by Peter Burke
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.
PLATE 4.5 AGNOLO BRONZINO: UGOLINO MARTELLI
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 thos
e 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.