Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Renaissance thinkers also believed that the entire universe was a model of the divine idea and that man was ‘a creator after the divine creator’. Central to this was the concept of beauty, a form of harmony which reflected divine intentions. What is pleasing to the eye and ear and mind is good, is morally valuable in itself. More important, it discloses part of the divine plan for mankind, because it reveals the relation of the parts to the whole. This Renaissance ideal of beauty supported the notion that it had two functions and applied across all disciplines. At one level, architecture, the visual arts, music, and the formal aspects of the literary and dramatic arts all informed the mind; at a second level, they pleased the mind, by means of decorum, style and symmetry. In this way an association was established between beauty and enlightenment. Again, this is what wisdom meant.

  The natural corollary was the desire for personal universality, and for mankind’s achievement of a universal corpus of knowledge. The bringing together of disciplines was, in part, a conscious quest to deepen understanding, by exploring the generic similarities at the core of the different spheres of knowledge. Because of the then-recent rediscoveries of the Greek and Latin classics and the greater availability of such material, the assumed existence of these similarities was more than ever in the air. As a result, Renaissance men were often led naturally from involvement in one field of activity to another. Vitruvius had noted that all the sciences and arts have theory in common despite great differences in practice and technique. He therefore recommended that the architect, for example, become a master of the theoretical background of many different disciplines. ‘He should be a man of letters, a skilful draughtsman, a mathematician familiar with scientific inquiries, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music; not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of juris consults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.’11 This idea of universality was taken up afresh by Renaissance men. It is found in the thought of humanists and in the ideals of the Florentine Academy. Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, wrote: ‘The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero, speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism…But among these many-sided men, some who may be truly called all-sided tower above the rest.’ He singled out Alberti and Leonardo (who had his own advisor for mathematics, Luca Pacioli).12

  Here is Burckhardt on Alberti: ‘Assiduous in the science and skill of dealing with arms and horses and musical instruments, as well as in pursuit of letters and the fine arts…showing by example that men can do anything with themselves if they will.’ Alberti himself wrote a great deal about universality, as did Leonardo. For example, Alberti said: ‘Man was created for the pleasure of God, to recognise the primary and original source of things amid the variety, dissimilarity, beauty, and multiplicity of animal life, amid all the forms, structure, coverings, and colours that characterise the animals.’13 In his book on architecture we are explicitly told that ‘the potential for awareness of harmony and beauty is innate in the mind’ and that recognition of these truths occurs from the ‘quick and direct’ stimulation of the senses. ‘In order to judge truly of beauty it is not opinion which matters but rather a kind of reason which is innate in the mind.’ Man, Alberti says, possesses qualities of mind that are analogous to divine qualities, in particular the ‘capacity to recognise’ and the ‘capacity to make’. All creatures perfect themselves as they fulfil their innate gifts.14

  Nature, Alberti further argued, has been arranged harmoniously by God in accordance with a divinely conceived pattern that is best described in mathematical terms. Others, like Kepler, agreed. Man’s conscious awareness of innate qualities–for example the awareness of beauty–can be increasingly magnified from an accumulation of good examples. This was the aim of art. In his search for truly good forms in nature, the artist continually shops around for beautiful examples–of, say, human bodies. From the range of these examples he gradually refines a clearer conception of what, for example, a beautiful body is. Eventually, over the course of many similar pursuits, the artist perfects his awareness of a general idea of beauty. Men are all gifted to recognise beauty but the artist practises to perfect his gift, and to represent his concept for his fellow men. He becomes our teacher of beauty by the quality of the artistic examples that he places before our eyes. The recognition of beauty centres on the divine gifts to the human intellect. In Alberti’s curriculum, there was no mention of Christian authors or the Bible, only classical sources.15 Some forty-three treatises on beauty were written during Renaissance times. The idea of the universal man was a common feature of nearly all of them.

  Peter Burke has identified fifteen universal men in the Renaissance (‘universal’ defined as talents in three or more areas, at a level beyond that of a dilettante): Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Antonio Filarete (1400–1465), architect, sculptor, writer; Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), architect, writer, medallist, painter; Lorenzo Vecchietta (1405/1412–1480), architect, painter, sculptor, engineer; Bernard Zenale (1436–1526), architect, painter, writer; Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1506), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Donato Bramante (1444–1514), architect, engineer, painter, poet; Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), architect, sculptor, painter, scientist; Giovanni Giocondo (1457–1525), architect, engineer, humanist; Silvestro Aquilano (before 1471–1504), architect, sculptor, painter; Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), architect, painter, writer; Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), architect, sculptor, painter, writer; Guido Mazzoni (before 1477–1518), sculptor, painter, theatrical producer; Piero Ligorio (1500–1583), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), architect, sculptor, painter, writer.16

  It will be noticed in this list that, out of fifteen universal men, fourteen were architects, thirteen were painters, ten were sculptors and six each were engineers and writers. What was it about architecture that it features so highly among this group? In the Renaissance, it was the aspiration of many artists to progress toward architecture. In the fifteenth century, architecture was one of the liberal arts, whereas painting and sculpture were only mechanical arts. This would change, but it helps explain the order of priorities in quattrocento Italy.

