The Italian Renaissance

by Peter Burke

  The cult of St Catherine of Alexandria, who far outshone St Catherine of Siena, is to be explained by her patronage of young girls. Her ‘mystic marriage’ to Christ made her an appropriate subject for paintings given as wedding presents. If one female saint out of eleven seems surprisingly little, the reason may well be that the others were eclipsed by the Virgin Mary in her many forms, such as the Mother of Mercy (with supplicants sheltering under her cloak), the Virgin of the Rosary or the Virgin of Loreto (the Italian town to which the ‘holy house’ from Bethlehem was said to have been miraculously transported).

  Since so much has been written about secular values in Renaissance Italy, the fact that the overwhelming majority of dated paintings are religious deserves emphasis. These images of the Virgin, Christ and the saints, doubtless commissioned for pious reasons, give us a glimpse of the culture of the silent majority. All the same, there is evidence of increasing interest in secular paintings in this period, and particularly in circles involved with the Renaissance as a movement.7 Federico Gonzaga, commissioning a work from Sebastiano del Piombo, wrote in 1524 that he did not want ‘saints stuff’ (cose di sancti), but ‘some pictures that are attractive and beautiful to look at’. He seems to have been part of a trend.

  As we have seen, most secular paintings were portraits. Before the middle of the fifteenth century they were relatively rare; only saints had their images painted. This is what gives its point to the opening lines of a poem by the Venetian patrician Leonardo Giustinian. The speaker tells his beloved that he has made a painting of her on a little sheet of paper as if she were one of the saints: io t’ho dipinta in su una carticella / Come se fussi una santa di Dio. Later on, it became customary to paint famous men, ancient or modern (the moderns including poets, soldiers and lawyers). The next stage, logically if not chronologically (one cannot be certain of the dates), was the painting of rulers in their own lifetime. Then came the portraits of patricians and their wives and daughters, and finally those of merchants and craftsmen, as we have seen (above, p. 99). By the end of the period, Aretino, himself a craftsman’s son who was painted by Titian, was denouncing the democratization of the portrait in his own day, writing: ‘it is the disgrace of our age that it tolerates the painted portraits even of tailors and butchers.’ To distinguish themselves from others, nobles now had to surround themselves with objects symbolizing their status, from velvet curtains and classical columns to servants and hunting dogs.8

  It is, however, with the iconography of narrative pictures that art historians have been most concerned, whether these istorie represent scenes from classical mythology, episodes from history, ancient or modern, or something more difficult to pin down. The scenes from classical mythology include some of the best-known paintings of the Renaissance. They frequently keep close to that favourite classical – and Renaissance – compendium of mythology, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Titian’s famous Bacchus and Ariadne, for example, illustrates book 8, while the painting of the enchantress Circe by Dosso Dossi of Ferrara illustrates book 14. Others follow the descriptions of lost mythological paintings by the classical writer Philostratus of Lemnos. A number of paintings by Piero di Cosimo representing Bacchus, Vulcan and other mythological figures illustrate not only Ovid but also the account of the early history of mankind in the poem On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius.9

  How important the exact subject matter was to contemporary viewers is very difficult to say. Was a St Sebastian or a Venus chosen primarily for its own sake or as a pretext for representing a beautiful naked figure? How can a modern historian possibly answer such a question? It would certainly be a mistake to answer with confidence, but to avoid anachronistic interpretations we can at least investigate the ways in which paintings were described at the time. It is, for example, interesting to know that Titian called his mythological scenes ‘poems’ (poesie), even if we do not know exactly what he meant by the term – whether he was referring to the fact that he drew on Ovid’s poem the Metamorphoses or whether he intended to imply that he was following his own imagination rather than a text.

