The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  Michelangelo was made when, at seventeen, he produced his first masterpiece, a marble relief, The Battle of the Centaurs. It is an exciting work, done with great facility and striking economy, the nude male figures exhibiting extraordinary energy in punching the narrative home to the viewer. But it is unfinished, for reasons we do not know, and this became almost the hallmark of Michelangelo’s work. However, he did finish his first important commission, a Pietà (Mary with the dead Christ) intended for the tomb of a French cardinal in Rome. Michelangelo began it when he was twenty-two and completed the project to a high state of polish three years later. It is by any standards a mature and majestic work, combining strength (the Virgin) and pathos (the Christ), nobility and tenderness, a consciousness of human fragility and a countervailing human endurance, which fill those who study it with a powerful mixture of emotions. It is the ideal religious work, inducing reverence, gratitude, sorrow and prayer. The standard of carving, of both the flesh and the draperies, is without precedent in human history, and it is not hard to imagine the astonishment and respect it produced among both cognoscenti and ordinary men and women alike. The youth of the sculptor made him a wonder, and the acclaim given to the work was the beginning of Michelangelo’s reputation as an artistic superman, larger than life—like some of his works—and endowed with godly qualities.

  Whether it benefits an artist to have this kind of reputation is debatable. Early in the sixteenth century, Michelangelo created from a gigantic marble block that had already been scratched at by earlier artists a heroic figure of David, designed to stand in the open (it is now in the Accademia, Florence) and overawe the Florentines. He omitted Goliath’s head and the boy’s sword, and the enormous work is a frightening statement of nude male power, carved with almost atrocious skill and energy. It made both Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s depictions seem insignificant by comparison, and it added to the growing legend of Michelangelo’s supranormal powers, patrons and public alike confusing the gigantism of the work with the man who made it. The year after he finished it Julius II summoned him to Rome to create, for his own vanity and the admiration of posterity, a splendid marble tomb with a multiplicity of figures and a magnificent architectural setting. Michelangelo accepted with joy the chance to create such an ambitious work for a munificent patron, and he did indeed complete, to his satisfaction and everyone else’s, at the time and since, part of the whole, a superb Moses, the godlike image of the lawgiver and judge who is the central figure in the Old Testament. Many would say it is the sculptor’s finest work. But the entire project took forty years and was never finished as intended. It involved the artist in quarrels with the great, flights from Rome, lawsuits and endless anxiety, even a sense of failure. It destabilized Michelangelo as a man and an artist, and affected his attitude to work that had nothing to do with the tomb.

  In the Accademia, Florence, there is the partial figure of the Atlas Slave for the tomb, really the torso and legs alone, the rest of the marble being cut to size but unworked. Why was it abandoned? We do not know. The Dying Slave (Louvre), also intended for the tomb, has the figure complete, and magnificent it is, but the supporting back and base are only roughly worked. Why? We do not know. Two marble tondos of the Virgin and Child, one in the Bargello, Florence, the other the prize possession of the Royal Academy, London, are also incomplete, the superb faces and limbs emerging tentatively out of rough working. Time and again, Michelangelo conceived a grand or beautiful design, roughed it out, worked at it, completed part, and then left the rest, whether from lack of time, pressure of other commissions, dissatisfaction with his work or sheer exhaustion is rarely evident. Of course great artists sometimes prefer their work to be unfinished: it gives an impression of spontaneity and inspiration that a meticulous veneer obscures. But in some cases, as in the great tomb of the Medici, with its awesome figure of the seated, pensive Lorenzo, itself complete as are the two supporting nudes beneath, niches are left empty and an air of incompleteness hovers over the whole.

