The Italian Renaissance (49 page)

T
he
explanations offered by historians – whether they admit this or not – depend on implicit comparisons, contrasts and even generalizations. The explanations advanced in this study are no exception, and it may be useful to make a few of these implied comparisons and contrasts more explicit.

The culture of the Italian Renaissance described and analysed here has many features in common with the culture of other societies, near and remote. For example, artistic achievement and innovation was linked to civic patronage and civic pride in sixteenth-century Nuremberg as in Florence and Venice. Albrecht Dürer was asked to paint murals in the Town Hall of Nuremberg in 1521, and the post of city painter was created ten years later. The idea that a ‘crisis of liberty’ successfully surmounted is a stimulus to the arts can be illustrated not only from Florence in the early fifteenth century but from ancient Greece in the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and from England in the age of Shakespeare. As Florence beat off the threat posed by Milan, so the English defeated the superior forces of Spain and the Greeks the Persian Empire. Although Vasari was the first European to devote a book to the lives of artists (Pliny’s anecdotes about Greek artists being part of his enormous
Natural History
), Chang Yen-Yuan had preceded him in China with biographies of 370 painters. On the other hand, the apparent lack of concern with individual creativity shown in the organization of workshops and in some large-scale projects in Renaissance Italy has parallels with some tribal societies, such as the Tiv of Nigeria, where different people may take turns carving the same object.
¹

The danger of isolating cultural traits lies in exaggerating apparent similarities and in ignoring the context in which their meaning resides. It is more illuminating, although obviously more difficult, to compare entire cultural configurations or systems. Joseph Alsop, for example, argued that the rise of the art market and of art history have occurred
together in several cultures, including ancient Rome and traditional China as well as Renaissance Italy.
²
The great French historian Marc Bloch made a useful distinction between two kinds of comparative history: comparisons between societies which are fundamentally alike (such as medieval France and England) and comparisons between the fundamentally unlike (such as France and Japan).
³
Each is instructive, but in different ways. In the pages which follow I shall sketch two comparisons with Renaissance Italy, one of each kind: with the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and with Japan in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (or, rather less Eurocentrically, in the Genroku period of the Tokugawa era).

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Netherlands was a centre of cultural innovation which (so far as Europe was concerned) was equalled or surpassed only by Italy. As in Italy, there was a whole cluster of outstanding painters, among them Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David, Hans Memlinc, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden and Pieter Brueghel the elder. As in Italy, there was conscious innovation, a
nouvelle pratique
as it was called. One of the chief aims of painters was verisimilitude, and one of their chief means to this end was the employment of perspective. Again, as in Italy, the subject matter of painting was becoming more secular, and a differentiation of genres was taking place. These genres included the portrait, even more popular than in Italy; the still-life, a sixteenth-century development; the landscape, from the miniatures in fifteenth-century manuscripts to the work of Joachim Patenir of Antwerp, described by Dürer as a ‘good landscape painter’; and scenes from everyday life, such as the card-players and chess-players of Lucas van Leyden or the markets painted by Pieter Aertsen.

In other respects, however, Italian and ‘Flemish’ culture, as it is convenient to call it (although Flanders was technically only a part of the Netherlands), were rather dissimilar. As the art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out, a comparison of cultural innovation in the two regions reveals a ‘chiastic pattern’. In Italy, innovation was greatest in architecture; then came sculpture, then painting and, finally, music. In the Netherlands, by contrast, innovation was greatest of all in music in the age of Dufay, Binchois, Busnois, Ockeghem and Josquin des Près. In the second place came painting. Sculpture was a long way behind; no
major figure succeeded Claus Sluter, who died in 1406 (the rivals of the Italian sculptors came from southern Germany and worked in wood). Architecture was relatively traditional in manner; a typical example is the Town Hall at Louvain, built in 1448 in ornate Gothic style.
⁴

To focus more sharply on painting is to reveal other differences between the two regions. Frescoes were less important in the Netherlands (where large windows left little wall space in churches) and miniatures in manuscripts more important. The most famous contrast between the painters of Italy and the Netherlands was made at the time, by Michelangelo:

They paint in Flanders only to deceive the outward eye [
vista exterior
] … Their painting is of textiles, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting, and finally without any substance or nerve.
⁵

The criticism is unfair but revealing – in its very unfairness – of the values of Michelangelo and of Florentine visual culture, in which idealization and the heroic were central, while the illusion of solidity mattered more than the illusion of space. The contrast did not prevent Italians of the period from admiring and buying works by painters such as Hans Memlinc, Hugo van der Goes or Rogier van der Weyden.
⁶

There were economic and social as well as cultural parallels between Italy and the Netherlands. As a fifteenth-century Spanish traveller put it, ‘two cities compete with each other for commercial supremacy, Bruges in Flanders in the West and Venice in the East.’ These cities were set in the most highly urbanized parts of Europe. Around the year 1500, in the provinces of Flanders and Brabant, as much as two-thirds of the population lived in towns. As in Italy, the commercialization of agriculture consequent on the growth of towns led to the disappearance of serfdom earlier than elsewhere. As in Italy, the textile industry was of great importance for export-led growth, and within the industry there was a shift towards production for the luxury market, as in the case of the tapestries made in Arras, Lille and Tournai. In the Netherlands, too, the peak
period for the visual arts coincided with the peak in the development of the luxury industries.
⁷

In Flanders, as in Italy, artists were often the sons of craftsmen. Out of seventeen leading painters whose father’s occupation is known, fourteen were the sons of craftsmen: a cutler, a weaver, a smith, an artist, and so on. Painting was a family business and there were well-known dynasties of artists, such as the Bouts, Brueghel, Floris and Massys families. However, female artists are more visible, ‘and must have made up a significant part of the workforce in many towns’.
⁸
The painters tended to be born in sizeable towns and to gravitate towards Bruges and Antwerp, the greatest commercial cities of the Netherlands. Bruges lost its economic dominance around the year 1500 owing to the silting up of the River Zwijn, and its place was taken by Antwerp, where the population rose to about 100,000 by 1550. In painting, too, the centre shifted from Bruges to Antwerp, which is not surprising, since merchants were among the most important patrons. As in Italy, an art market developed in the sixteenth century.
⁹

In the Netherlands, as in Italy, artists generally had the status of craftsmen, unless their patrons were rulers such as Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, who appointed Jan van Eyck his official painter and
valet de chambre
, sent him on diplomatic missions, visited his studio at Bruges and gave him six silver cups for the christening of the painter’s son. However, the painters of the Netherlands seem to have lacked the self-awareness of some of their Italian colleagues. Self-portraits are more rare, and the Dutch Vasari, Karel van Mander, did not publish his collection of artists’ biographies until 1604.

The relation of the music of the period to the society in which it was composed is rather more indirect and elusive. Most of this music is church music (possibly because church music had a better chance of survival). The great composers usually owed their musical training (as we have seen, p. 61) to cathedral choir schools. Some of them held benefices. However, the increasing size of church choirs in this period was made possible only by the generosity of the laity. The money was used in part to bring laymen into the choirs; for example, the cathedral chapter at Antwerp diverted income from some benefices to pay the salaries of professional singers, who did not have to be clerics. As in Italy, townspeople founded fraternities, and some, such as the Fraternity of Our Lady at Antwerp (whose members included bankers, merchants and craftsmen),
financed a daily service with singers. In other words, the ecclesiastical culture of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century was founded on urban wealth.