by Peter Burke
Alberti’s defence of simplicity suited the work of his friends Brunelleschi and Masaccio very well. Brunelleschi banished frescoes from his interiors, such as the church of San Lorenzo or the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce (Plate 6.1). Masaccio’s paintings were praised by Landino because they were ‘pure without ornament’ (puro senza ornato).21
Expressiveness
For the humanist Bartolommeo Fazio, expressiveness was one of the most important gifts of a painter. Pisanello, he wrote, excelled ‘in expressing feeling’ (sensibus exprimendis). A St Jerome of his, for example, was remarkable for the saint’s ‘majesty of countenance’. Roger van der Weyden’s Deposition, Fazio continued, was noteworthy for its depiction of the grief of the bystanders and his Passion for its ‘variety of feelings and emotions’.22 Again, Alberti advised the painter to ‘move the soul of the spectator’, explaining that ‘These movements of the soul are made known by the movements of the body’ – motion is a sign of emotion – and implying that to represent an emotion was to induce it in the beholder, who would ‘weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving’.23 Leonardo emphasized the need for the painter to represent emotions such as anger, fear and grief, and his own comments in his notebooks on the subject of his Last Supper describe not the tablecloth that seems to have impressed Vasari so much, but gestures and emotions, such as the apostle who makes ‘a mouth of astonishment’.24 To be fair, Vasari also noticed the expressive qualities of the painting, and commented that ‘Leonardo succeeded brilliantly in imagining and reproducing the tormented anxiety of the apostles to know who betrayed their master; so in their faces one can read the emotions of love, dismay and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ.’ He had similar praise for Michelangelo, whose figures ‘reveal thoughts and emotions which only he has known how to express’.
Skill
The last of our clusters of terms centres on the notion of skill, and may be illustrated from Fazio’s praise of van Eyck for that quality (artificium). Alberti praises artists for the ‘effort’ (istudio, industria) underlying their selection of elements from the visible world to create a work of beauty. A work may also be praised for its overcoming of difficulties. Vasari, for example, praised Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin because ‘it is marvellous to see the difficulties which he went out of his way to look for’ in representing the temple in perspective (Plate 6.2). ‘Of all the terms of praise used by authors of the Late Renaissance’, it has been suggested, ‘perhaps none is more frequent or more important than difficultà.’25 The successful overcoming of difficulties is sometimes called ‘facility’. The problem was that artists with facility might not seem to have this quality because the spectator might not realize that there was a problem to overcome. Hence the advice to young painters to ‘introduce at least one figure who is completely affected, mysterious and difficult [sforciata, misteriosa e difficile], that will show those who understand art how skilled you are’.26 That the advice was taken seriously is suggested by the fact that the fashionable term peregrino could mean both ‘strange’ and ‘elegant’.27 Again, ‘bizarre’ does not seem to have been a pejorative term at this time. At any rate, Vasari could use it about his own work.28
PLATE 6.1 INTERIOR OF THE PAZZI CHAPEL IN FLORENCE
The increasingly frequent references to ‘facility’ and ‘difficulty’ suggest that the public – and perhaps the artists as well – were becoming more conscious of style and more interested in it. Pejorative terms tell a similar story. Artists such as Vasari and laymen such as Gelli, who has already been quoted, make considerable use of such terms as ‘gross’, ‘rough’ or ‘clumsy’ (grosso, rozzo, goffo) when describing medieval art. A final example is the increasing use of the term ‘style’ itself (maniera).29 With the growing interest in individual style went a sharper awareness of what our post-romantic age calls creativity, inspiration or genius and contemporaries described in slightly different terms as inventiveness (invenzione), imagination (fantasia) or intelligence (ingegno).30
PLATE 6.2 RAPHAEL: MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN
In short, an analysis of the vocabulary used to appraise painting, sculpture and architecture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suggests – as does an inspection of the objects themselves – a change in taste from the natural to the fantastic and from the simple and modest to the complex, difficult and splendid.
