The Italian Renaissance (9 page)

Warburg’s central concern was, however, with the persistence and transformation of the classical tradition. For a thorough and detailed social history of Renaissance art, it was necessary to wait for Martin Wackernagel. Wackernagel, an art historian from Basel, made a study of Florence in the period 1420–1530 which concentrated on the organization of the arts: on workshops, patrons and the art market. In other words, he focused on what (with a rather unhappy choice of term for a book published in 1938) he called the artist’s
Lebensraum
, his milieu, defined as ‘the whole complex of economic-material as well as socio-cultural circumstances and conditions’. Although the present study is concerned with learning, literature and music as well as the visual arts, and with Italy as a whole rather than Florence, its debt to Wackernagel is considerable.
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Another attempt was made in the 1930s to fill the gap between the social and cultural history of the Renaissance. Where Wackernagel provided a detailed social history or ‘sociography’, Alfred von Martin (a pupil of the Hungarian social theorist Karl Mannheim) offered a sociology. His concise, elegant essay reads like a mixture of Marx and Burckhardt, with a dash of Mannheim and the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Like Burckhardt, von Martin was concerned with the themes of individualism and the origins of modernity, but he placed much more emphasis than Burckhardt on the economic basis of the Renaissance and its ‘curve of development’ through time. Alfred von Martin’s Renaissance is a ‘bourgeois revolution’. In the first part of his essay he charted the rise of the capitalist, who replaces the noble and the cleric as the leader of society. It is this social change that underlies the rise of a rational calculating mentality. In parts two and three, however, we see the bourgeois becoming timid and conservative and the individualist ideal of the entrepreneur replaced by the conformist ideal of the courtier.
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It is easy to criticize this essay for its confident use of general terms such as ‘Renaissance man’ (or indeed ‘bourgeois’) or for its speculations on ‘the analogy of money and intellectualism’ (two powerful forces which can be applied to any end) or between democracy and the representation of nude
figures in art (the idea being that nakedness is egalitarian). Its defects are partly those of a pioneer, lacking sufficient case studies in the social history of culture on which to base generalizations.
The Sociology of the Renaissance
(1932) nevertheless remains a valuable corrective and complement to Burckhardt.

Another study of the Renaissance in the tradition of Marx and Mannheim – despite the fact that its author had studied with Wölfflin – is Frederick Antal’s
Florentine Painting and its Social Background
(1947). It starts with a vivid contrast between two Madonnas, hanging side by side in the National Gallery in London, both of them painted between 1425 and 1426, one by Masaccio and the other by Gentile da Fabriano. Masaccio’s is described as ‘matter-of-fact, sober and clear-cut’, while Gentile’s is ‘ornate’, ‘decorative’ and ‘hieratic’ (cf. Plate 2.1). Antal went on to explain the differences by the fact that the works were intended for ‘different sections of the public’, more exactly different social classes, with different worldviews. The ‘upper middle class’, whose worldview was sober, rational and ‘progressive’, preferred the paintings of Masaccio, while those of Gentile appealed to the conservative ‘feudal’ aristocracy. Antal concluded that Masaccio’s appearance on the Florentine scene reflected the rise of the upper middle class, and that he lacked followers because this class was assimilated into the aristocracy.
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It is difficult not to admire this brilliant application of Marxist theory to art history. With great intellectual economy, a few central ideas of Marx are used to generate interpretations of art and society in a specific milieu as well as at a general level. All the same, Antal lays himself open to two serious charges. The first is that of anachronism, of applying to fifteenth-century Florence such modern terms as ‘progressive’ or even ‘class’ without expressing any awareness of the problems involved (some of which will be discussed in
chapter 9
). The second charge – and one to which von Martin must also plead guilty – is that of circularity. As Antal knew, one of Gentile da Fabriano’s patrons, Palla Strozzi, was the father-in-law of one of Masaccio’s patrons, Felice Brancacci. Do these two men belong to different classes? Antal modifies his thesis by arguing that the upper middle class contained a less progressive section which borrowed a feudal ideology from the aristocracy. How do we distinguish the more progressive section of the upper middle class from the rest? By looking at the paintings they commissioned.

The most powerful critique of the Marxist approach has come from Sir Ernst Gombrich, in what was originally a review of a social history of art by Arnold Hauser (1951). Like Antal, Hauser was a Hungarian refugee who had participated in the Sunday circle in the house of the critic Georg Lukács in Budapest. Gombrich distinguished two senses of the phrase ‘social history of art’. The first sense he defined as the study of art ‘as an institution’, or as ‘an account of the changing material conditions under which art was commissioned and created’. The second sense he described, and dismissed, as social history reflected in art.
²⁷

It is indeed dangerous to assume that art ‘reflects’ society in a direct way, but the phrase ‘art as an institution’ is also somewhat ambiguous. It may refer to Wackernagel’s
Lebensraum
– in other words, to the world of the workshop and the patron, to what sociologists call a ‘micro-social’ approach. Much valuable work on the social history of Renaissance art has been done along these lines, from Wackernagel to Gombrich’s own study of Medici patronage and Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s study of artists. The social history of Italian literature has been approached along similar lines, following the pioneering study of Renaissance writers by Carlo Dionisotti.
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The problem remains whether the study of ‘the changing material conditions under which art was commissioned and created’ should be limited to the immediate milieu or extended to society as a whole. It is obviously illuminating to consider the relationship between paintings and the art patronage of the time, but many historians will want to go further and ask what sociologists call ‘macro-social’ questions about the relationship of art patronage to other social institutions and to the state of the economy. Some historians have indeed asked this kind of question about the Italian Renaissance and come up with rather different answers, some stressing economic factors, such as Robert Lopez, and others politics, among them Hans Baron.

