The Italian Renaissance (21 page)

Filarete, for example, stressed the pleasure in building for its own sake, ‘a voluptuous pleasure as when a man is in love’. The more the patron sees the building, the more he wants to see it, and he loves to talk to everyone about it – typical lover’s behaviour. The names of some villas of the period suggest that they were playthings: Schifanoia (‘Avoid boredom’) at Ferrara; Casa Zoiosa (Happy House) at Mantua. According to the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, who did not go out of his way to praise the visual arts, two of his prominent clients, Federigo of Urbino and Cosimo de’Medici, took a keen personal pleasure in sculpture and architecture. To hear Federigo talk to a sculptor, ‘one would have thought it his trade’, while Cosimo was so much interested in architecture that his advice was sought by those who intended to build.
³⁰
The correspondence of Isabella d’Este leaves the impression that the reason she commissioned paintings was simply to have them. She was not the only patron to think in this way. Isabella failed to acquire two Giorgiones because they had been commissioned by two Venetian patricians ‘for their own enjoyment’.
³¹
There seems to have been a circle of patrician collectors in Venice at this time, including Taddeo Contarini and Gabriele Vendramin, a well-known art-lover in whose house the famous
Tempest
could be seen in 1530.
³²

This desire to acquire works of art for their own sake is found above all in individuals who have something else in common: a humanist education. After Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, engaged Vittorino da Feltre to teach his children, they grew up to become patrons of the arts, and so did Federigo of Urbino, who also studied with Vittorino. Similarly, the children of the ruling house of Este at Ferrara became patrons of the arts after they had been educated by Guarino of Verona. As a child, Lorenzo de’Medici had a humanist tutor, Gentile Becchi. Gabriele Vendramin moved in a social circle which took in humanists of the calibre of Ermolao Barbaro and Bernardo Bembo.
³³
Although humanists did not always respect artists, the study of the humanities seems to have encouraged a taste for pictures and statues, including statuettes.
³⁴

Now that
the patron and the artist have been introduced to each other, we may consider their relative influence on the finished product. A study of Cosimo de’Medici bears the subtitle ‘the patron’s oeuvre’, stressing his initiative and arguing that ‘For most of the fifteenth century artists were not considered to be independent creative agents and did not behave as such.’
³⁵
The testimony of contemporaries does indeed suggest that the influence of the patron was considerable. The term ‘made’ (
fecit
) continued to be used of patrons, as it had been in the Middle Ages. Filarete described the patron as the father of the building, the architect as the mother. Titian told Alfonso duke of Ferrara that he was

convinced that the greatness of art amongst the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes content to leave to the painter the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in commissioning pictures … I shall, after all, have done no more than give shape to that which received its spirit – the most essential part – from Your Excellency.
³⁶

He was, of course, flattering the duke, but the different forms taken by flattery in different periods provide valuable evidence for social historians.

More precise evidence about the relative importance of patrons and artists and the expectations of both parties is provided by the scores of surviving contracts.
³⁷
The contracts discuss many topics, including framing, installation and maintenance, but they concentrate on six issues. In the first place come materials, an important question because of the expense of the gold and lapis lazuli used for paintings or the bronze and marble for sculpture. Sometimes the patron provided the materials, sometimes the artist did so. Contracts often specified that the materials employed be of high quality. Andrea del Sarto promised to use at least 5 florins’ worth of azure on a Virgin Mary, while Michelangelo promised that the marble for his famous
Pietà
, begun in 1501, should be ‘new, pure and white, with no veins in it’.
³⁸
The emphasis on materials is a clue to what the client thought he was buying. Leonardo’s contract for
The Virgin of the Rocks
gives a ten-year guarantee; if anything was to need repainting within that period, it was to be at the expense of the artist. One wonders whether Leonardo gave a similar guarantee in the case of his flaky
Last Supper
.

Secondly, there was the question of price, including the currency (large ducats, papal ducats, and so on). Sometimes the money was paid on completion, sometimes in instalments while the work was in progress. Alternatively, the price might not be fixed in advance; either the artist declared his readiness to accept what the patron thought good to offer, or the work would be valued by other artists, as it was in cases of dispute.
³⁹
Payments in kind were sometimes included. Signorelli’s contract for frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral gave him the right to a sum of money, to gold and azure, to lodgings and a bed. After negotiations, he raised the offer to two beds.

Thirdly, there was the question of delivery date, vague or precise, with or without sanctions if the artist did not keep his word. A Venetian state commission to Giovanni Bellini stated that the paintings should be finished ‘as quickly as possible’. In 1529, Beccafumi was given ‘a year, or eighteen months at most’, to finish a picture. Other clients were more precise, or more demanding. In 1460, Fra Lippo Lippi promised a painting by September of that year and, if he failed to produce it, the client was given the right to ask someone else to finish it. On 25 April 1483, Leonardo promised to deliver
The Virgin of the Rocks
by 8 December. Michelangelo’s contract of 1501 for fifteen statues laid down that he was not to make any other contracts which would delay the execution of this one. (It is perhaps surprising that academic publishers do not make this stipulation today.) Raphael was given two years to paint an altarpiece, with a large fine (40 ducats, over half the price) if he failed to meet the deadline. The contract which Andrea del Sarto made in 1515 to paint an altarpiece within a year contained the clause ‘that if he did not finish the said picture within the said time, the said nuns would have the right to give the said commission to someone else’ (
dictam tabulam alicui locare
).