  Did Michelangelo suffer from some sickness of the soul? He was quarrelsome and often angry with himself as well as others. He seems to us an isolated figure, isolated in his greatness, in his lack of a private life or privacy, his heart empty of consummated love, his only competitor and measuring mark the Deity himself. It should also be said that Michelangelo imposed severe limitations on himself. He obviously did not like working in bronze, and rarely did so. It was an unlucky metal for him. His one great bronze effort, a gigantic statue of Julius II, was later melted down in an emergency and made into cannon. He made a wooden crucifix, and painted it. But in general he liked only marble and carving with a high finish, and he preferred an elaborate architectural setting, so that his works are seen from the front, not in the round. All these self-imposed limits increased his difficulties, and Michelangelo was not an artist who, in times of stress, could console himself with creating small objects of beauty. The man and his work were on the grandest of scales, so that his triumphs were epic, but so were his tragedies.

  The superhuman great tend to blast and sterilize the territory around them. Michelangelo dwarfed his contemporaries in sculpture, and in the generation after his own no one took on his record. There was a time lapse of some decades before another heroic Italian, Bernini, put on Elijah’s mantle, but by then the Renaissance was finally over and an entirely new epoch in European art, what we call the Baroque, had begun. The Italianized Fleming Giambologna, who claimed to be an heir of Michelangelo and who certainly attempted the heroic in marble and bronze, was also beyond the scope of the true Renaissance spirit. It is appropriate, however, to end this section with a reference to a contemporary of Michelangelo’s middle and later years, Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571). He was in many ways the antithesis of Michelangelo as an artist, but he was a superbly characteristic Renaissance figure in his love and knowledge of the antique, in his technical and artistic daring, in his amazing versatility and in his love of human beauty, which was simultaneously complex and simple.

  Like so many Renaissance practitioners of high art, Cellini came from that rich depository of skills, the Florentine artisanate. His grandfather was an expert mason and his father a specialized carpenter who among other things made and put up scaffolding for Leonardo da Vinci’s large-scale projects and carved elaborate musical instruments. Cellini went into that Aladdin’s cave and sorcerer’s den of the Renaissance, a goldsmith’s workshop. The skills he acquired there became the basis of an encyclopedic knowledge of how to work with materials of all kinds, from gold and silver and the most precious of stones to hard stones of every variety and base metals. Cellini was one of the few Renaissance artists trained as a goldsmith who is celebrated for a surviving piece of goldsmithing. Virtually all his early work vanished in the tragic sack of Rome in 1527, never to surface again, for like bronze, gold was a risky material in which to seek eternal fame, as owners melted it down in hard times. However, Cellini worked for the munificent François I of France, 1540–45, and the superb gold-and-enamel salt he made for the king somehow came through to posterity and is now one of the greatest treasures of the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. This enchanting object took Cellini two years to complete—which was regarded at the time as astonishing speed, and no wonder: no individual or team could produce it today in a century. If any one work of art, with its classical themes, its fecundity and brilliance, its adventurous technology and sheer love of art and humanity, sums up the entire Renaissance, it is this glorious extravaganza.

  Cellini made so many different things that it is hard to list them all: ceremonial medals with finely sculpted heads and ingenious reverses, coin dies, emblematic enseignes, the dies for seals—all of great artistry—elaborate candlesticks and ewers, altar furniture and tableware, small bronzes and decorative pieces of every description. He also aimed at the heroic and once or twice succeeded in achieving it, notably in his magnificent Perseus and the Head of Medusa, a large-scale bronze on an elaborate pedestal with a relief panel and f
our bronze statuettes in its niches. Commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici and designed to stand in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria alongside, and in competition with, Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, it was finished in 1560 and seen by the sculptor as the climax of his career. The new duke of Tuscany regarded it as the embodiment of his “Etruscan revival,” which his dukedom symbolized, for the pose recalls an Etruscan bronze of the fourth century B.C. that Cosimo admired. This work, too, with its deliberate recall of the glorious antique past and its brilliant display of what the artists of sixteenth-century Europe, and especially Florence, could now accomplish, was also a recapitulation and epitome of everything the Renaissance stood for.

