The Italian Renaissance (32 page)

So far the emphasis has fallen on general assumptions held in the period, on a common language of taste. It might be summed up, crudely, in the formula beauty = nature = reason = antiquity. These different values were not consistent with one another in the way that the formula implies, but they were very often treated as consistent by contemporaries. This is not to say that there were no aesthetic disagreements in the period; we have already noted, for example, not only the controversy over imitation but the different valuations of simplicity. What is being asserted is simply that disagreements took place within a common framework of assumptions that was all the more powerful for being unconscious. This common framework, which we might call a ‘mentality’, made it difficult for individuals to think beyond certain limits, which might be called ‘invisible barriers’. Ideas beyond those barriers appeared self-evidently absurd to most contemporaries.
³⁹

However,
it is now time to say something more about the varieties of taste. There were differences in taste between individuals. There were differences between the arts. There were also changes in taste during the period, as we have seen, with an increasing concern with richness and a growing unease about rules. This section will concentrate on three major contrasts: those dividing the inhabitants of different regions, the members of different social groups and, finally, the participants
in
from the opponents
of
the movement we call the Renaissance.

Firstly, differences between regions. We have already seen that different parts of Italy made extremely unequal contributions to different arts. It is also obvious that different regions had their own styles in painting and building, which presumably correspond to differences in taste. In most cases, literary evidence about these regional variations is lacking, but there is one famous exception. The contrast between Florentine and Venetian traditions of taste became the subject of a debate, with the Venetians stressing colour while the Florentines stressed draughtsmanship (
disegno
). On the Florentine side, Vasari, however great his interest in Titian, was never prepared to admit that he was the equal of Michelangelo, while, on the other, Paolo Pino, who dramatizes the debate in his
Dialogue on Painting
, and Lodovico Dolce, in his
Aretino
, insist on Titian’s supreme greatness.
⁴⁰
Again, as we have seen (above, p. 31) the Florentine taste for simplicity in architecture, for instance, was very different from the Lombard taste for rich decoration.

Secondly, differences between social groups. Was Frederick Antal, for example (above, p. 39), correct in contrasting aristocratic and bourgeois taste in early fifteenth-century Florence? Or, if he was mistaken in this instance, can a similar contrast be sustained for Renaissance Italy as a whole?

In this period as in others the language of taste was closely related to the language used to appraise social behaviour. Decorum was a social ideal as well as an aesthetic one. ‘Grace’ was a term applied to deportment before it was employed to describe works of art, and even
maniera
was originally associated with good manners rather than with artistic style.
⁴¹
The use of these terms underlines the fact that what we tend to call the taste of ‘the time’ was the creation of particular social groups, and that it sometimes expressed their social prejudices. It was, for example, considered a breach of decorum to use technical terms when
writing in the high style because an author should not show too much knowledge of the techniques of people of low status such as craftsmen. It was a breach of decorum to use new words because ‘new men’ were not acceptable socially. The poet Vida makes the analogy explicit: ‘But yet admit no words into the song / Unless they prove the stock from whence they sprung.’ Bembo’s discussions of literary vocabulary suggest that he was preoccupied with the question of what was known in Britain in the 1960s as ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. His preoccupation was brilliantly parodied by Aretino (a writer who did not come from the upper classes) in his story of the courtesan who declared that a window should be called
balcone
, never
finestra
; a door,
porta
rather than
uscio
; and a face,
viso
not
faccia
.
⁴²

According to contemporary theorists, different styles of building or music were appropriate for different social groups. Filarete, for example, declared that he could design houses for ‘each class of persons’ (
ciascheduno facultà di persone
) which differed not only in size but in style. Nicolò Vicentino distinguished two kinds of ancient music, one public, for ‘ordinary ears’ (
vulgari orecchie
), the other private, for ears which were ‘cultivated’ (
purgate
).
⁴³
In literature, the hierarchy of styles – high, middle and low – was associated with different social groups. Aristotle had said in his
Poetics
that tragedy dealt with good men, comedy with ordinary ones, but in the Renaissance he was believed to be referring to noblemen and commoners. Literature in the high style was literature for and about the elite.

