by Paul Johnson
Yet the Camera degli Sposi is an equally authentic presentation of fifteenth-century court life, as the painter actually witnessed it in the palace of the Gonzagas. The two main scenes, one outdoors (The Meeting), one indoors (The Signing of the Contract), take us straight into the world of ceremony, diplomacy, intrigue and maneuvering later described in words by Machiavelli and Castiglione. Indeed, in some ways these paintings, one in fresco, one largely in secco, tell us rather more about Renaissance courts than either of the two standard texts. There are many marvelous things in this room, including an eye or painted lunette in the ceiling, which introduces the new technique of di sotto in su, whereby figures are deliberately distorted to look natural when seen from the ground looking up—something Mantegna worked out from a typical Donatello trick. It prefigures the work of Correggio in the next generation and, indeed, the whole of the Baroque. Yet there are no tricks about the figures. These are actual faces of real people—fifteenth-century Italians of the urban, courtly breed, whispering and hiding their thoughts, making honeyed speeches, dissimulating and orating, boasting and cutting a bella figura, strutting for effect and feigning every kind of emotion—the women less numerous but more cunning than the men. The vicious-looking dogs are authentic too, and castles, houses, churches and countryside vividly depict the north of Italy. As in all Mantegna’s work, one learns a great deal because, though a master of illusionistic devices, he always tells the truth.
Mantegna’s interest in landscape, and the fidelity with which he presented it, underlines his northern Italian origins. If Florentine art had a weakness, it was that it focused too exclusively on the human body. The architectural settings in which it placed the figures were props or exercises in perspective, rather than observed realities with their own intrinsic interest. The farther north one gets, the more the forests and mountains, valleys and rivers impinge, and the towns are real ones, minutely recorded, rather than abstractions.
Venice, though a powerful, rich and hyperactive city with a long tradition of artistic patronage, was, again, slow to acquire the Renaissance spirit. It had nothing like Florence’s apostolic succession of Cimabue, Giotto and Masaccio. But from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, it began to produce great paintings, thanks mainly to the brilliant Bellini family. Its patriarch, Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400–1470), married his daughter Nicolosia to Mantegna, and (though the son of a pewterer) was himself taught by Gentile da Fabriano—so we have here one of the most densely woven artistic networks of the period. Jacopo is known chiefly through his marvelous albums of drawings in the Louvre and the British Museum, but his son Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) was a Venetian court painter of eminence who used the Venetian background to great effect in his work. His Miracle of the True Cross at San Lorenzo is a superb urban landscape, in which the buildings, painted in the most minute detail, tulip chimneys and all, are the chief characters. Indeed, as an artist of townscape, he was surpassed only by his pupil, the great Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460–1525), whose many identifiable Venetian backgrounds, including the marshes and lagoons as well as the city itself, make him one of the most fascinating realists of the entire Renaissance. Carpaccio was particularly ingenious at introducing dogs into his townscapes and interiors, as in his delightful painting of St. Augustine in his study, a beautifully observed depiction of the kind of room, with all its equipment, in which humanist scholars worked. Dogs also figure in his notable rendering of two Venetian ladies watching events from a balcony. Gentile Bellini, however, capped this by exotic touches, garnered during what seem to have been extensive travels in the eastern Mediterranean. In his giant painting St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, not only camels but a giraffe figure, and there are touches of Arab architecture (plus a self-portrait wearing a gold chain presented to him by the sultan). His Procession of the True Cross in the Piazza San Marco shows the façade of the basilica, a major topographical work of art and a reminder that Canaletto sprang from a long Venetian tradition that was 250 years old when he was born.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516), Gentile’s brother, never traveled outside the Veneto during his long life—Vasari says he was ninety when he died—and seems to have had a passionate attachment to its scenery, which peeps out from behind and sometimes towers over the figures in his sacred altarpieces and other paintings. It is often a rustic landscape, with farmers working their fields and cattle browsing. It has echoes of Netherlandish work, going back to the Limbourg brothers of the early fifteenth century, whose Très riches heures du duc de Berry, the most sumptuous book of hours produced at the close of the Middle Ages, depicts all the agricultural seasons in turn. Though untraveled, Bellini lived in one of the busiest crossroads of Europe and was exposed to Dutch, Flemish, German and French works, as well as Florentine and Lombard influences. He absorbed and transmuted them all into a highly personal and distinctive style that nonetheless constantly progressed as his skills, always formidable, developed and his interests expanded. He was at the center of the technical revolutions that made painting in oil dominant, that introduced the easel painting and that made portraiture popular. He had a wonderful eye for a face and huge skill at getting it down on panel or canvas, while at the same time his renderings of the Madonna and her Child made bishops and canons flock to employ him. He dignified the doges, brought tears to the eyes of elderly abbesses, and applied prodigies of inventiveness and imagination to renderings of hackneyed subjects, like the Pietà, the Drunkenness of Noah, the Repentant Magdalen and St. John the Baptist.
