The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  In this period as in others the language of taste was closely related to the language used to appraise social behaviour. Decorum was a social ideal as well as an aesthetic one. ‘Grace’ was a term applied to deportment before it was employed to describe works of art, and even maniera was originally associated with good manners rather than with artistic style.41 The use of these terms underlines the fact that what we tend to call the taste of ‘the time’ was the creation of particular social groups, and that it sometimes expressed their social prejudices. It was, for example, considered a breach of decorum to use technical terms when writing in the high style because an author should not show too much knowledge of the techniques of people of low status such as craftsmen. It was a breach of decorum to use new words because ‘new men’ were not acceptable socially. The poet Vida makes the analogy explicit: ‘But yet admit no words into the song / Unless they prove the stock from whence they sprung.’ Bembo’s discussions of literary vocabulary suggest that he was preoccupied with the question of what was known in Britain in the 1960s as ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. His preoccupation was brilliantly parodied by Aretino (a writer who did not come from the upper classes) in his story of the courtesan who declared that a window should be called balcone, never finestra; a door, porta rather than uscio; and a face, viso not faccia.42

  According to contemporary theorists, different styles of building or music were appropriate for different social groups. Filarete, for example, declared that he could design houses for ‘each class of persons’ (ciascheduno facultà di persone) which differed not only in size but in style. Nicolò Vicentino distinguished two kinds of ancient music, one public, for ‘ordinary ears’ (vulgari orecchie), the other private, for ears which were ‘cultivated’ (purgate).43 In literature, the hierarchy of styles – high, middle and low – was associated with different social groups. Aristotle had said in his Poetics that tragedy dealt with good men, comedy with ordinary ones, but in the Renaissance he was believed to be referring to noblemen and commoners. Literature in the high style was literature for and about the elite.

  It is difficult enough to assess the effect of social background on artistic and literary taste even in our own day, let alone the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It would be unwise to make any very general or unqualified assertions. We certainly have to take account of the fact that humanists and nobles participated in what we call ‘popular’ culture.44 Poliziano declared his enjoyment of folksongs, Lorenzo de’Medici wrote songs for Carnival, while the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano stood in the piazza to listen to a singer of tales (cantastorie).45 Ariosto also took pleasure in the romances of chivalry sung by the cantastorie, and his Orlando Furioso draws on this popular tradition. Conversely, the Orlando Furioso made its way into Italian popular culture via chapbook versions of particular cantos.46

  All this has to be borne in mind, but it does not imply that literary tastes did not vary according to the social group of readers or listeners. Ariosto did not simply imitate the cantastorie; he adapted traditional romances to his own milieu, the court of Ferrara. He writes, for example, with an irony not to be found in the texts of his predecessors. He was aware of the classical epic, though he refused to take Bembo’s advice and write in the Virgilian manner. Again, the chapbooks did not simply reproduce cantos of Ariosto; they made changes, most obviously in the direction of greater simplicity. It is reasonable to assume that all these singers, writers and publishers knew what their different audiences wanted. There is evidence from the inventories of libraries (such as those of the brothers da Maiano, already discussed) that Boccaccio’s Decameron, with its ‘low’ style, was popular among merchants and their wives, especially in Tuscany, while Dante, despite Bembo’s criticisms, was also widely read in this milieu. Petrarch’s love lyrics, on the other hand, were read all over Italy, but by young men and young ladies of noble family.47

  The last division of opinion to discuss here is the most central to this study, because it concerns the Renaissance itself. It is obvious enough that the Renaissance was a minority movement because the majority of the Italian population of the period comprised peasants who would have had little opportunity to learn about these cultural innovations, even had they wished to do so. However, the minority with the leisure and the skills necessary for involvement in the movement was not all of one mind about it. To revive a useful term from the Oxford of the sixteenth century, there were ‘Trojans’ as well as ‘Greeks’ in Renaissance Italy. More exactly, there was distaste for, or, rather, strong disapproval of, aspects of the innovations of the period on two grounds in particular.