It is difficult enough to assess the effect of social background on artistic and literary taste even in our own day, let alone the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It would be unwise to make any very general or unqualified assertions. We certainly have to take account of the fact that humanists and nobles participated in what we call ‘popular’ culture.
⁴⁴
Poliziano declared his enjoyment of folksongs, Lorenzo de’Medici wrote songs for Carnival, while the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano stood in the piazza to listen to a singer of tales (
cantastorie
).
⁴⁵
Ariosto also took pleasure in the romances of chivalry sung by the
cantastorie
, and his
Orlando Furioso
draws on this popular tradition. Conversely, the
Orlando Furioso
made its way into Italian popular culture via chapbook versions of particular cantos.
⁴⁶

All this
has to be borne in mind, but it does not imply that literary tastes did not vary according to the social group of readers or listeners. Ariosto did not simply imitate the
cantastorie
; he adapted traditional romances to his own milieu, the court of Ferrara. He writes, for example, with an irony not to be found in the texts of his predecessors. He was aware of the classical epic, though he refused to take Bembo’s advice and write in the Virgilian manner. Again, the chapbooks did not simply reproduce cantos of Ariosto; they made changes, most obviously in the direction of greater simplicity. It is reasonable to assume that all these singers, writers and publishers knew what their different audiences wanted. There is evidence from the inventories of libraries (such as those of the brothers da Maiano, already discussed) that Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, with its ‘low’ style, was popular among merchants and their wives, especially in Tuscany, while Dante, despite Bembo’s criticisms, was also widely read in this milieu. Petrarch’s love lyrics, on the other hand, were read all over Italy, but by young men and young ladies of noble family.
⁴⁷

The last division of opinion to discuss here is the most central to this study, because it concerns the Renaissance itself. It is obvious enough that the Renaissance was a minority movement because the majority of the Italian population of the period comprised peasants who would have had little opportunity to learn about these cultural innovations, even had they wished to do so. However, the minority with the leisure and the skills necessary for involvement in the movement was not all of one mind about it. To revive a useful term from the Oxford of the sixteenth century, there were ‘Trojans’ as well as ‘Greeks’ in Renaissance Italy. More exactly, there was distaste for, or, rather, strong disapproval of, aspects of the innovations of the period on two grounds in particular.

The more common argument put forward in this period against much art and literature was that they were temptations to immorality. San Bernardino of Siena was one of those who denounced the
Decameron
, long before it was ordered to be expurgated. Pope Eugenius IV condemned Panormita’s poem
The Hermaphrodite
, which was burned in public in Bologna, Ferrara and Milan in 1431. Savonarola denounced painters who ‘show the Virgin Mary dressed as a whore’. According to Vasari, the painter Baccio della Porta, better known as Fra Bartolommeo, was persuaded by Savonarola’s sermons that ‘it was not good to keep paintings of male and female nudes in the house, where there were children’, and put them on the bonfire during the famous ‘burning of vanities’ in Florence in 1497.
⁴⁸
The fig-leaves painted onto the figures in Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement
have been mentioned already. The
Trojans must not be forgotten; but the number of surviving Renaissance nudes suggests that – till about 1550 at least – they were fighting a losing battle. The history of reactions to literature is a similar one. The year 1559 marked a turning point, with Pope Paul IV’s condemnation, on moral grounds, of a number of famous books, such as the jests of Poggio Bracciolini, the stories of Masuccio Salernitano, the poems of Luigi Pulci and Francesco Berni, and the complete works of Aretino.

The second objection to the arts was that they were idolatrous because they so often dealt with the pagan gods. When Pope Adrian VI, a Netherlander of severe tastes, was shown the famous classical statue of Laocoön, installed in the Vatican by one of his predecessors, he is said to have remarked drily, ‘Those are the idols of the ancients.’ However, the number of paintings and poems from this period concerned with pagan mythology do not authorize the conclusion (drawn by some northerners, Erasmus no less than Adrian VI) that Italians were pagan. The myths were widely believed to have an allegorical meaning (a famous defence of mythology on these grounds was the humanist Coluccio Salutati’s treatise
The Labours of Hercules
). What kind of meaning, and what kind of people believed it, are topics for discussion in the next chapter.