In the age of the cultural movement known as the Renaissance, more or less the two centuries 1350–1550, Italy was neither a social nor a cultural unit, although the concept of ‘Italia’ existed. It was simply ‘a geographical expression’, as Count Metternich said in 1814 (nearly half a century before Italy would become a unified state). However, geography influences both society and culture. For example, the geography of the region encouraged Italians to devote more attention to commerce and the crafts than their neighbours did. The central location of the peninsula in Europe, and easy access to the sea, gave its merchants the opportunity to become middlemen between East and West, while its terrain, one-fifth mountainous and three-fifths hilly, made farming more difficult than it was in England (say) or France. It is hardly surprising that Italian cities such as Genoa, Venice and Florence should have played a leading part in the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century, or that in 1300 some twenty-three cities in north and central Italy had populations of 20,000 or more apiece. City-republics were the dominant form of political organization at this time. A relatively numerous urban population and a high degree of urban autonomy underpinned the unusual importance of the educated layman (and to a lesser degree the educated laywoman). It would be difficult to understand the cultural and social developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries without reference to these preconditions.1
In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a number of city-states lost their independence, and in the 1340s Italians, like people elsewhere in Europe and in the Middle East, were hit by slump and plague. However, the tradition of the urban way of life and of an educated laity survived and was central to the Renaissance, a minority movement that probably meant little or nothing to the majority of the population. Most Italians, about 9 or 10 million people altogether, were peasants, living for the most part in poverty. They too had a culture, which is worth study, can be studied and has been studied, but it is not the subject of this book, which is concerned with new developments in the arts in their social context.
The aim of this book is to place, or re-place, the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and learning of Renaissance Italy in their original environment, the society of the period – its ‘culture’ in the wider sense of that flexible term. In order to do this it is advisable to begin with a brief description of the main characteristics of the arts at this time. In this description the stress will fall on the viewpoint of posterity rather than that of contemporaries. (Their point of view is discussed in chapters 5 to 7). Although they sometimes wrote of ‘rebirth’, they did not have a clear and distinct idea of the Renaissance as a period. They were interested in poetry and rhetoric, but our idea of ‘literature’ would have been foreign to them, while a concept something like our ‘work of art’ was only just beginning to emerge at the end of the period.
This description will emphasize characteristics common to several arts more than those which seem to be restricted to one of them, and attempt to present the period as a whole (leaving the discussion of trends within it to chapter 10). The cultural unity of the age will not be assumed (as it was, for example, by Jacob Burckhardt), but it will be taken as a hypothesis to be tested.2
The conventional nineteenth-century view of the arts in Renaissance Italy (a view still widely shared today, despite the labours of art historians) might be summarized as follows. The arts flourished, and their new realism, secularism and individualism all show that the Middle Ages were over and that the modern world had begun. However, all these assumptions have been questioned by critics and historians alike. If they can be saved, it is only at the price of radical reformulations.
