The Italian Renaissance (30 page)

A similar concern with naturalism is to be found in Vasari’s
Lives
.
⁸
The horses painted in a stable by Bramantino, for example, were so lifelike that a horse mistook the image for reality and kicked it. The importance here of Vasari’s variation on the well-known Greek stories about
illusionistic grapes and curtains is that the illusionism is described as a triumph. Again, what Vasari finds remarkable in the
Mona Lisa
is that the lady’s mouth ‘appeared to be living flesh rather than paint’, while her eyebrows ‘were completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another and following the pores of the skin’. Similarly, what impresses him in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
is that ‘The texture of the tablecloth is imitated so skillfully that linen itself cannot look more real (
non mostra il vero meglio
).’ His praise of these particular paintings for naturalism rather than other qualities may make Vasari seem somewhat naif today, so it may be worth emphasizing that he was articulating a common assumption of the period, which was in fact shared by Leonardo, who once declared that, the closer a painting was to the object it was imitating, the better.

The assumption was not shared by everyone, however. Some writers who now appear to share it in fact did not, the phrase ‘to imitate nature’ being more ambiguous than it may seem. There were two different ideas of nature in the Renaissance: the physical world (
natura naturata
, as philosophers called it) and the creative force (
natura naturans
). Naturalism in the modern sense involves the imitation of the first nature, but what some Renaissance writers advocate is the imitation of the second. As Alberti put it in his treatise on painting, nature rarely achieves perfection, and artists should aim at beauty, as nature does, rather than at ‘realism’ (
similitudine
). Thus Alberti is saying in effect that artists should not paint what they see, but he is using the language of imitation to say so. Michelangelo expressed himself still more strongly. His objection to Flemish painting was that it was done merely ‘to deceive the external eye’. Again, when he was designing the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’Medici, he did not represent these individuals as ‘nature had sculpted and created them’ (
come la natura gli avea effigiati e composti
) but produced his own idealized versions of their appearance.
⁹

A second cluster of evaluative terms refers to order or harmony. When Alberti tells the architect to imitate nature the creator, he explains that its aim is ‘a certain rational harmony (
concinnitas
) of all the parts making up a whole so that nothing can be added or subtracted or changed for the better’.
¹⁰
Similarly, Ghiberti wrote that ‘only proportion makes beauty’ (
la proportionalità solamente fa pulchritudine
). To say that they ‘have proportion’ is a favourite term of praise for works of art. Another
term in this cluster is ‘order’ (
ordine
).
¹¹
Another is ‘symmetry’, used not only of buildings, as might have been expected, but of paintings as well; Landino declared that symmetry had been revived by the thirteenth-century painter Cimabue. ‘Measure’ (
misura
) is also common term; yet another is ‘rule’ (
regola
). Analogies were commonly drawn between the proportions of buildings and those of the human body and between visual and musical harmony. The basic attitude implied by the use of these terms and analogies was that beauty follows rules – rules which are not arbitrary but rational and indeed mathematical. Even gardens were supposed to be orderly: Alberti suggests that ‘The trees ought to be planted in rows exactly even, and answering to one another exactly upon straight lines.’
¹²
The little that is known about Italian gardens in this period suggests that he was expressing the conventional view. Topiary, for example, was revived in fifteenth-century Italy.
¹³
The ‘elegant ordination of vegetables’, as Sir Thomas Browne calls it in his
Garden of Cyrus
, is a vivid illustration of Renaissance values at a point where they differ strongly from our own.

Yet order was not to everyone’s taste, whether in nature or in art. In the 1480s, in his pastoral romance the
Arcadia
– which was one of Sidney’s models – the Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazzaro expressed a preference for wild beauty in the opening to his
Arcadia
(1504):

It is usual for high and spreading trees produced by nature in fearsome mountains to give greater pleasure to those who look at them than plants skilfully clipped and cultivated in elaborate gardens [
le coltivate piante, da dotte mani expurgate, negli adorni giardini
] … who doubts that a fountain that issues naturally out of the living rock surrounded by green plants is more pleasing to us than all the other fountains, works of art made from the whitest marble and resplendent with much gold?

It is surely this attitude that underlies the rise of landscape painting in our period.

Around the 1520s, there was a more general rejection of symmetry and artistic rules. Michelangelo’s theory and practice are the great examples of this reaction, though its violence should not be exaggerated. Two famous remarks attributed to Michelangelo sum up his attitude: the dismissal of Dürer’s book on proportion, with the remark that ‘one cannot make fixed rules, making figures as regular as posts’, and the declaration that ‘All the reasonings of geometry and arithmetic, and all the proofs of
perspective, are of no use to a man without the eye.’
¹⁴
As for practice, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel was described by Vasari as a reversal of ‘the work regulated by measure, order and rule [
misura, ordine e regola
] which other men did according to a common use’.

