The Italian Renaissance (3 page)

Within anthropology, particularly relevant to the questions discussed in this book is the work of the ‘ethnolinguists’ or the ‘ethnographers of communication’. The main concern of Dell Hymes and other members of this group, like that of sociologists of language such as Joshua Fishman, is to study who is saying what to whom, in what situations and through what channels and codes.
⁶
‘Saying’ includes not only speaking and writing but a much wider range of ‘communicative events’ such as rituals, events that between them both express and constitute a culture. The relevance of this approach to a book like this, concerned as it is with the messages of paintings, plays and poems at a time when the Gothic ‘code’ or style was replaced by another one (at once newer and older), will be obvious enough.

The idea that the material base of society affects the arts pervasively but indirectly is expressed in this study by the order of the chapters, working outwards from a centre. The centre is what we now call the art, humanism, literature and music of Renaissance Italy, and it is briefly described in the first chapter. That chapter poses the basic problems that the rest of the book will address: Why did the arts take these particular forms at this place and time?
chapter 2
offers an account of the various solutions propounded, from the painter-historian Giorgio Vasari, already aware of the need to explain recent artistic achievements, to our own time.

The second part of the book is concerned with the immediate social environment of the arts. In the first place, in
chapter 3
, with the kinds of people who produced the paintings, statues, buildings, poems, and so on, that we admire so much today. Six hundred of the best-known artists and writers are studied in particular detail. Secondly, in
chapter 4
, with the kinds of people for whom this ‘creative elite’ produced their artefacts and performances, and what the patrons expected for their money. Widening out,
chapters 5
and
6
examine the social uses of what we call ‘works of art’ and the responses of contemporary viewers and listeners – in other words, the taste of the time. These chapters present cultural and social level at the micro-level.

Some scholars, among them E. H. Gombrich, have argued that the
social history of the arts should stop at this point, but I believe that to do this is to leave the job half done.
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Hence the third and last section of the book widens out still further. A description of contemporary standards of taste does not make full sense if it is not inserted into the dominant worldview of the time, described in
chapter 7
. Again, social groups such as artists and patrons need to be situated in the whole social framework (
chapter 8
) if we are to understand their ideals, intentions or demands. A final problem is that of the relation between cultural and social change. Every chapter discusses specific changes, but
chapters 9
and
10
attempt to draw these different threads together and to illuminate developments in Italy by means of comparisons and contrasts, first with the Netherlands in the same period and then with a culture more remote in both space and time – Japan in its famous ‘Genroku era’.

One major feature of this study, and still a controversial one, is its use of quantitative methods. The discussion of the changing subject matter of paintings, for instance, is based on a sample of some 2,000 dated paintings and illustrates what the French call
histoire sérielle
, the analysis of a time-series. Again, the chapter on artists and writers is based on the analysis of six hundred careers. The original analysis, made in the 1960s, was facilitated by a computer, an ICT 1900, that must by now be regarded as an antique. This method of collective biography or ‘prosopography’ has been followed in some later studies of Renaissance Italy.
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On the other hand, my use of statistics was described by one of the first reviewers as ‘pseudoscientism’. This reaction suggests that a few words of clarification are needed, making at least two points.

The first point is that historians make implicitly quantitative statements whenever they use terms such as ‘more’ or ‘less’, ‘rise’ or ‘decline’, terms without which they would find their task of discussing change to be extremely difficult. Quantitative statements require quantitative evidence. A common criticism of quantitative methods is that they tell us only what we already know. They do indeed often confirm earlier conclusions but, like the discovery of new evidence, they also put these conclusions on a firmer base.

The second point concerns precision. The statistics are speciously precise because the exact relation of the sample analysed to the world outside it is less than certain. Hence it is useless, and indeed misleading,
in this historical field at least, to offer figures as precise as ‘7.25 per cent’, and so I have deliberately dealt in round numbers. All the same, the calculation of rough absolute figures is probably the least unreliable means of assessing relative magnitudes and the extent of changes, which are the true objects of the exercise.

I was invited to write this book in 1964 by John Hale, a leading figure in Renaissance studies. The moment was a good one for me, since I had recently been appointed Assistant Lecturer at the new University of Sussex, where I was teaching a course on ‘Culture and Society’ and another on Jacob Burckhardt. Invading the field of art history was a daunting prospect, but my entry was facilitated by a few months at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1967, allowing fruitful conversations with Millard Meiss, James Beck and Julius Held.

A great deal has happened in, or to, art history since that time, as it has to ‘plain’ or general history. The social history of art, once regarded by the majority of art historians as marginal or even (given its Marxist past) as subversive, has moved closer to the centre of the discipline. Studies of art patronage in particular, in the Renaissance as in other periods, have proliferated.
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The history of collecting has attracted increasing interest from the 1980s onwards, an interest reflected in the conferences and journals devoted to this subject. In Renaissance Italy, for example, humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini, painters such as Neroccio de’ Landi, aristocrats such as Isabella d’Este and even popes such as Paul II (formerly Pietro Barbo) collected classical statues, coins, cameos and, in the case of the humanist bishop Paolo Giovio, the portraits of famous people.
¹⁰
Many collectors loved the objects that they collected, but, like other forms of conspicuous consumption, collecting became a fashion and allowed individuals to maintain or improve their social status by distinguishing themselves from ordinary people in this way. Artists might portray members of the elite against a background that included favourite objects from their collections, as in the case of Bronzino’s Ugolino Martelli (Plate 4.5).
¹¹

In the 1960s, I felt somewhat isolated in my attempt to invade the
territory of art historians. Today, however, some art historians are invading the territory of ‘plain’ or general historians, writing about the family or about shopping in the Renaissance, and in the process making more use and more effective use of the evidence of images than their plain colleagues.
¹²
The idea of art history has been challenged from within the discipline by partisans of what is commonly called ‘visual culture’.

