The Italian Renaissance (33 page)

Invenzione
means devising poems and histories by oneself, a virtue practised by few modern painters, and it is something I regard as extremely ingenious and praiseworthy.

Pino,
Dialoghi di pittura
, p. 44

I
conography is the study of the meaning of images, of the content of what some Renaissance Italians called ‘inventions’ or ‘stories’ (
invenzioni
,
istorie
). The iconographical – or iconological – method involves the attempt to ‘read’ images as if they were texts (often by juxtaposing them to texts) and to distinguish different levels of meaning. Developed in the early twentieth century by Emile Mâle, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and others in reaction against a purely formal approach to the history of art, iconography has in turn provoked criticism, or iconoclasm, on the grounds that it privileges what has been called the ‘discursive’ aspect of the image – in other words, those features which show the influence of language – at the expense of the ‘figurative’ aspects – which do not. Even if its importance is a matter for debate, this approach to the art of the Renaissance remains a necessary one.
¹

For a social history of art, the question of the relative popularity of different images is an important one, but it is less easy to answer than it may look. There is not, for instance, any complete catalogue of the Italian paintings of the Renaissance, so it is necessary to study a sample instead. What does exist is a catalogue of dated paintings, with 2,229 examples from Italy for the 120 years 1420–1539. In 2,033 cases, the subject is described. Of these 1,796 (about 87 per cent) may be described as religious and 237 (about 13 per cent) as secular. Of the secular works, about 67 per cent are portraits. Of the religious paintings, about half represent the Virgin Mary and about a quarter show Christ, while nearly 23
per cent are concerned with the saints (leaving a few paintings of God the Father, the Trinity, or scenes from the Old Testament).
²
The importance of images of the Virgin is confirmed by a list of recorded visions of her in Italy in the two centuries between 1336 and 1536: thirty-one in total.
³

Is this sample a reliable one? There are two problems here. Surviving pictures and dated pictures may not be representative of the whole group. Since works commissioned by the Church, which never dies, have a better chance of preservation than those commissioned for individual collections, it may well be that the figure of 13 per cent for secular paintings is something of an underestimate. It should be taken as a minimum. Dated pictures may also be a biased sample, more especially because the number of dated paintings increased steadily from a mere thirty-one in the 1420s to 441 in the decade 1510–19. Here, as elsewhere, there is a danger of making generalizations about the Renaissance as a whole on the basis of evidence from the later part of the period. If one is conscious of the danger, however, the statistics have their uses. It remains to try to draw out their significance.

It may surprise a modern reader to learn that, in a Christian culture, pictures of Christ were only half as frequent as those of his mother and scarcely more frequent than images of the saints. It should be added that he had been much less important in the thirteenth century – in France at least – and also that he was represented more frequently in the second half of the period than in the first. From this point of view at least the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant, was more of a culmination of late medieval trends than a reaction against them.
⁴
Pictures of Christ generally represent his birth or his passion, death and resurrection, but rarely anything in between. The obvious explanation for this pattern is a liturgical one: Christmas and Easter were and are the major events of the ecclesiastical year. Again, the Adoration of the Kings is a scene separate from the Nativity because it has its own feast, that of the Epiphany.

A bewildering variety of saints occurs in Italian paintings of this period. What modern art historians (or, for that matter, what Renaissance clerics) could confidently identify the attributes of (say) saints Eusuperio, Euplo, Quirico or Secondiano? Yet each of these saints had a church dedicated to him in Pavia. Which saints were the most popular? Exactly a
hundred saints occur in our sample. St John the Baptist (who occurs 51 times) tops the list. Then comes St Sebastian (34); St Francis (30); St Catherine of Alexandria (22); St Jerome (22); St Anthony of Padua (21); St Roche (19); St Peter (18); and St Bernardino of Siena (17). St Bernard and St Michael (with 15 paintings each) tie for tenth place.

The exact numbers should not be taken too seriously, but the relative position of the saints tells us something important about Italian culture. It may be worth juxtaposing this list of preferences with those revealed by the choice of children’s names. In the group of six hundred selected for special attention in this study, the most popular Christian names were Giovanni, Antonio, Francesco, Andrea, Bartolommeo, Bernardo and Girolamo. To account for the pattern it would be necessary to write a monograph, or a whole shelf of monographs; here it is possible only to hazard a few hypotheses. The low position of St Peter, compared to his place in the formal Church hierarchy, deserves comment. One explanation might be the relative unimportance of Rome, and the weakness of the papacy, until the later fifteenth century. All the same, the split revealed here between official and unofficial religion is a remarkable one.