Lopez, was particularly interested in the economic history of Genoa (his native city), notorious for making a much smaller contribution to the Renaissance than Florence, Venice or Milan.
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He argued that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a period of economic recession for Europe in general and Italy in particular. He was well aware of the difficulties this recession theory creates for the conventional view of the economic preconditions of the Renaissance. The ‘superstructure’ seems to be out of phase with the ‘base’. All the same, Lopez firmly rejected any attempt to explain away the discrepancy by suggesting that culture lags behind the economy: ‘Cultural lags, as everybody knows, are ingenious elastic devices to link together events which cannot be linked by any other means …
Personally, I doubt the paternity of children who were born two hundred years after the death of their fathers … the Renaissance … was conditioned by its own economy and not by the economy of the past.’ What Lopez did was to turn the conventional view upside down and propound a theory of ‘hard times and investment in culture’. Struck by the fact that medieval Italy had a booming economy and small churches, while medieval France had great cathedrals and a less successful economy, he put forward the hypothesis that the cathedrals ate up capital and labour that might otherwise have gone into economic growth. Conversely, Renaissance merchants may have had more time to spare for cultural activities because they were less busy in the office. The value of culture ‘rose at the very moment that the value of land fell. Its returns mounted when commercial interest rates declined.’ It is not clear how seriously, how literally, we are to take the notion of ‘investment’ here, and it will be necessary to return to the problem in
chapter 4
. However, it is plain that the prosperity theory of culture had a serious competitor.
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A more political explanation of the Renaissance has been put forward by Hans Baron, a scholar who grew up during the Weimar Republic and remained committed to republican values. His study of Florence and the ‘crisis’ of the early Italian Renaissance (1955) noted the important changes in ideas which took place in the years around 1400. ‘By then, the civic society of the Italian city-states had been in existence for many generations and was perhaps already past its prime’, thus ruling out any simple social explanation of intellectual change. Instead, Baron offered a political explanation, returning to the traditional theme of liberty dear to Shaftesbury, Roscoe and Sismondi, but placing more stress on self-consciousness and offering a close analysis of key political events. He argued that, around the year 1400, Florentines suddenly became aware of their collective identity and of the unique characteristics of their society. This awareness led them to identify with the great republics of the ancient world, Athens and Rome, and this identification with antiquity led in turn to major changes in their culture. Baron explained this rise of Florentine self-consciousness and what he called ‘civic humanism’ as a response to the threat to the city’s liberty from the ruler of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, who made an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate Florence into his empire. To become aware of one’s ideals, there is nothing like fighting for them.
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The value
of Baron’s approach, like that of Lopez, lies in what it has added to the common store rather than in sweeping away all previous accounts of the Renaissance. Baron’s emphasis on political events, for example, does not make full sense without some consideration of underlying structures. Why, for instance, did Florence resist Milan when other city-states capitulated?

At a more general level, micro-social and macro-social approaches should be taken as complementary rather than contradictory. Each has its own dangers and defects. The macro-social approach runs the risk of what has been called ‘Grand Theory’ – too little information, too much interpretation, too rigid a framework. This approach tends to give the impression that ‘social forces’ (which take on a life of their own) act on ‘culture’ in a crudely direct way. The micro-social approach, on the other hand, runs the opposite danger of hyper-empiricism – description rather than analysis, too many facts, too little interpretation.
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There seems to be a case for a pluralistic approach which attempts to test the broader theories, old and new, and to weave empirical studies into a general synthesis. To do this, and in particular to link micro-social to macro-social approaches, is in fact the aim of this book. It is not concerned, as is the sociology of art, with cross-cultural generalization (apart from the comparisons and contrasts offered in the last few pages). Nor is it as sharply focused on the particular as historical monographs tend to be. It deals essentially with styles, attitudes, habits and structures which were typical of a particular society over a few generations – Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Regional variation, discussed in the next chapter, was important – as it still is in Italy. The Venetian cultural achievement of the period long received considerably less than its due, partly for accidental reasons. In the sixteenth century, a Venetian (perhaps the patrician Marcantonio Michiel) collected material on the lives of painters, but this Venetian Vasari did not complete his enterprise, let alone publish it, thus robbing posterity of material necessary to counter the real Vasari’s Tuscan bias. An equivalent of Wackernagel’s book on Florence, planned early in the twentieth century, also remained unpublished and incomplete. It is only relatively recently that studies of the social history of the arts in Venice in this period have been published in sufficient numbers to make possible serious comparisons and contrasts with Florence.
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Studies of
the regional cultures of Milan and Naples are also beginning to appear.
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I tried to avoid giving the Florentines more than their share of the limelight; indeed, only a quarter of the artists and writers discussed in the next chapter came from Tuscany.
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The primary aim of this book, however, is not so much to redress any regional imbalance, or even to explore the cultural differences between different parts of Italy, as to present a general picture against which to measure regional variation. In a similar way, the discussion of change within the period (within each section as well as in
chapter 10
) has been made relatively brief, in order to free the maximum space for the description and analysis of structures, for explaining how what might be called the ‘art system’ worked and in what ways it was related to other activities in the society. In other words, pluralistic as it is, this study does not claim to offer all the possible social interpretations of the Renaissance. In any case, the social approach is only one of a number of possible avenues to the study of the arts.