The Italian Renaissance (19 page)

Why do you think there was such a great number of capable men in the past, if not because they were well treated and honoured by princes?

Filarete,
Treatise on Architecture

I cannot live under pressures from patrons, let alone paint.

Michelangelo,
Carteggio

S
ystems of patronage differ. It may be useful to distinguish five main types. First, the household system: a rich man takes the artist or writer into his house for some years, gives him board, lodging and presents, and expects to have his artistic and literary needs attended to. Second, the made-to-measure system: again, a personal relationship between the artist or writer and his patron (‘client’ might be a better term in this case), but a temporary one, lasting only until the painting or poem is delivered. Third, the market system, in which the artist or writer produces something ‘ready-made’ and then tries to sell it, either directly to the public or through a dealer. This third system was emerging in Italy in the period, although the first two types were dominant. The fourth and fifth types – the academy system (government control by means of an organization staffed by reliable artists and writers) and the subvention system (in which a foundation supports creative individuals but makes no claim on what they produce) – had not yet come into existence.
¹

This chapter is concerned with two problems: first, with discovering what kinds of people gave artists commissions, and why they did so, and, second, with assessing the extent to which it was the patron or client, rather than the artist or writer, who determined the shape and content of the work. In the background lurks the more elusive question to which the epigraphs above allude. Was the patronage system encouraging or
discouraging to artists and writers? In other words, did the Renaissance happen in Italy because of the system or in spite of it?
²

Patrons may be classified in various ways. The division into ecclesiastical and lay is a simple and useful one, at least at first sight, contrasting (say) the monks of San Pietro in Perugia, for whom Perugino painted an altarpiece of the Ascension, with Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco de’Medici (not the famous Lorenzo, but his cousin), for whom Botticelli painted the
Primavera
. The Church was traditionally the great patron of art, and this is the obvious reason for the predominance of religious paintings in Europe over the very long term (from the fourth century or thereabouts to the seventeenth). In Renaissance Italy, however, it is likely that most religious paintings were commissioned by laymen. They might order the painting for a church (for their family chapel, for example); Palla Strozzi asked Gentile da Fabriano to paint his
Adoration of the Magi
to hang in the Strozzi Chapel in the church of Santa Trinità in Florence. Lay people might also commission religious paintings to hang in their own homes. The Medici did this, for example, as we know from the inventory of the contents of their palace.
³
Just as the laity asked for religious works, so the clergy commissioned paintings with secular subjects, such as the
Parnassus
which Raphael painted for Julius II in the Vatican. It would be interesting to know whether the laity were more likely to commission secular works, or whether the gradual secularization of painting reflected a secularization of patronage, but the evidence is too fragmentary to allow such questions to be answered.

A second way of classifying patrons is to distinguish public from private. The guild patronage of early fifteenth-century Florence is particularly well known. The wool guild, the Arte della Lana, was responsible for the upkeep of the cathedral, which involved new commissions – one to Donatello for a statue of the prophet Jeremiah, another to Michelangelo for his
David
. The cloth guild, the Calimala, was responsible for the
Baptistery, and so it was this guild which commissioned Ghiberti to make the famous doors. The lesser guilds as well as the greater placed statues on the façade of the church of Orsanmichele; Donatello’s
St George
, for example, was commissioned by the armourers.
⁴
The guilds were interested in paintings as well as sculptures. In 1433, the linen guild commissioned Fra Angelico to paint a Madonna for their guildhall.
⁵

Another kind of corporate patron, still more important if one takes the whole period and the whole of Italy into account, was the religious fraternity.
⁶
The fraternity was in effect a social and religious club, usually attached to a particular church, which might perform works of charity and might also act as a bank. The patronage of the Venetian fraternities, known as
scuole
, was particularly lavish. The huge pictures of St Ursula which Vittore Carpaccio painted in the 1490s were designed for the hall of the guild dedicated to that saint, a small guild with a mixed membership of men and women, nobles and commoners.
⁷
Still more important was the patronage of the six
scuole grandi
, including San Giovanni Evangelista, for whom Gentile Bellini painted a number of large pictures, and San Rocco, whose Tintorettos may still be viewed in the hall of the fraternity. Indeed, their expenditure on building and pageants was so great as to provoke criticism from contemporaries who considered that all this magnificence was at the expense of the poor, charity to whom was the original purpose of these organizations.
⁸

The patronage of fraternities was important not just in Venice but all over Italy, as the paintings of Vecchietta and Battista Dossi remind us (Plates 4.1, 4.2). Leonardo’s
Virgin of the Rocks
was commissioned by a fraternity, that of the Conception of the Virgin in the church of San Francesco at Milan. It was the fraternity of Corpus Christi at Urbino which commissioned Justus of Ghent’s
Institution of the Eucharist
, as well as Uccello’s
Profanation of the Host
. The importance of organizations like these in the history of art is that they made possible the participation in patronage of people who did not have the money to commission works individually. One would love to know what discussions went on before a particular artist or subject was chosen. It is intriguing to find that in 1433 the Florentine Board of Works for the Cathedral (the
Operai del Duomo
) delegated their authority to one man to work out details
of a commission to Donatello. Was this because the board was unable to agree? Would groups have been more conservative in their tastes than individuals, as they have generally been over the past couple of centuries, or is this assumption anachronistic?