Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Linked to all this, there was a stress on achievement rather than on birth, which was another marked change from medieval times, where the values of ‘blood’ had been paramount. This was related to the idea that man was a rational, calculating animal. In Italian the word for ‘reason’, ragione, was used in a variety of ways, but all implied calculation. Merchants called their account-books libri della ragione. The Palace of Reason in Padua was a court, for justice involves calculation. In art, ragione meant proportion or ratio. The verb ragionare, which still means ‘to talk’ in Italian, reflects the fact that man reasons (and calculates) in his talk, which separates him from the animals. Calculation, which as we have seen began in various walks of life after the twelfth century, became ingrained in the Renaissance. Burckhardt draws our attention to the statistics of import and export in both Venice and Florence, and to the budgets of the church in Rome.70 Until the end of the fourteenth century, time was in general divided up into the parts of the day, with short amounts counted in Aves, the amount of time it took to say a ‘Hail Mary’. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, public clocks went up in Bologna, Milan and Venice and shortly afterwards portable clocks were invented (horologi portativi). In Antonio Filarete’s utopia, Sforzinda, even the schools had alarm clocks. In Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on the family, he argues that time is ‘precious’ and showed a hatred of idleness.71 There was too a growing concern with utilitas, utility. Filarete, in his utopia, even went so far as to outlaw the death penalty, arguing that criminals were more ‘useful’ if they were forced to undertake the unpleasant duties that no one else wanted. This is crude, but it is calculation.

  Insofar as education helped in one’s calculations, study was felt to add to the dignity of man. Renaissance writers were especially concerned with what they called the humana conditio, the human condition. The ideal of the humanists was to become as rational as possible and so grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and ethics were known in Florence as the studia humanitatis, the humanities, because they helped make a man complete. Self-knowledge was considered essential to the completion of man.72 This led to a new concept of education, or rather we should say a revived concept–education not only as learning but understood as the production of good citizens, the old classical idea that the complete individual naturally takes part in the life of the polis. Medieval humanism had been aloof from the world. Renaissance humanism was a form of civic humanism and as such it represented another aspect of the rediscovery of antiquity.73

  One should not exaggerate these changes but we should not downplay them either. There was a downside to the Renaissance. There was violence in the streets, bitter and prolonged family feuds, political factionalism, vicious cruelty. Piracy and banditry at times seemed endemic. Magic and devil worship proliferated and even papally-sanctioned assassination was not unknown. The church, ‘the West’s fundamental institution’, seemed at times spiritually bankrupt.74 Was this due to the rapid build-up of wealth and the disruption of traditional values? Was it a by-product of rampant individualism? There are those who doubt now that individualism was quite as new or as rampant in the Renaissance as Burckhardt argued. Indeed, he himself began to doubt it towards the end of his life.75 Here is another area where the real change may have taken place in the renaissance of the twelfth century. But compared with the medieval view that man was a fallen, miserable creature, waiting here on earth in anticipation of a paradise somewhere else, the Renaissance humanists were far more concerned with the here-and-now, with the possibilities of this life, its pleasures and opportunities, with what could be achieved on earth.76 In much the same way, the old obsession with the contemplative life and with poverty was replaced by a passion for the active life and the praise of wealth. For example, Poggio Bracciolini, philologist, polemicist and antiquarian, produced a dialogue On Avarice, which was a defence of something that hitherto had been a vice. Men must produce more than they need, he says, otherwise, ‘All the splendour of cities will be removed, divine worship and its embellishments lost, no churches or arcades built, all the arts will come to an end…What are cities, commonwealths, provinces, kingdoms, but public workshops of avarice?’77 Conspicuous consumption, another innovation of the Renaissance, was itself a form of calculation, for the effect it had on one’s reputation and fame. Cosimo de’ Medici said that his greatest mistake ‘ever’ was not to have begun to spend his money ten years before he did.78

  Despite his backtracking on individualism, Burckhardt stood by his claim that the Italian was ‘the first-born among the sons of modern Europe’. In the Renaissance, the secular world expanded hugely, though there was as yet no retreat from Christian belief.