At the top, the position of St John the Baptist is only to be expected, given the two facts of his importance in the official hierarchy – as the precursor of Christ and as the patron of the city of Florence – and in particular of the great
Calimala
guild. St Sebastian, in the second place, and St Roche (San Rocco), in the seventh, owe their positions to their role as protectors against the plague. Rocco was a fourteenth-century Frenchman who went to Italy and ministered to plague victims. He was particularly popular in the Veneto, especially after the translation of his relics to Venice in 1485. Yet he was never formally canonized. In the late sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V intended either to canonize him or to delete him, but died before the ambiguity was resolved. His cult was essentially unofficial.
⁵
As for Sebastian, it seems to be the story of his martyrdom at the hands of archers which explains the belief in his protection against the ‘arrows’ of plague, as represented by Benozzo Gozzoli, for example, in a fresco in a church at San Gimignano, commemorating the plague of 1464.

The popularity of St Francis poses no problems: he was an Italian saint and he had the support of the religious order he had founded. His cult was strongest in his native Umbria and in Tuscany, but many important towns in other parts of Italy had churches dedicated to him. St Anthony of Padua might be regarded as a St Francis for the Veneto; he too was a Franciscan, who came from Portugal but preached in Padua, where he died in 1231. St Bernardino was another preacher and
another Franciscan. (It is worth noting that the rival order of friars, the Dominicans, produced no saint to rival the popularity of these three Franciscans.) St Jerome, like St Anthony, was particularly popular in the Veneto, in which he was born (near Aquileia). He was represented in two different ways, which suggests that he had two different ‘images’ and appealed to two kinds of people. Either he was a penitent in the desert, knocking his breast with a stone, the patron of hermits, or he was a scholar sitting in his study, making his translation of the Bible, an appropriate patron for humanists.
⁶

The cult of St Catherine of Alexandria, who far outshone St Catherine of Siena, is to be explained by her patronage of young girls. Her ‘mystic marriage’ to Christ made her an appropriate subject for paintings given as wedding presents. If one female saint out of eleven seems surprisingly little, the reason may well be that the others were eclipsed by the Virgin Mary in her many forms, such as the Mother of Mercy (with supplicants sheltering under her cloak), the Virgin of the Rosary or the Virgin of Loreto (the Italian town to which the ‘holy house’ from Bethlehem was said to have been miraculously transported).

Since so much has been written about secular values in Renaissance Italy, the fact that the overwhelming majority of dated paintings are religious deserves emphasis. These images of the Virgin, Christ and the saints, doubtless commissioned for pious reasons, give us a glimpse of the culture of the silent majority. All the same, there is evidence of increasing interest in secular paintings in this period, and particularly in circles involved with the Renaissance as a movement.
⁷
Federico Gonzaga, commissioning a work from Sebastiano del Piombo, wrote in 1524 that he did not want ‘saints stuff’ (
cose di sancti
), but ‘some pictures that are attractive and beautiful to look at’. He seems to have been part of a trend.

As we have seen, most secular paintings were portraits. Before the middle of the fifteenth century they were relatively rare; only saints had their images painted. This is what gives its point to the opening lines of a poem by the Venetian patrician Leonardo Giustinian. The speaker tells his beloved that he has made a painting of her on a little sheet of paper as if she were one of the saints:
io t’ho dipinta in su una carticella / Come se fussi una santa di Dio
. Later on, it became customary to paint famous men, ancient or modern (the moderns including poets, soldiers and lawyers). The next stage, logically if not chronologically (one cannot be certain of the dates), was the painting of rulers in their own lifetime. Then
came the portraits of patricians and their wives and daughters, and finally those of merchants and craftsmen, as we have seen (above, p. 99). By the end of the period, Aretino, himself a craftsman’s son who was painted by Titian, was denouncing the democratization of the portrait in his own day, writing: ‘it is the disgrace of our age that it tolerates the painted portraits even of tailors and butchers.’ To distinguish themselves from others, nobles now had to surround themselves with objects symbolizing their status, from velvet curtains and classical columns to servants and hunting dogs.
⁸

It is, however, with the iconography of narrative pictures that art historians have been most concerned, whether these
istorie
represent scenes from classical mythology, episodes from history, ancient or modern, or something more difficult to pin down. The scenes from classical mythology include some of the best-known paintings of the Renaissance. They frequently keep close to that favourite classical – and Renaissance – compendium of mythology, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. Titian’s famous
Bacchus and Ariadne
, for example, illustrates book 8, while the painting of the enchantress Circe by Dosso Dossi of Ferrara illustrates book 14. Others follow the descriptions of lost mythological paintings by the classical writer Philostratus of Lemnos. A number of paintings by Piero di Cosimo representing Bacchus, Vulcan and other mythological figures illustrate not only Ovid but also the account of the early history of mankind in the poem
On the Nature of Things
by the Roman poet Lucretius.
⁹