by Peter Burke
PLATE 5.1 SANDRO BOTTICELLI: THE PUNISHMENT OF KORAH, DATHAN AND ABIRON, SISTINE CHAPEL, VATICAN
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
POLITICS
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 5.3 DONATELLO: JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES
PLATE 5.4 BENVENUTO CELLINI: COSIMO I DE’MEDICI
PLATE 5.5 MASSACCIO: THE TRIBUTE MONEY (DETAIL)
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, Pop
e 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
THE PRIVATE SPHERE
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 s
hame.52
PLATE 5.7 VITTORE CARPACCIO: THE RECEPTION OF THE ENGLISH AMBASSADORS AND ST URSULA TALKING TO HER FATHER
ART FOR PLEASURE
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