423 for the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) for the Santa Trinita sacristy. Palla, who was the first of the really big fifteenth-century spenders, included the "building and decoration" of the chapel and sacristy among the expenses, together with his father's funeral, various dowries, and business losses, that cost him the huge sum of 30,000 florins between 1418 and 1422.(47) Across the river, in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine, some chapels were endowed by the district's popular confraternities, others by elite families (Soderini, Brancacci, Serragli), by the emerging Lanfredini, and by families of the popolo (Ferrucci, Tinghi).(48) In 1465 the Del Pugliese, a family of new wealth and rising status, took over a transept chapel.(49) Most famous among the Carmine's chapels is the one partially decorated by Masaccio and endowed by the Brancacci. In 1367 Piero Brancacci left money for a family chapel whose construction was begun by his son Antonio in the 1380s. In 1389 another family member bequeathed funds for its decoration, but only in the 1420s did Masaccio and Masolino begin painting scenes from the life of the apostle Peter, patron saint of the chapel's founder. By this time Felice Brancacci, from a different branch of the family, had inherited the chapel rights, but it is unknown whether he or others chose the painters. In his 1430 testament Felice stipulated that, if his son died without an heir, all members of the Brancacci clan would inherit the chapel, and in a revised testament of 1432 he obligated his heirs to complete its decoration should he die before doing so. As it happened, Felice, exiled after the Medici victory of 1434, never had the chance, and the chapel was completed only in the 1480s when Filippino Lippi painted the sections left unfinished by Masaccio and Masolino.(50) The main site of chapel patronage for the Oltrarno's elite families was Santo Spirito, whose new church was designed by Brunelleschi and built between the 1430s and 1490s. Control of building and chapel allocation was shared by the Augustinian friars, the citizen overseers of the opera, and the commune, which actually owned the church and provided much of the financing. Chapel assignment reflected the Oltrarno political and social hierarchy. Traditionally powerful Santo Spirito families that had had chapels in the old church received the prestigious new ones behind the main altar and in the transept: the Frescobaldi got three, the Corbinelli four, the Biliotti, Capponi, and newly prominent Nasi at least one each. Luca Pitti was made an operaio and given a chapel in 1458 without having to pay for its rights (presumably because of his central role in rescuing the regime that year). Families of lower status received nave chapels. More than in other Florentine churches, chapel decoration in Santo Spirito adhered to a general plan, which required altarpieces and stained-glass windows rather than wall paintings.(51) 672
San Lorenzo is in a category all its own because it was the Medici parish church and the first major site of their patronage. In the old church, torn down beginning in the 1420s and replaced according to a design by Brunelleschi, chaplaincies had been founded by moderately prominent families (Anchioni, Marignolli, later the Rondinelli and Ginori) and by artisans, notaries, and priests. Chaplaincies usually involved not the building of actual chapels but the appointment of a priest-chaplain to say masses for the soul of the testator. In 1336-7, for example, Chele di Aldobrandino bequeathed property outside the walls whose revenue was to pay for daily masses for the souls of Chele and his family at some altar in San Lorenzo that the prior and chapter were to make available.(52) Given the relatively small size of the old church and the existence by 1422 of nineteen chaplaincies, it is likely that some altars were sites of two or more.(53) Most were suppressed with the founding of the new and larger church, whose more numerous chapels were reallocated to the district's elite families. Operai appointed for three years in 1416 included members of the Rondinelli, Della Stufa, Guasconi, Dietisalvi-Neroni, and Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, who served again in 1423 and 1426, as did his sons Lorenzo and Cosimo in 1432 and 1433. Giovanni asserted patronage rights in the new church in both a transept chapel and the old sacristy and quickly completed their construction. Work on San Lorenzo slowed in the 1430s, no doubt because of political turbulence and perhaps a lack of funds, and when it resumed around 1440 a meeting of leading members of the gonfalone and parish decided to transfer patronage rights over the choir to Cosimo in return for his assumption of the costs of the church's construction. It was unprecedented for an individual to assume financial responsibility for the building of an entire, and very large, church. Patronage on such a colossal scale brought with it great influence, and Cosimo was behind major changes in the roster of chapel patrons, as some families were pushed out and Medici allies (like the Dietisalvi-Neroni) and political clients (like the Cambini) invited in. Cosimo also determined that he himself would be buried in a floor tomb at the center of the crossing before the main altar. Patronage, piety, and political selfaggrandizement could not have been more completely fused. The range of Cosimo's patronage was unlike anything even the wealthiest patrons had hitherto attempted, or dared attempt.(54) He (and his brother Lorenzo, since they commissioned jointly) extended their patronage to nearly every famous artist in the city, to artistic media and types of projects previously supported only by institutional patrons, to a long list of churches far beyond their neighborhood in and outside the city, and to several religious orders, plastering the Medici palle and images of their growing gaggle of patron saints anywhere and everywhere they could and associating the family with important sites in the city's processional, religious, and civic life. For example, ancient patronage rights over their former parish church of San Tommaso gave them a special interest in St. Thomas. Cosimo rebuilt the church and influenced the govern673
ment to institute an officially supported ritual observance in the saint's honor. A generation later Piero was instrumental in having Donatello's St. Louis of Toulouse removed from the niche at Orsanmichele that faced onto the processional route of via Calzaiuoli to make room for Andrea de! Verrocchio's bronze Doubting Thomas and Christ, thus identifying the prestigious site with the family's political power and patronage.(55) Bronze had been restricted to civic projects because of its immense cost, and Medici use of it conveyed their political pretensions and advertised their great wealth. Cosimo and Lorenzo had already commissioned the bronze reliquary chest from Ghiberti for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a private commission for a public place). More grandiose were the bronze doors they asked Donatello to design for the San Lorenzo sacristy in which their parents' quasi-regal tomb of marble, porphyry, and bronze was placed. Beyond San Lorenzo, Cosimo's architectural projects included the rebuilding or renovation of several ecclesiastical institutions: San Marco, where he installed the Observant Dominicans and built the library that housed the great collection of manuscripts donated by Niccolo Niccoli; the Observant Franciscan convent of Bosco ai Frati in the Mugello near the family's country estates; the Badia in Fiesole; and a novitiate chapel at Santa Croce. Along the way he commissioned tabernacles by Michelozzo at San Miniato and Santissima Annunziata, large altarpieces and frescoes by Fra Angelico, paintings by Filippo Lippi, and a long list of other works that only seem "lesser" by comparison with the magnitude of the larger projects.(56) Political messages in Medici-commissioned art became bolder. In the 1450s Cosimo had Benozzo Gozzoli paint the Procession of the Magi in the chapel of the family palace, with portraits of himself, his son Piero, and a representation (not an actual portrait) of the young Lorenzo di Piero, all with the Magi on their way to adore the child Christ. Although patrons had previously included images of themselves as participants in, or witnesses to, sacred dramas, never before had an entire family integrated itself so explicitly into sacred history. Dynastic implications are evident in the parallel between the three generations of kings and three generations of Medici, and in the presence of the Medici symbols on the caparison of the horse of the youngest king, Caspar, whose feast day coincides with Lorenzo's birthday (January 1).(57) Whether Cosimo commissioned or acquired Donatelloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bronze David, he placed it prominently in the private/ public courtyard of his palace. David had already begun the transition from prophet and precursor of Christ to a symbol of fortitude in defense of the patria. Years earlier Donatello had carved a marble David to go atop one of the buttresses of the north tribune of the cathedral, and the commune purchased it from the Cathedral Opera in 1416 and moved it to the palace of the priors. Cosimo's appropriation of David was an audacious statement of his and his family's self-identification with the civic virtues with which the biblical hero was associated; and the placement in Palazzo Medici established in effect a rival site of these virtues. But David was also a king, and the unprece674
dented youth of the Medici David also alludes, under the guise of civic virtue, to Lorenzo and the family's dynastic ambitions.(58) Medici patronage, continued by Lorenzo with the same ubiquity if not magnitude,(59) set a standard that could never be matched by other families, and their political dominance may have dissuaded potential competitors from even trying. Compared to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there was a dearth of chapel decoration for several decades after the consolidation of the Medici regime. Other families may have been cautious about advertising their prestige too loudly, perhaps fearing that it might be seen as an attempt to rival the Medici. Certainly families not in good Medici graces shied away from patronage that conveyed public self-fashioning. But families or individuals seeking such favor used art to flatter the Medici. In the early 1470s, the exchange broker Guasparre Dal Lama, a (perhaps would-be) Medici client of modest social status, built a chapel in Santa Maria Novella and commissioned Botticelli to paint the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) as its altarpiece. He used the painting to show off his ties to the Medici by having himself and several of them included in the picture, once again, if not in actual portraits, as types reflecting traditional Medici identification with the Magi.(60) Dal Lama had no family behind him, and the painting was a gesture of homage with no overtones of competition. Similarly, Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici bank, commissioned a fresco cycle at Santa Trinita, whose ostensible content is the life of St. Francis, but which is also a commemoration of his dependence on the Medici. In 1479 Sassetti negotiated the transfer of rights in the chapel at the north end of the transept from the Petriboni-Fastelli family to his own and engaged Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes that were finished by 1485 (see Plate 8). The patron, his family, his Medici boss, and several in-laws are all prominently represented, especially on the altar wall, which first commands the visitor's attention. On the lowest level, surrounding the altarpiece, are portraits of the kneeling donors, Francesco and his wife Nera Corsi. No doubt because the death of their eldest son some years earlier had been followed by the birth of another who was given, in good Florentine tradition, the same name, Sassetti replaced Ghirlandaio's suggested depiction in the middle register of a story normally included in Francis cycles with the less common episode of St. Francis Resuscitating the Roman Notary's Son, set, not in Rome, but in the piazza outside Santa Trinita, where the miracle is witnessed by Sassetti's daughters and his prominent neighbors, including Neri Capponi, whose grandson married one of the daughters. Above it is depicted the Confirmation of the Rule by Pope Honorius III, set, once again, not in Rome but in Florence in the piazza of the priors, with the loggia and palace in the background and, in the foreground on the right, portraits of Sassetti, his son Federigo, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Antonio Pucci, whose son married another of Sassetti's daughters, and on the left Sassetti's other sons, all welcoming the arrival of Lorenzo's children with their teachers (in675
cluding the poet Poliziano) from a lower level.(61) Sassetti was a "new man" who had risen with the fortunes of the Medici bank (ironically precarious at the very moment he had the chapel decorated) to become its general manager for thirty years. The first Sassetti prior, and the only one before 1500, was his brother Bartolomeo in 1453. Francesco's only major office was a term on the Sixteen in 1483. A creature of the Medici and utterly dependent on them, he never lost their trust and favor. The frescoes celebrate his ties to the Medici, implicitly expressing the hope, through the depiction of his and Lorenzo's children, that the link would persist into future generations. The family represented is limited to Francesco's wife, sons, daughters, and, through the latter, his powerful in-laws. Equally Medicean, but far more prestigious and ancient than the Sassetti, the Tornabuoni had patronage rights to the choir at Santa Maria Novella that went back to a thirteenth-century Tornaquinci who donated the land on which the original Dominican church was built. Giovanni Tornabuoni was manager of the Medici bank's Rome branch, but his link to the family was not limited to business; his sister Lucrezia was Piero's wife and Lorenzo's mother. After some uncertainty owing to an old Sassetti claim to the high altar, in 1486 the Dominicans gave Tornabuoni and his entire consorteria full rights over both the choir and the altar. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with Ghirlandaio for the depiction of scenes from the life of the Virgin (to whom Santa Maria Novella is dedicated) and that of John the Baptist (his patron saint) "as an act of piety and love of God, to the exaltation of his house and family and the enhancement of the said church and chapel." In addition to specifying scenes and stories and their location, the contract also stipulated that Ghirlandaio "shall begin to paint one or other of the above-mentioned stories and paintings only after first doing a drawing of the said story which he must show to Giovanni; and the [painter] may afterwards start this story, but painting and embellishing it with any additions and in whatever form and manner the said Giovanni may have declared."(62) Quite unlike fourteenth-century fresco cycles that reflect the founders, saints, and ideals of the religious orders that approved them more than the patrons who paid for them, the paintings in the Tornabuoni chapel had their patron's approval in every detail. But they are also different from those in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita. Whereas the latter showcase the ties of a parvenu to the city's most powerful family, the Tornabuoni frescoes are a lavish representation and commemoration of an extended kin-group without overt reference to the Medici. The Annunciation to Zacharias, in which the angel foretells the birth of the Baptist, is set in a space at once classical, civic, and sacred and is witnessed by many identifiable family members, including Giovanni himself and the elders of the consorteria's other three branches (Tornaquinci, Popoleschi, and Giachinotti).(63) Even if the Medici are not directly present, however, such family com-
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memoration would not have been possible without Giovanni Tornabuoni's many links to them. Wealthy patrons who had the favor of the Medici could indulge some selffashioning as long as competition was not overt. No doubt because of his family's long association with Santa Maria Novella, where many Strozzi were buried, in 1486 Filippo Strozzi bought from the Boni family the rights to the chapel to the right of the choir and made it his private burial place, in which be commissioned a sculpted tomb from Benedetto da Maiano and frescoes by Filippino Lippi of the lives of St. Philip and John the Evangelist, in which the Raising of Drusiana may have been intended as an allegory of his own return from the metaphorical death of exile. The contrast with the first Strozzi chapel, even across the obvious continuity of family burial traditions and chapel patronage, is illuminating. Although in the earlier one the donor and his family are apparently honored, it is Orcagna's severe, lawgiving Christ and the intimidating density of souls in the realms of the afterlife that dominate. In Filippo's chapel he himself is the center of attention in a visual fusion of the liturgical and the funereal surrounded by paintings whose subject matter he chose and stipulated in a contract with the painter.(64) Such self-glorification was not possible without Lorenzo's at least tacit permission. Palace building was the ultimate in conspicuous consumption and advertisement of a patron's status and means, an immensely expensive and highly visible item of material culture. Older palaces, like Palazzo Spini in piazza Santa Trinita or the Mozzi palace at the Oltrarno end of the Rubaconte bridge (today's Ponte alle Grazie), were imposing urban fortresses intended as much for defense as prestige. Some, like the Peruzzi palaces near Santa Croce, faced inward around ancient family enclaves. Beginning in the fourteenth century, palaces were increasingly built facing major streets with more attention to decorative and structural features that set one apart from another, but they were still part of the continuous urban fabric, often with rented ground-floor commercial spaces. Fifteenth-century private palaces transformed entire neighborhoods. They were larger and occupied more ground area, and, wherever possible, their owners bought and cleared surrounding spaces to allow them to be seen from a greater distance and thus to dominate a piazza or street. Ground-floor shops disappeared, and now the lower levels sported imposing rustication, consisting of large rough-hewn blocks of stone, and often included stone benches for the many clients that every great builder and political patron hoped to see conspicuously congregating and waiting for a chance to see him.(65) The new trend was inaugurated around 1410-20 by Niccolo da Uzzano who built a large palace with a rusticated facade in via de' Bardi. But it was Cosimo de' Medici who set the standard for all subsequent palace-building with a grand family townhouse 677
that marked an epoch in elite domestic architecture (see Plate 5). According to a perhaps apocryphal story reported by Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo expressed a desire for a new palace to Brunelleschi, who produced a model for a freestanding structure that would have faced, and perhaps overwhelmed, the piazza of San Lorenzo. Vasari claims that, when Cosimo decided against it "because it seemed too sumptuous and grand, and to avoid envy more than expense," an angry Brunelleschi smashed his model and Cosimo later regretted that he did not accept it. Traditionally attributed to Michelozzo, the palace that Cosimo had built between the mid-1440s and mid-1450s combines Tuscan Romanesque elements with antique features. But its rusticated facade and biforate windows certainly alluded to the palace of the priors and to an appropriation or sharing of the public authority that inhered in that quasi-sacred civic building (as the bronze David also did). Located at the point where the via Larga bends slightly to the right, Palazzo Medici presents itself in oblique and elongated view from the piazza of the baptistery and cathedral, thus creating a visual and symbolic link between the city's spiritual center and the home of its most powerful citizen and family.(66) In palace-building Medici grandeur generated emulation, if not in specific architectural and design features, certainly in proclaiming the "magnificence," or virtuous liberality, of their builders and the pride of families within their ancestral neighborhoods.(67) Benedetto Dei listed twenty palace projects in his lifetime (among thirty-three major building projects),(68) and between the mid1440s, when Cosimo began building, and the mid-1460s, at least ten palaces were constructed. It was almost as if others had been waiting for Cosimo to take the lead and not risk upstaging him. Giovanni Rucellai assembled several properties in the family's traditional site and built a palace on the Vigna Nuova, with its exquisite facade designed by Alberti (see Plate 9) and a loggia across the street. 69 Members of both elite families, including the Pazzi, DietisalviNeroni, and Gianfigliazzi, and relatively newer families like the Spinelli,(70) Boni (today Palazzo Antinori), Gondi, Nasi (today Palazzo Torrigiani), and Del Pugliese(71) joined the fashionable ranks of palace-builders. Most palaces were more modest than Palazzo Medici, but Luca Pitti's palace across the river rivaled it (although the original structure was not nearly the size of the building subsequently enlarged as the residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany and the king of Italy). By far the largest and most ambitious of the palaces, "more grandiose than that of [the Medici]," as one foreign observer suggested, was the Strozzi palace begun by Filippo in 1489 (see Plate 10). Whereas the "average" upper-class palazzo cost between 1,500 and 2,500 florins, Filippo and his heirs spent an astounding 40,000 florins on a palace that lacked ground floor shops or any commercial space. Although equivalent in height to a modern tenstorey building, it consists of only three floors and a dozen (albeit large) rooms intended for just the immediate families of two brothers.(72)
