The Italian Renaissance

In this context the terms ‘architect’, ‘composer’ and ‘scientist’ are convenient but problematic. The emergence of the architect, as opposed to the master mason, was taking place in this very period.³ Although the word compositore existed in this period, men whom we call ‘composers’ were more commonly described as ‘musicians’. The term ‘scientist’ is a convenient anachronism to avoid the circumlocution ‘writer in physics, medicine, etc.’ As for artista, although Michelangelo uses the term in the modern sense, in the early fifteenth century it meant a university student of the seven liberal arts (below, p. 60).

It is surely significant that, when the social obstacles were a little less massive than usual, women artists and writers made their appearance. For example, the daughters of artists sometimes painted. Tintoretto’s daughter Marietta is known to have painted portraits, though nothing that is certainly by her hand has survived.⁵ Vasari tells us that Uccello had a daughter, Antonia, who ‘knew how to draw’ and became a Carmelite nun. Nuns sometimes worked as miniaturists, among them Caterina da Bologna, better known as a saint. There was a sculptress active in Bologna, Properzia de’Rossi, whose life was written by Vasari, with appropriate references to such gifted women of antiquity as Camilla and Sappho. Only in the later sixteenth century did female painters, notably Sofonisba Anguissciola and Lavinia Fontana, become more visible as they became more independent.⁶

In the case of writers, it has been noted that, although ‘a striking confluence of female literary talent’ is already discernible in the 1480s and 1490s, ‘the first literary works by living secular women began to be published in any numbers’ only in the 1530s and 1540s.⁷ To the names of Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and Tullia d’Aragona one might add those of the poets Gaspara Stampa, Laura Terracina and Laura Battiferri, all six women writing towards the end of our period. Their emergence may well be a result of the increasing importance of Italian (as opposed to Latin) literature and to the opening up of literary society.

Even among adult males, however, the creative elite is far from a random sample. It is, for example, geographically biased. If we divide Italy into seven regions, we find that about 26 per cent of the elite came from Tuscany, 23 per cent from the Veneto, 18 per cent from the States of the Church, 11 per cent from Lombardy, 7 per cent from south Italy, 1.5 per cent from Piedmont and 1 per cent from Liguria. Another 7 per cent came from outside Italy altogether (leaving 5.5 per cent unknown). If we compare these figures with those for the populations of these seven regions, we find that four regions (Tuscany, the Veneto, the States of the Church and Lombardy, in that order) produced more than their share of artists and writers, while the other three, from Piedmont to Sicily, were culturally underdeveloped.¹⁰ It is also clear that, on these criteria, Tuscany is well ahead of the others.

Another striking regional variation concerns the proportion of the elite practising the visual arts. In Tuscany, the Veneto and Lombardy the visual arts are dominant, while in Genoa and southern Italy the writers are more important. In other words, the region in which he (or occasionally she) was born appears to have affected not only the chances of an individual’s entering the creative elite but also the part of it he entered.¹¹

It is only to be expected that sculptors and architects tended to come from regions where stone was plentiful and suitable for carving and building. In Tuscany, Isaia da Pisa did indeed come from Pisa, near the white marble of the west coast, while four major sculptors (Desiderio da Settignano, Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino, and Bartolomeo Ammannati) were all born in Settignano, a village near Florence with important stone quarries. Michelangelo was put out to nurse there with a stonecutter’s wife, and later joked about sucking in his love of sculpture with his nurse’s milk. Lombardy, with 10 per cent of the elite, had 22 per cent of the sculptors and 25 per cent of the architects, as well as much of the best stone. Domenico Gaggini and Pietro Lombardo, founders of whole dynasties of sculptors and architects, both came from the area around Lake Lugano. A third region rich in sculptors and architects as well as in stone was Dalmatia, beyond the frontiers of Italy but not far away and with economic links to Venice in particular. Luciano Laurana the architect and Francesco Laurana the sculptor both came, in all probability, from the Dalmatian town of La Vrana, while the famous sculptor Ivan Duknovic came from Trogir and the architect–sculptor Juraj Dalmatinac came from Šibenik.

These Dalmatians are a reminder of the importance of the foreign artists and writers who worked in Italy, forty-one of them altogether. There were twenty-one musicians, mostly Flemings such as Guillaume Dufay, Josquin des Près, Heinrich Isaac and Adriaan Willaert,¹⁴ some Greek humanists, notably Janos Argyropoulos, Georgios Gemistos Plethon, and Cardinal Bessarion, and a few Spaniards, including the poet Benedetto Gareth from Barcelona, the painter Jacomart Baço from Valencia, and the composer Ramos de Pareja.

What is the significance of these artist dynasties? The Victorian scientist Francis Galton quoted some of these examples to support his views on the importance of ‘hereditary genius’.¹⁷ However, a sociological explanation is at least as plausible as a biological one. In Renaissance Italy painting and sculpture were family businesses, like grocery or weaving. There is evidence to suggest that some artist fathers hoped that their sons would follow them into the craft; two of them at least named their children after famous artists of antiquity. The painter Sodoma called his son Apelles; the boy died young. The architect Vincenzo Seregni, equally hopeful, named his son Vitruvio; the boy survived to become an architect like his father. Guild regulations encouraged family businesses by reducing entry fees for the relatives of masters. The statutes of the painters’ guild at Padua, for example, laid down that an apprentice should pay 2 lire to enter the guild unless he was the son, brother, nephew or grandson of a master, in which cases the price was halved. A master was also allowed to take a relative as an apprentice without charge.¹⁸ The contrast between the visual arts on one side and literature and learning on the other supports the sociological against the biological explanation of artist dynasties. Nearly half the artists in the creative elite are known to have had artist relatives. In the case of literature and learning, however, which was not organized on family lines, the proportion sinks to just over a quarter (the exact figures are 48 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively). The difference between the two groups indicates the strength of social forces.

At the other end of the social scale, it was difficult for the sons of peasants to become artists and writers because they could not easily acquire the necessary training, if indeed they knew that such occupations even existed. Scala the humanist was a miller’s son, but millers were relatively well off. The painter Fra Angelico and the humanist Giovanni Antonio Campano climbed the traditional ladder for poor men’s sons; they entered the Church.²¹

Of four sons of peasants who became artists, stories were told which sound like folktales. Of the great fourteenth-century painter Giotto we learn that he was set to mind the sheep but was discovered by the artist Cimabue – who just happened to be passing – drawing on a rock with a piece of stone.²² In the case of Andrea del Castagno, we are told that ‘he was taken from keeping animals by a Florentine citizen who found him drawing a sheep on a rock, and brought him to Florence.’²³ Vasari adds, perhaps to flatter his own Medici patron, that this citizen was a member of the Medici family. He tells a similar story about Domenico Beccafumi, who was observed by a landowner ‘drawing with a pointed stick in the sand of a little stream as he was keeping his sheep’, and taken to Siena, and another about Andrea Sansovino, who ‘kept cattle like Giotto, drawing in the sand and on the ground the beasts which he was watching’, before he too was discovered and taken to Florence for training. These reworkings of the old myth of the birth and childhood of the hero do not have to be taken too literally. What they illustrate are contemporary perceptions of the poor boy with talent.²⁴ Yet something almost as dramatic must have happened for these boys to have become artists, and, in the case of the architect Palladio, life seems to have imitated art. There is documentary evidence that his father, a poor man, apprenticed his son to a stone-carver at Padua. The boy ran away to Vicenza, where his gifts were noticed by the humanist nobleman Gian Giorgio Trissino, on whose house he was working.²⁵

Unlike the sons of nobles and peasants, the sons of artisans did not run such a high risk of discouragement and frustration, and many of them would have been used to thinking in a plastic manner from childhood, having watched their fathers at work. The conclusion seems inescapable that, for the visual arts to flourish in this period, a concentration of artisans was necessary – in other words, an urban environment. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most highly urbanized regions in Europe were in Italy and the Netherlands, and these were indeed the regions from which most of the major artists came (on the Netherlands, see chapter 10).

The most favourable environment for artists to grow up in seems to have been a city which was orientated towards craft–industrial production, such as Florence, rather than towards trade or services, such as Naples or Rome. It was only when Venice turned from trade to industry, at the end of the fifteenth century, that Venetian art caught up with that of Florence.

