The Ugly Renaissance (2 page)

Yet if
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s
Oration on the Dignity of Man
offers a neat summary of the luster that the Renaissance has accrued in the popular imagination, his life also contained a hint that something else was at play in this most remarkable of periods. Although Pico had
his head in the clouds, he was also a man with visceral urges and a fondness for the seamier side of life. Not only was he arrested on suspicion of heresy following his forays into religious syncretism, but he also got himself embroiled in a host of rather sticky situations as a result of his unquenchable lust. Shortly after his first visit to Florence, he seduced the wife of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cousins, and, after being caught trying to elope with the love-struck woman, was horribly wounded and thrown into jail for a while. No sooner had he recovered than he leaped into something new, albeit of a rather different character. Finding that they had more than a little in common, Pico began a passionate friendship with
Angelo Poliziano that blossomed into a smoldering sexual relationship. Even after they were poisoned—perhaps on the orders of
Piero de’ Medici—the bond between them was commemorated by their being buried side by side in the church of San Marco, despite the Church’s strict injunctions against
homosexuality.

At first glance, this seems to jar somewhat with Pico’s image of man as a miraculous source of wonder and to compromise his own prestige as the archetypal
Renaissance man. Yet all is not what it seems. Buried within the
Oration on the Dignity of Man
, Pico offered an insight that explained both his otherworldly sophistication and his all-too-earthy desires.

Only a little way into his discourse, Pico pictured God addressing His creation with an unusual frankness. At first, the divinity’s words seem to reinforce Pico’s belief in humanity’s extraordinary capacities. Although “
the nature of all other beings is limited and constrained” by divine law, God tells man,

you, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand We have placed you, shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature. We have set you at the world’s center that you may from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.

But just at the moment when He seems to exalt mankind most fully, Pico’s God turns this gift of free will into the core of a potent paradox.
Rather than preordaining Renaissance man to untrammeled glory, God informs him:

You shall have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish [and] you shall have the power, out of your soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.

Although man did indeed have the capacity to ascend to the heights of heavenly beauty—Pico seems to suggest—he was also capable of plumbing the ugly depths of depravity. In fact, the
two sides of human nature were closely interrelated. Angels and demons lived side by side in man’s soul, locked in a strangely captivating symbiotic relationship. It was impossible to reach for the stars unless you also had feet of clay.

In this, Pico not only explained the apparent contradictions of his own character but also expressed a vital truth about the Renaissance more generally. However tempting it may be to succumb to the temptation of viewing it as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic beauty during which men and women were impossibly civilized and sophisticated, the achievements of the Renaissance coexisted with dark, dirty, and even diabolical realities. Corrupt bankers, greedy politicians, sex-crazed priests, religious conflict, rampant disease, and lives of extravagance and excess were everywhere to be seen, and the most ghastly atrocities were perpetrated under the gaze of the statues and buildings that tourists today admire with such openmouthed adoration. Indeed, as Pico himself exemplified, it would have been all but impossible for the greatest monuments of the Renaissance to have come into being had its foremost artists, writers, and philosophers not been mired in every kind of depravity and degradation. The one depended upon the other. If the Renaissance was an age of cultural angels, it was also a period of worldly demons.

Yet precisely because it is so very easy to be seduced by the beauty and elegance of the art and literature of the Renaissance, the uglier side of the period is all too easily forgotten and overlooked. Perhaps by virtue of the Romantic aura that surrounds its cultural achievements, the titillating private lives of its artists, the sordid concerns of its patrons, and the superabundance of intolerant hatred in its streets are regularly swept under the carpet and glossed over with the illusion
of unblemished perfection. At the level of historical accuracy, this tendency is unfortunate merely because it introduces a somewhat artificial separation between high culture and social realities. But at a much more human level, it is also unfortunate because it robs the period of its excitement, its vividness, and its true sense of wonder. For it is only by appreciating the seamier, grittier side of the Renaissance that the extent of its cultural achievements really becomes clear.

This book is a conscious effort to redress the balance. Looking at the hidden story behind the paintings that have come to dominate perceptions of the Renaissance in Italy, it seeks to examine anew three of the most important features of the Renaissance “story,” all of which are readily apparent in the life of Pico della Mirandola, and each of which reflects a different component in the creation of the art and culture of the age. Examining the brutal social universe of artists, the dastardly concerns of their patrons, and the unexpected prejudices that accompanied the “discovery of the world,” it shows that the Renaissance was much “uglier” than anyone might like to admit and—for precisely that reason—all the more impressive. And by the end of the journey, the Renaissance will not just appear to have been populated by angels and demons; it will never seem the same again.

PART ONE

T
HE
W
ORLD OF THE
R
ENAISSANCE
A
RTIST

1

M
ICHELANGELO’S
N
OSE

O
N A FINE
summer’s afternoon in 1491, the sixteen-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti was sitting sketching in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. With a stick of chalk between his fingers and a sheaf of paper on his knees,
he was busy copying
Masaccio’s celebrated frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel with “such judgement” that all those who saw his drawings were astonished.

