The Italian Renaissance (24 page)

As in the case of painters, court patronage offered writers status. It also offered protection, which might well be necessary. The poet Serafino of Aquila, for example, left the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza to live in Rome without a patron. However, his satirical verses provoked an attempt to assassinate him. When he recovered, ‘considering that to be without a protector was dangerous and shameful’, Serafino went back to the cardinal.
⁸³

Despite the examples of official historians of Venice, there was virtually no civic patronage for writers. Their choice was limited to the Church, the court or the occasional private individual, such as the patrician Alvise Cornaro of Padua, who encouraged the dramatist Angelo Beolco ‘il Ruzzante’ to write his plays, and had them collected and published.
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Some Venetian patricians, such as Francesco Barbaro and Bernardo Bembo (the father of Pietro Bembo, and himself a writer of distinction) regarded the patronage of scholars as a duty.
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The Church offered the greatest security, and so we find such writers as Alberti, Poliziano and Ariosto, who are difficult to see as career clergymen, trying to get benefices.
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Castiglione, the complete courtier, ended his life as a bishop, and his friend Pietro Bembo as a cardinal.

The difficulty of depending on patronage for a living can be illustrated from the career of Aretino (Plate 4.8), who began life as the son of a shoemaker. He attracted the attention first of the rich and cultivated banker Agostino Chigi, then of Cardinal Giulio de’Medici, and later of Federico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and of the
condottiere
Giovanni de’Medici. Multiplying patrons increased Aretino’s freedom but increased the risk of loss of favour, so he changed his strategy. In 1527 he moved to Venice, where, despite accepting protection from Doge Andrea Gritti and gifts from a number of noblemen, he was more or less his own master.
⁸⁷
That he was able to do this depended not only on his own remarkable talents for writing and self-advertisement but also on the rise of the market.

In the
long run, the invention of printing led to the decline of the literary patron and to his or her replacement by the publisher and the anonymous reading public. In this period, however, the new system coexisted with the old and interacted with it. It is possible to find instances of the commercialization of patronage (the dedication of a book in the hope of an instant reward in cash) and even of multiple dedications. Matteo
Bandello dedicated each story in his collection to a different individual, and, although some of the dedicatees were friends of his, they were in most cases members of noble families such as the Farnese, the Gonzaga and the Sforza, from whom he doubtless expected a return. Printers also looked for patrons. When Aldo Manuzio published his famous octavo edition of Virgil in 1501, he had several copies printed on vellum, as if they were manuscripts, and distributed to important people such as – once again – Isabella d’Este.

With the rise of the market in literature it is possible to find examples of successful printer-businessmen, such as the Giolito and the Giunti families.
⁸⁸
The printed book, originally viewed as a manuscript ‘written’ by machine, came to be regarded as a commodity standardized in size and price. The catalogue issued by the Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio in 1498 is the first to give prices, while the Aldine catalogue of 1541 is the first to use the terms ‘folio’, ‘quarto’ and ‘octavo’.
⁸⁹
The sales of the new commodity were boosted by means of advertisements, in prose or verse, placed by the printer at the end of one book to recommend the reader to go to his shop for another. One edition of Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
, for example, contained the following advertisement: ‘Whoever wants to buy a
Furioso
, or another work by the same author, let him go to the press of the Bindoni twins, the brothers Benedetto and Agostino.’
⁹⁰
One finds printers, such as Gabriele Giolito, employing professional authors, such as Lodovico Dolce, to write, translate and edit for them. This is how the Venetian ‘Grub Street’, just off the Grand Canal, came into existence in the middle of the sixteenth century (above, p. 77).
⁹¹
At much the same time, the mid-sixteenth century, came the rise of the commercialized newsletter, or
avviso
, which flourished in Rome in particular, and of the ‘professional theatre’ (the literal translation of the famous term
commedia dell’arte
).

In the visual arts, too, we find the rise of the market system, in which customers bought works ‘ready-made’, sometimes through a middleman.
⁹²
This art market, the importance of which is increasingly recognized by scholars, coexisted with the more important and better-known personalized system of patrons and clients, and some painters, such as the Pollaiuolo brothers, navigated between them.
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Examples of the sale of uncommissioned works of art go back at least as far as the fourteenth century. The demand for Virgins, Crucifixions or St John the Baptists was sufficiently great for workshops to be able to produce them without a particular customer in mind, although they might be left unfinished in order to accommodate special requirements. Some merchants – the ‘merchant of Prato’ Francesco Datini, for instance – dealt in works of art as in other commodities.
⁹⁴
Cheap reproductions of famous sculptures were already being manufactured in fourteenth-century Florence.

In the fifteenth century, there are signs that ready-made works were becoming more common. Some merchants, such as the Florentine Bartolommeo Serragli, now specialized in the sale of these commodities. Serragli searched Rome for antique marble statues for the Medici; he ordered fabrics in Florence for Alfonso of Aragon; he employed Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi and Desiderio da Settignano; he dealt in illuminated manuscripts and terracotta madonnas, chess sets and mirrors.
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Again, Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose activities as a bookseller have already been discussed, was also a middleman who arranged for illuminators, such as Attavante degli Attavanti, to work for customers they did not know, such as Federigo, duke of Urbino, and Matthias, king of Hungary.