Giovanni Bellini drew with all the grace of his father, but brought his paintings up to a high finish that delighted all. He has sensitivity and delicacy, making his women seem the essence of tenderness. There are many charming touches, such as the boy instrumentalists seated at the foot of the Virgin’s throne in his San Giobbe Altarpiece (Accademia, Venice), a device imitated by many later artists. Indeed, they plundered all his ideas and tried, many unsuccessfully, to copy his virtuoso technique. He ran a huge studio with dozens of assistants, attracted by his fame from all over the region, and it is likely that masters as diverse as Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto passed through his shop at an early stage in their careers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, he was widely regarded as the greatest living painter, known throughout Europe. Yet he continued to absorb new ideas and influences, including from the young Giorgione, from the next generation but one. Dürer, in Venice in 1506 when Bellini was in his late seventies, said he was painting as well as ever, “still the best.” Bellini has always been fervently admired by painters themselves and those with a passionate interest in art, like Ruskin, who declared his altarpiece in Santo Zaccaria and his triptych in the Venice Frari the two finest paintings in the world.
The rise of a mature school of painting in Venice was characteristic of the spread of the fine arts all over Italy during the fifteenth century. Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–92) worked on high-quality commissions in towns all over central Italy, such as Perugia and Arezzo, where his fresco cycle of The Legend of the True Cross constitutes his most considerable work. He illustrates the extraordinary lust for learning that the Renaissance bred and the upward progression of its artists—for his father was a tanner and his own first job was to paint the striped poles used to carry candles in religious processions. Yet he made himself a master mathematician and played a bigger role in reviving and spreading the use of Euclid than anyone else. Three of his innumerable learned treatises survive, including his De prospectiva pingendi, an exposition of the rules of perspective that demanded more mathematical knowledge than most painters have ever possessed. Perspective figured in his paintings sometimes to the exclusion of other, more central requirements and to the confusion of the public. Thus in his wonderfully light and radiant Flagellation in the Ducal Palace, Urbino, Christ and his assailants have been pushed backstage while three unrelated figures, who are not even watching the scourging, dominate the foreground. Piero was an eccentric. In his Baptism of Christ in
the National Gallery, London, interest is as likely to center on the man taking his shirt off, or the three shocked angels, as on the Baptist pouring Jordan water on Christ’s head. The Resurrection, in Piero’s hometown of Sansepolcro, is an amazing work, with Christ emerging somnambulistically from a marble sarcophagus against which the sleepers lie. There is about all Piero’s characterizations—saints, singers, onlookers, dignitaries—a certain icy calm, a frozen stillness, which perhaps reflects his obsession with that chilly science, geometry. Yet he has an extraordinary gift for planting his images on one’s mind indissolubly, which after all is the mark of a great painter. This ability may explain why he, together with Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), today constitutes, for most people, the very essence of the Italian Renaissance.
Botticelli was an eccentric too, and like Piero (who was thirty years older) a passionate humanist, though his interests were literary rather than scientific. Where as Piero was static, Botticelli was fluid, sinuous, dynamic, with a strong, elastic line, so that his figures are drawn onto the surface rather than built up out of it. They sway, they dance, they wreath themselves into undulating patterns, interwoven with flowers and trees, sea, sand and grass. Botticelli was the first great Renaissance artist to make full use of ancient mythology not merely for subject matter— The Birth of Venus, Primavera, et al.—but to give his works spiritual content. There is a daring whiff of paganism about his blond maidens and goddesses, an insouciance, a hedonism and a cool, bold, graceful sensuality— never lascivious or carnal—that is overwhelmingly attractive now as it undoubtedly was then. But Botticelli was also a prolific and efficient producer of Virgins and Baby Jesuses— some of them even better than those of his master, Filippo Lippi—and he was in constant employment for the churches, as well as the palaces of the Medici, who preferred the pagan work. He may, indeed, have been a man of strong religious bent at times, for when the fierce Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98) began to preach (initially at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s invitation) against worldly vanities, and begged the population to burn rich dresses, scandalous books and unholy pictures, Botticelli is said to have responded by burning some of his own works (it is true that some of those whose existence we know of from literary sources have vanished). When Sixtus IV, having built his Sistine Chapel, brought artists to Rome to decorate the lower part of its walls, Botticelli was one of those chosen (1481) and contributed The Temptation of Christ and episodes from the Life of Moses, not with any great success. Paganism was his forte and myth his inspiration. But artists do not always know what is good for them.