Plain history has changed as well. In Renaissance studies, three movements are particularly visible. We might call them the feminine, domestic and global turns.

The feminine turn is linked to the rise of women’s history in the 1970s, a part of the wider feminist movement. It was in that decade that the art historian Linda Nochlin asked in print, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, while the historian Joan Kelly followed this question with another, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’, and the feminist Germaine Greer wrote a study of female artists under the title
The Obstacle Race
.
¹³
The search for female artists in Renaissance Italy did not produce substantial results (below, p. 48). Female writers were another matter: indeed, some of them had been well known for a long time, though they now attracted more interest. Increasing attention was also paid to a number of learned ladies whose place in the history of humanism had hitherto been marginal: Isotta Nogarola of Verona, for instance (below, p. 49).
¹⁴
Studies on the position of women in the Renaissance and on ‘Renaissance feminism’ multiplied.
¹⁵
Since the obstacles in the way of women entering the creative elite were so numerous, scholars turned their attention to other ways in which women had made contributions to the arts, either directly as patrons or indirectly as supporters or stimulators – what the French call
animateurs
. Studies of women in Renaissance Italy who commissioned paintings, statues and buildings have proliferated.
¹⁶
Studies of the patronage of Isabella d’Este,
marchioness of Mantua, now fill half a shelf by themselves.
¹⁷
Other women acted as patrons at one remove, recommending artists and writers to male relatives.
¹⁸
The court of Urbino, the setting for Castiglione’s famous dialogue on the courtier, has been studied from a feminist or, at any rate, from a female point of view, noting that, owing to the illness of Duke Guidobaldo, the court was dominated by the duchess, Elisabetta Gonzaga, and that women play a discreet but important role in the dialogue.
¹⁹

These studies are part of a much broader trend towards making women visible in history, in the economy and in politics as well as in culture, a trend in which historians of Italy have participated.
²⁰
Interest in the cultural role of women has also encouraged what might be called the ‘domestic turn’ in Renaissance studies.

The domestic turn includes a concern with private life, with the everyday world of families, but it is most visible in the field of material culture.
²¹
A major shift of interest in Renaissance studies since this book was first published in 1972 has been the rise of interest in and the revaluation of the decorative or ‘applied’ arts and their settings, especially the domestic interior. An earlier phase of interest was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and its equivalents elsewhere and led to a few studies of the Renaissance from this point of view.
²²
The current shift or turn forms part of broader historical trends, notably the rise of interest in both private life and material culture.
²³

At this conjuncture, it was possible for British scholars to obtain grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board for two collective research projects, one on the ‘Material Renaissance’ and the other on the ‘Domestic Interior’ (including Italian interiors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), while the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted an exhibition in 2006–7 entitled ‘At Home in Renaissance Italy’. Scholars in Italy, the United States and France have also made important contributions
to the turn from the 1980s to the present. Female scholars are prominent in this new field and so are museum curators. Participants in the turn have produced an important body of work on the interiors of houses, especially the urban palaces of the upper classes, as a setting for display.
²⁴

Other scholars have focused attention on the different kinds of object to be found in houses, such as chairs, beds, tapestries, carpets, plates, dishes, mirrors, goblets and inkwells. They were often designed and decorated with care and skill, as in the case of the bronze inkstands by Andrea Riccio, which have become objects of interest alongside the texts written with their aid. Bronze statuettes, sometimes copies of larger works in marble, displayed the owner’s taste and interest in antiquity.
²⁵
Beautiful domestic objects were displayed in reception rooms, studies and bedrooms (which were sometimes open to visitors) and attracted the interest of contemporary connoisseurs such as Lorenzo de’Medici and Isabella d’Este. Botticelli’s
Primavera
, for instance, was originally hung in a bedroom.
²⁶
Historians have also examined the family rituals associated with some of these items, with the
cassone
(a chest for the trousseau), for example, or the birth tray (bring refreshments to a woman in childbirth, and later displayed on the wall), and with the values embedded in them.
²⁷
Chests and birth trays alike were sometimes decorated with elaborate scenes of love and marriage.

This new wave of research has not only helped to bring Renaissance Italy closer to us but also encouraged a revaluation of what we perhaps too easily call its ‘works of art’, reproducing a distinction between ‘fine art’ (or, in French,
beaux-arts
), considered to be superior, and ‘decorative arts’, treated as inferior. The distinction was clear enough in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it may be argued that, in the case of Renaissance Italy, it is anachronistic.
²⁸
The same painters might be employed painting what we call ‘easel pictures’ one day and birth trays the next. More exactly, it may be suggested that the distinction between fine and decorative art was emerging in Italy in the course of the period discussed in this book, a suggestion supported by Vasari’s remark that, in
the fifteenth century, ‘even the most excellent painters’ decorated chests ‘without being ashamed, as many would be today’ (below, p. 000). However, even during the ‘High Renaissance’ of the early sixteenth century, a painter as famous in his own time as Raphael designed metalwork and tapestries.
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