Qualche gentil figuretta,
Per tenerla sopra letto
O in su qualche basetta?
Ogni camera s’asetta
Ben con le nostre figure.
(Who wants some elegant statuette for their delight?
You can put it above your bed or on a stand.
Our figures make any room look well).
Carnival song of the sculptors of Florence,
in Singleton, Canti carnascialeschi
The idea of a ‘work of art’ is a modern one, although art galleries and museums encourage us to project it into the past. Before 1500 it is more exact to speak of ‘images’.1 Even the idea of ‘literature’ is a modern one. This chapter, however, is concerned with the different uses, for contemporary owners, viewers or listeners, of paintings, statues, poems, plays, and so on. They did not regard these objects in the same ways as we do. For one thing, paintings might be regarded as expendable. A Florentine patrician, Filippo Strozzi the younger, asked in his will of 1537 for a monument in the family chapel in Santa Maria Novella, which contained a fresco by Filippino Lippi. ‘Do not worry about the painting which is there now, which it is necessary to destroy’, Strozzi ordered, ‘since of its nature it is not very durable’ (di sua natura non è molto durabile).2 If we want to understand what the art of the period meant to contemporaries, we have to look first at its uses.
The most obvious use of paintings and statues in Renaissance Italy was religious. In a secular culture like ours, we may well have to remind ourselves that what we see as a ‘work of art’ was viewed by contemporaries primarily as a sacred image. The idea of a ‘religious’ use is not very precise, so it is probably helpful to distinguish magical, devotional and didactic functions, although these divisions blur into one another, while ‘magic’ does not have quite the same meaning for us as it did for a sixteenth-century theologian. It is more precise and so more useful to refer to the thaumaturgic and other miraculous powers attributed to particular images, as in the case of certain famous Byzantine icons.
Some gonfalons or processional banners – for example, those painted by Benedetto Bonfigli in Perugia – seem to have been considered a defence against plague. The Madonna is shown protecting her people with her mantle against the arrows of the plague, and the inscription on one gonfalon begs her ‘to ask and help thy son to take the fury away’.3 The popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of images of St Sebastian, who was also associated with defence against plague (below, p. 000), suggests that the thaumaturgic function was still an important one. When he was working in Italy in the 1420s and 1430s, the Netherlander Guillaume Dufay wrote two motets to St Sebastian as a defence against plague. Music was generally believed to have therapeutic power; stories were current about cures effected by playing to the patient.4
A celebrated Italian example of another kind of miraculous power is the image of the Virgin Mary in the church of Impruneta, near Florence, which was carried in procession to produce rain in times of drought or to stop the rain when there was too much, as well as to solve the political problems of the Florentines. For example, the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci records in his journal that in 1483 the image was brought to Florence ‘for the sake of obtaining fine weather, as it had rained for more than a month. And it immediately became fine.’5
Some Renaissance paintings appear to belong to a magical system outside the Christian framework (below, p. 000). The frescoes by Francesco del Cossa in the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara are concerned with astrological themes, as Aby Warburg pointed out, and they may well have been painted to ensure the good fortune of the duke.6 It has also been argued (following a suggestion of Warburg’s), that Botticelli’s famous Primavera may have been a talisman – in other words, an image made in order to draw down favourable ‘influences’ from the planet Venus.7 We know that the philosopher Ficino made use of such images, just as he played ‘martial’ music to attract influences from Mars: a Renaissance Planets suite.8 Again, when Leonardo (as Vasari tells us) painted the thousand-eyed Argus guarding the treasury of the duke of Milan, it is difficult to tell whether he intended simply to make an appropriate classical allusion or whether he was also attempting a piece of protective magic. It is similarly difficult to tell how serious Vasari is being when he works a variant of the Byzantine icon legends into his life of Raphael. He tells us that a painting of Raphael’s was on the way to Palermo when a storm arose and the ship was wrecked. The painting, however, ‘remained unharmed … because even the fury of the winds and the waves of the sea had respect for the beauty of such a work.’ In a similar way, we need at least to entertain the possibility that the images of traitors and rebels painted on the walls of public buildings in Florence and elsewhere were a form of magical destruction of fugitives who were beyond the reach of conventional punishment – the equivalent of sticking pins in wax images of one’s enemies.