The second half of the fifteenth century was an exceptional period of busy activity and the nurturing of genius in Florence. There were those who pursued an individual path, like Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521); he loved painting animals, drew well from nature and made a speciality of depicting his own wild interpretations of mythology. He was one of the few Florentines who loved landscape, and his weird Death of Procris in London’s National Gallery, with its desolate estuary, magnificent dog (and other creatures) and long-eared faun, combines his obsessions. He made his living designing magnificent banners and other gear for public ceremonies, but he was by nature a loner who left the busy studio of Cosimo Rosselli, his guardian, as soon as he could work on his own. Vasari says he was a recluse who lived on hard-boiled eggs, preparing them fifty at a time while boiling glue for size. He loathed noise, especially crying children, church music, old men coughing and flies buzzing. But at one time or another he taught, and inspired, a number of remarkable painters, including Fra Bartolommeo (c. 1472–1517), Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) and Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557).
Most Florentine art, however, revolved round the large workshops. There was that run by the Pollaiuolo family, chiefly Antonio (c. 1431–98) and his brother Piero (1441–96). Antonio was trained as a goldsmith and practiced the craft. He also made superb bronze statuettes, designed embroidery and produced stained glass. Both brothers painted. Together they created the gigantic Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, one of the glories of the National Gallery in London, which is really a brilliant exercise in the presentation of the nude or semi-clothed male. Antonio’s preoccupation with the nude is further illustrated in his remarkable engraving The Battle of the Ten Nudes. Medieval artists had kept well clear of nudity, except for damned souls in hell, but it now became a subject in which Florentine artists, with their strict tradition of draftsmanship, specialized. Not only did they draw from the nude (males only; women, except prostitutes, willing to pose nude were rare) but in Antonio’s case studied anatomy too. It was one way in which the Renaissance passion for exact, scientific knowledge expressed itself. A large workshop, like the Pollaiuolos’, not only employed models regularly but kept stocks of anatomical casts in plaster—arms, feet, torsos, etc.—for rapid copying. The brothers did a lot of drawing and engraving, as well as producing ceremonial material and banners for tournaments, and Piero in particular experimented in painting in oils on panel, playing a notable part in making it the standard medium in Tuscany.
A much bigger workshop was run by the Ghirlandaios, Domenico (1449–94) and Davide (1452–1525). They came from a background of agile craftsmen working in leather, cloth, tapestry and other decorative soft goods and employed numerous members of their family—sons, in-laws and so forth. Domenico’s was the organizing, businesslike brain. Though he occasionally worked in Rome, on for instance the lower range of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, he spent most of his life producing a mass of high-quality artistic goods. These included mosaics, something the Florentines usually left to Venice. He painted a grand series of frescoes for Santa Maria Novella in Florence that are remarkable for their durability. Domenico took buon fresco extremely seriously and practiced this difficult craft with highly professional polish, which explains the strong survival power of his output. He also drew beautifully in true local fashion, and large numbers of his drawings have come down to us, so that we can see exactly how a conscientious Florentine artist-craftsman built up a finished picture. He was indeed the epitome of all that was meticulous and professional in Florentine art in the broadest sense, always striving to excel himself and experimenting with new media and techniques. These included various mixtures of oil and tempera, brush-tip drawing, chalk, pen and ink and metalpoint for drawings, with white highlights, and brush drawings on prepared linen. Vasari lists many artists who were trained in Domenico’s shop, including Michelangelo, whose early drawings at least strongly reflect the technique of his master.
The most famous shop of all, however—as we have already noted—was Verrocchio’s. This was a powerhouse of ideas and a brilliant seminary of a huge variety of techniques in different media, for Verrocchio was an all-around craftsman and his figure sculpture and bronze casting were particularly fine. His most famous assistant was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who was there several years and learned a lot not only from the master but from other brilliant pupils. His training helps to explain the extraordinary breadth of his interests. However, we must not take too elevated a view of the Florentine art shop. It was a business venture, whose chief object was to get lucrative commissions, execute them at a profit and excel or fend off the competition. Florence was about art. But it was also about money, and it was the peculiar gift of leading Florentine craftsmen to pursue one without allowing the other to suffer. In Verrocchio’s shop, the craftsmanship had to be faultless—he insisted on that—but every aid to efficient production was ruthlessly adopted. We see this in Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel, now in London’s National Gallery, his exemplary response to a competitive work by the Pollaiuolo brothers on the same, highly popular subject. Their painting is altogether delightful—nothing illustrates better the freshness and joy of the Renaissance—but it is trade all the same. It now seems likely that Verrocchio himself painted only the angel, as the principal figure, and left Tobias to the young Leonardo. And Leonardo also did all four hands, the two left hands, which are identical, being drawn from studio cas
ts (the right hands are a bit suspicious too). None of this detracts from the excellence of the work, but it is a reminder that, in fifteenth-century Florence, there was a continuum from the countinghouse, through the wholesale cloth warehouse, to shops selling embroidery and colored shoes, to the all-purpose art workshop, catering to the sometimes vulgar taste of rich parvenus but also producing works of genius that we now venerate.