The painter Carlo da Milano is described in a document as ‘a doctor of arts’, while another painter, Giulio Campagnola, was a page at the court of Ferrara; but, in the overwhelming majority of cases, painters and sculptors were trained, like other craftsmen, by apprenticeship in workshops (botteghe) which were part of guilds that might include other kinds of artisan as well. In Venice, for instance, the guild of painters encompassed gilders and other decorators. At the beginning of our period, the process of apprenticeship was described as follows:

To begin as a shop-boy studying for one year, to get practice in drawing on the little panel; next, to serve in the shop under some master, to learn how to work at all the branches which pertain to our profession; and to stay and begin the working up of colours; and to learn to boil the sizes, and grind the gessos [the white ground used in painting]; and to get experience in gessoing anconas [panels with mouldings], and modelling and scraping them; gilding and stamping; for the space of a good six years. Then to get experience in painting, embellishing with mordants, making cloths of gold, getting practice in working on the wall, for six more years, drawing all the time, never leaving off, either on holidays or on workdays.²⁷

Apprentices generally formed part of their master’s extended family. Sometimes the master was paid for providing board, lodging and instruction; Sodoma’s father paid the considerable sum of 50 ducats for a seven-year apprenticeship (on the purchasing power of the ducat, see p. 230 below). In other instances, however, it was the master who paid the apprentice, at higher rates as the boy grew more highly skilled. Michelangelo’s contract with the Ghirlandaio workshop laid down that he was to receive 6 florins in the first year, 8 in the second and 10 in the third.

The fact that apprentices sometimes took their master’s name, as in eighteenth-century Japan, is a reminder of the importance of the master by whom an artist was trained. Jacopo Sansovino and Domenico Campagnola were not the sons but the pupils of Andrea Sansovino and Giulio Campagnola. Piero di Cosimo took his name from his master Cosimo Rosselli. It is in fact possible to identify whole chains of artists, each the pupil of the one before. Bicci di Lorenzo, for example, taught his son Neri di Bicci, who taught Cosimo Rosselli, who taught Piero di Cosimo, who taught Andrea del Sarto, who taught Pontormo, who taught Bronzino. The differences in individual style among these examples show that the Florentine system of cultural transmission was far from producing a traditional art. Again, Gentile da Fabriano taught Jacopo Bellini, who taught his sons Gentile (named after his old master) and Giovanni (who had a whole host of pupils, traditionally said to have included Giorgione and Titian).

A few workshops seem to have been of central importance for the art of the period: among Lorenzo Ghiberti’s pupils, for example, were Donatello, Michelozzo, Uccello, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and possibly Masolino, and among Verrocchio’s were not only Leonardo da Vinci but also Botticini, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Credi and Perugino. The most important workshop in the whole period was probably that of Raphael, in which the pupils and assistants included Giulio Romano, Gianfrancesco Penni, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Perino del Vaga and Lorenzo Lotti (to be distinguished from Lorenzo Lotto). A recent study speaks of Raphael’s ‘managerial style’. Michelangelo also made considerable use of assistants, of whom thirteen have been identified for the Sistine Chapel project alone.²⁹

An important part of the training of painters was the study and copying of the workshop collection of drawings, which served to unify the shop style and to maintain its traditions. A humanist described the process in the early fifteenth century: ‘When the apprentices are to be instructed by their master … the painters follow the practice of giving them a number of fine drawings and pictures as models of their art.’³⁰ Such drawings formed an important part of a painter’s capital, and might receive a special mention in wills, as they do from Cosimo Tura of Ferrara in 1471. Designs might be lettered in code because they were considered trade secrets, as in the case of a notebook from Ghiberti’s studio.³¹

It is possible that, as deliberate individualism in style came to be prized more highly (above, p. 28), workshop drawings lost their importance. Vasari tells us that Beccafumi’s master taught him by means of ‘the designs of some great painters which he had for his own use, as is the practice of some masters unskillful in design’, a comment which suggests that the practice was dying out.

The next most popular university among the elite was Bologna, with twenty-six students. The senior university of Italy, Bologna had been through a decline, but it was reviving in the fifteenth century. Next came Ferrara, with twelve members of the elite. It had an international reputation for low fees; a sixteenth-century German student wrote that Ferrara was commonly known as ‘the poor man’s refuge’ (miserorum refugium).³⁴ Pavia (which serviced the state of Milan as Padua did Venice), Pisa (which serviced Florence), Siena, Perugia and Rome each accounted for about half a dozen of the elite. It is a pleasure to add that two of them (John Hothby and Paul of Venice) were Oxford men. Their colleges are not known.

Students tended to go to university younger than they do now; the historian Francesco Guicciardini was fairly typical in going up to Ferrara when he was sixteen. They began by studying ‘arts’ – in other words, the seven liberal arts, divided into the more elementary, grammar, logic and rhetoric (the trivium), and the more advanced, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the quadrivium) – and proceeded to one of the three higher degrees in theology, law or medicine. The curriculum was the traditional medieval one, and officially nothing changed during the period. However, it is well known that what is taught at university – let alone what is studied – does not always correspond to what is on the curriculum. Research on British universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, based on the notes taken by students, has shown that a number of new subjects, including history, had been introduced unofficially. No equivalent study of Italian universities has yet been made, but there is reason to believe that what was described at the time as the ‘humanities’ (the studia humanitatis, the phrase from which our term ‘humanism’ is derived), a package of rhetoric, history, poetry and ethics, was coming to displace the quadrivium.³⁵

Architects and composers need to be considered apart from the rest. Architecture was not recognized as a separate craft, so there was no guild of architects (as opposed to masons) and no apprenticeship system. Consequently, the men who designed buildings during this period had one curious characteristic in common – that they had been trained to do something else. Brunelleschi, for example, was trained as a goldsmith, Michelozzo and Palladio as sculptors or stone-carvers, and Antonio da Sangallo the elder as a carpenter, while Leon Battista Alberti was a university man and a humanist. There were, however, opportunities for informal training. Bramante’s workshop in Rome was the place where Antonio da Sangallo the younger, Giulio Romano, Peruzzi and Raphael learned how to design buildings; its importance in the history of architecture is something like that of Ghiberti’s workshop in Florence a hundred years earlier. Some famous architects, such as Tullio Lombardo and Michele Sammicheli, learned their trade from relatives.³⁷

To sum up. In Italy at this time there were two cultures and two systems of training: manual and intellectual, Italian and Latin, workshop-based and university-based. Even in the cases of architecture and music it is not difficult to identify the ladder which a particular individual has climbed. The existence of this dual system raises certain problems for historians of the Renaissance. If artists were such ‘early leavers’, how did they acquire the familiarity with classical antiquity that is revealed in their paintings, sculptures and buildings? And has the famous ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance any existence outside the vivid imaginations of nineteenth-century historians?

Contemporary writers on the arts were well aware of the relevance of higher education. Ghiberti, for example, wanted painters and sculptors to study grammar, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, philosophy, history, medicine, anatomy, perspective and ‘theoretical design’.³⁹ Alberti wanted painters to study the liberal arts, especially geometry, and also the humanities, notably rhetoric, poetry and history.⁴⁰ The architect Antonio Averlino, who took the Greek name Filarete (‘lover of virtue’), wanted the architect to study music and astrology, ‘For when he orders and builds a thing, he should see that it is begun under a good planet and constellation. He also needs music so that he will know how to harmonize the members with the parts of a building.’⁴¹ The ideal sculptor, according to Pomponio Gaurico, who wrote a treatise on sculpture as well as practising the art, should be ‘well-read’ (literatus) as well as skilled in arithmetic, music and geometry.⁴²

All the same, it should not be assumed that artists’ workshops of the Renaissance were empty of literary or humanistic culture. There was a tradition that Brunelleschi was ‘learned in holy scripture’ and ‘well-read in the works of Dante’.⁴⁴ Some artists are known to have owned books; the brothers Benedetto and Giuliano da Maiano, for example, Florentine sculptors, owned twenty-nine books between them in 1498. More than half of the books were religious: among them a Bible, a life of St Jerome and a book of the miracles of Our Lady. Among the secular books there were the two Florentine favourites, Dante and Boccaccio, as well as an anonymous history of Florence. Classical antiquity was represented by a life of Alexander and Livy’s history of Rome. The intellectual interests of the brothers revealed in this collection, traditional in orientation but with some tincture of the new learning, are not unlike those of Florentine merchants earlier in the century.⁴⁵ Artists with books like these in their possession were clearly interested in the classical past, and not only in its art, although that kind of interest can also be documented from inventories. At the time of his death in 1500, the Sienese painter Neroccio de’Landi owned several pieces of antique marble sculpture, together with forty-three plaster casts of fragments.⁴⁶

