Why do you think there was such a great number of capable men in the past, if not because they were well treated and honoured by princes?
Filarete, Treatise on Architecture
I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.
Michelangelo, Carteggio
Systems of patronage differ. It may be useful to distinguish five main types. First, the household system: a rich man takes the artist or writer into his house for some years, gives him board, lodging and presents, and expects to have his artistic and literary needs attended to. Second, the made-to-measure system: again, a personal relationship between the artist or writer and his patron (‘client’ might be a better term in this case), but a temporary one, lasting only until the painting or poem is delivered. Third, the market system, in which the artist or writer produces something ‘ready-made’ and then tries to sell it, either directly to the public or through a dealer. This third system was emerging in Italy in the period, although the first two types were dominant. The fourth and fifth types – the academy system (government control by means of an organization staffed by reliable artists and writers) and the subvention system (in which a foundation supports creative individuals but makes no claim on what they produce) – had not yet come into existence.1
This chapter is concerned with two problems: first, with discovering what kinds of people gave artists commissions, and why they did so, and, second, with assessing the extent to which it was the patron or client, rather than the artist or writer, who determined the shape and content of the work. In the background lurks the more elusive question to which the epigraphs above allude. Was the patronage system encouraging or discouraging to artists and writers? In other words, did the Renaissance happen in Italy because of the system or in spite of it?2
Patrons may be classified in various ways. The division into ecclesiastical and lay is a simple and useful one, at least at first sight, contrasting (say) the monks of San Pietro in Perugia, for whom Perugino painted an altarpiece of the Ascension, with Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco de’Medici (not the famous Lorenzo, but his cousin), for whom Botticelli painted the Primavera. The Church was traditionally the great patron of art, and this is the obvious reason for the predominance of religious paintings in Europe over the very long term (from the fourth century or thereabouts to the seventeenth). In Renaissance Italy, however, it is likely that most religious paintings were commissioned by laymen. They might order the painting for a church (for their family chapel, for example); Palla Strozzi asked Gentile da Fabriano to paint his Adoration of the Magi to hang in the Strozzi Chapel in the church of Santa Trinità in Florence. Lay people might also commission religious paintings to hang in their own homes. The Medici did this, for example, as we know from the inventory of the contents of their palace.3 Just as the laity asked for religious works, so the clergy commissioned paintings with secular subjects, such as the Parnassus which Raphael painted for Julius II in the Vatican. It would be interesting to know whether the laity were more likely to commission secular works, or whether the gradual secularization of painting reflected a secularization of patronage, but the evidence is too fragmentary to allow such questions to be answered.
A second way of classifying patrons is to distinguish public from private. The guild patronage of early fifteenth-century Florence is particularly well known. The wool guild, the Arte della Lana, was responsible for the upkeep of the cathedral, which involved new commissions – one to Donatello for a statue of the prophet Jeremiah, another to Michelangelo for his David. The cloth guild, the Calimala, was responsible for the Baptistery, and so it was this guild which commissioned Ghiberti to make the famous doors. The lesser guilds as well as the greater placed statues on the façade of the church of Orsanmichele; Donatello’s St George, for example, was commissioned by the armourers.4 The guilds were interested in paintings as well as sculptures. In 1433, the linen guild commissioned Fra Angelico to paint a Madonna for their guildhall.5
Another kind of corporate patron, still more important if one takes the whole period and the whole of Italy into account, was the religious fraternity.6 The fraternity was in effect a social and religious club, usually attached to a particular church, which might perform works of charity and might also act as a bank. The patronage of the Venetian fraternities, known as scuole, was particularly lavish. The huge pictures of St Ursula which Vittore Carpaccio painted in the 1490s were designed for the hall of the guild dedicated to that saint, a small guild with a mixed membership of men and women, nobles and commoners.7 Still more important was the patronage of the six scuole grandi, including San Giovanni Evangelista, for whom Gentile Bellini painted a number of large pictures, and San Rocco, whose Tintorettos may still be viewed in the hall of the fraternity. Indeed, their expenditure on building and pageants was so great as to provoke criticism from contemporaries who considered that all this magnificence was at the expense of the poor, charity to whom was the original purpose of these organizations.8
The patronage of fraternities was important not just in Venice but all over Italy, as the paintings of Vecchietta and Battista Dossi remind us (Plates 4.1, 4.2). Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks was commissioned by a fraternity, that of the Conception of the Virgin in the church of San Francesco at Milan. It was the fraternity of Corpus Christi at Urbino which commissioned Justus of Ghent’s Institution of the Eucharist, as well as Uccello’s Profanation of the Host. The importance of organizations like these in the history of art is that they made possible the participation in patronage of people who did not have the money to commission works individually. One would love to know what discussions went on before a particular artist or subject was chosen. It is intriguing to find that in 1433 the Florentine Board of Works for the Cathedral (the Operai del Duomo) delegated their authority to one man to work out details of a commission to Donatello. Was this because the board was unable to agree? Would groups have been more conservative in their tastes than individuals, as they have generally been over the past couple of centuries, or is this assumption anachronistic?
PLATE 4.1 LORENZO VECCHIETTA: SAN BERNADINO DA SIENA (DETAIL)
Another kind of corporate patron was the state, whether republic or principality. It was the Signoria, the government of Florence, which commissioned Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and its companion piece, Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. In Venice there existed an official position of Protho, or architect to the Republic (held by Jacopo Sansovino, among others), and a quasi-official position of painter to the Republic (offered to Dürer on one occasion and held by both Giovanni Bellini and Titian).9
However, one painter alone could not cope with all the state’s commissions. In 1495 there were nine painters, including Giovanni Bellini and Alvise Vivarini, working on battle scenes to decorate the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace. The problems of patronage by committee emerge clearly from the documents referring to a battle scene by Titian for the same place. In 1513 Titian petitioned the Council of Ten to be allowed to paint it, with the help of two assistants. A resolution accepting the offer was carried (10 votes to 6); Bellini protested. In March 1514 the decree was revoked (14 votes to 1) and the assistants were struck off the payroll; Titian protested. In November, the revocation was revoked (9 votes to 4), and the assistants reappeared on the payroll. Then it was reported that three times as much money had been spent as need have been, and all arrangements were cancelled. Titian agreed to accept a single assistant, and his offer was accepted in 1516, but the battle painting was still unfinished in 1537.10
Individual patrons came from a wide range of social groups, not just the social and political elites. Architecture and sculpture were usually expensive, but the evidence of wills shows that some shopkeepers and artisans commissioned chapels.11 There is also evidence that some people with modest incomes commissioned paintings. The surviving documents are concerned mainly with upper-class patronage, but those are the precisely the documents that are most likely to survive. In any case there are records of some commissions by merchants, shopkeepers, artisans and even peasants.
Take the case of portraits. Portraits of merchants were not uncommon. Among those that have survived are Leandro Bassano’s Orazio Lago and Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Paolo Vidoni Cedrelli. Lorenzo Lotto noted in his account-book the names of five businessmen he painted – ‘a merchant from Ragusa’, ‘a merchant from Lucca’, ‘a wine merchant’, and so on. Lotto also painted a surgeon from Treviso (at this time the status of surgeons, who were associated with barbers, was rather low) and a portrait of ‘Master Ercole the shoemaker’, who paid him in kind rather than in cash.12 Hence Moroni’s famous portrait of a tailor, still to be seen in the National Gallery in London, is likely to be a portrait rather than, as was once thought, a genre painting.
