by Peter Burke
Another material sign of the awareness of the past is the fake antique, which seems to have been a fifteenth-century innovation. The young Michelangelo made a faun, a Cupid and a Bacchus in the classical style. He was essentially competing with antiquity rather than trying to deceive, but by the early sixteenth century the faking of classical sculptures and Roman coins was a flourishing industry in Venice and Padua in particular, so much so that the Italian engraver Enea Vico, in his Discourses on Ancient Medals (1555), told his readers how to distinguish genuine from faked artefacts. This response to two new trends, the fashion for ancient Rome and the rise of the art market, depended – like the detecting of the fakes – on a sense of period style. Texts too might be faked. Some humanists showed their skill by producing texts that they passed off as the work of Cicero and other classical writers, while others demonstrated the same kind of ability by identifying the fakes.55
This new sense of the past is one of the most distinctive but also one of the most paradoxical features of the period. Classical antiquity was studied in order to imitate it more faithfully, but the closer it was studied, the less imitation seemed either possible or desirable. ‘How mistaken are those’, wrote Francesco Guicciardini, ‘who quote the Romans at every step. One would have to have a city with exactly the same conditions as theirs and then act according to their example. That model is as unsuitable for those lacking the right qualities as it would be useless to expect an ass to run like a horse.’56 However, many people did quote the Romans at every step; Guicciardini’s friend Machiavelli was one of them.
Another paradox was that, at a time when Italian culture was strongly marked by the propensity to innovate, innovation was generally considered a bad thing. In political debates in Florence, it was taken for granted that ‘new ways’ (modi nuovi) were undesirable, and that ‘every change takes reputation from the city’.57 In Guicciardini’s History of Italy, the term ‘change’ (mutazione) seems to be used in a pejorative sense, and when a man is described, as is Pope Julius II, as ‘desirous of new things’ (desideroso di cose nuove), the overtones of disapproval are distinctly audible. Innovation in the arts was doubtless less dangerous, but it was rarely admitted to be innovation. It was generally perceived as a return to the past. When Filarete praises Renaissance architecture and condemns the Gothic, it is the latter which he calls ‘modern’ (moderno). It is only at the end of the period that one can find someone (Vasari, for example) cheerfully admitting to being moderno himself (above p. 19).
VIEWS OF MAN
Classical views of the physical constitution of man, and the distinction between four personality types (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy), were taken seriously by writers in this period, which was an important one in the history of medicine.58 These views are not without relevance to the arts. Ficino, for example, joined the suggestion (which comes from a text attributed to Aristotle) that all great men are melancholies to Plato’s concept of inspiration as divine frenzy, and argued that creative people (ingeniosi) were melancholic and even ‘frantic’ (furiosi). He was thinking of poets in particular, but Vasari applied his doctrine to artists and so helped create the modern myth of the bohemian (above, pp. 88–90).59
However, the major theme of this section is inevitably one which contemporaries did not discuss in treatises but was discovered (or, as some critics would say, invented) by Jacob Burckhardt: Renaissance individualism. ‘In the Middle Ages’, wrote Burckhardt, in one of the most frequently quoted passages of his essay, ‘… Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation, only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air … man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.’60 He went on to discuss the passion for fame and its corrective, the new sense of ridicule, all under the general rubric of ‘the development of the individual’. For the use of this ‘blanket term’ he has been severely criticized.61 Burckhardt himself came to be rather sceptical about the interpretation he had launched, and towards the end of his life he confessed to an acquaintance: ‘You know, so far as individualism is concerned, I hardly believe in it anymore, but I don’t say so; it gives people so much pleasure.’62
The objections are difficult to gainsay, since urban Italians of this period were very much conscious of themselves as members of families or corporations.63 And yet we need the idea of individualism, or something like it. The idea of the self, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out more than half a century ago, is not natural. It is a social construct, and it has a social history.64 Indeed, the concept of person that is current (indeed, taken for granted) in a particular culture needs to be understood if we are to comprehend that culture, and, as another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, has suggested, it is a direct path into that culture for an outsider.65
If we ask about the concept of person current – among elites, at least – in Renaissance Italy, we may find it useful to distinguish the self-consciousness with which Burckhardt was particularly concerned from self-assertiveness, and to distinguish both from the idea of the unique individual.66
The idea of the uniqueness of the individual goes with that of a personal style in painting or writing, an idea which has been discussed already (above, p. 28). At the court of Urbino, the poet Bernardo Accolti went by the nickname ‘L’unico Aretino’. The poet Vittoria Colonna described Michelangelo as unico. An anonymous Milanese poem declares that, just as there is only one God in Heaven, so there is only one ‘Moro’ (Ludovico Sforza) on earth. In his biographies, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci often refers to men as ‘singular’ (singolare).
