The Italian Renaissance (29 page)

We arrive
at last at what has come to seem the natural ‘use’ of the arts: to give pleasure. The playful side of the arts must not be forgotten, although it has not often been studied.
⁵³
The increasing importance of this function is one of the most significant changes in the period. By the mid-sixteenth century, the writer Lodovico Dolce went so far as to suggest that the purpose of painting was ‘chiefly to give pleasure’ (
principalmente per dilettare
). The carnival song of the sculptors of Florence – quoted in the epigraph to this chapter – catches the new mood. It should be noticed, however, that, as the song makes clear, pleasure (
diletto
) is taken in the statue as a contribution to interior decoration. We are still a long way from modern ideas of ‘art for art’s sake’. Even the Gonzagas, who cared a good deal about painting, seem to have thought of it primarily in this way. Isabella asked Giovanni Bellini for a picture ‘to decorate a study of ours’ (
per ornamento d’uno nostro studio
), while her son Federico wrote to Titian in 1537 telling him that the new rooms in the castle were finished; all that was lacking were the pictures ‘made for these rooms’ (
fatte per tall lochi
). Sabba di Castiglione, a knight of the Order of Rhodes, advised nobles to decorate their houses with classical statues or – if these were not available – with works by Donatello or Michelangelo.
⁵⁴

In architecture, we see the increasing importance of the pleasure house, the country villa, where, as the greatest designer of such houses, Palladio, put it, a man ‘tired of the bustle of cities, will restore and console himself’.
⁵⁵
In literature too there was increasing emphasis (especially in prefaces) on pleasure – the author’s and, more particularly, the reader’s – a shift that may well be related to the gradual commercialization of literature and art. But what exactly gave pleasure to spectators, readers or listeners in the Renaissance? An attempt to answer this question will be made in the next chapter.

Everyone has a certain natural taste … for recognizing beauty and ugliness (
un certo gusto … del bello e del brutto
).

Dolce,
Aretino
, p. 102

N
either artists nor patrons were completely free to make aesthetic choices. Their liberty was limited, whether they realized this or not, by the need to take into account the standards of taste of their period. These standards need to be described in order that we may look at works of art and literature – if only momentarily – with the eyes of contemporaries.
¹
To reconstruct the taste of the time, historians can use two main kinds of literary source. A number of treatises on art and beauty were produced in this period by famous humanists such as Alberti and Bembo, and also by a number of lesser figures. These treatises, which have often been studied, have the advantage of explicitness, but they are often rather abstract. They need to be supplemented by the analysis of the standards implied by a more practical criticism, the judgements on individual works of art, literature, and so on, to be found in contracts, in private letters, in poems, in biographies and in stories.
²

It is interesting to find, for example, that, whereas the term ‘sublime’ became important in art theory only in the eighteenth century, it was already used in this period by the poet Veronica Gambara, in a letter to Beatrice d’Este (sister of Isabella), praising Correggio’s painting of St Mary Magdalen for expressing
il sublime
. Another precious piece of evidence is the memorandum to Ludovico Sforza, cited in
chapter 4
(p. 103), in which the agent tries to find words to distinguish the styles of four leading painters to help the duke make a choice between them, contrasting the ‘virile air’ of Botticelli, the ‘sweeter air’ of Filippino Lippi, the ‘angelic air’ of Perugino and the ‘good air’ of Ghirlandaio.
³

The sources are, of course, written in Latin as well as Italian. The Latin
sources will not be ignored, but the emphasis here will fall on Italian texts because they are closer to the ordinary speech and thought of the time.

It would not be difficult to draw up a list of some fifty terms which came regularly to the lips and pens of Italians of the period when they were appraising paintings, sculptures and buildings. Some are general, almost vacuous terms, such as ‘beauty’ (
bellezza
,
pulchritudine
), but others are more precise and so more revealing. It may be useful to distinguish five clusters of terms, centred on the concepts of nature, order, richness, expressiveness and skill.

The ‘return to nature’, a favourite formula of modern historians of the Renaissance, does in fact correspond to a commonplace of the period. For example, the humanist Bartolommeo Fazio praised Jan van Eyck for a portrait ‘which you would judge to lack only a voice’ and for ‘a ray of the sun which you would take to be real sunlight’, while he described Donatello’s achievement as ‘to produce lively expressions (
vivos vultus ducere
).
⁴
Another humanist, Cristoforo Landino, described Donatello’s statues as having ‘great vivacity’ (
grande vivacità
), so that the figures all seemed to be in movement.
⁵
Another sought-after quality in painting was three-dimensionality or ‘relief’ (
rilievo
). The Florentine writer Giambattista Gelli, for example, made fun of Byzantine art as ‘without any relief’, so that the figures looked not like men but like clothes spread out on a wall or ‘flayed skins’.
⁶
The great preacher Girolamo Savonarola seems to have been articulating the assumptions of his audience when he remarked: ‘The closer they imitate nature, the more pleasure they give. And so people who praise any pictures say: look, these animals seem as if they were alive, and these flowers seem natural ones.’
⁷