Figure 7 Albrecht Dürer, Hercules at the crossroads, c. 1498, engraving
Renaissance painting in the lagoon city of Venice in north-east Italy may appear to follow along the same lines as Florence and Rome, at least in so far as it imitates nature, featuring rounded figures placed in convincing three-dimensional spaces. But closer attention reveals that Venice (like so many other artistic centres across Italy and Europe) had its own very particular approach to making art. With its long-standing political and trading connections in the east (most importantly the spice trade with the Levant area on the Black Sea) Venice’s cultural orientation was very different from that of Florence or Rome.
The famous onion domes of its main church of St Mark’s were based on those of the Orthodox church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul); inside, glittering medieval mosaics on the walls and ceilings recalled the churches of Byzantium rather than Rome. Venice was to this extent distanced from the westward-looking culture of other parts of Italy. Although its artists certainly moved toward illusionistic naturalism from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, the local tradition maintained a vital connection with the sensual values of the east, granting colour, texture, and surface a central expressive role. The disegno-based intellectual classicism of Central Italy can appear cold and formal when compared with Venetian colour or colore.
If artists in Florence and Rome used an increasingly selective kind of naturalism based on the sculptural models of classical antiquity, then the approach to nature of leading Venetian painters such as Giovanni Bellini (1431/6–1516) and his pupil Giorgione (1478/80–1510) remained more direct. Their paintings were based more closely on immediate sensual appearances than on abstracted or intellectualised forms or ideas. In this regard, the work of the Venetian school was closer to that of contemporary artists working in Flanders or Germany. Venetian trading connections with northern Europe were particularly strong, and the interchange of artistic ideas across the Alps once more followed established economic links. It is no accident that the great painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) of Nuremberg chose to base himself in Venice rather than Florence or Rome on his two extended visits to Italy.
Dürer enjoyed and responded to a vibrant artistic culture in Venice which had already proved responsive to the direct kind of realism in northern art. But Dürer was a truly international figure, and was more widely interested in Italian Renaissance artistic culture, such that he also engaged with current Central Italian ideas about perspective, ideal proportion, and the need to emulate classical sculptural models. In his synthetic approach he was unusual among German artists of his time. The other northern master discussed in this chapter was simply not concerned with the kind of art being produced in Florence and Rome, and probably knew little about it. The intricate yet monumental limewood sculptures of Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460–1531), who worked predominantly in Würzburg, are very far from Michelangelo’s muscular marbles. But Riemenschneider’s confident independence from Italian classicism tells us something very important about the way that localism continued to provide the lifeblood of Renaissance art around 1500.
The Venetian Renaissance altarpiece
Artists in Venice were aware of, and actively responded to, developments in Florence from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. One only has to look at Giovanni Bellini’s large painting of 1478–80 known as the San Giobbe altarpiece to see the ease with which the Venetian painter handles three-dimensional space (plate 7). Giovanni’s mastery of linear perspective owed much to his training in the workshop of his father, Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400–71), who made two sketchbooks full of detailed drawings which are demonstration models of one-point linear perspective. Jacopo clearly knew of Leon Battista Alberti’s directives to painters in this regard, and must have used his studies as teaching aids in his family workshop. But if Giovanni’s altarpiece is based on a sound understanding of Albertian pictorial space, with all the forms arranged according to their due place within a box-like construction receding to a single central vanishing point, it is light rather than line which binds the composition together.
Giovanni’s soft golden light, with its reference back to the mosaics of St Mark’s, was set to become a trademark of his mature style in the altarpieces and smaller devotional pictures he specialised in. Its softening action on the surfaces it touches, like its almost tangible presence in the air that moves between Bellini’s sacred figures, makes his paintings look very different from those of both his father and his elder brother Gentile (c. 1429–1507). If their work remained linear, overly detailed, and minute, Giovanni’s achieves a new measure of breadth and simplicity, as well as atmosphere. Giovanni’s advance in this regard was reliant on his use of oil paint, rather than the more traditional tempera that he had used in his father’s workshop and in early paintings such as his Pietà of the late 1460s. The catalyst for this change of medium was the visit to Venice in 1475–6 of Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–79), a Sicilian painter who had travelled north to Flanders to learn Jan van Eyck’s method of oil painting.