  19

  The Explosion of Imagination

  To Chapter 19 Notes and References

  On the last day of carnival in 1497 in Florence, and again a year later, a curious construction appeared in the Piazza della Signoria, overlooked by the Palazzo Vecchio. The centre of the structure was a great flight of stairs in the form of a pyramid. On the lowest step was displayed a number of false beards, masks and disguises used in the carnival. Above them was a collection of books (both printed and manuscript)–Latin and Italian poets, including the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch. Then came various female ornaments–mirrors, veils, cosmetics, scents–with lutes, harps, playing cards and chess pieces above them. At the very top, on the two highest tiers, were paintings, but paintings of a special kind, showing female beauties, in particular those bearing classical names: Lucretia, Cleopatra, Faustina, Bencina. As this ‘bonfire of the vanities’ was set ablaze, the Signoria, or assembly of politicians, watched from the balconies of their palazzos. Music was played, the people sang, and church bells rang out. Then everyone adjourned to the Piazza di San Marco where they formed into three concentric circles for the dancing. The monks were in the middle, alternating with boys dressed as angels. Outside them came other ecclesiastics and then the citizens.1

  This was all performed for the satisfaction of the Dominican prophet, Fra Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara. ‘Pungent with charisma’, convinced that he had been sent by God to aid the inward reform of the Italian people, and insistent that the office of preacher was a high one, ‘the next place below the angels’, he sought the regeneration of the church in, among other things, a series of Jeremiads–terrible warnings of the evils that would arise unless reform was total and immediate. In this, classical literature and learning had little or no place. ‘The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle,’ he said, ‘is that they brought forward many arguments we can use against heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed.’2

  This destruction of the representations and trappings of beauty was especially poignant because, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, art, artistic purpose and commitment to beauty were defining characteristics of Renaissance civilisation.3 For Burckhardt at least, ‘even the outward appearance of [Italian] men and women and the habits of daily life were more perfect, more beautiful and more polished than among the other nations of Europe’.4 Aesthetics ruled in the Renaissance more than at any other time and the ‘long’ sixteenth century, 1450–1625, has aptly been called the aesthetic moment.

  In the realm of art, the fifteenth century was packed with innovations of which the most important were the invention of oil painting, the discovery of linear perspective, advances in the understanding of anatomy, a new concern with nature and, arguably the most pervasive and fundamental influence of all, the Platonic notion of universalism.

  The technique of oil painting is traditionally credited to the van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, both active from the 1420s, in and around Ghent, Bruges and the Hague. Though this is no longer tenable, what is clear is that Jan van Eyck did perfect the method of oil painting, and varnishing, which has enabled his colours, and colour-effects, to have survived unchanged over the centu
ries. The important point about oil painting is that, unlike fresco–the most popular medium to that point–it dries slowly. Fresco dried so quickly that painters had to work very fast and their chances of changing what they had done were minimal. But pigments mixed with oil do not dry for weeks, meaning that alterations could be made, painters could improve weak patches, or change their minds completely if a new idea occurred to them. This made painters more thoughtful, more reflective, and also enabled them to take their time over mixing colours, to achieve more subtle effects. This was in evidence early on with the van Eycks, whose detailed rendering of objects and surfaces (next to impossible in fresco) meant that form and space were now much more developed and realistic. The same applied to the emotional force of paintings. The greater time allowed by oils enabled painters to explore facial expression in more detail, and in so doing to widen the range of emotions represented.

  Linear perspective, known originally in Italy as costruzione legittima, was invented in the early fifteenth century, possibly by Brunelleschi, though it was built on and improved by Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca. The idea may have been slowly maturing since the great age of cathedral-building, which drew attention to distances, and spawned a surge in three-dimensional sculpture. Perspective was important not just for the added realism it gave to paintings but also for the fact that it involved an understanding of mathematics, which at that time was included in the liberal arts. If painters could therefore demonstrate that their art depended on, or benefited from, mathematics, it would further their claim that painting was a liberal art, and not a mechanical one. The essential point about linear perspective was that parallel lines never meet but they appear to do so, with all parallel lines converging at a vanishing point on the horizon. This transformed the verisimilitude of painting and accounted in large measure for its increased popularity.5

  The greater realism allowed by oil painting and perspective was added to by both the close study of anatomy that many artists made in the fifteenth century–allowing a much more accurate rendering of musculature, thanks to advances in medical science (discussed in a later chapter)–and a new affinity for nature, provoked by humanism, and which likewise stimulated the portrayal of landscapes in addition to figures. Allied to this was a new interest in the narrative style–that is to say, paintings which, as well as glorifying God, told a story that would appeal to most people. As was mentioned earlier, Peter Burke found that out of two thousand dated paintings of the period, in 1480–1489 there were 5 per cent that were secular in character; by 1530–1539, this had risen to 22 per cent. This is a four-fold increase over half a century but the change should not be exaggerated: even at the later date the great majority of paintings were still religious in character.

