The problem of explaining the clustering of so many outstandingly creative individuals in this period – as in the case of ancient Greece and Rome – is one which has concerned historians since the Renaissance itself. The humanist Leonardo Bruni believed that politics was the key to the problem. Like Tacitus, he thought that the end of the Roman Republic had meant the decline of Roman culture. ‘After the Republic had been subjected to the power of a single head, those outstanding minds vanished, as Tacitus says.’ Conversely, he suggested (at least by implication) that the literary achievements of the Florentines were the result of their liberty.1 A hundred years later, Machiavelli remarked that letters flourish in a society later than arms; first come the captains, then the philosophers.2
It was Giorgio Vasari, however, who first offered a detailed analysis of the problem. Vasari is, of course, the most indispensable source for the art history of the Italian Renaissance: a writer who was also an artist (though he lived towards the end of the period, so that he is as far away from Masaccio as we are from the Pre-Raphaelites, and his information is correspondingly second- or third-hand). We use him, as some Renaissance architects used the ruins of ancient Rome, as a quarry for raw material. However, we should remember that he was himself, in collaboration with the Florentine scholar Don Vincenzo Borghini, a serious historian.3 Although he was concerned most with individual achievement, Vasari found room in his lives of painters, sculptors and architects for what we might call the social factor. Impressed by the clustering of talents of the order of Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, he commented that ‘It is Nature’s custom, when she creates a man who really excels in some profession, often not to create him by himself, but to produce another at the same time and in a neighbouring place to compete with him.’4
Vasari also addressed himself, in his life of Perugino, to the problem of explaining the outsized contribution of Florence to the arts, placing into the mouth of Perugino’s teacher the suggestion that three incentives were present in that city which were generally lacking elsewhere.
The first was the fact that many people were extremely critical (because the air was conducive to freedom of thought), and that men were not satisfied with mediocre works … Secondly, that it was necessary to be industrious in order to live, which meant using one’s wits and judgement all the time … for Florence did not have a large or fertile countryside round about it, so that men could not live cheaply there as they could in other places. Thirdly … came the greed for honour and glory which that air generates in men of every occupation.
Modern readers may find this emphasis on the air as the ultimate cause rather difficult to take seriously, but this difficulty should not prevent them from seeing that Vasari has offered explanations of what we would call an economic, social and psychological kind, in terms of challenge and response and the need for achievement.
It was only in the eighteenth century, however, that what contemporaries called the ‘history of manners’, which more or less coincides with what we describe as cultural and social history, became the object of systematic study. Voltaire, for example, tried to shift the attention of historians from wars to the arts. His Essay on Manners (1756) made the point – in language not unlike Vasari’s – that the sixteenth century was a time when ‘nature produced extraordinary men in almost all fields, above all in Italy’.5
Enlightenment writers offered essentially two explanations for this phenomenon: liberty and opulence. Lord Shaftesbury explained the ‘revival of painting’ by the ‘civil liberty, the free states of Italy as Venice, Genoa and then Florence’.6 If Gibbon had written the history of Florence which he once planned, it is likely that the relation between liberty and the arts would have been a central theme, as it was in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In any case the book he failed to write, or something like it, was produced only a few years later by the Liverpool banker William Roscoe.7 His Life of Lorenzo de’Medici (1795) began as follows:
Florence has been remarkable in modern history for the frequency and violence of its internal dissensions, and for the predilection of its inhabitants for every species of science, and every production of art. However discordant these characteristics may appear, they are not difficult to reconcile … The defence of freedom has always been found to expand and strengthen the mind.
The liberty theme was developed still further in the History of the Italian Republics (1807–18) by the Swiss historian J. C. L. S. de Sismondi.
