The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

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

  PLATE 3.7 TITIAN: PORTRAIT OF GIULIO ROMANO

  Composers of the period sometimes compared themselves to poets. Johannes de Tinctoris, who had impeccable credentials as an academic theorist of music, dedicated his treatise on modes to two practitioners, Ockeghem and Busnois – an unusual thing to do since the conventional view was that theory was the master and practice (composition no less than performance) merely the servant. A number of composers were treated with honour in Italy at this time, although it is not easy to decide whether this was a tribute to their compositions or their performances (if indeed such a distinction was taken seriously at all). The humanists Guarino of Verona and Filippo Beroaldo wrote epigrams in praise of the lutenist Piero Bono, and medals were struck in his honour. Ficino and Poliziano wrote elegies on the death of the organist Squarcialupi, while Lorenzo de’Medici composed his epitaph and had a monument to him erected in the cathedral in Florence. Lorenzo’s son Pope Leo X made the lutenist Gian Maria Giudeo a count, while Philip the Handsome of Burgundy did the same for the Italian singer–composer Mambriano da Orto. The elaborate preparations made for the arrival of Jakob Obrecht in Ferrara show how highly he was prized by Duke Ercole d’Este. At the court of Mantua in the time of Ercole’s daughter Isabella, Marchetto Cara and Bartolommeo Tromboncino were honoured members of a musical circle. In Venice, Willaert, master of St Mark’s chapel, died rich, while Gioseffe Zarlino, another master of St Mark’s, had medals struck in his honour by the Republic and ended his days as a bishop.98

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

  In case Florence was not typical, it may be useful to take a brief look at twenty-five humanists who were born outside Tuscany and active in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.100 Of these twenty-five, at least fourteen had fathers from the upper classes, while only three are definitely of humble origin (Guarino, Vittorino and Platina). Two were ennobled: Filelfo by King Alfonso of Aragon, Nifo by both Pope Leo X and Charles V. Three were famous university teachers: the lawyer Andrea Alciati, the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, and the literary critic Sperone Speroni. The Venetians Ermolao Barbaro and Andrea Navagero had distinguished political careers as senators and ambassadors. Angelo Decembrio, Antonio Loschi, Mario Equicola and Giovanni Pontano all held high administrative or diplomatic posts at the courts of Milan, Mantua and Naples. By worldly standards, almost all of them seem to have had successful careers.

  There is, however, another side to the picture. Artists and writers were not respected by everyone. Some members of the elite whose achievements have been recognized by posterity had a difficult time of it in their own age. Three social prejudices against artists retained their power in this period. Artists were considered ignoble because their work involved both manual labour and retail trade and because they lacked learning.

  To use a twelfth-century classification still current in the Renaissance, painting, sculpture and architecture were not ‘liberal’ but ‘mechanical’ arts. They were also dirty; a nobleman would not like to soil his hands using paints. The argument from antiquity, which Alberti had used in defence of artists, was actually double-edged, since Aristotle had excluded craftsmen from citizenship because their work was mechanical, while Plutarch had declared in his life of Pericles that no man of good family would want to become a sculptor like Phidias.101 Leonardo’s vigorous protest against views like these is well known: ‘You have set painting among the mechanical arts! … If you call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands represent what the imagination creates, your writers are setting down what originates in the mind by manual work with the pen.’ He might have added the example of fighting sword in hand. Even Leonardo, however, shared the prejudice against sculptors: ‘The sculptor produces his work by … the labour of a mechanic, often accompanied by sweating which mixes with the dust and turns into mud, so that his face becomes white and he looks like a baker.’102

  The second point commonly made against artists was that they made a living from retail trade, so that they deserved the same low status as cobblers and grocers. Noblemen, on the other hand, were ashamed to take money for their work. Giovanni Boltraffio, a Lombard nobleman and humanist who also painted, usually worked on a small scale, perhaps because he intended his pictures to be gifts for his friends, and his epitaph emphasized his amateur status. Leonardo threw this accusation, too, back into the faces of the humanists: ‘If you call it mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error … more than you yourselves? If you lecture for the schools, do you not go wherever you are paid the most?’103 In practice, a distinction was often drawn between being on the payroll of a prince, which could happen to the best people, and keeping a shop. Michelangelo insisted strongly on this distinction: ‘I was never a painter or a sculptor like those who set up shop for that purpose. I always refrained from doing so out of respect for my father and brothers’ (this did not prevent him from being concerned with money).104 In a similar manner Vasari, after years in Medici service, was able to refer with contempt to a minor painter, in his life of Perino del Vaga, as ‘One of those who keep an open shop and stand there in public, working at all sorts of mechanical tasks.’

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

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

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

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

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

  Artists were in fact respected by some of the noble and powerful, but they were despised by others. The status insecurity which naturally resulted may well explain the touchiness of certain individuals, such as Michelangelo and Cellini. In the third place, the status of both artists and writers was probably higher in Italy than elsewhere in Europe, higher in Florence than in other parts of Italy, and higher in the sixteenth century than it had been in the fifteenth. They might be represented as melancholy geniuses (plate 3.8).108 By the middle of the sixteenth century it was no longer extraordinary for artists to have some knowledge of the humanities; the distinction between the two cultures was breaking down.109 The social mobility of painters and sculptors is symbolized if not confirmed by the appearance of the term ‘artist’ in more or less its modern meaning.

  ARTISTS AS SOCIAL D EVIANTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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