MUSIC
It was a Renaissance commonplace that there were parallels between music and other arts, architecture in particular. Audible and visible proportions were thought to be analogous. This was the point of Alberti’s warning phrase to his assistant Matteo de’Pasti (above, p. 71) that, if he changes the proportions of the pilasters, ‘all that music turns into discord’ (si discorda tutta quella musica). In his report of 1535, the Franciscan scholar Francesco Zorzi (or Giorgi) described the proportions of the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice (Plate 6.3) in musical terms such as ‘diapason’ and ‘diapente’.31
These analogies were treated as more than metaphors. They had practical consequences, at least on occasion. For example, Franchino Gaffurio, musical director at the cathedral of Milan, was called in as an architectural consultant. Analogies between music and the other arts were less precise, but they were not infrequently drawn, as in the case, already quoted, of the comparison between Michelangelo and Josquin des Près.
The musical taste of the period is harder to reconstruct than its visual or literary taste. There is no musical equivalent of Vasari’s Lives, and in any case, then as now, it was more difficult for people to explain why they liked a particular musical composition than why they liked a particular poem or painting. Hence the following paragraphs rely heavily on three treatises of the period, written by Johannes de Tinctoris, Pietro Aron and Nicolò Vicentino.
The most overworked term of praise was ‘sweet’ (soave, dolce), but this tells us little more about taste in music than a term such as ‘beauty’ does in the case of the visual arts. More helpful is a cluster of terms centred on ‘harmony’ and having much in common with the visual cluster centred on ‘order’. Again, the basic idea is that success depends on following rules. Tinctoris, for example, frequently criticizes the composers of his day for what he calls their ‘inexcusable errors’. He wrote a treatise on proportion in music. Pietro Aron uses similar terms of praise, such as ordinato.
An acute problem for the writers on music of this period was that of the discord. The problem springs from a fundamental difference between music and the visual arts, a difference disguised by their use of a common vocabulary of order and harmony. The discords which occur in the music of the time can be compared either to decoration or to asymmetry in the visual arts. In the first case they are desirable, but in the second case they are to be shunned. Tinctoris found it difficult to make up his mind on this point. In one passage he compared musical discords to figures of speech, while in another he defined the discord as ‘a mixture of two voices which naturally offends the ear’. His conclusion is a compromise – that discords may be permitted, provided that they are little ones (discordantiae parvae). Aron, nearly fifty years later, was prepared to go further towards accepting discords. For Tinctoris, a piece of music must both begin and conclude with a perfect concord; for Aron, it is only necessary for it to end that way.
Another group of terms centres on the idea of expressiveness. In this case the analogy with the visual arts will be obvious, but there seems to have been a time lag; it was only in 1500 or even later that the expressive became important, in theory and practice alike. Thus one of the characters in Castiglione’s Courtier contrasts the effects on the listeners of two styles of singing practised by Bidon of Asti in Rome and Marchetto Cara in Mantua:
Bidon’s style of singing is so skilful, quick, vehement, rousing and varied in its melodies [tanto artificiosa, pronta, veemente, concitata e di così varie melodie] that everyone who hears it is moved and set on fire … our Marchetto Cara is no less
emotional in his singing, but with a softer harmony; he makes the soul tender and penetrates it calmly and in a manner full of mournful sweetness [flebile dolcezza].32
Some music of the period was clearly composed to communicate emotion, for example to reinforce the feelings expressed in a text. Josquin’s mournful setting of Dido’s lament from Virgil’s Aeneid is a famous example. The madrigals of the 1520s and 1540s by Costanzo Festa, Adriaan Willaert, Jacques Arcadelt and others furnish many more instances. For the theory behind these expressive songs, however, we have to wait until the 1550s. As Nicolò Vicentino (a pupil of Willaert’s) put it, ‘If the words speak of modesty, in the composition one will proceed modestly, and not wildly; if they speak of gaiety, one will not write sad music, and if of sadness, one will not write gay music; when they are bitter, one will not make them sweet …’ He is echoed by Gioseffe Zarlino:
PLATE 6.3 THE INTERIOR OF SAN FRANCESCO DELLA VIGNA, VENICE
Musicians are not supposed to combine harmony and text in an unsuitable manner. Therefore it would not be fitting to use a sad harmony and a slow rhythm with a gay text, or a gay harmony and quick and light-footed rhythms to a tragic matter full of tears … the composer should set each word to music in such a way that where it denotes harshness, hardness, cruelty, bitterness and other similar things the music will be similar to it, that is, somewhat hard and harsh, though without offending.33
There are further parallels between music and the sister arts. Tinctoris suggested, for example, that ‘variety should be most diligently searched for in all counterpoint.’ Music was even expected to imitate nature, notably hunting scenes and battles, such as Heinrich Isaac’s A la battaglia.