Again, take the case of religious paintings. There are casual references in Vasari to artisan clients, such as the mercer and the joiner who commissioned Madonnas from Andrea del Sarto and the tailor who commissioned Pontormo’s first recorded work. Again, the will of an agricultural labourer who lived near Perugia leaves 10 lire to pay for a painting of Christ in majesty (a Maestà) to hang above his grave.13 Ex-votos (discussed below, p. 136) were also commissioned by ordinary people. What we do not know is whether popular patronage of art was as commonplace as it would be in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.
Recent research, as we have seen (above, pp. 9–10) has revealed that female patrons were an important group. Scholars now go far beyond the unusually well-documented case of Isabella d’Este (Plate 4.4).14 They distinguish the patronage of nuns, the Dominicans for instance, and of laywomen, that of wives and that of widows (widows had more freedom to do as they liked). A few noblewomen built palaces, such as Ippolita Pallavicino-Sanseverina at Piacenza.15 Some women, such as Margarita Pellegrini of Verona, were able to commission a chapel, while Giovanna de’Piacenza commissioned Correggio’s now famous frescoes in the Camera di San Paolo, a room in a convent in Parma. Others, such as the widow Lucretia Andreotti of Rome, commissioned a tomb. Yet others commissioned altarpieces, which might include their portrait as the donor, as in the case of a panel by Carlo Crivelli that has a tiny figure of the donor, Oradea Becchetti of Fabriano, kneeling at the feet of St Francis.16
How did artists acquire patrons or clients, or patrons acquire artists? When artists heard that projects were in the air, they might approach the patron directly or through an intermediary. For example, in 1438 the painter Domenico Veneziano wrote to Piero de’Medici: ‘I have heard that Cosimo [Piero’s father] has decided to have an altarpiece painted, and wants a magnificent work. This pleases me a great deal, and it would please me still more if it were possible for me to paint it, through your mediation’ (per vostra megianita).17 In 1474, there was news in Milan that the duke wanted a chapel painted at Pavia. The duke’s agent complained that ‘all the painters of Milan, good and bad, asked to paint it, and trouble me greatly about it.’ Again, in 1488, Alvise Vivarini petitioned the doge to let him paint something for the Hall of the Great Council in Venice as the Bellinis were doing, and in 1515, as we have seen, Titian made a similar request.18
In these cases, as in many other matters, friendships, equal and unequal, counted for a great deal. Art patronage was part of a much larger patron–client system, discussed in chapter 9. The importance of friends and relations may be illustrated from the careers of two sixteenth-century Tuscan artists, Giorgio Vasari and Baccio Bandinelli. Vasari came to work for Ippolito and Alessandro de’Medici because he was a distant relative of their guardian, Cardinal Silvio Passerini. After his hopes had been ‘blown away’, as we have seen, by the death of Duke Alessandro, Vasari managed to enter the permanent service of his successor Cosimo. Bandinelli also had a family connection with the Medici in the sense that his father had worked for them before their expulsion from Florence in 1494. After their restoration in 1513, Baccio introduced himself to the brothers Giovanni (soon to become Pope Leo X; Plate 4.7) and Giuliano, offered them a gift, and received commissions in return. Bandinelli also worked for Giulio de’Medici, who became Pope Clement VII. He expected the commission to make the tombs of both Medici popes and visited Cardinal Salviati so often to arrange this that, as Vasari tells us in his biography of Bandinelli, he was mistaken for a spy and nearly assassinated.
It is less easy to discover how patrons chose particular artists. The less expert sometimes asked advice of others, such as Cosimo de’Medici (as we have seen) or his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was Lorenzo, for example, who recommended the sculptor Giuliano da Maiano to prince Alfonso of Calabria. Princes might commission artists via intermediaries, such as court officials, as in Milan under the Sforza.19 Some patrons seem to have chosen between rival offers on financial grounds, others for stylistic reasons. The duke of Milan’s agent, in the case of the chapel quoted above, chose the artists who offered to do the work for 150 rather than for 200 ducats. Twenty years later, however, a memorandum from the papers of the new duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, attempted to distinguish between Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Perugino and Ghirlandaio on the grounds of style (cf. p. 152 below).20
Formal competitions for commissions also took place on occasion, especially in Florence and Venice, which is what one might have expected from republics of merchants. The most famous of these competitions are surely those for the Baptistery doors in Florence in 1400 (in which Ghiberti defeated Brunelleschi) and for the cupola of Florence Cathedral (in which it was Brunelleschi’s turn to win), but there are many other examples. In 1477, for instance, Verrocchio defeated Piero Pollaiuolo for the commission for the tomb of Cardinal Forteguerri.21 In 1491, there was a competition for designs for the façade of the cathedral in Florence. In 1508, Benedetto Diana won and Vittore Carpaccio lost a commission from the Venetian Scuola della Carità. In Venice, incidentally, even the organists at San Marco were appointed only after a competition.
It may be useful to distinguish three main motives for art patronage in the period: piety, prestige and pleasure (see also chapter 5). A fourth has been suggested, but it may be anachronistic: investment.22 If investment in works of art means buying them on the assumption that they will be worth more in the future, then it is difficult to find evidence for it before the eighteenth century.23 ‘The love of God’, on the other hand, is frequently mentioned in contracts with artists; and if piety had not been an important as well as a socially acceptable motive for patrons, it would be difficult to explain the predominance of religious paintings and sculptures in the period (above, pp. 27–8). Prestige, or what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the desire for ‘distinction’ from others, was also a socially acceptable motive, above all in Florence. It is not infrequently mentioned in contracts. When the Operai del Duomo of Florence commissioned twelve apostles from Michelangelo, for example, they referred to the ‘fame of the whole city’ and its ‘honour and glory’. When Giovanni Tornabuoni commissioned frescoes for his family chapel in Santa Maria Novella, he referred openly to the ‘exaltation of his house and family’, and ensured that the family coat of arms was prominently displayed.24
The most extraordinary example of the desire for prestige, however, is surely the tabernacle commissioned by Piero de’Medici for the church of the Annunziata in Florence and inscribed ‘the marble alone cost 4,000 florins’ (Costò fior. 4 mila el marmo solo).25 This classic example of nouveau-riche exhibitionism makes one wonder whether – as seems to have been the case in eighteenth-century Venice – rising families saw art patronage as a way of showing the world that they had reached the top, and whether they were more active as patrons than families already established.26
The prestige acquired by art patronage might be of political value to a ruler. Filarete, who had of course an axe to grind, or, rather, a palace to build, argued this case and tried to demolish the economic argument that buildings were too expensive:
Magnanimous and great princes and republics as well, should not hold back from building great and beautiful buildings because of the expense. No country was ever impoverished nor did anyone ever die because of the construction of buildings … In the end when a large building is completed there is neither more nor less money in the country but the building does remain in the country or city together with its reputation or honour.27
Machiavelli too saw the political use of art patronage and suggested that ‘a prince ought to show himself a lover of ability, giving employment to able men and honouring those who excel in a particular field.’28
The third motive for patronage was ‘pleasure’, a more or less discriminating delight in paintings, statues, and so on, whether as objects in their own right or as a form of interior decoration. It has often been suggested that this motive was more important as well as more self-conscious in Renaissance Italy than it had been anywhere in Europe for a thousand years.29 This is likely enough, although the ‘more’ cannot be measured; all that can be done is to quote examples of the trend.
