The Italian Renaissance (48 page)

Such an account is too simple because it ignores the possibility of changes in style being – in part at least – reactions to art rather than to the world outside it. In any case, corroborative evidence is lacking yet again about the inner lives of most artists and their responses to the world around them. The one exception, Michelangelo, comes from an earlier
generation (he was born in 1475). He was involved in the religious movements of his time, sympathetic to Savonarola in his youth and to Ignatius Loyola in his old age. His letters and poems do communicate a sense of spiritual anguish. However, the little we know about the lives and personalities of such artists as Giulio Romano and Parmigianino suggests that they were very different from Michelangelo. The most that could be safely said would be that the Mannerists responded in different ways to similar experiences, of which the sack of 1527 was the most important.
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At the same time as these dramatic events, other cultural and social changes were taking place in Italy, which were no less significant for passing virtually unnoticed at the time. If we compare the situation in the later sixteenth century with that in 1400, certain major differences will become apparent. In 1400, for example, what we now call the Renaissance was a movement restricted to a small group of Florentines, who made important innovations in the arts and criticized some traditional assumptions and values. They were surrounded, even in Florence, by colleagues with traditional attitudes, patrons who made the usual demands, and craftsmen who went on working in the customary manner. The new ideas and the new style gradually spread from Florence to the rest of Tuscany and from Tuscany to the rest of Italy.
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The invention of printing helped spread the ideals of the movement more quickly than had ever been possible before. Grammars and anthologies of poems and letters familiarized literate men and women all over Italy with Tuscan usage. The illustrated architectural treatises of Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio made the classical language of architecture equally familiar. The new art gradually created a market for itself. Patrons became aware that it was possible to commission statuettes or scenes from classical mythology, while the knowledge of the differences between the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders became part of a gentleman’s education.

The growth of a public interested in the new ideals was itself a force for change, encouraging the development of a more allusive art and literature. Aretino and Berni were among the writers who parodied the love lyrics of
Petrarch. To enjoy their poems the reader needs to have some familiarity with Petrarch and his fifteenth-century imitators, a familiarity which breeds boredom if not exactly contempt.
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In a similar way the deliberate mistakes or solecisms in Giulio Romano’s frieze at Mantua imply spectators who are educated enough to know the rules, to entertain certain visual expectations, to receive a shock when those expectations are falsified, and finally to enjoy being shocked because familiarity with the rules has made them rather blasé.

Another unintended consequence of the spread of the new ideals was the gradual diminution of regional diversities, which had been enormously important in earlier centuries and remained visible even in the sixteenth century in Lombardy, in Naples and especially in Venice.
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Domenico Beccafumi, for example, was not as distinctively Sienese a painter as (say) Neroccio de’ Landi had been. From Milan to Naples, literature composed in dialect was giving way to literature composed in Tuscan.
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Other cultural changes have been discussed more than once in this study. Individual style in art and literature was becoming more noticeable, and was indeed attracting more notice in the sixteenth century than before (above, pp. 230ff.). There was a slow but steady secularization of the arts – for example a rise in the proportion of paintings with secular subjects.
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There was an increasing concern with gravity, elegance, grace, grandeur and majesty in art and literature alike.
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As a result, many words had to be eliminated from literature (dialect terms, technical terms, ‘vulgar’ terms, and so on) and many gestures had to be eliminated from art. Wölfflin’s example is a striking one: ‘St Peter, in Ghirlandaio’s
Last Supper
of 1480, gestures with his thumb towards Christ, a gesture of the people, which High Art forthwith rejected as inadmissible.’
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In the course of the sixteenth century, the upper classes gradually withdrew from participation in popular festivals. They did not give up Carnival, but they created a Carnival of their own, parallel to popular festivities rather than a part of it. In short, the cultural differences between regions were replaced by cultural differences between classes. As the gap between
Lombard culture and Tuscan culture narrowed, the gap between high culture and low culture widened.
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Why did these changes take place? It would be presumptuous even to attempt to explain them down to the last detail, but it would also be absurd to ignore obvious connections with social changes that were taking place both in the milieu of the arts and in Italy as a whole.

There was, for example, a gradual rise in the social status of artists and also in their social origin. Such leading artists of the early fifteenth century as Fra Angelico, Jacopo Bellini (son of a tinsmith), Andrea Castagno (son of a peasant), Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Masolino and Michelozzo all had humble social origins. On the other hand, a number of leading artists born in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century were of relatively high status: Paris Bordone, for example (whose mother was noble), Angelo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Leone Leoni (who was knighted) and Pirro Ligorio (a nobleman). Most cases of ennobled painters are later than 1480 or thereabouts, as are most cases of painters with a splendid style of life, such as Raphael (whom some expected to be made a cardinal) and Baldassare Peruzzi, who was taken for a nobleman when he was captured during the sack of Rome. In his life of Dello Delli, Vasari noted that, in the fifteenth century, unlike ‘today’, artists were not ashamed to paint and gild furniture. The obvious reason for this increase in shame is a rise in social status. Another sign of the separation of artists from the main body of craftsmen was the foundation of academies, such as the Accademia di Disegno in Florence (founded in the 1560s) and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (founded in the 1590s); the models for these institutions were the literary academies, which were clubs of noble amateurs. In 1400, the social status of art was low, and so were the social origins of artists; each factor helps explain the other. By 1600, however, the status of art and the origins of artists had risen together.