It would be unwise to take Leonardo as typical of anything, but there is a fair amount of evidence about the literary culture of sixteenth-century artists. The study of their handwriting offers some clues. In the fifteenth century, they tended to write in the manner of merchants, a style which was probably taught at abacus school. In the sixteenth century, however, Raphael, Michelangelo and others wrote in the new italic style.⁴⁸ Some artists, among them Michelangelo, Pontormo and Paris Bordone, are known to have gone to grammar school. The painter Giulio Campagnola and the architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo both knew Greek as well as Latin.⁴⁹ A few artists acquired a second reputation as writers. Michelangelo’s poems are famous, while Bramante, Bronzino and Raphael all tried their hands at verse. Cennini, Ghiberti, Filarete, Palladio and the Bolognese architect Sebastiano Serlio all wrote treatises on the arts. Cellini and Bandinelli wrote autobiographies, while Vasari is better known for his lives of artists than for his own painting, sculpture and architecture. It is worth adding that Vasari was able to bridge the two cultures by the happy accident of powerful patronage which gave him a double education – a training in the humanities from Pierio Valeriano as well as an artistic training in the circle of Andrea del Sarto.⁵⁰

These examples are impressive, but it is worth underlining the fact that they do not include all distinguished artists. Titian, for example, is absent from the list: it is unlikely that he knew Latin. In any case, the examples do not add up to the ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance. Was he fact or fiction? The ideal of universality was indeed a contemporary one. One character in the dialogue On Civil Life by the fifteenth-century Florentine humanist Matteo Palmieri remarks that ‘A man is able to learn many things and make himself universal in many excellent arts’ (farsi universale di piu arti excellenti).⁵¹ Another Florentine humanist, Angelo Poliziano, wrote a short treatise on the whole of knowledge, the Panepistemon, in which painting, sculpture, architecture and music have their place.⁵² The most famous exposition of the idea comes in count Baldassare Castiglione’s famous Courtier (1528), in which the speakers expect the perfect courtier to be able to fight and dance, paint and sing, write poems and advise his prince. Did this theory have any relation to practice? The careers of Alberti (humanist, architect, mathematician and even athlete), Leonardo and Michelangelo are dazzling testimony to the existence of a few universal men, and another fifteen members of the elite practised three arts or more, among them Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Vasari.⁵³ The humanist Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (a friend of Alberti and Brunelleschi) also deserves a place in this company since his interests included mathematics, geography and astronomy.⁵⁴

About half of these eighteen universal men were Tuscans; about half had fathers who were nobles, professional men or merchants; and no fewer than fifteen of them were, among other things, architects. Either architecture attracted universal men or it encouraged them. Neither possibility is surprising, because architecture was a bridge between science (since the architect needed to know the laws of mechanics), sculpture (since he worked with stone) and humanism (since he needed to know the classical vocabulary of architecture). Apart from Alberti, however, these many-sided men belong to the tradition of the non-specialist craftsman rather than that of the gifted amateur. The theory and the practice of the universal man seem to have coexisted without much contact. The greatest of all, Michelangelo, did not believe in universality. At the time he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he wrote to his father complaining that painting was not his job (non esser mia professione). He created masterpieces of painting, architecture and poetry while continuing to protest that he was just a sculptor.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARTS

The workshop was often a family affair. A father, for example, Jacopo Bellini, would train his sons in the craft. When Jacopo died he bequeathed his sketchbooks and unfinished commissions to his eldest son, Gentile, who took over the shop. Giovanni Bellini succeeded his brother Gentile, and was succeeded in turn by his nephew Vittore Belliniano. Again, Titian’s workshop included his brother Francesco, his son Orazio, his nephew Marco and his cousin Cesare.⁵⁸ The garzoni were generally treated as members of the family, and might marry their master’s daughter, as Mantegna and others did.

The signing of paintings used to be taken to be a mark of ‘Renaissance individualism’. However, it has been argued that when a painting is signed by the head of a workshop it does not mean that he painted it with his own hand. It may even mean the reverse; the point is to declare that the work meets the standards of the shop.⁵⁹

Architecture was, of course, organized on a larger scale with a more elaborate division of labour. Even a relatively small palace like the Ca D’Oro, still to be seen on the Grand Canal in Venice, had twenty-seven craftsmen working on it in 1427. There were carpenters; two main kinds of mason, concerned respectively with hewing and laying stone; unskilled workmen, to carry materials; and perhaps foremen. Coordination was therefore a problem. As Filarete put it, a building project is like a dance; everyone must work together in time (Plate 3.6). The man who ensured coordination was sometimes called the architetto, sometimes the protomaestro or chief of the master masons. It is likely that the two names reflect two different conceptions of the role, the old idea of the senior craftsman and the new idea of the designer. In any case, considerable administrative work was involved. Besides designing the building, someone had to appoint and pay the workmen and arrange for the supply of lime, sand, brick, stone, wood, ropes, and so on. All this work could be organized in a number of different ways. In Venice, building firms were small because master masons were not allowed to take more than three apprentices each. When a large building was needed, it was common for an entrepreneur (padrone) to contract for the whole work and then subcontract pieces of it to different workshops.⁶² At the other extreme, at St Peter’s in the 1520s and 1530s, there was only one workshop, with a large staff including an accountant (computista), two surveyors (mensuratori) and a head clerk (segretario), as well as masons and other workmen. Filarete recommends an agent (commissario) as middleman between the architect and the craftsmen. Alberti seems to have followed this system and employed at least three artists in this way: Matteo de’Pasti as his agent in Rimini, Bernardo Rossellino as his agent in Rome, and Luca Fancelli as his agent in Mantua and Florence.

This division of labour has created problems for art historians as it doubtless did for the agents. It is difficult enough to assess individual responsibility for particular paintings and statues, and still harder, in the case of a building, to know whether patron, architect, agent, master mason or mason was responsible for a given detail. The difficulty is increased by the fact that it was not yet customary for the architect to give his men measured drawings to work from. Many of the instructions were given a bocca, by word of mouth.⁶³

The fact that architecture was such a cooperative enterprise must have acted as a brake on innovation. Since craftsmen were trained by other craftsmen, they learned fidelity to tradition as well as to techniques. When executing a design which broke with tradition, they would be likely, if they were not supervised very closely, to ‘normalize’ it – in other words, to assimilate it to the tradition from which the designer was deliberately diverging. Michelozzo’s design for the Medici Bank at Milan was executed by Lombard craftsmen in a local style (a fragment of this building may still be seen in the museum of the Castello Sforzesco). A small detail, but a significant one, is the difference in proportions between capitals made by Florentine craftsmen for Brunelleschi when he was on the spot and one made in 1430 while he was away.⁶⁵

There seems to be a relationship between the development of a new architectural style and the rise of a new kind of designer – the architect who, like Alberti, had not been trained as a mason. A parallel with shipbuilding may be illuminating. In fifteenth-century Venice, ships were designed by senior ship carpenters, the nautical equivalent of master masons. In the sixteenth century, they were challenged by an amateur. The role of Alberti was played by the humanist Vettor Fausto, who designed a ship (which was launched in 1529) on the model of the ancient quinquereme.⁶⁶

The larger unit of organization for painters, sculptors and masons, but not architects, was the guild. Guilds had several functions. They regulated both standards of quality and relations between clients, masters, journeymen and apprentices. They collected money from subscriptions and bequests and lent or gave some of it to members who were in need. They organized festivals in honour of the patron of the guild, with religious services and processions. In some cities, such as Milan, painters had a guild of their own, often under the patronage of St Luke, who was supposed to have painted a portrait of the Virgin. Elsewhere they formed part of a larger guild, such as that of the papermakers in Bologna or that of the physicians and apothecaries in Florence (though Florentine painters did have a social guild of their own, the Company of St Luke).⁶⁷

