The Italian Renaissance (25 page)

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the market system was still very far from having equalled, let alone displaced, the personalized patronage system. For examples of the dominance of the new system, we have to wait till the seventeenth century, to the commercial opera houses of Venice and the art market of the Dutch Republic.

It is impossible to give a direct answer to the question whether the arts flourished in Renaissance Italy because of the patrons, as Filarete suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, or in spite of them, as is implied by Michelangelo. What can be discussed, however, is the somewhat complicated relation between patronage and the unequal distribution of artistic achievement among different parts of Italy.

In the previous chapter, it was suggested that art flourished in Florence and Venice in particular because these cities produced many of their own artists. This is not the whole story. Besides ‘producer cities’ there were also ‘consumer cities’ that acted as magnets, attracting artists and writers from elsewhere.
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Rome is the obvious example, and the patronage of the popes (notably Nicholas V and Leo X) and of the cardinals is the obvious explanation.
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Urbino, Mantua and Ferrara are other famous examples of cities with few important native artists which nevertheless became important cultural centres.
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In these three small courts the stimulus came from the patron, from the ruler or his wife. In Urbino, it was Federigo da Montefeltro who made the arts important by attracting Luciano Laurana from Dalmatia, Piero della Francesca from Borgo San Sepolcro, Justus from Ghent, and Francesco di Giorgio from Siena. In Mantua, Isabella d’Este and her husband gave commissions, as we have seen,
to Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Leonardo, Mantegna, Perugino, Titian and other non-Mantuans. Their only Mantuan painter was a minor master, Lorenzo Leombruno.
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In these ‘court cities’, the patron seems to be calling art into existence where there was none before. However, two qualifications to this thesis need to be borne in mind. The first is that such patronage was parasitic on the art of major centres such as Florence and Venice in the sense that it would have been impossible without them. The second qualification is that the achievements of princely patrons rarely outlived them. Alfonso of Aragon, for example, was an effective patron in many fields. He took five humanists into his permanent service (Panormita, Fazio, Valla and the Decembrio brothers). He built up a chapel of twenty-two singers and paid his organist the unusually large sum of 120 ducats a year. He invited the painter Pisanello to his court in Naples and commissioned works from major sculptors such as Mino da Fiesole and Francesco Laurana. He bought Flemish tapestries and Venetian glass.
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The death of Alfonso ‘brought an end to the halcyon days of Neapolitan humanism’, because the King’s son and successor ‘did not support men of learning and culture on as grand a scale’, while Neapolitan nobles did not follow Alfonso’s example and take an interest in patronage.
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In contrast to Alfonso, Lorenzo de’Medici had everything in his favour as a patron.
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Living in Florence, he had instant access to major artists and did not to have to go to the trouble of attracting them from a distance. He was not a lone patron but one of many, great and small. The importance of his patronage has been exaggerated in the past. The issue here, however, is not its extent but its facility. Patronage was structured – easier in some parts of Italy, more difficult in others.

As for the rise of the market, it is likely to have given artists and writers more freedom at the price of more insecurity. It involved the rise of reproduction and even mass production. Yet it may well have encouraged the increasing differentiation of subject matter and individualism of style noted in the first chapter: the exploitation of the artist’s unique qualities in order to catch the eye of a purchaser.