by Peter Burke
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.
1 Belting, Likeness and Presence; Ferino Pagden, ‘From cult images to the cult of images’.
2 Quoted, but translated differently, in Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, p. 102n.
3 Bombe, ‘Tafelbilder, Gonfaloni und Fresken’.
4 Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic.
5 Casotti, Memorie istoriche; Landucci, Florentine Diary; Trexler, ‘Florentine religious experience’.
6 Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 563–92.
7 Yates, Giordano Bruno, pp. 76ff.
8 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic; Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, pp. 101–44.
9 Goffen, Piety and Patronage; Hills, ‘Piety and patronage’; Verdon and Henderson, Christianity and the Renaissance; Eisenbichler, Crossing the Boundaries; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 131–207; Ladis and Zuraw, Visions of Holiness; Kubersky-Piredda, ‘Immagini devozionali’; Kasl, Giovanni Bellini; Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore.
10 Wackernagel, World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, pp. 180ff.; Ringbom, Icon to Narrative; Baxandall, Painting and Experience, pp. 45ff.
11 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 172.
12 Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, p. 59.
13 Morse, ‘Creating sacred space’; Bombe, Nachlass-Inventare.
14 Dominici, Regola del governo, pp. 131ff.
15 Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, ch. 14.
16 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, p. 91.
17 D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni.
18 Novelli and Massaccesi, Ex voto.
19 By Fra Michele da Carcano (quoted in Baxandall, Painting and Experience, p. 41, for example), and by Dolce, Aretino, p. 112.
20 Kernodle, From Art to Theatre.
21 Ettlinger, Sistine Chapel; cf. Numbers, 16: 1–34.
22 Jones and Penny, Raphael, ch. 5; cf. 2 Maccabees, 3: 7–40.
23 Mâle, L’art religieux après le concile de Trente; Ostrow, Art and Spirituality.
24 On Boccaccio, Sorrentino, Letteratura italiana; on Italian literary censorship in general, Guidi, in Rochon, Le pouvoir et la plume; Grendler, ‘Printing and censorship’; Fragnito, Church, Censorship and Culture; Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice.
25 Blunt, Artistic Theory, ch. 9; De Maio, Michelangelo e la Controriforma.
26 Schaffran, ‘Inquisitionsprozesse’.
27 Welch, Art and Society, pp. 209–73.
28 Hill, Corpus of Italian Medals, p. 12 and plate 9.
29 Ibid., p. 236.
30 Seymour, Michelangelo’s David, p. 56; cf. Hartt, ‘Art and freedom’; Ames-Lewis, ‘Donatello’s bronze David’; Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 202–7.
31 Wilde, ‘Hall of the Great Council’.
32 Pope-Hennessy, Portrait in the Renaissance, pp. 180–5; Levey, Painting at Court; Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny; Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici.
33 Meiss, ‘Masaccio and the early Renaissance’; Molho, ‘Brancacci Chapel’.
34 Ortalli, Pittura infamante; Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, esp. p. 76.
35 Grafton and Jardine, ‘Humanism’.
36 Medin and Frati, Lamenti.
37 Muir, Civic Ritual, pp. 185ff., 238ff.
38 Shearman, ‘Florentine entrata of Leo X’.
39 Plaisance, ‘Politique culturelle’ and Florence.
40 Plaisance, ‘Une première affirmation’; Bertelli, ‘Egemonia linguistica’.
41 Larivaille, Pietro Aretino, pp. 47ff.
42 Fahy, ‘Marriage portrait’.
43 Burke, Historical Anthropology, pp. 150–67.
44 Welch, Art and Society, pp. 275–311.
45 Burke, Historical Anthropology, pp. 132–49; Goldthwaite, ‘Empire of things’, pp. 77ff.
46 Goffman, Presentation of Self, pp. 22ff.
47 Jenkins, ‘Cosimo de’Medici’s patronage’; Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici; Lindow, Renaissance Palace; Shepherd, ‘Republican anxiety’.