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Palaces represented investment in family immortality and personal fame. Filippo Strozzi died in 1491 before his great palace was completed and thus never had the opportunity to express the sentiments he would no doubt have felt over this immense monument to his and his family's memory. But other great Florentine builders did express such feelings. Giovanni Rucellai was not the only Florentine to write in his ricordanze that "there are two principal things men do in this world: the first is to procreate, the second to build." Yet some conservative impulse in Rucellai toward modesty in spending, signaled by his reminder to himself in the very next sentence that "St. Bernard says one must build more out of necessity than desire, because building makes desire grow stronger rather than weaker," needed to be overcome for him to praise his own building without reservation. Perhaps he was reflecting some of the old moralistic condemnation of conspicuous building, expressed a century earlier by Giovanni Villani (12.94) who remarked that, although the innumerable country villas surrounding the city were a magnificent sight, their builders committed a serious error and sin in spending so uncontrollably and were considered insane for doing so. In one such mood Rucellai advised his sons to be "wise about spending," to avoid excess, and to practice thrift and prudent management. Big spenders, he warned, are ultimately avaricious because they can never acquire enough wealth by means fair or foul to satisfy their desires. Underscoring the distinction between "necessary" and "voluntary" expenditures, he advised waiting and reflecting before indulging in the latter to see if the "desire would pass in the meantime." But in other moods Rucellai overcame such scruples. As he reviewed his extensive building, "done for the honor of God, the honor of the city, and the memory of me," he said he agreed with the "common saying, which is true," that "making and spending money are among the great pleasures men take in this world," adding that it would be difficult to say "which is greater." "For fifty years I have done nothing but make and spend money; I have taken the greatest and sweetest pleasure in doing so, and I think the greater sweetness has been in spending than in earning." Much of that spending was for artworks and buildings, and in him we see, for the first time, the self-conscious collector of works known by the names and reputations of those who made them. Rucellai notes with satisfaction in the Zibaldone that "we have in our house many works of sculpture, painting, and intarsia by the best masters that have existed for a long time, not only in Florence but in Italy," and he gives their names: Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, Giuliano da Maiano, Antonio de! Pollaiuolo, Maso Finiguerra, Verrocchio, Vittorio Ghiberti, Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello, and Desiderio da Settignano. It is a remarkable list, and indicative of his awareness of the leading artists of the age. But when it came to building, Rucellai made himself the author, perhaps not surprisingly given his comparison of building and procreation. Besides the family palace, his main projects included the family burial chapel in the nearby parish church of San Pancrazio, with the marble replica of the Holy Sepul679
chre in Jerusalem, and the glorious facade of Santa Maria Novella. Although both were designed by Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect's name is absent, not only on the works themselves, but even in Rucellai's voluminous Zibaldone. Instead, both the sepulchre and the facade prominently feature the Rucellai arms and the name of Giovanni himself. The facade's inscription of his name and the year 1470 proclaims that he, not Alberti, not the friars, not the church, was its maker(73) (Plate 11). Notes 1. Franceschi, Oltre il "Tumulto," pp. 3-31, 94-104. 2. H. Hoshino, L'Arte della Lana in Firenze nel Basso Medioevo: il commercio della Lana e il mercato dei panni fiorentini nei secoli XIII-XV (Florence, 1980), pp. 194211, 227-9,231-303. 3. Cronica, ed. Barducci, p. 82. 4. B. Dini, "La ricchezza documentaria per l'arte della seta e l'economia fiorentina nel Quattrocento," in Dini, Manifattura, commercio e ban ca 11ella Firenze 111edievale (Florence, 2001), p. 29. 5. S. Tognetti, Un'industria di lusso al servizio def grande commercio: il mercato dei drappi serici e della seta nella Firenze def Q11attroce11to (Florence, 2002), p. 32. 6. F. Edler de Roover, "Andrea Banchi, Florentine Silk Manufacturer and Merchant in the Fifteenth Century," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3 (1966): 224-85. 7. Tognetti, Un'industria di lusso, pp. 19-21. 8. R. A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 318-19; Franceschi, Oltre Il "Tumulto," pp. 235-59. 9. Franceschi, Oltre il "Tumulto," pp. 273-4. 10. S. Epstein, "Cities, Regions and the Late Medieval Crisis: Sicily and Tuscany Compared," Past and Present 130 (1991): 3-50 (19-20, 37-41, 44). 11. Based on the data in Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, T11sca11s, p. 94, and Martines, Social W1orld, pp. 365-78. 12. De Roover, Medici Bank, pp. 29-31. 13. Tognetti, II Banco Cambini. 14. F. Arcelli, II banchiere del papa: Antonio della Casa mercante e banchiere a Roma (14381440) (Catanzaro, 2001); De Roover, Medici Banh, pp. 211, 216, 284-5. 15. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna. 16. Molho, Marriage Alliance, p. 387. 17. P. Jacks and W. Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (University Park, Penn., 2001). 18. P. Malanima, I Riccardi di Pire11ze. Una famiglia e un patrimonio nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence, 1977). 19. S. Tognetti, Da Figline a Firenze. Ascesa economica e politica della famiglia Serristori (secoli XIV-XVI) (Figline, 2003). 20. Using Martines's tables in Social World. 21. Using Molho's tables in Marriage Alliance. 22. Cronica, ed. Barducci, pp. 85-6. 23. Giovanni Rucellai ed ii suo Zibaldone, vol. 1, "II Zibaldone Q11aresi111ale", ed. A. Perosa (London, 1960), p. 19. 24. Ibid., pp. 120-1; F. W. Kent, "The Making of a Renaissance Patron of the Arts," in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2, A Plorentine Patrician and His Palace (London, 1981), pp. 1820, 32-6, 79-80, 88-91. 680
25. R. A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, 1968), pp. 52-73. 26. B. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Worh (New York, 1983); E. Welch, Art and Society in Italy 1350-1500 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 103-29; H. McNeal Caplow, "Sculptors' Partnerships in Michelozzo's Florence," Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 145-75. 27. Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, pp. 57-74. 28. An overview: R. A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 176-255. 29. J. Burke, Changing Patro11s: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park, Penn., 2004). 30. D. F. Zervas, "Orsanmichele and its Operai, 1336-1436," in Opera: carattere e molo delle (abbriche cittadine fino all'inizio dell'eta 111odema, ed. M. Haines and L. Riccctti (Florence, 1996), pp. 315-43. 31. Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, pp.118-21. 32. M. Haines, "L'Arte della Lana e l'Opera del Duomo a Firenze con un accenno a Ghiberti tra due istituzioni," in Opera, ed. Haines and Riccetti, pp. 267-94 (267-71). 33 M. Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market, trans. A. Luchs (Princeton, :I 981; original German edition, 1938); D. C. Ahl, '"In corpo di compagnia': Art and Devotion in the Compagnia dell a Purificazione e di San Zanobi of Florence," in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image, ed. B. Wisch and D. C. Ahl (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 46-73. 34. For what follows, chiefly M. Haines, "Brunelleschi and Bureaucracy: The Tradition of Public Patronage at the Florentine Cathedral," I Tatti Studies 3 (1989): 89-125; also H. Saalman, "Santa Maria de! Fiore: 1294-1418," Art B111/eti11 46 (1964): 471-500; L. Fabbri, "L'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore nel quindicesimo secolo: tra Repubblica fiorentina e Arte della Lana," in La cattedrale e la citta; saggi sul Duomo di Pirenze, 3 vols., ed. T. Verdon and A. Innocenti (Florence, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 319-39. 35. C. Guasti, Santa Maria def Fiore: la costruzione della chiesa e del campanile (Florence, J887; reprint edn. 1974), pp. 171-2, 199-205, 206-7, 218-20. 36. Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. L. Bartoli (Florence, 1998), p. 93; R. Krautheimer, with T. Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956; third printing 1982), pp. 31-43. 37. Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. I-I. Saalman, trans. C. Enggass (University Park, Penn., 1970), pp. 78-83. 38. M. Bergstein, The Sculpture of Nanni di Banco (Princeton, 2000), pp. 47-57, 114-31, 136-47. 39. D. F. Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1987); Zervas, Orsamnichele Documents/Documenti 1336-1452 (Ferrara, 1996); Orsanmichele a Firenze/ Orsanmichele, Florence, ed. Zervas (Ferrara, 1996), pp. 181-207. 40. ASF, Arte de] Cambio, 18; A. Doren, Das Ahtenbuch fiir Ghibertis Matthausstatue an Or. S. Michele Zu Florenz (Berlin, 1906). 41. R. King, Brunelleschi's Dome (London, 2000), pp. 45-6; Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, ed. Saalman, pp. 68-9, 82-9, 98-9. 42. Dameron, Florence and Its Church, pp. 184-9. 43. S. K. Cohn, Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 214-22, 245, 254-70. 44. E. Borsook, The Companion Guide to Florence, 5th edn. (London, 1988), pp. 129-49. 45. D. Norman, "The Art of Knowledge: Two Artistic Schemes in Florence," in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280-1400, Vol. II: Case Studies, ed. D. Norman (London, 1995), pp. 176-87, 217-41; Cohn, Cult of Remembrance, p. 245. 681
46. R. Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto's Bardi Chapel (University Park, Penn., 1988), pp. 9-10, 51-77; C. Harrison, "Giotto and the 'Rise of Painting'," in Siena, Florence and Padua, Volume I: Interpretative Essays, ed. Norman, pp. 73-95; Norman, "Those Who Pay, Those Who Pray and Those Who Paint: Two Funerary Chapels," ibid., vol. 2, pp. 169-93. 47. R. Jones, "Palla Strozzi e la sagrestia di Santa Trinita," Rivista d'arte 37 (1984): 9-106 (91); H. Gregory, "Palla Strozzi's Patronage and Pre-Medicean Florence," in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. \YI. Kent and P. Simons with J. C. Eade (Oxford, 1987), pp. 201-20; J. R. Sale, "Palla Strozzi and Lorenzo Ghiberti: New Documents," Mitteilimgen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 22 (1978): 355-8; D. Davisson, "The Iconology of the S. Trinita Sacristy, 1418-1435: A Study of the Private and Public Functions of Religious Art in the Early Quattrocento," Art Bulletin 58 (1975): 315-33. 48. N. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence (Florence, 1995), p. 155. 49. Burke, Changing Patrons, p. 29. 50. A. Molho, "The Brancacci Chapel: Studies in its Iconography and History," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 50-98. D. C. Ahl, "Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel," in The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, ed. Ahl (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 138-57. 51. Burke, Changing Patrons, pp. 63-83. 52. W. M. Bowsky, La chiesa di San Lorenzo a Firenze nel Medioeuo (Florence, 1999), pp. 13942. 53. For what follows: C. Elam, "Cosimo de' Medici and San Lorenzo," in Cosimo "il Vecchio," ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 157-80. 54. For splenclicl illustrations, see D. Kent, Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. 55. K.]. P. Lowe, "A Matter of Piety or of Family Tradition and Custom: The Religious Patronage of Piero de' Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni," in Piero de' Medici, ed. Beyer and Boucher, pp. 55-69; J. Paoletti, "' ... ha fatto Piero con volunta del padre .. .': Piero de' Medici and Corporate Commissions of Art," ibid., pp. 221-50. 56. J. Paoletti, "Fraternal Piety and Family Power: The Artistic Patronage of Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici," and C. Robinson, "Cosimo de' Medici and the Franciscan Observants at Bosco ai Frati," both in Cosimo "II Vecchio," ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 181-219. 57. R. Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and the Chapel of His Palace," in Cosimo "il Vecchio," ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 221-44 (238). 58. A. W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, 2002), pp. 139-92; S. B. McHam, "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 32-47. 59. F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore, 2004). 60. R. Hatfield, Botticelli's Uffizi "Adoration": A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton, 1976). 61. E. Borsook and J. Offerhaus, Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita, Florence: History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel (Doornspijk, 1981). 62. Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, ed. D. S. Chambers (Columbia, S.C., 1971), pp. 173-5. 63. P. Simons, "Patronage in the Tornaquinci Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence," in Patronage, Art, and Society, ed. Kent and Simons, pp. 221-50. 64. D. Friedman, "The Burial Chapel of Filippo Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella in Florence," L'arte 3 (1970): 109-31; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, pp. 69-72; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 1115. 65. Y. Elet, "Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (2002): 444-69. 682
66. B. Preyer, "L'archittetura del palazzo mediceo," in Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli (Florence, 1990), pp. 58-75. 67. F. W. Kent, "Palaces, Politics and Society in Fifteenth-Century Florence," I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 41-70. 68. Cronica, ed. Barducci, p. 86. 69. B. Preyer, "The Rucellai Palace," in Giovanni Rucellai e ii suo Zibaldone, vol. 2, pp. 155-225; B. Preyer, "The Rucellai Loggia," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 21 (1977}: 183-98. 70. Jacks and Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence, pp. 91-142. 71. Burke, Changing Patrons, pp. 35-61. 72. R. Goldthwaite, "The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 977-1012. 73. Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 1, ed. Perosa, pp. 15-17, J 21, 20-7; F. W. Kent, "The Making of a Renaissance Patron," ibid., vol. 2, pp. 13, 52.
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SECTION 4
A. D. Fraser Jenkins, Cosimo deâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Mediciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence Between 1436 and 1450 Cosimo de' Medici was alone in Italy in spending very large sums of money on a series of building projects. This was opposed to the most generally expressed opinion of the time that ostentation and the use of wealth to produce some personal monument should be avoided, and was also in contrast to the usual method of financing new buildings from state or guild funds. During this period however these attitudes began to change, and by the middle of the century the idea was current that it was the natural behaviour of a nobleman to patronize architecture, and in fact a duty of his superior position. The example of Cosimo (who was not, of course, a nobleman) was instrumental in this change of fashion as it produced the need for a defence of architectural patronage, which was found in the discussion of the virtue of Magnificence. After the middle of the century there were several patrons of architecture on Cosimo's scale, although the size of private fortunes was continually decreasing. In the Trecento, up to the time of Salutati's De seculo et religione of 1381, when the humanists discussed riches they came to the conclusion that poverty should be praised, and this conclusion has been analysed by Hans Baron in terms of Franciscan ideals.(1) Later, riches came to be regarded as neither good nor bad in themselves, and even very useful for the exercise of virtue, as in Bruni's 1419 commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. It was often argued in these discussions that riches have only a relative value, as in Poggio Bracciolini's De nobilitate(2) ( 1440) or in the central theme of Francesco Filelfo's De paupertate(3) (about 1445), where Leonardo Bruni argues at length that riches are 'indifferentia' and compares their use amongst various rich men. Those who are virtuous do not try too hard to become rich, but if this is inevitable they spend their money quickly, according to the advice of Matteo Palmieri in his Della vita civile(4) of 1439. To hoard up money and then spend it on a tomb, for example, is ridiculous, as Leonardo Bruni writes,(5) since it is better to be known by works. The worst way to use money is to bring it into any sort of association with usury, which was generally stated to be an evil. The embarrassing suspicion that the life of the merchant depends upon usury (explicitly attacked by preachers-most notably in the early Quattrocento by San Bernardino) lies behind these discussions. Contemporary sources frequently give the impression that money given to charities was an atonement for usury, and the practice of making restitution serve to gain merit was attacked by St. Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, and San Bernardino. 684
Giovanni Dominici (died 1420), Antoninus's Doininican teacher, had earlier given rules on the morality of donating to charity in his Regola del governo di cura famigliare. Rebuilding churches is one of the expenditures he recommends, but only if it is done so that nobody knows whose money was used-it is better therefore to repair old churches than to found new ones: Arai ancora in questo stato stando a dispensare i hen del tuo signore a'forestieri, i quali sono tutti altri poveri non inchiusi ne'membri due detti di sopra. Cosi si possono spendere i beni in fabbricare chiesa, monasteri, spedali; maritar fanciulle, liberar prigioni, vestir mal vestiti, dare a ciascuno che chiede per l'amor di Dio, dove tu non sai essere stremita o ultimo bisogno. E queste limosine sono tutte buone fatte per Dio; pure che sieno di quello soperchia a'poveri se'obbligata, come di sopra a detto. Ma dispiace a Dio tu facci a lui chiesa di pietra morte, e lasci stare quello della viva pietra, cioe l'uomo. Guarti dalla comune vanagloria, la quale ha moltiplicate molte spelonche di ladroni. Se vuogli spendere quantita di danari, piu ti consiglio rifacci una chiesa guasta e abbandonata, o special rifiutata per poverta, dotando di quel che puoi, che fabbricar di nuovo; pero sara maggiore onore di Dio avere una casa sofficiente, che due mendiche; e tu n'arai piu premio, perche arai minor fama nel mondo. Pero che presuppongo, cosi faccendo tu fabbricherai in sull'altrui, e l'arme d'altri aranno fama; e cosi il nome del patronaggio rimarra pure ne'primi. E cosi non sapra la man manca quello far Ia diritta, perche la limosina tua sara in ascondito; e il Padre Eterno, che vede in ascondito, la ti rendera in cielo.(6) By the fifteenth century the merchants and bankers were most unlikely to be actually prosecuted for usury; it might be thought they became free to use charity as an excuse for flamboyance, but this is not the case. B. N. Nelson remarks(7) that Cosimo's conscious policy of getting the best return in 'service and goodwill' from money given during his lifetime was unusual compared with the more prevalent random scattering of petty amounts. One of the first hints that Dominici's attitude was being relaxed is in Alberti's Della famiglia, written in the 1430's. One of the interlocutors asks what rules should govern spending money, as the Alberti had, on building additions to churches, and in 'molti luoghi dentri e fuori della terra ... publici e privati edifici'.(8) The reply is that these sorts of expenses, as well as 'dipignere la loggia, comperare gli arienti, volersi magnificare con pompa, con vestire e con liberalita' are unnecessary but both harmless and pleasurable, and therefore may be indulged in at will. Elsewhere in the book he writes of riches: Puossi colle ricchezze conseguire fama e autorita adoperandole in cose amplissime e nobilissime con molta larghezza e magnificenza.(9) 685
This recommends their use in a way which seems comparable to architectural patronage in intention and in scale. The dates of some of the buildings commissioned by Cosimo are in dispute, but his first large work in Florence was certainly the convent of San Marco, begun in 1436. His total oeuvre was an innovation both in its scale and its wide geographical distribution. He was prepared to take part in joint works for example, at the SS. Annunziata and at S. Croce - but also in huge buildings for which he alone was responsible - S. Marco, S. Lorenzo (after 1440) and the Badia at Fiesole, in addition to his palace and villas. More usually architecture and large sculptural commissions in Florence had been administered by small committees appointed by the guilds and financed from public funds. Individual patronage was important in the case of the rich man who supported the churches and monasteries in the quarter of the city in which he lived, as, for example, Palla Strozzi and Niccolo da Uzzano had.(10) As far as architecture was concerned, in the first half of the century the patronage of such men consisted of adding to existing churches and to the family palace. An essential part of Cosimo's place in the changing of this practice was the spread of his reputation for generosity. This emerges from two letters from Venice appealing to him for money for building. In 1437 the Confraternity of the Florentines in Venice wrote to the brothers Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici asking for money to build a chapel in the Frari.(11) The Confraternity say that they have heard of 'le magne hopere si veghono fatte per voj nelle chiese e luoghj di dio' after the example of their father; furthermore, the brothers are famous, wherever they have been, for spending a lot of money 'in nonore dj dio'. They therefore expect a donation measurable 'a rispetto della vostra magnificienza'. The chapel was built and finished in 1443, but whether or not with Medici money is not known. Francesco Barbaro wrote to Cosimo from Venice in 1443, explaining that he had the responsibility of looking after the Carthusian monastery ofS. Andrea, and felt obliged to enlarge or decorate it in some way.(12) He reminds Cosimo that he once stayed there in a difficult time-presumably in 1433 during his flight from Florence-and that he should now repay them by building a chapel or decorating the church, as he had promised. He adds also that it will be a contribution to Cosimo's immortality to be known in Venice as well as in Florence for his munificence.(13) There is a slight lack of respect in both of these letters which suggests that the money was being demanded in the light of past obligations rather than being begged for, but the point here is not Cosimo's motives-whether personal or political-for patronizing architecture, or the opportunities that were available to him as a private citizen with power over the state, but the effect of creating a situation in which patronage was expected.