Antonello’s main commission in Venice was for a large painting known as the San Cassiano altarpiece, only a fragment of which now survives. Both this work and Bellini’s response to it in the San Giobbe painting are early examples of an essentially new kind of Renaissance altarpiece, which offers a more immediate relationship with the viewer. In these works, the traditional multi-panelled form (known as a polyptych, triptych, or diptych; see figure 2 and plate 11, for example) was abandoned in favour of an expanded single and vertical pictorial field. In traditional altarpieces, ornately carved and moulded frames had predominated over the painted fields, their richly gilded architectural shapes separating the painted figures off from the surrounding space, as if to confirm their otherworldliness. In the new type introduced by Antonello and Bellini, in contrast, image dominates over frame, such that the viewer responds more directly to the painted scene.
In both paintings, we see the enthroned Virgin and Child surrounded by a gathering of saints, a so-called sacra conversazione (‘sacred conversation’). This iconography was not in itself new, but the underlying idea that the sacred figures occupy a single unified space that is continuous with our own certainly was. Bellini’s painting was originally placed over a side altar in the Franciscan church of San Giobbe: the viewer/worshipper was invited to think that he or she looked into an actual chapel issuing off the nave of the church: the perspective, established above all by the mouldings of the painted architecture, is arranged to suggest continuity with the stone frame of the altarpiece (still in situ), and beyond that with the real space of the church.
It is this underlying implication that the familiar sacred figures have come down to earth in order to co-exist with the worshipful viewer that is so new in Bellini’s altarpiece. It provides the key to the overall naturalism of his picture. The Virgin remains enthroned (referring to her role as Queen of Heaven); the saints are solemn, do not chat or (apart from St Francis) acknowledge the viewer; and the music-making angels tell us that the scene takes place in Heaven. But it is hard not to feel that these divine figures are very close, present in a domain that is intimately connected to our own world. The point is reinforced by St Francis’s turn outwards toward the viewer, his communicative expression and imploring gesture inviting us to participate in the devotional meditations going on in the fictive chapel. In a way that recalls the Flemish artists discussed in chapter 1, Bellini uses naturalism to intensify our sense that the divine is closely adjacent, sensuously palpable in the reality about us.
Despite his debts to the ‘Eyckian’ manner, Bellini replaced Flemish meticulousness and accuracy with a more generalising approach, reminding us that he was, after all, an Italian artist. Instead of a cumulative approach to the visual world, built up from small details, and differentiating a wide range of textures and visual effects, Bellini used oils to bind figures, objects and spaces together in broader masses to create a new sense of monumentality. He used pigments that are very close to one another in the colour scale, his tonal approach drawing the various elements of his composition together so that each object or figure appears to occupy the same warmly emotional world.
This structural use of oil paint to create a coherent and unified composition in the San Giobbe altarpiece makes it a fine early example of Venetian Renaissance colore (‘colour’). It may be, however, that the related Italian word colorito (‘colouring’) gives a truer sense of this approach, given that it better suggests the Venetian artist’s active manipulation of the paint on the picture surface. After all, bright, sometimes unmixed colour abounds in Florentine and Roman paintings of the period. What distinguishes the Venetian tradition from Bellini onwards is not so much the use of intense colour, or even of a wide range of pigments, but rather the extent to which the given painting was arranged, perhaps even thought out, at the painting stage. Instead of using extensive preparatory drawings on paper to arrange the composition before painting began (like Raphael, for example), Venetian painters exploited the slow-drying quality of oil paint to develop a more integrated or even improvisatory approach.
In the San Giobbe altarpiece, Bellini certainly used a charcoal underdrawing to establish the main compositional outlines, but the final effect of his painting is dependent on the subsequent stage: on the layers of oil paint that he then applied. Exploiting the translucence of oils in the technique known as glazing (one colour showing through another placed on top of it), Bellini made his manipulation of paint itself central to his working procedure, and to the subtle appearance of his finished paintings. His talented pupils Giorgione and Titian took this approach even further, as we shall see. But why did oil painting, increasingly on a canvas support, become so central in Venetian Renaissance painting? To some extent, the answer may be found in the Venetian climate. Neither tempera (typically used on a wooden panel support) nor fresco was suited to the damp and saline environment of the Venetian lagoon. Though many frescos were painted to decorate the facades of Venetian buildings, artists and their patrons fully understood that these paintings would not last long in the salty and corrosive air. Oil paintings on canvas, on the other hand, promised great durability, and quickly gained a much higher aesthetic and monetary value in the city.