The market in reproductions and replicas also increased in importance at this time.
⁹⁶
Woodcuts of devotional images began to be produced shortly before the invention of printing. In the later fifteenth century, they were joined by woodcuts of topical events, such as the meeting of the pope and the emperor in 1468. After the invention of printing, book illustrations became important. Aldo Manuzio produced famous illustrated editions of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and so on. Some prints reproduced famous paintings. Prints of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
were in circulation by the year 1500, while Giulio Campagnola made prints after paintings by Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione, and Marco Raimondi made his reputation by his free ‘translations’ of paintings by Raphael into prints.
⁹⁷

Reproduction extended to sculptures. Around 1470, the Della Robbia workshop in Florence was turning out coloured sculptures in terracotta, such as the miniature replicas of the Madonna of Impruneta, which were cheap and standardized and so presumably uncommissioned. In Florence at about the same time, portrait medals were being turned out by what one scholar has described as ‘assembly-line’ methods, repetitive
in form and making use of the division of labour.
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Statuettes sometimes reproduced famous classical statues in miniature: the sculptor known as ‘Antico’ gained his nickname for making small bronze replicas of the Apollo Belvedere, for example, or the Dioscuri.
⁹⁹

Another fifteenth-century development was the rise of majolica – in other words, of the painted, tin-glazed pottery jars and plates produced in Bologna, Urbino, Faenza and elsewhere. Some of them were large, splendid and expensive and appreciated by connoisseurs such as Lorenzo de’Medici, but others were cheap enough to be bought by modest artisans.
¹⁰⁰
Some of the majolica plates produced in Urbino showed scenes from paintings by Raphael, among them a plate commissioned by Isabella d’Este.

In the sixteenth century, the art market became still more important than it had been in the fifteenth. Isabella d’Este, for example, was prepared to buy paintings and statues second-hand. When Giorgione died in 1510, she wrote to a Venetian merchant:

we are informed that among the stuff and effects of the painter Zorzo of Castelfranco there exists a picture of a night (
una nocte
), very beautiful and singular; if so it might be, we desire to possess it and we therefore ask you, in company with Lorenzo da Pavia and any other who has judgment and understanding, to see whether it is a really fine thing and if you find it such, to go to work … to obtain this picture for me, settling the price and giving me notice of it.
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However, the answer was that the two pictures of this kind to be found in Giorgione’s studio had been painted on commission, and that the clients were not prepared to let them go. Here, as elsewhere, Isabella was a little in advance of her time.

A year later, in 1511, it was an artist who took the initiative in a sale of uncommissioned work to the Gonzagas. Vittore Carpaccio wrote to Isabella’s husband, Gianfrancesco II, marquis of Mantua, that he possessed a watercolour painting of Jerusalem for which an unknown person, perhaps from the court of Mantua, had made an offer. ‘And so it has occurred to me to write this letter to Your Sublime Highness in order to draw attention both to my name and to my work.’ The apologetic preamble suggests that selling pictures in this way was not yet quite proper.
¹⁰²
However,
in 1535 Gianfrancesco’s son Federico bought 120 Flemish paintings second-hand.

Isabella’s agents, whom she employed to arrange commissions as well as to make offers for ready-made paintings, were not full-time specialist art dealers. One of them was a maker of clavichords. In Florence, however, a patrician, Giovanni Battista della Palla, has been described as ‘an art dealer in the fullest and truest sense, that is, a systematic purchaser of contemporary as well as antique art works’.
¹⁰³
He is most celebrated for his activities on behalf of Francis I, king of France, for whom he bought, among other things, a statue of Hercules by Michelangelo, a statue of Mercury by Bandinelli, a
St Sebastian
by Fra Bartolommeo and a
Raising of Lazarus
by Pontormo. It was in pursuit of further works by the last artist that – according to Vasari in his life of Pontormo – Palla went to the house of a certain Borgherini, but was driven out by Borgherini’s wife, who called him ‘a vile second-hand dealer, a four-penny merchant [
vilissimo rigattiere, mercantatuzzo di quattro danari
]’. It was doubtless worth risking a scolding, since there were great profits to be made selling to the king of France. Vasari tells us that ‘the merchants’ received from Francis four times what they had paid Andrea del Sarto.
¹⁰⁴

There are other cases of the sale of
uncommissioned works in sixteenth-century Florence. Ottaviano de’Medici, a keen collector, bought two paintings by Andrea del Sarto which had been made for someone else. There are also references by Vasari to the exhibition of paintings in public, a form of advertising perhaps related to the rise of the market. Bandinelli, for example, painted a
Deposition of Christ
and ‘exhibited it’ (
lo messe a mostra
) in a goldsmith’s shop.
¹⁰⁵
In Venice too there is evidence of an art market. To return to Bellini’s
Nativity
: at one point, when negotiations with Isabella d’Este seemed to be breaking down, the artist informed her that he had found someone who wanted to buy it. The first-known case of a Titian portrait being bought by someone other than the sitter is a purchase by the duke of Urbino in 1536. A certain Zuan or Giovanni Ram, a Catalan resident in Venice, seems to have been active as an art dealer in the early sixteenth century. Paintings were exhibited at the Ascension Week fair in Venice – Lotto and the Bassanos were among the exhibitors – and also at St Anthony’s fair at Padua.
¹⁰⁶
Recent research suggests that more works were produced for the market in Renaissance Venice than used to be thought.
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Woodcuts and engravings, made to be sold to an unknown public, became more common in the sixteenth century. Some artists were beginning to specialize in the new media: Giulio and Domenico Campagnola, for example, who concentrated on landscape, or Marcantonio Raimondi, who produced engraved versions of paintings by Leonardo and Raphael, thus making them much better known. The age of the mechanically reproduced work of art, lamented by critics such as Walter Benjamin, goes back further than is generally realized.
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