686
Pius II and Machiavelli wrote about the buildings that Cosimo patronized, and they both mention the popular feeling against them. In 1463 Pius in his Commentaries gave a brief account of Cosimo's control of Florence and his expenditure on building, and adds that although he thinks these were excellent works there were people who hurled insults at him for appearing too powerful.(14) Machiavelli, in the Istorie Fiorentine of 1525, gives a detailed list of Cosimo's buildings,(15) and then describes how although his actions were always those of a king he was careful to avoid appearing grander than an ordinary citizen in his way of life, since he was so aware of the danger of attracting envy. He was apparently successful in this as Machiavelli writes that Cosimo was so prudent that 'mai la civile modestia non trapasso', but the description of such precise calculations implies that expenditure on architecture in such a political context was thought of as something that would naturally arouse envy. Anyone hoping to benefit from Cosimo's willingness to spend money on architecture had to have an answer for such criticism. This situation arose with the church and monastery of the Badia at Fiesole that had been given to an order of Augustinian Canons in 1439 and was rebuilt at Cosimo's expense from 1456. A defence of Cosimo, In magnijicentiae Cosmi Medicei Fiorentini detractores, was written in Florence by a member of the order, Timoteo Maffei.(16) It was most probably written between 1454 and 1456, as Maffei seems to refer to his office of rector general of the order, which he held from 1454-57,(17) and it must be before work was started on the Badia since it is clearly an appeal for this: the Badia is not mentioned. Maffei's work is in the form of a dialogue, and the material is mostly borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas's discussion of Magnificence in the Summa Theologica.(18) Thomas's pattern of arguments for and against Magnificence being a virtue is easily turned into an argument between a defender, Maffei, and a detractor of Cosimo's 'Magnificence', and is easily related to architecture since Thomas's discussion is carried on in such abstract terms. Once the relation is established the defence is ready-made, as Thomas concludes that Magnificence is a virtue. At the beginning of the dialogue Maffei describes the architecture 'wonderfully embellished at the expense of Cosimo de' Medici, that most famous and magnificent man',(19) and then goes on ' ... nor can I help admiring the virtue of this man ... especially as there is no one ... who could be compared with Cosimo for achieving Magnificence'. After this we get Thomas's arguments as to whether or not Magnificence is a mean, whether it is an action or the virtue in control of the action, whether it is a subsection of Fortitude, whether it can be practised by the poor and whether the Magnificent man is 'in the sanctification of God', as a quotation from the Psalms claims.(20) All this is interspersed with references to Cosimo's buildings, and made a little more humanist in character through the use of classical exempla and the form of the dialogue. The revival of Thomas's treatment of Magnificence shifts the central point of the discussion away from the value of usury and riches, with its equivocal conclusion, to the 687
abstract status of Magnificence as a virtue. The buildings have their taint removed as they become some sort of concrete exempla encouraging the virtue, since everyone can see from the imprese on them whose they are; Cosimo's are therefore described at length. They are not to be condemned for their excessive size, but praised for the excess of virtue in the patron's mind, shewn by his having spent more than he need; Maffei therefore also praises the expense of the decoration and furnishings. He explains why in the middle of a list of buildings: But all these things deserve extraordinary praise and should be recommended to posterity with the utmost enthusiasm, since from Cosimo's Magnificence in building monasteries and temples it will have had divine excellence before its eyes, and it will consider with how much piety and with how much thankfulness we are indebted to God, and not to religious people and clerics. And in his house he has not thought about what Cosimo wanted but what was consistent with such a great city as Florence, in that he thought that if he was not going to look ungrateful it was necessary that he should appear more fully equipped and more distinguished than the other people in the town in the same proportion as he received benefits from it greater than theirs. (21) There is very little, however, in the Maffei text that is a positive recommendation to great men in general to be Magnificent. This is much more explicit in the passage of the Nicomachean Ethics that was Thomas's source. Here the emphasis is on the practical activity of the rich. Aristotle discusses at length what class of people can be Magnificent, and excludes the poor, unlike Thomas and Maffei: But great expenditure is becoming to those who have suitable means to start with, acquired by their own efforts or from ancestors or connexions, and to people of high birth and reputation, and so on; for all these things bring with them greatness and prestige. (22) This Aristotelian sense of Magnificence was current in Cosimo's time, and was exploited by Francesco Filelfo in the Convivia Mediolanensia, written in Milan in 1443 and dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti.(23) Part of this dialogue is a discussion of the nature of Magnidecentia, a direct translation of Aristotle's megaloprepeia. Magnidecentia is exclusively a virtue of the rich. Filelfo's main concern is to differentiate between it and liberality by referring megaloprepeia to the standard of behaviour thought suitable to the situation and the agent. The situations are Aristotle's-weddings and hospitality to famous guests, for example-and the agent is in effect anyone who wishes to appear civilized and dignified. Filelfo did not connect this with architecture, but the theory of Magnidecentia refers to all large expenditure. Once architectural patronage had been connected with Magnificence, the implication that it was a natural practice of every great man followed from the Aristotelian sense of the word. 688
The great men who became new patrons needed instruction. Alberti's De re aedijicatoria takes the form of an exposition of architecture as an art, and is so introduced in the preface and the first chapter; the whole approach differs from Vitruvius's introduction of his work as a guide for his patron Augustus. Although Alberti does not claim to be writing a textbook for the patron, topics that first arose from the discussion of Magnificence appear throughout the book. His view in Della famiglia that extensive patronage is 'harmless' has now hardened into detailed and authoritative (because antique) instructions for patronage. A large section of the preface is devoted to praise and encouragement of the patron: Men of publick Spirits approve and rejoice when you have raised a fine Wall or Portico, and adorned it with Portals, Columns, and a handsome Roof, knowing you have thereby not only served yourself, but them too, having by this generous Use of your Wealth, gained an addition of great Honour to yourself, your Family, your Descendants, and your City.(24) His approach is repeatedly that the particular piece of architecture must be related to the social status of the patron, and to its use. Although the details of this owe most to Vitruvius, the desire to find rules for patronage goes with an awareness that the great man reveals himself in architecture; this arose out of the idea of Magnificence and was made more urgent by Cosimo's precedent. The change in the pattern of patronage can be seen in individual examples. The most striking of the patrons of architecture in the second half of the century is Lodovico Gonzaga.(25) He succeeded to the Marquisate of Mantua in 1444, and in 1450 called Luca Fancelli from Florence as architect of a new hospital in the town and a palace at Revere, twenty miles away, both begun in that year. He built villas for himself and in 1459, the earliest date at which Alberti's presence is documented at Mantua, commissioned two churches from him; Alberti was working on these by 1460-5. Lorenzo (which came to nothing) and S. Sebastiano. In 1470 Lodovico accepted Alberti's designs for S. Andrea, for which a project already existed by another architect. Lodovico also patronized the building of the dome of the SS. Annunziata in Florence, adding enormously to the money that his father had left for that purpose. In 14 0 Alberti gave advice on this, submitting a new plan. This was a very large building programme, particularly as the latest building, S. Andrea, was of unprecedented size for a new church in the fifteenth century. It seems to have been closely associated with Lodovico personally, as most of the work was seriously interrupted at his death, whereas much other architectural work was done by his successor, and there is criticism of the style of S. Sebastiano from his immediate circle during his lifetime. A large oeuvre can also be associated from the 1450's with Pope Pius II(26) and Federigo da Montefeltre,(27) and to a lesser extent with Alfonso V of Naples,(28) but in 689
each case the situation is confused by the peculiar status of the patron: Pius worked through other people, partly for himself, partly for the church; Federigo embellished with funds earned outside Urbino the city to which he had succeeded only by election; and Alfonso concentrated on military architecture and triumphal processions. Nevertheless in each case huge and expensive buildings were being seen as aspects of their patron. Leonello d'Este, Duke of Ferrara from 1441 until his death in 1450, was probably not a great patron of architecture,(29) although the destruction of much of the town and its outskirts by the Venetians in 1482 makes it difficult to be certain. The Visconti in Milan built little after the death of Gian Galeazzo in 1402.(30) Francesco Sforza, duke from 1450, continued the work on the cathedral which had been interrupted for fifty years, continued the Certosa of Pavia, and began various other churches. Calling Filarete to Milan he put him in charge of the Castello and the new and very large Ospedale Maggiore. Filarete's building work for Francesco Sforza is less important than his treatise on architecture, written in the early 1460's and dedicated to Francesco, of which the best extant version is a copy dedicated to Piero de' Medici and probably written before 1465. Although very much indebted to Alberti this is planned as a dialogue between architect and patron, for whom it is a textbook. The theme is again that the quality of the building must reflect the dignity of the owner, but Alberti's discussion in terms of universals is simplified and treated in terms of real examples. The reasons for building are now utility and fame,(31) and the houses suitable for certain ranks of society are described with sketch plans. Lodovico Gonzaga is used as a shining example of the best sort of patron, who builds in a correctly learned style. Filarete had probably never read any discussion of Magnificence, but he nevertheless reflects the conclusions of the argument both in the idea of a textbook on architectural patronage and in the pervasive notion of decorum. In the absence of texts giving reasons why people built, it is difficult to be sure these patrons were of a type that did not exist before, conscious of the need to associate themselves with an architectural oeuvre. Certainly, like Palla Strozzi, many men continued to look after the ecclesiastical buildings in the neighbourhood of the family palace, but the scale of the later patrons is vastly larger. These men were also more preoccupied with style. They have been mentioned because they were the most extensive individual patrons, but it is notable that each employs a conspicuously Magnificent style. It is the classicizing attitude to ornament typical of this style which is the most notable characteristic of Italian architecture just after Brunelleschi. The convention of considering the patron as author of a building is illustrated by the lists of buildings put in patrons' biographies. That of Filippo Maria Visconti (died 1447) by Pier Candido Decembrio includes among its seventy-one chapters two entitled 'de aedificiis per eum conditis' and 'de cura, et restitutione sacrarum aedium'.(32) Vespasiano da Bisticci's biogra690
phies are particularly rich in this, and although probably written in the 148o's no doubt reflect the prevailing opinion about his subjects at the time that he knew them. In his life of Cosimo de' Medici he makes no mention of Michelozzo as his architect, although he says that Maffei designed the Badia at Fiesole, and mentions 'uno maestro intendentissimo ... che si chiamava Lorenzo' at Careggi.(33) The twenty-fifth book of Filarete's treatise is devoted to listing Cosimo's buildings,(34) but although Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia and Gozzoli, and the intarsiatori Gusto and Minore are named, the impression is always that Cosimo was the author. In the case of the Badia, Cosimo and Maffei were jointly responsible, according to Filarete, even though Michelozzo is mentioned elsewhere in the book. In the chronicle of S. Marco at Florence the prior, Lapaccini, who died in 1457, refers to the rebuilding in 1437 and to ' ... magnificis viris Cosmo et Laurentio Mediceis autoribus'.(35) The way in which attitudes towards the patronage of architecture changed in Tuscany may be summarized. Early in the century such patronage was on a small scale and local. From the 1430's Cosimo de' Medici began much larger works on sites throughout the area, and was criticized for doing so. In the 1430's Alberti wrote in Della famiglia that expenditure on building for the honour of the family was harmless, and could be practised freely. Francesco Filelfo, living in Milan but having been in Florence earlier, wrote in 1443 recommending magnidecentia, the Aristotelian Magnificence, as a natural practice of the superior classes, although this was quite outside the context of architecture. By the time he was writing De re aedificatoria (1452) Alberti was much more specific about the building being related to the owner's social position and being seen in terms of the family's honour. Shortly after this Maffei used St. Thomas's treatment of Magnificence in order to defend Cosimo's work from criticism. During the 1450's some princes in Italy, in particular Lodovico Gonzaga and Francesco Sforza, began to build on a scale for which Cosimo was the only precedent. These events are too close to one another in time and too varying in character to be seen as a connected sequence, but they do document a clear change in taste either side of the mid-century. In all this Cosimo's position is slightly ironical, in that the argument that naturally formed around him in defence of patronage by a private individual as opposed to a prince led to an encouragement to the princes themselves to build. Appendix There is an interesting letter in the Biblioteca Laurenziana from the prior of the church of S. Bartolomeo at Monteoliveto outside the Porta S. Frediano at Florence, thanking Cosimo de' Medici for restoring the buildings. The library of the church is mentioned by Gutkind in his list of Cosimo's buildings (Cosimo de' Medici, 1938, pp. 304-7), but otherwise the church seems to have been forgotten. The letter is not dated. Its vocabulary and content are very close to Maffei's dialogue. Cosimo is praised as the author (te auctore et duce) of restorations of old churches and the construction of new ones. He has, however, recognized the danger of this and is determined to
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aim at 'gloria', not 'voluptas'. Bandini gives excerpts in his Catalogus codicum Latinorum bibliotecae Mediceae Laurentianae, iii, I 776, col. 523: Quum aliquando ipse in agro Florentino superioribus annis praefuerim, licet indigne, Abbatiae S. Miniatis, demum S. Barptolemaei, quod Montis Oliveti vulgo appellatur, cernens oculis non sine ingenti animi maerore eiusdem Monasterii aedificia vetustate paene collapsa, et prope diruta, omnemque fabricam brevi minari ruinam, vehementer etiam atque etiam indolui, quod in tanta, et tam praeclara Etruriae, immo totius ltaliae urbe, quae Dei numine, florentibus opibus, multitudine, potentia, ac principatu terrae, marisque floret, ubi te auctore, et duce magnificentissime tot celeberrima templa, tot aedes sacrae refectae, tot Monasteria cum omni ornatu infinitis prope sumptibus Deo immortali dedicata, tot denique aedificia regie splendideque constructa, quae singula mihi saepenumero contemplanti, praeclara, et admirabilia videri solent; hoc solum S. Barptolemaei Coenobium, proh dolorl inertia atque ignavia quadam destitutum, desertum et quodammodo ab omnibus derelictum esse videatur; praesertim quum is locus, quemadmodum conspicari licet, sit, et natura, et situ haud dubie omnium praestantissimus . . . . Tu enim is es, qui non voluptatem, malorum omnium matrem, sed gloriam ex his sumptibus quaerere soles. Quid dicam de Bibliothecis, ubi tanto studio, et diligentia coegisti libros plurimos Graecos, Hebraeos pariter et Latinos, quo studiosi et letterati homines, tamquam in amoenissimum quoddam Musarum diversorium se conferre possint? (Gadd. Plut. LXXXX Sup. Cod. XXXVI, xxxii, pag. 55, 58.) Notes 1. H. Baron, 'Franciscan poverty and civic wealth', Speculum, xiii, 1938, pp. iff. 2. Poggio Bracciolini, De nobilitate, 1657, pp. 27f. 3. Francesco Filelfo, De paupertate, in E. Garin, Prosatori latini del quattrocento, 1952, PP¡ 494ff. 4. Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, ed. F. Battaglia, 1944, p. 60. 5. L. Bruni, Epistolae, ed. L. Mehus, ii, 1741, p. 45. 6. G. Dominici, Regola del governo di cura famigliare, 1860, p. 122. 7. B. N. Nelson, 'Usurer and merchant prince', Journal of Economic History, Supplement vii, 1947, pp. 104ff. 8. L. B. Alberti, Della famiglia, ed. C. Grayson, 1960, p. 210. 9. Ed. cit., p. 141. 10. M. Wackernagel, Der Lebensraum des Kunstlers in der Florentinischen Renaissance, 1938, pp. 226ff. 11. I am indebted to Miss Susan Connell for pointing out and sending a transcription of this letter to me. It is in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Filza xiii, no. 65, M.A.P. 12. F. Barbaro, 130 Lettere, ed. R. Sabbadini, 1884, p. 114. 13. 'Quare cum nuper ab ipsis monachis certior sim factus te aliquando, cum apud eos devertisses, aut cellam unam aedificandum aut ecclesiam exornandam tibi desumpsisse, tenere me non potui quin a te meo iure postularem, ut divo Andreae ac sanctissimo ordini Carthusiensium cum tua gloria sicut semper soles satisfacias. Quamquam enim istic multa monumenta posteris sis relicturus munificentiae tuae, in quibus ut ita dicam nomen tuum immortalitati consecrasti, non parvam tamen laudem consequeris, si etiam apud nostros homines velut ex quadam specula gentis tuae alio quodam modo peregrinabitur in omnis fere nationes' (loc. cit.). 14. Pius II, Commentarii, 1614, p. 49. 15. N. Machiavelli, Istoria Fiorentine, ed. M. Bonfantini, 1954, p. 880. 16. The dialogue exists in two manuscripts both in the Biblioteca Laurenziana: (a) Plut. xivii, Cod. xvii, fols. 78-102, and (b) Plut. hoax, Sup. Cod. xiviii, fols. 125v-131v. It is published inaccurately in G. Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum, xii, 1742, pp. 150-68. It has recently been discussed by E. H.