Many images were made and bought for sacred settings and religious purposes.9 The term ‘devotional pictures’ (quadri di devotione) was current in this period, when images and religious fervour seem to have been more closely associated than usual, whether the images were crucifixes (recommended by leading preachers such as Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola), the new medium of the woodcut, or a new type of religious painting, small and intimate, suitable for a private house, not so much an icon as a narrative, which would act as a stimulus to meditation on the Bible or the lives of the saints.10
A vivid illustration of the devotional uses of the image comes from Rome, from the fraternity of St John Beheaded (San Giovanni Decollato), which comforted condemned criminals in their last moments by means of tavolette – small pictures of the martyrdom of saints which were employed, in the words of their recent historian, ‘as a kind of visual narcotic to numb the fear and pain of the condemned criminal during his terrible journey to the scaffold’.11 The wear and tear visible today on some sacred images of the period offers vivid evidence of what one scholar calls the ‘tactile devotion’ of the owners.12
The increasing importance of devotional images seems to have been linked to the increasing lay initiatives in religious matters characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from the foundation of religious fraternities to the singing of hymns or the reading of pious books at home. Surviving inventories of the houses of the wealthy, in Venice for instance, reveal images of Our Lady in almost every room, from the reception room or portego to the bedrooms. In the castle of the Uzzano family, Florentine patricians, there were two paintings of the ‘sudary’ (Christ’s face imprinted on Veronica’s towel), and immediately before one of them a predella or prie-Dieu is listed, as if the inhabitants of the castle commonly knelt before the sacred image.13
As the fifteenth-century friar Giovanni Dominici put it, parents should keep sacred images in the house because of their moral effect on the children. The infant Jesus with St John would be good for boys, and also pictures of the Massacre of the Innocents, ‘in order to make them afraid of arms and armed men’. Girls, on the other hand, should fix their gaze on Saints Agnes, Cecilia, Elizabeth, Catherine and Ursula (with her legendary eleven thousand virgins) to give them ‘a love of virginity, a desire for Christ, a hatred for sins, a contempt for vanities’.14 In a similar way, Florentine girls, whether young nuns or young brides, would be given images, or more exactly dolls, of the Christ-child to encourage identification with his mother.15
An interesting example of the devotional use of certain images, and a material sign of spectator response, is what one might call pious vandalism – the defacing of the painted devils in a painting by Uccello, for instance, or the scratching out of the eyes of the executioner of St James in a fresco by Mantegna16 – the equivalent, one might say, of the audience hissing the villain in a melodrama. In fact, the religious plays of the period had similar aims. These rappresentazioni sacre, as they were called, which were written and acted in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were rather like the miracle and mystery plays of late medieval England (a reminder of the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Middle Ages’, particularly in the case of popular culture). They usually end with angels exhorting the audience to take to heart what they have just seen. At the end of a play about Abraham and Isaac, for example, the angel points out the importance of ‘holy obedience’ (santa ubidienzia).17
Ex votos are a kind of devotional image of which Italian examples remain from the fifteenth century onwards, recording a vow made to a saint in a time of danger, whether illness or accident. Those that have survived, in the sanctuary of the Madonna of the Mountain at Cesena, for example, which contains 246 examples earlier than 1600, are probably only a tiny proportion of those that once existed.18 It may well have been this kind of occasion that most often persuaded ordinary people to commission paintings. The artistic level of the majority of ex votos is not high, but the category does include a few well-known Renaissance paintings, notably Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria, commissioned by Gianfrancesco II, marquis of Mantua, after the battle of Fornovo, in which he had, at least in his own eyes, defeated the French army. It was the Jews of Mantua who actually paid for the painting, though not out of choice. Again, Carpaccio’s Martyrdom of 10,000 Christians and Titian’s St Mark Enthroned were both commissioned to fulfil vows in time of plague, while Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno was painted for the historian Sigismondo de’Conti, apparently to express his gratitude for his escape when a meteor fell on his house.