  The careers of some of these universal men were extraordinary. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for example, designed a large number of fortresses and military engines. Other ideas of his may be seen from seventy-two bas reliefs he constructed ‘which consist wholly of instruments for the purposes of war’. He was a councillor in Siena and rather more than that, as it turned out, becoming a spy of sorts, who reported on papal and Florentine troop movements. Trained as a painter, he had a career that matured through sculpture to architecture in the 1480s and the writing of an important architectural thesis. In his treatise he contrasted such things as birds’ nests and spiders’ webs, arguing that their very invariability proved that animals were not touched by the divine quality of invenzione as humans were.17 Giovanni Giocondo was a Dominican friar, ‘a man of rare parts and a master of all the noble faculties’. Vasari depicts him chiefly as a man of letters, but adds that he was a very good theologian and philosopher, an excellent Greek scholar, when such a thing was rare in Italy, a very fine architect, and an excellent master of perspective. He became famous in Verona, where he lived, for the part he played in redesigning the Ponte della Pietra, a bridge built on such soft ground that it was always collapsing. In his youth he spent many years in Rome and in that way became familiar with the relics of antiquity, collecting many of the most beautiful things into a book. Mugellane called Giocondo ‘a profound master in antiquities’. He wrote commentaries on Caesar, taught Vitruvius to his contemporaries, and discovered the letters of Pliny in a Parisian library. He built two bridges over the Seine for the king of France. On the death of Bramante he was, with Raphael, given the commission to complete
Bramante’s work at St Peter’s. He ensured that the foundations were renewed, exposing a number of wells in the process and filling them in. But his greatest accomplishment is probably his solution for the great canals of Venice, diverting water brought down by the river Brenta, and helping La Serenissima survive until today. He was a great friend of Aldus Manutius.18 Brunelleschi had even more varied talents than those mentioned above. He was a clockmaker, a goldsmith and an archaeologist in addition to designing and directing the construction of the amazing dome of his city’s cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. A friend of Donatello and Massaccio, he was more versatile than either.19

  Has the concept of universal man, Renaissance man, been overdone? In the twelfth century certain scholars–Aquinas, for example–came close to having ‘universal knowledge’, knowing all that could be known (remember R. W. S. Southern’s point, discussed in Chapter 15, that the sum-total of texts in those days was a few hundred, meaning that it was possible for someone to be acquainted with everything, or almost everything). Perhaps the real significance of the Renaissance idea of universal men is their attitude, their self-consciousness, their optimism. This, as much as anything, surely accounts for the explosion of imagination.

  Intimately related to universality was the matter of paragone–whether painting was superior to sculpture, or vice versa. This was a major intellectual issue of the day in the fifteenth century and a central topic in the writings of, for example, Alberti, Antonio Filarete and Leonardo. Alberti argued for the superiority of painting. It had colour, could depict many things that sculpture couldn’t (clouds, rain, mountains) and made use of the liberal arts (mathematics, in perspective). Leonardo thought that bas relief was a kind of cross between painting and sculpture and might be superior to both. The advocates of sculpture, on the other hand, argued that the three dimensions of statues were more real and that painters drew their inspiration from carved figures. Filarete argued that sculpture could never escape the fact that it was made out of stone or wood, say, whereas painting could show the colour of skin, of blonde hair, it could depict a city in flames, the light of a beautiful dawn, the shimmer of the sea. All this was beyond sculpture. To overcome the objections of those who argued for the superiority of sculpture, brushmen like Mantegna and Titian painted stone figures in trompe l’oeil ‘relief’. Painting could imitate sculpture, but not the other way round.20

  Just as painting and sculpture were endlessly compared at the time of universal men, so too were painting and poetry. For a while a great similarity was seen between the two activities. Lorenzo Valla, writing in 1442 and perhaps following the line taken by Alberti in his treatise On Painting, suggested that painting, sculpture and architecture are among the activities that ‘most closely approximate to the liberal arts’. In the introduction to the section on painting and painters in his De viris illustribus (On Famous Men) of 1456, Bartolomeo Fazio gave more detailed but comparable arguments: ‘…there is…a certain great affinity between painters and poets; a painting is indeed nothing else than a wordless poem. For truly almost equal attention is given by both to the invention and the arrangement of their work…It is as much the painter’s task as the poet’s to represent those properties of their subjects, and it is in that very thing that the talent and capability of each is most recognised.’21 It was Alberti who, in On Painting, written twenty years before Fazio’s biographies of painters, first articulated at length the need for artists to learn from poets and to seek parity between painting and poetry. He wanted the painter ‘as far as he is able to be learned in all the liberal arts,’ and so ‘it will be of advantage if [he takes] pleasure in poets and orators, for these have many ornaments in common with the painter.’22 Moreover, Alberti advised ‘the studious painter to make himself familiar with poets and orators and other men of letters, for he will not only obtain excellent ornaments from such learned minds, but he will also be assisted in those very inventions which in painting may gain him the greatest praise. The eminent painter Phidias used to say that he had learned from Homer how best to represent the majesty of Jupiter. I believe that we too may be richer and better painters from reading our poets…’ For Alberti painting, like poetry, uses parts of the quadrivium–geometry and arithmetic–in its theoretical basis; therefore, like poetry, painting should rank as a liberal art.23