There is rather more to say about self-assertion. Burckhardt argued that the craving for fame was a new phenomenon in the Renaissance. The Dutch historian Huizinga retorted that, on the contrary, it was ‘essentially the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times’.67 The romances of chivalry do indeed suggest that the desire for fame was one of the leading motives of medieval knights, so what Burckhardt noticed may have been no more than the demilitarization of glory. However, it is remarkable quite how often self-assertion words occur in the Italian literature of this period. Among them we find ‘competition’ (concertazione, concorrenza), ‘emulation’ (emulazione), ‘glory’ (gloria), ‘envy’ (invidia), ‘honour’ (onore), ‘shame’ (vergogna), ‘valour’ (valore) and, hardest of all to translate, virtù, a concept of great importance in the period referring to personal worth, which we have already met when discussing its complementary opposite, fortune.68 Psychologists would say that, if words of this kind occur with unusual frequency in a particular text, as they do, for example, in the dialogue on the family by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti, then its author is likely to have had an above-average achievement drive, which in Alberti’s case his career does nothing to refute. That the Florentines in general were unusually concerned with achievement is suggested by the novelle of the period, which often deal with the humiliation of a rival.69 The suggestion is confirmed by the institutionalization of competitions between artists; by the sharp tongues and the envy in the artistic community, as recorded by Vasari, notably in his life of Castagno; and, not least, by the remarkable creative record of that city.
At any rate self-assertion was an important part of the Italian, and especially the Florentine, image of man. The humanists Bruni and Alberti both described life as a race. Bruni wrote that some ‘do not run in the race, or when they start, become tired and give up half way’; Alberti, that life was a regatta in which there were only a few prizes: ‘Thus in the race and competition for honour and glory in the life of man it seems to me very useful to provide oneself with a good ship and to give an opportunity to one’s powers and ability (alle forze e ingegno tuo), and with this to sweat to be the first.’70 For a hostile account of the same kind of struggle, we may turn to the Sienese pope Pius II (who was not exactly backward in the race to the top), and his complaint that ‘In the courts of princes the greatest effort is devoted to
pushing others down and climbing up oneself.’71 Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists to draw in company because ‘a sound envy’ would act as a stimulus to do better.72 Rivalry between artists was not confined to Tuscans such as Leonardo and Michelangelo but involved Raphael and Titian as well, to mention only the most famous names.73
It is not unreasonable to suggest that competition encourages self-consciousness, and interesting to discover that the Tuscan evidence for this kind of individualism is once again richer than anything to be found elsewhere. The classic phrase of the Delphic oracle, ‘know thyself’, quoted by Marsilio Ficino among others, was taken seriously in the period, although it was sometimes given a more worldly interpretation than was originally intended.
The most direct evidence of self-awareness is that of autobiographies or, more exactly (since the modern term ‘autobiography’ encourages an anachronistic view of the genre), of diaries and journals written in the first person, of which there are about a hundred surviving from Florence alone.74 The local name for this kind of literature was ricordanze, which might be translated ‘memoranda’, a suitably vague word for a genre which had something of the account book and something of the city chronicle in it, and was focused on the family, but none the less reveals something about the individual who wrote it – the apothecary Luca Landucci, for example, who has been quoted more than once in these pages, or Machiavelli’s father Bernardo, or the Florentine patrician Giovanni Rucellai, who left a notebook dealing with a variety of subjects, a ‘mixed salad’ as he called it.75 Even if these memoranda were not intended to express self-awareness, they may have helped to create it. Rather more personal in style are the autobiographies of Pope Pius II (written, like Caesar’s, in the third person, but none the less self-assertive for that), Guicciardini (a brief but revealing memoir), the physician Girolamo Cardano (a Lombard, for once, not a Florentine) and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.
Autobiographies are not the only evidence for the self-consciousness of Renaissance Italians. There are also paintings. Portraits were often hung in family groups and commissioned for family reasons, but self-portraits are another matter. Most of them are not pictures in their own right but representations of the artist in the corner of a painting devoted to something else, such as the figure of Benozzo Gozzoli in his fresco of the procession of the Magi, Pinturicchio in the background to his Annunciation (Plate 8.2) or Raphael in his School of Athens. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, we find self-portraits in the strict sense by Parmigianino, for example, and Vasari, and more than one by Titian. They remind us of the importance of the mirrors manufactured in this period, in Venice in particular. Mirrors may well have encouraged self-awareness. As the Florentine writer Giambattista Gelli put it in a Carnival song he wrote for the mirror-makers of Florence, ‘A mirror allows one to see one’s own defects, which are not as easy to see as those of others.’76 Even letters from clients to patrons have been analysed as evidence of the gradual emergence of a new sense of self as ‘an autonomous, discreet and elusive agent’.77
PLATE 8.2 PINTURICCHIO: SELF-PORTRAIT (DETAIL FROM THE ANNUNCIATION)