Another use of religious paintings was didactic. As Pope Gregory the Great had already pointed out in the sixth century, ‘Paintings are placed in churches so that the illiterate can read on the walls what they cannot read in books’, a sentence much quoted in the Renaissance.19 A good deal of Christian doctrine was illustrated in Italian church frescoes of the fourteenth centuries: the life of Christ, the relation between the Old and New Testaments, the Last Judgment and its consequences, and so on. The religious plays of the period consider many of the same themes, so that each medium reinforced the message of the others and made it more intelligible. It does not seem useful to argue which came first, art or theatre.20
A special case of the didactic is the presentation of controversial topics from a one-sided point of view – in other words, propaganda. Like rhetoric, painting was a means of persuasion. Paintings commissioned by Renaissance popes, for example, present arguments for the primacy of popes over general councils of the Church, sometimes by drawing historical parallels. For Pope Sixtus IV, for example, Botticelli painted the Punishment of Korah, illustrating a scene from the Old Testament in which the earth opened and swallowed up Korah and his men after they had dared to challenge Moses and Aaron (Plate 5.1). An earlier fifteenth-century pope, Eugenius IV, had made reference to Korah when condemning the Council of Basel.21 In a similar manner, Raphael painted for Pope Julius II, who was in conflict with the Bentivoglio family of Bologna, the story of Heliodorus, who tried to plunder the Temple of Jerusalem but was expelled by angels.22 Again, after the Reformation, paintings in Catholic churches in Italy and elsewhere tended to illustrate points of doctrine which the Protestants had challenged.23
Following the Reformation, the Catholic Church became much more concerned to control literature and, to a lesser degree, painting. An Index of Prohibited Books was drawn up (and made official at the Council of Trent in the 1560s), and Boccaccio’s Decameron, among other works of Italian literature, was first banned and then severely expurgated.24 Michelangelo’s Last Judgement was discussed at the Council of Trent, which ordered the naked bodies to be covered by fig-leaves.25 An Index of Prohibited Images was considered, and Veronese was on one occasion summoned before the Inquisition of Venice to explain why he had included in a painting of the Last Supper what the inquisitors called ‘buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and similar vulgarities’.26
The visual defence of the papacy has introduced the subject of political propaganda, at least in the vague sense of images and texts glorifying or justifying a particular regime, if not in the more precise sense of recommending a particular policy.27 There are so many examples of glorification from this period that it is difficult to know where to begin, whether to look at republics or principalities, at large-scale works such as frescoes or small-scale ones such as medals. Like the coins of ancient Rome, the medals of Renaissance Italy often carried political messages. Alfonso of Aragon, for example, had his portrait medal by Pisanello (1449) inscribed ‘Victorious and a Peacemaker’ (Triumphator et Pacificus).28 On his triumphal arch there was a similar inscription, ‘Pious, Merciful, Unvanquished’ (Pius, Clemens’, Invictus). The king, who had recently won Naples by force of arms, seems to be telling his new subjects that if they submit they will come to no harm, but that in a conflict he is bound to win. In Florence, at the end of the regime of the elder Cosimo de’Medici, a medal was struck showing Florence, personified in the usual manner as a young woman, with the inscription ‘Peace and Public Liberty’ (Pax Libertasque Publica).29 Under Lorenzo the Magnificent, medals were struck to commemorate particular events, such as the defeat of the Pazzi conspiracy or Lorenzo’s successful return from Naples in 1480. The sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano commemorated the peace arranged between Ferdinand of Aragon and Louis XII with a medal giving the credit to Pope Julius II and describing him as ‘the restorer of justice, peace and faith’ (Iustitiae pacis fideique recuperator). Mechanically reproducible as they were, and relatively cheap, medals were a good medium for spreading political messages and giving a regime a good image.