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Gombrich in 'The early Medici as Patrons of Art', originally published in 1960 and reissued in Norm and Form, 1966, p. 35. 17. N. Widloecher, La congregazione dei Canonici Regolari Lateranense, 1929, Appendix. 18. Summa Theologica, IIa, IIae, q. 134, a. 1-4. 19. Manuscript (a) of note 16, fol. 82v. 20. Psalms xcv, 6. 21. Manuscript (a) of note 16, fol. 86r. 22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, 1915, ii22b, II. 30ff. 23. F. Filelfo, Convivia Mediolanensia, 1537, pp. 78ff. 24. Trans. J. Leoni, ed. J. Rykwert, 1965, p. x. 'Boni viri, quod parietem aut porticum duxeris lautissimam, quod ornamenta postium columnarum tectique imposueris, et tuam et suam vicem comprobant et congratulantur vel ea re maxime, quod intelligunt quidem te fructu hoc divitiarum tibi familiae posteris urbique plurimum decoris ac dignitatis adauxisse' (ed. G. Orlandi, i, 1966, p. 13). 25. E. Marani and C. Perina, Mantova, Le arti, ii, 1961, chs. 3 and 4. 26. R. Rubinstein, Pius II as patron of art. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London 1957. 27. For a list, see Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, ed. d'Ancona/Aeschlimann, 1951, pp. 224-6. 28. G. L. Hersey, 'The arch of Alfonso in Naples and its Pisanellesque "Design" ', Master Drawings, vii, 1969, pp. 16-23. 29. B. Zevi, Biagio Rossetti, 1960, pp. 20, 68. 30. E. Arslan, in Storia di Milano, vii, 1956, pp. 621ff. 31. Filarete's treatise on architecture, ed. J. R. Spencer, 1965, bk. ii, fol. Sr. Translation volume, p. 16. 32. P. C. Decembrio, Vita Philippi Mari(E Vicecomitis, in Muratori, Rerum ltalicarum Scriptores, 1731, vol. xx, cap. xxxvi, xxxvii. The buildings in fact amount to very little. 33. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, ed. cit., 1951, p. 416. 34. Ed. cit., p. 318. 35. La cronica di San Marco, ed. R. Morcay, in Archivio Storico Italiano, 1913, p. 1 x.
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SECTION 5
Martines, Art: An Alliance with Power PATRONAGE AND PROPAGANDA Art and power in Renaissance Italy went hand in hand. Pictures and sculptures were made for patrons, not for an open market. As late as the 1560s, an artist was likely to lose face and standing if he produced and sold unsolicited works. The important patrons, lay and ecclesiastical, came largely from among the urban ruling groups. Architecture, the voie royale of patronage and the umbrella art for 'lesser' arts, was for the monied taste of popes, princes, oligarchs, and rich men; for the state, and for organized groups of the sort that drew men of substance together in leading guilds and religious confraternities. Even Carpaccio's famous cycle of the life of St Ursula (1490s), executed for one of Venice's more modest confraternities, the Scuola of St Ursula, had the patronage of Nicolo Loredan - born to one of the city's richest and most illustrious houses - and the cycle shows his family arms, family portraits, and the ex voto ciphers of his patronage. One can say of cities, 'Tell me how their space is distributed and I will tell you who governs or owns them'; and one can say of Italian Renaissance cities, 'Tell me who owns the imposing palazzi or let me study the family chapels in the different churches, and I will tell you who the princes, oligarchs, and rich men arc and who their patron saints.' Masaccio's tenements (Fig. 4 in inset of illustrations) art the backside of the fifteenth century's 'ideal cities' (Fig. 15). Articulation of the urban space was dialectical, a question of relations between wealth and poverty, churches and lay dwellings. It was also a question of other social balances: of where the prepotent families were concentrated, of where they had their houses, churches, or waterfront. Powerful bishops had once been a decisive force in the layout of the urban space. When Cosimo de' Medici, after about 1436, began to move out of his quarter of the city to offer massive charitable support for the restoration of religious buildings in other parts of Florence, he roused fears and envies. ¡whatever his private motives, his actions seemed the stealthy movements of an aspiring tyrant. The psychology of eminent men was a datum in Florentine spatial arrangements. Cosimo's activity posed a threat to the controls of other old families in the private chapels that had long belonged to their patronage. More was involved than the saying of Masses for deceased kinfolk: the manner of the banker's patronage prefigured a shift in the axis of Florentine political power. However, a change in patronage rarely involved anything so far-reaching. Domenico Ghirlandaio's great 694
frescoes in the Tornabuoni (choir) chapel of Santa Maria Novella (1485-90), which cost about 1,100 florins, got there by conventional oligarchicmcans: the chapel had long been the property of the once prominent Ricci family, but Giovanni Tornabuoni hired Ghirlandaio to decorate the chapel, and then managed to get it associated with his own name by means of money, tricky promises, cleverly placed armorial bearings, and influence in one of the Florentine courts. Giovanni was closely related by marriage to the Medici. Looking back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from modern times, we sort out a segment of experience and call it' art'. The men and women of the early Italian Renaissance did not look merely to art, often not at all. Their eyes were primed to find a religious meaning, and the subject matter of Italian Renaissance art was overwhelmingly religious. It was, in the truest sense, propaganda - that which was to be propagated. A religious picture might serve not only as a profession of faith but also to help convey doctrine, to prop up belief, to remind sinners of their obligations, or even as a voice in defense of the Church. The fact that militant Protestantism turned violently against the imagery of the old Church, and so against religious painting and sculpture, shows that communities instinctively recognized the educational and propagandistic intent of religious art. The deep-rooted habit of reading the products of the figurative imagination will be a point to keep in mind, for patrons and viewers did not abandon it with the entry of ever more worldly themes into the subject matter of Renaissance art. When a chapel, a fresco, a statue, or a church facade was made on commission from an association of merchants or a religious confraternity, as was common down to 1600, it was distinctly associated with a group. Here already, in the bonds between piety and the pride of an organized group, was the visual affirmation of a special interest. At Florence, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the big cloth merchants, working via their guilds, openly asserted their dominant place in the community. They controlled the public monies earmarked for work on the cathedral and Baptistery (the patronal church), and they took major decisions in the most important artistic projects of the period - Ghiberti's bronze doors, the statuary at Orsanmichcle, and Brunelleschi's dome. Corporate patronage of a different sort belonged to the state, as when the Florentine government invited Michelangelo to sculpt The Dauid (1501) or when Giovanni Bellini, in Venice, took charge of pictorial decoration in the hall of the Great Council. Governments could at any moment commission works of art. David in Quattrocento Florentine art - young man pitted against brute giant - symbolized a republican stance against despotic rule. The story of Judith and Holofernes, occasionally represented in painting and sculpture, had similar accents. 695
Yet another order of patronage and control belonged to rich families and oligarchs, who spent large sums on private chapels, tombs, frescoes, and religious panels, thus exhibiting their ascendency through their piety and vice versa. In 1448 the rich Antonio Ovetari put up 700 gold ducats for the frescoes (now mostly destroyed) of St James and St Christopher in the Ovetari chapel of the Eremitani church in Padua. Mantegna and another artist carried out the work. The impact of the individual art patron was increasingly felt in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Pride of time and place goes perhaps to Enrico Scrovegno. Son of a rich and notorious Paduan usurer, he commissioned Giotto's Lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ (1302-5) in the Arena chapel at Padua. The cider Scrovegno had been forced to make partial restitution of usury in order to ensure Enrico's rights of inheritance, and Enrico himself was compelled to enter a lay religious order. Giotto's frescoes served, accordingly, both to help expiate sin and to reinstate the moral worth of the Scrovegni in the Paduan commune, though the entire city-state world was tainted with usurious wealth. In the early 1470s, when Lorenzo de' Medici sat down to figure out the principal expenditures made by his family between 1434 and 1471, he did not even bother to distinguish the disbursements for architectural and artistic commissions from those for charity and taxes. All were lumped together because all served the one end -the grandeur of his house and its power in the state. Far from regretting the astounding total (663,755 gold florins), he concluded: 'I think it casts a brilliant light on our estate and it seems to me that the monies were well spent and I am very well pleased with this.' If this candid observation is related to a declaration made by the painter Domenico Veneziano in a letter to Lorenzo's father in 1438 - 'I promise that my work will bring you honor' - the unity of intdests binding patron and painter flashes forth at once: the one provided employment and opportunity, while the other toiled to enhance the reputation of his patron, although the success of this depended upon the finished work. In the early 1490s, on commission from Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci modeled a horseman in clay or plaster some twenty-four, feet high, intended to be cast in bronze: an equestrian statue that would celebrate the clan of the :first Sforza duke of Milan, Francesco (d. 1466). And before we daze ourselves with notions about the period's universal love of art, let it be remembered that popes Julius H and Leo X used artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo to glorify themselves personally, their families, and their office. Power sought self-images, or their destruction. In 1511, in rebellion against the imperious pope, the Bolognese destroyed Michelangelo's fourteen-foot bronze statue of Julius II, which had been posted, three years before, in a niche above the central portal of San Petronio. They melted it down to make a cannon. It remains to mention the countless orders for small works placed by humbler patrons - modest clerics and people from the ordinary bourgeoisie. A marked distinction 696
has already been drawn, by implication, between influential and ordinary patrons. If the taste of major patrons remained conservative to 1440 or 1450, as at Siena, or even regressive, as at Genoa and Venice, taste must have been even more backward-looking among stay-at-home folk with more limited means. We infer this from much of the work done in country towns, from the productions of popular workshops, such as those of Bicci di Lorenzo in Florence and Giovamii di Paolo in Siena, or from the nature of pictorial decoration on wedding chests (cassoni). But there was a category of important patrons, individual and corporate, whose demands and needs opened the way for a new style. And in Arezzo, Orvicto, or other small towns, where we find monuments in the style of the artistic vanguard, say by Piero della Francesca or even by the lesser artist Luca Signorelli, we come in contact with a taste that was first fashioned in the great centers or for leading patrons. It is no mystery when provincial taste follows a more cosmopolitan one: ambition makes men ready to imitate their imagined betters. SOCIAL POSITIONS AND MOBILITY The question of the social position and mobility of artists in Quattrocento Italy is not an idle exercise for social historians. It holds a central place in efforts to decipher the social notation in the art of the period. For the artist's receptivity to the demands of patronage depended in part on his place in the social system, on his position vis-a-vis patrons (hence on their position), and on the nature of the 'wares' made up for them. The goldsmith who exhibited a few rings, belts, and necklaces for a small open market had to keep in mind the fashion and taste of his customers, and he continually took orders to rearrange old gems in new settings. Artists and patrons were forced into an even closer and more vital rapport. Scholarship has established, rather conclusively, that artists belonged to the order of craftsmen down to the sixteenth century. Their training and work relegated them to the ranks of small shopkeepers and petty merchants: to the world of those who held the obscurer levels of the middle classes. And if certain artists, such as Masaccio and Castagno, died young and poor, while others - e.g., Ghiberti, Tura, Verrocchio, the Pollaiuolo brothers - built up small fortunes, many more of them ended somewhere between, the owners of a small house or two, or a bit of land, but far from rich. In the 1450s, Donatello still rented a house and workshop. The Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia was knighted by Siena in 1435, and this, although extraordinary, points to a changing consciousness. After 1500 the most fashionable artists lived like affluent gentlemen: Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Titian. Yet one of the great and busiest Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, Tintoretto (1518-94), died on the edge of poverty, not because he lived beyond his means but because he took in modest earnings and kept a large family. Luca Signorelli (c. 1441-1523), who straddled the two centuries, lived, said Vasari, 'rather like a great lord and gentleman than as a 697
painter'. Others - Brunelleschi, Mantegna, Ghirlandaio - lived as comfortable bourgeois. The Quattrocento was the age of transition for the social status of the artist. Donatello (d. 1466) refused to wear a splendid cloak and matching undergarment given him by Cosimo de' Medici because the effect was too fine for him. Brunelleschi and Baldovinetti, born into established Florentine families, elected - most exceptionally architecture and painting. Their sort, by a kind of ironclad social law, nearly always took up more respectable pursuits. But up in Genoa, between 1425 and 1450, there were already two noblemen from Pavia, the count Donato de' Bardi and his brother, Boniforte, who had fallen on bad times and were forced to live by their painting, although they had originally learned the art per puro diletto dello spirito (from sheer love of it). The humanist Alberti designed several buildings but was primarily a theorist. Not having a craftsman's background, far from it, he approached art through his amateur's love and was known as a humanist, nobleman, and well-placed cleric. No craftsman would have thought of him as a fellow artist. Architects, goldsmiths, painters, and sculptors came generally from among the multitude of craftsmen and other petty bourgeois; a few were born the sons of notaries, some sprang from simple country stock. Florence, the most republican of all cities, at all events in the mythology, can ¡provide one example only of a fifteenth-century artist who held a public office of any note. The exception was Brunelleschi, born into the class of political citizens: he once served in the Priorate (1425). A family of great fourteenth-century painters, the Gaddi, 'made it' in the fifteenth century by abandoning art for trade and then banking. At Venice the social distance between artists and political authority-between, say, the Bellini or Carpaccio 'and public office - was simply unbridgeable. Yet they could be the underwriters of political values. Hired to paint the pictures of doges, and battles and other historical scenes in the hall of the Great Council, they celebrated the Venetian past and so were propagandists for the republic. The formal education of the artist stopped at the elementary level: he learned to read, to write, and to calculate. In some cases he developed the latter to the point of being able to manage relatively sophisticated problems. The writings of Piero della Francesca reveal this. Vasari claimed that Mantegna, too, had planned to write a treatise on perspective. Probably Francesco di Giorgio and Jacopo de' Barbari could have managed one. A few artists received a smattering of Latin. But none is known - Mantegna's case is doubtful -for whom even the rudiments of a humanistic education may be claimed. Heavy full-time training in the workshop routinely began before the age of twelve - Michelozzo was casting bronze at fourteen - and often boys were already being trained at eight or nine, the very years when they were meant, in the literary or professional track, to secure the foundations of grammar and rhetoric. 698
This somewhat static picture of the social position of the art craftsman must be followed by a recognition of his dynamic promise. For in this respect the fifteenth century was pivotal; and an exceptional man, born to a modest family around 1450, could end his life as a 'gentleman'. Such were Signorelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Raphael, and Leonardo. Later, Titian and Michelangelo could afford to thumb their noses at noblemen and clamoring patrons; but Tintoretto failed to break out of the neighborhood world of the petty craftsman. The artists most in fashionable demand were decidedly better off at the end of the fifteenth century than at the beginning. Their fees and profits rose; their basic expenses probably did not. The social mobility of the artist was not, however, a function solely of pecuniary gain. More decisive were the changing and growing needs of the important patrons. Their consciousness, as a process grounded in a social structure, had telling effects. As the identity and self-image of the upper classes changed in the course of the century, taking in sharper mundane accents, such as the demand for larger houses, more brilliant marriages, greater show in personal wear, and more pre-eminence in government, the needs of their patronage also changed. Rich patrons required more images of themselves and their world in figurative representation, and they put more and more 'works of art' into their houses. Increasingly, the aims of Renaissance patronage came to lie in the affirmation of a social identity. In the process, which involved nothing less than a transformation in the outlook of the upper classes, the .artist-craftsman entered into a new and closer contact with influential patrons. This raised his social position. Giotto, Arnolfo di Cambio, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and other artist-craftsmen of the fourteenth century were associated with major enterprises, fresco cycles, and building projects. They won fame and material rewards - though Giotto's name is not even mentioned in payment documents on the Arena chapel - but did not alter their status in terms of the upper-class presuppositions of the day. They labored with their hands, and this was demeaning. Celebrity did not raise their skills from the mechanical to the liberal arts, the arts 'suitable for free men'. Nor, again, was the Renaissance rise in the status of the visual arts owing to the impact of humanism, for humanism was itself a¡ vanguard current in the evolving consciousness of the upper classes. Most cities had competing botteghe (workshops) with small teams of artists, but there were individual workshops as well. The larger shops allowed for some specialization among the different craftsmen; apprentices and the less dexterous workers were often assigned to the more decorative parts of commissions or to the painting of chests and banners and the gilding of saddles. Two or three well-known workshops in Florence specialized in the production to order of ornamented wedding-chests and seem to have clone little b else. Others concentrated on small devotional pictures of a relatively 699
inexpensive sort, done usually in a very traditional idiom. Popular or fashionable artists, like the Ghirlanclaio in Florence and the Bellini in Venice, by taking¡ in more commissions and profits, could also enlist more assistants or apprentices, with the result that their botteghe turned out a larger volume of work. Architects and sculptors engaged in a good deal of sub-contracting, which took care of the more menial or routine parts of their commissions. Casting in bronze, for example, was not often done by the-sculptor himself. The traditions of the late-medieval workshop prepared craftsmen for a rich variety of jobs, and the age produced tremendously versatile men who might combine goldsmithery with sculpture, painting, and knowledge of engineering solutions. Versatility was a measure of the artist's eagerness to satisfy patrons and make a name for himself. Allowing for flexibility in the following categories, we discern three types of artists: the itinerant worker, the sort who stayed at home, and the worker at court. The 'courtiers' arc the easiest to single out: Pisancllo, Mantegna, Tura, Cossa, Roberti, Picro dclla Francesca, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and others. But most of these men also traveled, the last four extensively, and worked in more than one court. Among the more successful 'nomads' were Gentile da Fabriano, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, Signorelli, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Pcrugino. But these too break ranks: the Florentines, Donatello and the Pollaiuolo, spent long years in Florence. Ghibcrti, Fra Angelico, the Bicci, Giovanni di Paolo, Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, and the Ghirlandaio all answer more to the description of the stay-at-home artist, though, again, some of these executed major commissions abroad. Travel was exceedingly important for the fortunes of fifteenth-century art in that it diffused style and artistic manner. No artist could finally say, therefore, that he was unaware of the incoming or dominant trends. And this was no less true of important patrons, who also did much traveling. If we try to compare the material success of the three different groups - and there was much overlapping - the victory goes to the 'courtiers'. Attachment to a court, when it lasted, brought continuous work and some kind of security, even when compensation was grossly in arrears. Leonardo and Raphael, and later Giulio Romano, were handsomely rewarded. But there was no discernible difference in overall earnings between the travelers and the more stay-at-home bodies. Often the former were keenly sought after; they had reputations and could attract commissions from afar. Some more sedentary artists, like Ghiberti and the Bicci, had enough work at home for many years. But the artists who failed to obtain commissions at home either suffered or were forced to go abroad, even if they were unknown. The essential thing was to work, and leaving home to do so, for years at a time, could be the lot even of artists of the first rank, such as Masaccio, Donatello, Domenico Veneziano, Perugino; the aging Carpaccio, and 700