To say that the arts ‘flourished’ in a particular society is to say, surely, that better work was produced there than in many other societies, which leads one straight out of the realm of the empirically verifiable. It no longer seems as obvious as it once did that medieval art is inferior to that of the Renaissance. Raphael has been judged a great artist and Ariosto a great writer from their own time to the present, but there has been no such consensus about Michelangelo, Masaccio or Josquin des Près, however high their reputation now stands. All the same, few would quarrel with the suggestion that Renaissance Italy was a society where artistic achievements ‘clustered’.3 The clusters are most spectacular in painting, from Masaccio (or indeed from Giotto) to Titian; in sculpture, from Donatello (or from Nicola Pisano in the thirteenth century) to Michelangelo; and in architecture, from Brunelleschi to Palladio. The economic historian Richard Goldthwaite asks, ‘Why did Italy produce so much art in the Renaissance?’ Not only ‘more art’, but also ‘a greater variety’.4
Literature in the vernacular is a more difficult case. After Dante and Petrarch comes what has been called the ‘century without poetry’ (1375–1475), which is in turn followed by the achievements of Poliziano, Ariosto and many others. The fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries are great ages of Italian prose, but the fifteenth century is not (partly because scholars preferred to write in Latin).5 In the realm of ideas, there are many outstanding figures – Alberti, Leonardo, Machiavelli – and a major movement, that of the ‘humanists’, most exactly defined as the teachers of the ‘humanities’.6
The most conspicuous gaps in this account of Italian achievements are to be found in music and mathematics. Although much fine music was composed in Renaissance Italy, most of it was the work of Netherlanders, and it is only in the sixteenth century that composers of the calibre of the Gabrielis and Costanzo Festa appear. In mathematics, the famous Bologna school belongs to the later sixteenth century.7
It is more useful to investigate innovation rather than ‘flourishing’ in the arts because the concept is more precise. In Italy, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were certainly a period of innovation in the arts, a time of new genres, new styles, new techniques. The period is full of ‘firsts’. This was the age of the first oil-painting, the first woodcut, the first copperplate and the first printed book (though all these innovations came to Italy from Germany or the Netherlands). The rules of linear perspective were discovered and put to use by artists at this time.8
The line dividing new from old is more difficult to draw in the case of genres than in the case of techniques, but the changes are obvious enough. In sculpture we see the rise of the free-standing statue, and more especially that of the equestrian monument and the portrait-bust.9 In painting, too, the portrait emerged as an independent genre.10 It was followed rather more slowly by the landscape and the still-life.11 In architecture, one scholar has described the fifteenth century as the age of the ‘invention’ of conscious town planning, although some medieval towns had been designed on a grid plan.12 In literature, there was the rise of the comedy, the tragedy and the pastoral (whether drama or romance).13 In music, the emergence of the frottola and the madrigal, both types of song for several voices.14 Art theory, literary theory, music theory and political theory all became more autonomous in this period.15 In education, we see the rise of what is now called ‘humanism’ and was then called ‘the studies of humanity’ (studia humanitatis), an academic package which emphasized five subjects in particular, all concerned with language or morals: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and ethics.16
Innovation was conscious, though it was sometimes seen and presented as revival. The classic statement about innovation in the visual arts is that of the mid-sixteenth-century artist-historian Giorgio Vasari, with his three-stage theory of progress since the age of the ‘barbarians’. The same pride in innovations is noticeable in his description of his own work in Naples, the first frescoes ‘painted in the modern manner’ (lavorati modernamente). He makes frequent contemptuous references to what he calls the ‘Greek style’ and the ‘German style’ – in other words, Byzantine and Gothic art.17 Musicians also thought that great innovations had been made in the fifteenth century. Johannes de Tinctoris, a Netherlander living in Italy, writing in the 1470s, dated the rise of modern composers (the moderni) to the 1430s, adding that, ‘Although it seems beyond belief, there does not exist a single piece of music regarded by the learned as worth hearing which was not composed within the last forty years.’18
This disrespectful attitude to the past suggests the possibility that one reason for the central place of Italy in the Renaissance was the fact that Italian artists had been less closely associated with the Gothic style than their colleagues in France, Germany or England. Innovations often take place in regions where the previously dominant tradition has penetrated less deeply than elsewhere. Germany, for example, was less deeply affected by the Enlightenment than France, and this facilitated the German transition to Romanticism. Similarly, it may have been easier to develop a new style of architecture in Florence in the fifteenth century than in Paris or even Milan.