48 Lillie, Florentine Villas; Rupprecht, ‘Villa’; Coffin, Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome.
49 Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni; Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, pp. 21–46; Baskins, Cassone Painting; Musacchio, Ritual of Childbirth; Randolph, ‘Gendering the period eye’; Musacchio, Art, Marriage and Family.
50 Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, pp. 225ff.; Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, pp. 47–83.
51 Barolsky, Infinite Jest, pp. 28ff., 89ff., 93ff.
52 Simeoni, ‘Una vendetta signorile’.
53 Barolsky, Infinite Jest, is one of the rare exceptions.
54 Sabba di Castiglione, Ricordi, no. 109, trans. in Klein and Zerner, Italian Art, p. 23.
55 Palladio, Quattro libri dell’architettura, bk 2, ch. 12.
6
TASTE
Everyone has a certain natural taste … for recognizing beauty and ugliness (un certo gusto … del bello e del brutto).
Dolce, Aretino, p. 102
Neither artists nor patrons were completely free to make aesthetic choices. Their liberty was limited, whether they realized this or not, by the need to take into account the standards of taste of their period. These standards need to be described in order that we may look at works of art and literature – if only momentarily – with the eyes of contemporaries.1 To reconstruct the taste of the time, historians can use two main kinds of literary source. A number of treatises on art and beauty were produced in this period by famous humanists such as Alberti and Bembo, and also by a number of lesser figures. These treatises, which have often been studied, have the advantage of explicitness, but they are often rather abstract. They need to be supplemented by the analysis of the standards implied by a more practical criticism, the judgements on individual works of art, literature, and so on, to be found in contracts, in private letters, in poems, in biographies and in stories.2
It is interesting to find, for example, that, whereas the term ‘sublime’ became important in art theory only in the eighteenth century, it was already used in this period by the poet Veronica Gambara, in a letter to Beatrice d’Este (sister of Isabella), praising Correggio’s painting of St Mary Magdalen for expressing il sublime. Another precious piece of evidence is the memorandum to Ludovico Sforza, cited in chapter 4 (p. 103), in which the agent tries to find words to distinguish the styles of four leading painters to help the duke make a choice between them, contrasting the ‘virile air’ of Botticelli, the ‘sweeter air’ of Filippino Lippi, the ‘angelic air’ of Perugino and the ‘good air’ of Ghirlandaio.3
The sources are, of course, written in Latin as well as Italian. The Latin sources will not be ignored, but the emphasis here will fall on Italian texts because they are closer to the ordinary speech and thought of the time.
THE VISUAL ARTS
It would not be difficult to draw up a list of some fifty terms which came regularly to the lips and pens of Italians of the period when they were appraising paintings, sculptures and buildings. Some are general, almost vacuous terms, such as ‘beauty’ (bellezza, pulchritudine), but others are more precise and so more revealing. It may be useful to distinguish five clusters of terms, centred on the concepts of nature, order, richness, expressiveness and skill.