If these values were to be rejected, what was to be put in their place? A favourite sixteenth-century term for the beauty which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules is ‘grace’ (
grazia
). In his delightful dialogue on
The Beauties of Women
, the Florentine Agnolo Firenzuola suggested that this grace was not a matter of mere vital statistics but something more mysterious, ‘born from a hidden proportion and from rules which are not in our books’.
¹⁵
Thus the language of rules is used to argue that rules do not exist. Another mid-sixteenth-century Florentine, Benedetto Varchi, contrasted grace with beauty. Beauty is physical, objective and based on proportions, while grace is spiritual, subjective and impossible to define.
¹⁶
But how does one represent the spiritual in art? As the term became more popular in the sixteenth century, ‘grace’ is used to mean something like ‘sweetness’, ‘elegance’ or ‘loveliness’ (
dolcezza
,
leggiadria
,
venustà
). It is associated with Raphael and Parmigianino in particular.
¹⁷
It would be uncharitable to conclude that the ‘mystery’ consisted in making girls with sweet expressions and ten heads high, but there can be little doubt that some artists, associated with the movement we now call ‘Mannerism’, believed that even grace could be reduced to a formula.
¹⁸

A third cluster of terms of appraisal centres on the notion of richness in a broad sense which encompasses ‘variety’ (
varietà
), ‘abundance’ (
copiosità
), ‘splendour’ (
splendore
) and ‘grandeur’ (
grandezza
). Recurrent adjectives, which it would be difficult – and perhaps useless – to distinguish, include
illustre
,
magnifico
,
pomposo
(without the pejorative overtones of the English ‘pompous’),
sontuoso
and
superbo
. The humanist Leonardo Bruni, called in, as we have seen, to advise on the third pair of doors for the Baptistery in Florence, considered that they should be what he called
illustri
– in other words, that they should ‘feed the eye well with variety of design’. Ghiberti, who actually designed the doors, tells
us that he aimed at ‘richness’. Again, Alberti objected to what he called ‘solitude’ in a ‘history’ (
istoria
, in the sense of a painting which tells a story), suggesting that pleasure comes primarily ‘from copiousness and variety of things … I say that history is most copious in which in their places are mixed old, young, maidens, women, youths, boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, landscapes and all similar things.’
¹⁹

Judgments on buildings in particular make frequent use of this cluster of terms. Filarete, for example, rather overworks the term ‘imposing’ (
dignissimo
). Vasari tends to describe houses as
onoratissimo
,
sontuosissimo
or
superbissimo
, the superlatives adding to the effect of richness. As for painting, Vasari identifies the ‘grand style’ (
maniera grande
) as the characteristic of the work he admires most, such as Michelangelo’s.

However, the values associated with simplicity also had their admirers. Alberti, for example, despite his praise of copiousness, was hostile to ornament, a ‘secondary’ kind of beauty as he called it. He attacked ‘confusion’ in architecture, which sounds like a defect related to the qualities of richness and variety. He argued in favour of whitewashed churches on the grounds that ‘purity and simplicity of colour, as of life, must be pleasing to the divine being’.
²⁰
He also suggested that a sculptor will prefer pure white marble, and that painters should use white rather than gold. One of his terms of praise for works of art was ‘modesty’ (
verecundia
).

Alberti’s defence of simplicity suited the work of his friends Brunelleschi and Masaccio very well. Brunelleschi banished frescoes from his interiors, such as the church of San Lorenzo or the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce (Plate 6.1). Masaccio’s paintings were praised by Landino because they were ‘pure without ornament’ (
puro senza ornato
).
²¹

For the humanist Bartolommeo Fazio, expressiveness was one of the most important gifts of a painter. Pisanello, he wrote, excelled ‘in expressing feeling’ (
sensibus exprimendis
). A
St Jerome
of his, for example, was remarkable for the saint’s ‘majesty of countenance’. Roger van der Weyden’s
Deposition
, Fazio continued, was noteworthy for its depiction of the grief of the bystanders and his
Passion
for its ‘variety of feelings and emotions’.
²²
Again, Alberti advised the painter to ‘move the soul of the spectator’,
explaining that ‘These movements of the soul are made known by the movements of the body’ – motion is a sign of emotion – and implying that to represent an emotion was to induce it in the beholder, who would ‘weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving’.
²³
Leonardo emphasized the need for the painter to represent emotions such as anger, fear and grief, and his own comments in his notebooks on the subject of his
Last Supper
describe not the tablecloth that seems to have impressed Vasari so much, but gestures and emotions, such as the apostle who makes ‘a mouth of astonishment’.
²⁴
To be fair, Vasari also noticed the expressive qualities of the painting, and commented that ‘Leonardo succeeded brilliantly in imagining and reproducing the tormented anxiety of the apostles to know who betrayed their master; so in their faces one can read the emotions of love, dismay and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ.’ He had similar praise for Michelangelo, whose figures ‘reveal thoughts and emotions which only he has known how to express’.

The last of our clusters of terms centres on the notion of skill, and may be illustrated from Fazio’s praise of van Eyck for that quality (
artificium
). Alberti praises artists for the ‘effort’ (
istudio
,
industria
) underlying their selection of elements from the visible world to create a work of beauty. A work may also be praised for its overcoming of difficulties. Vasari, for example, praised Raphael’s
Marriage of the Virgin
because ‘it is marvellous to see the difficulties which he went out of his way to look for’ in representing the temple in perspective (Plate 6.2). ‘Of all the terms of praise used by authors of the Late Renaissance’, it has been suggested, ‘perhaps none is more frequent or more important than
difficultà
.’
²⁵
The successful overcoming of difficulties is sometimes called ‘facility’. The problem was that artists with facility might not seem to have this quality because the spectator might not realize that there was a problem to overcome. Hence the advice to young painters to ‘introduce at least one figure who is completely affected, mysterious and difficult [
sforciata, misteriosa e difficile
], that will show those who understand art how skilled you are’.
²⁶
That the advice was taken seriously is suggested by the fact that the fashionable term
peregrino
could mean both ‘strange’ and ‘elegant’.
²⁷
Again, ‘bizarre’ does
not seem to have been a pejorative term at this time. At any rate, Vasari could use it about his own work.
²⁸