All the same, Renaissance Italians had not lost their reverence for tradition altogether. What they did was to repudiate recent tradition in the name of a more ancient one. Their admiration for classical antiquity allowed them to attack medieval tradition as itself a break with tradition. When, for example, the fifteenth-century architect Antonio Filarete referred to ‘modern’ architecture, he meant the Gothic style which he was rejecting.19 His position was not unlike that of the rebels and reformers of late medieval and early modern Europe, who regularly claimed to be going back to the ‘good old days’, before certain evil customs had become established. In any case the enthusiasm for classical antiquity is one of the main characteristics of the Renaissance movement, which cultural historians have to make intelligible, whether they discuss it in terms of the affinity between the two cultures, as a means of legitimating innovation in a traditional society, or as an extension to the arts of the political glamour of ancient Rome.
In architecture, this tendency to imitate the Greeks and Romans is particularly obvious. The treatise by the Roman writer Vitruvius was studied, and ancient buildings were measured, in order to learn the classical ‘language’ of architecture, not only the vocabulary (pediments, egg-and-dart mouldings, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns, and so on) but also the grammar, the rules for combining the different elements. In the case of sculpture, such innovations as the portrait-bust and the equestrian statue were ancient genres revived.20 In the case of literature, it is again easy to see how writers of comedy imitated the Romans Terence and Plautus, writers of tragedy, Seneca, and writers of epic, Virgil.
Painting and music are more intriguing cases because classical models were not available (the Roman paintings now discussed by scholars were discovered only in the eighteenth century or later). The lack of concrete exemplars did not rule out imitation on the basis of literary sources. Botticelli’s Calumny and his Birth of Venus, for example, are attempts to reconstruct lost works by the Greek painter Apelles.21 The literary criticism of classical writers such as Aristotle and Horace was pressed into service to provide criteria for excellence in painting on the principle that, ‘as is poetry, so is painting’.22 Discussions of what Greek music must have been like were based on passages in Plato or on classical treatises such as Ptolemy’s Harmonika.23 However, this interest in Greek music comes relatively late, in the sixteenth century. For this reason the idea of a musical ‘Renaissance’ in the fifteenth century has been challenged.24
Contemporary descriptions of changes in the arts are indispensable sources for understanding what was happening, but, like other historical sources, they cannot be taken at their face value. Contemporaries generally claimed to be imitating the ancients and breaking with the recent past, but in practice they borrowed from both traditions and followed neither completely. As so often happens, the new was added to the old rather than substituted for it. Classical gods and goddesses did not drive the medieval saints out of Italian art but coexisted and interacted with them. Botticelli’s Venuses are difficult to distinguish from his Madonnas, while Michelangelo modelled the Christ in his Last Judgement on a classical Apollo. In sixteenth-century Venice, inventories of furnishings show that religious paintings in the ‘Greek’ style (in other words, icons) continued to be displayed.25 Architecture in particular developed hybrid forms, partly classical and partly Gothic.26 As we have seen (above, pp. 12–14), cultural hybridity and cultural translation are much older than our own age of globalization.
In the case of literature, the poets Jacopo Sannazzaro and Marco Girolamo Vida wrote epics on the birth and the life of Christ in the manner of Virgil’s Aeneid, combining Christian material with classical form.27 A Renaissance prince would be as likely to read or listen to the medieval romance of Tristan as to the classical epic of Aeneas, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is a hybrid epic-romance set in the age of Roland and Charlemagne. Indeed, the interpenetration of chivalric and humanist attitudes was great enough for one scholar to speak of ‘chivalric humanism’.28 Poliziano’s pastoral drama Orfeo begins with the entry of Mercury, who takes over the place and function of the angel who commonly introduced Italian mystery plays.