Naturalism v. idealism
The ‘return to nature’, a favourite formula of modern historians of the Renaissance, does in fact correspond to a commonplace of the period. For example, the humanist Bartolommeo Fazio pr
aised Jan van Eyck for a portrait ‘which you would judge to lack only a voice’ and for ‘a ray of the sun which you would take to be real sunlight’, while he described Donatello’s achievement as ‘to produce lively expressions (vivos vultus ducere).4 Another humanist, Cristoforo Landino, described Donatello’s statues as having ‘great vivacity’ (grande vivacità), so that the figures all seemed to be in movement.5 Another sought-after quality in painting was three-dimensionality or ‘relief’ (rilievo). The Florentine writer Giambattista Gelli, for example, made fun of Byzantine art as ‘without any relief’, so that the figures looked not like men but like clothes spread out on a wall or ‘flayed skins’.6 The great preacher Girolamo Savonarola seems to have been articulating the assumptions of his audience when he remarked: ‘The closer they imitate nature, the more pleasure they give. And so people who praise any pictures say: look, these animals seem as if they were alive, and these flowers seem natural ones.’7
A similar concern with naturalism is to be found in Vasari’s Lives.8 The horses painted in a stable by Bramantino, for example, were so lifelike that a horse mistook the image for reality and kicked it. The importance here of Vasari’s variation on the well-known Greek stories about illusionistic grapes and curtains is that the illusionism is described as a triumph. Again, what Vasari finds remarkable in the Mona Lisa is that the lady’s mouth ‘appeared to be living flesh rather than paint’, while her eyebrows ‘were completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another and following the pores of the skin’. Similarly, what impresses him in Leonardo’s Last Supper is that ‘The texture of the tablecloth is imitated so skillfully that linen itself cannot look more real (non mostra il vero meglio).’ His praise of these particular paintings for naturalism rather than other qualities may make Vasari seem somewhat naif today, so it may be worth emphasizing that he was articulating a common assumption of the period, which was in fact shared by Leonardo, who once declared that, the closer a painting was to the object it was imitating, the better.
The assumption was not shared by everyone, however. Some writers who now appear to share it in fact did not, the phrase ‘to imitate nature’ being more ambiguous than it may seem. There were two different ideas of nature in the Renaissance: the physical world (natura naturata, as philosophers called it) and the creative force (natura naturans). Naturalism in the modern sense involves the imitation of the first nature, but what some Renaissance writers advocate is the imitation of the second. As Alberti put it in his treatise on painting, nature rarely achieves perfection, and artists should aim at beauty, as nature does, rather than at ‘realism’ (similitudine). Thus Alberti is saying in effect that artists should not paint what they see, but he is using the language of imitation to say so. Michelangelo expressed himself still more strongly. His objection to Flemish painting was that it was done merely ‘to deceive the external eye’. Again, when he was designing the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’Medici, he did not represent these individuals as ‘nature had sculpted and created them’ (come la natura gli avea effigiati e composti) but produced his own idealized versions of their appearance.9
Order v. grace
A second cluster of evaluative terms refers to order or harmony. When Alberti tells the architect to imitate nature the creator, he explains that its aim is ‘a certain rational harmony (concinnitas) of all the parts making up a whole so that nothing can be added or subtracted or changed for the better’.10 Similarly, Ghiberti wrote that ‘only proportion makes beauty’ (la proportionalità solamente fa pulchritudine). To say that they ‘have proportion’ is a favourite term of praise for works of art. Another term in this cluster is ‘order’ (ordine).11 Another is ‘symmetry’, used not only of buildings, as might have been expected, but of paintings as well; Landino declared that symmetry had been revived by the thirteenth-century painter Cimabue. ‘Measure’ (misura) is also common term; yet another is ‘rule’ (regola). Analogies were commonly drawn between the proportions of buildings and those of the human body and between visual and musical harmony. The basic attitude implied by the use of these terms and analogies was that beauty follows rules – rules which are not arbitrary but rational and indeed mathematical. Even gardens were supposed to be orderly: Alberti suggests that ‘The trees ought to be planted in rows exactly even, and answering to one another exactly upon straight lines.’12 The little that is known about Italian gardens in this period suggests that he was expressing the conventional view. Topiary, for example, was revived in fifteenth-century Italy.13 The ‘elegant ordination of vegetables’, as Sir Thomas Browne calls it in his Garden of Cyrus, is a vivid illustration of Renaissance values at a point where they differ strongly from our own.
Yet order was not to everyone’s taste, whether in nature or in art. In the 1480s, in his pastoral romance the Arcadia – which was one of Sidney’s models – the Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazzaro expressed a preference for wild beauty in the opening to his Arcadia (1504):
It is usual for high and spreading trees produced by nature in fearsome mountains to give greater pleasure to those who look at them than plants skilfully clipped and cultivated in elaborate gardens [le coltivate piante, da dotte mani expurgate, negli adorni giardini] … who doubts that a fountain that issues naturally out of the living rock surrounded by green plants is more pleasing to us than all the other fountains, works of art made from the whitest marble and resplendent with much gold?