Filarete, for example, stressed the pleasure in building for its own sake, ‘a voluptuous pleasure as when a man is in love’. The more the patron sees the building, the more he wants to see it, and he loves to talk to everyone about it – typical lover’s behaviour. The names of some villas of the period suggest that they were playthings: Schifanoia (‘Avoid boredom’) at Ferrara; Casa Zoiosa (Happy House) at Mantua. According to the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, who did not go out of his way to praise the visual arts, two of his prominent clients, Federigo of Urbino and Cosimo de’Medici, took a keen personal pleasure in sculpture and architecture. To hear Federigo talk to a sculptor, ‘one would have thought it his trade’, while Cosimo was so much interested in architecture that his advice was sought by those who intended to build.30 The correspondence of Isabella d’Este leaves the impression that the reason she commissioned paintings was simply to have them. She was not the only patron to think in this way. Isabella failed to acquire two Giorgiones because they had been commissioned by two Venetian patricians ‘for their own enjoyment’.31 There seems to have been a circle of patrician collectors in Venice at this time, including Taddeo Contarini and Gabriele Vendramin, a well-known art-lover in whose house the famous Tempest could be seen in 1530.32
This desire to acquire works of art for their own sake is found above all in individuals who have something else in common: a humanist education. After Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, engaged Vittorino da Feltre to teach his children, they grew up to become patrons of the arts, and so did Federigo of Urbino, who also studied with Vittorino. Similarly, the children of the ruling house of Este at Ferrara became patrons of the arts after they had been educated by Guarino of Verona. As a child, Lorenzo de’Medici had a humanist tutor, Gentile Becchi. Gabriele Vendramin moved in a social circle which took in humanists of the calibre of Ermolao Barbaro and Bernardo Bembo.33 Although humanists did not always respect artists, the study of the humanities seems to have encouraged a taste for pictures and statues, including statuettes.34
Now that the patron and the artist have been introduced to each other, we may consider their relative influence on the finished product. A study of Cosimo de’Medici bears the subtitle ‘the patron’s oeuvre’, stressing his initiative and arguing that ‘For most of the fifteenth century artists were not considered to be independent creative agents and did not behave as such.’35 The testimony of contemporaries does indeed suggest that the influence of the patron was considerable. The term ‘made’ (fecit) continued to be used of patrons, as it had been in the Middle Ages. Filarete described the patron as the father of the building, the architect as the mother. Titian told Alfonso duke of Ferrara that he was
convinced that the greatness of art amongst the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes content to leave to the painter the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in commissioning pictures … I shall, after all, have done no more than give shape to that which received its spirit – the most essential part – from Your Excellency.36
He was, of course, flattering the duke, but the different forms taken by flattery in different periods provide valuable evidence for social historians.
More precise evidence about the relative importance of patrons and artists and the expectations of both parties is provided by the scores of surviving contracts.37 The contracts discuss many topics, including framing, installation and maintenance, but they concentrate on six issues. In the first place come materials, an important question because of the expense of the gold and lapis lazuli used for paintings or the bronze and marble for sculpture. Sometimes the patron provided the materials, sometimes the artist did so. Contracts often specified that the materials employed be of high quality. Andrea del Sarto promised to use at least 5 florins’ worth of azure on a Virgin Mary, while Michelangelo promised that the marble for his famous Pietà, begun in 1501, should be ‘new, pure and white, with no veins in it’.38 The emphasis on materials is a clue to what the client thought he was buying. Leonardo’s contract for The Virgin of the Rocks gives a ten-year guarantee; if anything was to need repainting within that period, it was to be at the expense of the artist. One wonders whether Leonardo gave a similar guarantee in the case of his flaky Last Supper.
Secondly, there was the question of price, including the currency (large ducats, papal ducats, and so on). Sometimes the money was paid on completion, sometimes in instalments while the work was in progress. Alternatively, the price might not be fixed in advance; either the artist declared his readiness to accept what the patron thought good to offer, or the work would be valued by other artists, as it was in cases of dispute.39 Payments in kind were sometimes included. Signorelli’s contract for frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral gave him the right to a sum of money, to gold and azure, to lodgings and a bed. After negotiations, he raised the offer to two beds.
Thirdly, there was the question of delivery date, vague or precise, with or without sanctions if the artist did not keep his word. A Venetian state commission to Giovanni Bellini stated that the paintings should be finished ‘as quickly as possible’. In 1529, Beccafumi was given ‘a year, or eighteen months at most’, to finish a picture. Other clients were more precise, or more demanding. In 1460, Fra Lippo Lippi promised a painting by September of that year and, if he failed to produce it, the client was given the right to ask someone else to finish it. On 25 April 1483, Leonardo promised to deliver The Virgin of the Rocks by 8 December. Michelangelo’s contract of 1501 for fifteen statues laid down that he was not to make any other contracts which would delay the execution of this one. (It is perhaps surprising that academic publishers do not make this stipulation today.) Raphael was given two years to paint an altarpiece, with a large fine (40 ducats, over half the price) if he failed to meet the deadline. The contract which Andrea del Sarto made in 1515 to paint an altarpiece within a year contained the clause ‘that if he did not finish the said picture within the said time, the said nuns would have the right to give the said commission to someone else’ (dictam tabulam alicui locare).
Princes were particularly impatient. ‘We want you to work on some paintings which we wish to have made, and we wish you, as soon as you have received this, to drop everything, jump on your horse and come here to us’, wrote the duke of Milan to the Lombard painter Vincenzo Foppa. The same ruler commanded painters to work night and day to decorate the Castello Sforzesco, and a contemporary chronicle tells a story of a room painted ‘in a single night’. His successor was equally demanding and on one occasion resolved, as he put it, ‘to have our ballroom at Milan painted immediately with stories, at all possible speed’.40
Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara was a man of the same stamp. When Raphael kept him waiting, Alfonso sent him a message: ‘Let him beware of provoking our anger.’ When Titian failed to produce a painting on time in 1519, Alfonso instructed his agent ‘To tell him instantly, that we are surprised that he should not have finished our picture; that he must finish it whatever happens or incur our great displeasure; and that he may be made to feel that he is doing a bad turn to one who is in a position to resent it.’41
Another impatient patron was Federico II, marquis of Mantua. For example, he wrote to Titian in 1531 asking for a picture of St Mary Magdalen, ‘and above all, let me have it quickly’ (Titian sent it in less than a month).42 Again, when Giulio Romano and his assistants failed to decorate the Palazzo del Te with sufficient speed, the marquis wrote: ‘We are not amused that you should again have missed so many dates by which you had undertaken to finish.’ Giulio replied obsequiously: ‘The greatest pain I can receive is when Your Excellency is angry … if it is pleasing to you, have me locked up in that room until it is done.’ This seems a far cry from Federico’s flattering comparison of his painter to Apelles (above, p. 81), unless Alexander the Great treated his painters in the same way.43
Fourthly, there was the question of size. This is surprisingly often left unspecified, perhaps an indication of sixteenth-century vagueness about measurements, although in many cases the fact that a fresco was painted on a particular wall, or a statue made from the client’s block of marble or to fit a particular niche, would have made precision unnecessary. However, Michelangelo promised in 1514 to make his Christ Carrying the Cross ‘life size’. Andrea del Sarto agreed to make his altarpiece of 1515 at least 3 braccia wide and 3½ braccia high. Isabella d’Este, who wanted a set of matching pictures for her study, enclosed a thread in her letter commissioning Perugino so that he would get the measurements right.
Fifthly, the question of assistants. Some contracts were made with groups of artists rather than individuals. Others mention assistants, usually to specify the responsibility for paying them. Some stipulate that the artist signing the contract should produce all or part of the work ‘with his own hand’ (sua mano), though this phrase cannot always be taken literally.44 In the course of the period, however, patrons came to demand the personal intervention of the signatory. Indeed, as early as 1451 a merchant of Perugia refused to pay Filippo Lippi for an altarpiece that he had ordered because the work was ‘made by others’ (fatta ad altri), whereas ‘he should have made it himself’ (egli la dovea fare esso medesimo).45 Raphael promised to paint with his own hand the figures in his altarpiece of the coronation of the Virgin. Perugino and Signorelli, however, promised to paint the figures in the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral only ‘from the waist up’.