The hidden subject: a ‘private’ Renaissance painting
Local climatic considerations do not, however, really explain the radically loose oil-based style developed by Bellini’s pupil Giorgione in the first decade of the sixteenth century. In order to understand his paintings, we have also to take into account factors such as patronage. In fifteenth-century Venice, painting had a predominantly public face: it was large-scale and typically religious or patriotic in its subject-matter. Large and crowded history paintings adorned the walls of the Ducal Palace in the centre of the island city, where the Republican government met under the leadership of an elected nobleman known as the Doge. They were also present in large numbers in the lavish meeting houses of the city’s so-called Scuole (‘schools’), powerful charitable confraternities of religious-minded citizens. In the city’s more than 200 churches, grand religious paintings (like Bellini’s painting from San Giobbe) adorned the altars, forming a focus for communal prayer.
Giovanni Bellini himself fostered a growing taste for more private paintings, making a number of individual portraits and specialising in smaller half-length paintings of the Madonna and Child. Many of Bellini’s Madonnas were commissioned to hang in family chapels or bedrooms of more wealthy private citizens, where they were the focus of private prayer or devotion. But this kind of image does not quite prepare us for works such as Giorgione’s Tempest (plate 9). In this intimate little panel, the more usual public or communal orientation of Venetian art is abandoned altogether. Instead we peer at a little landscape whose colours and forms are transfigured by the arrival of a storm and a sudden flash of lightning.
A man with a pike and a semi-naked woman suckling a child occupy the foreground, but it is the landscape that dominates. The relation of the figures to one another, their precise identity and wider meaning, remain obscure. All at once, it seems that Renaissance painting has lost its usual role as a carrier of identifiable and significant subject-matter or iconography (see box on this page). The long tradition of monumental religious or patriotic pictures featuring famous actors and significant events in Venetian art has been replaced by an altogether more intimate, esoteric, and private kind of art.
The Tempest is one of a very small number of surviving paintings by an elusive master whose career was tragically cut short by the plague of 1510 (he died in his early thirties, after little more than a decade as an independent master). It is typical of Giorgione in its small scale, very loose handling of paint, and ambiguous meaning. In 1530 the painting was described by Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552), a Venetian art enthusiast and collector, as the ‘little landscape with the storm and the gypsy’. But many have sought to interpret further, seeing it as a classical mythology, a Christian narrative painting, or a moral or political allegory. Others have wanted to respect Michiel’s indication that the painting does not have a subject at all, considering it to be a genre image, or as one of the first landscapes in Western art. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is evident that Giorgione, as in many of his other known works, very deliberately departed from the expected, producing an image that was self-consciously novel and therefore difficult to interpret.
The term ‘iconography’ refers to the subject-matter, as opposed to the form, of a work of art. It was first properly defined in art history by the German scholar Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who worked primarily on the Renaissance period. Panofsky noted that the vast majority of Renaissance works had subjects that could be traced back to one written text or another: not only the Bible or later devotional books, but also classical and Renaissance writings dealing with a wide array of topics. Visual images fell into patterns or types according to the given textual source that was followed by the artist. Up until Panofsky’s time, art history had been largely concerned with the style or form of the work, and had paid relatively little attention to subject-matter. Now it became possible to interpret many features of works of art with reference to written descriptions in books, with the result that their original meanings became clear. The study of iconography has since become a major tool in the interpretation of Renaissance art, given that most works from the period have a discernible subject. But in works such as Giorgione’s Tempest this kind of approach has not got scholars very far.
Giorgione’s association with a small group of art patrons from leading Venetian families may provide the key to his new kind of painting. When Michiel saw the Tempest in 1530, it was in the private art collection of the Venetian nobleman Gabriele Vendramin, though it is not clear whether or not he was the original patron. Vendramin was, though, a relative of others who owned paintings by Giorgione, and seems to have been part of a social clique that bears some resemblance to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, though this group certainly did not have political control in Venice, as Lorenzo did in Florence. The circle was dominated by wealthy and fashionable members of the city’s leading families, in a position to withdraw from their more humdrum mercantile and public duties into a world of refined leisure and poetic contemplation. And here too an interest in poetry quickly developed: the bucolic pastoral works of Virgil seem to have been particularly popular, and the genre was actively revived by Venetian poets such as Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). This poetic tradition recounts the loves and losses of simple nymphs and shepherds who live innocently in the fields and forests, far beyond the cares of the city: its imagery may have had an impact on Giorgione’s paintings, which often have rural settings and a ‘pastoral’ look.