For a more vivid impression of the activities of a guild, we may look at the fifteenth-century statutes of one of them, the ‘brotherhood’ or fraglia of the painters of Padua.⁶⁸ The officers of the guild were a bursar, two stewards, a notary and a dean. There were several social and religious activities in which participation was compulsory. On certain days in the year the guild marched in procession with ‘our gonfalon’, and absentees were fined. There was a rota for visiting sick members and for encouraging them to confess and communicate, and fines for non-attendance at funerals. Alms were given to the poor and to lepers. There were also arrangements for the relief of needy members. A poor master had the right to sell a piece of work to the guild, which the bursar would try to sell ‘as best he could’ (ut melius poterit). Other guilds lent money; Botticelli, for example, received a loan from the Company of St Luke in Florence. The Paduan statutes also required masters to keep apprentices for three years at least, and forbade them to make overtures to the apprentices of other masters ‘with gifts or blandishments’ (donis vel blandimentis). There were regulations for the maintenance of standards; candidates aspiring to be masters were examined in the usual way, and houses were inspected to see if work was being ‘falsified’ (si falsificetur aliquod laborerium nostre artis). Standards and fair prices were also maintained by the new but common practice of calling in artists to evaluate the work of others – artistic judgment by one’s peers – in cases of dispute with the client.⁶⁹ Finally, there was the restrictive side of the guild’s activities. The Padua statutes forbade members to give or sell to non-members anything pertaining to the craft. They laid down that no work was to be brought from another district to sell in Padua, and three days only were allowed for the transit of such ‘alien’ work through the territory of the guild.

In Venice too the guild or arte seems to have had a strong territorial imperative. When Albrecht Dürer visited Venice in 1506, he commented on the suspicion or sensitivity to competition of the painters there: ‘They have summoned me before the magistrates three times, and I have had to pay four florins to their guild.’⁷⁰ It has been suggested that, when he was working in Venice in the middle of the fifteenth century, the Tuscan painter Andrea del Castagno had to be supervised by a less gifted artist, Giambono, simply because the latter was a Venetian.⁷¹

In Florence, however, guilds did not have so much power. The Florentine government would not allow them to force all craftsmen to join. Some artists, such as Botticelli, entered a guild only at the end of their career. As a result ‘foreigners’ could come and work in Florence. This more liberal policy, which exposed local tradition to stimuli from outside, may help to explain Florence’s cultural lead.

Writers, humanists, scientists and musicians had no guilds and no workshops. The nearest analogy to the guild in their world was the university (a term which simply meant ‘association’ and was sometimes used in the period to refer to guilds of painters). However, the analogy between students and apprentices, tempting as it is in some respects, is also misleading. Most of the students did not go to university to learn how to be professors but looked forward to careers in Church and state. The students had more power in Italian universities than apprentices had in guilds. It was thanks to a petition from the students from the University of Pisa, for example, that one of their teachers, the scientist Bernardo Torni, had his salary raised. The university was not geared to the production of books by the dons. Their job was lecturing, and their books were something of a sideline.

If humanists and scientists had their universities, writers had no form of organization at all. With the exception of a few professionals, known as poligrafi, writing was something a man did in his spare time, whereas his occupation was soldier, diplomat or bishop. Hence it was a little easier for women to become writers than for them to practise as painters or sculptors. There were, however, some full-time poets who made a living from this occupation. I hesitate to use such a modern term as ‘professional’, however, because these singers of tales or cantastorie, improvisers of epic poetry, such as Cristoforo Altissimo (who died about 1515) or Bernardo Accolti (1458–1535), who wandered from one court to another, represented survivals in Renaissance Italy of an oral culture that we tend to associate with heroic ages like Homeric Greece.⁷²

The effects of the invention of printing on the organization of literature were as diverse as they were shattering. In the first place, it was a disaster to scribes and stationarii who were not prepared to adapt themselves and begin a new career. In the second place, the expansion of book production led to the creation of new occupations which helped support creative writers. As libraries became bigger, there was a greater need for librarians. Several members of the creative elite were in fact occupied in this way. The grammarian Giovanni Tortelli was the first Vatican librarian (to the so-called humanist pope, Nicholas V), a post that was later held by the humanist Bartolommeo Platina. The poet–scholar Angelo Poliziano was librarian to the Medici. The Venetian poet–historian Andrea Navagero was librarian of the Marciana, while the philosopher Agostino Steuco was librarian to the Venetian cardinals Marino and Domenico Grimani.⁷⁵

By the sixteenth century, printers and publishers had begun to ask writers to edit books, to translate them and even to write them, a new form of literary patronage which led to the rise of poligrafo, or professional writer, in Venice towards the middle of the sixteenth century. The most famous of this group of professionals was Pietro Aretino, who made even his ‘private’ letters saleable. Around Aretino’s sun circulated lesser planets (not to say Grub Street hacks) such as his secretary Niccolò Franco, his sometime friend and later enemy Anton Francesco Doni, Giuseppe Betussi, Lodovico Dolce, Ludovico Domenichi, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Francesco Sansovino, son of the artist Jacopo.⁷⁷

The firm of Giolito at Venice, which concentrated on books that were popular rather than scholarly at a time when this was still unusual, seems to have been a pioneer in its use of professional writers. Betussi and Dolce were both in Giolito service, editing, translating, writing and (as hostile critics pointed out) plagiarizing.⁷⁸ Even at the end of our period, however, the professional writer was only just beginning to emerge.

Music resembled literature in that reproduction was organized but production was not. Churches had their choirs, towns had their drummers and pipers, and courts had both, but the role of composer was scarcely recognized. Although the word compositore sometimes occurs, the more common term is the more vague musico, which makes no disinction between someone who invents a tune and someone who plays it.⁷⁹ In their own day, all the forty-nine composers in the creative elite were viewed as writers on the theory of music, or as singers, or as players of instruments, as some of their names, for example Alfonso della Viola and Antonio degli Organi, remind us.

Printers also travelled widely, like Simon Bevilacqua, who worked in Venice, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Novi Ligure, Savona and Lyons during the decade 1506–15. If humanists and printers were often on the road from year to year, actors, singers of tales and pedlars of books (not to mention students in vacation) travelled from day to day. There may also have been some artists in this class, for the fifteenth-century painter Dario da Udine is described in a document as pictor vagabundus.

The Church remained an important source of part-time employment for writers (twenty-two members of the elite), humanists (twenty-two more) and composers (twenty), not to mention seven scientists (such as Paul of Venice), six painters (of whom the most famous are Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolommeo), and one architect (Fra Giovanni Giocondo of Verona).⁸⁵

Another common employment for writers and humanists was that of secretary; their rhetorical skills were in high demand. Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini and Bartolommeo della Scala were made chancellors of Florence for their skill in writing persuasive letters; the humanists Antonio Loschi and Pier Candido Decembrio performed similar services for the Visconti of Milan; while the poets Benedetto Chariteo and Giovanni Pontano were secretaries of state in Naples. Other writers were more like private secretaries: Masuccio Salernitano, best known for his prose fiction, was secretary to Prince Roberto Sanseverino, while the poet Annibale Caro served various members of the Farnese family.⁸⁶

THE STATUS OF THE ARTS

The status associated with the roles of artist and writer was problematic. The problem was a special case of the more general difficulty of accommodating in the social structure, as the division of labour progressed, all roles other than those of priest, knight and peasant – those who prayed, fought and worked – the ‘three orders’ officially recognized in the Middle Ages.⁸⁸ If the status of an artist was ambiguous, so was that of a merchant. And just as Italians, in some regions at least, had gone further towards the social acceptance of the merchant than had most other Europeans, so it was in Italy that the status of the artist seems to have been at its peak. In the discussion that follows, the evidence of high status comes first, then the evidence of contempt and, finally, an attempt to reach a balanced conclusion.