  The great bronze is perhaps the best documented of any Renaissance work of art, for Cellini describes its conception and fabrication in considerable detail. He was a hot-blooded, rash, difficult and audacious man, with all the vices of artistic flamboyance we associate with the more sensational Renaissance artists, and some peculiar to himself in addition. The surviving court records show him in and out of trouble all his life, often being forced to flee to escape trial. He was guilty of at least two killings, being pardoned by virtue of his artistic services—a typical Renaissance touch. He was twice accused of sodomy, the second time after the genesis of Perseus, causing him to flee to Venice, where he met the architect Sansovino and Titian. He was nonetheless convicted, sentenced to four years in prison, and actually endured a long house arrest, which he used to write his autobiography. This delightful and highly informative work, a real window into the artistic world of his day, tells us all about the Perseus and many other works of his. It is also a work of literary art, which in its own way confirms the long process by which the humble and often anonymous medieval craftsman raised himself to the status of a Renaissance hero, albeit that in the violent and boastful Cellini’s case he was more of an antihero. We learn from the autobiography that he was an art collector. Vasari says he amassed several cartoons from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling, and he apparently copied out a treatise by Leonardo on the three arts of sculpture, painting and architecture, together with a study of perspective. The truth is, during the Renaissance, and especially in Florence, these arts were all closely interconnected, and from sculpture we now turn to the art of building.

  PART 4

  THE BUILDINGS OF THE RENAISSANCE

  To the ordinary citizens of late medieval Florence or any other town in Italy, architecture was visually far more important than any other art, let alone writing. They might not penetrate to the treasures housed in the palaces, but they could see the buildings from the outside, and they were familiar with the churches and the cathedrals, even being allowed on occasion into the sacristies, where the most precious art objects were kept. Building, even more than public sculpture, was a matter of civic pride. Italian citizens were also conscious of the architecture of antiquity, for its ruins were still there in many cases, not yet entirely looted for stone, tidied up or cleared away. In a sense, large parts of medieval Italy were still one vast architectural ruin, a constant reminder of the gigantism and glory of Rome, so that when increasing wealth encouraged the leading cities to glorify themselves in turn, it was to the example of their Roman past that artists naturally looked, and the public could compare the results. In architecture, then, the Renaissance was a natural event; it went with the grain of the country.

  We have here a marked contrast between southern Europe, Italy in particular, and the north. Gothic had evolved in twelfth-century France out of Romanesque, itself a primitive, bastard form of the architecture of the late Roman Empire. But it had evolved into a style of its own, a truly original creation, eventually of great majesty and subtlety, embodying considerable engineering achievements, overwhelming decorative effects and impressive power. The major Gothic cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Spain are some of the largest and finest buildings ever constructed, and they became depositories of artistic treasures only a fraction of which now remain. They were a wonder of the world, but they did not impress the Italians—even those who were aware of their existence or, a far smaller group, those who had seen them. Gothic was a habit, an impulse, not a system. It had no theory and no literature. It was a sophisticated evolution from a primitive instinct. Very few cathedrals were conceived and built as a whole, according to a master plan (Salisbury in England was a rare exception, and even in its case the spire was not added until two hundred years later). Some, like Cologne, remained unfinished until modern times. The Italians, particularly in their northern plains, built Gothic cathedrals, such as that in Milan, but without enthusiasm or relish. The Gothic spirit, as opposed to forms, never settled upon them. There was something organic about it that Italians found unreasonable, so that one senses they adopted it only in an aberrant form and longed, perhaps unconsciously, to replace it with something better, derived from the roots of their culture.

  In Florence, where the architecture of the Renaissance properly began, those roots were deep and went back to Roman times. The cathedral was originally a building of the fifth or even the fourth century, which had twice been reconstructed in early medieval times. It was, then, a Roman-Romanesque work. The Baptistry, which is part of the complex, was modeled on the circular Pantheon in Rome, in the sixth or seventh century, though it was altered and reconsecrated in 1059. So it too could be called a Roman work. The third building in the complex, the campanile or bell tower, was designed by Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337), more celebrated as a painter, who was made master of the Cathedral Works in 1334. His plans survive, but he died three years later, and the actual building, constructed in turn by Andrea Pisano, the sculptor, and Francesco Talenti, is rather different. It does not look Gothic. But then it does not look Roman or Romanesque, either. It is sui generis.

