The Italian Renaissance (14 page)

The signing of paintings used to be taken to be a mark of ‘Renaissance individualism’. However, it has been argued that when a painting is signed by the head of a workshop it does not mean that he painted it with his own hand. It may even mean the reverse; the point is to declare that the work meets the standards of the shop.
⁵⁹

Not all master painters could afford to set up shop on their own. Like other small masters (dyers, for example), painters sometimes shared expenses for rent and equipment. Usually, though not always, they acted as a trading company and pooled expenses and receipts.
⁶⁰
Giorgione, for instance, was in partnership with Vincenzo Catena. An association of this kind
had the advantage of offering a kind of insurance against illness and defaulting clients. There may also have been a division of labour inside the shop.

These habits of collaboration make it easier to understand how well-known artists could work on the same paintings, together or consecutively. In the Ovetari Chapel at Padua, for example, four artists worked on the frescoes in pairs: Pizzolo with Mantegna, and Antonio da Murano with Giovanni d’Allemagna. Pisanello finished a picture of St John the Baptist begun by Gentile da Fabriano. This practice continued into the sixteenth century. Pontormo made two paintings from cartoons by Michelangelo, while Michelangelo agreed to finish a statue of St Francis by Pietro Torrigiani. This system of collaboration obviously militated against deliberate individualism of style and helps explain why this individualism emerged only slowly.

Sculptors’ workshops were organized in a similar way to those of painters. Donatello was in partnership with Michelozzo, while the Gaggini and
Solari dynasties furnish obvious examples of family businesses. Assistants were all the more necessary, since statues take longer to make and because the head of the shop might have to arrange for marble to be quarried in order to carry out a particular commission, with the problem that, if it turned out badly, as Michelangelo complains in his letters, hundreds of ducats might be wasted, and it might be difficult to prove to the client that the expenditure had been necessary or even that it had taken place at all. The workshop of Bernardo Rossellino was one in which there was considerable division of labour, on ‘apparently arbitrary’ lines.
⁶¹

Architecture was, of course, organized on a larger scale with a more elaborate division of labour. Even a relatively small palace like the Ca D’Oro, still to be seen on the Grand Canal in Venice, had twenty-seven craftsmen working on it in 1427. There were carpenters; two main kinds of mason, concerned respectively with hewing and laying stone; unskilled workmen, to carry materials; and perhaps foremen. Coordination was therefore a problem. As Filarete put it, a building project is like a dance; everyone must work together in time (Plate 3.6). The man who ensured coordination was sometimes called the
architetto
, sometimes the
protomaestro
or chief of the master masons. It is likely that the two names reflect two different conceptions of the role, the old idea of the senior craftsman and the new idea of the designer. In any case, considerable administrative work was involved. Besides designing the building, someone had to appoint and pay the workmen and arrange for the supply of lime, sand,
brick, stone, wood, ropes, and so on. All this work could be organized in a number of different ways. In Venice, building firms were small because master masons were not allowed to take more than three apprentices each. When a large building was needed, it was common for an entrepreneur (
padrone
) to contract for the whole work and then subcontract pieces of it to different workshops.
⁶²
At the other extreme, at St Peter’s in the 1520s and 1530s, there was only one workshop, with a large staff including an accountant (
computista
), two surveyors (
mensuratori
) and a head clerk (
segretario
), as well as masons and other workmen. Filarete recommends an agent (
commissario
) as middleman between the architect and the craftsmen. Alberti seems to have followed this system and employed at least three artists in this way: Matteo de’Pasti as his agent in Rimini, Bernardo Rossellino as his agent in Rome, and Luca Fancelli as his agent in Mantua and Florence.

This division of labour has created problems for art historians as it doubtless did for the agents. It is difficult enough to assess individual responsibility for particular paintings and statues, and still harder, in the case of a building, to know whether patron, architect, agent, master mason or mason was responsible for a given detail. The difficulty is increased by the fact that it was not yet customary for the architect to give his men measured drawings to work from. Many of the instructions were given
a bocca
, by word of mouth.
⁶³

If we know something about Alberti’s intentions, it is because he did not stay in Rimini while the church of San Francesco was being built, but designed it by correspondence, some of which has survived. On one occasion the agent, Matteo de’Pasti, was apparently thinking of altering the proportions of some pilasters, but Alberti wrote to stop him. A letter from Matteo to the client, Sigismondo Malatesta, explains that a drawing of the façade and of a capital had arrived from Alberti, and that it had been
shown to ‘all the masters and engineers’. The problem was that the drawing was not completely consistent with a wooden model of the building which Alberti had previously provided. ‘I hope to God that your lordship will come in time, and see the thing with your own eyes.’ Later on, another craftsman working on the church wrote to Sigismondo for permission to go to Rome and talk to Alberti about the vaulting.
⁶⁴