A common Enlightenment view was that liberty encouraged commerce, while commerce encouraged culture. As Charles Burney, the historian of music, put it, ‘All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce; and they will, in general, be found to have pursued the same course … that is, like commerce, they will be found, upon enquiry, to have appeared first in Italy; then in the Hanseatic towns; next in the Netherlands.’8 The social theorists of Scotland agreed. Adam Ferguson noted that ‘the progress of fine arts has generally made a part in the history of prosperous nations’; John Millar of Glasgow pointed out that Florence led the way in ‘manufactures’ as well as in the arts; and Adam Smith planned to write a book about the relationship between the arts and sciences and society in general in which it is likely that – as in his Wealth of Nations – the city-states of Italy would have had a prominent place.9
The Scottish theorists dreamed of a science of society on Newtonian lines. It is not unfair to describe their model of cultural change as a mechanical one. At much the same time, an alternative, organic model was being created in Germany. J. J. Winckelmann took the important step of replacing the lives of artists, in the manner of Vasari, by a History of Ancient Art (1764), in which he discussed the relation between art and the climate, the political system, and so on, in order to make art history ‘systematically intelligible’.10 J. G. Herder did much to develop the history of literature, which he saw as growing naturally out of particular local environments. Where the Scottish theorists had discussed cultural changes in terms of the impact of commerce, Herder saw art and society as parts of the same whole. ‘As men live and think, so they build and inhabit.’ In the case of Italy, he stressed the ‘spirit’ of commerce, of industry, of competition.11 A similar stress on the organic unity of a given culture can be found in the Philosophy of History (1837) of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who described the arts (like politics, law and religion) as so many ‘objectifications’ of spirit, the ‘spirit of the age’. Discussing the Renaissance, Hegel suggested that the flowering of the arts, the revival of learning and the discovery of America were three related instances of spiritual expansion.12
Karl Marx was also interested in the place of the Renaissance in world history. Rejecting Hegel’s emphasis on consciousness (‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’), he returned to the eighteenth-century concern with the relation between the arts and the economy, though he showed more interest than Ferguson or even Adam Smith in the precise relationship between material production and what he called ‘cultural production’ (geistige Produktion). Marx and Engels (1846) suggested that the cultural ‘superstructure’ was shaped by the economic ‘base’ and that, in the case of the Italian Renaissance, ‘Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.’13 A complementary point about ‘supply’ rather than ‘demand’ and the role of the individual in the history of the Renaissance was made by the Russian Marxist Plekhanov (1898) when he wrote that, ‘If … Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci had died in their infancy, Italian art would have been less perfect, but the general trend of its development in the period of the Renaissance would have remained the same. Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo did not create this trend; they were merely its best representatives.’14
It should by now be obvious that Jacob Burckhardt’s famous study of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860 and still influential, stands in a long tradition of attempts to relate culture to society. Burckhardt’s discovery of Italy was, like Winckelmann’s, one of the great experiences of his life. He came from an art-loving patrician family of Basel, which when he was born in 1818 was still a quasi-city-state, much like Florence. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a member of a rival family expressed the hope that ‘Heaven would deliver us from these Medicis!’15 Burckhardt himself was something of a ‘universal man’ who sketched, played the piano, and wrote music and poetry.
Renaissance Italy was for him not unlike an idealized version of the world of his youth, as well as an escape from the modern, centralized, industrial society he hated. Himself a ‘good private individual’, he saw the Renaissance as an age of individualism.16 In this sense his interpretation was a contribution to what has been called the nineteenth-century ‘myth of the Renaissance’.17 His ‘essay’, as he called it, also owes a good deal to his predecessors. Like Voltaire and Sismondi, he emphasized the importance for Renaissance culture of the wealth and freedom of the towns of northern Italy. Burckhardt’s approach also owes something to Herder, Hegel, and perhaps Schopenhauer, despite the fact he claimed to put forward no philosophy of history, preferring to study what he called ‘cross-sections’ through a culture at particular moments in time. He shared with the philosophers a concern with the polarities of inner and outer, subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious. His study of Renaissance Italy resembles Hegel’s discussion of ancient Greece in its stress on the growth of individualism and its awareness of the state as a ‘work of art’. Like Herder and Hegel, Burckhardt believed that some periods, at least, should be seen as wholes, and in his Reflections on History he analysed societies in terms of the reciprocal interaction of three ‘powers’: the state, culture and religion.18 In so doing he made explicit his method in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
One does not have to be a Marxist to be struck by the absence from both studies of a fourth ‘power’: the economy. Burckhardt admitted this himself. To a younger friend he wrote fourteen years after the publication of his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy that ‘your ideas about the early financial development of Italy as the foundation (Grundlage) of the Renaissance are extremely important and fruitful. That was what my research always lacked.’19
What that study also lacked, as its author again admitted, was any serious discussion of Renaissance art. Burckhardt had been collecting material on the prices of paintings and on patronage, and these and other papers were found after his death with instructions that they were not to be printed. His executors were able to print three late essays on the art collector, the altarpiece and the portrait. But these essays, fascinating as they are, do not fill the gap.20 Nor does the volume on the architecture of Renaissance Italy, despite its occasional remarks on the functions of buildings. It is possible that the gap was left deliberately. Although he was interested in the relation between the three ‘powers’, each shaping and in turn being shaped by the other two, Burckhardt also believed that ‘the connection of art with general culture is only to be understood loosely and lightly. Art has its own life and history.’