It is surely this attitude that underlies the rise of landscape painting in our period.
Around the 1520s, there was a more general rejection of symmetry and artistic rules. Michelangelo’s theory and practice are the great examples of this reaction, though its violence should not be exaggerated. Two famous remarks attributed to Michelangelo sum up his attitude: the dismissal of Dürer’s book on proportion, with the remark that ‘one cannot make fixed rules, making figures as regular as posts’, and the declaration that ‘All the reasonings of geometry and arithmetic, and all the proofs of perspective, are of no use to a man without the eye.’14 As for practice, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel was described by Vasari as a reversal of ‘the work regulated by measure, order and rule [misura, ordine e regola] which other men did according to a common use’.
If these values were to be rejected, what was to be put in their place? A favourite sixteenth-century term for the beauty which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules is ‘grace’ (grazia). In his delightful dialogue on The Beauties of Women, the Florentine Agnolo Firenzuola suggested that this grace was not a matter of mere vital statistics but something more mysterious, ‘born from a hidden proportion and from rules which are not in our books’.15 Thus the language of rules is used to argue that rules do not exist. Another mid-sixteenth-century Florentine, Benedetto Varchi, contrasted grace with beauty. Beauty is physical, objective and based on proportions, while grace is spiritual, subjective and impossible to define.16 But how does one represent the spiritual in art? As the term became more popular in the sixteenth century, ‘grace’ is used to mean something like ‘sweetness’, ‘elegance’ or ‘loveliness’ (dolcezza, leggiadria, venustà). It is associated with Raphael and Parmigianino in particular.17 It would be uncharitable to conclude that the ‘mystery’ consisted in making girls with sweet expressions and ten heads high, but there can be little doubt that some artists, associated with the movement we now call ‘Mannerism’, believed that even grace could be reduced to a formula.18
Richness v. simplicity
A third cluster of terms of appraisal centres on the notion of richness in a broad sense which encompasses ‘variety’ (varietà), ‘abundance’ (copiosità), ‘splendour’ (splendore) and ‘grandeur’ (grandezza). Recurrent adjectives, which it would be difficult – and perhaps useless – to distinguish, include illustre, magnifico, pomposo (without the pejorative overtones of the English ‘pompous’), sontuoso and superbo. The humanist Leonardo Bruni, called in, as we have seen, to advise on the third pair of doors for the Baptistery in Florence, considered that they s
hould be what he called illustri – in other words, that they should ‘feed the eye well with variety of design’. Ghiberti, who actually designed the doors, tells us that he aimed at ‘richness’. Again, Alberti objected to what he called ‘solitude’ in a ‘history’ (istoria, in the sense of a painting which tells a story), suggesting that pleasure comes primarily ‘from copiousness and variety of things … I say that history is most copious in which in their places are mixed old, young, maidens, women, youths, boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, landscapes and all similar things.’19
Judgments on buildings in particular make frequent use of this cluster of terms. Filarete, for example, rather overworks the term ‘imposing’ (dignissimo). Vasari tends to describe houses as onoratissimo, sontuosissimo or superbissimo, the superlatives adding to the effect of richness. As for painting, Vasari identifies the ‘grand style’ (maniera grande) as the characteristic of the work he admires most, such as Michelangelo’s.
However, the values associated with simplicity also had their admirers. Alberti, for example, despite his praise of copiousness, was hostile to ornament, a ‘secondary’ kind of beauty as he called it. He attacked ‘confusion’ in architecture, which sounds like a defect related to the qualities of richness and variety. He argued in favour of whitewashed churches on the grounds that ‘purity and simplicity of colour, as of life, must be pleasing to the divine being’.20 He also suggested that a sculptor will prefer pure white marble, and that painters should use white rather than gold. One of his terms of praise for works of art was ‘modesty’ (verecundia).