Statues displayed in public were another way of glorifying warriors, princes and republics. Donatello’s great equestrian statue at Padua honours a condottiere in Venetian service, Erasmo da Narni, nicknamed ‘Gattamelata’, who died in 1443, and it was commissioned by the state (by contrast, the monument to Bartolommeo Colleoni in Venice was effectively paid for by the condottiere himself). A number of Florentine statues had a political meaning which is no longer immediately apparent. In their wars with greater powers (notably Milan), the Florentines came to identify with David defeating Goliath, with Judith cutting off the head of the Assyrian captain Holofernes (Plate 5.3), or with St George (leaving the role of the dragon to Milan). Donatello’s memorable renderings of all three figures are thus republican statements. When the Florentine Republic was restored in 1494, political symbols of this kind reappeared, notably Michelangelo’s great David, which refers back to Donatello’s David and so by extension to the dangers which the Republic had successfully survived in the early fifteenth century. The statue thus ‘demands a knowledge of contemporary political events before one can understand it as a work of art’.30
PLATE 5.2 SCHOOL OF PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA: PORTRAIT OF ALFONSO OF ARAGON
Paintings, too, carried political meanings. In Venice, the Republic was glorified by the commissioning and display of official portraits of its doges, and of scenes of Venetian victories in the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace. In Florence, when the Republic was restored in 1494, a Great Council was set up on the Venetian model, together with a hall in the Palazzo della Signoria as a meeting-place, complete with victory paintings on the walls, the battles of Anghiari and Cascina commissioned from Leonardo and Michelangelo. When the Medici returned in 1513, the paintings, still unfinished, were destroyed. This destruction of works by major artists suggests that the political uses of art were taken extremely seriously by contemporaries.31 So does the employment of Vasari, Bronzino and other painters by Cosimo de’Medici, grand duke of Tuscany (Plate 5.4), to redecorate the Palazzo Vecchio with frescoes of the achievements of the regime and to paint official portraits of the grand-ducal family.32 What is more difficult to decide, at this distance in time, is whether certain paintings carried more precise messages – whether, for instance, they recommended certain policies. One example which has attracted considerable attention is Masaccio’s great fresco of The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (Plate 5.5). The subject is an unusual one; it carries a clear moral, ‘Render unto Caesar’, and it was painted in 1425, at a time, when proposals to introduce a new tax, the famous catasto, were under discussion. Is it a pictorial defence of the tax? Or is its message one about papal primacy, like Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah?33
In other cases, the political reference of a painting is clear, but its political purpose is rather more doubtful: for example, the images of traitors and rebels. In 1440, for instance, Andrea del Castagno is said to have painted images of rebels hung by their feet on the façade of the gaol in Florence. As a result he was nicknamed ‘Andrew the Rope’ (Andrea degli impiccati). In 1478, it was Botticelli’s turn to paint the images of the Pazzi conspirators in the same place. In 1529–30, during the siege of Florence, it was Andrea del Sarto who painted on the same building the images of captains who had fled (cf. Plate 5.6). One wonders why this was done. Was it, as suggested earlier, magical destruction? Or were the paintings made primarily to give information, like a ‘wanted’ poster? This would at least be a plausible explanation of the public display in Milan of the images of bankrupts. The most likely explanation of these paintings, however, given the importance of honour and shame in the value system of this society (below, p. 204), is that they were executed to dishonour the victims and their families, to destroy them socially, to make them infamous.34 Such an explanation is made more plausible by the existence of a literary equivalent. In Florence, the public herald had the duty of writing what were called cartelli d’infamia – in other words, verses insulting the enemies of the Republic.
PLATE 5.6 ANDREA DEL SARTO: TWO MEN SUSPENDED BY THEIR FEET (DETAIL), RED CHALK ON CREAM PAPER
Humanism too had its uses, whether to produce virtuous rulers (as the humanists claimed) or to foster habits of docility and obedience (as some scholars now argue).35 It is less necessary to dilate upon literature here, since its potential for political persuasion is obvious enough. Suffice it to say that the epics in Latin and Italian discussed in the last chapter were poems in praise of rulers through their ancestors, real and imaginary, and justifications of their rule, no less political than their model, Virgil’s Aeneid, which was commissioned to give Augustus a good public image and – according to some classical scholars – even to defend certain of his policies. Historical works, the prose equivalents of epic according to Renaissance literary theory, were often used for similar purposes; that was why governments pensioned humanist historians such as Lorenzo Valla in Naples, Marcantonio Sabellico in Venice, or Benedetto Varchi in the Florence of the grand duke Cosimo de’Medici. They were supposed to be new Livys, just as the states they celebrated were new Romes. Some poems carried more precise and more topical messages – for example, the ‘laments’ put into the mouths of rulers at their fall (such as Cesare Borgia, who lost everything on the death of his father, Pope Alexander VI, or Giovanni Bentivoglio, who was driven from Bologna by Julius II) or cities at times of crisis (Venice in 1509, following a major defeat at Agnadello, or Rome in 1527, after it was sacked by imperial troops).36 Luigi Pulci’s famous epic the Morgante (1478) seems to be, among other things, a plea for a crusade against the Turks, an aim which the poet is known to have supported. Ariosto makes a similar point in his Orlando Furioso (1516), urging Frenchmen and Spaniards to fight Muslims rather than their fellow Christians (in other words, to desist from their wars in Italy).
