by Peter Burke
In Flanders, as in Italy, artists were often the sons of craftsmen. Out of seventeen leading painters whose father’s occupation is known, fourteen were the sons of craftsmen: a cutler, a weaver, a smith, an artist, and so on. Painting was a family business and there were well-known dynasties of artists, such as the Bouts, Brueghel, Floris and Massys families. However, female artists are more visible, ‘and must have made up a significant part of the workforce in many towns’.8 The painters tended to be born in sizeable towns and to gravitate towards Bruges and Antwerp, the greatest commercial cities of the Netherlands. Bruges lost its economic dominance around the year 1500 owing to the silting up of the River Zwijn, and its place was taken by Antwerp, where the population rose to about 100,000 by 1550. In painting, too, the centre shifted from Bruges to Antwerp, which is not surprising, since merchants were among the most important patrons. As in Italy, an art market developed in the sixteenth century.9
In the Netherlands, as in Italy, artists generally had the status of craftsmen, unless their patrons were rulers such as Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, who appointed Jan van Eyck his official painter and valet de chambre, sent him on diplomatic missions, visited his studio at Bruges and gave him six silver cups for the christening of the painter’s son. However, the painters of the Netherlands seem to have lacked the self-awareness of some of their Italian colleagues. Self-portraits are more rare, and the Dutch Vasari, Karel van Mander, did not publish his collection of artists’ biographies until 1604.
The relation of the music of the period to the society in which it was composed is rather more indirect and elusive. Most of this music is church music (possibly because church music had a better chance of survival). The great composers usually owed their musical training (as we have seen, p. 61) to cathedral choir schools. Some of them held benefices. However, the increasing size of church choirs in this period was made possible only by the generosity of the laity. The money was used in part to bring laymen into the choirs; for example, the cathedral chapter at Antwerp diverted income from some benefices to pay the salaries of professional singers, who did not have to be clerics. As in Italy, townspeople founded fraternities, and some, such as the Fraternity of Our Lady at Antwerp (whose members included bankers, merchants and craftsmen), financed a daily service with singers. In other words, the ecclesiastical culture of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century was founded on urban wealth.
Music was also written for the court. Duke Philip the Good made Binchois his chaplain and appointed Dufay music tutor to his son Charles the Bold, who learned to sing, play the harp and compose chansons and motets. When he became duke he employed Busnois, and he took his musicians with him even on campaign. The importance of this court patronage is suggested by the fact that, after Charles’s death in 1477, the leading composers Isaac and Josquin left the Netherlands.
The court had, of course, to be paid for. The Feast of the Pheasant, a Burgundian banquet held in 1454 at which musicians played a prominent part, cost so much that even a courtier who took part in it, Olivier de la Marche, commented in his chronicle on what he called the ‘outrageous and unreasonable expense’. It was the good fortune of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold that their dominions took in towns such as Ghent and Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp, with rich merchants who could provide large sums in taxation. The court, like the Church, depended ultimately on trade.
JAPAN
In Japan over a century later, there was a cluster of cultural achievements and innovations at least as remarkable as the cases of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands.10 The height of the period was the Genroku era, from 1688 to 1703. The great figures include the poet Matsuo Basho (best known for his haiku), Ihara Saikaku, a writer of prose fiction, the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the philosopher Ogyu Sorai and the artist Moronobu. Among the new genres were the coloured woodblock print; ‘kana books’, written not in Chinese characters but in a simple syllabic script; and two new kinds of drama, the kabuki and the jōruri (in which the roles were taken by puppets). It was at this time that the samisen was introduced into Japanese music and used to accompany dramatic performances.
As in the case of Italy and the Netherlands, one important trend in the arts in Japan at this period was their secularization. In philosophy, the Japanese Confucians of the period, like the humanists of the fifteenth century, shifted their emphasis from knowing heaven to knowing man.11 The dominant form of drama before 1600, the Nō, was religious, but jōruri and kabuki theatres played historical dramas or scenes from domestic life. Traditional Japanese painting, like sculpture, was mainly Buddhist in inspiration, but after 1600 secular works become more common, among them painted screens, statues to ornament private houses, and woodblock prints, which usually represented landscapes, actors or scenes from everyday life.
At once an illustration and a symbol of this process of secularization is the term ukiyo, ‘floating world’. Originally a Buddhist term for the transience of all worldly things, it took on hedonist overtones in the seventeenth century and came to mean ‘living for the moment’, particularly if that kind of living took place in the pleasure-quarters of the three great cities of Edō (now Tokyo), Kyōto and Ō saka. The ‘floating trade’ was prostitution. The entertainment industry (actors, courtesans, wrestlers, etc.) was often represented in the woodblock prints, which came to be called ‘pictures of the floating world’ (ukiyo-e). The secularization of Buddhist values had its parallel in the fiction of the period, which was sometimes known as ‘notes from the floating world’ (ukiyo-zōshi). Iharu Saikaku’s most famous story, The Life of an Amorous Woman, is an adaptation to secular purposes of a religious genre, Buddhist confession literature. It resembles that genre about as closely in form and about as little in spirit as Defoe’s Moll Flanders resembles Bunyan’s Grace Abounding.