The new kind of patron would have wanted a new kind of painting, one with less obvious or explicit meanings than those on offer in crowded altarpieces and history paintings. To this extent, it may be that the difficulty we have in interpreting Giorgione’s Tempest is, and always was, part of the work’s meaning. It may be best to see it as a kind of picture puzzle made for a patron who preferred poetic suggestion to anything more direct or obvious. We might recognise such literate patrons, and the ambiguous work they enjoyed, as distinctly more ‘modern’ than their fifteenth-century forebears. They had a ready appreciation of works of art as objects to be enjoyed for their own sake: to be collected alongside other precious curiosities and pored over in private, their possible meanings generating lively discourse between learned friends. Giorgione’s new ‘sophisticated’ approach to painting has something in common with a number of other Italian masters of the Renaissance, such as the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni (c. 1420–91), who worked on a small scale in the service of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
While Giorgione’s oil-based style still reflects that of Bellini, it is by comparison very free in its treatment of space, anatomical correctness, and overall clarity of composition. More readily than his master, Giorgione sacrificed the underlying reality of forms, blurring their edges and revealing the individual brush stroke on the picture surface. The fluidity or lack of stability of Giorgione’s pictorial language takes the painterly possibilities of the oil medium a step further, such that his colorito no longer works in a structural way. In his pictures, the radical uncertainties of human sight become newly significant: natural forms are merely glimpsed under ever-changing conditions of atmosphere and light.
Giorgione’s concern with naturalism is also evident in his turn to landscape: although figures, buildings, or even distant towns are typically included, his paintings often feature extensive rural views or settings that challenge the usual dominance given to human figures in Italian Renaissance painting (see, for example, his Sunset landscape). His interest in landscape did not, though, come out of the blue: Bellini often included sharply lit views of the countryside in his religious paintings, and sometimes reduced the scale of his figures in order to emphasise natural setting (see his St Francis in the desert). But in Bellini’s work the landscape typically provides ballast to the sacred story, intensifying our sense of the presence and authority of the sacred figures in the real world. Giorgione’s landscape is fundamentally more independent of the religious subject and often ambiguous or multi-dimensional in its meaning: in his religious paintings it threatens to distract us from the figures placed within it (see his Castelfranco altarpiece). When it features in secular subjects, it becomes more independently significant again, though also more generalised and poetic.
Though Giorgione follows his master in referring to the landscapes of the Veneto or ‘terrafirma’, the rural hinterland of Venice, he rarely alludes to specific places (though it has recently been claimed that the town in the Tempest is Padua). It was into this pleasant rural area that Giorgione’s patrons retreated from the pressures of life in metropolitan Venice. The prime time of Veneto villa culture came later in the sixteenth century when the famous architect Andrea Palladio (1508–80) created a stunning sequence of glorified farmhouses in a classical style. But already in Giorgione’s day an important cultural circle, which included the pastoral poet Pietro Bembo mentioned earlier, had gathered in a country villa near the village of Asolo that was home to the exiled Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro (1454–1510). It may be that Giorgione’s hazy sunlit landscapes served to remind such viewers of the Veneto and its sensuous and poetic pleasures. But something rather different is on offer in the Tempest, which features a more immediate and dramatic impression of a dramatic weather effect.
Venetian colour versus Central Italian design
Giorgione’s depiction of a lightning strike was perhaps an attempt to outdo a lost marvel of antique painting, given that Apelles’ depiction of a thunderbolt was much celebrated in the classical literature. But we should not underestimate Giorgione’s sense of the immediacy and power of the storm. Its explosive force and transformative impact on the world below is very far from Bellini’s confident incorporation of natural phenomena into the sacred schema. Giorgione’s depiction reminds us more of Leonardo da Vinci’s depictions of violent storms or deluges in the group of drawings mentioned in the previous chapter. A work such as the Tempest suggests that Giorgione, like Leonardo, perceived nature in a new way, as something in a state of essential flux or flow, but also of enormous strength or power, with the potential to suddenly rise up and assert its dominance over the world. The connection with Leonardo has other dimensions too. Giorgione’s careful description of the way the arrival of a storm changes colours and dissolves forms was dependent on his exploitation of the fluid possibilities of oil paint, the medium that Leonardo had experimented so effectively with.