  Among the secular paintings, allegories grew in popularity after 1480. Allegorical paintings look rather strange and are generally unpopular these days (except among art historians). Scantily clad women, dancing or dashing about amid classical ruins, small chubby cupids holding bows and arrows, or swords and ribbons, men who are half-beast, or goats with fishes’ tails, do not sit easily with modern taste. But in the Renaissance, with humanism in full flood, allegory was as popular as, say, Impressionism is in our own day. Classical allegory became popular around the time Botticelli finished his Primavera, which is now among the most famous paintings in the world. Rich in complex Christian and mythological allusions, it includes among its nine figures Mercury, Cupid, the Three Graces and the most famous figure of all, Flora, decked in hundreds of flowers. Allegory grew in popularity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but by the end of that period the heavy symbolism which had such an appeal to begin with had become so fragmented that mythology, as a way of presenting a particular message, had been fatally weakened.

  Throughout the Renaissance, however, the fact that allegory flourished is of great significance. The popularity of the classical deities suggests, for instance, that they had never really disappeared but had simply gone underground, often adapted to the Christian tradition in hybrid form. In turn this raises the possibility that, in medieval times, the general public had never been quite so convinced of Christianity as the church liked to maintain. There were of course unavoidable elements of paganism in the Christian world, starting with the names for the days of the week and the very timing of Christmas. But it was more than that. During the great flowering of Christian art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, astrologers in Italy directed the lives of whole cities. By the early fourteenth century, the pagan gods commonly appeared not just in literature but on monuments as well. In Venice they were used on the Gothic capitals of the Doges’ Palace, and appeared at much the same time in Padua, Florence and Siena.6 In the early fifteenth century the use of pagan mythology and astrology became even more open. In the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, just above the altar, there is a cupola containing mythical figures and a constellation of the heavens which coincides with the sky above the city at the time of the Council of Florence. Later equivalent decorations were to invade even the palaces of the popes (the list of St Peter’s successors in the Borgia apartments is surrounded by celestial symbols, including Jupiter and Mars). Marsilio Ficino founded a whole school of exegesis in which it was accepted that wisdom could be sought in classical allegory, and this makes clear that allegory is more than simple allusion to mythology. To be able to decipher an allegory conferred a kind of insider status which appealed very much to the mood of the times and was adroitly developed by one of Ficino’s followers, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). According to him, and others like him, the ancient myths were a kind of code which concealed a secret wisdom: this wisdom was veiled by allegory which, once deciphered, would reveal the secrets of the universe. Pico cited the teaching of Moses who, after all, had communed with God for forty days on the mountain and yet returned from Sinai with but two tablets: much more must have been revealed to him which he kept secret. Jesus himself confessed as much when he said to his disciples: ‘It has been granted to you to know the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven; but to those others it has not been granted.’ To Mirandola, and many others like him, all religions shared mysteries, and only to a select few–philosophers–could the secrets be revealed through the deciphering of ancient myths. One way of trying to do this was to explore the links and similarities between classical myths and Christianity.7

  But the most dominant idea among the artists of the Renaissance was the essentially Platonic notion of universalism. Universalism is in fact one of the oldest and most influential ideas in history. It stems in part from ancient Greece, reflecting the theories of Pythagoras and Plato, though it also owes a great deal to the early Christian thinkers who adapted Greek ideas in Alexandria in the first centuries AD. By Renaissance times, the idea of universality had a long genealogy and had become more and more sophisticated.

  In his survey of medieval theories about art and beauty, Umberto Eco concluded that medieval aesthetics was filled with repetitions and regurgitations and constituted a world ‘where everything was in its proper place…medieval civilisation attempted to capture the eternal essences of things, beauty as well as everything else, in precise definitions.’8 The difference was shown most clearly in the status of artists: the medieval artist was someone ‘dedicated to humble service of faith and the community’ (a community that might be a monastery, remote in the countryside).9 Underlying universalism in the Renaissance, however, was the idea that though nature was a ‘divinely ordained’ system, as it was held to be in the Middle Ages, it was now given to man–especially artists and geniuses–to apprehend that system. According to this theory, nature is homogeneous and all knowledge can therefore be reduced to a few primary axioms–‘natural law’. People such as Francis Bacon believed that man was divinely endowed to know nature and that the age was at hand when that knowledge would be perfected. Christians–knowingly or unknowingly–adopted Platonic ideas, in particular the notion that, since man shared some of the
qualities of the divine mind, then the proper observation of nature, and of the links between the various arts and sciences, would provide man–and in particular the artist and scientist–with glimpses of the real essence of the universe, the underlying reality. In the Renaissance, this is what wisdom meant. Marsilio Ficino was specific. ‘God has created all only that you may see it. As God creates so man thinks. Human understanding, on a limited scale, parallels the act of creation. Man is united to the gods by what he has of the divine, his intellect.’10 Pico della Mirandola put it more strongly: ‘In him are all things; so let him become all things, understand all things and in this way become a god.’ Whereas beasts had a fixed nature, it was given to man–artists especially–to alter his nature and ‘become all things’. This is what being an artist meant and why being an artist was so important.