many others. Besides, when the call came from a great patron, such as a pope, a duke of Milan, or a merchant prince, it was best in all ways to accept the invitation. The life of court artists did not necessarily fall into routines and well-defined activities. There were too many needs and changing whims at court. The 'courtiers' worked in fresco, on wood, and on canvas; they did portraits, devotional pieces, and large mundane groups in elaborate architectural settings; they painted flags, bam1ers, furniture, stage settings, arms, and horse trappings; they designed festal decorations, costumes, masks, and other accouterments; and they made designs for textiles and for woven or embroidered fabrics to be used as bench covers, bed quilts, and door curtains. At Ferrara, Cosimo Tura made models for goldsmiths and worked as a decorative sculptor in the Este villa of Belriguardo. All in all, then, artists scurried around to obtain commissions. Exceptionally, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giovanni Bellini were most successful at home; indeed, the former - a shrewd toady with superiors and probably a bully with those under him - was also influential in the assignment of Florentine civic commissions. But on the whole, it was the modest men who tended to stay at home, where they handled small local jobs. The more ambitious and able sought major commissions at home and abroad, usually being more successful abroad. Security, fame, and honor were chiefly to be garnered at the courts. And if modest talents had to cater to the local taste of people with small sums to spend, it follows that leading artists, on a major commission that might require several years' work, had to be responsive to the wishes of their patrons. Working under very strained relations must have been, after all, unusual. Like Jacopo della Quercia, artists sometimes fled from a job or were simply dismissed. But at the princely courts service was the keynote: you did what was expected of you. The power of patronage in Renaissance art - its power to influence, to decide, and to reject - has not been stressed enough in scholarship. Most art historians, for better and worse, have made an occupation of concentrating on artistic personalities. This emphasis has been so pronounced at times as to make us believe that one artist - e.g., Pisanello, Leonardo, or Giorgione - could impose his manner on a princely court or on the taste of a generation. Arguably, the movement of taste is just the other way around. Communities seize upon an idea, a style, a manner or a point of view, and give it a visible existence by their acceptance of it, thus enabling it to surface as history; but they seize and accept it only when it endorses or flatters vital interests and group identities. Social Identity into Artistic Style The critical point in the sociology of art centers on the way in which artists convert social experience into a figurative language. It is what happens when a way of seeing,
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as a function of social structure and social change, finds its expression in style. Art is what we have always thought it was, but it is also a mysterious social language. From about 1300, with Giotto and his followers, the direction of painting, as it advanced from the early to the high Renaissance, was in the so-called imitation of 'nature' (il vero). The aim along this track was to depict everyday things more or less as they seem to present themselves to the eye. But this entailed incalculable difficulties, for the enterprise required learning how to create the illusion of space in the picture, modeling rounded figures and planting them firmly on the ground plane, watching the sources and play of light (chiaroscuro), understanding foreshortening, and giving more care to the study of human anatomy. Beyond this, the quest for il vero depended upon the ability to render movement and emotions via gesticulation and vivid facial expression. Change of this magnitude presupposes a fundamental change in perception and only comes, evidently, with the historical emergence of a new view of reality; it comes with the decline of one social order and the ascent of another. For our subject is not only a radical change in artistic style but also the larger underlying transformation, the overturning of a whole structure of assumptions. Down to the third decade of the fifteenth century, the main opposition to the imitation of il vero was another, more traditional style. This was based upon the heavy use of symbolic colour (chiefly blue and gold), the hieratic placing of figures on a more or less flattened picture space, determination of the sizes of figures and objects by their symbolic values, and then, as from the later fourteenth century-in the style's International Gothic phase - on a spiraling fluidity of linear forms and swaying rhythms. But neither style was pure, neither the emerging new one nor the one which adhered to the old conventions. Each had elements of the other. Tradition in the art workshop was deeply rooted; subject matter was almost entirely religious - hence set to a conservative key - and the vanguard of development had to await the fifteenth-century changes in social consciousness. The visual revolution brought in by Giotto's generation belongs to the victory of the city and commune in the life of the age. Thus the popularity in religious narrative of urban scenes and scenes just outside cities. More particularly, the Giottesque style caught the self-assurance and practicality of those who lived by trade, stood at the head of the commune, and reached out in aggressive control over the countryside. Their eye was keyed to a religious symbolism, but now it also desired and took delight in everyday images. This was the revolution of Giotto's time. His human forms and those in the oeuvre of his followers are the popolani of the communal age at the summit of its economic and demographic expansion. The leading patrons of art in Giotto's time - guilds, rich individuals, religious corporations, and communal chieftains 702
wanted the lessons of religion illustrated in a more mundane fashion and they wanted to see more of the Christ, more of His life story. It was no longer enough to illustrate religious mysteries by means of symbolic, 'essential', and flat forms; now something of the life around had to be got into the picture space. This mime is what struck con-, temporaries and what fifteenth-century observers saw when they turned to the work of Giotto and his school. Frederick Antal argued that the new taste was the result of a rationalist view of the world, more specifically of the popolano's tendency, particularly as seen in the merchant bankers at the head of the commune, to de-emphasize irrational or mystic elements in the conditions of existence, in order to have a field of apprehension that was more understandable and controllable. It remains to add, rather changing the emphasis, that the new taste was also a function of the popolano's vigor, of his will to bring the message of Christ into a closer, more practical contact with urban life. This meant a line of roundabout self-images, notably .in more popolano-like madonnas and saints, rather than the old idiom for rendering the hypnotic and static essences of the ItaloByzantine style, the maniera greca (Fig. I); it meant scenes from urban life more than hierarchies of angels. The bold new painting of about 1290 and after had an upperclass 'optic' because it stemmed from a triumphant revolution in perception, and triumph in Florence, Siena, Bologna, and some other cities belonged to the merchants, bankers, and big guildsmen who had won the great thirteenth-century social struggles for power. Appropriately, the new way of seeing involved an optimistic and more worldly Christianity, fully articulated in the monumental and dramatic forms of the Giottesque style. Art historians have often referred to Giotto's 'heroic' manner: this is a strikingly apt characterization of the social calligraphy of the style. By the outset of the fifteenth century, figurative expression had gone beyond Giotto (in Maso, Avanzo, and Menabuoi) in the representation of three-dimensional space and the modeling of forms in the round. In sculpture the freak accomplishments of the Pisani had not again been matched. John White has demonstrated that the exploration of pictorial space remained a challenge for fourteenth-century painting, that spatial perception made a gradual advance, and that most effective solutions relied upon the use of architectural borderings, such as the interiors of large rooms, arcades, or a framework of buildings and city streets: what in effect amounts to urban space from the viewpoint of this study. The understanding and mastery of three-dimensional space proved to be remarkably difficult and came slowly. Although most patrons around 1400 seem to have been satisfied with the curvilinear rhythms and swaying forms of the International style, there was also a demand for more rounded space and solid, weighted forms. At Florence, about 1410, this was ex703
pressed in the work of sculptors - Ghiberti, Donatello, and Nanni di Banco. Then, rather suddenly, the 1420s saw a surge of new plastic forms and a finer, more rationalized grasp of spatial values in painting and narrative bas-reliefs: accomplishments associated with the names of Donatello, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Masolino. The supreme achievement of this breakthrough was the representation of the human figure in an amplitude of space, in such a manner as to heighten its qualities and dignity. Between 1399 and 1427, thirty-four over-life-size statues of prophets and saints appeared in the heart of Florence, in the most eminent niches of the cathedral and Orsanmichele. At least fifteen of the thirty-four may be ranked as vanguard pieces, the first in a full Renaissance style, and these have been associated with the conditions of a drawn-out political crisis: the Florentine republic's all-out resistance to the advancing armies of despotism, sent first by the Visconti (139os-1402, 1420s) and then by King Ladislaus of Naples (1409-14). Intended for public view at two of the city's three main points and commissioned almost entirely by the leading guilds, 'the race of heroes that populated the center of the city' gave evidence of the concentration and energies of the Florentine citizenry, The statues at Orsanmichele were 'the guardians of the ¡ guilds in the' maintenance of the Republic, and its spiritual defenders in the¡ battle for the survival of free institutions. As such, they partake of the virtus and probitas which were the ideal of the Florentine citizen.' In this view, Donatello's powerful vision helped to alter the course of painting in the 1420s, which saw the sudden emergence of the new style, partly in Gentile da Fabriano but especially in Masaccio and Masolino, witli Angelico, Lippi, and Uccello following fast in the 1430s. Interestingly, although cast in a thoroughly idealistic mode, the foregoing argument finds the origins of the Renaissance style in a political crisis, and more particularly in the republican ideals adduced by Florence to face and fight tyranny. The dignity of Donatello's freestanding statues and the controlled (perspective) viewpoint of his St George bas-relief go to embody the ideal of individual freedom, and this too was a central point in Florentine republican ideals, as enunciated by the humanist Leonardo Bruni. By implication, therefore, the rise of the individual portrait; the portrait bust, the new amplitude of space in three-dimensional painting, and the birth of one-point perspective all go back in their immediate origins to Florentine republican ideals. This astonishing interpretation may not be so far-fetched as it is likely to seem in this summary, if we substitute ideology for the more idealistic notion of ideals. Whatever the slogans coined by Florence and her humanist chancellors in the struggle to keep Tuscany from being dragged under one-man rule, the city's mercantile oligarchy was driven to save itself, to preserve its own supremacy both in Tuscany and the city. The cynicism of the republic's chancellors was matched by the oligarchy's cynical policies toward Pisa and republican Lucca, and later on toward the Ambrosian repub704
lic. But in rousing support for its political struggle, one so costly that the city's fiscal machine reeled nearly out of control in the 1420s and early 1430s, the Florentine ruling class naturally put its claims in the best possible light. Since when do oligarchies go around confessing to their narrowest interests? At the critical moments, the most callous oligarchs believed in their fine rhetoric and the rectitude of their awakened passions. Emergency generated illusionary ideals that aimed at uniting a divided and troubled Florentine community. The Renaissance statue and the statuesque in Renaissance painting, with the concomitant mastery of pictorial space, were born in part from ideals and feelings gathered around a struggle for the survival of the Florentine patriciate. All leading guilds and one at least of the lesser ones - the armorers who commissioned Donatello's St George - were deeply affected by the wars against the Visconti and Ladislaus. The city's political schisms were healed in the visual language of the sculpted 'race of heroes', whose religious themes and strong 路civic overtones seemed to put community ideals and energies above faction and disagreement. During much of the period between 1393 and 1434, the city was - a turmoil of political feeling. The array of statues pointed up the will and focused ardor of the guild community in its final display of political resolution. Guilds in Florence 路 would never again have political clout. Their assertive civic activity, as expressed in their support 路of the period's great architectural and sculptural commissions, was their swan song. Caught in a series of hauntingly路 expensive wars in defense of 'republican liberty', government and oligarchy found and brandished ideals, however illusory and self-interested, that stimulated humanism and art. Although a spontaneous cluster of ideals was a major force in the sudden emergence of the Renaissance style, the style's fecundity and the requirements of patrons moved it immediately away from its ideological moorings and adapted it to other tastes and more enduring interests. Our subject is, in effect, the identity of the Florentine ruling class, its self-awareness and state of mind during a generation of emergency which subverted Florentine political institutions. For the rise of the Medici house came out of the fiscal and political nightmares of the 1420s and 1430s. Using the solvent of a republican ideology, the oligarchy stood up to the dangers, external and internal; and in the tight topography of the city's small urban space, the array of 'heroic' statues, like Masaccio's brooding forms, could take on the aspect of self-images, mirroring the idealized self of the city's leading groups. Indeed, sometime in 1426 or 1427, in the same Carmelite church that holds the Tribute Money (Fig. 5), Masaccio seems to have executed a group portrait of contemporary oligarchs, in a fresco destroyed by fire in the late eighteenth century. Within a decade Alberti enunciated the dictum that man, as anatomical figure, is the 705
measure of all things within the picture space. At a stroke, symbolic size and hieratic essences had been swept away. As in humanism, so in Renaissance art Roman classical motifs and themes became prominent. This involved the imitation of classical heads and stances, as in Masaccio's Tribute Money; bolder forms, as in the new statuary; and the depiction of pediments, triumphal arches, colunms, pilasters, cornices, and coffered ceilings. Art and humanism at the princely courts found ways to draw upoi1 classical antiquity and especially upon imperial Rome. But the art prepared for the republican upper classes, first at Florence and then at Venice, also reached for association with an eventful and glorious past. Republicans sought sanctions, precedents, and principles in classical antiquity as a way of clarifying and asserting their identity as leaders; so also the men in princely courts. Since the birth of the Renaissance style has been linked in part with an ideology, it will be well to restate the case. 1. In a time of great political and social distress for Florence, guilds and patriciate plunged into the vigorous support of major commissions: thirty-four over-life-size statues, the Baptistery's bronze doors, the cathedral's cupola, and the Foundling Hospital. All were produced or started in an atmosphere of civil tension and fiscal sacrifice, and all involved the civic pride of the Florentines, who soon boasted about them. 2. Using the dignity of the state and exploiting traditional animosities, such as against Pisa and Lucca, the ruling group sought to unify Florence, while being itself often divided in its views of foreign dangers, taxation, and the Florentine middle classes. The result, as in the chancellors Salutati and Bruni, and less coherently in simpler folk, was an ideology of militant republicanism with a note of universality that could have no basis in social reality. Exaggerated idealisms arc inevitable in times of momentous stress and need, when government is forced to call upon the larger community. 3. Florence was caught up in the fusionist process of having recourse to ideals that seemed to overcome rifts in the body politic and served to defend the community from external threat. Artists also were caught up in the civic fervor. Whereupon turning to earlier models - e.g., Giotto, Roman sculpture - that buttressed intuitions of the new direction, a few artists made the breakthrough. They developed techniques for catching images, frequently idealized, from the pantheon of daily life. The celebration of earthly existence, whether through religious or secular imagery, could now be complete. And soon enough, in Filippo Lippi and a host of others, representations of the Madonna would be little more than more graceful versions of the daughters and young wives, at times the mistresses, of contemporaries. But the breakthrough came by way of a mystification: an anxious puffing up of ideals whose supposed universality was negated in oligarchic realities. 706
Donatello's St George (Fig. 7, 1415-17), vanquisher of the beast, idealizes the period's republican ideology, and we glimpse the Viscontean serpent in the tail of the dragon. Ghiberti's St John the Baptist (1412-16), Donatello's St Mark (1411-13), and Nanni di Banco's Four Martyrs (c. 1413) capture also in idealized form the independent spirit, force of leadership, and dignity of sacrifice in the Florence of those years. In that decade too, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and perhaps others rummaged through the ruins of Rome, studying fragments of classical sculpture and measuring columns, arches, and cornices. Like their wealthy patrons, they were testing themselves against Roman models, eager to imitate the things that seemed to bear tellingly upon their own experience. We saw this in the humanists. And like them, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Ghiberti, and many others found classical Rome in themselves; they found their own aspirations in their conception of Rome. Both Christ and the self-association with the power whose triumphs rang down the ages are underlined by means of the hypnotic arch and coffered ceiling in Masaccio' s Trinity (Fig. 6), which shows against Corinthian pilasters the profiles of the two donors, Lorenzo Lenzi and his wife. Lorenzo (at left) wears the dress of Florence's supreme executive dignity. Quite possibly the most influential painter of the fifteenth century, Masaccio was associated with everything that made for the new style: man-based proportions, onepoint perspective, nudes, portraits, deep modeling, gesture, and smart effects of foreshortening. All spoke for remarkable control of his medium, and, like Giotto, he worked with great rapidity. He executed a life-size nude man and woman which Vasari saw in the house of a Florentine patrician, Palla Rucellai. Another lost work, already mentioned, a fresco once in the Carmclite church; linked artists and oligarchs in a procession on the occasion of the church's consecration. Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masolino were the masters shown; the statesmen were Felice Brancacci, Niccolo da Uzzano, Giovanni Bicci de' Medici, Bartolommeo Valori, and Lorenzo Ridolfi; 'and not only did he [Masaccio] draw all these notable men from life but also the door of the convent and the porter with the keys in his hand' (Vasari). His Tribute Money (Fig. 5) in the Brancacci chapel, done in a time of acute fiscal distress for Florence, is so austere that it must have been unsettling and may well have driven off prospective patrons: Masaccio was seeing too incisively, too truly. Christ tells Peter to find the tax money in the mouth of a fish in Lake Galilee and commands him to pay it to the Roman tax collector. The fresco is a sermon on paying to the state what is the state's; it may also be suggesting that the Church should make contributions to government to help defend the community. In making such an unusual commission, the patron of the chapel, Felice Brancacci, a respected political figure, was evidently moved by a strong sense of civic feeling, but he balanced the theme of payment to the state with other frescoes in the same chapel, showing the distribution of alms to the poor and St Peter healing the 707