Many viewers have been struck by the visual similarities between Giorgione and Leonardo, noting their shared habit of dissolving the hard edges and underlying structure of forms in their paintings. As early as 1550, in his Lives of the Artists, Vasari claimed that Giorgione based his new style directly on Leonardo, who had briefly visited Venice in 1500. Ever the patriot, Vasari may have exaggerated this Tuscan influence in order to give the Florentine school priority over that of Venice. Having established Giorgione’s role in the progression of Venetian painting as directly equivalent to that of Leonardo in the Florentine, as ushering in a ‘modern’ and perfect phase of Renaissance art, Vasari then went on the attack.
While Leonardo and the other leading Florentines are exalted as masters of disegno, Giorgione is criticised for his lack of preparatory drawing. According to Vasari, drawing allowed the Renaissance artist not only to record what he saw in nature, but also to improve it, in accordance with his own idea of artistic perfection, a procedure that we have already seen at work in the art of Raphael. The Venetian painter’s lack of drawing, on the other hand, meant that he was slavishly tied to the depiction of what was directly in front of him, and thus to all its imperfections.
The controversy between the Central Italian disegno and Venetian colore stirred up by Vasari was probably of little concern to Leonardo or Giorgione, though it certainly had a major impact on the practice and theory of European art in the centuries that followed. In the present context we simply need to note that the approaches and discoveries of Leonardo and Giorgione were not so different from one another. X-radiography has revealed that Giorgione originally painted a woman at the lower left of the Tempest: he clearly changed his mind about the positioning of his figures in the course of painting. The appearance of discarded or radically altered figures beneath the surface of many other Venetian Renaissance paintings indicates that Vasari was in certain ways right. Venetian painters used preparatory drawings less frequently or systematically than their Florentine equivalents, and did not so clearly separate invention from execution. Yet this more improvisatory approach hardly tied them to the individual motif in nature as Vasari presumed. Rather, it allowed them to continue ‘inventing’ as painting proceeded, and thereby to capture subtle natural effects that are often lost in the disegno-bound art of Central Italy.
Giorgione’s artistic process may not, however, have been an additive one, or have been based on progressive clarification of the given subject. On the contrary, Giorgione – like Leonardo in works such as the Mona Lisa – seems to have understood that a decrease in the amount of information given in a painting could result in an increase in its suggestiveness to the viewer. Lack of clarity is more alluring in a painting than too much: the thing half-seen or understood more likely to stimulate interest and discourse. In the Tempest, forms and textures are suggested, but Giorgione’s free brushwork undermines their precise identity. In place of close description and definition something emerges that is more ineffable, but also more open to interpretation.
A Renaissance synthesis of German and Italian styles
Figure 7 shows Albrecht Dürer’s Hercules at the crossroads: it is one of a number of increasingly masterful prints from the artist’s early period and a good example of the spread of Renaissance values to the north. Made in the city of Nuremberg, it provides evidence of a vibrant culture with classical and humanist interests in southern Germany (Franconia) around 1500. It is probably a classical allegory, showing the Greek hero Hercules (the standing man with the winged helmet) between Virtue (also standing) and Vice. The landscape has been organised with this theme in mind: leaving behind him the pleasures of the soft river valley glimpsed below to the right, Hercules must overcome the lolling ‘Voluptas’ who lies across his path on the lap of a lecherous satyr (half-man, half-goat). Aided by the primly clad Virtue, he must continue on up the path toward his goal, symbolised by the steep landscape to the left. The dramatic 270-degree twist in Hercules’s direction of travel symbolises in spatial terms the extent of his moral turnabout.
The meticulous detail of the Hercules is immediately noticeable: Dürer exploits the variation of line available when working with the burin to indicate minute differences of texture, surface, and light. The vivacious clump of trees and bushes offers something more than a foil to the illuminated bodes of the main actors. Dürer dwells lovingly on the particularities of the foliage and on the dynamic and organic twisting growth of trunks and branches. The same kind of attention is paid to the bodies of the actors. Variations in the diagonal cross-hatching on their surfaces reveal the different qualities of their flesh. A careful contrast is made between the feathery diffuse hatching across the surface of Vice’s body (to indicate its softness) and the structural and precise modelling of Hercules’s form, which reveals its hard musculature.
Dürer’s careful attention to textures and surfaces, and the fall of light upon them, recalls the fifteenth-century Flemish masters’ use of oils for similar ends. Such minuteness of description is rather different from the generalising effect of the colorito of Bellini and Giorgione, and reminds us that Dürer was a northern artist. But many local viewers would none the less have been struck by how very different this image looked from the kind they were used to. In contrast to the static depictions of heavily draped sacred figures in altarpieces and devotional pictures, Dürer features predominantly naked or semi-naked figures in very mobile postures, who vigorously interact with one another. In spite of its allegorical meaning, Dürer insists on giving his scene the immediacy of a sudden dramatic event. His Hercules is, in fact, far closer to the kind of all’antica art being produced in contemporary Italy than it is to other works from northern Europe of the 1490s.
