The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  In addition to these forces of technical change in the world of painting, there was a further fact, more properly belonging to the world of ideas, that was of immense importance in giving the Renaissance its peculiar dynamism. This was the notion of progress. It is of the nature of humankind to wish to improve things and better our condition, and all societies have possessed this wish to some extent. But some societies make it a cardinal principle of existence, while others put different considerations first. The ancient Egyptians did not seem to be interested in progress. They were much more anxious to ensure that things were done in the right and canonical way. By contrast, the Greeks sought self-improvement and set targets to be attained, and they spread this notion through their eikoumene. They certainly infected the Romans under the Republic. But under the empire, the authorities became more concerned with order and stability than with advantageous changes. That had a deadening effect on their economy, as we have seen. It also in time affected the arts, which began to regress rather than improve, so that the artistic decadence that we associate with the Dark Ages and the forces of intruding barbarism actually set in well before the empire disintegrated as a defensive system. Up until the eleventh century, at least, the power of progressive ideas, and the desire to improve systematically on the work of previous generations, was weak. But thereafter it gained strength, and as we have already noted, it drew inspiration from antiquity, when “they did things so much better than we do.” From the fourteenth century onward, and especially in Italy, where interest in antiquity was more active, the notion grew that modern men (as they saw themselves) not only should learn all that the ancients had to teach in the days of Rome’s glory, but should build on that knowledge to reach even higher standards of knowledge and writing, of architecture, sculpture and art.

  What is significant is the way in which the spirit of competition, always strong in Florence, seeking to beat off rivals in Genoa, Venice and elsewhere, spread from commerce to art in the thirteenth century and after. Painters, sculptors and architects were encouraged to compete among themselves for contracts, and still more for glory. As the cult of the individual artist spread, emerging from medieval anonymity to the blaze of personal fame, so the competition sharpened. It was a race within generations and between them.

  Dante himself first made the point that Giotto’s fame had obscured Cimabue’s. Two centuries later Leonardo echoed his remark by affirming, “He is a wretched pupil who does not surpass his master.” E. H. Gombrich, in a famous essay, “The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences,” resurrected a forgotten text of 1473, in which the Florentine humanist Alamanno Rinuccini wrote a dedication to the great artistic patron Federigo da Montefeltro. In it he argued with great force that progress in the arts had been such in recent times that men no longer had to abase themselves before the ancients. He instanced the original work of Cimabue, Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi as being progressively of so high a standard as to make them worthy to stand alongside the artists of the ancient world. Since then, he added, Masaccio had done even better. And what about Domenico Veneziano? And Filippo the Monk (Fra Filippo Lippi)? And John of the Dominican Order (Fra Angelico)? He adds to his litany Ghiberti and Luca Della Robbia and, above all, Donatello. Over the whole range of achievements, he insisted, including oratory and the writing of Latin, artists and scholars had been building on the achievements of predecessors to reach standards of performance that had never been equaled in ancient times.

  Rinuccini’s dedication seems to have been written after he read Alberti’s Della pittura. Therein, Alberti stated flatly that his earlier belief that humanity was in decline and could no longer produce giants like the ancient masters had been completely dispelled when he returned to Florence and saw the work of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti and Della Robbia. Artists strove to excel not only one another, let alone their predecessors, but even themselves. And they set up absolute standards taken from the real world they saw around them. Gombrich argues that Ghiberti, perhaps the most conscientious of all the great Renaissance artists, had taken to heart a saying of Lysippus, the finest sculptor of antiquity, which is recorded by Pliny: An artist should imitate not the work of other artists, but nature itself. His second set of bronze doors at the Baptistry was a conscious effort to excel the first by a closer study of nature. It is likely that men such as Ghiberti and Brunelleschi saw themselves not just as artists but also as scientists (as we would call them), adding by progressive experiments to the sum total of human knowledge. Many of the great paintings of this time were demonstrations of what could be done and how to do it. Patrons knew this, and encouraged it. Each time they commissioned a master, they were striving to help him push forward the frontier of knowledge and skill a little further—or in some cases a lot further. It was the true spirit of the Renaissance.