The final question, crucial to posterity, of what actually went into the picture has been left till last because it does not loom large in the contracts themselves. On occasion, the subject is spelled out in words, sometimes in detail, but on other occasions rather briefly. Elaborate details were laid down for Domenico Ghirlandaio by Giovanni Tornabuoni in the Santa Maria Novella frescoes which have already been mentioned. Domenico and the others were to paint the right-hand wall of the chapel with seven specified scenes from the life of the Virgin. The painters also promised ‘in all the aforesaid histories … to paint figures, buildings, castles, cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks, garments, animals, birds and beasts … just as the patron wants, if the price of materials is not prohibitive’ (secundum tamen taxationem colorum).46
A more common formula in contracts was to give a relatively brief description of the iconographical essentials. On some occasions the description of even these essentials in legal Latin seems to have been too much for the notary, and the document suddenly lapses into Italian. The Ghirlandaio frescoes were to be ‘as they say in the vernacular, frescoed’ (ut vulgariter dicitur, posti in frescho). A contract for a church at Loreto from 1429 asks for the Virgin ‘with her son in her lap, according to custom’ (secondo l’usanza), an interestingly explicit demand on a painter to follow tradition. It was often simpler to refer to a sketch, plain or coloured, or a model.47 When the duke of Milan was having his chapel painted in 1474, his agent sent him two designs to choose from, ‘with cherubs or without’ (cherubs cost extra), and asked for the designs back ‘to see, when the work is finished, whether the azure was as fine as was promised’.48 Alternatively, the client might send the sketch to the artist (as Isabella d’Este did when commissioning Perugino) or ask for something along the lines of a painting by someone else which had taken his or her fancy. A contract for a Crucifixion between a painter called Barbagelata and the Confraternity of St Bridget at Genoa (1485) required the figures to be painted in the same manner and quality ‘as those which are painted in the altarpiece of St Dominic for the late Battista Spinola in the church of the said St Dominic, made and painted by master Vincent of Milan’ (Vincenzo Foppa).49
Besides these descriptions and drawings, there may be more or less precise references to the initiative of the artist or, more often, to the wishes of the patron. Tura contracted with the duke of Ferrara to paint the chapel of Belriguardo ‘with the histories which please his said Excellency most’. When the monks of San Pietro in Perugia contracted with Perugino for an altarpiece, the predella was to be ‘painted and adorned with histories according to the desire of the present abbot’. Isabella left Perugino a restricted area of freedom: ‘you may leave things out if you like, but you are not to add anything of your own.’50 A study of 238 contracts suggests that, from the late fifteenth century onwards, painters were allowed more freedom than before.51 Michelangelo, late in the period and a law unto himself, seems usually to have got his own way. The contract for Christ Carrying the Cross says simply that the figure should be posed ‘in whatever attitude seems good to the said Michelangelo’, while the commission for a work never finished which was at one point Hercules and Cacus, at another Samson and a Philistine, describes the transfer of a block of marble to the sculptor, ‘who is to make from it a figure together or conjoined with another, just as it pleases the said Michelangelo.’52
PLATE 4.6 PIETRO PERUGINO: BATTLE OF LOVE AND CHASTITY
Contracts, however valuable their testimony to the relationships between artists and clients, do not tell the whole story. They offer evidence of intentions, and historians, however interesting they find intentions, also want to know whether things went according to plan. In some cases we can be sure that they did not. In the case of Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies, for example, both contract and painting have survived, but there are serious discrepancies between them. The contract refers to two angels; they do not appear in the finished painting. The contract refers to St John the Evangelist: in the painting he has turned into St Francis. Such alterations may well have been negotiated with the client; we do not know. They are none the less a warning not to take one kind of evidence too seriously.53 The most effective way to discover the true balance of power between artists and patrons in this period is surely to study the open conflicts between them – conflicts that made manifest the tensions inherent in the relationship. Although the evidence for these conflicts is fragmentary, a coherent picture does at least appear to emerge.
There were two main reasons for conflicts between artists and patrons at this time. The first, which need not detain us, was money. It was a special instance of the general problem of getting clients of high status to pay their debts. Mantegna, Poliziano and Josquin des Près were driven to remind their patrons of their obligations by pictorial, literary and musical means respectively.
The second reason for conflict, which reveals a good deal more about the relationship between culture and society in this period, concerns the works themselves. What happened when the artist did not like the patron’s plan or the patron was dissatisfied with the result? Here are some examples. In 1436 the Opera del Duomo of Florence commissioned Paolo Uccello to paint the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood on the cathedral wall, but a month later they ordered the picture to be destroyed ‘because it is not painted as it should be’ (quia non est pictus ut decet). One wonders what experiments in perspective Uccello had been trying out. Again, Piero de’Medici objected to certain small seraphs in a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, who wrote to say: ‘I’ll do as you command; two little clouds will take them away.’54
In other cases, the conflict seems to have reached deadlock. Vasari tells a story about Piero di Cosimo painting a picture for the Foundling Hospital in Florence. The client, who was the director of the hospital, asked to see the picture before it was finished; Piero refused. The client threatened not to pay; the artist threatened to destroy the painting. Again, Julius II, the irresistible force, and Michelangelo, the immovable object, came into conflict over the Sistine ceiling. Before he had finished, Michelangelo left Rome in secret and returned to Florence. Vasari’s explanation for Michelangelo’s flight was ‘that the pope became angry with him because he would not allow any of his work to be seen; that Michelangelo distrusted his own men and suspected that the pope … disguised himself to see what was being done.’ Why did Piero and Michelangelo object to their work being seen before it was finished? Some artists today are touchy about laymen looking over their shoulder; but there may have been something more to these cases than that. Suppose an artist did not want to treat a subject in the way that the client wanted. A possible tactic would be to hide the picture from him until it was finished, hoping that he would accept a fait accompli rather than wait for another version. For another Sistine ceiling the pope would have had to wait quite a while.
Giovanni Bellini was another painter who did not easily submit to the will of others. The humanist Pietro Bembo described him as one ‘whose pleasure is that sharply defined limits should not be set to his style, being wont, as he says, to wander at his will in paintings’ (vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture). Isabella d’Este asked him for a mythological picture. It appears that he wanted neither to paint such a picture nor to lose the commission, so he used delaying tactics while hinting, via the agents Isabella used in her dealings with artists, that another subject might not take so long. As one of the agents told her, ‘If you care to give him the liberty to do what he wants, I am absolutely sure that Your Highness will be served much better.’ Isabella knew when to give way gracefully, and replied: ‘If Giovanni Bellini is as reluctant to paint his history as you say, we are content to leave the subject to him, provided that he paints some history or ancient fable.’ In fact, Bellini was able to beat her down still further, and she ended by accepting a Nativity. This example supports the recent critique of scholarly emphasis on Isabella’s ‘ungrateful and demanding nature’ and the argument that ‘her activity as an art patron was subtle and flexible’.55
In this last case, the history of events leads us to the history of structures. The fact that Bellini kept a shop, and that he was in Venice while Isabella was at Mantua, probably helped him to get his way. Had he been attached to the court, the outcome of the conflict would probably have been very different. Isabella seems to have learned this lesson, and soon afterwards she took Lorenzo Costa into her permanent service.