LITERATURE
‘A picture is nothing but a silent poem’, wrote Bartolommeo Fazio. If the idea was not already a commonplace in the early fifteenth century, when he was writing, it rapidly became one. The analogy, usually supported by a phrase from Horace – ‘as is painting, so is poetry’ (ut pictura poesis) – was one of which contemporaries never seemed to tire.34 It also informed their practical criticism. When the humanist Poliziano described the medieval poet Cino da Pistoia as the first who ‘began to abandon the old uncouthness’ (l’antico rozzore), he was in effect describing Cino as a kind of Cimabue or Giotto. Five central concepts in the literary criticism of the period have their parallels in the visual arts in particular: decorum, grandeur, grace, variety and simulitude.35
Decorum (decoro, convenevolezza) seems to have played a greater part in literary criticism than in art criticism. In the visual arts, it simply meant avoiding such obvious solecisms as placing an old head on an apparently youthful body or, more controversially, giving Christ on the cross the features of a peasant. In literature, however, decorum was invoked when discussing the central problem of the relationship between form (forma) and content (materia).
Following the classical tradition, the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo, in his authoritative formulation of what was, or was becoming, the conventional wisdom, distinguished three styles (maniere e stili) – high, medium and low: ‘If the subject is a grand one, the words should be grave, stately, sonorous, spectacular, brilliant (gravi, alte, sonanti, apparenti, luminose); if the subject is a low and vulgar one, they should be light, plain, humble, ordinary, calm (lievi, plane, dimesse, popolare, chete); if a middle one, the words should be in between.’ Bembo went on to argue that Dante had broken this rule in his Divine Comedy because he had picked a lofty subject, yet introduced ‘the lowest and vilest things’.36
As this example suggests, what most pleased the critics, if not the reading public, was a grand subject treated in the grand style. A whole cluster of terms centres on this idea of grandeur: ‘dignity’, for example, ‘gravity’, ‘height’, ‘majesty’, ‘magnificence’ (dignità, gravità, altezza, maestà, magnificenza). The contexts in which it was used suggest that the term ‘sublime’ (sublime) had a similar meaning, without the association with terror which it acquired, or regained, in the eighteenth century. To write in the grand style involved the exclusion of many topics – most obviously, ordinary people – and many words, such as ‘owl’ and ‘bat’. Indeed, some critics even recommended the replacement of the terms ‘sea’ and ‘sun’ by such circumlocutions as ‘Neptune’ or ‘the planet which marks the passage of time’. These phrases, which now seem unnatural and cumbrous, appear to have struck many readers of the time as elegant and stylish.37
A central concept in literary criticism, corresponding more or less to ‘richness’ in the visual arts, was that of variety, whether it referred to content or form. Bembo gave Boccaccio a good mark for his skilful use of variation in the prologues to the hundred different tales in his Decameron. Ariosto was much praised for the variety of themes in his Orlando Furioso. Even the Bible was praised, by Savonarola, on these grounds, for its ‘diversity of stories, multiplicity of meanings, variety of figures’.