Dürer’s Hercules was made just a few years after his return from a visit to Venice and is clearly a response to his time in the south. It is telling, though, that he modelled the main figures on works by non-Venetian artists, as if to display his more general interest in antique and Italian Renaissance art. The figures of Vice and Virtue follow recent Italian engravings based on antique models which he had recorded in careful drawings. The hero himself recalls in more generic fashion the dynamic male nudes featured in the work of the Florentine artists Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo (c. 1432–98, c. 1441–c. 1496): a very appropriate source, given that, in Florence at least, the figure of Hercules had become almost synonymous with the Pollaiuolo brothers following their completion of three large paintings featuring the hero for the Palazzo Medici (1460s, now lost).
Dürer’s rather self-conscious display of his new knowledge of the art of contemporary Italy needs to be considered in context. The classical quotations, which would certainly have been recognised by more discerning viewers, were studiously brought together with the more conventionally ‘northern’ features noted earlier. The new combination offered German art a place at the Renaissance table, suggesting that the two traditions, north and south, could now live together. The formation of an international composite style was, indeed, one of Dürer’s lasting ambitions, and was deepened further by a second visit to Italy in 1504–6. Yet he had to remain sensitive to the wider public that he courted.
Works such as the Hercules, with its blatant nudity and pagan theme, would have been disturbing to many pious northern viewers. It may be significant that Dürer gave his classical print a moral meaning, acceptable to the devout Christian. In other engravings of the period, such as the Four witches (1497) and the Dream of the doctor (c. 1498), Dürer ‘justified’ erotic images of nudity by including allegorical meanings which condemn the display of feminine flesh. This approach was subsequently taken up by followers of Dürer in Germany such as Lucas Cranach, who specialised in such ‘moral nudes’.
The rise of the Renaissance print
Dürer’s Hercules is a precociously new kind of work aimed at a wide international audience. Despite the classical theme, Dürer did not seek to serve the social elite with works such as this. Unlike Giorgione’s Tempest, Dürer’s Hercules was not made on the request of a specific patron: it was not tailor-made to suit a particular set of cultural interests. For all its pictorial qualities and its classical subject-matter, the Hercules was made to be reproduced, its small scale and ready availability anticipating a potentially broad and diverse viewing audience. It may have been among the copies of Dürer’s prints that members of his family sold in the local market in Nuremberg, for example. If Giorgione’s short career involved a retreat into a more ‘private’ cultural field, Dürer’s went in the opposite direction. He attempted to expand the visual domain, anticipating the widening interest of a new art-loving public, both at home and abroad. It was this that lay behind his attempt to synthesise diverse artistic styles. The natural medium for such an enterprise was the reproductive print.
Prints were immediately smaller, cheaper, and more quickly produced than traditional works of art: based on the principle of replication, they co-existed in many places at once and were easily transportable, contradicting the fixed or site-specific qualities of, for example, large-scale altarpieces or sculptures. The ease and rapidity with which prints were produced and consumed promised the visual image a new measure of ubiquity, and made it a suitable carrier for an expanded range of meanings and ideas. In addition to the more traditional diet of stories from the Bible, or from the lives of the Virgin and saints, printmaking artists often depicted topical or ‘contemporary’ subjects: accurate views of famous towns, cities, and monuments, for example, or images recording the appearances and dress of the people of different regions. Social types, from emperors, kings, and popes down to peasants and beggars (see figure 9) became valid subjects for the Renaissance print, as did important social and natural events and unusual occurrences. Even if it does not have a topical subject, Dürer’s Hercules has its place within this dramatic widening of the established subject-matter of visual art within print culture.
The reproductive print formed part of the wider communications revolution that followed the spread of the printing presses across Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. The discovery of moveable type allowed for the text to be brought into a new alliance with the printed image. But when, in 1498, Dürer published an illustrated book featuring sixteen woodcuts drawn from St John’s Revelation – known as the Apocalypse – he made a very significant change. Though John’s text was included, the words were relegated to the back (or verso) of each sheet, with pride of place given to Dürer’s large and complex images on the front (recto). The more usual priority allowed to the text in early printed books was undone, with the ‘illustrations’ taking on a new place of independence and authority.