crippled with his shadow (Fig. 4). As the scenes hauntingly suggest, Florence had a large number of paupers and unemployed people, known as 'the wretched' (miscrabili) in the famous Florentine tax census of 1426-7. Late in 1428, Masaccio himself died in debt and poor in Rome. He had failed to attract the necessary commissions in Florence. Why this was so must forever be conjecture, because the record is silent. But there is plausibility in the argument that his work was not pretty enough, not elegant enough, not acceptably enough idealized in its treatment of faces and themes. He had all the mastery and craft needed to flatter, to play, to delight the eye with baubles, gold, and rich trappings. He performed this way at least once, probably on demand, in parts of the Pisa polyptych (1426), particularly in the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 3), with its portrait of the donors. But that which Masaccio would not or could not do, others, learning from him, were ready to carry out - Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Mantegna - and their patrons were well pleased with them. Arnold Hauser's well-known distinction between the middleclass and courtly styles of Renaissance art has some utility. It also raises problems, the major one having to do with the overlapping or crossing-over of tastes. Renaissance Italy had a marked degree of artistic cosmopolitanism, as illustrated, for example, by Gentile da Fabriano (d. 1427), who painted for princes as well as for republican oligarchs. Much the same may be said of Jacopo della Quercia, Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Signorelli, the Pollainolo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. But once we have attached an artistic manner to a social identity, 'courtly' or 'bourgeois', how do we explain in social terms any fusion of artistic manners? If in the realm of militant political ideas, basic points or emphases are borrowed between mutually hostile camps, as when national socialism took the principle of mass organization from the communists, all the more so in art may aspects of style be borrowed from one taste to serve the aims of another. This does not mean that the two tastes converge and become one. It means only that they have points in common. Though tastes may issue from differing group identities, patrons from different groups are likely to share a common view-point in some matters because they live in the same social universe. Florence's artistic revolution came out of conditions of extreme political ¡and social stress, but once it was launched, it could-be and was mediated to satisfy contrasting tastes, including taste at the princely courts. As mediation, the marmoreal heroics of an artist such as Mantegna served the boastful aims of taste in the Gonzaga court of Mantua. The new style was resourceful: drawing upon the art of antiquity because the Quattrocento found images of itself there, the new style now commanded, the panoply of resources required.to reshape-architecture and cater to the varied demands of patronage. 708
The fundamental fact for the sociology of Renaissance art was the changing identity of upper-class groups, a changing constitutive consciousness. This process centered on a view of themselves and the world; it involved a transformation in both selfawareness-and outlook. The claim that elite identity was fundamental to the fortunes of Renaissance: art presupposes two other claims: that the activity of the upper classes was decisive for the production of art, and that we must plot changes in consciousness in order to get at the direction of artistic style. The first of these has already been treated; the second follows. The transformation in upper-class identity was keyed to changes in society. The fifteenth century recorded a growing concentration of wealth; more land and capital ended in fewer hands; entry into trade required larger disbursements of capital; credit was tighter and business risks increased; Patterns of marriage became more conservative, as exemplified in the trend toward later marriage and the upper-class demand for bigger dowries and stronger, more endogamous marriage alliances. In government and politics, the groups at the top planted themselves more firmly, drew increasingly away from the middle classes, and developed a deeper self-assurance, threatened only in moments of danger triggered by war. This over, all process of social crystallization went with an intensification of the claims to family antiquity and lineage, with the result that the elite groups experienced an ever stronger sense of their being special, different, more elevated. The fifteenth century brought a boom in the construction of family palazzi (palaces). At Florence the upswing started in the later fourteenth century. From about the 1440s the princely courts also entered into a long-lasting cycle of major building or rebuilding schemes, involving both older palazzi and new villas, but here the resolution to build on a large scale went back for a generation or two; Outside some of the cities, as in the Bolognese, old castles were occasionally converted into hunting lodges and villas. It was a time of stability; ¡especially after mid-century; Recent scholarship has noted that in the 1400s, Florence alone was the site of about a hundred new palazzi. Even if reduced by a third, the figure is astounding when we consider that in 1427 the city had only about 10,000 taxpaying households. Signs of the building craze were evident elsewhere, too, as at Ferrara; Siena, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. And private wealth in the last two cities exceeded the like of anything seen in Florence. At Milan the families Borromeo, Viniercati, Parravicini, Fontana, Marliani, 'Atellani; Dal Verme, Pozzobonelli, Grifi, and Simonetta all built new palazzi. Among the new palaces built in Venice, suffice it to list those of the Foscari, Contarini Fasan, Corner Spinelli, Marin Contarini (ca d'Oro), Dario, and Vendramin Calergi. Equally important in identifying the new consciousness is the evidence of widespread redecoration and renovation in old family pa-
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lazzi, as in the addition of new rooms, new wings, or the reappointment of the internal space. The flaring desire for more ample and ordered household spaces was not a mere quest on the part of the rich ruling classes for increased physical comfort, unless things are merely what they seem. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the nobility had erected soaring towers to serve their military needs, but they were also an effective visual propaganda and mode of self-assertion; they were the nobility's testament of energy and dominance, and the matter of comfort in them was an afterthought or no thought at all. So, in the fifteenth century, the search for comfort as such was not foremost. Urban upper classes know how to procure this. And comfort is, in any case, relative. The Quattrocento building and rebuilding craze was the very process of elite consciousness, redefining itself in terms of new needs, new pursuits and satisfactions. In this process, the needs of an emerging new identity were primary: they took the form of a growing resolution to remake or reshape the things around, and first of all the old domestic interiors and exteriors, the great blocks of stone inhabited by the upper-class groups. In effect, this was a quest for greater control over immediate environments. Princes, oligarchs, and rich men desired to rearrange the main objects in their field of vision. They sought to affirm themselves by means of more imposing palazzi, more organized and splendid facades, wider and higher internal spaces, a display of finer manual work of all sorts (from marquetry to hammered metal and leather), a higher finish to things, more rounded edges and polished surfaces, and larger accumulations of objects. There was an escalating taste for grander arches and doorways, carved chimney pieces, coffered ceilings, polychrome ceramic floors, wall hangings, marble plaques, armorial bearings on polychrome enameled terra-cotta, new kinds of sideboards (credenze), racks for caps and headpieces, and colorful earthenware (maiolica). These new furnishings and decorations were, taken in their entirety, the outward signs of inward change. They accorded perfectly with the sharp rise, in the fifteenth century, of fancier and fussier styles of dress, which required finer handiwork. Social classes work the signature of their identities into their possessions and surroundings. And the changing social identity profiled above was one ever more intent on its authority and on forms of display; it was turning more worldly, more refined, more ostentatious, more boastful. We call this 'secularization', that near synonym for the Italian Renaissance; it was the processing of experience along more worldly lines, the process itself of elite and upperclass consciousness. By the 1480s, princes and wealthy men were collecting maps of countries, as well as paintings and drawings of different cities, such as Venice, Paris, Genoa, Cairo, Jerusalem, Florence, and Rome. This aspect of the new worldliness was yet another, if more 710
roundabout, manifestation of the higher certitude and increased assertiveness of the urban ruling groups, as they looked around themselves in rivalry, envy, curiosity, selfsatisfaction, and acquisitive bent. The changing identity of the upper-class groups could have no other form than that of an altered consciousness. Filtering through patronage, it transformed art by making new demands on it. The portrait was the key subject of the new consciousness. Patrons longed to see themselves and those important to them. The demand grew. Every major sculptor and painter produced portrait busts and portraits, sometimes groups of portraits in fresco. In the fourteenth century, profile portraits of donors were occasionally entered, very subordinately, into religious pictures. The equestrian statue of Cangrande della Scala (1330s) stuns us by its remarkably early date. After 1420, portraits edge their way toward the center of religious narrative, as in works by Masaccio, Gozzoli, Fra Filippo, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Carpaccio, and Raphael. There was also a rising and then rocketing demand for individual portraits and portrait busts. The second half of the century saw a traffic in portraits of dignitaries and princes; done on wood and canvas. The latter could be rolled around on a rod and easily transported. The advancing edge of change in art, the vanguard vision, was in the imitation of everyday reality. This is why the portrait was the key subject: in its resolve to copy 'nature', portraiture provided the standard of reality and roused the impulse to catch the immediate world around the sitter. The young Donatello built his fame on his realism. Masaccio, Ghiberti, Uccello, Pisanello, Fra Filippo, Domenico Veneziano - most of the vanguard masters of the age were portraitists of the first rank. This was more strikingly true Michelangelo being perhaps the only exception - of the masters of the High Renaissance. But in the fifteenth century, the portrait was the attempt par excellence to capture the face of contemporary reality; it was a pragmatic coming-to-terms with actual appearance and surfaces. It depended upon a vision of things that did not, however, come forth in isolation. The vision was related directly to the new domineering view of reality; it was related to the growing concentration of wealth and power, which went to enhance the self-confidence of the upper-class groups; and it was part of the building and renovation craze, as princes; oligarchs, and rich men enlarged and reappointed their domestic environments, at the same time moving out, with their larger palazzi, to claim more and more of the urban space. The attendant view of reality - as glimpsed, for example, in militant humanism - was poised, optimistic, and imperious. In epistemological terms, it was a view that took reality to inhere in the everyday world of affairs and manifest sensations. Nature, as that which is looked upon every day, was deemed benign by the groups at the top. It was to be considered so until about 1500, when the 711
concussio1iof foreign invasion shattered the reigning view of reality and the track of upper-class consciousness veered again. Next in importance to the portrait, in Quattrocento painting, was a more general subject already stipulated in detailed contracts of the second quarter of the century. Patrons desired images or views taken 'from life', such as cities, domestic interiors, street scenes, rivers, and mountains. Although an effort to render these had been ma.de by earlier painting, there had been no real program for getting the artist to work 'from nature', as is clear from the formula for invented landscapes in Cennini's Il libro dell' arte. The call for portraits and for images of the life around confronted the artistic imagination with such specific demands that the Renaissance style, with Florentine events as the trigger, was born in this way. No matter that the main themes in painting and sculpture remained predominantly religious; the manner of representation became ever more lifelike. For the source of decisive patronage; the changed consciousness of the upper-class groups, was, as we have found, strongly assertive and self-confident, above all with regard to its place and authority in the world. This explains the remarkable surge of imposing new houses and villas - the true triumphal arches of the victors. In the full Quattrocento world, princes and oligarchs, the rich as well as the privileged, exhibit a heightened hope and confidence in the surrounding world. They believe in their ability to govern and enjoy it, even to impose their will upon it; and so they call for images of themselves and their world, the city and neighboring countryside. This selfassured view of reality has its expression - for all their differing manners - in the luminous clairvoyance and hyper-organized rationalism of Uccello; Castagna; Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Perugino, Antonello, Giovanni Bellini, and Carpaccio. Frederick Hartt has said of Piero, apropos of the Montefeltro portraits, that he 'shows man in complete control of nature.' This is particularly true of the famous Flagellation (Fig. 11), with its cold and radiant geometry. In one way or another, all the designated artists show man in control of nature. For perhaps two generations (c; 14401500), princes and ruling classes enjoyed a kindred vision of the world; it came forth from their bold self-confidence and it imbued humanism with the passionate belief that men could truly imitate the achievements of antiquity and draw positive, applicable precepts from the lessons of history. And the artistic reminiscences of classical Rome, whether in the stances of painted figures or in architectural motifs, served to glorify the present, the us of the present, by linking this us to an impressive and much-admired past. The history of Renaissance art tracks the changing consciousness of the social groups at the forefront of urban life.
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Manner and Style We have seen something about how social views and values may be so altered as to have decisive effects upon artistic content and style. Social identity is the mediator: it transforms social views into an imaginative geometry, or finds correspondences in visual and literary imaginings. The advancing art of the Renaissance will be considered here in terms of one style and a variety of manners. In this view, Masaccio, Piero, and Mantegna worked within the same general style but had different manners, reflecting differences in time, circumstance, and personality. Down to about 1500 or 1510, the advancing style had its lineaments in the endeavor to get close to 'nature ' - to imitate, replicate, or mirror it. By 1520 a new style had emerged, centering on the desire to rival or even to improve upon nature, but often distorting it and in any case drawing away from it, away from an easy ¡or assured commitment to the shapes and surfaces of the everyday world. In the Quattrocento, on the contrary, the leading masters' commitment to nature as quotidian reality set the general guidelines. This is why art historians have often referred to the' pedestrian realism' of much Quattrocento painting. Writing his Speculum lapidum in 1502, C. Leonardi inadvertently summed up the leading fifteenth-century ideal: 'Mantegna has demonstrated for posterity every rule and kind of painting ... he can, in the twinkling of an eye, draw the figures of men and animals of every age and kind, as also the customs, dress and gestures of various peoples in such a way that they almost seem to move.' To the artists and theorists of the middle and later sixteenth century, such painting was dry, prosaic, and literal-minded. If we see the commitment to ordinary appearance (naturn) as providing the standard for the advancing style of the fifteenth century, then what do we say about Sienese painting before 1440, or, for that matter, about painting and sculpture at Venice, Bologna, or Genoa during the first half of the fifteenth century? Such questions misconstrue the aims of this discussion. The unconscious focus of many art historians is the conscious center of attention here: the artistic vanguard, the advancing edge of change that began at Florence with the generation of Donatello and Masaccio. This is an attempt to explain the process and direction of artistic change, not traditional or dilatory taste. The upper-class transformation of identity was in process, and some cities or groups of men went through it sooner than others. In most cities the traditional views and tastes long persisted, or gave way only in part to the new and more purposive vision of quotidian reality. Down to 1440 and beyond, with some exceptions, taste and painting at Siena looked back for models to the great Sienese masters of the fourteenth century and to 713
the graces of International Gothic: to color symbolic and expensive, to an elegantly curving line, an inchoate pictorial space, and mystical subjects mystically treated (e.g., saints bigger than trees or city walls). In the hands of Giova1mi di Paolo and Sani di Pietro, perspective became decoration rather than a means of charting objects in space. As a school for art, quotidian nature and appearance did not easily win the certification of the Sienesc ruling groups. The four or five political blocs in government were too heterogeneous and unsure of themselves, overly subject to decisive pressures from Florence and especially Rome, forced to cleave to cautious policies, and always confronted economically by the business establishments of Lucca and of larger cities, like Florence and Milan. The plastic dynamism and heroic idiom of the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia (d. 1438) were out of place in these circumstances. We need not doubt the allegations concerning his difficult and proud personality. His true competitors were in Florence. He returned from Bologna to his native Siena, probably to be ill at case, and perhaps it took a knighthood to hold him there. The Sienese used his talents but converted the ardor and power of his forms (Fig. 8), one suspects, into a compensatory heroism. Appropriately enough, as John Pope-Hennessy has observed, 'Sienese painting in the fifteenth century developed under an external stimulus and not under an impetus provided from within.' Arguably, upper-class Venice should have held the front line of changing consciousness and worldly taste. Powerful, successful, and ruled by a proud nobility preoccupied with the building of a mainland empire, Venice was the most suitable ground for an optimistic encounter with 'nature', whether on the sea, in the conquered Venetian hinterland, or in the city, which was built on sandbars and piles. In Venice, if anywhere, despite the advance of the Ottoman Turks, the ruling class could afford to glory in the world it had made and controlled. Something like this was in fact to be seen, but in a roundabout, devious fashion. The purposive force which had shaped much of Venice remained attached to a religious grammar. That force was a patriciate which had managed, with a ballast of strong religious ideals, to scour the seas, to turn every chance to profit, to keep a single-minded vision, and to preserve devotion for the large family unit. A traditional religious faith worked, paradoxically, to license commercial and political ruthlessness, and there was no reason to discard that which had always worked. The dilution of the Venetian nobility's religious grammar - the transformation of identity - came in the fifteenth century. Very gradual to begin with, the process was best seen, at first, in the humanism of members of the patriciate, as they turned to antiquity and the literary classics for a divergent ideal, a new civic perspective, a more mundane Christianity. After 1450, the change proceeded with great swiftness, and within a generation Venetian art and humanism 'caught up' with accomplishments at Florence. At Venice, however, the frank encounter with reality as everyday appearance 714
lasted hardly more than a generation: it is in evidence in some of the better-known pictures by Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and Giovanni Mansueti. Then the artistic and more fashionable imagination swerved off into' pronounced degrees of idealization, as in the work of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. Quattrocento Genoa presented a spectacle of political vacillation and instability, as it passed back and forth between French and Milanese hegemony. Right up to 1500 the Genoese nobility was too weak, too divided, to hold unquestioned authority. The major art commissions ¡went to outsiders, above all to Lombard masters who worked in a conservative and traditional vein. Then, in the second half of the Quattrocento, with Vincenzo Foppa, Giovanni Mazzone, and Carlo Braccesco, monied Genoa inclined increasingly toward the marmoreal surfaces and lapidary 'realism' of the North Italian courtly manner. Not until the resurgence of the nobility in the early sixteenth century, and with the coming to Genoa of Raphael's pupils, Giulio Romano and especially Perin del Vaga, was Genoese upper-class taste seen to turn emphatically worldly. The turn, however, favored mannerist forms - rhetoric, grandeur, ultra-idealization, and technical brilliance. These were the compensatory solutions; pitched on an aestheticomoral plane, to the horrendous political strains that gripped the peninsula's upper classes in the age of the Italian Wars. Siena, Venice, and Genoa illustrate the power of local resistance to the vanguard style of the Quattrocento. Traceable in a line of artists from Donatello to Raphael, the style converted the reality of everyday forms and surfaces into a guiding standard. Masaccio, Mantegna, and Carpaccio, for example, worked very close to the standard; others, such as Piero dclla Francesca and Perugino, worked only a little farther away. But all took their bearings from it; all worked in the style: Donatello and Ghiberti (in their bas-reliefs), Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Gozzoli, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Pinturicchio, Verrocchio, Perugino, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Melozzo da Forli, Antonello da Messina, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, Mansueti, and Raphael (e.g., in the Doni portraits). These artists have different manners, in some cases very different manners, but they also share a vision. They all executed portraits and provide glimpses of contemporary life; all studied the sources and modulations of light in the picture space; all render surfaces in high relief (gran rilievo), seek the contours of three-dimensional space, and have an eye for the governing value of the human body's proportions; finally, all strive for clarity and coherence. They suffer; if at all, from a kind of hyper-organization: a view of the world in which objects are perhaps too clearly depicted or too rationally disposed. And here at once we see that Fra Angelico, Domenico Veneziano, Francesco dcl Cossa, Botticelli, and the early Giovanni Bellini also' belong to the list above.
