The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  Palladio never repeated himself. Each design is a little world in itself. The Villa Godi-Malinverni, the Palazzo Chiericati and the Palazzo della Ragione, all in or near Vicenza, the Villa Cornaro, near Treviso, and the Villa Rotonda, at Vicenza, are all very different, and the Villa Serego, near Verona, with its all-rusticated surface, surprises people when they are told Palladio was the architect, as it seems so uncharacteristic. But all these works and others, on close inspection, are seen to embody Palladio’s principles: attention to climate and setting; serving to impress from afar and offer service and comfort within; radiating order and economy as well as utility; and making the most intelligent possible use of sun and shade, varying materials, angles, different façades and surrounding gardens and plantations. His most famous villa, the Rotonda, with its imposing Ionic façades on each side of a domed square, looks like a house to impress rather than to live in. Not so. It works very well. The combination of beauty and functionalism, of grandeur and utility, explains why Palladio was so much in demand by rich men (and their wives) who loved display but took a practical approach to estate management and farming, had to indeed to be able to afford what the master provided for them.

  His practice flourished, and in due course these buildings and what he wrote about them became known all over Europe and were imitated and adapted to different climates and latitudes. Thus the Palladian style was born, spread, in time crossed the Atlantic and went east to India and beyond. He was the only one of the Renaissance architects to give his name to a style that has endured. He was also the last of the true Renaissance architects—that is, men inspired by a love and knowledge of the antique, especially Roman, past, who wanted to re-create its best features, suitably modified, in the sunny cities and countryside of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. By the time he died in 1580, the work of the Renaissance, in Italy at least, was complete, and its buildings were spread out for men to see, to love, to learn from and to be warned by, and a different spirit was in the air.

  PART 5

  THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSIONS OF RENAISSANCE PAINTING

  The history of painting during the Renaissance is enormously complicated and involves hundreds of good or outstanding painters, operating over a huge geographical area for the best part of three hundred years. In order to understand it, certain salient points must be grasped from the beginning. And the first point concerns visualization—that is, the way in which painters analyzed the visual world with their eyes and brains, and transferred what they saw to a two-dimensional surface. In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspective: that is, the artist, working in paint or low-relief sculpture, conveyed to his two-dimensional surface not so much what he saw as what he knew was there. All the details that he felt were significant for his purpose, not just those to be seen from a single viewpoint, were systematically put down. The result is real and truthful in the sense that everything represented is there, and so the information conveyed is exact. But the eye does not see it, or all of it, so in another sense it looks false or clumsy or primitive.

  Since the artist is striving to create illusion, to produce a two-dimensional something that looks exactly like the real thing, he is never content with aspective art, unless (as in ancient Egypt) he is constrained by canonical conventions laid down by religious dogma. The ancient Greeks were subject to no such constraints, or freed themselves from them, so that from the seventh century B.C., and especially during the classic period of Greek art in the fifth century B.C., they developed various devices, such as foreshortening of the human figure and the use of perspective, to create two-dimensional illusions of reality. This replacement of aspective art by perspective art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civilization. It is not always easy to follow, since virtually no Greek wall painting survives. What does survive is usually on the curved or spheroid surfaces of painted vases and other utensils. The Greeks learned not only to portray the human body as it is seen, but to present it in realistic action and in the context of its surroundings. By using foreshortening and other illusionistic devices, and by deploying perspective conjunctions, they contrived to conquer pictorial space, just as in the twentieth century we began to conquer astronomic space. The Romans inherited their knowledge and skills, and some of their flat-surface painting does survive, notably at Pompeii. In the Wall of the Corinthian Oecus, in a wall from the Villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor and in friezes from the house of Marcus Lucretius Fronto we see three examples of the effective use of linear and aerial perspective, foreshortening and other tricks.

  In late antiquity, or early in what we call the Dark Ages, this form of sophisticated illusionary art disappeared, and its techniques were lost. The loss applied as much to the Greek world of Byzantium, where the empire of Rome survived in debased and truncated form, as in the Latin West, where it disappeared completely. Artists reverted to the primitive visual technology of aspective art, both on two-dimensional surfaces, such as wall painting and illuminated manuscripts, and in low relief and sculpture. However, enough survived of illusionism, in the Byzantine world and in Italy, for artists to note it and in due course to imitate it. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a classicizing revival in the Byzantine Empire, most notably expressed in wall paintings in the church of St. Nicholas, at Boyana in what is now Bulgaria, which are dated 1259. Similar, and possibly quite unconnected, developments took place in central Italy, at a somewhat later date. First Cimabue (1240–1302), then Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255–1318) and Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), in Siena, Florence and elsewhere, began to use foreshortening and various forms of perspective. These key developments can be seen in various churches, especially Cimabue’s wall paintings in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi and Giotto’s work in the Arena Chapel in Padua and in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels at Santa Croce in Florence.