  Some of the most intriguing literary evidence concerns what we call ‘landscape’ because it suggests an increasing awareness of the backgrounds of paintings, and even a shift towards considering these features the true subject. Giovanni Tornabuoni asked Ghirlandaio in the 1480s, as we have seen, for ‘cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks’ in a commission to paint stories from the life of the Virgin Mary. In the correspondence of Isabella d’Este and her husband Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, there are references to ‘views’ (vedute), and in one case to ‘a night’ (una nocte). The latter may have been a Nativity, but to describe a religious painting in this way would itself be significant. In 1521 an anonymous Venetian observer (often identified with the patrician Marcantonio Michiel) recorded the existence of ‘many little landscapes’ (molte tavolette de paesi) in the collection of cardinal Grimani.10 Again, the humanist bishop Paolo Giovio described some of Dosso Dossi’s paintings, in the 1520s, as ‘oddments’ (parerga), consisting of ‘sharp crags, thick groves, dark shores or rivers, flourishing rural affairs, the busy and happy activities of farmers, the broadest expanses of the land and sea as well, fleets, markets, hunts and all that sort of spectacle’.11 In other words, what we call ‘the rise of landscape’ in this period seems to correspond to changes in the way in which contemporaries looked at pictures.12

  What has been discussed so far is the more or less manifest content of Renaissance paintings. However, it is clear that some of them at least, like literary works, were intended to contain hidden meanings. How often this was the case, what the meanings were and how many contemporaries understood them are questions which require discussion, but they are rather more obscure.

  It is advisable to begin this discussion with literature, where the hidden is sometimes at least made explicit in commentaries. Contemporaries were used to looking for hidden meanings in literature, if only because they were told from the pulpit that the Bible had four different interpretations, not only the literal but also the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical.13 Some humanists looked for hidden meanings in worldly literature as well, even if they did not always distinguish the allegorical, the moral, and so on, as carefully as theologians did. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Coluccio Salutati all interpreted classical myths as a ‘poetic theology’.14 In the fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino wrote that, when poetry ‘most appears to be narrating something most humble and ignoble or to be singing a little fable to delight idle ears, at that very time it is writing in a rather secret way the most excellent things of all, which are drawn forth from the fountain of the gods.’15 Commentaries expounded the hidden meanings (usually religious or philosophical) underlying the apparently secular or even frivolous surface of classical writers such as Virgil and Ovid or modern ones such as Petrarch and Ariosto.

  Ovid is a useful example to discuss at this point, because his Metamorphoses inspired artists as well as poets of the Renaissance. From the twelfth century onwards, it became customary to ‘moralize’ him – in other words, to give the poem an allegorical interpretation. The allegorizations of Ovid by Giovanni da Bonsignore in the fourteenth century were printed in some Renaissance editions of the Metamorphoses, so that the reader could learn, for instance, that Daphne (who, fleeing from Apollo, turned into a laurel tree) stands for prudence while the laurel stands for virginity. The question how commonly these myths were given this kind of interpretation in the period remains problematic.

  Ariosto was treated in a similar way by the all-purpose writer Lodovico Dolce, who produced an edition of Orlando Furioso in 1542 in which the flight of Angelica in the first canto is interpreted in terms of ‘the ingratitude of women’, while Ruggiero’s combat with Bradamante in the forty-fifth canto reveals ‘the qualities of a perfect knight’. These interpretations are described as ‘allegories’, but in modern terms they might be better described as symbols. Whereas Bonsignore treated Ovid’s
characters as personifications of abstract qualities, Dolce simply generalizes about human nature from the actions of Angelica and Ruggiero.

  One is left with the impression of a whole spectrum of hidden meanings, whether intended by authors or read into them by commentators – meanings which seem to have had considerable appeal to readers of the period. (Dolce, for example, would not have written anything if he had not thought it would sell.) This impression is worth bearing in mind when we turn to painting. Paintings of scenes from the Old Testament are likely to have been read by some people at least as the text was read, with an eye on what was to come – in other words, characters from the Old Testament were seen as ‘types’ or ‘figures’ of the New. Eve and Judith were both taken to prefigure the Virgin Mary. (Judith liberated Israel by cutting off the head of the Assyrian captain Holofernes; Mary liberated mankind by giving birth to Christ.)