  The more common argument put forward in this period against much art and literature was that they were temptations to immorality. San Bernardino of Siena was one of those who denounced the Decameron, long before it was ordered to be expurgated. Pope Eugenius IV condemned Panormita’s poem The Hermaphrodite, which was burned in public in Bologna, Ferrara and Milan in 1431. Savonarola denounced painters who ‘show the Virgin Mary dressed as a whore’. According to Vasari, the painter Baccio della Porta, better known as Fra Bartolommeo, was persuaded by Savonarola’s sermons that ‘it was not good to keep paintings of male and female nudes in the house, where there were children’, and put them on the bonfire during the famous ‘burning of vanities’ in Florence in 1497.48 The fig-leaves painted onto the figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement have been mentioned already. The Trojans must not be forgotten; but the number of surviving Renaissance nudes suggests that – till about 1550 at least – they were fighting a losing battle. The history of reactions to literature is a similar one. The year 1559 marked a turning point, with Pope Paul IV’s condemnation, on moral grounds, of a number of famous books, such as the jests of Poggio Bracciolini, the stories of Masuccio Salernitano, the poems of Luigi Pulci and Francesco Berni, and the complete works of Aretino.

  The second objection to the arts was that they were idolatrous because they so often dealt with the pagan gods. When Pope Adrian VI, a Netherlander of severe tastes, was shown the famous classical statue of Laocoön, installed in the Vatican by one of his predecessors, he is said to have remarked drily, ‘Those are the idols of the ancients.’ However, the number of paintings and poems from this period concerned with pagan mythology do not authorize the conclusion (drawn by some northerners, Erasmus no less than Adrian VI) that Italians were pagan. The myths were widely believed to have an allegorical meaning (a famous defence of mythology on these grounds was the humanist Coluccio Salutati’s treatise The Labours of Hercules). What kind of meaning, and what kind of people believed it, are topics for discussion in the next chapter.

  1 On ‘the period eye’, Baxandall, Painting and Experience, ch. 2.

  2 Land, Viewer as Poet.

  3 Chambers, Patrons and Artists, no. 95. Cf. Baxandall, Painting and Experience, pp. 26, 109ff.

  4 Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on painting’.

  5 Morisani, ‘Cristoforo Landino’.

  6 Gelli, ‘Vite d’artisti’, p. 37.

  7 Savonarola, Prediche e scritti, pp. 2, 47.

  8 Blunt, Artistic Theory, ch. 8.

  9 Clements, Michelangelo; Summers, Michelangelo, ch. 20.

  10 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, bk 6, ch. 2.

  11 Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 197ff.

  12 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, bk 9, ch. 4.

  13 Coffin, Italian Garden; Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance Garden.

  14 Clements, Michelangelo, no. 21; Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 352ff., 380 (with a warning not to assume that Michelangelo ‘had no patience with theories of proportion at all’).

  15 Firenzuola, Prose, pp. 108ff.

  16 Varchi, Due lezioni.

  17 On Giovio’s association of Raphael with venustas, Zimmermann, ‘Paolo Giovio’, p. 416.

  18 Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera; Shearman, Mannerism.

  19 Alberti, On Painting, p. 75.

  20 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, bk 7, ch. 10; On Painting, pp. 84–5. Cf. Gombrich, Meditations
, pp. 16ff.

  21 Morisani, ‘Cristoforo Landino’, pp. 267ff.

  22 Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on painting’.

  23 Alberti, On Painting, p. 77.

  24 Leonardo da Vinci, Literary Works, pp. 341ff.

  25 Summers, Michelangelo, p. 177; cf. ch. 11.

  26 Pino, Dialoghi di pittura, p. 45.

  27 Weise, ‘Maniera und Pellegrino’.

  28 Vasari, Literarische Nachlass, pp. 17ff.

  29 Weise, ‘Maniera und Pellegrino’; Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera.

  30 Kemp, ‘From “mimesis” to “fantasia”’.

  31 Wittkower, Architectural Principles, pp. 90ff., 117ff.; cf. Foscari and Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti.