A few painters achieved high status according to the criteria of the time, notably by being knighted or ennobled by their patrons. Gentile Bellini was made a count by the emperor Frederick III, Mantegna by Pope Innocent VIII, and Titian by the emperor Charles V. The Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli was knighted by Prince Ferdinand of Capua; Sodoma by Pope Leo X; Giovanni da Pordenone by the king of Hungary. For the patron it was a cheap way of rewarding service, but for the artist the honour was real enough. Some painters held offices which conferred status as well as income. Giulio Romano held an office at the court of Mantua, while the painters Giovanni da Udine and Sebastiano del Piombo held office in the Church. (Sebastiano’s nickname, ‘the lead’, was a reference to his office as Keeper of the Seal.) Other painters held high civic office. Luca Signorelli was one of the priors (aldermen) of Cortona; Perugino, one of the priors of Perugia; Jacopo Bassano, consul of Bassano; Piero della Francesca, a town councillor of Borgo San Sepolcro.

There is similar evidence for the status of sculptors and architects. Ghiberti’s programme of studies for sculptors, and Alberti’s for architects, implies that these occupations are on a level with the liberal arts. Ghiberti suggested that the sculptor should study ten subjects he calls ‘liberal arts’: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology, perspective, history, anatomy, design and arithmetic. Alberti advised architects to build only for men of quality, ‘because your work loses its dignity by being done for mean persons’.⁹⁴ The patent issued in 1468 by Federigo da Montefeltro, the ruler of Urbino, on behalf of Luciano Laurana declares that architecture is ‘an art of great science and ingenuity’, and that it is ‘founded upon the arts of arithmetic and geometry, which are the foremost of the seven liberal arts’.⁹⁵ A papal decree of 1540, freeing sculptors from the need to belong to the guilds of ‘mechanical craftsmen’, remarked that sculptors ‘were prized highly by the ancients’, who called them ‘men of learning and science’ (viri studiosi et scientifici).⁹⁶ Some sculptors, Andrea il Riccio of Padua for example, had poems addressed to them. Some were ennobled. The king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, not only made Giovanni Dalmata a nobleman but gave him a castle as well. Charles V made Leone Leoni and Baccio Bandinelli knights of Santiago. Ghiberti’s work made him rich enough to be able to buy an estate complete with manor house, moat and drawbridge. Other prosperous sculptors and architects include Brunelleschi, the brothers da Maiano, Bernardo Rossellino, Simone il Cronaca of Florence, and Giovanni Amadeo of Pavia, while Titian was among the wealthiest of all artists. The houses of artists are a sign of their rising status – in particular, the palaces of Mantegna and Giulio Romano at Mantua and of Raphael in Rome.⁹⁷

A number of humanists also achieved high status. In the case of Florence, it has been argued that humanists belonged to the top 10 per cent of Florentine families. Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Carlo Marsuppini, Giannozzo Manetti and Matteo Palmieri, for example, were all wealthy men. Bruni, Poggio and Marsuppini all held the high office of chancellor of Florence, while Palmieri held office at least sixty-three times and Manetti had a distinguished career as a diplomat and a magistrate. Of these five, three were born into the upper class, while Bruni (the son of a grain dealer) and Poggio (the son of a poor apothecary) entered it through their own efforts. All five made good marriages. Finally, Bruni, Marsuppini and Palmieri were all given splendid state funerals.⁹⁹

The third prejudice against the visual arts was that artists were ‘ignorant’ – in other words, they lacked a certain kind of training (in theology and the classics, for example) that had a higher esteem than the training which they had received and their critics had not. When cardinal Soderini was trying to excuse Michelangelo’s flight from Rome (below, p. 114), he told the pope that the artist ‘has erred through ignorance. Painters are all like this both in their art and out of it.’ It is a pleasure to record that Julius did not share this prejudice. He told Soderini roundly: ‘You’re the ignorant one, not him!’¹⁰⁵

Although a few artists, already mentioned, became rich by means of their art, many remained poor. Their poverty was probably as much the cause as the result of prejudices against the arts. The Sienese painter Benvenuto di Giovanni declared in 1488 that ‘The gains in our profession are slight and limited, because little is produced and less earned.’¹⁰⁶ Vasari made a similar point: ‘The artist today struggles to ward off famine rather than to win fame, and this crushes and buries his talent and obscures his name.’ Vasari’s comment might be dismissed as special pleading, inconsistent with what he says elsewhere (let alone with his own wealth). Benvenuto’s remarks, on the other hand, come from his tax return, which he knew would be subject to checking. The same goes for Verrocchio, whose return for 1457 claims that he was not earning enough to keep his firm in hose (non guadagniamo le chalze).¹⁰⁷ Botticelli and Neroccio de’Landi went into debt. Lotto was once reduced to trying to raffle thirty pictures, and he was able to dispose of only seven of them.

Humanists too did not always make fortunes and they were not invariably respected. The Greek scholar Janos Argyropoulos is said to have been so poor at one time that he was forced to sell his books. Bartolommeo Fazio had an up-and-down career, at one time a schoolteacher in Venice and Genoa, at another a notary in Lucca, before he landed a safe and well-paid job as secretary to Alfonso of Aragon. Bartolommeo Platina worked in a variety of occupations – soldier, private tutor, press-corrector, secretary – before becoming Vatican librarian. Angelo Decembrio was at one time a schoolmaster in Milan, Pomponio Leto in Venice and Francesco Filelfo in several different towns. Jacopo Aconcio was at one time a notary, at another secretary to the governor of Milan, at another trying his luck in England.

These humanists were the distinguished ones. To calculate the status of the group as a whole, it is also necessary to consider the less important ones. Ideally, if the evidence permits, a study should be made of the careers of all the students of the humanities. Until such a study is published, it is difficult to do more than guess at the status of humanists. My own guess would be that there was a considerable gap between the few stars and the less successful majority, even if a small-town teacher or impoverished corrector for the press might enjoy a status higher than that of a successful but ‘ignorant’ artist. Musicians, whose low status was lamented by Alberti, seem to have been in a similar position. For every lutenist who was rewarded by a patron as generous as Pope Leo X, there must have been many who were poor, since there were few Italian courts and still fewer honourable positions outside them.

In summing up, it is tempting to take the easy way out and to close on a note of ‘on the one hand … on the other’. However, it is possible to make a few more precise points – three at least. As in the case of training, so in status the creative elite formed two cultures, with literature, humanism and science enjoying more respect than the visual arts and music. All the same, to choose the humanities as a career was to take a considerable risk. Many were trained but few were chosen. In the second place, Renaissance artists were an example of what sociologists call ‘status dissonance’. Some of them achieved high status, others did not. According to some criteria, artists deserved honour; according to others, they were just craftsmen.

ARTISTS AS SOCIAL D EVIANTS

If the artist was not an ordinary craftsman, what was he? He could if he wished imitate the style of life of a nobleman, a model suitable for those endowed with wealth, self-confidence and the ability to behave like something out of Castiglione’s Courtier. A number of artists, mainly sixteenth-century ones, are described in these terms in Vasari’s Lives. An obvious example is Raphael, who was in fact one of Castiglione’s friends. Other instances of the artist as gentleman are Giorgione, Titian, Vasari’s kinsman Signorelli, Filippino Lippi (described as ‘affable, courteous and a gentleman’), the sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano (who makes an appearance in The Courtier), and a small number of others, including, of course, Vasari himself. All the same, the artist who adopted this role still had to face the social prejudice against manual labour which has just been described. For those who were no longer content to be ordinary craftsmen, yet lacked the education and poise necessary to pass as gentlemen, a third model was developed in this period (how self-consciously, it is hard to say) – that of the eccentric or social deviant.