From the artist’s point of view, in so far as it is possible to reconstruct it, each of the two systems – service at court or keeping an open shop – had its advantages and disadvantages. Permanent service at court gave the artist a relatively high status, without the social taint of shop-keeping (above, p. 86). It also meant relative economic security: board and lodging and presents of clothes, money and land. When the prince died, however, the artist might lose everything. When the duke of Florence, Alessandro de’Medici, was murdered in 1537, Giorgio Vasari, who had been in the duke’s service, found his hopes ‘blown away by a puff of wind’. Another disadvantage of the system was its servitude. At the court of Mantua, Mantegna had to ask permission to travel or to accept outside commissions. It was not possible to avoid the demands of patrons as easily as those of temporary clients.
What patrons often wanted was an artist, or artisan, able to perform a variety of tasks. When Cosimo Tura entered the service of Borso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, he earned his regular salary not only from pictures but by painting furniture, gilding caskets and horse trappings, and designing chair backs, door curtains, bed quilts, a table service, tournament costumes, and so on. A surviving painting by Andrea Castagno decorates a shield, probably for a tournament (Plate 4.3). At the court of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, Leonardo was similarly occupied in miscellaneous projects. He painted the portrait of the duke’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani; he decorated the interior of the Castello Sforzesco; he worked on ‘the horse’, an equestrian monument to the duke’s father; he designed costumes and stages for court festivals; and he was employed as a military engineer. One might say that at least he went to Milan with his eyes open, since the draft of the letter he wrote to the duke asking to be taken into his service has survived; it lists what he could do in the way of designing bridges, mortars and chariots, ending, ‘in the tenth place’, that he could also paint and sculpt. All the same, from posterity’s point of view it is ironic that we remember Leonardo at Milan for two works, neither of which was created for the duke (though he may have arranged the first commission); the Last Supper was painted for a monastery, the Virgin of the Rocks for a fraternity.56
The disadvantages of courts as a milieu for artists should not be exaggerated. Republics too commissioned temporary decorations on festive occasions, and to regret this is perhaps only to express the bias towards the permanent of our age of museums. All the same, an impression remains that court artists were more likely than others to have to dissipate their energies on the transient and the trivial, like the court mathematicians in seventeenth-century Versailles, concerned with the hydraulics of fountains or with the probable outcomes of royal games of cards.
When an artist kept a shop, on the other hand, he had less economic security and a lower social status, but it was easier for him to evade a commission that he did not want, as Giovanni Bellini seems to have done in the case of a request from Isabella d’Este (above, p. 114). Clients too might offer artists a variety of odd jobs, but some workshops were so organized that different members could specialize. It is hard to say how important this freedom of working was to artists, but it may be significant that when Mantegna was appointed court painter in Mantua, in 1459, he lingered in Padua, as if the decision to leave had been a difficult one.57 Whether individual artists cared about their freedom or not, the difference in working conditions seems to be reflected in what was produced. The major innovations of the period took place in Florence and Venice, republics of shop-keepers, and not in courts.
These examples of conflict are some of the most celebrated and best-documented ones. They are not a sufficient basis for generalization. The range of variation between patrons was considerable, while even a single patron, such as Isabella d’Este, might grant some artists more freedom than others.58 However, there is other evidence to suggest that the balance of power between patron and artist was changing in this period in the artist’s favour, allowing a greater individualism of style. As the status of artists rose, patrons made fewer demands. To Leonardo, Isabella made concessions from the start: ‘We shall leave the subject and the time to you.’59 Again, a famous letter to Vasari from the poet Annibale Caro acknowledges the freedom of the artist by comparing the two roles: ‘For the subject matter (invenzione) I place myself in your hands, remembering … that both the poet and the painter carry out their own ideas and their own schemes with more love and with more diligence than they do the schemes of others.’ It is unfortunate that he was to follow this compliment with fairly precise instructions for an Adonis on a purple garment, embraced by Venus.
Caro also drew up a detailed programme for the decoration of the palace for the Farnese family at Caprarola.60 He was, in other words, a humanist adviser, an intellectual middleman between patron and client. The hypothesis of the humanist adviser – Poliziano in this case – was put forward by Aby Warburg when discussing the mythological paintings of Botticelli.61 Since artists, as we have seen, generally lacked a classical education, they must have needed advice when required to paint scenes from ancient history or mythology. There is, in fact, evidence of such advice being given on a few occasions.
In the earliest known case the subject was not classical but biblical: in 1424, the Calimala guild of Florence asked the humanist Leonardo Bruni to draw up a programme for the ‘Gates of Paradise’, the third pair of doors for the Baptistery in Florence. Bruni chose twenty stories from the Old Testament. However, the sculptor, Ghiberti, claimed in his memoirs to have been given a free hand, and the Bruni programme was not followed, for the doors illustrate only ten stories.62
In Ferrara in the mid-fifteenth century, the humanist Guarino of Verona suggested a possible programme for a painting of the Muses for the marquis, Leonello d’Este.63 Later in the century, the court librarian, Pellegrino Prisciani, was concerned with the programme of the famous astrological frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, painted by Francesco del Cossa.64 In the Medici circle in the later fifteenth century, there is more indirect evidence for the advice of two humanists, the poet– philologist Angelo Poliziano and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, on the programme of Botticelli’s Primavera, the meaning of which still divides scholars. According to his pupil Condivi, the young Michelangelo made his relief of The Battle of the Centaurs at the suggestion of Poliziano, ‘who explained the whole myth to him from beginning to end’ (dichiarandogli a parse per parse tutta la favola).65
Another milieu in which there is firm evidence of humanist advisers is the court of Mantua in the early sixteenth century. When Isabella d’Este planned a series of pagan ‘fantasies’ for her study and grotto, it was to the humanists Pietro Bembo and Paride da Ceresara that she turned for advice. It was Paride who provided the programme for the Battle of Love and Chastity which Isabella, as we have seen, commissioned from Perugino (Plate 4.6).66
It would not be difficult to add to these examples, particularly for the sixteenth century. One thinks of the humanist bishop Paolo Giovio planning the decoration of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, or the poet Annibale Caro doing the same, as noted above, for the Farnese at Caprarola.67 Whether they were called in by artists or patrons, and whether their advice was taken seriously or not, classical scholars, and more rarely theologians, were involved in the planning of pictorial and sculptural programmes. They helped artists to cope with the sudden demand for classical mythology and ancient history which workshop traditions had not trained artists to provide.68
Architecture needs to be considered separately because architects did not work with their hands. They provided nothing but the programme, so that, in cases where patrons took an active interest, their role was diminished. Filarete’s treatise presents a picture, no doubt a wish-fulfilment, of a prince who accepts the plans of his architect with enthusiasm. In practice, however, patrons often wanted to interfere, or at least to intervene, in the building process. They had political and social reasons for choosing particular designs, from the desire to display their status to the obligation of hospitality and the need to meet with their followers and dependants.69 Some of them studied treatises on architecture. Alfonso of Aragon, for example (Plate 5.2), asked for a copy of Vitruvius when the plans for a triumphal arch at Naples were being discussed. Federigo of Urbino owned a copy of Francesco di Giorgio’s treatise on architecture, presented by the author.70 Ercole d’Este borrowed Alberti’s treatise on architecture from Lorenzo de’Medici before deciding how to rebuild his palace. A panegyric on Cosimo de’Medici describes him as wanting to build a church and a house in his own way (more suo).71 As for Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo, he went so far as an amateur architect as to submit a design for the competition for the façade of Florence Cathedral in 1491. The judges were unable to choose either the design of the effective ruler of Florence or that of any other competitor, so the façade was left unbuilt.
