The Italian Renaissance (10 page)

L
et
us begin by assuming that artistic and other creative abilities are randomly distributed among the population. In conditions of perfect opportunity, a cultural elite – that is, the people whose creative abilities are recognized in that society – would be in all other respects a random sample of the population. In practice this never happens. Every society erects obstacles to the expression of the creativity of some groups, and Renaissance Italy was no exception. Six hundred painters, sculptors, architects, humanists, writers, ‘composers’ and ‘scientists’ will be studied in this chapter (and described for simplicity’s sake as ‘artists’ and ‘writers’ or ‘the creative elite’). Conclusions will be drawn from their collective biographies or ‘prosopography’.
¹
The choice of the six hundred is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, though no more arbitrary than the choice of named individuals in other studies of the Renaissance.
²

In this context the terms ‘architect’, ‘composer’ and ‘scientist’ are convenient but problematic. The emergence of the architect, as opposed to the master mason, was taking place in this very period.
³
Although the word
compositore
existed in this period, men whom we call ‘composers’ were more commonly described as ‘musicians’. The term ‘scientist’ is a convenient anachronism to avoid the circumlocution ‘writer in physics, medicine, etc.’ As for
artista
, although Michelangelo uses the term in the
modern sense, in the early fifteenth century it meant a university student of the seven liberal arts (below, p. 60).

The artists and writers examined here were in many ways untypical of the Italian population of the time. To begin with the most spectacular example of bias, one ‘variable’ in the survey of artists and writers appears to have been almost invariable: their sex. Only three out of the six hundred are women: Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and Tullia d’Aragona. All three are poets, and all come at the end of the period. This bias is not, of course, uniquely Italian or confined to this period, whether it is to be explained psychologically, as male creativity as a substitute for inability to bear children, or sociologically, as a result of the suppression of women’s abilities in a male-dominated society. There were few ‘old mistresses’ in an age of ‘old masters’ because female artists were engaged in an ‘obstacle race’.
⁴

It is surely significant that, when the social obstacles were a little less massive than usual, women artists and writers made their appearance. For example, the daughters of artists sometimes painted. Tintoretto’s daughter Marietta is known to have painted portraits, though nothing that is certainly by her hand has survived.
⁵
Vasari tells us that Uccello had a daughter, Antonia, who ‘knew how to draw’ and became a Carmelite nun. Nuns sometimes worked as miniaturists, among them Caterina da Bologna, better known as a saint. There was a sculptress active in Bologna, Properzia de’Rossi, whose life was written by Vasari, with appropriate references to such gifted women of antiquity as Camilla and Sappho. Only in the later sixteenth century did female painters, notably Sofonisba Anguissciola and Lavinia Fontana, become more visible as they became more independent.
⁶

In the case of writers, it has been noted that, although ‘a striking confluence of female literary talent’ is already discernible in the 1480s and 1490s, ‘the first literary works by living secular women began to be published in any numbers’ only in the 1530s and 1540s.
⁷
To the names of Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and Tullia d’Aragona one might add those of the poets Gaspara Stampa, Laura Terracina and Laura Battiferri, all six women writing towards the end of our period. Their emergence may well be a result of the increasing importance of Italian (as opposed to Latin) literature and to the opening up of literary society.

Recent research has also uncovered a small group of women who were
interested in humanism. The most important of these learned ladies were Laura Cereta, Cassandra Fedele, Isotta Nogarola and Alessandra della Scala. They attracted some attention at the time, but they also had to face male ridicule and, whether they married or became nuns, their studies generally came to a premature end.
⁸
Nuns deserve a special mention because the ‘convent culture’ of cities such as Florence, Rome and Venice offered opportunities for writing chronicles, performing in plays, making music and delivering Latin orations as well as needlework and copying manuscripts.
⁹

Even among adult males, however, the creative elite is far from a random sample. It is, for example, geographically biased. If we divide Italy into seven regions, we find that about 26 per cent of the elite came from Tuscany, 23 per cent from the Veneto, 18 per cent from the States of the Church, 11 per cent from Lombardy, 7 per cent from south Italy, 1.5 per cent from Piedmont and 1 per cent from Liguria. Another 7 per cent came from outside Italy altogether (leaving 5.5 per cent unknown). If we compare these figures with those for the populations of these seven regions, we find that four regions (Tuscany, the Veneto, the States of the Church and Lombardy, in that order) produced more than their share of artists and writers, while the other three, from Piedmont to Sicily, were culturally underdeveloped.
¹⁰
It is also clear that, on these criteria, Tuscany is well ahead of the others.

Another striking regional variation concerns the proportion of the elite practising the visual arts. In Tuscany, the Veneto and Lombardy the visual arts are dominant, while in Genoa and southern Italy the writers are more important. In other words, the region in which he (or occasionally she) was born appears to have affected not only the chances of an individual’s entering the creative elite but also the part of it he entered.
¹¹