Again, the rise of humanism did not drive out medieval scholastic philosophy (despite the deprecating remarks the humanists made about the scholastici). Indeed, leading figures in the Renaissance movement, such as the neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, were well read in medieval as well as in classical philosophy. Lorenzo de’Medici, the ruler of Florence, can be found writing to Giovanni Bentivoglio, the ruler of Bologna, asking him to search the local bookshops for a copy of the commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics by the late medieval philosopher Jean Buridan, while Leonardo da Vinci studied the work of Albert of Saxony and Albert the Great.29
Realism, secularism and individualism are three features commonly attributed to the arts in Renaissance Italy. All three characteristics are problematic. In the case of the term ‘realism’, several different problems are involved. In the first place, although artists in a number of cultures have claimed to abandon convention and imitate ‘nature’ or ‘reality’, they have nevertheless made use of some system of conventions.30 In the second place, since the term ‘realism’ was coined in nineteenth-century France to refer to the novels of Stendhal and the paintings of Courbet, its use in discussions of the Renaissance encourages anachronistic analogies between the two periods. In the third place, the term has too many meanings, which need discrimination. It may be useful to distinguish three kinds of realism: domestic, deceptive and expressive.
‘Domestic’ realism refers to the choice of the everyday, the ordinary or the low status as a subject for the arts, rather than the privileged moments of privileged people. Courbet’s stonebreakers and Pieter de Hooch’s scenes from everyday Dutch life are examples of this ‘art of describing’.31 ‘Deceptive’ realism, on the other hand, refers to style, for example to paintings which produce or attempt to produce the illusion that they are not paintings. ‘Expressive’ realism also refers to style, but to the manipulation of outward reality the better to express what is within, as in the case of a portrait where the shape of the face is modified to reveal the sitter’s character or a natural gesture is replaced by a more eloquent one.
PLATE 1.1 CARLO CRIVELLI: THE ANNUNCIATION WITH SAINT EMIDIUS, 1486
How useful are these concepts in approaching the arts in Renaissance Italy? Expressive realism is not difficult to identify in Leonardo’s Last Supper, say, or in the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo; the only difficulty lies in finding a period in which works of art do not have this trait. More of an innovation in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance (as in the Flemish art of the period) is the domestic realism of the backgrounds. Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation, for example (Plate 1.1), lingers lovingly on carpets, embroidered cushions, plates, books and the rest of the interior decoration of the Virgin’s room. Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Shepherds (Plate 1.2) includes, as the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin put it, ‘the family luggage – a shabby old saddle lying on the ground with a small cask of wine beside it’.32 It is important to see that the details are there, but also to remember that they are merely in the background. Today, we often see the details as genre paintings in miniature, and reproduce them as such. Contemporaries, on the other hand, did not have the concept of genre picture, and may well have seen the details as symbolic or as ornaments to fill up a blank space.
It is possible to find similar domestic details in the literature of the time, in the mystery plays, for example. In one anonymous play on the birth of Christ the shepherds, Nencio, Bobi, Randello and the rest, bring food with them when they go to adore the Saviour, and eat it on stage.33 In literature, however, unlike painting, there were genres in which domestic realism filled the foreground. There was the novella, for example, the short story dealing with the lives of ordinary people, a favourite Italian genre between Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and Bandello in the sixteenth. The comedy might portray peasant life, as in the case of the plays in Paduan dialect written and performed by Antonio Beolco il Ruzzante (‘the jester’). Music too might attempt to re-create hunting or market scenes. The idea of domestic realism might be extended to include pictorial narratives in what has come to be called the ‘eyewitness style’, by Vittore Carpaccio, for example (Plate 5.7), on the grounds that these paintings might be used to prove that certain events had really taken place.34
More difficult is the question of deceptive realism. From Vasari to Ruskin and beyond, the Renaissance was generally seen as an important step in the rise of more and more accurate representations of reality. At the beginning of this century, however, this notion was challenged, just at the time (surely no coincidence) of the development of abstract art. Heinrich Wölfflin, for example, suggested that ‘it is a mistake for art history to work with the clumsy notion of the imitation of nature, as though it were merely a homogeneous process of increasing perfection’, while another celebrated art historian, Alois Riegl, wrote more dramatically still that ‘Every style aims at a faithful rendering of nature and nothing else, but each has its own conception of nature.’35
PLATE 1.2 DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO: ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS, SANTA TRINITÀ, FLORENCE
