The Italian Renaissance (6 page)

In the case of literature, the poets Jacopo Sannazzaro and Marco Girolamo Vida wrote epics on the birth and the life of Christ in the manner of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, combining Christian material with classical
form.
²⁷
A Renaissance prince would be as likely to read or listen to the medieval romance of Tristan as to the classical epic of Aeneas, and Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
is a hybrid epic-romance set in the age of Roland and Charlemagne. Indeed, the interpenetration of chivalric and humanist attitudes was great enough for one scholar to speak of ‘chivalric humanism’.
²⁸
Poliziano’s pastoral drama
Orfeo
begins with the entry of Mercury, who takes over the place and function of the angel who commonly introduced Italian mystery plays.

Again, the rise of humanism did not drive out medieval scholastic philosophy (despite the deprecating remarks the humanists made about the
scholastici
). Indeed, leading figures in the Renaissance movement, such as the neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, were well read in medieval as well as in classical philosophy. Lorenzo de’Medici, the ruler of Florence, can be found writing to Giovanni Bentivoglio, the ruler of Bologna, asking him to search the local bookshops for a copy of the commentary on Aristotle’s
Ethics
by the late medieval philosopher Jean Buridan, while Leonardo da Vinci studied the work of Albert of Saxony and Albert the Great.
²⁹

Realism, secularism and individualism are three features commonly attributed to the arts in Renaissance Italy. All three characteristics are problematic. In the case of the term ‘realism’, several different problems are involved. In the first place, although artists in a number of cultures have claimed to abandon convention and imitate ‘nature’ or ‘reality’, they have nevertheless made use of some system of conventions.
³⁰
In the second place, since the term ‘realism’ was coined in nineteenth-century France to refer to the novels of Stendhal and the paintings of Courbet, its use in discussions of the Renaissance encourages anachronistic analogies between the two periods. In the third place, the term has too many meanings, which need discrimination. It may be useful to distinguish three kinds of realism: domestic, deceptive and expressive.

‘Domestic’ realism refers to the choice of the everyday, the ordinary or the low status as a subject for the arts, rather than the privileged moments of privileged people. Courbet’s stonebreakers and Pieter de Hooch’s scenes from everyday Dutch life are examples of this ‘art of describing’.
³¹
‘Deceptive’ realism, on the other hand, refers to style, for example to paintings which produce or attempt to produce the illusion
that they are not paintings. ‘Expressive’ realism also refers to style, but to the manipulation of outward reality the better to express what is within, as in the case of a portrait where the shape of the face is modified to reveal the sitter’s character or a natural gesture is replaced by a more eloquent one.

How useful are these concepts in approaching the arts in Renaissance Italy? Expressive realism is not difficult to identify in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
, say, or in the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo; the only difficulty lies in finding a period in which works of art do not have this trait. More of an innovation in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance (as in the Flemish art of the period) is the domestic realism of the backgrounds. Carlo Crivelli’s
Annunciation
, for example (Plate 1.1), lingers lovingly on carpets, embroidered cushions, plates, books and the rest of the interior decoration of the Virgin’s room. Ghirlandaio’s
Adoration of the Shepherds
(Plate 1.2) includes, as the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin put it, ‘the family luggage – a shabby old saddle lying on the ground with a small cask of wine beside it’.
³²
It is important to see that the details are there, but also to remember that they are merely in the background. Today, we often see the details as genre paintings in miniature, and reproduce them as such. Contemporaries, on the other hand, did not have the concept of genre picture, and may well have seen the details as symbolic or as ornaments to fill up a blank space.

It is possible to find similar domestic details in the literature of the time, in the mystery plays, for example. In one anonymous play on the birth of Christ the shepherds, Nencio, Bobi, Randello and the rest, bring food with them when they go to adore the Saviour, and eat it on stage.
³³
In literature, however, unlike painting, there were genres in which domestic realism filled the foreground. There was the
novella
, for example, the short story dealing with the lives of ordinary people, a favourite Italian genre between Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and Bandello in the sixteenth. The comedy might portray peasant life, as in the case of the plays in Paduan dialect written and performed by Antonio Beolco
il Ruzzante
(‘the jester’). Music too might attempt to re-create hunting or market scenes. The idea of domestic realism might be extended to include pictorial narratives in what has come to be called the ‘eyewitness style’, by Vittore Carpaccio, for example (Plate 5.7), on the grounds that these paintings might be used to prove that certain events had really taken place.
³⁴

More difficult is the question of deceptive realism. From Vasari to
Ruskin and beyond, the Renaissance was generally seen as an important step in the rise of more and more accurate representations of reality. At the beginning of this century, however, this notion was challenged, just at the time (surely no coincidence) of the development of abstract art. Heinrich Wölfflin, for example, suggested that ‘it is a mistake for art history to work with the clumsy notion of the imitation of nature, as though it were merely a homogeneous process of increasing perfection’, while another celebrated art historian, Alois Riegl, wrote more dramatically still that ‘Every style aims at a faithful rendering of nature and nothing else, but each has its own conception of nature.’
³⁵