This last remark was made by Burckhardt in conversation with his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin, who was in a sense his intellectual heir. Wölfflin is often described as a supporter of an autonomous (or even isolationist) art history, but his approach was more subtle and somewhat ambivalent. He distinguished two approaches to innovation in the arts: the ‘internalist’ approach with which he is generally associated, which accounts for change in terms of an inner development, and the ‘externalist’ approach, according to which ‘to explain a style … can mean nothing other than to place it in its general historical context and to verify that it speaks in harmony with the other organs of its age.’21 The illuminating observations on historical context which Wölfflin sometimes produced (such as the remarks on the social history of gesture, below p. 250) are enough to make one regret the self-denying ordinance by which he generally restricted himself to explanations of style in intrinsic terms. As a result, Burckhardt’s intellectual heritage passed not to Wölfflin but to Aby Warburg.
Aby Warburg’s life is reminiscent of more than one character in the novels of his contemporary Thomas Mann. The eldest son of a Hamburg banker, he rejected the world of business for the world of scholarship. It is hardly surprising that he should have been fascinated by the Medici. Warburg was not a pupil of Burckhardt’s, but in 1892 he sent the older man his essay on Botticelli, and the generous comments on this ‘fine piece of work’ suggest that Burckhardt thought that this study of a painter’s contacts with poets and humanists did not diverge in essentials from his own. It was a testimony, wrote Burckhardt, to ‘the general deepening and many-sidedness’ that research on the Renaissance had reached.22 Warburg was indeed many-sided. He treated the history of art as part of the general history of culture and disliked any kind of intellectual ‘frontier control’, as he called it. On the other hand, he was faithful to the maxim that God is to be found in the details (‘Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail’). To interpret the paintings of Botticelli, for example, he went to the poems of Poliziano and the philosophy of Ficino. Warburg’s interests extended to social and economic history; in his own work the concept of the Florentine ‘bourgeoisie’ played a considerable part, while his friend the economic historian Alfred Doren dedicated to him a study of the Florentine cloth industry.23
Warburg’s central concern was, however, with the persistence and transformation of the classical tradition. For a thorough and detailed social history of Renaissance art, it was necessary to wait for Martin Wackernagel. Wackernagel, an art historian from Basel, made a study of Florence in the period 1420–1530 which concentrated on the organization of the arts: on workshops, patrons and the art market. In other words, he focused on what (with a rather unhappy choice of term for a book published in 1938) he called the artist’s Lebensraum, his milieu, defined as ‘the whole complex of economic-material as well as socio-cultural circumstances and conditions’. Although the present study is concerned with learning, literature and music as well as the visual arts, and with Italy as a whole rather than Florence, its debt to Wackernagel is considerable.24
Another attempt was made in the 1930s to fill the gap between the social and cultural history of the Renaissance. Where Wackernagel provided a detailed social history or ‘sociography’, Alfred von Martin (a pupil of the Hungarian social theorist Karl Mannheim) offered a sociology. His concise, elegant essay reads like a mixture of Marx and Burckhardt, with a dash of Mannheim and the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Like Burckhardt, von Martin was concerned with the themes of individualism and the origins of modernity, but he placed much more emphasis than Burckhardt on the economic basis of the Renaissance and its ‘curve of development’ through time. Alfred von Martin’s Renaissance is a ‘bourgeois revolution’. In the first part of his essay he charted the rise of the capitalist, who replaces the noble and the cleric as the leader of society. It is this social change that underlies the rise of a rational calculating mentality. In parts two and three, however, we see the bourgeois becoming timid and conservative and the individualist ideal of the entrepreneur replaced by the conformist ideal of the courtier.25
It is easy to criticize this essay for its confident use of general terms such as ‘Renaissance man’ (or indeed ‘bourgeois’) or for its speculations on ‘the analogy of money and intellectualism’ (two powerful forces which can be applied to any end) or between democracy and the representation of nude figures in art (the idea being that nakedness is egalitarian). Its defects are partly those of a pioneer, lacking sufficient case studies in the social history of culture on which to base generalizations. The Sociology of the Renaissance (1932) nevertheless remains a valuable corrective and complement to Burckhardt.