At this point distinctions are necessary. Vasari and others have recorded a number of highly dramatic stories about artists of the period who killed or wounded men in brawls (Cellini, Leone Leoni and Francesco ‘Torbido’ of Venice) or committed suicide (Rosso, Torrigiani). Others were described by contemporaries as ‘sodomites’ (Leonardo, ‘Sodoma’). The significance of these stories is difficult to assess. The evidence is insufficient to determine whether these artists were what they were described as being, and, even if they were, we cannot conclude from a few cases that artists were more likely than other social groups to kill others or themselves or to love members of the same sex.¹¹⁰

There is a much richer vein of contemporary comment about a more significant kind of eccentricity associated with artists: irregular working habits. In one of the stories of Matteo Bandello, who was in a good position to know, there is a vivid description of Leonardo’s way of working, which stresses his ‘caprice’ (capriccio, ghiribizzo).¹¹¹ Vasari made similar comments about Leonardo, and told a story in which the artist justified his long pauses to the duke of Milan with the argument that ‘Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for they are thinking of designs’ (inventioni). The key concept here is a relatively new one, ‘genius’ (genio), which turned the eccentricity of artists from a liability into an asset.¹¹² Patrons had to learn to put up with it. On one occasion the marquis of Mantua, explaining to the duchess of Milan why Mantegna had not produced a particular work on time, made the resigned remark that ‘usually these painters have a touch of the fantastic’ (hanno del fantasticho).¹¹³

Other clients were less tolerant. Vasari remarked of the painter Jacopo Pontormo that ‘What most annoyed other men about him was that he would not work save when and for whom he pleased and after his own fancy.’ Composers – or their patrons – posed similar problems. When the duke of Ferrara wanted to hire a musician, he sent one of his agents to see – and hear – both Heinrich Isaac and Josquin des Près. The agent reported that ‘It is true that Josquin composes better, but he does it when he feels like it, not when he is asked.’ It was Isaac who was hired (below, p. 120).¹¹⁴

In the case of other artists, their eccentricity took the form of doing too much work rather than too little, and neglecting everything but their art. Vasari has a series of such stories. Masaccio, for example, was absent-minded (persona astratissima): ‘Having fixed his mind and will wholly on matters of art, he cared little about himself and still less about others … he would never under any circumstances give a thought to the cares and concerns of this world, nor even to his clothes, and was not in the habit of recovering his money from debtors.’ Again, Paolo Uccello was so fascinated by his ‘sweet’ perspective that ‘He remained secluded in his house, almost like a hermit, for weeks and months, without knowing much of what was going on in the world and without showing himself.’¹¹⁵ Vasari also gives a vivid account of the ‘strangeness’ of Piero di Cosimo, who was absent-minded, loved solitude, would not have his room swept, and could not bear children crying, men coughing, bells ringing or friars chanting (is his attempt to preserve himself from distraction really so ‘strange’?).

The fact that Masaccio, in early fifteenth-century Florence, is presented as uninterested in money is a trait worth emphasis. A still more conspicuous contempt for wealth is shown by Donatello, of whom ‘It is said by those who knew him that he kept all his money in a basket, suspended from the ceiling of his workshop, so that everyone could take what he wanted whenever he wanted.’¹¹⁶ This looks very much like a conscious rejection of the fundamental values of Florentine society. Why Donatello should have rejected these values emerges from another story of Vasari’s, about a bust made by the sculptor for a Genoese merchant, who claimed to have been overcharged because the price worked out at more than half a florin for a day’s work.

Donatello considered himself grossly insulted by this remark, turned on the merchant in a rage, and told him that he was the kind of man who could ruin the fruits of a year’s toil in the hundredth part of an hour; and with that he suddenly threw the bust down into the street where it shattered into pieces, and added that the merchant had shown he was more used to bargaining for beans than for bronzes.

Whether the point was Donatello’s or Vasari’s, the moral is clear: works of art are not ordinary commodities, and artists are not ordinary craftsmen to be paid by the day.

One is reminded of what the attorney-general said to Whistler about his Nocturne, and the artist’s reply: ‘The labour of two days then is that for which you ask 200 guineas?’ ‘No: I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.’ The point still needed to be made in 1878. However, the question was very much alive in Renaissance Italy. The archbishop of Florence recognized, as we have seen (p. 81), that artists claimed with some justification to be different from ordinary craftsmen. Francisco de Hollanda, a Portuguese in the circle of Michelangelo, argued still more forcefully that ‘Works of art are not to be judged by the amount of useless labour spent on them but by the worth of the knowledge and skill which went into them’ (lo merecimento do saber e da mao que as faz).¹¹⁷

¹ On problems raised by this method, Burke, ‘Prosopografie van der Renaissance’.

² For the composition of this group, see the names marked with an asterisk in the Index. No references will be given for information about individual artists derived from the Thieme–Becker Allgemeines Lexicon; about humanists from Cosenza’s Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary; or about musicians from Grove’s New Dictionary of Music. Nor will page references be given for Vasari’s Lives, since the lives are short and the editions are many.

³ Ettlinger, ‘Emergence of the Italian architect’. Cf. Pevsner, ‘The term “architect”’; Ackerman, ‘Ars sine scientia nihil est’; Murray, ‘Italian Renaissance architect’.

⁴ Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’; Greer, Obstacle Race; Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses.

⁵ Tietze-Conrat, ‘Marietta, fille du Tintoret’, attempted some identifications.

⁶ Niccoli, Rinascimento al femminile; Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa.

⁷ Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p. xiii.

⁸ Pesenti, ‘Alessandra Scala’; King, ‘Thwarted ambitions’; Jardine, ‘Isotta Nogarola’ and ‘Myth of the learned lady’; Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, pp. 2–17.

⁹ Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles.

¹⁰ Tuscany had 10 per cent of the population and 26 per cent of the elite; the Veneto, 20 and 23 per cent; the States of the Church, 15 and 18 per cent; Lombardy, 10 and 11 per cent. On the other hand, south Italy had 30 per cent of the population and 7 per cent of the elite; Piedmont, 10 and 1.5 per cent; Liguria, 5 and 1 per cent. For statistics on writers alone, Bec, ‘Lo statuto socio-professionale’, p. 247.

¹¹ Tuscany, 60 per cent visual (95 to 62); the Veneto, 55 per cent (75 to 62); Lombardy, 70 per cent (45 to 19); south Italy, 58 per cent non-visual (24 to 17); while the Genoese had four humanists to one artist.

¹² Urbino had a population of less than 5,000, but it included the historian Polidore Vergil, the mathematician Commandino, the composers M. A. Cavazzoni and his son Girolamo, and the painters Genga, Santi and Raphael. The architect Bramante was born nearby.

¹³ Hall, Rome.

¹⁴ Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 7.

¹⁵ The known fathers of painters, sculptors and architects include 96 artisans and shopkeepers compared to 40 nobles, professional men or merchants. The known fathers of writers, humanists and scientists include 7 artisans and shopkeepers compared to 95 nobles, professional men and merchants. Cf. Bec, ‘Lo statuto socio-professionale’, pp. 248–9.

¹⁶ Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano.

¹⁷ Galton, Hereditary Genius.

¹⁸ Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, pp. 43ff.

¹⁹ However, the life of Brunelleschi attributed to Manetti and written some sixty years closer to the events records that Filippo’s father made no objection, ‘as he was a man of discernment’.

²⁰ Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, p. 24.

²¹ On Campano, D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 14–15.

²² The story is told by Ghiberti, Commentari, p. 32, followed by Vasari.

²³ Frey, Il libro de Antonio Billi, pp. 21–2.

²⁴ Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic, ch. 2. Cf. Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles.

²⁵ Puppi, Andrea Palladio, ch. 1.

²⁶ On workshop training, Thomas, Painter’s Practice; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 79–102; Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, pp. 35–46. Cf. Ames-Lewis, Intellectual Life.

²⁷ Cennini, Libro dell’arte, p. 65. Cf. Cole, Renaissance Artist at Work, ch. 2; on Florence, Wackernagel, World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, ch. 12, and Thomas, Painter’s Practice; on Venice, Tietze, ‘Master and workshop’.

²⁸ Goldthwaite, ‘Schools and teachers’.

²⁹ Talvacchia, ‘Raphael’s workshop’; Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s assistants’.

³⁰ Gasparino Barzizza, quoted by Baxandall, ‘Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras’, p. 183n. On drawings, Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, ch. 4, and Ames-Lewis and Wright, Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop.

³¹ Prager and Scaglia, Brunelleschi, pp. 65ff.

³² Kagan, ‘Universities in Italy’; Black, ‘Italian Renaissance education’; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy and Universities of the Italian Renaissance; Belloni and Drusi, Umanesimo ed educazione.

³³ Since this book first appeared, there has been something of a boom in the history of universities in Italy and elsewhere, thanks to Verde, Studio fiorentino; Schmitt, ‘Philosophy and science’; Denley, ‘Recent studies on Italian universities’ and ‘Social function of Italian Renaissance universities’; Kagan, ‘Universities in Italy’; and the synthesis by Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance. On Padua, Giard, ‘Histoire de l’université’.