At this point the reader may well be thinking that the Renaissance discovery of linear perspective is a counter-example, but even this argument was challenged by the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Pierre Francastel, who argued that perspective is a ‘symbolic form’, ‘a set of conventions like any other’, depending on monocular vision. This was the point of Brunelleschi’s famous box with a peephole in it, to which the viewer could put one eye and see, reflected in a mirror, a view of the Baptistery in Florence.36
If these arguments are valid, to talk about ‘Renaissance realism’ is to talk nonsense. However, Riegl’s arresting formulation is in danger of unfalsifiability, of circularity. The evidence of an artist’s conception of nature comes from his paintings, but the paintings are then interpreted in terms of that same conception. It seems more useful to start from the empirical fact that some societies, like some individuals, take a particular interest in the visible world, as it appears to them, and that Renaissance Italy was one of these. Wax images, often life-size and dressed in the clothes of the person they represented, were placed in churches, life-masks and death-masks were frequently made, and some artists dissected corpses in order to understand the structure of the human body.37 The point is not that deceptive realism was the only aim of the artists of the time; it is easy to show such a statement to be false. Paolo Uccello, for example, coloured his horses according to quite different criteria. However, Vasari criticized Uccello precisely for this lack of verisimilitude, and the literary sources discussed in chapter 6 suggest that many viewers expected this kind of realism and judged paintings in terms of truth to appearances.
Another distinctive feature of the Italian culture of the Renaissance was that, relative to the Middle Ages, it was secular.38 The contrast should not be exaggerated. A sample study suggests that the proportion of Italian paintings that were secular in subject rose from about 5 per cent in the 1420s to about 20 per cent in the 1520s. In this case, ‘secularization’ means only that the minority of secular pictures grew somewhat larger.39 In the case of sculpture, literature and music, it is more difficult to use quantitative methods, or to go beyond the obvious point that several of the new genres were secular: the equestrian statue, for example, the comedy and the madrigal.
If one tries to go further, conceptual problems become acute, as the case of what might be called ‘crypto-secularization’ illustrates. Pictures which are officially concerned with St George (say) or St Jerome seem to devote less and less attention to the saint and more and more to the background; the saints become smaller, for example. This trend suggests a possible tension between what the patrons really wanted and what they considered legitimate. The difficulty is that contemporaries did not make the sharp distinctions between the sacred and the secular that became obligatory in Italy in the late sixteenth century, following the Council of Trent. By later standards they were continually sanctifying the profane and profaning the sacred. Masses were based on the tunes of popular songs. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino liked to call himself a ‘priest of the Muses’, and there was a ‘chapel of the Muses’ in the palace at Urbino. God and his vicar the pope might be addressed as ‘Jupiter’ or ‘Apollo’. Some people, such as Erasmus, who visited Rome in 1509, were scandalized by practices such as these, but they persisted throughout the period, as chapter 9 will suggest. If we are going to discuss the Renaissance in terms of ‘secularization’, we should at least be aware that we are imposing later categories on the period.
A third characteristic generally ascribed to the culture of Renaissance Italy, and discussed in detail in Burckhardt’s famous book on the subject, is ‘individualism’. Like ‘realism’, ‘individualism’ is a term which has come to bear too many meanings (discussed on pp. 000 below). It will be used here to refer to the fact that works of art in this period (unlike the Middle Ages) were made in a personal style. But is this really a ‘fact’? To twenty-first-century observers, medieval paintings look much less like the work of different individuals than Renaissance paintings do, but this may be an illusion of the type ‘all Chinese look alike’ (to the non-Chinese). At all events, the testimony of contemporaries suggests that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists and public alike were interested in individual styles.40 In his craftsman’s handbook, Cennino Cennini advised painters ‘to find a good style which is right for you’ (pigliare buna maniera propia per te). In his discussion of the perfect courtier and his understanding of the arts, Baldassare Castiglione suggested that Mantegna, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelanglo and Giorgione were each perfect ‘in his own style’ (nel suo stilo). The Portuguese visitor to Italy Francisco de Hollanda made a similar point about Leonardo, Raphael and Titian: ‘each one paints in his own style’ (cada um pinta por sua maneira).41 In literature, the imitation of ancient models was a matter for debate, in which some protagonists, notably Poliziano, attacked the ideal of writing like Cicero, and argued the value of individual self-expression.42 There was, of course, much imitation of classical and modern artists and writers. Indeed, it was probably the norm. The point about individualism, like secularism, is not that it was dominant, but that it was relatively new, and that it distinguishes the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.