The mobilization of the arts in an attempt to persuade was most elaborate in the cases where least is now left for posterity to view and judge – in other words, in court and civic festivals, which often carried fairly precise and extremely topical political messages as well as contributing to the general task of celebrating or legitimating a particular regime. In the case of Venice, with its elaborate ducal processions and its annual Marriage of the Sea, one historian speaks, not without reason, of ‘government by ritual’, stressing the image of a harmonious hierarchical society projected by these quasi-dramatic forms. As for topical references, a good example comes from 1511, during the famous war of the League of Cambrai, in which the very existence of Venice (or at least of her empire) was at stake. The Scuola di San Rocco (above p. 96) exhibited an allegorical tableau vivant, including Venice (personified as a woman) and the king of France (the principal enemy of the Republic), flanked by the pope with a placard asking why France had denied the true faith.37 In Florence, the political uses of festivals are most obvious in the period following the Medici restoration of 1513. A notable example is that of the state entry into Florence in 1515 of the Medici pope, Leo X, through an elaborate sequence of triumphal arches in which the theme of the return of the golden age was emphasized.38 In this field, too, the second Cosimo – that is, the grand duke of Tuscany – showed his awareness of the political value of the arts. Not only was his wedding to Eleonora of Toledo in 1539 the occasion for an elaborate display, but the annual celebrations marking Carnival and the feast of St John the Baptist (patron saint of Florence) were more or less taken over by Cosimo and his men and used with what another writer calls – with particular appropriateness in this context – a ‘conscious Machiavellianism’.39
One has the impression – it is difficult to be more precise – that the political uses of the media were greater and also more self-conscious in the sixteenth century than they had been in the fifteenth. Faced with the wider diffusion of unorthodox ideas made possible by the invention of printing, governments, like the Church, turned to censorship. When Guicciardini’s great History of Italy was published, posthumously, in 1561, a number of anticlerical remarks had been expurgated. It was, however, not the Church but Cosimo de’Medici of Tuscany who was responsible for the expurgations, so as to preserve good relations between his regime and the papacy. On the positive side, Cosimo showed his awareness of the political uses of culture by founding first the Florentine Academy and then the Academy of Design. In other words, he tried to turn Tuscan ‘cultural capital’ (the primacy of its language, its literature, its art) into political capital for his regime.40
The political messages discussed so far are those delivered on behalf of those in power. However, opponents of the various regimes were far from silent. They could, for example, make their views known by a kind of secular iconoclasm. After the defeat of the Venetian forces at Agnadello in 1509 the revolt of the subject cities, such as Bergamo and Cremona, was marked by the defacing of the sculpted lion of St Mark, placed in each city as a sign of Venetian domination. On the death of Pope Julius II, his statue in Bologna, another sign of domination, also met its end. Graffiti already had their place in the politics of Italian city-states and were sometimes recorded in chronicles or private letters. A literary development from these graffiti were the so-called pasquinades (pasquinate), verses satirizing the popes and cardinals which came from the later fifteenth century onwards to be attached to the pedestal of a fragment of a classical statue. The verses, attributed to the statue, were written on occasion by distinguished writers, such as Pietro Aretino, whose pungent verses on the conclave following the death of Leo X did much to make his reputation.41
There remain some uses of the arts which do not fit our categories of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, at least in the strict sense. One could perhaps widen the latter category to include the use of portraits of marriageable daughters in negotiations between princes, or indeed between families of a middling social status.42 Even the portraits of private persons can be seen as a kind of propaganda, with the artist collaborating with the sitter to present a favourable image of an individual, or of his or her family, to impress rival families, or perhaps posterity.43 However, it is worth pausing to think how much of the material culture of Renaissance Italy was produced for a domestic setting (above, pp. 10–12).44 It was for the use or the glory not so much of individuals as of families, especially noble families, or families with noble pretensions.