Another study of the Renaissance in the tradition of Marx and Mannheim – despite the fact that its author had studied with Wölfflin – is Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and its Social Background (1947). It starts with a vivid contrast between two Madonnas, hanging side by side in the National Gallery in London, both of them painted between 1425 and 1426, one by Masaccio and the other by Gentile da Fabriano. Masaccio’s is described as ‘matter-of-fact, sober and clear-cut’, while Gentile’s is ‘ornate’, ‘decorative’ and ‘hieratic’ (cf. Plate 2.1). Antal went on to explain the differences by the fact that the works were intended for ‘different sections of the public’, more exactly different social classes, with different worldviews. The ‘upper middle class’, whose worldview was sober, rational and ‘progressive’, preferred the paintings of Masaccio, while those of Gentile appealed to the conservative ‘feudal’ aristocracy. Antal concluded that Masaccio’s appearance on the Florentine scene reflected the rise of the upper middle class, and that he lacked followers because this class was assimilated into the aristocracy.26
It is difficult not to admire this brilliant application of Marxist theory to art history. With great intellectual economy, a few central ideas of Marx are used to generate interpretations of art and society in a specific milieu as well as at a general level. All the same, Antal lays himself open to two serious charges. The first is that of anachronism, of applying to fifteenth-century Florence such modern terms as ‘progressive’ or even ‘class’ without expressing any awareness of the problems involved (some of which will be discussed in chapter 9). The second charge – and one to which von Martin must also plead guilty – is that of circularity. As Antal knew, one of Gentile da Fabriano’s patrons, Palla Strozzi, was the father-in-law of one of Masaccio’s patrons, Felice Brancacci. Do these two men belong to different classes? Antal modifies his thesis by arguing that the upper middle class contained a less progressive section which borrowed a feudal ideology from the aristocracy. How do we distinguish the more progressive section of the upper middle class from the rest? By looking at the paintings they commissioned.
The most powerful critique of the Marxist approach has come from Sir Ernst Gombrich, in what was originally a review of a social history of art by Arnold Hauser (1951). Like Antal, Hauser was a Hungarian refugee who had participated in the Sunday circle in the house of the critic Georg Lukács in Budapest. Gombrich distinguished two senses of the phrase ‘social history of art’. The first sense he defined as the study of art ‘as an institution’, or as ‘an account of the changing material conditions under which art was commissioned and created’. The second sense he described, and dismissed, as social history reflected in art.27
It is indeed dangerous to assume that art ‘reflects’ society in a direct way, but the phrase ‘art as an institution’ is also somewhat ambiguous. It may refer to Wackernagel’s Lebensraum – in other words, to the world of the workshop and the patron, to what sociologists call a ‘micro-social’ approach. Much valuable work on the social history of Renaissance art has been done along these lines, from Wackernagel to Gombrich’s own study of Medici patronage and Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s study of artists. The social history of Italian literature has been approached along similar lines, following the pioneering study of Renaissance writers by Carlo Dionisotti.28
The problem remains whether the study of ‘the changing material conditions under which art was commissioned and created’ should be limited to the immediate milieu or extended to society as a whole. It is obviously illuminating to consider the relationship between paintings and the art patronage of the time, but many historians will want to go further and ask what sociologists call ‘macro-social’ questions about the relationship of art patronage to other social institutions and to the state of the economy. Some historians have indeed asked this kind of question about the Italian Renaissance and come up with rather different answers, some stressing economic factors, such as Robert Lopez, and others politics, among them Hans Baron.