  New Testament scenes, by contrast, were painted for their own sake, but they may have been given a more subtle theological meaning on occasion, at least as an extra. At all events, it is interesting to find a friar, Pietro da Novellara, writing to Isabella d’Este about a sketch by Leonardo (Plate 7.1), offering the following theological interpretation, at least hypothetically (note the ‘may be’):

  PLATE 7.1 LEONARDO DA VINCI: THE VIRGIN, CHILD AND SAINT ANNE

  PLATE 7.2 GIORGIO VASARI: PORTRAIT OF LORENZO DE’MEDICI

  A cartoon of a child Christ, about a year old, almost jumping out of his mother’s arms to seize hold of a lamb. The mother is in the act of rising from St Anne’s lap, and holds back the child from the lamb, an innocent creature which is a symbol of the Passion [significa la passion], while St Anne, partly rising from her seat, seems anxious to restrain her daughter, which may be a type of the Church [forsi vole figurare la Chiesa], who would not hinder the Passion of Christ.16

  At this point it may finally be more or less safe to turn to the vexed question of the secular paintings of the Renaissance and their possible moral or allegorical meanings. At the end of the period, the evidence is sometimes extremely rich and precise – in the case of Vasari, for example, who explained his intentions in considerable detail. His portrait of the late Lorenzo de’Medici (Plate 7.2), he wrote, would depict in the background a vase, a lamp and other objects, ‘showing that the magnificent Lorenzo, by his remarkable method of government … enlightened his descendants, and this magnificent city’.17

  The programmes devised by sixteenth-century humanists such as Paolo Giovio, Vincenzo Borghini and Annibale Caro (above, pp. 116) are similarly detailed. More of a problem is posed by paintings of the fifteenth century, notably Botticelli’s, which have long been a subject of scholarly debate. His so-called Primavera, for example, illustrates a scene from another poem of Ovid’s, the Fasti, dealing with the nymph Flora and the month of May, but there is a good deal in the painting which the text does not explain. Humanists sometimes interpret the classical gods, as we have seen, as symbols of moral or physical qualities. Marsilio Ficino wrote on one occasion that ‘Mars stands for speed, Saturn for tardiness, Sol for God, Jupiter for the law, Mercury for reason, and Venus for humanity [humanitas].’ As he was writing to the youth who commissioned the Primavera, it has been suggested that ‘humanity’ is what Venus represents in the picture.18 Again, Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur may be given a moral interpretation, with Pallas Athene (or, as the Romans called her, Minerva) standing for wisdom and the tamed centaur for the passions.19 In most cases we can do no more than conjecture what the hidden moral meaning may have been. Contemporaries (apart from the artist, the client and their intimates) will have had a similar problem. The important point is to remember that many contemporaries approached paintings with expectations of meanings of this kind.

  Hidden political meanings also figured on the contemporary ‘horizon of expectations’, though they are even more difficult to decode, since topicality stales so rapidly. Could Botticelli’s Pallas, for example, whose gown is adorned with the Medici device of interlaced diamond rings, stand for Lorenzo the Magnificent and the Centaur for his enemies?20

  To be sure not to project on to paintings and statues meanings which the artists and their clients did not have in mind, it is prudent to start with literature, and with explicit discussions of implicit political meanings. The preface to the 1542 edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, written by the publisher, Gabriel Giolito, suggests that the poem has a political message, contrasting ‘the prudence and justice of an excellent prince’ with ‘the rashness and the negligence of an unwise king’. Did contemporaries really read this poem as if it were putting forward a political theory, as if Ariosto were another Machiavelli? Conversely, Machiavelli on occasion – in the seventeenth chapter of The Prince – quoted Virgil as an authority on politics, using Dido’s apology to Aeneas for her initial suspicions as evidence that a new prince has to be harsher than one who is well established.