³⁴ Rashdall, Universities of Europe, vol. 2, p. 54.

³⁵ Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen; Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, ch. 1; Denley, ‘Social function of Italian Renaissance universities’; Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 199–248.

³⁶ Martines, Social World, p. 117.

³⁷ Ackerman , ‘Architectural practice’.

³⁸ Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 4.

³⁹ Ghiberti, Commentari, p. 2.

⁴⁰ Alberti, On Painting; and On Sculpture, bk 3, pp. 94ff.

⁴¹ Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, bk 15, p. 198.

⁴² Gauricus, De sculptura, pp. 52ff.

⁴³ Pevsner, Academies of Art, ch. 1, gives the traditional view. Vasari’s famous account of Bertoldo’s academy has been questioned by Chastel, Art et humanisme, pp. 19ff. Cf. Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’Medici’s sculpture garden’.

⁴⁴ Frey, Il libro de Antonio Billi, p. 31.

⁴⁵ Cèndali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, pp. 182ff.; Bec, Marchands écrivains; cf. Bec, Livres des florentins.

⁴⁶ Coor, Neroccio de’Landi, p. 107.

⁴⁷ Fumagalli, Leonardo; Reti, ‘Two unpublished manuscripts’, pp. 81ff.

⁴⁸ Petrucci, La scrittura.

⁴⁹ Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie; Dempsey, ‘Some observations’; Bolland, ‘From the workshop to the academy’.

⁵⁰ Boase, Giorgio Vasari; Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 72–3.

⁵¹ Palmieri, Vita civile, bk 1, p. 43.

⁵² Poliziano, Panepistemon; Summers, Michelangelo, ch. 17.

⁵³ Only seven arts are distinguished here: painter, sculptor, architect, writer, humanist, scientist and composer, a classification which tends to play down the many-sidedness of the elite rather than exaggerate it. The eighteen men who practised three arts or more are Alberti, Aquilano, Bramante, Brunelleschi, Filarete, Ghiberti, Giocondo, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo, Ligorio, Mazzoni, Michelangelo, Alessandro Piccolomini, Serlio, Tebaldeo, Vasari, Vecchietta and Zenale.

⁵⁴ Santillana, ‘Paolo Toscanelli and his friends’.

⁵⁵ Cole, Renaissance Artist at Work; Thomas, Painter’s Practice and ‘Workshop as the space’; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 79–101; Comanducci, ‘Il concetto di “artista”’ and ‘Organizazzione produttiva’; Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano.

⁵⁶ Chambers, Patrons and Artists, nos. 7, 11, 15.

⁵⁷ Marabottini, ‘Collaboratori’; Burke, ‘Italian artist’.

⁵⁸ On the persistence of the family workshop in Venice, Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, pp. 7ff.; Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano, pp. 152–91.

⁵⁹ Tietze, ‘Master and workshop’; cf. Fraenkel, Signature, genèse d’un signe; Matthew, ‘Painter’s presence’.

⁶⁰ Procacci, ‘Compagnie di pittori’.

⁶¹ Schulz, Sculpture of Bernardo Rossellino, p. 11; Caplow, ‘Sculptors’ partnerships’; Sheard and Paoletti, Collaboration in Italian Renaissance Art. On the quarries, Klapisch-Zuber, Maîtres du marbre; Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 2.

⁶² Wyrobisz, ‘Attività edilizia a Venezia’.

⁶³ Manetti, Vita di Brunelleschi, p. 77.

⁶⁴ Ricci, Tempio malatestiano, pp. 588ff.; Wittkower, Architectural Principles, pp. 29ff; Chambers, Patrons and Artists, pp. 181–3.

⁶⁵ Saalman, ‘Filippo Brunelleschi’.

⁶⁶ Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders; Concina, Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia, pp. 108ff.

⁶⁷ MacKenney, ‘Arti e stato a Venezia’, ‘Guilds and guildsmen’ and Tradesmen and Traders; Motta, ‘Università dei pittori’.

⁶⁸ Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, pp. 43ff.

⁶⁹ Conti, ‘Evoluzione dell artista’, pp. 151ff.

⁷⁰ Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, pp. 41ff.

⁷¹ Muraro, ‘Statutes of the Venetian Arti’.

⁷² Lord, Singer of Tales; Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico; Burke, ‘Learned culture and popular culture’ and ‘Oral culture and print culture’.

⁷³ Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, especially the life of Cosimo de’Medici; De la Mare, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci’; Martini, Bottega di un cartolaio fiorentino; Petrucci, ‘Libro manoscritto’; Richardson, Manuscript Culture.

⁷⁴ Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, esp. ch. 1; Zeidberg and Superbi, Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture; Tenenti, ‘Luc’Antonio Giunti’.

⁷⁵ Branca, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola; Petrucci, ‘Biblioteche antiche’.

⁷⁶ Trovato, Con ogni diligenza; Grafton, Culture of Correction.

⁷⁷ Bareggi, Mestiere di scrivere; Larivaille, Pietro Aretino; Grendler, Critics of the Italian World and ‘Francesco Sansovino’.

⁷⁸ Quondam, ‘Mercanzia d’honore’.

⁷⁹ Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 2.

⁸⁰ Martines, Social World, p. 97.

⁸¹ Of 103 humanists in the elite, 14 may be classified as extremely sedentary, 29 as fairly sedentary, 12 as fairly mobile, and 46 as extremely mobile, with two individuals unknown. On transient foreign humanists in Venice, King, Venetian Humanism, pp. 220ff.

⁸² Wittkower, ‘Individualism in art and artists’; Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn; Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage.

⁸³ Kristeller Renaissance Thought, ch. 1, a salutary reaction against some extremely vague conceptions of the humanist.

⁸⁴ Acciarini to Poliziano, quoted in Usmiani, ‘Marko Marulić’, p. 19.

⁸⁵ Dionisotti, Geografia e storia.

⁸⁶ On humanists as secretaries in Venice, King, Venetian Humanism, pp. 294ff.

⁸⁷ That Grazzini actually practised as an apothecary has been questioned by Plaisance, ‘Culture et politique’, p. 82n.

⁸⁸ Duby, Three Orders; Niccoli, Sacerdoti.

⁸⁹ Cennini, Libro dell’arte, vol. 2; Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, p. 91.

⁹⁰ Gilbert, ‘The archbishop on the painters’.

⁹¹ Hartt, Giulio Romano, doc. 69.

⁹² Dürer to Pirckheimer, 13 October 1506, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, pp. 41ff.

⁹³ Castiglione, Cortegiano, bk 1, ch. 49; on Barbaro, Dolce, Aretino, pp. 106ff.

⁹⁴ Ghiberti, Commentari, p. 2.

⁹⁵ Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 104.

⁹⁶ Steinmann, Sixtinische Kapelle, vol. 2, p. 754.

⁹⁷ Conti, ‘Evoluzione dell’artista’, pp. 206ff.

⁹⁸ Anthon, ‘Social status of Italian muscians’; Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 2; Lowinsky, ‘Music of the Renaissance as viewed by Renaissance musicians’.

⁹⁹ Martines, Social World, a study of 45 humanists in the period 1390–1460.

¹⁰⁰ The 25 are as follows: Andrea Alciati, from Alzate in Lombardy; Ermolao Barbaro, from Venice; Filippo Beroaldo, from Bologna; Flavio Biondo, from Forli in the Papal States; Angelo Decembrio, from Lombardy; Mario Equicola, from Caserta; Bartolommeo Fazio, from La Spezia in Liguria; Francesco Filelfo, from Tolentino, near Ancona; Guarino Veronese; Pomponio Leto, from Lucania; Antonio Loschi, from Vicenza; Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, from Lombardy; Andrea Navagero, from Venice; Agostino Nifo, from Calabria; Antonio Panormita, from Palermo; Giovanni Pico, from Mirandola; Bartolommeo Platina, from Cremona; Pietro Pomponazzi, from Mantua; Giovanni Pontano, from Ponte in Umbria; Sperone Speroni, from Padua; Giorgio Valla, from Piacenza; Lorenzo Valla, from Rome; Maffeo Vegio, from Lodi; Pietro Paolo Vergerio the elder, from Capodistria; and Vittorino da Feltre from the Veneto.

¹⁰¹ Mondolfo, ‘Greek attitude’.

¹⁰² Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, p. 91.