Evidence of self-awareness is also provided by the conduct books, of which the most famous are Castiglione’s Courtier (1528), Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) and the Civil Conversation of Stefano Guazzo (1574). All three are manuals for the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’, as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it – instructions in the art of playing one’s social role gracefully in public. They inculcate conformity to a code of good manners rather than the expression of a personal style of behaviour, but they are nothing if not self-conscious themselves, and they encourage self-consciousness in the reader. Castiglione recommends a certain ‘negligence’ (sprezzatura), to show that ‘whatever is said or done has been done without pains and virtually without thought’, but he admits that this kind of spontaneity has to be rehearsed. It is the art which conceals art, and he goes on to compare the courtier to a painter. The ‘grace’ (grazia) with which he was so much concerned was, as we have seen, a central concept in the art criticism of his time. It is hard to decide whether to call Castiglione a painter among courtiers or his friend Raphael a courtier among painters, but the connections between their two domains are clear enough. The parallel was clear to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which he has God say to man that, ‘as though the maker or moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.’78
The dignity of man was a favourite topic for writers on the ‘human condition’ (the phrase is theirs: humana conditio). It is tempting to take Pico’s treatise on the dignity of man to symbolize the Renaissance, and to contrast it with Pope Innocent III’s treatise on the misery of man as a symbol of the Middle Ages. However, both the dignity and the misery of man were recognized by writers in both Middle Ages and Renaissance. Many of the arguments for the dignity of man (the beauty of the human body, its upright posture, and so on) are commonplaces of the medieval as well as the classical and Renaissance traditions. The themes of dignity and misery were considered as complementary rather than contradictory.79
All the same, there does appear to have been a change of emphasis revealing an increasing confidence in man in intellectual circles in the period. Lorenzo Valla, with characteristic boldness, called the soul the ‘man-God’ (homo Deus) and wrote of the soul’s ascent to heaven in the language of a Roman triumph. Pietro Pomponazzi declared that those (few) men who had managed to achieve almost complete rationality deserved to be numbered among the gods. Adjectives such as ‘divine’ and ‘heroic’ were increasingly used to describe painters, princes and other mortals. Alberti had called the ancients ‘divine’ and Poliziano had coupled Lorenzo de’Medici with Giovanni Pico as ‘heroes rather than men’, but it is only in the sixteenth century that this heroic language became commonplace. Vasari, for example, described Raphael as a ‘mortal god’ and wrote of the ‘heroes’ of the house of Medici. Matteo Bandello referred to the ‘heroic house of Gonzaga’ and to the ‘glorious heroine’ Isabella d’Este. Aretino, typically, called himself ‘divine’. The famous references to the ‘divine Michelangelo’ were in danger of devaluation by this inflation of the language of praise.80
These ideas of the dignity (indeed divinity) of man had their effect on the arts. Where Pope Innocent III, for example, found the human body disgusting, Renaissance writers admired it, and the humanist Agostino Nifo went so far as to defend the proposition that ‘nothing ought to be called beautiful except man’. By ‘man’ he meant woman, and in particular Jeanne of Aragon. One might have expected paintings of the idealized human body in a society where such views were expressed. The derivation of architectural proportions from the human body (again, idealized) also depended on the assumption of human dignity. Again, at the same time that the term ‘heroic’ was being overworked in literature, we find the so-called grand manner dominant in art. If we wish to explain changes in artistic taste, we need to look at wider changes in worldviews.
Another image of man, common in the literature of the time, is that of a rational, calculating, prudent animal. ‘Reason’ (ragione) and ‘reasonable’ (ragionevole) are terms which recur, usually with overtones of approval. They are terms with a wide variety of meanings, but the idea of rationality is central. The verb ragionare meant ‘to talk’, but then speech was a sign of rationality which showed man’s superiority to animals. One meaning of ragione was ‘accounts’: merchants called their account books libri della ragione. Another meaning was ‘justice’: the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua was not so much a ‘Palace of Reason’ as a court of law. Justice involved calculation, as the classical and Renaissance image of the scales should remind us. Ragione also meant ‘proportion’ or ‘ratio’. A famous early definition of perspective, in the life of Brunelleschi attributed to Manetti, called it the science which sets down the differences of size in objects near and far con ragione, a phrase which can be (and ha
s been) translated as either ‘rationally’ or ‘in proportion’.
The habit of calculation was central to Italian urban life. Numeracy was relatively widespread, taught at special ‘abacus schools’ in Florence and elsewhere. A fascination with precise figures is revealed in some thirteenth-century texts, notably the chronicle of Fra Salimbene of Parma and Bonvesino della Riva’s treatise on ‘The Big Things of Milan’, which lists the city’s fountains, shops and shrines and calculates the number of tons of corn the inhabitants of Milan demolished every day.81 The evidence for this numerate mentality is even richer in the fourteenth century, as the statistics in Giovanni Villani’s chronicle of Florence bear eloquent witness, and richer still in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In Florence and Venice in particular, an interest was taken in statistics of imports and exports, population and prices. Double-entry book-keeping was widespread. The great catasto of 1427, a household-to-household survey of a quarter of a million Tuscans who were then living under Florentine rule, both expressed and encouraged the rise of the numerate mentality.82 Time was seen as something ‘precious’, which must be ‘spent’ carefully and not ‘wasted’; all these terms come from the third book of Alberti’s dialogue on the family. In similar fashion, Giovanni Rucellai advised his family to ‘be thrifty with time, for it is the most precious thing we have’.83 Time could be the object of rational planning. The humanist schoolmaster Vittorino da Feltre drew up a timetable for the students. The sculptor Pomponio Gaurico boasted that since he was a boy he had planned his life so as not to waste it in idleness.