Another characteristic to be found in several arts and genres in Genroku Japan was realism, particularly domestic realism (above, p. 23). The equivalent Japanese term, sewamono, was applied to kabuki plays about contemporary life as opposed to historical events. Just as Hishikawa Moronobu made prints of street scenes in the Yoshiwara (the pleasure-quarter of Edo), so Monzaemon Chikamatsu and Iharu Saikaku took scenes from everyday life and turned them into literature, without even changing the names and addresses. There is a story that Chikamatsu was in a restaurant when he was told that there had been a love suicide at Amijima, and was asked to write a puppet-play on the subject immediately. What he produced for performance two days later is one of his most famous pieces. Saikaku was fascinated, like Defoe, by true-to-life details of clothes and prices, and incorporated them into his stories to give them a greater air of verisimilitude.
Whether or not this is an illusion on the part of a European observing from a distance and missing the finer detail, I have the impression that these changes in Japanese culture were more obviously and more closely related to social changes than their equivalents in Italy or the Netherlands.
The sixteenth century had been a period of civil war in Japan. Towards the end of the century, peace was established by a succession of three strong rulers, the third of whom, Tokugawa Ieyasu, founded a dynasty of effective rulers or shōguns. Peace was followed by a rise in population, an improvement in communications and a rapid growth of towns. Three cities in particular expanded: the old capital, Kyōto, which had 410,000 inhabitants in 1634; Ō saka, which had 280,000 in 1625; and Edō, which was no more than a village before Tokugawa Ieyasu chose it for his capital, but rose to half a million people by 1721.12
The Tokugawa regime was not sympathetic to artisans and merchants (the chōnin), which it regarded as inferior to peasants as well as to samurai. However, these chōnin prospered as never before, while many samurai, whose contempt for trade equalled that of seventeenth-century Spanish noblemen, found themselves in economic difficulties.13 As for the values of the period, they seem to be reflected in Saikaku’s Family Storehouse, a series of success stories in business which would be reminiscent of Samuel Smiles if t
hey did not antedate him by a century and a half (Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) was in fact translated into Japanese only a few years after publication).
It seems plausible to argue that the rise of the chōnin – not to say ‘middle class’ – and the cultural innovations of the period are connected. Of the major writers and artists, Moronobu was the son of an embroiderer; Saikaku the son of an Ō saka merchant; Kiseki, the best-known of Saikaku’s followers, the son of a Kyōto shop-keeper. The Nō plays had been for samurai only. On the other hand, samurai were forbidden to go to performances of kabuki and jōruri, which were for the chōnin, and not infrequently dealt with their lives. As for the stories of Saikaku and others, they were printed in the simple kana script and so reached an audience (female as well as male) that was much wider than that of traditional literati. In the seventeenth century, bookselling was good business; there were fifty bookshops in Ō saka in 1626. Adapting Defoe’s remark about England, we may say that writing was becoming ‘a very considerable part of the Japanese commerce’. So were images. Woodblock prints could be mass-produced cheaply, so that they were within the means of craftsmen. One of their functions was commercial – to advertise the skills and charms of the actors and courtesans they so frequently portrayed. In Japan as in Europe we see the rise of what we might call an art market and the commercialization of art and literature.
There are two qualifications to make to this picture of townspeople’s culture. The first is to point out that it was associated with merchants who were no longer accumulating but indulging in conspicuous consumption. The second is to emphasize that Genroku culture was not for merchants and craftsmen alone. Edō was a capital with a court and a traditional culture associated with it. All that is being argued here is that new genres were created primarily for new social groups (or groups that were newly rich, numerous or literate). Even these new genres drew on aristocratic traditions, from Nō plays to the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, though it is not easy to say whether they are examples of imitation, of parody or of an ambiguous and unstable mixture of the two.
This brief comparison of Italy with the Netherlands and Japan contains obvious gaps. The available secondary literature does not permit a discussion of the merchant ethos in Flanders or the milieu of Japanese artists. In any case, these examples are not the only ones that could have been chosen. Yet they do suggest the existence of recurrent patterns of cultural and social change, and they bring us back to a problem which has appeared many times in this study (sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background): the problem of the cultural role of the bourgeoisie.
I began work on this book, in the later 1960s, with the idea of juxtaposing the ideas of Jacob Burckhardt and those of Karl Marx, criticizing and rejecting where criticism and rejection were needed and attempting a synthesis. Burckhardt is not, of course, the only interesting interpreter of the Renaissance, and a good many of his successors – Baron, Baxandall, Gombrich, Lopez, etc. – have contributed ideas as well as information to this study. Nor is Marx the only important social theorist, or the only one whose ideas are relevant to this period and this problem. It is a stimulating intellectual exercise (but more than just an exercise) to imagine how Max Weber might have discussed the Renaissance (emphasizing secularization, calculation, abstraction); how Emile Durkheim might have discussed it (stressing the division of labour and its effect on collective representations); how Norbert Elias might view it (as part of the civilizing process); Erving Goffman (focusing on the presentation of self); Pierre Bourdieu (attending to ‘cultural capital’, ‘distinction’ and strategies for ‘symbolic dominance’); or Clifford Geertz (considering the relation between order and meaning). I have learned something from each of these thinkers, and others, and made use of them all in this book.