In the case of music, it was the performers who were the recipients of patronage, and on a permanent basis, precisely because their performances were ephemeral. There were three main types of patron: Church, city and court.72
The Church was a great patron of singers, although not a particularly generous one. Singers were needed for masses and other parts of the liturgy, and they were needed all the time, as were organists. Choirmasters included men we now remember as composers, such as Giovanni Spataro, choirmaster at the church of San Petronio at Bologna from 1512 to 1541.
Cities also took musicians into their permanent service. Trumpeters, for example, were in demand for civic events such as state visits or major religious festivals. The best civic posts were in Venice. The church of San Marco was the doge’s chapel, and so its choirmaster was a civic (in other words, a political) appointment. The post was created in 1491 for a Frenchman, Pierre de Fossis. When he died, Doge Andrea Gritti, who was used to getting his own way, forced through the appointment of an outsider, the Netherlander Adriaan Willaert, against considerable opposition. The musical importance of sixteenth-century Venice may owe something to the relative munificence of its civic patronage.
Court patronage was the least secure of the three main types, but it offered the possibility of the greatest rewards. Some princes took a great interest in their chapels: Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, for example, Ercole d’Este of Ferrara or Pope Leo X. When the duke of Milan decided, in 1472, to found a choir, he spared no effort to make it a good one. He wrote to his ambassador in Naples with instructions to persuade some of the singers there to move to Milan. He was to talk to them and to make promises of ‘good benefices and good salaries’, but in his own name, not that of the duke: ‘Above all, take good care that neither his royal majesty nor others should imagine that we are the cause of those singers being taken away.’ Presumably a diplomatic incident might have followed this discovery. By 1474 the duke had acquired a certain ‘Josquino’, perhaps Josquin des Près. He continued to take a great interest in his chapel choir, which had to follow him to Pavia, Vigevano and even outside the duchy. As for Alfonso of Aragon, he even took his choir with him when he went hunting!73
Isabella d’Este was interested in music as well as painting, and two major composers of frottole (songs for several voices), Marchetto Cara and Bartolommeo Tromboncino, were active at her court.74 A still greater interest in music was taken by Pope Leo X. He played and composed himself (a canon written by him still survives). His enthusiasm was well known and, when news arrived that Leo had been elected pope, many of the marquis of Mantua’s singers left for Rome. The most distinguished composers in Leo’s service were Elzéar Genet, who was in charge of the music for the papal chapel; Costanzo Festa, who was famous for his madrigals; and the organist Marco Antonio Cavazzoni. The contemporary anecdotes of Leo’s generosity to musicians have been confirmed from the papal accounts. He had more than fifteen musicians in his private service in 1520. He paid the famous lutenist Gian Maria Giudeo 23 ducats a month and made him a count into the bargain.
A fourth kind of patronage should not be forgotten. It was possible for musicians to make careers in the service of private individuals. Willaert, for example, organized concerts for a Venetian lady, Pollissena Pecorina, and a nobleman, Marco Trivisano.75 The organist Cavazzoni was at one time in the service of the humanist Pietro Bembo.
In all these cases, it is difficult to say whether musicians were hired because they could sing or play well or because they could compose or invent. There is a little evidence of interest in the activity of invention. Some compositions were dedicated to individuals or written in their honour. For example, a certain Cristoforo da Feltre wrote a motet on the election of Francesco Foscari as doge of Venice in 1423. Heinrich Isaac, who spent the decade 1484–94 in Florence, wrote an instrumental piece, ‘Palle, palle’, presumably for the Medici, since it refers to their rallying-cry and their device, and he also set to music Poliziano’s lament for the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. New compositions were required for court festivals; Costanzo Festa, for example, wrote the music for the wedding, in 1539, of Cosimo de’Medici, duke of Tuscany, and Eleonora of Toledo.
What patrons wanted from musicians emerges most vividly from a letter to Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara, written by one of his agents about 1500. The duke was trying to make up his mind which of two candidates to hire, Heinrich Isaac or Josquin des Près.
Isaac the singer … is extremely rapid in the art of composition, and besides this he is a man … who can be managed as one wants … and he seems to me extremely suitable to serve your lordship, more than Josquin, because he gets on better with his colleagues, and would make new things more often; it is true that Josquin composes better, but he does it when he feels like it, not when he is asked; and he is demanding 200 ducats, and Isaak will be satisfied with 120.76
In other words, the fact that Josquin ‘composes better’ is recognized, but it is not the most important consideration. The social historian could hardly ask for a more revealing document about the workings of patronage.
PLATE 4.7 RAPHAEL: LEO X
In the case of literature and learning, patronage was less necessary because so many writers were amateurs with private means and so many scholars were academics. Patronage was most necessary when it was least likely, when a writer was poor, young and unknown and wanted to study. In some cases, aid was forthcoming. Lorenzo de’Medici, for example, made it possible for Poliziano to study, while Landino was financed by a notary and Guarino by a Venetian nobleman. The Greek cardinal Bessarion, who was a generous and discerning patron of scholars such as Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini and Bartolommeo Platina, also financed the studies of his compatriot Janos Lascaris. If Alfonso I of Aragon knew of boys who were poor but able (so his official biographer, the humanist Antonio Panormita, informs us), he paid for their education. At Ferrara, Duke Borso d’Este paid for the food and clothes of poor students at the university. However, these examples are not many, and one wonders how many promising careers came to nothing for lack of patronage of this kind.
For humanists, it was possible to make a career in the service of the Church or the state. This was in part because particular popes (Nicholas V, for example, or Leo X) and princes (such as Alfonso I) appreciated their achievements, and in part because their skills, notably the art of writing an elegant and persuasive Latin letter, were needed in administration. The chanceries of Rome and Florence in particular were staffed by humanists, among them Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla in the first case and Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni in the second.77
For writers who were already established, court patronage was often forthcoming because princes were interested in fame and believed that poets had it in their gift. It might, however, take a gift for intrigue as well as for literature to defeat rival candidates for a particular post. Augustus, as Horace and Virgil had known, could only be approached through Maecenas, and, on occasion in Renaissance Italy, Maecenas could only be approached through intermediaries – ‘Mecenatuli’, as Panormita contemptuously called them. His own search for patronage led him up several blind alleys before eventual success.78 He tried Florence, dedicating a poem to Cosimo de’Medici as early as 1425; he tried Mantua, only to discover that, having Vittorino da Feltre, they needed no more humanists; he tried Verona, via Guarino, with similar results. Finally, thanks to the help of the archbishop, he obtained the post of court poet at Milan. Another ploy was to attract the attention of what has been called a ‘threshold patron’, often a woman (Isabella d’Este, for example, in the case of Ariosto), who facilitated the approach to her husband or other male relative.79
For an actual or aspiring court poet, an obvious move – following Virgil’s precedent – was to write an epic about the prince. Thus the humanist Francesco Filelfo wrote a Sforziad to celebrate the ruling house of Milan. Federigo of Urbino had his Feltria and Borso d’Este his Borsias, the first of a series of epics for a ruling house which became the patrons of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. Ariosto made his hero and heroine Ruggiero and Bradamante ancestors of the house of Este. In the third canto, modelled on the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Merlino prophesies that the golden age will return in the reign of Ariosto’s patron Alfonso I.