  32 Castiglione, Cortegiano, bk 1, ch. 37.

  33 Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche, bk 4, ch. 32: the translation is Lowinsky’s.

  34 Lee, ‘Ut pictura poesis’.

  35 Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, offers a guide to this subject.

  36 Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua. Cf. Auerbach, Literary Language.

  37 Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua; Vida, De arte poetica; Daniello, Poetica.

  38 Among the best discussions of this topic are Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence, pp. 91ff., and Greene, Light in Troy, ch. 8 (the letter to Cortese, p. 319). For Bembo’s exchange with Gianfrancesco Pico, Santangelo, Epistole ‘De imitatione’, esp. pp. 45ff.

  39 Burke, ‘Strengths and weaknesses’.

  40 For the nuances in Vasari’s attitude to Venice in general and Titian in particular, see Dolce, Aretino, pp. 45ff., and Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, pp. 20–1. On disegno in Michelangelo, see Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 250ff.

  41 Blunt, Artistic Theory, pp. 92ff.; Weise, ‘Maniera und Pellegrino’; Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators.

  42 Aretino, Sei giornate, p. 82.

  43 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, bks 11–12; Vicentino, quoted in Einstein, Italian Madrigal, vol. 1, p. 228.

  44 Burke, Popular Culture, pp. 8, 51–4.

  45 Cocchiara, Origini della poesia popolare, pp. 29ff.

  46 Guerri, Corrente popolare; Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico; Burke, ‘Learned culture and popular culture’ and ‘Oral culture and print culture’.

  47 Graf, Attraversa il ’500; Bec, Marchands écrivains.

  48 Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola.

  7

  ICONOGRAPHY

  Invenzione means devising poems and histories by oneself, a virtue practised by few modern painters, and it is something I regard as extremely ingenious and praiseworthy.

  Pino, Dialoghi di pittura, p. 44

  Iconography is the study of the meaning of images, of the content of what some Renaissance Italians called ‘inventions’ or ‘stories’ (invenzioni, istorie). The iconographical – or iconological – method involves the attempt to ‘read’ images as if they were texts (often by juxtaposing them to texts) and to distinguish different levels of meaning. Developed in the early twentieth century by Emile Mâle, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and others in reaction against a purely formal approach to the history of art, iconography has in turn provoked criticism, or iconoclasm, on the grounds that it privileges what has been called the ‘discursive’ aspect of the image – in other words, those features which show the influence of language – at the expense of the ‘figurative’ aspects – which do not. Even if its importance is a matter for debate, this approach to the art of the Renaissance remains a necessary one.1

  For a social history of art, the question of the relative popularity of different images is an important one, but it is less easy to answer than it may look. There is not, for instance, any complete catalogue of the Italian paintings of the Renaissance, so it is necessary to study a sample instead. What does exist is a catalogue of dated paintings, with 2,229 examples from Italy for the 120 years 1420–1539. In 2,033 cases, the subject is described. Of these 1,796 (about 87 per cent) may be described as religious and 237 (about 13 per cent) as secular. Of the secular works, about 67 per cent are portraits. Of the religious paintings, about half represent the Virgin Mary and about a quarter show Christ, while nearly 23 per cent are concerned with the saints (leaving a few paintings of God the Father, the Trinity, or scenes from the Old Testament).2 The importance of images of the Virgin is confirmed by a list of recorded visions of her in Italy in the two centuries between 1336 and 1536: thirty-one in total.3

  Is this sample a reliable one? There are two problems here. Surviving pictures and dated pictures may not be representative of the whole group. Since works commissioned by the Church, which never dies, have a better chance of preservation than those commissioned for individual collections, it may well be that the figure of 13 per cent for secular paintings is something of an underestimate. It should be taken as a minimum. Dated pictures may also be a biased sample, more especially because the number of dated paintings increased steadily from a mere thirty-one in the 1420s to 441 in the decade 1510–19. Here, as elsewhere, there is a danger of making generalizations about the Renaissance as a whole on the basis of evidence from the later part of the period. If one is conscious of the danger, however, the statistics have their uses. It remains to try to draw out their significance.

