The Italian Renaissance (7 page)

So much for the apparently obvious features of Italian Renaissance culture and the need to describe them with care. Some other general characteristics of more than one art may be worth a brief mention. There was, for example, a trend towards greater autonomy, in the sense that the arts were becoming increasingly independent from practical functions (discussed in
chapter 5
) and from one another. Music, for example, was ceasing to depend on words. Instrumental pieces, such as the organ compositions of Andrea Gabrieli and Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, were growing longer and more important. Sculpture was becoming more independent from architecture, the statue from the niche. There are even a few sculptures, such as the battle scene made by Bertoldo for Lorenzo de’Medici, which have no subject in the sense that they do not illustrate a story, and a few paintings at least which appear to be independent of religious, philosophical or literary meanings (a topic discussed in
chapter 7
).
⁴³
It may well be significant that the term
fantasia
is used in this period of pictorial and musical compositions alike, to mean a work which the painter or musician has created out of pure imagination, rather than to illustrate or accompany a literary theme.

Another general characteristic of Italian culture at this time was the breakdown of compartments, the cross-fertilization of disciplines. The gap between theory and practice in a number of arts and sciences narrowed at this time, and this was a cause or consequence of a number of famous innovations. For example, Brunelleschi’s box, which dramatized his discovery of the rules of linear perspective, was a contribution to optics (called
perspective
in his day) as well as to the craft of painting. The humanist Leon Battista Alberti was a man of theory, a mathematician, as well as a man of practice, an architect, and each kind
of study helped the other. His churches and palaces were built on a system of mathematical proportions, while he told scholars that they could learn from observing craftsmen at work. Again, Leonardo’s studies of optics and anatomy were used in his paintings. Some writers on music, such as the monk Pietro Aron, a member of the papal chapel in Pope Leo X’s time and the author of a series of treatises known as
Toscanella
, bridged the traditional gap between the theorist of music and the player–composer. In the history of political thought Machiavelli, a sometime professional civil servant, bridged the gap between the academic mode of thought about politics, exemplified in the ‘mirror of princes’ tradition of treatises dealing with the moral qualities
of the ideal ruler, and the practical mode of thought, which can be illustrated in the records of council meetings and in the dispatches of ambassadors.
⁴⁴

Another gap which was closing was the one between the culture of the different regions of the peninsula, as Tuscan achievements became the model for the rest. The reception of the Italian Renaissance abroad was preceded by the reception of the Tuscan Renaissance in other parts of Italy. Florentine innovations were introduced by Florentine artists, such as Masolino in Castiglione Olona (in Lombardy), Donatello in Padua and Naples, Leonardo in Milan, and so on, while the dialect of Tuscany established itself as the literary language of the entire peninsula. Marked regional variations continued to exist throughout the period; Venetian painting, for example, stressed colour where Tuscan painting stressed form (
disegno
), and Lombard architecture emphasized ornament (Plate 1.3) where Tuscan architecture emphasized simplicity (Plate 6.1). However, the minor art centres, such as Siena or Emilia, were gradually attracted into the orbit of the greater ones. The rise of Rome, a city which lacked a strong artistic tradition of its own but became a major centre of patronage in the early sixteenth century, encouraged an inter-regional art. Like literature, the visual arts were more Italian in 1550 than they had been a hundred or two hundred years before.
⁴⁵