At
this point the reader may well be thinking that the Renaissance discovery of linear perspective is a counter-example, but even this argument was challenged by the art historians Erwin Panofsky and Pierre Francastel, who argued that perspective is a ‘symbolic form’, ‘a set of conventions like any other’, depending on monocular vision. This was the point of Brunelleschi’s famous box with a peephole in it, to which the viewer could put one eye and see, reflected in a mirror, a view of the Baptistery in Florence.
³⁶

If these arguments are valid, to talk about ‘Renaissance realism’ is to talk nonsense. However, Riegl’s arresting formulation is in danger of unfalsifiability, of circularity. The evidence of an artist’s conception of nature comes from his paintings, but the paintings are then interpreted in terms of that same conception. It seems more useful to start from the empirical fact that some societies, like some individuals, take a particular interest in the visible world, as it appears to them, and that Renaissance Italy was one of these. Wax images, often life-size and dressed in the clothes of the person they represented, were placed in churches, life-masks and death-masks were frequently made, and some artists dissected corpses in order to understand the structure of the human body.
³⁷
The point is not that deceptive realism was the only aim of the artists of the time; it is easy to show such a statement to be false. Paolo Uccello, for example, coloured his horses according to quite different criteria. However, Vasari criticized Uccello precisely for this lack of verisimilitude, and the literary sources discussed in
chapter 6
suggest that many viewers expected this kind of realism and judged paintings in terms of truth to appearances.

Another distinctive feature of the Italian culture of the Renaissance was that, relative to the Middle Ages, it was secular.
³⁸
The contrast should not be exaggerated. A sample study suggests that the proportion of Italian paintings that were secular in subject rose from about 5 per cent in the 1420s to about 20 per cent in the 1520s. In this case, ‘secularization’ means only that the minority of secular pictures grew somewhat larger.
³⁹
In the case of sculpture, literature and music, it is more
difficult to use quantitative methods, or to go beyond the obvious point that several of the new genres were secular: the equestrian statue, for example, the comedy and the madrigal.

If one tries to go further, conceptual problems become acute, as the case of what might be called ‘crypto-secularization’ illustrates. Pictures which are officially concerned with St George (say) or St Jerome seem to devote less and less attention to the saint and more and more to the background; the saints become smaller, for example. This trend suggests a possible tension between what the patrons really wanted and what they considered legitimate. The difficulty is that contemporaries did not make the sharp distinctions between the sacred and the secular that became obligatory in Italy in the late sixteenth century, following the Council of Trent. By later standards they were continually sanctifying the profane and profaning the sacred. Masses were based on the tunes of popular songs. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino liked to call himself a ‘priest of the Muses’, and there was a ‘chapel of the Muses’ in the palace at Urbino. God and his vicar the pope might be addressed as ‘Jupiter’ or ‘Apollo’. Some people, such as Erasmus, who visited Rome in 1509, were scandalized by practices such as these, but they persisted throughout the period, as
chapter 9
will suggest. If we are going to discuss the Renaissance in terms of ‘secularization’, we should at least be aware that we are imposing later categories on the period.

A third characteristic generally ascribed to the culture of Renaissance Italy, and discussed in detail in Burckhardt’s famous book on the subject, is ‘individualism’. Like ‘realism’, ‘individualism’ is a term which has come to bear too many meanings (discussed on pp. 000 below). It will be used here to refer to the fact that works of art in this period (unlike the Middle Ages) were made in a personal style. But is this really a ‘fact’? To twenty-first-century observers, medieval paintings look much less like the work of different individuals than Renaissance paintings do, but this may be an illusion of the type ‘all Chinese look alike’ (to the non-Chinese). At all events, the testimony of contemporaries suggests that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists and public alike were interested in individual styles.
⁴⁰
In his craftsman’s handbook, Cennino Cennini advised painters ‘to find a good style which is right for you’ (
pigliare buna maniera propia per te
). In his discussion of the perfect courtier and his understanding of the arts, Baldassare Castiglione suggested that Mantegna, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelanglo and Giorgione were each perfect ‘in his own style’ (
nel suo stilo
). The Portuguese visitor to Italy Francisco de Hollanda made a similar point about Leonardo, Raphael and
Titian: ‘each one paints in his own style’ (
cada um pinta por sua maneira
).
⁴¹
In literature, the imitation of ancient models was a matter for debate, in which some protagonists, notably Poliziano, attacked the ideal of writing like Cicero, and argued the value of individual self-expression.
⁴²
There was, of course, much imitation of classical and modern artists and writers. Indeed, it was probably the norm. The point about individualism, like secularism, is not that it was dominant, but that it was relatively new, and that it distinguishes the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.