Court historians were also in request in the fifteenth century, especially on the part of new princes. Alfonso of Aragon commissioned works of history from the rival humanists Lorenzo Valla and Bartolommeo Fazio. Ludovico Sforza commissioned a history of Milan from a nobleman, Bernardino Corio.80 Machiavelli’s History of Florence was commissioned by the Medici pope Clement VII, and dedicated to the pope by his ‘humble slave’. Republics too were aware of the value of official history. The Venetian government, for example, commissioned histories from the humanist Marcantonio Sabellico and the patricians Andrea Navagero and Pietro Bembo.81
Rulers might also act as patrons of natural science for practical reasons. Leonardo da Vinci went to the court of Milan, as we have seen, as a military engineer rather than an artist. Pandolfo Petrucci, lord of Siena, was the patron of the engineer Vannoccio Biringuccio. Fra Luca Pacioli, who wrote on mathematics, attracted the patronage of the dukes of Milan and Urbino.82 As a friar, however, he did not depend on patrons. Since most ‘scientists’ made their living through university teaching or the practice of medicine, they did not depend on patrons either.
Less directly useful works might also be commissioned by patrons who had a taste for literature or a liking for particular authors. Cosimo de’Medici gave the philosopher Marsilio Ficino a farm in the Tuscan countryside at Careggi and encouraged him to translate Plato and other ancient authors. Poliziano wrote a poem to celebrate a famous joust in which Giuliano de’Medici, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had taken part. Like painters and musicians, poets might have to help provide the entertainment at festivals. When Poliziano was in Mantuan service, he wrote his famous drama Orfeo to order for a wedding. He also wrote begging poems to Lorenzo de’Medici describing how his clothes had worn out. The verse request was a conventional literary genre, but its existence is a reminder of the importance of patronage for the culture of the time and also in the life of the individual writer.
As in the case of painters, court patronage offered writers status. It also offered protection, which might well be necessary. The poet Serafino of Aquila, for example, left the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza to live in Rome without a patron. However, his satirical verses provoked an attempt to assassinate him. When he recovered, ‘considering that to be without a protector was dangerous and shameful’, Serafino went back to the cardinal.83
Despite the examples of official historians of Venice, there was virtually no civic patronage for writers. Their choice was limited to the Church, the court or the occasional private individual, such as the patrician Alvise Cornaro of Padua, who encouraged the dramatist Angelo Beolco ‘il Ruzzante’ to write his plays, and had them collected and published.84 Some Venetian patricians, such as Francesco Barbaro and Bernardo Bembo (the father of Pietro Bembo, and himself a writer of distinction) regarded the patronage of scholars as a duty.85 The Church offered the greatest security, and so we find such writers as Alberti, Poliziano and Ariosto, who are difficult to see as career clergymen, trying to get benefices.86 Castiglione, the complete courtier, ended his life as a bishop, and his friend Pietro Bembo as a cardinal.
The difficulty of depending on patronage for a living can be illustrated from the career of Aretino (Plate 4.8), who began life as the son of a shoemaker. He attracted the attention first of the rich and cultivated banker Agostino Chigi, then of Cardinal Giulio de’Medici, and later of Federico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and of the condottiere Giovanni de’Medici. Multiplying patrons increased Aretino’s freedom but increased the risk of loss of favour, so he changed his strategy. In 1527 he moved to Venice, where, despite accepting protection from Doge Andrea Gritti and gifts from a number of noblemen, he was more or less his own master.87 That he was able to do this depended not only on his own remarkable talents for writing and self-advertisement but also on the rise of the market.
PLATE 4.8 TITIAN: PIETRO ARETINO
In the long run, the invention of printing led to the decline of the literary patron and to his or her replacement by the publisher and the anonymous reading public. In this period, however, the new system coexisted with the old and interacted with it. It is possible to find instances of the commercialization of patronage (the dedication of a book in the hope of an instant reward in cash) and even of multiple dedications. Matteo Bandello dedicated each story in his collection to a different individual, and, although some of the dedicatees were friends of his, they were in most cases members of noble families such as the Farnese, the Gonzaga and the Sforza, from whom he doubtless expected a return. Printers also looked for patrons. When Aldo Manuzio published his famous octavo edition of Virgil in 1501, he had several copies printed on vellum, as if they were manuscripts, and distributed to important people such as – once again – Isabella d’Este.
With the rise of the market in literature it is possible to find examples of successful printer-businessmen, such as the Giolito and the Giunti families.88 The printed book, originally viewed as a manuscript ‘written’ by machine, came to be regarded as a commodity standardized in size and price. The catalogue issued by the Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio in 1498 is the first to give prices, while the Aldine catalogue of 1541 is the first to use the terms ‘folio’, ‘quarto’ and ‘octavo’.89 The sales of the new commodity were boosted by means of advertisements, in prose or verse, placed by the printer at the end of one book to recommend the reader to go to his shop for another. One edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for example, contained the following advertisement: ‘Whoever wants to buy a Furioso, or another work by the same author, let him go to the press of the Bindoni twins, the brothers Benedetto and Agostino.’90 One finds printers, such as Gabriele Giolito, employing professional authors, such as Lodovico Dolce, to write, translate and edit for them. This is how the Venetian ‘Grub Street’, just off the Grand Canal, came into existence in the middle of the sixteenth century (above, p. 77).91 At much the same time, the mid-sixteenth century, came the rise of the commercialized newsletter, or avviso, which flourished in Rome in particular, and of the ‘professional theatre’ (the literal translation of the famous term commedia dell’arte).
In the visual arts, too, we find the rise of the market system, in which customers bought works ‘ready-made’, sometimes through a middleman.92 This art market, the importance of which is increasingly recognized by scholars, coexisted with the more important and better-known personalized system of patrons and clients, and some painters, such as the Pollaiuolo brothers, navigated between them.93 Examples of the sale of uncommissioned works of art go back at least as far as the fourteenth century. The demand for Virgins, Crucifixions or St John the Baptists was sufficiently great for workshops to be able to produce them without a particular customer in mind, although they might be left unfinished in order to accommodate special requirements. Some merchants – the ‘merchant of Prato’ Francesco Datini, for instance – dealt in works of art as in other commodities.94 Cheap reproductions of famous sculptures were already being manufactured in fourteenth-century Florence.
In the fifteenth century, there are signs that ready-made works were becoming more common. Some merchants, such as the Florentine Bartolommeo Serragli, now specialized in the sale of these commodities. Serragli searched Rome for antique marble statues for the Medici; he ordered fabrics in Florence for Alfonso of Aragon; he employed Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi and Desiderio da Settignano; he dealt in illuminated manuscripts and terracotta madonnas, chess sets and mirrors.95 Again, Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose activities as a bookseller have already been discussed, was also a middleman who arranged for illuminators, such as Attavante degli Attavanti, to work for customers they did not know, such as Federigo, duke of Urbino, and Matthias, king of Hungary.
The market in reproductions and replicas also increased in importance at this time.96 Woodcuts of devotional images began to be produced shortly before the invention of printing. In the later fifteenth century, they were joined by woodcuts of topical events, such as the meeting of the pope and the emperor in 1468. After the invention of printing, book illustrations became important. Aldo Manuzio produced famous illustrated editions of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and so on. Some prints reproduced famous paintings. Prints of Leonardo’s Last Supper were in circulation by the year 1500, while Giulio Campagnola made prints after paintings by Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, and Marco Raimondi made his reputation by his free ‘translations’ of paintings by Raphael into prints.97
Reproduction extended to sculptures. Around 1470, the Della Robbia workshop in Florence was turning out coloured sculptures in terracotta, such as the miniature replicas of the Madonna of Impruneta, which were cheap and standardized and so presumably uncommissioned. In Florence at about the same time, portrait medals were being turned out by what one scholar has described as ‘assembly-line’ methods, repetitive in form and making use of the division of labour.98 Statuettes sometimes reproduced famous classical statues in miniature: the sculptor known as ‘Antico’ gained his nickname for making small bronze replicas of the Apollo Belvedere, for example, or the Dioscuri.99
Another fifteenth-century development was the rise of majolica – in other words, of the painted, tin-glazed pottery jars and plates produced in Bologna, Urbino, Faenza and elsewhere. Some of them were large, splendid and expensive and appreciated by connoisseurs such as Lorenzo de’Medici, but others were cheap enough to be bought by modest artisans.100 Some of the majolica plates produced in Urbino showed scenes from paintings by Raphael, among them a plate commissioned by Isabella d’Este.