Princes were particularly impatient. ‘We want you to work on some paintings which we wish to have made, and we wish you, as soon as you have received this, to drop everything, jump on your horse and come here to us’, wrote the duke of Milan to the Lombard painter Vincenzo Foppa. The same ruler commanded painters to work night and day to decorate the Castello Sforzesco, and a contemporary chronicle tells a story of a room painted ‘in a single night’. His successor was equally demanding and on one occasion resolved, as he put it, ‘to have our ballroom at Milan painted immediately with stories, at all possible speed’.
⁴⁰

Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara was a man of the same stamp. When Raphael kept him waiting, Alfonso sent him a message: ‘Let him beware of provoking our anger.’ When Titian failed to produce a painting on time in 1519, Alfonso instructed his agent ‘To tell him instantly, that we are surprised that he should not have finished our picture; that he must finish it whatever happens or incur our great displeasure; and that he may be made to feel
that he is doing a bad turn to one who is in a position to resent it.’
⁴¹

Another impatient patron was Federico II, marquis of Mantua. For example, he wrote to Titian in 1531 asking for a picture of St Mary Magdalen, ‘and above all, let me have it quickly’ (Titian sent it in less than a month).
⁴²
Again, when Giulio Romano and his assistants failed to decorate the Palazzo del Te with sufficient speed, the marquis wrote: ‘We are not amused that you should again have missed so many dates by which you had undertaken to finish.’ Giulio replied obsequiously: ‘The greatest pain I can receive is when Your Excellency is angry … if it is pleasing to you, have me locked up in that room until it is done.’ This seems a far cry from Federico’s flattering comparison of his painter to Apelles (above, p. 81), unless Alexander the Great treated his painters in the same way.
⁴³

Fourthly, there was the question of size. This is surprisingly often left unspecified, perhaps an indication of sixteenth-century vagueness about measurements, although in many cases the fact that a fresco was painted on a particular wall, or a statue made from the client’s block of marble or to fit a particular niche, would have made precision unnecessary. However, Michelangelo promised in 1514 to make his
Christ Carrying the Cross
‘life size’. Andrea del Sarto agreed to make his altarpiece of 1515 at least 3 braccia wide and 3½ braccia high. Isabella d’Este, who wanted a set of matching pictures for her study, enclosed a thread in her letter commissioning Perugino so that he would get the measurements right.

Fifthly, the question of assistants. Some contracts were made with groups of artists rather than individuals. Others mention assistants, usually to specify the responsibility for paying them. Some stipulate that the artist signing the contract should produce all or part of the work ‘with his own hand’ (
sua mano
), though this phrase cannot always be taken literally.
⁴⁴
In the course of the period, however, patrons came to demand the personal intervention of the signatory. Indeed, as early as 1451 a merchant of Perugia refused to pay Filippo Lippi for an altarpiece that he had ordered because the work was ‘made by others’ (
fatta ad altri
), whereas ‘he should have made it himself’ (
egli la dovea fare esso medesimo
).
⁴⁵
Raphael promised to paint with his own hand the figures in his altarpiece
of the coronation of the Virgin. Perugino and Signorelli, however, promised to paint the figures in the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral only ‘from the waist up’.

The final question, crucial to posterity, of what actually went into the picture has been left till last because it does not loom large in the contracts themselves. On occasion, the subject is spelled out in words, sometimes in detail, but on other occasions rather briefly. Elaborate details were laid down for Domenico Ghirlandaio by Giovanni Tornabuoni in the Santa Maria Novella frescoes which have already been mentioned. Domenico and the others were to paint the right-hand wall of the chapel with seven specified scenes from the life of the Virgin. The painters also promised ‘in all the aforesaid histories … to paint figures, buildings, castles, cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks, garments, animals, birds and beasts … just as the patron wants, if the price of materials is not prohibitive’ (
secundum tamen taxationem colorum
).
⁴⁶

A more common formula in contracts was to give a relatively brief description of the iconographical essentials. On some occasions the description of even these essentials in legal Latin seems to have been too much for the notary, and the document suddenly lapses into Italian. The Ghirlandaio frescoes were to be ‘as they say in the vernacular, frescoed’ (
ut vulgariter dicitur, posti in frescho
). A contract for a church at Loreto from 1429 asks for the Virgin ‘with her son in her lap, according to custom’ (
secondo l’usanza
), an interestingly explicit demand on a painter to follow tradition. It was often simpler to refer to a sketch, plain or coloured, or a model.
⁴⁷
When the duke of Milan was having his chapel painted in 1474, his agent sent him two designs to choose from, ‘with cherubs or without’ (cherubs cost extra), and asked for the designs back ‘to see, when the work is finished, whether the azure was as fine as was promised’.
⁴⁸
Alternatively, the client might send the sketch to the artist (as Isabella d’Este did when commissioning Perugino) or ask for something along the lines of a painting by someone else which had taken his or her fancy. A contract for a Crucifixion between a painter called Barbagelata and the Confraternity of St Bridget at Genoa (1485) required the figures to be painted in the same manner and quality ‘as those which are painted in the altarpiece of St Dominic for the late Battista Spinola in the church of the said St Dominic, made and painted by master Vincent of Milan’ (Vincenzo Foppa).
⁴⁹