The Italian Renaissance (22 page)

Besides these descriptions and drawings, there may be more or less
precise references to the initiative of the artist or, more often, to the wishes of the patron. Tura contracted with the duke of Ferrara to paint the chapel of Belriguardo ‘with the histories which please his said Excellency most’. When the monks of San Pietro in Perugia contracted with Perugino for an altarpiece, the predella was to be ‘painted and adorned with histories according to the desire of the present abbot’. Isabella left Perugino a restricted area of freedom: ‘you may leave things out if you like, but you are not to add anything of your own.’
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A study of 238 contracts suggests that, from the late fifteenth century onwards, painters were allowed more freedom than before.
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Michelangelo, late in the period and a law unto himself, seems usually to have got his own way. The contract for
Christ Carrying the Cross
says simply that the figure should be posed ‘in whatever attitude seems good to the said Michelangelo’, while the commission for a work never finished which was at one point Hercules and Cacus, at another Samson and a Philistine, describes the transfer of a block of marble to the sculptor, ‘who is to make
from it a figure together or conjoined with another, just as it pleases the said Michelangelo.’
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Contracts, however valuable their testimony to the relationships between artists and clients, do not tell the whole story. They offer evidence of intentions, and historians, however interesting they find intentions, also want to know whether things went according to plan. In some cases we can be sure that they did not. In the case of Andrea del Sarto’s
Madonna of the Harpies
, for example, both contract and painting have survived, but there are serious discrepancies between them. The contract refers to two angels; they do not appear in the finished painting. The contract refers to St John the Evangelist: in the painting he has turned into St Francis. Such alterations may well have been negotiated with the client; we do not know. They are none the less a warning not to take one kind of evidence too seriously.
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The most effective way to discover the true balance of power between artists and patrons in this period is surely to study the open conflicts between them – conflicts that made manifest the tensions inherent in the relationship. Although the evidence for these conflicts is fragmentary, a coherent picture does at least appear to emerge.

There were two main reasons for conflicts between artists and patrons at this time. The first, which need not detain us, was money. It was a special instance of the general problem of getting clients of high status to pay their debts. Mantegna, Poliziano and Josquin des Près were driven to remind their patrons of their obligations by pictorial, literary and musical means respectively.

The second reason for conflict, which reveals a good deal more about the relationship between culture and society in this period, concerns the works themselves. What happened when the artist did not like the patron’s plan or the patron was dissatisfied with the result? Here are some examples. In 1436 the
Opera del Duomo
of Florence commissioned Paolo Uccello to paint the equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood on the cathedral wall, but a month later they ordered the picture to be destroyed ‘because it is not painted as it should be’ (
quia non est pictus ut decet
). One wonders what experiments in perspective Uccello had been trying out. Again, Piero de’Medici objected to certain small seraphs in a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, who wrote to say: ‘I’ll do as you command; two little clouds will take them away.’
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In other cases, the conflict seems to have reached deadlock. Vasari tells a story about Piero di Cosimo painting a picture for the Foundling
Hospital in Florence. The client, who was the director of the hospital, asked to see the picture before it was finished; Piero refused. The client threatened not to pay; the artist threatened to destroy the painting. Again, Julius II, the irresistible force, and Michelangelo, the immovable object, came into conflict over the Sistine ceiling. Before he had finished, Michelangelo left Rome in secret and returned to Florence. Vasari’s explanation for Michelangelo’s flight was ‘that the pope became angry with him because he would not allow any of his work to be seen; that Michelangelo distrusted his own men and suspected that the pope … disguised himself to see what was being done.’ Why did Piero and Michelangelo object to their work being seen before it was finished? Some artists today are touchy about laymen looking over their shoulder; but there may have been something more to these cases than that. Suppose an artist did not want to treat a subject in the way that the client wanted. A possible tactic would be to hide the picture from him until it was finished, hoping that he would accept a
fait accompli
rather than wait for another version. For another Sistine ceiling the pope would have had to wait quite a while.

Giovanni Bellini was another painter who did not easily submit to the will of others. The humanist Pietro Bembo described him as one ‘whose pleasure is that sharply defined limits should not be set to his style, being wont, as he says, to wander at his will in paintings’ (
vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture
). Isabella d’Este asked him for a mythological picture. It appears that he wanted neither to paint such a picture nor to lose the commission, so he used delaying tactics while hinting, via the agents Isabella used in her dealings with artists, that another subject might not take so long. As one of the agents told her, ‘If you care to give him the liberty to do what he wants, I am absolutely sure that Your Highness will be served much better.’ Isabella knew when to give way gracefully, and replied: ‘If Giovanni Bellini is as reluctant to paint his history as you say, we are content to leave the subject to him, provided that he paints some history or ancient fable.’ In fact, Bellini was able to beat her down still further, and she ended by accepting a Nativity. This example supports the recent critique of scholarly emphasis on Isabella’s ‘ungrateful and demanding nature’ and the argument that ‘her activity as an art patron was subtle and flexible’.
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In this last case, the history of events leads us to the history of structures. The fact that Bellini kept a shop, and that he was in Venice while Isabella was at Mantua, probably helped him to get his way. Had he been attached to the court, the outcome of the conflict would probably have been
very different. Isabella seems to have learned this lesson, and soon afterwards she took Lorenzo Costa into her permanent service.

