The Italian Renaissance (26 page)

Chi volessi per diletto

Qualche gentil figuretta,

Per tenerla sopra letto

O in su qualche basetta?

Ogni camera s’asetta

Ben con le nostre figure.

(Who wants some elegant statuette for their delight?

You can put it above your bed or on a stand.

Our figures make any room look well).

Carnival song of the sculptors of Florence,

in Singleton,
Canti carnascialeschi

T
he idea of a ‘work of art’ is a modern one, although art galleries and museums encourage us to project it into the past. Before 1500 it is more exact to speak of ‘images’.
¹
Even the idea of ‘literature’ is a modern one. This chapter, however, is concerned with the different uses, for contemporary owners, viewers or listeners, of paintings, statues, poems, plays, and so on. They did not regard these objects in the same ways as we do. For one thing, paintings might be regarded as expendable. A Florentine patrician, Filippo Strozzi the younger, asked in his will of 1537 for a monument in the family chapel in Santa Maria Novella, which contained a fresco by Filippino Lippi. ‘Do not worry about the painting which is there now, which it is necessary to destroy’, Strozzi ordered, ‘since of its nature it is not very durable’ (
di sua natura non è molto durabile
).
²
If we want to understand what the art of the period meant to contemporaries, we have to look first at its uses.

The
most obvious use of paintings and statues in Renaissance Italy was religious. In a secular culture like ours, we may well have to remind ourselves that what we see as a ‘work of art’ was viewed by contemporaries primarily as a sacred image. The idea of a ‘religious’ use is not very precise, so it is probably helpful to distinguish magical, devotional and didactic functions, although these divisions blur into one another, while ‘magic’ does not have quite the same meaning for us as it did for a sixteenth-century theologian. It is more precise and so more useful to refer to the thaumaturgic and other miraculous powers attributed to particular images, as in the case of certain famous Byzantine icons.

Some gonfalons or processional banners – for example, those painted by Benedetto Bonfigli in Perugia – seem to have been considered a defence against plague. The Madonna is shown protecting her people with her mantle against the arrows of the plague, and the inscription on one gonfalon begs her ‘to ask and help thy son to take the fury away’.
³
The popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of images of St Sebastian, who was also associated with defence against plague (below, p. 000), suggests that the thaumaturgic function was still an important one. When he was working in Italy in the 1420s and 1430s, the Netherlander Guillaume Dufay wrote two motets to St Sebastian as a defence against plague. Music was generally believed to have therapeutic power; stories were current about cures effected by playing to the patient.
⁴

A celebrated Italian example of another kind of miraculous power is the image of the Virgin Mary in the church of Impruneta, near Florence, which was carried in procession to produce rain in times of drought or to stop the rain when there was too much, as well as to solve the political problems of the Florentines. For example, the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci records in his journal that in 1483 the image was brought to Florence ‘for the sake of obtaining fine weather, as it had rained for more than a month. And it immediately became fine.’
⁵

Some Renaissance paintings appear to belong to a magical system outside the Christian framework (below, p. 000). The frescoes by Francesco del Cossa in the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara are concerned with astrological themes, as Aby Warburg pointed out, and they may well have been painted to ensure the good fortune of the duke.
⁶
It has also been argued (following
a suggestion of Warburg’s), that Botticelli’s famous
Primavera
may have been a talisman – in other words, an image made in order to draw down favourable ‘influences’ from the planet Venus.
⁷
We know that the philosopher Ficino made use of such images, just as he played ‘martial’ music to attract influences from Mars: a Renaissance
Planets
suite.
⁸
Again, when Leonardo (as Vasari tells us) painted the thousand-eyed Argus guarding the treasury of the duke of Milan, it is difficult to tell whether he intended simply to make an appropriate classical allusion or whether he was also attempting a piece of protective magic. It is similarly difficult to tell how serious Vasari is being when he works a variant of the Byzantine icon legends into his life of Raphael. He tells us that a painting of Raphael’s was on the way to Palermo when a storm arose and the ship was wrecked. The painting, however, ‘remained unharmed … because even the fury of the winds and the waves of the sea had respect for the beauty of such a work.’ In a similar way, we need at least to entertain the possibility that the images of traitors and rebels painted on the walls of public buildings in Florence and elsewhere were a form of magical destruction of fugitives who were beyond the reach of conventional punishment – the equivalent of sticking pins in wax images of one’s enemies.

Many images were made and bought for sacred settings and religious purposes.
⁹
The term ‘devotional pictures’ (
quadri di devotione
) was current in this period, when images and religious fervour seem to have been more closely associated than usual, whether the images were crucifixes (recommended by leading preachers such as Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola), the new medium of the woodcut, or a new type of religious painting, small and intimate, suitable for a private house, not so much an icon as a narrative, which would act as a stimulus to meditation on the Bible or the lives of the saints.
¹⁰

A vivid illustration of the devotional uses of the image comes from Rome, from the fraternity of St John Beheaded (
San Giovanni Decollato
), which comforted condemned criminals in their last moments by means of
tavolette
– small pictures of the martyrdom of saints which were
employed, in the words of their recent historian, ‘as a kind of visual narcotic to numb the fear and pain of the condemned criminal during his terrible journey to the scaffold’.
¹¹
The wear and tear visible today on some sacred images of the period offers vivid evidence of what one scholar calls the ‘tactile devotion’ of the owners.
¹²

The increasing importance of devotional images seems to have been linked to the increasing lay initiatives in religious matters characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from the foundation of religious fraternities to the singing of hymns or the reading of pious books at home. Surviving inventories of the houses of the wealthy, in Venice for instance, reveal images of Our Lady in almost every room, from the reception room or
portego
to the bedrooms. In the castle of the Uzzano family, Florentine patricians, there were two paintings of the ‘sudary’ (Christ’s face imprinted on Veronica’s towel), and immediately before one of them a
predella
or prie-Dieu is listed, as if the inhabitants of the castle commonly knelt before the sacred image.
¹³

As the fifteenth-century friar Giovanni Dominici put it, parents should keep sacred images in the house because of their moral effect on the children. The infant Jesus with St John would be good for boys, and also pictures of the Massacre of the Innocents, ‘in order to make them afraid of arms and armed men’. Girls, on the other hand, should fix their gaze on Saints Agnes, Cecilia, Elizabeth, Catherine and Ursula (with her legendary eleven thousand virgins) to give them ‘a love of virginity, a desire for Christ, a hatred for sins, a contempt for vanities’.
¹⁴
In a similar way, Florentine girls, whether young nuns or young brides, would be given images, or more exactly dolls, of the Christ-child to encourage identification with his mother.
¹⁵