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If the Renaissance style of the Quattrocento is not easy to pin down, the age's variety of artistic manners may seem to present insuperable problems. Not so; but a finer mode of analysis is needed. Characterized above all by its candid acceptance of everyday visual 'truths' as the guiding .standard, the Renaissance style was an expression of the vanguard currents in upper-class consciousness; it was the expression of a changing identity in an age when the groups at the top could afford so much self-confidence, as in the program of humanism, that they surrounded themselves boldly with self-images and. pictorial reflections of their urban world. Boldly, too, they demanded more living space in their town houses and villas; and they set out to rearrange their field of vision, as well in their domestic interiors as in the beginnings of urban renewal. Their confident, humanizing Christianity held the implicit assumption that the world could be turned into a limpid and rational place, and thus be made more easily subject to the control of mind and authority, as in Venice's readiness to rearrange the political map of Italy or Ludovico Sforza's belief in his ability to orchestrate political destinies, and precisely as in the ordered clarities of the artistic style which reveals the identity of the ruling groups. All in all, the view was unflinchingly optimistic. This confidence existed in the work of Gentile da Fabriano (d. 1427) and his pupil Pisanello (d. 1455), both of whom combined fresh interests with a late allegiance to the International Gothic style. Gentile's altarpiece (Fig. 19), done for a rich Florentine oligarch; Palla di Nofri Strozzi, teems with the images of cities; travel, cultivated fields; exotic animals, exotic dress, hounds, falcons, golden spurs, attendants, lowly grooms, ostentatious brocades; and a splash of gold-leaf paint: all the trappings of nobility, power, and money. Passages of bravura foreshortening point up the symbols of noble rank: richly harnessed horses, spurs, and birds of prey, while cities and their spectral power the 'signs of civilization' - appear everywhere. There is a similar assembly of aristocratic self-images in Pisanello' s St George and the Princess, painted for the Pellegrini chapel in St Atiastasia, Verona: hounds; foreshortened horses with resplendent harnessing; a striking elegance of line along the forehead and imposing headpiece of the princess, a hovering city with white towers, and in the upper left; hanging prominently from a gibbet, two corpses beside a turreted mass of urban masonry- as if the looming power of the signorial city had not already been asserted. The advancing style of the Quattrocento would take these scenes and do a more direct projection of them, in accordance with the new order of perception that drew its models from quotidian nature. In this enterprise, the group portrait was a subject always very near to the main guideline: thus, for example, Fra Filippo's Obsequies for St Stephen (Prato; Duomo), Mantegna's fresco of the Gonzaga family (Fig. 17), Gozzoli's Processioti of the Magi (Florence, Medici Palace), Cossa's portrait of Borso d'Este and his courtiers (Ferrara, Schi716
fanoia), Melozzo da Forli's fresco of Pope Sixtus IV and his nephews (Fig. 16), Botticelli's Purification of the Leper (Vatican, Sistine Chapel), Gentile Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza San Marco (Venice, Accademia), Domenico Ghirlandaio’s frescos in the Tornabuoni and Sassetti chapels (Florence), and Carpaccio’s A Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross (Venice, Addademia). Even passages in Raphael’s Mass of Bolsena (Vatican, Stanza d’Eliodoro), notably the group portraits on the right (Fig. 18), are amaxingly close to the standard of Quattrocento realism. The problem of ‘manner' remains. If we emphasize impersonal social processes, while yet allowing for differences among artistic personalities, how do we account for the variety of manners in Renaissance art? Here again we return to social identities, to their disguised or transmuted forms in artistic expression. The dominating Renaissance identities are, of course, upper class: ‘courtly’, ‘aristocratic', 'bourgeois'. But there are also profiles that arc more or less oligarchic, older or more parvenu, more land - or more trade-oriented, provincial or cosmopolitan; and all draw upon elements from the dominant identities, for the influence of these is strong and often decisive. The Renaissance style of the Quattrocento is first fully delineated in Masaccio's Brancacci frescoes (Figs 4, 5); but the manner is severe, direct, penetrating, vigorouscompelling and lyrical without being in the least rhetorical. In the 1420s, such realism was astounding for the few who understood but very likely baffling and even repellent -the idiom was strange -for most people even in Florence. The vision was an upperclass one: intellectual, rational, bold, an articulation in full control of the visual cone. It designated a clear and firm hold over the world that lay before the eyes of contemporaries. These qualities were linked in consciousness to the most enterprising, traveled, and self-confident part of the Florentine community, the political and commercial upper class. But there was nothing as yet aristocratic or courtly about this vision/style: for it did not include enough that was traditional and hence comfortable; it was too austere, that is, not playful, not dressed up, not' correctly' idealized; nor did it obviously flatter the patron, like the manner in Gentile da Fabriano's Strozzi altarpiece. But the resources of the style were instrumental; in other hands, they could result in a flattering and fetching manner. Focused perspective, controlled light, modeling, studied anatomies, and right proportions: these were the means to project self-images. Masaccio himself titillated clients in his Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 3), where in the center right we see portraits of the patrons, the rich Pisan notary, Ser Giuliano degli Scarsi, and his son. To the display of horses and many spots of gold, the artist added late-Gothic touches, as in certain heads and the gently elongated bodies of the two Pisans and standing magus. From between the heads of two horses, one groom strains flirtatiously to catch our eyes,' really the painter's eye, as if also trying to catch his own reflection in a mirror. The effect, in a work of 1426, must have been startling. 717
The next generation of Florentine painters timed the new style by softening its austerities and mixing it with more conventional accents. Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Uccello, Gozzoli, Baldovinetti, and Domenico Veneziano can manage Masaccio's sculptural modeling, controlled light, and three-dimensional spaces. They also, however, adduce a cheerful luminosity, dainty idealizations, and strong traditional elements, such as pretty Gothic heads and suavely elongated forms: the lot calculated to satisfy a rich clienteleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s taste for optimism, for more conventional and familiar pieties, and for the contours that were necessarily appealing because they reflected partly, and partly idealized, an enclosed urban world which that clientele ruled and enjoyed. Cosimo de' Medici (d. 1464) doled his favors out to Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo. His son, Piero (d. t, 1469), who was no less astute, hired Gozzoli, Uccello, Veneziano, and probably Baldovinctti. These were artists of the first rank; history has judged them so; but they worked to taste. Uccello's use of perspective went toward ornament; his orthogonals turned into erudite entertainment. The three largc panels of his playful and gay Battle of San Romano (Fig. 14) ended quite rightly in the master bedroom of the Medici palace. His Hunt (Oxford, Ashmolean) might also have ended there, as did a picture on the same subject by Pesellino. Jousts and hunting, celebrated by contemporary poets too, were among the most diverting pastimes of the Laurentian circle. Uccello's Battle and Hunt could be read as social breviaries; they were also pure pleasure for Lorenzo, one of the earliest collectors to theorize about delight as the true end of paintings Lorenzo possessed portraits of the duke of Urbino, Duke Galcazzo Sforza of Milan, the condottieri Francesco Sforza and Gattamelata, and a tapestry of the duke of Burgundy on a hunt. Here were reflections, direct and devious, of Lorenzo's preoccupation with power. In the 1470s and 1480s, he was the near-lord of 'republican' Florence. By the 1450s the style invented in Florence was being adapted to courtly and aristocratic tastes. The Italian upper classes were on an aristocratic course, in republican as in signorial cities, and it was natural for them, in their self-assurance and deepening worldliness, to turn to the new style for images of themselves, their surroundings, their patron saints, and their enthroned Madonnas done up in lush brocades, precious stones, and attitudes of refined detachment. This refracted or filtered quest for suitable self-images gave rise to a varied manner especially fit for princely courts, for merchant bankers and oligarchs (who often numbered aristocrats and princes among their friends), and for small-town noblemen (e.g., Perugians, Marchigiani), who occasionally appeared at some of the courts. Of the Quattrocento painters who gave much time to working for princes and courtiers, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca Leonardo da Vinci apart - must count as the leading masters. Piero spent about three years working for the Este at Ferrara and completed major works for the lords of Rimini and Urbino. Mantegna was for 718
forty-six years court painter for the Gonzaga at Mantua. A group of lesser masters Tura, Cossa, Roberti - executed important fresco cycles, now mostly destroyed, at the Este court of Ferrara. After 1470, Cossa moved on to serve the Bcntivoglio of Bologna, a lordly family, as well as the Griffoni and other prominent Bolognese families. In Umbria and Tuscany, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, and Perugino catered in part to the taste of smaller courts, eminent noblemen, and rich merchants. They also executed major commissions for the papal court. Finally, there was the provincial-aristocratic manner of masters such as Carlo and Vittore Crivelli, who painted hundreds of pictures in the Marches and farther north. A throng of lesser craftsmen also worked in the aristocratic-courtly vein. Variations in accent aside, the aristocratic-courtly manner after 1450 has a strong predilection for highly finished surfaces, meticulous detail, sharp contours and edges, and a line tending to break or jerk as it curves. These traits often go with an allpervading clarity and a fondness for luminous coloration or brilliant light, as in the famous San Bernardino cycle (Fig. 12) and Piero's Flagellation (Fig. 11). Marmoreal or lapidary textures predominate - of garments, surroundings, and even flesh. In the hands of the leading masters, the picture space is likely to be thoroughly organized: geometry takes over. A taste abounds for bravura passages of perspective foreshortening, though this passes into cuteness or provincialism when overdone. At times, even in work of the highest quality, the picture is crowded with objects and rich decoration arches, thrones, other architectural elements, putti, floral and fanciful patterns, garlands of fruit and flowers, polychrome marbles, and luxuriously embossed fabrics. The favorite subjects arc religious - Madonnas, patron saints, and stories from the Bible. There was also, as we have seen, a heavy demand for portraits and, later on, for mythological scenes. Finally, content and manner arc often combined with a plethora of Roman imperial ingredients (a figurative ideology of grandeur), with heroics (e.g., St George, St Sebastian, Hercules, the Flagellation of Christ), with elegance of stance and gesture, and, in the provincial schools, with a medley of self-conscious mannerisms. The aristocratic-courtly vision betrays such a firm and almost hypnotic grasp of detail, so confident a control of spatial relations, such optimism in its preference for an all-pervading luminosity that the viewpoint - the identity in question - speaks for itself: it is the window of a palace, and the resulting view is for those in command of things, for those who dominate their environment. The luxury in this view belongs to two features: to a pronounced decorative element which borders on symbolism, and to the near-hypnotic grasp of detail, as in pictures where objects are microscopically observed (Figs 13, 21, 22). The devotion to detail is a late-medieval touch, found in northern Europe too and often given symbolic overtones or ascribed to a love of nature; but it is 719
also a mode of playful self-indulgence. The eye is invited to dwell on strikingly observed surfaces; in other words, the love of detail is also part of the larger demand for ornamentation. Here is a vision of space as surplus, space for sensuous enjoyment rather than for use, and in this respect it departs completely from Masaccio's manner and economy. The Renaissance theme of 'the dignity of man' belonged to an upper-class vision. It was the slogan for an age when princes and ruling elites had so much faith in their own leadership that they could also think of themselves as lords over 'nature'. The same viewpoint is present in art, in the aristocratic-courtly manner. Nothing better illustrates this than one of the most salient and persistent motifs of ltalian painting in the second half of the fifteenth century: the imagery of strange rock formations - architectonic, fantastic, lovingly delineated (Figs 12, 13). These forms appear as background or flanking landscape, usually in the vicinage of a city. Again and again we find, on close scrutiny, that we cannot tell whether the oddly mannered constructions arc natural geological formations or the ruins of ancient structures and urban sites. The guiding vision is intensely urban, the forms often resembling or suggesting bits of city. When it looked to the rural space outside cities, this taste drew away from endowing it with an air of naturalness. Rather, the countryside had to be altered to hint at the grand surroundings of princes and oligarchies, with their great masses of cut and shaped and arranged stone, the proud palazzi and churches under their possessive patronage. This was selfconfidence of a sort prepared to remake the face of nature. Precisely this is why Borso d' Este, lord of Ferrara, was not mad when he decided to have a mountain built on the flat Ferrarese landscape, in January 1471. All the peasants of the region were put under a decree of forced labor; ships, wagons, and carts were employed to haul earth and rocks to the site; and the enterprise was pursued, despite much complaining by the populace. Borso's extravagant gesture sums up the special consciousness of the age, the absolute self-assurance in the upper strata of society and the complaining but coercible docility below. The oeuvre of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) throws light on the social calligraphy of the aristocratic-courtly manner. He was not, perhaps, the ideal court painter, being too passionate and intellectual. Yet there is more candor in his vision than in the work of lesser court masters. The main figure in his Madonna of the Stonecutters (Fig. 22) is put up against an explosion of stone; in the right background we see little men cutting into the huge mass and quarrying stone, sections of which have already been turned into part of a clearly rounded column a1id base. It is as if raw nature is to be transformed into a city before our eyes: again, a triumphant, domineering vision. The motif is repeated in his Copenhagen Christ in a Tomb, showing, in the right background, some stonecutters, a recently carved statue, and again a half-made column; or is this, 720
under the hill of Calvary, an archaeological site? Specialists associate these images with Mantegna's keen interest in Roman antiquity. Of course. But classicizing attitudes were easily joined to the militant self-assurance of Quattrocento ruling elites: the Renaissance will to remake the natural environment, and the imitative enthusiasm for the clan of antiquity, were different expressions of the same self-confidence. Antiquity was used to dress up the robustness of Mantegna's upper-class world. And there is no doubt as to where his aspiring identity lay: he longed to be a nobleman, obtained a Palatinate countship from the Gonzaga marquis of Mantua, and built a stylish house as soon as he could afford it. The Gonzaga cherished the feats of Julius Caesar and had Mantegna celebrate these in a lost cycle, probably in fresco. He executed a series of the deeds of Hercules, now also lost, in one of the Gonzaga castles. The elements of spectacle in the nine panels at Hampton Court, The Triumph of Caesar, reveal Mantegna's heroic manner and catch a self-image of the Gonzaga court. Art historians find 'a hard, masculine world of valour, discipline, and leadership' in Mantegna's view of imperial Rome. His life-size group portrait of the Gonzaga family in the Camera degli sposi (Fig. 17) was 'done in the grand manner'. The low optical viewpoint makes the figures loom up, magnifying their stature. E. Tietze-Conrat has observed that their 'self-assured power' was originally more striking, 'before repeated restorations softened them to the taste of a later public. A less reworked portion, such as the Death of Orpheus on the ceiling, bears witness to the sheer brute strength of the original painting.' The artist turned his decorative assemblies into political statements: space as pleasure and surplus was pointedly associated with authority. Mantegna's cosmopolitan intellectualism was put entirely in the service of power, and religious themes were not allowed to get in the way of this. His manner was flattering, heroic, propagandistic, and highly decorative but astringent too. Just before moving to the court of Mantua in 1459, he completed major works for Venetian aristocrats: Gregorio Correr, the rich abbot of San Zeno in Verona, and Giacomo Antonio Marcello, governor of Padua. The social moorings of his manner are already evident in the San Zeno Altarpiece (Fig. 20), commissioned by Correr. We look upon a closely, packed assembly of figures, books, fruits, garlands, ornate frieze, medallions, piers, clouds, and patterned marbles. There is scarcely a passage untouched by ornamentation. Such visual wealth doubtless made for a satisfying altarpiece; but the idiom would have been strange in Florence save to the most aristocratic and traveled part of the bourgeoisie. The emphasis on luxurious surfaces and intricate detail responds to the patron's self-satisfaction and to his taking for granted of such surroundings; it also draws attention to the man's ability to hire fine craftsmanship on a grand scale. The result is that Mantegna's control of the picture space threatens to crack under the massed 721
weight of so many objects and ornaments. Control and ostentation conflict: the San Zeno Altarpiece dramatizes the concealed social oppositions between rational enterprise and unfettered expense, between space for use and space for ostentatious enjoyment. Mantegna's art somehow joined - but did not transcend - conflicting social identities. In Carlo and Vittore Crivelli, we get a provincial variation of the aristocraticcourtly manner. After some troubles in Venice and a stint in Dalmatia, the two brothers settled in the Marches in the late r46os. They lived and worked separately in and around Fermo and Ascoli, serving a small-town lay and clerical nobility. Carlo's well-known Annunciation (Fig. 21) uses the virtuoso ¡perspective of the Renaissance style in a setting of overstated elegance and fastidious detail. Absolute spatial control is foiled by the clutter of decoration. The result is a ludic effect; a hard but candied surface. Geometry's invitation to the mind is neutralized by the assault of ornament and precious detail. The Crivelli tend to turn aspects of the aristocratic-courtly manner into stereotypes. In keeping with the manner, they favor a clear light, an incisive line, touches of costly decoration; marbled surfaces, and an assured spatial control. But they fuse these with a regressive provincial taste: swathes of gold-leaf paint, rich Gothic-type frames, crowded ornamentation, the heavy use of direct traditional symbolism, and, in their representation of Madonnas, a colder and more detached figure (the late incarnation of a fourteenth-century or even Byzantine type). To these elements the brothers brought an ideal of refinement which often slipped over into clichÊ: as in finely cracked floors or parapets, sinuous tresses of hair, fine-grained wood, heads tilted downward in studied foreshortening, the elegantly lipped wounds of Christ, and strikingly long fingers and hands, sometimes a choreography of these, all smoothly curved to win the viewer's admiration. The result was a mannered elegance joined with fuss, achieved mainly by means of clichÊ; and loved by a clientele that was not overly sophisticated. The Crivelli inundated the Marches with hundreds of their Madonnas. The imperious feature of the aristocratic-courtly identity had a perfect instrument in the much-favored low optical viewpoint, which made figures seem to tower in importance (Fig. r7). Melozzo da Forli's Sixtus IV Appointing Platina (Fig. 16) works in this fashion, while also fixing the personalities in the steely outlines of the individual portraits, just as in Mantegna's handling of the Gonzaga group. The manner of these painters - Tura, Cossa, Pinturicchio, and the Crivelli also come to mind -had a persistently static note, whether in its chiselled line, candied surfaces, preference for the profile portrait, exaggerated detail, or the frozen postures of figures. The fixed note came 722
out of the aristocratic-courtly identity as a function ¡in part of the emphasis on social caste, the arrogant belief in the control over' nature', and the nimbus-like effect around the prince when he was seen as the end or culmination of all social mobility. Caste, the dominant view of reality, and the effect of the prince: these contributed to a certain rigidity of perception or outlook, and more so in the provinces, where tradition was stronger, than in the cosmopolitan signorial cities. Moreover, after 1450, the upperclass approval or validation of everyday reality went far enough to encourage the artistic conversion of surface appearances into 'essences' - another reason for the fascination with marbled surfaces, blinding detail, hard profiles, and an adamantine line. These 'essences', rising up from a self-assured command over the surrounding environment, were the projected ghosts of a haughty and bullying elite in the provinces, the courts, and the narrowing front ranks of urban oligarchy. Only the shock of prolonged foreign invasion would shake up the dominant identities after 1500. At Florence, upper-class identity was organized around politics as well as commerce and profit; hence it was more yielding, more adaptable and practical. Style here, accordingly, throughout the century, was more searching, less predictable, often more intellectual, and the result was a more innovative manner. Venice, with its fixed tiers of citizen and aristocrat, had long provided an environment of stability and an ideology of order and supposed justice. The ruling class had marked distinctions political and pecuniary, but within their tiers aristocrats and citizens had a strong sense of their social identities. A stream of Venetian portraits tell us that they were a self-satisfied lot. They knew themselves to be powerful in Italy, but powerful only in their collectivity. This explains the great importance to them of their integrationist ideology. In the 1420s they were already having the hall of the Great Council decorated with individual portraits of every doge and with large mural paintings of the celebrated events of Venetian history. By the 1470s they considered this hall 'one of the foremost showpieces of our city'. In their private life and intimate tastes, however, there seems to have been little need for the artistic rhetoric of heroism, at all events not until the humiliating encounter with the Ottoman navy at Zonchio (1499) and the harrowing defeat at Agnadello (1509). The call to sec and to show themselves in portraits had started in the 1460s or 1470s and soon became fashionable. From about 1450, as is evident from his sketchbooks, Jacopo Bellini had longed to experiment with the geometry of complicated architectural constructs and the placement of figures within more ample slots of space. This was a turning toward the urban realism of the Renaissance style. But his conservative clientele avoided this route. It was only around 1470 that the vanguard of taste in Venice broke decisively out of the old forms. Then Jacopo's sons were among the first to profit from and reflect the turn in consciousness.