In the sixteenth century, the art market became still more important than it had been in the fifteenth. Isabella d’Este, for example, was prepared to buy paintings and statues second-hand. When Giorgione died in 1510, she wrote to a Venetian merchant:
we are informed that among the stuff and effects of the painter Zorzo of Castelfranco there exists a picture of a night (una nocte), very beautiful and singular; if so it might be, we desire to possess it and we therefore ask you, in company with Lorenzo da Pavia and any other who has judgment and understanding, to see whether it is a really fine thing and if you find it such, to go to work … to obtain this picture for me, settling the price and giving me notice of it.101
However, the answer was that the two pictures of this kind to be found in Giorgione’s studio had been painted on commission, and that the clients were not prepared to let them go. Here, as elsewhere, Isabella was a little in advance of her time.
A year later, in 1511, it was an artist who took the initiative in a sale of uncommissioned work to the Gonzagas. Vittore Carpaccio wrote to Isabella’s husband, Gianfrancesco II, marquis of Mantua, that he possessed a watercolour painting of Jerusalem for which an unknown person, perhaps from the court of Mantua, had made an offer. ‘And so it has occurred to me to write this letter to Your Sublime Highness in order to draw attention both to my name and to my work.’ The apologetic preamble suggests that selling pictures in this way was not yet quite proper.102 However, in 1535 Gianfrancesco’s son Federico bought 120 Flemish paintings second-hand.
Isabella’s agents, whom she employed to arrange commissions as well as to make offers for ready-made paintings, were not full-time specialist art dealers. One of them was a maker of clavichords. In Florence, however, a patrician, Giovanni Battista della Palla, has been described as ‘an art dealer in the fullest and truest sense, that is, a systematic purchaser of contemporary as well as antique art works’.103 He is most celebrated for his activities on behalf of Francis I, king of France, for whom he bought, among other things, a statue of Hercules by Michelangelo, a statue of Mercury by Bandinelli, a St Sebastian by Fra Bartolommeo and a Raising of Lazarus by Pontormo. It was in pursuit of further works by the last artist that – according to Vasari in his life of Pontormo – Palla went to the house of a certain Borgherini, but was driven out by Borgherini’s wife, who called him ‘a vile second-hand dealer, a four-penny merchant [vilissimo rigattiere, mercantatuzzo di quattro danari]’. It was doubtless worth risking a scolding, since there were great profits to be made selling to the king of France. Vasari tells us that ‘the merchants’ received from Francis four times what they had paid Andrea del Sarto.104
There are other cases of the sale of uncommissioned works in sixteenth-century Florence. Ottaviano de’Medici, a keen collector, bought two paintings by Andrea del Sarto which had been made for someone else. There are also references by Vasari to the exhibition of paintings in public, a form of advertising perhaps related to the rise of the market. Bandinelli, for example, painted a Deposition of Christ and ‘exhibited it’ (lo messe a mostra) in a goldsmith’s shop.105 In Venice too there is evidence of an art market. To return to Bellini’s Nativity: at one point, when negotiations with Isabella d’Este seemed to be breaking down, the artist informed her that he had found someone who wanted to buy it. The first-known case of a Titian portrait being bought by someone other than the sitter is a purchase by the duke of Urbino in 1536. A certain Zuan or Giovanni Ram, a Catalan resident in Venice, seems to have been active as an art dealer in the early sixteenth century. Paintings were exhibited at the Ascension Week fair in Venice – Lotto and the Bassanos were among the exhibitors – and also at St Anthony’s fair at Padua.106 Recent research suggests that more works were produced for the market in Renaissance Venice than used to be thought.107
Woodcuts and engravings, made to be sold to an unknown public, became more common in the sixteenth century. Some artists were beginning to specialize in the new media: Giulio and Domenico Campagnola, for example, who concentrated on landscape, or Marcantonio Raimondi, who produced engraved versions of paintings by Leonardo and Raphael, thus making them much better known. The age of the mechanically reproduced work of art, lamented by critics such as Walter Benjamin, goes back further than is generally realized.108
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the market system was still very far from having equalled, let alone displaced, the personalized patronage system. For examples of the dominance of the new system, we have to wait till the seventeenth century, to the commercial opera houses of Venice and the art market of the Dutch Republic.
It is impossible to give a direct answer to the question whether the arts flourished in Renaissance Italy because of the patrons, as Filarete suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, or in spite of them, as is implied by Michelangelo. What can be discussed, however, is the somewhat complicated relation between patronage and the unequal distribution of artistic achievement among different parts of Italy.
In the previous chapter, it was suggested that art flourished in Florence and Venice in particular because these cities produced many of their own artists. This is not the whole story. Besides ‘producer cities’ there were also ‘consumer cities’ that acted as magnets, attracting artists and writers from elsewhere.109 Rome is the obvious example, and the patronage of the popes (notably Nicholas V and Leo X) and of the cardinals is the obvious explanation.110 Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara are other famous examples of cities with few important native artists which nevertheless became important cultural centres.111 In these three small courts the stimulus came from the patron, from the ruler or his wife. In Urbino, it was Federigo da Montefeltro who made the arts important by attracting Luciano Laurana from Dalmatia, Piero della Francesca from Borgo San Sepolcro, Justus from Ghent, and Francesco di Giorgio from Siena. In Mantua, Isabella d’Este and her husband gave commissions, as we have seen, to Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Leonardo, Mantegna, Perugino, Titian and other non-Mantuans. Their only Mantuan painter was a minor master, Lorenzo Leombruno.112
In these ‘court cities’, the patron seems to be calling art into existence where there was none before. However, two qualifications to this thesis need to be borne in mind. The first is that such patronage was parasitic on the art of major centres such as Florence and Venice in the sense that it would have been impossible without them. The second qualification is that the achievements of princely patrons rarely outlived them. Alfonso of Aragon, for example, was an effective patron in many fields. He took five humanists into his permanent service (Panormita, Fazio, Valla and the Decembrio brothers). He built up a chapel of twenty-two singers and paid his organist the unusually large sum of 120 ducats a year. He invited the painter Pisanello to his court in Naples and commissioned works from major sculptors such as Mino da Fiesole and Francesco Laurana. He bought Flemish tapestries and Venetian glass.113 The death of Alfonso ‘brought an end to the halcyon days of Neapolitan humanism’, because the King’s son and successor ‘did not support men of learning and culture on as grand a scale’, while Neapolitan nobles did not follow Alfonso’s example and take an interest in patronage.114
In contrast to Alfonso, Lorenzo de’Medici had everything in his favour as a patron.115 Living in Florence, he had instant access to major artists and did not to have to go to the trouble of attracting them from a distance. He was not a lone patron but one of many, great and small. The importance of his patronage has been exaggerated in the past. The issue here, however, is not its extent but its facility. Patronage was structured – easier in some parts of Italy, more difficult in others.
As for the rise of the market, it is likely to have given artists and writers more freedom at the price of more insecurity. It involved the rise of reproduction and even mass production. Yet it may well have encouraged the increasing differentiation of subject matter and individualism of style noted in the first chapter: the exploitation of the artist’s unique qualities in order to catch the eye of a purchaser.