The publication of the Apocalypse was a great success across Europe, quickly making Dürer famous. The young artist, originally trained in the workshop of his goldsmith-father, had seen and quickly exploited the huge potential of the new medium of reproductive print. Initiating the Apocalypse project himself – rather than waiting to be asked to work by a patron – the young Dürer understood not only that prints offered artists a new measure of creative freedom, but also that the medium opened up an international market for visual art. Further series of religious woodcuts quickly followed, including the Life of the Virgin (1500–5) and the Large (c. 1497–1511) and Small Passion (1511).
In these extensive cycles, Dürer almost seamlessly translated the ‘core’ Christian stories into the new medium, brilliantly exploiting the linear possibilities of woodcut to create dramatic narratives every bit as engaging and impressive as those familiar from monumental paintings and sculptures. It is typical of him that he granted small-scale black and white woodcuts a kind of expressive equality with more traditional and exalted image-types. Comparison of his woodcut cycles with the paintings (including portraits and altarpieces) that he also produced even suggests that he was more at home with prints. Dürer clearly did not prioritise one artistic medium above another, and a similar kind of equality is evident in his approach to different subject-matters. He lavished great care and attention on images of humble animals and plants, for example, as can be seen in his superb watercolour drawings of a Young hare, a Piece of turf and a Stag beetle.
Dürer’s attention to the visual specifics of such ‘trivial’ subjects may remind us of the realism of earlier northern masters in the Flemish tradition. But at the same time, he transforms the significance of these familiar examples of nature by making them the sole focus of our attention in a way that recalls the ‘scientific’ Leonardo in Italy. Like him, Dürer treated drawing as a semi-independent medium that was not closely or necessarily related to his paintings. He used drawing as a means of getting very close to the complex reality of nature around him. Leonardo had a more precise influence on Dürer’s art during his second visit to Italy, but the Nuremberg master’s intense interest in all things natural had developed quite independently. On his return from his first journey in 1495, he had made a series of evocative watercolours showing the lonely heights and valleys of the Alps, which are among the first independent landscape paintings in the Western tradition (e.g. Alpine landscape). These wholly independent images of nature are borne out of a very modern sense of the inherent value and interest of the world at large.
Renaissance Gothic
But here we need to take a reality check. Elsewhere in Franconia, in the region of Würzburg, an artist was at work who has a good claim to be more typical of his time and place than the ‘international’ Dürer. In contrast to the Nuremberg master, Tilman Riemenschneider didn’t travel to Italy and did not become an international printmaker. Instead, he remained in his native town and the immediate area, producing more than twenty large and complex church altarpieces or retables for local churches in the traditional medium of limewood.
Unlike Dürer’s little prints, these wooden structures are physically monumental and intensely site-specific in their imagery and meaning. They are often rather nervously described as ‘Late Gothic’ in style. But given that Riemenschneider’s altarpieces span the years 1483–1515, the very period of the so-called ‘High Renaissance’, the term seems inadequate. Riemenschneider’s example offers an important corrective to the common idea that in the Renaissance the classical style of Italy simply came to dominate across Europe. We have seen in earlier chapters that there was a continuing taste for the Gothic (see box on this page) in the Renaissance period. But examination of Riemenschneider’s example allows us to appreciate that the two styles were not really opposed to one another, and that they could happily co-exist together in a single work.
Riemenschneider’s works may seem to have little in common with the artistic developments we have been following in this book. But further attention suggests that (as in the Brancacci Chapel or in Botticelli’s mythologies) ‘Gothic’ and ‘Renaissance’ styles were closely entwined. On first appearances the Holy Blood altar of 1499–1505 looks entirely Gothic in form and conception (figure 8). This is especially the case in the area above the main images, which achieves an effect of delicate, almost transparent, verticality through the use of elaborately extended decorative features such as recesses or niches and decorative finials. But there is a clear visual contrast between this superstructure and the more solid horizontal, box-like area below, in which large figures and narratives predominate. Above each scene in this lower area, tracery is included that deliberately recalls Gothic architecture. But a closer view reveals twining branches rippling with life, including ripe buds, thistle blossoms, and even birds. The mimicry of stone readily gives way to a description of nature which reflects the organic vitality of the sculptor’s material. The initial reference to traditional church architecture cannot contain the sculptor’s avid interest in natural forms, one that reminds us more of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Dürer than of the medieval past.