The fact that architecture was such a cooperative enterprise must have acted as a brake on innovation. Since craftsmen were trained by other craftsmen, they learned fidelity to tradition as well as to techniques. When executing a design which broke with tradition, they would be likely, if they were not supervised very closely, to ‘normalize’ it – in other words, to assimilate it to the tradition from which the designer was deliberately diverging. Michelozzo’s design for the Medici Bank at Milan was executed by Lombard craftsmen in a local style (a fragment of this building may still be seen in the museum of the Castello Sforzesco). A small detail, but a significant one, is the difference in proportions between capitals made by Florentine craftsmen for Brunelleschi when he was on the spot and one made in 1430 while he was away.
⁶⁵

There seems to be a relationship between the development of a new architectural style and the rise of a new kind of designer – the architect who, like Alberti, had not been trained as a mason. A parallel with shipbuilding may be illuminating. In fifteenth-century Venice, ships were designed by senior ship carpenters, the nautical equivalent of master masons. In the sixteenth century, they were challenged by an amateur. The role of Alberti was played by the humanist Vettor Fausto, who designed a ship (which was launched in 1529) on the model of the ancient quinquereme.
⁶⁶

The larger unit of organization for painters, sculptors and masons, but not architects, was the guild. Guilds had several functions. They regulated both standards of quality and relations between clients, masters, journeymen and apprentices. They collected money from subscriptions and bequests and lent or gave some of it to members who were in need. They organized festivals in honour of the patron of the guild, with religious services and processions. In some cities, such as Milan, painters had a guild of their own, often under the patronage of St Luke, who was supposed to have painted a portrait of the Virgin. Elsewhere they formed part of a larger guild, such as that of the papermakers in Bologna or that of
the physicians and apothecaries in Florence (though Florentine painters did have a social guild of their own, the Company of St Luke).
⁶⁷

For a more vivid impression of the activities of a guild, we may look at the fifteenth-century statutes of one of them, the ‘brotherhood’ or
fraglia
of the painters of Padua.
⁶⁸
The officers of the guild were a bursar, two stewards, a notary and a dean. There were several social and religious activities in which participation was compulsory. On certain days in the year the guild marched in procession with ‘our gonfalon’, and absentees were fined. There was a rota for visiting sick members and for encouraging them to confess and communicate, and fines for non-attendance at funerals. Alms were given to the poor and to lepers. There were also arrangements for the relief of needy members. A poor master had the right to sell a piece of work to the guild, which the bursar would try to sell ‘as best he could’ (
ut melius poterit
). Other guilds lent money; Botticelli, for example, received a loan from the Company of St Luke in Florence. The Paduan statutes also required masters to keep apprentices for three years at least, and forbade them to make overtures to the apprentices of other masters ‘with gifts or blandishments’ (
donis vel blandimentis
). There were regulations for the maintenance of standards; candidates aspiring to be masters were examined in the usual way, and houses were inspected to see if work was being ‘falsified’ (
si falsificetur aliquod laborerium nostre artis
). Standards and fair prices were also maintained by the new but common practice of calling in artists to evaluate the work of others – artistic judgment by one’s peers – in cases of dispute with the client.
⁶⁹
Finally, there was the restrictive side of the guild’s activities. The Padua statutes forbade members to give or sell to non-members anything pertaining to the craft. They laid down that no work was to be brought from another district to sell in Padua, and three days only were allowed for the transit of such ‘alien’ work through the territory of the guild.

In Venice too the guild or
arte
seems to have had a strong territorial imperative. When Albrecht Dürer visited Venice in 1506, he commented on the suspicion or sensitivity to competition of the painters there: ‘They have summoned me before the magistrates three times, and I have had to pay four florins to their guild.’
⁷⁰
It has been suggested that, when he was working in Venice in the middle of the fifteenth century, the Tuscan painter
Andrea del Castagno had to be supervised by a less gifted artist, Giambono, simply because the latter was a Venetian.
⁷¹

In Florence, however, guilds did not have so much power. The Florentine government would not allow them to force all craftsmen to join. Some artists, such as Botticelli, entered a guild only at the end of their career. As a result ‘foreigners’ could come and work in Florence. This more liberal policy, which exposed local tradition to stimuli from outside, may help to explain Florence’s cultural lead.

Writers, humanists, scientists and musicians had no guilds and no workshops. The nearest analogy to the guild in their world was the university (a term which simply meant ‘association’ and was sometimes used in the period to refer to guilds of painters). However, the analogy between students and apprentices, tempting as it is in some respects, is also misleading. Most of the students did not go to university to learn how to be professors but looked forward to careers in Church and state. The students had more power in Italian universities than apprentices had in guilds. It was thanks to a petition from the students from the University of Pisa, for example, that one of their teachers, the scientist Bernardo Torni, had his salary raised. The university was not geared to the production of books by the dons. Their job was lecturing, and their books were something of a sideline.