  These changes were pushed further by artists such as Masaccio (1401–28) and by the sculptors Ghiberti and Donatello. Early users of linear perspective, such as Giotto, tended to employ it instinctively, without ocular aids, as many artists have done ever since. But there are hints in Vitruvius that the Romans, and possibly the Greeks before them, had a “scientific” method. Early in the fifteenth century, Brunelleschi produced two “demonstration panels” of the Florence Baptistry and the Palazzo Vecchio, showing how correct perspective could be scientifically determined in the depiction of buildings. These have since disappeared, and we know about them only through his biography. However, in 1435–36, Alberti, building on the Brunelleschi panels and the work of Donatello and Masaccio, produced a detailed description of perspective technique in his treatise Della pittura. From the 1430s onward, virtually all the leading Italian painters began to familiarize themselves with perspective. They could thus organize space within their paintings in a natural manner (as seen), and were able to take on in consequence a much greater variety of subjects and—more important—treat them in far more adventurous and imaginative ways than in the past. The science of perspective was the basis of the art of composition. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of this development in Renaissance painting. It gave artists a freedom they had never enjoyed before.

  But many objective difficulties remained, particularly in the materials available to painters and the way in which they had to be used. Late medieval and early Renaissance painters were often employed in covering wall spaces in churches and palaces, using methods that had been employed in Roman times and almost certainly much earlier. Here we must go into a little technical detail. The Romans smoothed the wall surface and then applied a preliminary layer of lime-and-sand plaster called (using later Italian painters’ terminology) an arriccio. If they wished they could then sketch in the outlines of the work (sinopia), followed by the application of several layers of lime and powdered marble to give a final smooth surface, or intonaco. The paint, a mixture of earth colors with egg yolk, or tempera, was the
n applied while the plaster was still wet (a fresco). The paint was then bonded to the wall by the carbonization of the calcium hydroxide in the plaster as it dried. It was the most satisfactory and permanent technique, but it involved a great deal of trouble and organization for the painters, who had to work rapidly while the plaster was wet. This often, in large wall paintings, meant dividing the work into strips corresponding to the height of the scaffolding. If the paint was applied on dry plaster (secco), it was less durable and the surface was more likely to crack and flake. The Romans polished the surface of frescoes to get a veneer effect, and they also applied wax as a preservative. We know all about this from Pliny’s Natural History and other sources.

  Roman methods of wall painting never wholly passed out of use in the West, though they lost their complexity and sophistication. From a crude base, then, techniques were gradually improved, rather than revolutionized. In the age of Giotto, the procedure was as follows. The surface was smoothed. Then a rough arriccio was applied, one part lime, two parts water. The painter then drew the outlines in charcoal and went over them with a brush to produce the sinopia. The entire work was then divided into sections, each one of which could be finished in a day—these were known as giornate. Then, at the beginning of each day, the allotted portion was covered by the intonaco, the outlines were drawn in again and the painting proceeded. Some bits could then be redone in secco, but with all its disadvantages. The technique is described in detail in Cennino Cennini’s treatise, Il Libro dell’arte, published about 1390. It has one huge and obvious disadvantage and one less-obvious but important advantage: Fresco painting meant final decisions had to be made at an early stage in the work. Once the sinopia was complete and measured up, no major changes in composition were possible, and even minor changes raised problems. Spontaneity was ruled out, and as the painter saw his work emerge, he must have been agonized by the faults and misjudgments that emerged too, and he could not correct them, as a rule, without starting all over again. Hence, despite the growing freedom of treatment that artists enjoyed thanks to foreshortening and perspective techniques, a certain formality and woodenness persisted even in the best work of the early Renaissance.

  On the other hand, in Florence in particular, where fresco was always ruthlessly preferred to other methods, artists were forced to think out their projects carefully in advance, and to prepare for them with detailed drawings, of the whole and its parts. This was the great advantage of the system. It made the Florentines concentrate on what they called disegno, which embraced both design and draftsmanship. Florentine artists, or those trained in Florence, thus formed the habit of producing countless drawings, thousands of which survive and some of which—Raphael’s, for instance—have become among the greatest treasures of Western art. The drawings were increasingly from life, enabling Florentine artists to observe the human form with fiendish concentration and reproduce it with wonderful fidelity. The glories of the High Renaissance, and its celebration—one might almost say sanctification—of the human body, would have been impossible without this meticulous tradition of draftsmanship.

  All the same, wall painting in fresco imposed odious limitations on excitable and volatile painters. Mixing pigments with egg yolk has many drawbacks. Some pigments have to be excluded altogether. The paint has to be applied thinly, using a delicate hair brush with a point. It cannot be applied thickly, with impasto, and if the artist wants this kind of effect he has to put on repeated layers. He cannot apply the paint smoothly, so that his brushwork becomes invisible, but has to produce a hatched or stippled effect, extraordinarily monotonous on close inspection. He cannot blend or fuse or mix his colors and tones on the surface, which rules out any of those delightful accidental effects that rejoice the heart of every good artist, and which, more important, means that he has to decide in advance exactly what colors he is using in every tiny part of the work. To introduce subtleties and gradations of tone, he has to use all kinds of complex techniques. Shadows involve fresh problems, and in general attempts at darker effects end in muddiness and despair.