The central problem of this study, however, remains that of the relationship between cultural and social structures and change, and the apparent detour via the Netherlands and Japan has revealed this centrality even more clearly. The link between realism and the bourgeoisie, for example, is not as simple as some Marxists (Antal, for instance) have argued or assumed, because (as we have seen) there is more than one type of realism, more than one kind of bourgeoisie and more than one possible relationship between society and culture.
Refining the concepts, however, does not dissolve the problem. There do seem to be affinities between social groups and artistic genres (if not styles). If bourgeoisies are divided into merchants and craftsmen, their contributions to the arts may be distinguished as follows. The milieu from which most artists come is urban and dominated by craftsmen, so that it can be argued (above, p. 52) that it is in craft-industrial towns that the abilities of potential artists are least likely to be frustrated. Merchants, on the other hand, are especially important as patrons, and often quick to take up new genres. They are, after all, professionally adaptable and need to be able to adapt to new situations if they are to survive economically. The emphasis on novelty is important here. The argument is not that rulers, nobility (mandarins, samurai) and the Church (or its Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim equivalents) are unimportant patrons; this is clearly false. The focus of this study, however, has been on cultural innovation, and the Flemish and Japanese examples, no less than the Italian ones, suggest that innovations need the support, initially at least, of new kinds of patron. In culture as in economic life, there are rentiers and there are entrepreneurs.
1 Bohannan, ‘Artist and critic’, p. 89.
2 A concern with the whole is the strength of Alsop, Rare Art Traditions, as of Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth.
3 Bloch, Land and Work, pp. 44–81.
4 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting. Cf. Chipps Smith, Northern Renaissance; Nash, Northern Renaissance Art; Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance.
5 Hollanda, Da pintura antigua, first dialogue, p. 63.
6 This topic has interested scholars since the time of Aby Warburg. A recent study is Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence.
7 Lestocquoy, Aux origines de la bourgeoisie; Prevenier and Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands.
8 Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 77.
9 Floerke, Studien.
10 Hibbett, Floating World; Keene, World within Walls; Lane, Masters of the Japanese Print.
11 Bellah, Tokugawa Religion; Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History.
12 Hall and Jansen, Studies in the Institutional History.
13 Sheldon, Rise of the Merchant Class; cf. Crawcour, ‘Changes in Japanese commerce’.
APPENDIX: THE CREATIVE ELITE
The six hundred painters, sculptors, architects, writers, humanists, scientists and musicians whose lives form the basis of chapter 3, in particular, were selected as follows:
1 314 painters and sculptors from the article on Italian Art in the Encyclopaedia of World Art (organized by region, this list seemed to counter the Tuscan bias of Vasari).
2 88 writers from E. H. Wilkins, A History of Italian Literature (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1954).
3 74 humanists from E. Garin, Italian Humanism (Eng. trans., Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).
4 55 ‘scientists’ from R. Taton (ed.), A General History of the Sciences, vol. 2 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), revised with the help of Professor Marshall Clagett.
5 50 musicians selected from G. Reese, Music in the Renaissance (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1959).
6 19 writers and humanists not in Wilkins or Garin, added to round the number up to 600 and chosen because I thought them important: J. Aconcio, G. B. Adriani, Aldo Manuzio, G. Aurispa, F. Barbaro, G. Barzizza, G. Benivieni, F. Beroaldo, B. Bibbiena, A. Bonfini, V. Calmeta, J. Caviceo, B. Corio, L. Domenichi, F. Nerli, B. Rucellai, M. A. Sabellico, B. della Scala and B. Segni.
The complete list can be found in the index to this book, with asterisks against the names.
Such a list is inevitably arbitrary, at least at the edges. Contemporaries, however much in sympathy with the idea of a coll
ection of biographies, might have found the criterion of selection, ‘creativity’, hard to understand, and the learned would have expected to find canon lawyers or theologians rather than artists. The object of the exercise was to conduct something like a social survey of the dead: to look for patterns or tendencies. Hence the need to ask precise questions, as follows:
1 Region of birth: nine possible answers (Lombardy; Veneto; Tuscany; States of the Church; south Italy; Liguria; Piedmont; outside Italy; not known).
2 Size of birthplace: four possible answers (large; medium; small; not known).
3 Father’s occupation: nine possible answers (cleric; noble; humanist; professional or merchant; artist; artisan or shop-keeper connected with the arts; artisan or shop-keeper unconnected with the arts; peasant; not known).
4 Training: six possible answers (University of Padua; other universities; other humanist education; apprenticeship; musical education; not known).
5 Main discipline practised: seven possible answers (painting; sculpture; architecture; literature; humanism; science; music).
6 Specialization: three possible answers (one discipline; two disciplines; three or more).
7 Relatives practising these disciplines: five possible answers (no known relatives; one; two; three; four or more).