In the main scene showing the Last Supper, the bodies of the main actors are thin and narrow with sloping shoulders. Comparison with Leonardo’s famous version of the subject of 1495–8 shows that Tilman’s forms lack the broad expansive qualities of the Italian master, and that his treatment of drapery is fussy and complex, tending to form decorative folds that defy gravity, rather than suggesting the underlying form beneath. Yet the same play between abstract and real noted in the tracery is apparent again in these human figures. If the intricate flowing lines of their draperies take on an abstract life of their own, this is interspersed with passages of intense naturalism. As in Leonardo’s fresco, Tilman’s Apostles are caught in mid-action; at the right, an animated conversation has broken out, while the momentary glance of the Apostle Philip just to the left of centre is particularly striking.
Like many altarpieces, the Holy Blood altar has a pointedly Eucharistic meaning: indeed, the sacraments of the bread and wine are physically displayed upon it (in a container known as a monstrance at the centre of the Crucifixion below the main scene and in a glass cross holding a relic of the Holy Blood higher up). There was an especially strong veneration of the ‘Holy Blood’ in the town of Rothenburg, after some consecrated wine spilled onto the special cloth on which it is placed during the Mass (the corporal) and left miraculous traces. But this only makes it more surprising that Riemenschneider did not emphasize this in the central panel. Once again like Leonardo, he ignored the more obvious doctrinal moment of the institution of the Eucharist in favour of the dramatic historical one of the annunciation of the betrayal: ‘In truth, in very truth I tell you, one of you is going to betray me’. Perhaps more astonishing still is Tilman’s placement of Judas, rather than Christ, at the very centre of his composition.
In this regard he even went a step further than Leonardo, who maintained the absolute centrality of Christ in keeping with his primary theological importance. Riemenschneider’s freedom may bring to mind the kind of compositional inversion noted in chapter 1 in the Portinari altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes (figure 2). For all their piety and sense of the debt owed to the art of the past, the northern masters felt freer to manipulate their compositions for expressive effect than the ‘classical’ Italians. In Riemenschneider’s Last Supper, the table top tilts up against all spatial logic to help highlight Christ’s action as he reaches over to hand Judas a piece of bread, while the latter holds up his money bag to identify his role as the betrayer. There is a further purpose to Judas’s visual prominence. As the sinner who cheats Christ he becomes the viewer’s representative in the image.
Our identification with Judas is reconfirmed by the gesture of Philip, who turns meaningfully toward the viewer while pointing out the central exchange. But why did Riemenschneider lay such emphasis on the ‘Judas communion’, as it has been called? Was it intended as a stark warning to the faithful in front of the altar not to take communion unworthily? It is difficult to prove any such thing. Yet the dark sense of mankind as full of sin, more like the traitor Judas who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, than the saintly Apostles, finds echoes in other northern works from the period, such as those of the Flemish master Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). The grim perception of man’s essential cupidity also led to calls for a spiritual renewal based on individual purity and faith. That is, to the Reformation.
Discussion of the Holy Blood altar has shown that Riemenschneider readily mixed traditional and new, with little sense that ‘Gothic’ and ‘Renaissance’ elements in his art contradicted each other. On one level, of course, the whole structure is very readily distinguishable from contemporary art in Florence, Rome, or Venice; and unlike Dürer’s Hercules engraving it betrays precious little interest in the newly international revival of classical forms or subject-matter. It is, in fact, a very well documented work, closely tied to the traditional civic and religious culture of Rothenburg. The city counsellors who commissioned and paid for it would have required a work that looked like the other altarpieces Tilman had made for churches in Würzburg and elsewhere in the area. And the control over artistic individualism is also apparent from the fact that much of the altarpiece other than the figures (including the decorative carving on the superstructure and the fenestrated cabinet containing the main scene) were the work of Erhart Harschner, a local carpenter.
Sculptor and carpenter apparently worked independently of one another, but they were paid a similar amount of money, indicating that the local patrons did not readily distinguish between one craftsman and another. Low evaluation of figurative artists was very traditional, and was just the kind of thing that Dürer, who had recently painted two self-portraits showing himself in the guise of a gentleman and a god-like creator, sought to overturn. Dürer noted in a letter from Venice that he was treated like a gentleman there, while at home he was considered a mere craftsman. Yet Riemenschneider was clearly undisturbed by such issues and worked harmoniously alongside Harschner the joiner on the Holy Blood altar. As we have seen, his traditional artisan identity did not stop him innovating and inventing in his vividly expressive image of the Last Supper.