  Everything takes a long time, much waiting and great patience. Of course, as with the preparatory stage, these obstacles provoke forethought, no bad thing for painters, a thoughtless tribe as a rule. They also produce a high palette, and the light colors of the early Renaissance, with a good deal of white or near white, appeal strongly to many people. On the other hand, the range of colors is narrow and they become tedious in consequence, particularly since they are not mixed or overlaid while painting. This limitation is underlined by the small size of the early Renaissance palette, little more than a narrow oblong, compared to the huge palettes that appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century, when painting with oil had taken over more or less completely. Moreover, not only is the range narrow; the lower, darker tonalities and colors are excluded. Chiaroscuro is ruled out; so is the sfumato that Leonardo da Vinci exploited so effectively once he took to oil.

  Tempera, then, is not just a different medium from oil, but an inferior one, and it is a fact that, once it passed out of general use, attempts to revive it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have never succeeded for long. We come, then, to another central paradox of the Renaissance. Just as, in writing, the most important event of the Renaissance—printing by movable type—was a non-Italian invention, which came from Germany, so in painting, the most welcome technical change of the Renaissance, the adoption of oil for painting, was also a non-Italian development, which came from the Low Countries. (Indeed, you could say that both these discoveries undermine the concept of the Renaissance, since neither was known to antiquity.) We do not get the first reference to mixing pigments with oil until the manual of Theophilus, De diversis artibus, of 1110–40. Walnut oil or linseed oil was used, and it took an unconscionably long time to dry, as Theophilus complained. The Norwegians used it for altarpieces in the thirteenth century, and they decorated their wooden statues with oil paint. Cennini (1390) sees it as a German method.

  However, it was the painters in the Low Countries who took it up in a highly professional way and improved on the process steadily. By the fifteenth century it was their usual method for painting on panel, and they were beginning to use it on walls too. They quickly discovered that, if you were careful and placed successive layers of thin oil paint on a detailed underdrawing, you could achieve effects of great translucency and depth, as with stained glass. Indeed, the early oil painters were often glass artists too and learned how to achieve the same glowing effects of church windows on opaque wood surfaces. Dirk Bouts (1415–75) habitually used five layers of thin paint, sometimes more. His contemporary Jan van Eyck (active 1422–41) achieved results that staggered visitors who had never seen oil employed as a medium—detail, brilliance, sensitivity, great depth and completely new ways of depicting the existence and fall of light. Vasari, writing a hundred years later, was so impressed by van Eyck’s mastery of the medium that he wrongly credited him with inventing it.

  Unlike printing, however, painting in oil took a long time to reach Italy and even longer to be generally adopted. Antonello da Messina, a much-traveled painter, is credited with being the first Italian to take it up, and he certainly showed specimens during a visit to Venice in 1475–76. In central Italy, Perugino was using a mixture of oil and tempera in the 1480s, switching entirely to oil during the 1490s. Venice was the first city school of art to take to oil enthusiastically, and it had lasting effects. It is certainly not true that the Venetians paid little attention to drawing—the two albums that have survived of drawings by Jacopo Bellini, father of Giovanni and Gentile, show how brilliant and inventive Venetian draftsmen could be. But the Venetians never made a fetish of drawing as the Florentines did, and one reason they adopted oil with such passion was that they could change their minds while at work. X rays of Giorgione’s masterpiece The Tempest, which may be from as early as 1505, show the pentimenti that were to become familiar in European art, involving important changes of detail. His
collaborator Titian made even more extensive changes and corrections all his life. The Venetians also relished painting in oil because it extended the range of colors open to them, increased their richness and brilliance, and allowed for dramatic contrasting effects of darkness and light. Hence, just as the Florentines were preeminent for their draftsmanship, so the Venetians achieved an unrivaled reputation for color and drama.

  There were other, equally fundamental consequences. If the Dutch and Flemish initially painted in oils on wood, they soon also learned to use stretched canvases, variously treated to receive paint. The introduction of canvas was almost as important as the use of oil, for it gave artists much more freedom in determining the size, shape and texture of their working surface, adding lightness and economy too. The panel painting, which went back a long time, was succeeded or complemented by the easel painting, which was new and revolutionary. Once an artist could make a living from painting smallish canvases or panels on his easel, he could go in for portraits, then as now one of the most remunerative forms of art. He could either carry his easel about with him or work from his studio—where he could more readily get models, including nude ones, male and female, to sit for him—and above all he could escape from the time-consuming tyranny of the wall painting. That involved much less church work. Artists continued to create altarpieces in their studios, but this kind of product was now merely one of several. The result was a commercial impetus to the ending of the religious monopoly of art, a process that was taking place anyway but that painting in oils immeasurably accelerated in the sixteenth century. A further result, since the artists escaped from the tyranny of palace walls too, was to break the aristocratic and princely stranglehold on art patronage, and allow the rising bourgeoisie a look-in. This happened much sooner and faster in the Low Countries than elsewhere, but it eventually began to happen in Italy too. To tell the truth, Italian painting was never quite the same after it did.