¹⁰³ Ibid.

¹⁰⁴ Michelangelo, Carteggio, 2 May 1548.

¹⁰⁵ Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, p. 45.

¹⁰⁶ Coor, Neroccio de’Landi, p. 10.

¹⁰⁷ Mather, ‘Documents’.

¹⁰⁸ Zilsel, Entstehung des Geniebegriffes.

¹⁰⁹ Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie; Dempsey, ‘Some observations’.

¹¹⁰ Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn; Zanrè, Cultural Non-Conformity.

¹¹¹ Bandello, Novelle, novella 58, dedication.

¹¹² Zilsel, Entstehung des Geniebegriffes; Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy.

¹¹³ Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 61.

¹¹⁴ Straeten, Musique aux Pays-Bas, p. 87.

¹¹⁵ Masaccio died in 1428, Uccello in 1475. Vasari could have learned about them from the oral traditions of the artists of Florence, but in Masaccio’s case this would have been more than a hundred years after the event. Readers can make their own assessment of the reliability of information transmitted orally over such a period.

3

ARTISTS AND WRITERS

RECRUITMENT

TRAINING

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARTS

THE STATUS OF THE ARTS

ARTISTS AS SOCIAL D EVIANTS

1 On problems raised by this method, Burke, ‘Prosopografie van der Renaissance’.

3 Ettlinger, ‘Emergence of the Italian architect’. Cf. Pevsner, ‘The term “architect”’; Ackerman, ‘Ars sine scientia nihil est’; Murray, ‘Italian Renaissance architect’.

4 Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’; Greer, Obstacle Race; Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses.

5 Tietze-Conrat, ‘Marietta, fille du Tintoret’, attempted some identifications.

6 Niccoli, Rinascimento al femminile; Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa.

7 Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, p. xiii.

8 Pesenti, ‘Alessandra Scala’; King, ‘Thwarted ambitions’; Jardine, ‘Isotta Nogarola’ and ‘Myth of the learned lady’; Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, pp. 2–17.

9 Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles.

11 Tuscany, 60 per cent visual (95 to 62); the Veneto, 55 per cent (75 to 62); Lombardy, 70 per cent (45 to 19); south Italy, 58 per cent non-visual (24 to 17); while the Genoese had four humanists to one artist.

12 Urbino had a population of less than 5,000, but it included the historian Polidore Vergil, the mathematician Commandino, the composers M. A. Cavazzoni and his son Girolamo, and the painters Genga, Santi and Raphael. The architect Bramante was born nearby.

13 Hall, Rome.

14 Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 7.

16 Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano.

17 Galton, Hereditary Genius.

18 Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, pp. 43ff.

19 However, the life of Brunelleschi attributed to Manetti and written some sixty years closer to the events records that Filippo’s father made no objection, ‘as he was a man of discernment’.

20 Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, p. 24.

21 On Campano, D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 14–15.

22 The story is told by Ghiberti, Commentari, p. 32, followed by Vasari.

23 Frey, Il libro de Antonio Billi, pp. 21–2.

24 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic, ch. 2. Cf. Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles.

25 Puppi, Andrea Palladio, ch. 1.

26 On workshop training, Thomas, Painter’s Practice; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 79–102; Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, pp. 35–46. Cf. Ames-Lewis, Intellectual Life.

27 Cennini, Libro dell’arte, p. 65. Cf. Cole, Renaissance Artist at Work, ch. 2; on Florence, Wackernagel, World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, ch. 12, and Thomas, Painter’s Practice; on Venice, Tietze, ‘Master and workshop’.

28 Goldthwaite, ‘Schools and teachers’.

29 Talvacchia, ‘Raphael’s workshop’; Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s assistants’.

30 Gasparino Barzizza, quoted by Baxandall, ‘Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras’, p. 183n. On drawings, Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, ch. 4, and Ames-Lewis and Wright, Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop.

31 Prager and Scaglia, Brunelleschi, pp. 65ff.

32 Kagan, ‘Universities in Italy’; Black, ‘Italian Renaissance education’; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy and Universities of the Italian Renaissance; Belloni and Drusi, Umanesimo ed educazione.

34 Rashdall, Universities of Europe, vol. 2, p. 54.

35 Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen; Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, ch. 1; Denley, ‘Social function of Italian Renaissance universities’; Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 199–248.

36 Martines, Social World, p. 117.

37 Ackerman , ‘Architectural practice’.

38 Bridgman, Vie musicale, ch. 4.

39 Ghiberti, Commentari, p. 2.

40 Alberti, On Painting; and On Sculpture, bk 3, pp. 94ff.

41 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, bk 15, p. 198.

42 Gauricus, De sculptura, pp. 52ff.

43 Pevsner, Academies of Art, ch. 1, gives the traditional view. Vasari’s famous account of Bertoldo’s academy has been questioned by Chastel, Art et humanisme, pp. 19ff. Cf. Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’Medici’s sculpture garden’.

44 Frey, Il libro de Antonio Billi, p. 31.

45 Cèndali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, pp. 182ff.; Bec, Marchands écrivains; cf. Bec, Livres des florentins.

46 Coor, Neroccio de’Landi, p. 107.

47 Fumagalli, Leonardo; Reti, ‘Two unpublished manuscripts’, pp. 81ff.

48 Petrucci, La scrittura.

49 Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie; Dempsey, ‘Some observations’; Bolland, ‘From the workshop to the academy’.

50 Boase, Giorgio Vasari; Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 72–3.

51 Palmieri, Vita civile, bk 1, p. 43.

52 Poliziano, Panepistemon; Summers, Michelangelo, ch. 17.

54 Santillana, ‘Paolo Toscanelli and his friends’.

55 Cole, Renaissance Artist at Work; Thomas, Painter’s Practice and ‘Workshop as the space’; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 79–101; Comanducci, ‘Il concetto di “artista”’ and ‘Organizazzione produttiva’; Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano.

56 Chambers, Patrons and Artists, nos. 7, 11, 15.

57 Marabottini, ‘Collaboratori’; Burke, ‘Italian artist’.

58 On the persistence of the family workshop in Venice, Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, pp. 7ff.; Tagliaferro and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano, pp. 152–91.

59 Tietze, ‘Master and workshop’; cf. Fraenkel, Signature, genèse d’un signe; Matthew, ‘Painter’s presence’.

60 Procacci, ‘Compagnie di pittori’.

61 Schulz, Sculpture of Bernardo Rossellino, p. 11; Caplow, ‘Sculptors’ partnerships’; Sheard and Paoletti, Collaboration in Italian Renaissance Art. On the quarries, Klapisch-Zuber, Maîtres du marbre; Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 2.

62 Wyrobisz, ‘Attività edilizia a Venezia’.

63 Manetti, Vita di Brunelleschi, p. 77.

64 Ricci, Tempio malatestiano, pp. 588ff.; Wittkower, Architectural Principles, pp. 29ff; Chambers, Patrons and Artists, pp. 181–3.

65 Saalman, ‘Filippo Brunelleschi’.

66 Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders; Concina, Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia, pp. 108ff.

67 MacKenney, ‘Arti e stato a Venezia’, ‘Guilds and guildsmen’ and Tradesmen and Traders; Motta, ‘Università dei pittori’.

68 Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti, vol. 2, pp. 43ff.

69 Conti, ‘Evoluzione dell artista’, pp. 151ff.

70 Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1, pp. 41ff.

71 Muraro, ‘Statutes of the Venetian Arti’.

72 Lord, Singer of Tales; Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico; Burke, ‘Learned culture and popular culture’ and ‘Oral culture and print culture’.

73 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, especially the life of Cosimo de’Medici; De la Mare, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci’; Martini, Bottega di un cartolaio fiorentino; Petrucci, ‘Libro manoscritto’; Richardson, Manuscript Culture.

74 Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, esp. ch. 1; Zeidberg and Superbi, Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture; Tenenti, ‘Luc’Antonio Giunti’.

75 Branca, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola; Petrucci, ‘Biblioteche antiche’.

76 Trovato, Con ogni diligenza; Grafton, Culture of Correction.

77 Bareggi, Mestiere di scrivere; Larivaille, Pietro Aretino; Grendler, Critics of the Italian World and ‘Francesco Sansovino’.

78 Quondam, ‘Mercanzia d’honore’.