The most important and expensive item was of course the town house, or ‘palace’ as the Italians like to call it, a symbol of the family as well as a shelter for its members, designed to impress outsiders rather than to provide the inhabitants with comfortable surroundings. Comfort is a more recent ideal, dating from the eighteenth century or thereabouts. Older ideals were modesty and defence. The fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the other hand, were the heyday in Italy of what is often called ‘conspicuous consumption’, in which nobles built to sustain the honour of the house and to make their rivals envious.45 The house (especially its façade) and its contents formed part of a family’s ‘front’, the setting and the stage props for the long-playing drama in which their status was enacted. The analysis of ‘front’ offered by Goffman seems particularly appropriate to the behaviour of nobles in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.46
In the language of the time, the palace demonstrated the ‘magnificence’ of the family that owned it, although the ‘propriety of display’, or the scale of display, was a matter for debate.47 Villas or houses in the countryside moved in a similar direction. In the early part of the period, they were essentially farmhouses, allowing the owners to supervise the workers on their estate. Gradually, however, the emphasis shifted from profit to pleasure.48
Other material objects were associated with important and highly ritualized moments of family history, notably births, marriages and deaths. The desca di parto or ‘birth tray’, on which refreshments were brought to the new mother, was often painted with appropriate themes such as the triumph of love. The cassone, a large chest with paintings on the outside – and sometimes inside the lid as well – was associated with marriage, for it contained the bride’s trousseau.49 Pictures were frequently given as wedding presents, and newly-weds not infrequently had their portraits painted, the bride wearing the new clothes given her by the husband’s family and sometimes bearing their badge, thus marking her as theirs.50 The open allusions to sexuality permitted at weddings seem to have affected the conventions of nuptial art, which includes such Renaissance masterpieces as Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi at Mantua, Raphael’s Galatea, and Sodoma’s Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne, the last two painted for the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi.51 Poetry and plays might also be associated with the happy occasion; Poliziano wrote his pastoral drama Orfeo for a double betrothal at the court of Mantua. To commemorate deaths in the family, there were funeral monuments, some of them extremely grand affairs. Since our period covers Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel and his tomb for Pope Julius II, always concerned for the glory of the della Rovere family, no more need be said on that account. If states employed artists and writers to defame enemies, so, on occasion, did noble families. The painter Francesco Benaglio of Verona was once commissioned to go at night and paint obscene pictures by torchlight on the walls of the palace of a nobleman (the enemy of his client), presumably to put him to public shame.52
PLATE 5.7 VITTORE CARPACCIO: THE RECEPTION OF THE ENGLISH AMBASSADORS AND ST URSULA TALKING TO HER FATHER
We arrive at last at what has come to seem the natural ‘use’ of the arts: to give pleasure. The playful side of the arts must not be forgotten, although it has not often been studied.53 The increasing importance of this function is one of the most significant changes in the period. By the mid-sixteenth century, the writer Lodovico Dolce went so far as to suggest that the purpose of painting was ‘chiefly to give pleasure’ (principalmente per dilettare). The carnival song of the sculptors of Florence – quoted in the epigraph to this chapter – catches the new mood. It should be noticed, however, that, as the song makes clear, pleasure (diletto) is taken in the statue as a contribution to interior decoration. We are still a long way from modern ideas of ‘art for art’s sake’. Even the Gonzagas, who cared a good deal about painting, seem to have thought of it primarily in this way. Isabella asked Giovanni Bellini for a picture ‘to decorate a study of ours’ (per ornamento d’uno nostro studio), while her son Federico wrote to Titian in 1537 telling him that the new rooms in the castle were finished; all that was lacking were the pictures ‘made for these rooms’ (fatte per tall lochi). Sabba di Castiglione, a knight of the Order of Rhodes, advised nobles to decorate their houses with classical statues or – if these were not available – with works by Donatello or Michelangelo.54
In architecture, we see the increasing importance of the pleasure house, the country villa, where, as the greatest designer of such houses, Palladio, put it, a man ‘tired of the bustle of cities, will restore and console himself’.55 In literature too there was increasing emphasis (especially in prefaces) on pleasure – the author’s and, more particularly, the reader’s – a shift that may well be related to the gradual commercialization of literature and art. But what exactly gave pleasure to spectators, readers or listeners in the Renaissance? An attempt to answer this question will be made in the next chapter.