  It may surprise a modern reader to learn that, in a Christian culture, pictures of Christ were only half as frequent as those of his mother and scarcely more frequent than images of the saints. It should be added that he had been much less important in the thirteenth century – in France at least – and also that he was represented more frequently in the second half of the period than in the first. From this point of view at least the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant, was more of a culmination of late medieval trends than a reaction against them.4 Pictures of Christ generally represent his birth or his passion, death and resurrection, but rarely anything in between. The obvious explanation for this pattern is a liturgical one: Christmas and Easter were and are the major events of the ecclesiastical year. Again, the Adoration of the Kings is a scene separate from the Nativity because it has its own feast, that of the Epiphany.

  A bewildering variety of saints occurs in Italian paintings of this period. What modern art historians (or, for that matter, what Renaissance clerics) could confidently identify the attributes of (say) saints Eusuperio, Euplo, Quirico or Secondiano? Yet each of these saints had a church dedicated to him in Pavia. Which saints were the most popular? Exactly a hundred saints occur in our sample. St John the Baptist (who occurs 51 times) tops the list. Then comes St Sebastian (34); St Francis (30); St Catherine of Alexandria (22); St Jerome (22); St Anthony of Padua (21); St Roche (19); St Peter (18); and St Bernardino of Siena (17). St Bernard and St Michael (with 15 paintings each) tie for tenth place.

  The exact numbers should not be taken too seriously, but the relative position of the saints tells us something important about Italian culture. It may be worth juxtaposing this list of preferences with those revealed by the choice of children’s names. In the group of six hundred selected for special attention in this study, the most popular Christian names were Giovanni, Antonio, Francesco, Andrea, Bartolommeo, Bernardo and Girolamo. To account for the pattern it would be necessary to write a monograph, or a whole shelf of monographs; here it is possible only to hazard a few hypotheses. The low position of St Peter, compared to his place in the formal Church hierarchy, deserves comment. One explanation might be the relative unimportance of Rome, and the weakness of the papacy, until the later fifteenth century. All the same, the split revealed here between official and unofficial religion is a remarkable one.

  At the top, the position of St John the Baptist is only to be expected, given the two facts of his importance in the official hierarchy – as the precursor of Christ and as the patron of the city of Florence – and in particular of the great Calimala guild. St Sebastian, in the second place, and St Roche (San Rocco), in the seventh, owe their positions to their role as protectors against the plague. Rocco was a fourteenth-century Frenchman who went
to Italy and ministered to plague victims. He was particularly popular in the Veneto, especially after the translation of his relics to Venice in 1485. Yet he was never formally canonized. In the late sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V intended either to canonize him or to delete him, but died before the ambiguity was resolved. His cult was essentially unofficial.5 As for Sebastian, it seems to be the story of his martyrdom at the hands of archers which explains the belief in his protection against the ‘arrows’ of plague, as represented by Benozzo Gozzoli, for example, in a fresco in a church at San Gimignano, commemorating the plague of 1464.

  The popularity of St Francis poses no problems: he was an Italian saint and he had the support of the religious order he had founded. His cult was strongest in his native Umbria and in Tuscany, but many important towns in other parts of Italy had churches dedicated to him. St Anthony of Padua might be regarded as a St Francis for the Veneto; he too was a Franciscan, who came from Portugal but preached in Padua, where he died in 1231. St Bernardino was another preacher and another Franciscan. (It is worth noting that the rival order of friars, the Dominicans, produced no saint to rival the popularity of these three Franciscans.) St Jerome, like St Anthony, was particularly popular in the Veneto, in which he was born (near Aquileia). He was represented in two different ways, which suggests that he had two different ‘images’ and appealed to two kinds of people. Either he was a penitent in the desert, knocking his breast with a stone, the patron of hermits, or he was a scholar sitting in his study, making his translation of the Bible, an appropriate patron for humanists.6