Another cluster of terms centred on the idea of giving pleasure (piacev-olezza), distinguished into ‘elegance’ (leggiadria), ‘loveliness’ (vaghezza), ‘sweetness’ and, of course, ‘grace’. Perhaps the most important remark to make about these terms is that they often referred to what we might call the ‘second-class’ beauties of the middle style, lyric rather than epic, or even to the low style, to Boccaccio’s Decameron, for example. The fact that the same adjectives were used of many paintings makes one wonder whether the same second-class implications were intended.
As in paintings, so in discussions of literature, the critics spoke much of ‘imitation’. Not so much the imitation of nature, as in art criticism and indeed in the literary criticism of later periods, but rather the imitation of other writers – how to vary or transform what was borrowed, and how far to go without being a mere ‘ape’ of Virgil, Horace or Cicero. This topic, central to the whole Renaissance enterprise of the revival of antiquity, was also a controversial one, involving, among others, Poliziano and Bembo. Bembo, writing to Gianfrancesco Pico, favoured the imitation of a particular author such as Cicero, not in the sense of copying details but in that of absorbing the essence, of taking that author’s style as a model to emulate. Poliziano, on the other hand, condemned what he called ‘apes’, ‘parrots’ and ‘magpies’ and declared his belief that he expressed himself, not Cicero (me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo). His letter to a fellow humanist, Paolo Cortese, now looks rather like a manifesto for Renaissance ‘individualism’, as Burckhardt saw it, but it should be added that Poliziano was not rejecting all literary imitation, merely the ‘concern with reproducing Cicero alone’ (anxiam … effingendi tantummodo Ciceronem).38
VARIETIES OF TASTE
So far the emphasis has fallen on general assumptions held in the period, on a common language of taste. It might be summed up, crudely, in the formula beauty = nature = reason = antiquity. These different values were not consistent with one another in the way that the formula implies, but they were very often treated as consistent by contemporaries. This is not to say that there were no aesthetic disagreements in the period; we have already noted, for example, not only the controversy over imitation but the different valuations of simplicity. What is being asserted is simply that disagreements took place within a common framework of assumptions that was all the more powerful for being unconscious. This common framework, which we might call a ‘mentality’, made it difficult for individuals to think beyond certain limits, which might be called ‘invisible barriers’. Ideas beyond those barriers appeared self-evidently absurd to most contemporaries.39
However, it is now time to say something more about the varieties of taste. There were differences in taste between individuals. There were differences between the arts. There were also changes in taste during the period, as we have seen, with an increasing concern with richness and a growing unease about rules. This section will concentrate on three major contrasts: those dividing the inhabitants of different regions, the members of different social groups and, finally, the participants in from the opponents of the mov
ement we call the Renaissance.
Firstly, differences between regions. We have already seen that different parts of Italy made extremely unequal contributions to different arts. It is also obvious that different regions had their own styles in painting and building, which presumably correspond to differences in taste. In most cases, literary evidence about these regional variations is lacking, but there is one famous exception. The contrast between Florentine and Venetian traditions of taste became the subject of a debate, with the Venetians stressing colour while the Florentines stressed draughtsmanship (disegno). On the Florentine side, Vasari, however great his interest in Titian, was never prepared to admit that he was the equal of Michelangelo, while, on the other, Paolo Pino, who dramatizes the debate in his Dialogue on Painting, and Lodovico Dolce, in his Aretino, insist on Titian’s supreme greatness.40 Again, as we have seen (above, p. 31) the Florentine taste for simplicity in architecture, for instance, was very different from the Lombard taste for rich decoration.
Secondly, differences between social groups. Was Frederick Antal, for example (above, p. 39), correct in contrasting aristocratic and bourgeois taste in early fifteenth-century Florence? Or, if he was mistaken in this instance, can a similar contrast be sustained for Renaissance Italy as a whole?