  In a large number of notes written in preparation for his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci makes plain that in his view (which was based on classical arguments) painting is the superior, nobler art. It is with Leonardo, in fact, that many of these ideas about painting and poetry crystallise. ‘If you assert that painting is dumb poetry,’ Leonardo wrote, ‘then the painter may call poetry blind painting…but painting remains the worthier in as much as it serves the nobler sense’–in other words, the sense of sight. He insisted that the power of a painting that imitates nature to deceive the viewer is greater than that of a poem. ‘We may justly claim that the difference between the science of painting and poetry is equivalent to that between a body and its cast shadow.’24

  Some Renaissance painters sought to exercise their inventive abilities by writing poetry themselves. They wanted recognition as poets because, in spite of Alberti’s defence of painting and Leonardo’s arguments for the painter’s superiority, throughout the early Renaissance poets were more highly regarded than painters in intellectual circles. Brunelleschi wrote a group of sonnets in self-defence in his argument with Donatello about the decoration of the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence and a number still survive. Bramante, too, tried his hand at writing verse: thirty-three accomplished sonnets by him survive. It was of course the young Michelangelo who of all Renaissance artists wrote poetry of the truest literary merit.25

  The very idea of universality implied that universal men were something special, set apart, examples of the ideal. Thus it was only natural that these universal men should be at the forefront of the movement by means of which the status of the artist improved in the fifteenth century. One way this showed itself was in the art of self-portraiture. Antonio Filarete was unmatched in the middle of the century in his consciousness of the value of self-portraiture and associated imagery for publicising his intellectual and social position. He incorporated not one but two self-portraits into the decoration of the bronze doors of St Peter’s, cast for Pope Eugenius IV between 1435 and 1445. The first is a profile portrait closely based on Roman coins and medals. It is a small medal, let into the centre of the bottom border of the left leaf of the doors; its reverse is in the same position on the right leaf, and both have inscribed signatures.26 Filarete’s second acknowledgement of his own work is a relief attached to the inside of the door at floor level and which shows him and his assistants performing a dance. This is more than it seems because in his imaginary ideal city, Sforzinda, to which he devoted an entire treatise, he wrote: ‘If all are to work together at the same time, the first as well as the last, it will have to be like a dance. The first dances like the last if they have a good leader and good music.’27

  In line with the increased standing of the artist, the conceits of paragone and self-portraiture, were the twin concepts of invenzione and fantasia, invention and imagination, which together might be called artistic licence. During the fifteenth century, and especially with universal men, it came to be accepted that artists could not always be expected to do exactly what their patrons said. This was a major change. Here, for instance, is Isabella d’Este writing to Fra Pietro della Novellara in March 1501: ‘If you think [Leonardo, the Florentine painter] will be staying there for some time, Your Reverence might then sound him out as to whether he will take on a picture for our studiolo. And if he is pleased to do this, we will leave both the subject and the time of doing it to him…’ In other words, there was no attempt even to specify a subject.28

  The huge changes taking place in the visual arts are perhaps most neatly summed up by the appearance, in 1573, of Veronese before the Inquisition. The Inquisition will be explored more thorough
ly a little later on but, after the Reformation, and the Catholic church’s response–the Council of Trent, which met on and off from 1544 to 1563, with the aim of deciding Roman policy–one effect was that works of art were liable to censorship. Veronesehad painted a vast, sumptuous feast canvas for the learned Dominican fathers of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, who needed to replace a painting of the Last Supper by Titian which had been lost in a fire. Veronese’s picture was, in effect, a triptych, three Palladian arches with Christ in the central one and staircases leading off the canvas. Despite its religious theme, the picture is lively and shows a sophisticated Venetian celebration, with the partygoers in fine clothes, surrounded by jugs of wine, rich food, exotically garbed black people, dogs and monkeys and is painted in striking perspective. The Inquisition took him to task for this.

  Inquisitor. What is the significance of the man whose nose is bleeding? And those armed men dressed as Germans?