  A generation before, in 1294, the Florentines decided they ought to pull down their old cathedral and build a new and bigger one, and a plan was drawn up two years later. The façade was built of brick faced with white, green and pink marble, but work was suspended to build the campanile in similar fashion, and the old cathedral was not finally demolished until 1375. By then the final design had been settled: a vast, oblong church with four immense bays between the façade and the sanctuary, an octagonal space surmounted by a great drum with a dome on top. The cathedral, as designed, was imagined in a splendid fresco, The Church Triumphant, painted by Andrea da Firenze, a member of the planning committee. But by whom and how was this monster, unprecedented in size and raising engineering problems that had never been tackled before, to be built?

  The piers for the octagon were constructed between 1384 and 1410, the drum was begun, and in 1418 a competition was held for the dome. It was won by Filippo Brunelleschi, in association with Ghiberti, who was of course already at work on the Baptistry doors. Brunelleschi guaranteed that the dome would not require construction by centering, the elaborate scaffolding process used in Gothic cathedrals to put up the stone vaults with which the masons covered large internal spaces. In fact a similar large internal space in Ely Cathedral in England, created earlier in the fourteenth century by the collapse of the central tower, had been filled by a gigantic piece of carpentry forming an octagonal lantern. But the Italians were not capable of high-level carpentry on this scale and may not have known about Ely anyway. They wanted a dome, and Brunelleschi turned to the Pantheon, the largest surviving dome from Roman times, for inspiration.

  It should be understood that Brunelleschi was not, strictly speaking, the architect, since the size and form and indeed the actual curvature of the dome had been decided in 1367, ten years before he was born. He was rather the engineer or, as the contracts put it, “the inventor and governor” of the project. He was an educated man, the son of a lawyer, intended for a learned profession until his brilliant drawing led him into goldsmithing, like most Florentine artists. He had been in competition with Ghiberti for the Baptistry doors, and after his rejection he went with Donatello to R
ome to study the antique firsthand. He became a master of the details, as well as the forms, and the experience led him to make architecture his chief passion. He was, then, an intellectual. But he was also a scientist, in that he brought to the dome problem considerable knowledge of the practice of stress. The dome he designed, and carried to completion in 1436, rests on eight major ribs that continue the work of the piers beneath, assisted by sixteen minor ones, all being bound by horizontal strainer arches and reinforced by metal tension chains. The angle of the dome was made as steep as its form allowed, so that its construction was self-supporting, center-work being dispensed with. To make the weight carried lighter, Brunelleschi hit upon the device of outer and inner skins, an invention of his own. Hence, although the Pantheon dome was his inspiration, it was not his engineering model, since it had been built by the usual Roman frontal-assault method of brute strength. Brunelleschi’s dome was more sophisticated, more modern. The real test of his method, however, was not just the dome’s stability but its external appearance, and it passed triumphantly. The Florentines voted it a marvel, and indeed it still dominates the city in a way that few cathedrals do these days.

  Brunelleschi emerged from the dome experience as a new kind of artist—the master architect, as distinct from the craftsman or stonemason who had dominated medieval building. The architect was commissioned and paid by the patron, and he then directed and usually employed the craftsmen. Increasingly, too, the architect took charge of the design, rather than carried out a scheme laid down by a committee. Brunelleschi was a characteristic Renaissance figure, in that he carefully studied Roman and especially Etruscan models, and he certainly used elements from antiquity. But when we look carefully at what he produced, there is not much that is Roman about it, or Greek either. From 1419 he created the beautiful asylum for orphans, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, whose façade certainly employs the decorative vocabulary of classical architecture. But this spacious loggia of fragile Corinthian columns, supporting semicircular arches, with roundels in the spandrels, surmounted by a deep entablature, is quite unlike anything the Romans ever built in its slender grace and delicate proportion. It has sometimes been called the first true Renaissance building, and it introduced a design that could be adapted, and was, to countless different purposes over the coming centuries, and really has nothing to do with ancient Rome. It was a new style, indeed, a new way of beauty.