  When reading the literature of this period it is always worth entertaining the possibility, as contemporaries seem to have done, that the events narrated, whether real or imaginary, recent or remote, refer to or stand for incidents of the writer’s own day. Take for instance one of the Florentine religious plays of the period, Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Its particular interest in this context is that it was written by a ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent. It is in fact much concerned with the political problems of the emperor Constantine. The rebellion of Dacia and its suppression by order of the emperor Constantine is reminiscent of the rebellion of the city of Volterra against Lorenzo and the suppression of that revolt by Federigo da Montefeltro. In the play, Constantine is made to emphasize the fact that he did everything for the common good. It looks as if Lorenzo was writing propaganda for himself.21

  Paintings and statues may also carry political meanings. The figures represented may be allegories in the sense that the apparent subject stands for someone else. Decoding these allegories is necessarily speculative, and interpretations are bound to be controversial, but the attempt at interpretation is not anachronistic. In this period, as in the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to refer to living individuals as a ‘new’ or ‘second’ Caesar, Augustus, Charlemagne, and so on. For instance, the great preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola called Charles VIII of France the ‘new Cyrus’ after the famous king of Persia, and also the ‘new Charlemagne’.22 The comparisons are a kind of secular parallel to the Old Testament prefigurations of the New, discussed earlier in this chapter. It is therefore not implausible to suggest, for example, that certain statues of David stand for Florence, or that Piero della Francesca’s paintings of the emperor Constantine refer to the Byzantine emperor John VII Palaeologus, who had visited Italy to enlist help in the defence of his capital, Constantinople (a city which had been founded by Constantine), against the Turks.23

  A particularly elaborate political allegory can be seen in Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican for Julius II and Leo X.24 The Expulsion of Heliodorus has already been discussed. Another fresco deals with the Repulse of Attila. Italians of the period, including Julius himself, often called the foreigners who invaded Italy after 1494 the ‘barbarians’; this fresco elaborates the parallel between the two waves of barbarian invaders. Raphael went on to paint frescoes of Pope Leo III crowning Charlemagne as emperor in St Peter’s and Leo IV thanking God for a Christian victory over the Saracens. To reinforce the parallel with his own day, Raphael has given the two popes the features of their namesake Leo X.25 It would be a mistake to reduce these frescoes to a commentary on current events; even the political point they were making, as with Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah (above, p. 138), was essentially a more general one – a pictorial legitimation of papal authority. All the same, the topical references and, still more important, the habit of using topical references and historical parallels to legitimate political claims are worth bearing in mind. The relation between art and power, between systems of meaning and systems of domination, is at its most transparent in instances such as these.
<
br />   If the political messages and the historical parallel inscribed in these frescoes do not strike us with enough force today, one reason is that most of us are not sufficiently familiar with early medieval papal history, with Maccabees, or even with Numbers. Were contemporaries much better off? Who in this period was able to decode the iconography and read the message of the works we have been considering?

  We know all too little about contemporary readings and responses, but the range of variation between them is clear enough. Raphael could afford to be allusive; the Vatican was not open to the public, and his paintings were for the eyes of members of the papal court. It is no coincidence that some of the paintings which have given art historians most trouble since they began to try to unravel their meanings, from Botticelli’s Primavera to Giorgione’s Tempestà, were made to hang in private houses and to be enjoyed by the patrons and their friends.26 Posterity looks at them through the keyhole. Even well-informed contemporaries might fail to read them. Vasari complained in his life of Giorgione that he could not understand some of his pictures – ‘nor have I, by asking around as I have done, ever found anyone who does’.

  Most secular paintings were probably intelligible to a larger minority. Scenes from Greek and Roman history would not have been difficult to identify for anyone who had been to a grammar school. Ovid was also studied at grammar schools, and would have provided a key to most scenes from classical mythology. It is likely that the number of people able to understand these paintings rose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as humanist education spread. As for religious paintings, despite the difficulty of interpreting them today now that the legends of the saints are no longer part of the common culture, it is likely that they were generally easy to decode for anyone who heard sermons regularly or watched performances of religious plays – in other words, the majority of the urban population.