So much for the apparently obvious features of Italian Renaissance culture and the need to describe them with care. Some other general characteristics of more than one art may be worth a brief mention. There was, for example, a trend towards greater autonomy, in the sense that the arts were becoming increasingly independent from practical functions (discussed in chapter 5) and from one another. Music, for example, was ceasing to depend on words. Instrumental pieces, such as the organ compositions of Andrea Gabrieli and Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, were growing longer and more important. Sculpture was becoming more independent from architecture, the statue from the niche. There are even a few sculptures, such as the battle scene made by Bertoldo for Lorenzo de’Medici, which have no subject in the sense that they do not illustrate a story, and a few paintings at least which appear to be independent of religious, philosophical or literary meanings (a topic discussed in chapter 7).43 It may well be significant that the term fantasia is used in this period of pictorial and musical compositions alike, to mean a work which the painter or musician has created out of pure imagination, rather than to illustrate or accompany a literary theme.
Another general characteristic of Italian culture at this time was the breakdown of compartments, the cross-fertilization of disciplines. The gap between theory and practice in a number of arts and sciences narrowed at this time, and this was a cause or consequence of a number of famous innovations. For example, Brunelleschi’s box, which dramatized his discovery of the rules of linear perspective, was a contribution to optics (called perspective in his day) as well as to the craft of painting. The humanist Leon Battista Alberti was a man of theory, a mathematician, as well as a man of practice, an architect, and each kind of study helped the other. His churches and palaces were built on a system of mathematical proportions, while he told scholars that they could learn from observing craftsmen at work. Again, Leonardo’s studies of optics and anatomy were used in his paintings. Some writers on music, such as the monk Pietro Aron, a member of the papal chapel in Pope Leo X’s time and the author of a series of treatises known as Toscanella, bridged the traditional gap between the theorist of music and the player–composer. In the history of political thought Machiavelli, a sometime professional civil servant, bridged the gap between the academic mode of thought about politics, exemplified in the ‘mirror of princes’ tradition of treatises dealing with the moral qualities of the ideal ruler, and the practical mode of thought, which can be illustrated in the records of council meetings and in the dispatches of ambassadors.44
PLATE 1.3 THE COLLEONI CHAPEL IN BERGAMO
Another gap which was closing was the one between the culture of the different regions of the peninsula, as Tuscan achievements became the model for the rest. The reception of the Italian Renaissance abroad was preceded by the reception of the Tuscan Renaissance in other parts of Italy. Florentine innovations were introduced by Florentine artists, such as Masolino in Castiglione Olona (in Lombardy), Donatello in Padua and Naples, Leonardo in Milan, and so on, while the dialect of Tuscany established itself as the literary language of the entire peninsula. Marked regional variations continued to exist throughout the period; Venetian painting, for example, stressed colour where Tuscan painting stressed form (disegno), and Lombard architecture emphasized ornament (Plate 1.3) where Tuscan architecture emphasized simplicity (Plate 6.1). However, the minor art centres, such as Siena or Emilia, were gradually attracted into the orbit of the greater ones. The rise of Rome, a city which lacked a strong artistic tradition of its own but became a major centre of patronage in the early sixteenth century, encouraged an inter-regional art. Like literature, the visual arts were more Italian in 1550 than they had been a hundred or two hundred years before.45