There were also significant changes in patronage during the period. By the sixteenth century, it is possible to find a significant number of collectors who, like the well-documented Isabella d’Este or the Venetian patrons of Giorgione, bought works of art for their own sake, were interested in the style and the iconographic details, and were concerned to acquire a Raphael or a Titian rather than a Madonna or a St Sebastian. Artistic individualism was now profitable, and, although artists are rarely named in inventories before 1600, there is other evidence of a shift in certain circles from ‘cult images’ in the religious sense to the ‘cult of images’ for their own sake.
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There was also a shift in the balance of power between
the patron and the artist. Their rising status perhaps improved the bargaining position of artists. Michelangelo, who stood up to patrons in a manner which most of his colleagues could not emulate, was the son not of a craftsman but of a Florentine magistrate. On the other hand, the increasing independence of artists, who were becoming more like poets and less like carpenters, doubtless enhanced their status. The roles of artist and patron were mutually dependent and they changed together. They were also part of a much larger network of social roles and were affected by changes in the social structure.

These changes in the social structure may be summed up in two words, standing for two conflicting trends: ‘commercialization’ and ‘refeudalization’.

A certain amount of evidence for commercialization has been offered in earlier chapters. Towns were growing in the fifteenth and still more rapidly in the sixteenth century. The population of Florence, for example, grew from about 40,000 in 1427 to about 70,000 in the early to mid-sixteenth century. Naples contained about 40,000 people in 1450 but more than 200,000 a century later. The growth of these and other towns involved the commercialization of agriculture. Share-cropping spread in Tuscany, for example, a system which implies that landlords were increasingly inclined to think like businessmen about profits rather than a steady income from a fixed rent. At the same time, the book market was becoming important, thanks to the invention of printing. So, as we have seen, was the market in works of art, ancient and modern, originals and reproductions alike.

Yet this trend was to some degree offset by another, which historians describe as ‘refeudalization’ (in the wide, Marxist sense of the term ‘feudal’) or, as Braudel does, as the ‘treason of the bourgeoisie’.
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A number of wealthy merchants (how many in any given decade it is unfortunately impossible to say) shifted their investments from trade to land. The trend is most noticeable in the two cities that have concerned us most in this study, Florence and Venice, where the patricians, poised for a long time between bourgeoisie and nobility, opted by their changing style of life for the latter. In Florence, the movement was gradual, almost imperceptible in any one generation, though obvious enough if one compares the patriciate of 1600 with its equivalent in 1400 or the better-documented year 1427. In Venice, the movement was more sudden. It was after the year 1570 or thereabouts that the patricians began to switch their investments from trade to landed estates on the
mainland, from neighbouring Padua to distant Friuli.
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They changed from being entrepreneurs to rentiers; from having a dominant interest in profit to a dominant interest in consumption. The elegant gestures in Florentine portraits by Bronzino and others reflect the attitudes of the sitters, who were no longer prepared to get their hands dirty as their fathers and grandfathers had done (good merchants, as Giovanni Rucellai had observed in the later fifteenth century, always have inky fingers).
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The most splendid Venetian villas, starting with Villa Maser, built by Palladio and decorated by Veronese in the early 1560s for the Barbaro family, belong to this period of the return to the land.

Why did this change take place? It looks like an example of the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves cycle, the third-generation syndrome which the American economist W. W. Rostow called ‘the pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics’, after the Lübeck family described in a famous novel by Thomas Mann.
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As in Mann’s novel, so in Renaissance Italy one can point to examples (most obviously that of the Medici) of families ruined for trade by a humanist education; Lorenzo the Magnificent composed poems while the family bank went into decline. However, the significant change is the one that affected not only some families but a whole social group. Families had withdrawn from trade before; what was new, in Florence, Venice and elsewhere, was the lack of new families to replace them.

Why? The fundamental explanation was probably an economic one. As a result of the discovery of America, the centre of gravity of European trade was shifting away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic. The Italians were losing their traditional role as middlemen in international trade, which was being taken over by the Portuguese, the English and, above all, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch. We have returned to the theme of ‘hard times and contempt for trade’ (above, p. 239). At the same time food prices were rising, so that, to wealthy urban Italians, land appeared an increasingly attractive investment.

This change in the style of life of the patriciate was good for the arts in the short term but not so beneficial in the long run. The ruling class was more inclined to patronize the arts because this was part of their new aristocratic lifestyle, but in the long term the wealth which permitted them to build palaces and buy works of art dried up. The change in values – especially the emphasis on birth and the contempt for manual labour – worked against the newly risen status of the artist. There was a kind of ‘brain drain’ (brains being what an artist mixes his colours with)
thanks to the diffusion of Renaissance ideals abroad and the consequent demand for Italian artists in Hungary, France, Spain, England and elsewhere. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italy, a country of merchant republics, had been as distinctive socially as she was culturally. As she came to resemble other European societies, Italy lost her cultural lead. There was also a shift of creativity from the visual arts into music, which has been explained by the decline of the city-state as well as increasing ecclesiastical control of the media.
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All the same, Italian art remained the envy of Europe until the death of Bernini in 1680.