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Venetian emphasis on the collectivity is evident in the processions and group portraits done by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Mansueti, and others. Here were the self-images of groups, and art historians have held that this form was especially favored by the men of the big and officious religious confraternities (scuole grandi), whose active membership consisted mainly of high-ranking citizens and patricians. Later, there was a taste for family groupings, often of the males only, but individual portraits also catered to the worldliness of the Venetian upper class. At first there was a preference for the sharp, limpid spaces and crisp detail of Antonello da Messinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oils and Giovanni Bellini's work to about 1490. Taste then inclined toward the late Bellini's atmospheric manner, in portraits as in larger pictures and altar-pieces. Giovanni's workshop was the largest and busiest in Venice around 1500. At the end of the fifteenth century, Venetian artists worked in a variety of manners: that of the Vivarini, for example, was regressive, hard, ornate - rather Mantegnaesque; in Carpaccio the manner was prosy and clear; in Bellini, tonal values were foremost, making for a filtered or atmospheric effect. But these manners also had much in common: modeling in high relief, clear outlines (save for the late Bellini), luminosity of color, more or less clarity of detail, an assured handling of three-dimensional space, and a moderate to higher degree of ornamentation, depending upon the occasion and private taste. The different manners pivoted, in short, in a basic commitment to urban realism. This allegiance, like the certitude present in the accent on order and clarity, catered to the self-confidence of the upper-class groups and to belief in their ability to rule the environment. Entering Venetian painting in the course of the 1460s and 1470s, urban realism immediately triumphed. But by 1510, throughout Italy, the determining, underlying confidence was collapsing, owing to foreign invasion, war, and a chain of political earthquakes. Giorgioneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s superlative dreaminess, hinted at even in the late Bellini, played around an evasive mode and already gave expression to the oncoming retreat from quotidian reality. Space Real and Imaginary Perceptions of the urban space changed in the fifteenth century, and artists were there to register the change. They 'encoded' it in style. Their works bear all the marks of the change, but it can be rendered back into the idioms of social experience only by means of special analysis. We have seen that the dominant social groups solidified their authority in the course of the Quattrocento, as the political apathy of the lower classes deepened, while the middle classes, already much weakened economically, were more harried fiscally. The groups in command underwent a change in consciousness and in identity. We tracked 724
the change in their building of new palazzi, in the renovation of their old palazzi, the reappointment of their domestic interiors, and in their groping out for an array of new furnishings and decorative fittings. Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502) - the Sienese engineer, architect, painter, sculptor, and writer -was one of the first observers to urge that the houses of merchants and small tradesmen be constructed with a clean separation between the rooms intended for family use and those for the conduct of business. But Francesco was theorizing. Moreover, as a working architect, he was writing not from the standpoint of the petty tradesman but from that of the groups at the top. Here were the patrons for architecture, and he was voicing their needs and new inclinations. Indeed, when writing his architectural treatise, Trattato di architettura civile e militare, in the later 1470s, he was employed at the court of Urbino. In the economics of the fifteenth century, new buildings belonged to the initiative of the powerful and rich. The middle and lower classes would go on living, as always, in the crowded conditions that joined home to workshop, to store, or to warehouse. These conditions were far more realistic than spatial arrangements predicated upon the family's reduced productivity, which tradesmen could not, in any case, afford. The passion for building and redecoration, especially noticeable after 1440, had its interpreters. Looking to their peers and patrons, the humanists disseminated an ideology of magnificence, according to which wealthy and powerful men displayed their high status or proved their virtue by showing liberality and spending lavishly on architectural projects such as churches, chapels, palazzi, villas; and new public buildings. In this argument, borrowed in part from Aquinas and Aristotle, the humanists were doing little more than bringing Ciceronian Latin and classical allusions to a feeling that was already strong among rich men and princes. They lent their Latinity to the glorification of worldly success. By 1460 a number of major building projects answered to the new ideology, and later on there would be hundreds more - projects associated with the Medici, Rucellai, Pitti, and Pazzi families of Florence, the Bentivoglio of Bologna, the Raimondi and Stanga of Cremona, the Este lords of Ferrara; the Gonzaga of Mantua, the duke of Urbino, the new duke of Milan (Francesco Sforza), and the Sienese nobleman become Pope Pius II. Thus the urban drive for grandeur and for more ample living spaces sprang from the new needs and wishes of the commanding social groups. As the political and monied elite spread out and pre-empted more urban spate, all others had to be content with less. When about 1500 Duke Ercole d'Este greatly extended Ferrara's walls and tripled the enclosed area, more urban space was created ex novo, but this was rare. Few princes had the revenue or resources in forced labor to turn their capital cities into showpieces. Instead; the building boom required some urban clearance: many old houses and shops were tom down to make room for the new palazzi. 725
Such was the setting for the first treatises on .architecture in modem history. And from the first, the theorists - Alberti, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo - conceived of urban space as a totality; they reflected upon the nature of urban sites and contemplated the construction of whole cities. Alberti and his successors took much guidance and material from De architectura by Vitruvius, the Roman architect of the first century B.C.; but this text had been looked at occasionally and even studied during the Middle Ages, In effect, tl1e rediscovery of Vitruvius was grounded in Quattrocento experience: in upper-class demand, in the building craze, the ideology of magnificence, and the rising awareness that elites could reapportion or remake the urban space if they so willed. So was born the Renaissance interest in 'the ideal city'. Here power and imagination united and the ensuing vision of space was domineering, moved by a faith in men's ability to control the spatial continuum. Appropriately, therefore, Renaissance treatises on architecture are profoundly classconscious. They distinguish carefully among the kinds of residences fit for noblemen, for professional men, for rich merchants, and for petty tradesmen. Country dwellings are also treated according to social rank. Moreover, in their conception of improved or ideal cities, the theorists have definite views concerning the most fitting sites for the hierarchy of trades and occupations. Thus, because of the attendant sights and smells, tanners and butchers were not to be allowed to concentrate in the 'more honorable' parts of the city - namely, the main thoroughfares, the principal public squares, and the areas adjacent to the seats of power. These sites were more appropriate for the luxurious silk trade (Francesco di Giorgio) or for those who served expensive tastes, like the goldsmiths (Alberti). Leonardo imagined a city on two levels: the upper one, turned to the sun, for the upper classes; the lower - with its streets backing onto the upper streets by means of stairs - for the workers and 'crowd of paupers'. Palladio, in the sixteenth century; took a softer line: he wanted special streets only for animals and for the work carts. But the great humanist Alberti planned a city (c. 1450) which divided rich from poor, so as to keep the important and dignified families away from the noises of petty tradesmen and from the eyes and evil influence of the 'scoundrel rabble'. In its more extreme form, his circular plan called for two walled cities, one held concentrically inside the other. The poor were to be enclosed within the inner city (De re aedificatoria, Bk V, Chaps. I, 6). Francesco di Giorgio and Alberti flatly declared that human society, to exist at all, requires social divisions and varieties of skills, wherefore some men are naturally dominant over others, the few over the many, mind over body. Indeed, certain men are born to rules. This way of reasoning - a classic ideological formulation was meant to justify the claims of princes, particularly in their need of arms and fortifications, but the argument also turned fully in favor of urban oligarchy. 726
It follows that the new perception of space - living space, urban space, imaginary space -came forth from 'material' realities and was filtered through social consciousness. The changing identity of the dominant social groups, tracked in their buildings and patronage, had a decisive effect upon architects and artists, more than has ever been supposed. Any plan to reorganize the urban space, however dreamlike its goals, was bound to favor the urban elites, unless it also looked to fundamental social changes. For no ideal city was possible, nor could the space of the existing cities be reorganized, save by a relocation of the urban population. But unless the relocation accorded more meterage to the humbler social classes -and this presupposed an improvement in their lot the redistribution of space would go overwhelmingly to the service of grandeur: to vast public squares (a la Perugino, Fig. 10), wider and straight streets (Fig. 15), and larger buildings or spacious interiors (Mantegna, Antonello, the Lippi, Raphael, and others). This was signorial space: impressive and triumphal voids. Social preconceptions made it impossible to plan the restructuring of cities except by allotting more space to the powerful and less to the powerless. Architectural theorists and visionaries were not radicals: they dreamed in accord with the realities of the day, and these were stacked in favor of power and the class of important patrons. The 'ideal city' of the Quattrocento was politically a deeply, conservative conception. It was a response to the rising demand, voiced by princes and urban elites, for grandeur and show, order and ample spaces, finesse and finished surfaces. Where reliable information is obtainable, we find artists and writers whose political and social views are indistinguishable from those of their patrons. In fact, being socially ambitious, like Mantegna, Signorelli, Raphael, Giorgione, and many another, artists could be brusquely committed to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;classâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. In a letter written about 1501 to the Elector Frederick duke of Saxony, the Venetian painter Jacopo de' Barbari, who had a keen interest in perspective and urban cartography, urged that he declare painting to be the eighth liberal art and that only those men schooled in the seven liberal arts and 'noble both by birth and money' be allowed to practice it. Barbari emphasized the intellectuality and loftiness of painting. Painters should work for praise, not profit. Validated by the groups in command, the dominant perception of space emphasized number, measurement, and proportion. Articulate contemporaries held that arithmetic and geometry gave the way to understand and dominate space. Eugenio Garin has stressed the fact that 'we find a great confidence in the power and virtue of man in the 15th century.' All the period's writings on architecture are buoyed up by a sense of technological and intellectual triumph. We detect the note of self-assurance even in the perspective sketches of artists such as Paolo Uccello and Jacopo Bellini, and the architectural drawings of Francesco di Giorgio and Giuliano da Sangallo.
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If the concern for signorial space had touched architects only, this discussion would be complete, but it also affected the painters and sculptors of the vanguard. Much of their most interesting work betrays a preoccupation with the frozen spaces of the ideal city that is to say, with unified geometrical compositions, always on an architectural base or within a broad architectural frame-work, and usually in or beside the confines of a city. We have only to think of Donatello's perspective bas-reliefs, Jacopo Bellini's sketchbooks, Mantegna's destroyed Ovetari frescoes, the perspective Annunciations by Filippo Lippi and Carlo Crivelli, the Flagellations by Piero della Francesca (Fig. 9) and Francesco di Giorgio (Fig. 9), Antonello da Messina's St Sebastian (Dresden), Perugino's Christ Giving Keys to St Peter (Fig. 10), and Raphael's School of Athens. All these illustrate the ideal city's aristocratic voids: vast organized spaces, or spaces more neatly boxed and absolutely controlled. We see spacious piazze, sharply receding perspective views with flanking buildings, crisply organized architectural constructs, or arches and columns looming in the near background and suggesting a monumental, marbled city all around. These spatial concerns appear even in the work of artists whose lyricism supposedly turned them against the lapidary structuring of space: Botticelli, for example, in both his Uffizi and his Washington, D.C., Adoration of the Magi. The rational analysis of space in Quattrocento art is not just space seen geometrically from a single viewpoint, perspective; it is also urban space, inseparable from the architecture of cities; space delineated by stone pavements (the perspective or reticulated platform), large rooms with coffered ceilings and checkered floors, angular views of monumental rectangular forms, and a rich variety of architectural members, In the early Netherlandish masters, the introduction of buildings and receding streets into rural backgrounds 'to stimulate the illusion of space ... is connected with the embarrassment which these masters experienced in developing pure landscape from the point of view of perspective.' And in Italian painting, many a rural background - by Uccelio, Mantegna, Cossa, and even Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo - is hardly more than a fanciful urban environment. In 1425, Brunelleschi, possibly the first man to work out the geometry of focused perspective, plotted his views from Florence's two principal points: from just inside the main entrance to the cathedral, looking out to the Baptistery; and from one corner of the main government square, looking toward the great palazzo, the seat of power. Samuel Y. Edgerton has argued that the preoccupation with linear perspective was an integral part of die moral quest to match the tidiness and mystic harmony of 'God's geometrically ordered universe'. In other words, in line with the central argument of these pages, the commitment to linear perspective moved from a sense of having discerned the nature of God's mastery and was at the same time an effort to imitate His grand design. Men would be gods.
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We return, accordingly, to the domineering city: to the viewpoint and tastes of those who ruled it. The perfected forms of the imaginary ideal city - grand, symmetrical, proportioned, in fixed optical recession - went forth from a wish for control over the whole environment and from the implicit assumption that this was possible. The quest for the control of space in architecture, painting, and bas-relief sculpture was not analogous to a policy for more hegemony over the entire society; it belonged, rather, to the same movement of consciousness. Behind the two different enterprises was the same drive to comprehend the environment: to convert the surroundings, urban and even rural, to a 'known' field. With an astonishing appropriateness, accordingly, the Vitruvian texts suddenly sprang to life and the human body, in keeping with those texts, was turned into a standard for proportions in architecture and painting. Human head and body, for example, were capital and column; or the body might be laid out along the outlines of a church design; and the tips of a man's arms and legs, when spreadeagled, became guiding coordinates for the supposedly 'perfect' forms, the square and circle. The confidence and self-glorification of the fifteenth century are visible here, in the stress on planning and on the human body as universal standard. Historians see this 'heroic' vision as a general characteristic of the period down to about 1490. Not so. We should guard against ascribing to a whole society that which pertained only to the upper class, above all to its leading groups. The same mistake is usually made in praise concerning 'the dignity of man'. Though humanists sometimes credited all men potentially with this, neither the tone of triumph nor the cult of self-glorification can be explained save by reference to the consciousness of the dominant social groups. The Christ figure aside, the reigning images of Quattrocento art are those of saints, princes, courtiers, oligarchs, and rich men. The pagan gods, toys for the playful andeducated fancy of upper-class audiences, were only just beginning their pictorial fortunes we have taken note of the muted desire to remake the urban space in accord with the demands and self-esteem of the social groups in command. With the elimination of symbolic size and color from painting, pictorial composition became the means to indicate importance. Space also was a means: the cubic illusion which invested each figure with its proper dignity. We have only to study the articulation of space in five of the century's greatest masters Masaccio, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, and Leonardo - to see that it was used to single out, to point up, or to encircle and 'hold' the most important figures. Up to the beginnings of Mannerism, amplitude of space was a cipher for power and dignity; it possessed a symbolic virtue, as in representations of Christ, Pilate, the Madonna, St Sebastian, St Jerome, and Hercules. So also, in numerous pictures, the space that went around princes, oligarchs, and rich patrons served to enhance their presence. For the stately rooms of much Quattrocento painting, the vast squares envisaged by Perugino and Raphael, and the great crystalline or resonant spaces of Cossa, Signorelli, Antonello, Leonardo, Giovani Bellini, and oth729
ers are not living spaces for humble men but rather for a society of upper-class saints: the members of an urban elite, including the worldly heads of rich churches and convents. So we get back to self-images or, rather, to the appropriate settings and spaces for the prestigious self-images of the age. And if rich parvenus also commissioned pictures with such spaces, this is because the history of 'high' culture in the Italian Renaissance was in the domination of a few social identities, and new men were ready to change, ready to exchange one identity for another.
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