Even as an adolescent, Michelangelo had begun to grow used to such admiration. Despite his youth, he had already earned a degree of celebrity and had acquired a correspondingly high opinion of himself. Carrying a letter of recommendation from the artist
Domenico Ghirlandaio, he had not only been accepted as a pupil of the sculptor
Bertoldo di Giovanni at the artistic school that had recently been founded in the gardens of San Marco, but had even been welcomed into the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence’s de facto ruler. Enraptured by the young man, Lorenzo had ushered Michelangelo into the company of the city’s foremost intellectuals, including the humanists
Angelo Poliziano,
Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola. Michelangelo flourished. He nurtured those skills that were to characterize the art of the period. Studying anatomy with extreme care, he honed the naturalistic style that had been in continuous development since the innovations of
Giotto di Bondone, two centuries earlier. And devoting himself to the emulation of classical sculpture, he set out on the path that later led Giorgio Vasari to claim that he had “
surpassed and vanquished the ancients.” Following a suggestion made by Poliziano in this period, he carved a relief depicting the battle of the centaurs that was “so beautiful” it seemed to be “
the work not of a young man, but of a great master with a wealth of study and experience behind him.”

Michelangelo’s fame and self-confidence were growing by the day, but as he was about to discover, so was
the envy of his schoolfellows. Sitting
next to him in the Brancacci Chapel that day was Pietro Torrigiano. Although three years older than Michelangelo, Pietro was another of
Bertoldo di Giovanni’s pupils and was also recognized as something of a rising star. Competition between the two was almost inevitable. Under Bertoldo’s tutelage, they had been encouraged to compete, and they strove to outdo each other in imitating and surpassing the works of masters like
Masaccio. Michelangelo was, however, too brilliant and outspoken for the rivalry to be entirely friendly.

As they sketched alongside one another in the chapel, Michelangelo and Pietro appear to have begun discussing who was better placed to take up Masaccio’s mantle as Florence’s finest painter. Given their surroundings, it was a natural subject. Despite being acclaimed as an artist of genius in his own lifetime, Masaccio had died before he could complete the frescoes in the chapel. His work had been completed by
Filippino Lippi, although how successfully was a matter of personal opinion. Perhaps Michelangelo, who had spent many months studying the frescoes, observed that Lippi had been unable to match Masaccio’s talent and that he himself was the only person capable of attaining—if not exceeding—the master’s standards. He may simply have
spoken derisively of Pietro’s sketches, as was apparently his habit. Whatever the case, Michelangelo managed to enrage his friend. Talented but hardly brilliant, Pietro couldn’t stand Michelangelo’s ribbing.

“
Jealous [at] seeing him more honoured than himself and more able in his work,” Pietro began mocking Michelangelo. If his behavior in later years is anything to go by, Michelangelo might simply have laughed. Whatever the case, Pietro was furious. Clenching his fists, he punched Michelangelo squarely in the face. The blow was so hard that it “
almost tore off the cartilage of [the] nose.” Michelangelo slumped unconscious to the floor,
his nose “broken and crushed” and his torso covered with blood.

Michelangelo was hurriedly carried back to his home in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, where he is said to have been
lying “as if dead.” It did not take Lorenzo de’ Medici long to learn of his plight. Storming into the room in which his stricken protégé lay, he flew into a towering rage and hurled every imaginable insult at the “bestial” Pietro. At once, Pietro saw the magnitude of his mistake: he had no option but to leave Florence.

Unwittingly, the barely conscious Michelangelo was caught up in a moment that captured perfectly an important dimension of the world of late Renaissance art and that represented the fulfillment of what has become known as the “rise of the artist.” Although he was only sixteen years old, he had already begun to hone that unique combination of talents that contemporaries would later describe as “divine.” Skilled in sculpture and drawing, he was also devoted to Dante, learned in the Italian classics, a fine poet, and a friend to the finest humanist minds. Without any sense of irony intended, he was what we might now call a
Renaissance man. What’s more, he was recognized as such. Despite his age, Michelangelo had been feted by Florence’s
social and intellectual elite, and his ability had been honored with patronage and respect.
The son of a comparatively modest bureaucrat from an obscure little town, he had earned the affection of the most powerful family in Florence because of his artistic skill. Lorenzo “the Magnificent”—himself a noted poet, connoisseur, and collector—treated him “like a son.” Indeed, Lorenzo’s son Giovanni and Giovanni’s illegitimate cousin Giulio—each of whom would later become pope (as Leo X and Clement VII, respectively)—would address him as their “brother” ever after.

Two hundred years earlier, it would have been unthinkable for any artist to have been honored in such a way. In the eyes of most contemporaries, a late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century artist was not a creator but a craftsman. The practitioner of a merely mechanical art, he was largely restricted to the confines of a provincial
bottega
(workshop) that was subject to the often draconian regulations of guilds.