From the artist’s point of view, in so far as it is possible to reconstruct it, each of the two systems – service at court or keeping an open shop – had its advantages and disadvantages. Permanent service at court gave the artist a relatively high status, without the social taint of shop-keeping (above, p. 86). It also meant relative economic security: board and lodging and presents of clothes, money and land. When the prince died, however, the artist might lose everything. When the duke of Florence, Alessandro de’Medici, was murdered in 1537, Giorgio Vasari, who had been in the duke’s service, found his hopes ‘blown away by a puff of wind’. Another disadvantage of the system was its servitude. At the court of Mantua, Mantegna had to ask permission to travel or to accept outside commissions. It was not possible to avoid the demands of patrons as easily as those of temporary clients.

What patrons often wanted was an artist, or artisan, able to perform a variety of tasks. When Cosimo Tura entered the service of Borso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, he earned his regular salary not only from pictures but by painting furniture, gilding caskets and horse trappings, and designing chair backs, door curtains, bed quilts, a table service, tournament costumes, and so on. A surviving painting by Andrea Castagno decorates a shield, probably for a tournament (Plate 4.3). At the court of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, Leonardo was similarly occupied in miscellaneous projects. He painted the portrait of the duke’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani; he decorated the interior of the Castello Sforzesco; he worked on ‘the horse’, an equestrian monument to the duke’s father; he designed costumes and stages for court festivals; and he was employed as a military engineer. One might say that at least he went to Milan with his eyes open, since the draft of the letter he wrote to the duke asking to be taken into his service has survived; it lists what he could do in the way of designing bridges, mortars and chariots, ending, ‘in the tenth place’, that he could also paint and sculpt. All the same, from posterity’s point of view it is ironic that we remember Leonardo at Milan for two works, neither of which was created for the duke (though he may have arranged the first commission); the
Last Supper
was painted for a monastery, the
Virgin of the Rocks
for a fraternity.
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The disadvantages of courts as a milieu for artists should not be exaggerated. Republics too commissioned temporary decorations on festive occasions, and to regret this is perhaps only to express the bias towards the permanent of our age of museums. All the same, an impression remains that court artists were more likely than others to have to
dissipate their energies on the transient and the trivial, like the court mathematicians in seventeenth-century Versailles, concerned with the hydraulics of fountains or with the probable outcomes of royal games of cards.

When an artist kept a shop, on the other hand, he had less economic security and a lower social status, but it was easier for him to evade a commission that he did not want, as Giovanni Bellini seems to have done in the case of a request from Isabella d’Este (above, p. 114). Clients too might offer artists a variety of odd jobs, but some workshops were so organized that different members could specialize. It is hard to say how important this freedom of working was to artists, but it may be significant that when Mantegna was appointed court painter in Mantua, in 1459, he lingered in Padua, as if the decision to leave had been a difficult one.
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Whether individual artists cared about their freedom or not, the difference in working conditions seems to be reflected in what was produced. The major innovations of the period took place in Florence and Venice, republics of shop-keepers, and not in courts.

These examples of conflict are some of the most celebrated and best-documented ones. They are not a sufficient basis for generalization. The range of variation between patrons was considerable, while even a single patron, such as Isabella d’Este, might grant some artists more freedom than others.
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However, there is other evidence to suggest that the balance of power between patron and artist was changing in this period in the artist’s favour, allowing a greater individualism of style. As the status of artists rose, patrons made fewer demands. To Leonardo, Isabella made concessions from the start: ‘We shall leave the subject and the time to you.’
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Again, a famous letter to Vasari from the poet Annibale Caro acknowledges the freedom of the artist by comparing the two roles: ‘For the subject matter (
invenzione
) I place myself in your hands, remembering … that both the poet and the painter carry out their own ideas and their own schemes with more love and with more diligence than they do the schemes of others.’ It is unfortunate that he was to follow this compliment with fairly precise instructions for an Adonis on a purple garment, embraced by Venus.

Caro also drew up a detailed programme for the decoration of the palace for the Farnese family at Caprarola.
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He was, in other words, a humanist adviser, an intellectual middleman between patron and client. The hypothesis of the humanist adviser – Poliziano in this case – was put
forward by Aby Warburg when discussing the mythological paintings of Botticelli.
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Since artists, as we have seen, generally lacked a classical education, they must have needed advice when required to paint scenes from ancient history or mythology. There is, in fact, evidence of such advice being given on a few occasions.

In the earliest known case the subject was not classical but biblical: in 1424, the Calimala guild of Florence asked the humanist Leonardo Bruni to draw up a programme for the ‘Gates of Paradise’, the third pair of doors for the Baptistery in Florence. Bruni chose twenty stories from the Old Testament. However, the sculptor, Ghiberti, claimed in his memoirs to have been given a free hand, and the Bruni programme was not followed, for the doors illustrate only ten stories.
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In Ferrara in the mid-fifteenth century, the humanist Guarino of Verona suggested a possible programme for a painting of the Muses for the marquis, Leonello d’Este.
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Later in the century, the court librarian, Pellegrino Prisciani, was concerned with the programme of the famous astrological frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, painted by Francesco del Cossa.
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In the Medici circle in the later fifteenth century, there is more indirect evidence for the advice of two humanists, the poet– philologist Angelo Poliziano and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, on the programme of Botticelli’s
Primavera
, the meaning of which still divides scholars. According to his pupil Condivi, the young Michelangelo made his relief of
The Battle of the Centaurs
at the suggestion of Poliziano, ‘who explained the whole myth to him from beginning to end’ (
dichiarandogli a parse per parse tutta la favola
).
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