Lopez, was particularly interested in the economic history of Genoa (his native city), notorious for making a much smaller contribution to the Renaissance than Florence, Venice or Milan.29 He argued that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a period of economic recession for Europe in general and Italy in particular. He was well aware of the difficulties this recession theory creates for the conventional view of the economic preconditions of the Renaissance. The ‘superstructure’ seems to be out of phase with the ‘base’. All the same, Lopez firmly rejected any attempt to explain away the discrepancy by suggesting that culture lags behind the economy: ‘Cultural lags, as everybody knows, are ingenious elastic devices to link together events which cannot be linked by any other means … Personally, I doubt the paternity of children who were born two hundred years after the death of their fathers … the Renaissance … was conditioned by its own economy and not by the economy of the past.’ What Lopez did was to turn the conventional view upside down and propound a theory of ‘hard times and investment in culture’. Struck by the fact that medieval Italy had a booming economy and small churches, while medieval France had great cathedrals and a less successful economy, he put forward the hypothesis that the cathedrals ate up capital and labour that might otherwise have gone into economic growth. Conversely, Renaissance merchants may have had more time to spare for cultural activities because they were less busy in the office. The value of culture ‘rose at the very moment that the value of land fell. Its returns mounted when commercial interest rates declined.’ It is not clear how seriously, how literally, we are to take the notion of ‘investment’ here, and it will be necessary to return to the problem in chapter 4. However, it is plain that the prosperity theory of culture had a serious competitor.30
A more political explanation of the Renaissance has been put forward by Hans Baron, a scholar who grew up during the Weimar Republic and remained committed to republican values. His study of Florence and the ‘crisis’ of the early Italian Renaissance (1955) noted the important changes in ideas which took place in the years around 1400. ‘By then, the civic society of the Italian city-states had been in existence for many generations and was perhaps already past its prime’, thus ruling out any simple social explanation of intellectual change. Instead, Baron offered a political explanation, returning to the traditional theme of liberty dear to Shaftesbury, Roscoe and Sismondi, but placing more stress on self-consciousness and offering a close analysis of key political events. He argued that, around the year 1400, Florentines suddenly became aware of their collective identity and of the unique characteristics of their society. This awareness led them to identify with the great republics of the ancient world, Athens and Rome, and this identification with antiquity led in turn to major changes in their culture. Baron explained this rise of Florentine self-consciousness and what he called ‘civic humanism’ as a response to the threat to the city’s liberty from the ruler of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who made an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate Florence into his empire. To become aware of one’s ideals, there is nothing like fighting for them.31
The value of Baron’s approach, like that of Lopez, lies in what it has added to the common store rather than in sweeping away all previous accounts of the Renaissance. Baron’s emphasis on political events, for example, does not make full sense without some consideration of underlying structures. Why, for instance, did Florence resist Milan when other city-states capitulated?
At a more general level, micro-social and macro-social approaches should be taken as complementary rather than contradictory. Each has its own dangers and defects. The macro-social approach runs the risk of what has been called ‘Grand Theory’ – too little information, too much interpretation, too rigid a framework. This approach tends to give the impression that ‘social forces’ (which take on a life of their own) act on ‘culture’ in a crudely direct way. The micro-social approach, on the other hand, runs the opposite danger of hyper-empiricism – description rather than analysis, too many facts, too little interpretation.32
There seems to be a case for a pluralistic approach which attempts to test the broader theories, old and new, and to weave empirical studies into a general synthesis. To do this, and in particular to link micro-social to macro-social approaches, is in fact the aim of this book. It is not concerned, as is the sociology of art, with cross-cultural generalization (apart from the comparisons and contrasts offered in the last few pages). Nor is it as sharply focused on the particular as historical monographs tend to be. It deals essentially with styles, attitudes, habits and structures which were typical of a particular society over a few generations – Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Regional variation, discussed in the next chapter, was important – as it still is in Italy. The Venetian cultural achievement of the period long received considerably less than its due, partly for accidental reasons. In the sixteenth century, a Venetian (perhaps the patrician Marcantonio Michiel) collected material on the lives of painters, but this Venetian Vasari did not complete his enterprise, let alone publish it, thus robbing posterity of material necessary to counter the real Vasari’s Tuscan bias. An equivalent of Wackernagel’s book on Florence, planned early in the twentieth century, also remained unpublished and incomplete. It is only relatively recently that studies of the social history of the arts in Venice in this period have been published in sufficient numbers to make possible serious comparisons and contrasts with Florence.33 Studies of the regional cultures of Milan and Naples are also beginning to appear.34
I tried to avoid giving the Florentines more than their share of the limelight; indeed, only a quarter of the artists and writers discussed in the next chapter came from Tuscany.35 The primary aim of this book, however, is not so much to redress any regional imbalance, or even to explore the cultural differences between different parts of Italy, as to present a general picture against which to measure regional variation. In a similar way, the discussion of change within the period (within each section as well as in chapter 10) has been made relatively brief, in order to free the maximum space for the description and analysis of structures, for explaining how what might be called the ‘art system’ worked and in what ways it was related to other activities in the society. In other words, pluralistic as it is, this study does not claim to offer all the possible social interpretations of the Renaissance. In any case, the social approach is only one of a number of possible avenues to the study of the arts.