  This, then, is the background against which artists in those days worked. The motion was always forward. There was no turning back. Nor was there stability. But we must not think of painters, at any time during the Renaissance, as prisoners of collective forces. The best of them, particularly, were highly individualistic, laws unto themselves. Cimabue (c. 1240– 1302), the first of them, set the pattern. He was known as “Ox Head.” He was proud, obstinate, highly motivated and absolutely determined to do what he thought right. Dante says that he took no notice of criticism. What Cimabue was trying to do, especially in the frescoes of the sanctuary and crossing at the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, was to absorb all that was valuable in the recent revival of Roman-style art among the Byzantines—new gestures and movements, tones and presentational tricks with vestments and background— while rejecting its suffocating tendency to freeze innovations into canonical devices, and to repeat. The Orthodox Church had a paralyzing tendency to tell artists what was the “correct” way to render holy personages, as well as to limit the range of permitted subjects, something Roman Catholicism did not do until the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Cimabue fought against this. He was a dramatic man, who painted with great power and sometimes with a touch of the sensational.

  This comes through occasionally in his work at Assisi, despite its dreadful condition, which was bad enough even before the earthquake of 1997. In the lower walls of the transepts there is a scene of the destruction of Babylon that makes the hair stand on end and a glorious view of St. Mary Magdalen lamenting, an image of grief that alone would differentiate Cimabue from the unadventurous medieval talent that nurtured his genius. He also worked in mosaic, and there is a rendering of St. John, in the apse of Pisa Cathedral, which shows a new elegance and sympathy in this stiffest of all techniques, which the Italian artists of the West wisely, as a rule, left to the Byzantines. The difficulty with Cimabue, as with other masters of the early Renaissance, is that their innovations quickly became routine, even clichés, as later artists absorbed and repeated them.

  All the same, there was a big leap from Cimabue to Giotto di Bondone, a leap of more than the twenty-seven years that separated their births. Opinion in Italy followed Dante’s judgment, and later critics, looking back, saw Giotto as “the beginning” of something entirely new in painting. Matteo Palmieri, writing in the 1430s, referred to painting “before Giotto” as “the lifeless mistress of laughable figures.” It was “full of amazing stupidities” before Giotto “resurrected” it. We see in the best portions of his work in the Arena Chapel at Padua (1303–6)—the Lamentation, for instance, the Betrayal of Christ and Joachim and the Shepherd—the emergence of genuine pictures as we understand them today, with figures intelligently and skillfully grouped, located clearly in space and in surroundings that bear some resemblance to the actual world. In Joachim the trees are absurd and the sheep are ratlike, but the dog is real and the shepherds are people one can actually see tending their flocks on the hillside. Both the Betrayal and the Lamentation convey deep intensity of feeling, expressed in anxious, convulsed and tearful faces that one recognizes from the street and the fields of c
ommon life. Two decades later, in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels at Santa Croce in Florence, and possibly in the Upper Church at Assisi, Giotto was painting his figures with greater freedom and facility—they have grace as well as motion—and he placed them within increasingly complex perspective settings, so that there is considerable depth within the composition. For the first time since antiquity, the onlooker can step into the scene and feel at home there. Giotto’s work has fared better than Cimabue’s, but his later masterpieces, which were the ones that most impressed his contemporaries and successors, have not survived. Later artists tended to place him at the head of the apostolic succession of great painters, the man who had annihilated the Byzantine manner and made nature his model—this last is a point that Ghiberti, Alberti and Leonardo all made in their comments on his work.

  Looking back from the vantage point of the mid–sixteenth century, Vasari divided the development of art into three periods, the first introduced by Giotto, the second by Masaccio, the third by Leonardo. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. The common opinion among artists, at any rate by the mid–fifteenth century, was that Giotto’s followers and successors failed to improve materially on his performance because they neglected the study of nature. Masaccio, coming more than half a century later, “restored” his work and improved upon it. Hence he is often seen as the first great Renaissance painter, though in justice to Giotto, he ought to be called the second. Unlike Giotto, who was a harbinger of the Renaissance, Masaccio was a beneficiary of it: he was aware of the classical texts on painting, he knew far more about the recovered literature, he was infused with the spirit of antiquity in a way that was impossible in the early fourteenth century. More important, perhaps, he benefited from both the perspective work of Brunelleschi and the figure rendering of Donatello. In effect his entire working life was less than a decade, and much of his output has been lost. But, thanks to the outstanding sculptors among whom he worked, he did two things that were beyond Giotto. First, in for instance the central panel of an altarpiece, Virgin and Child, now in the National Gallery, London, and still more in the Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, he made his perspective settings look natural, something he had clearly learned from intense study of Brunelleschi’s demonstration panels. Second, in his beautiful panel St. Paul, from the Pisa Altarpiece, he produced a genuine three-quarter-length portrait study of the saint, painted with wonderful facility, the face and hands rendered with grace, sensitivity and confidence. The influence of Donatello’s figure statues is transparent, but Masaccio adds a softness and sympathy that the fierce Donatello lacks. The same spirit infuses the beautiful fresco Tribute Money, which Masaccio painted on the wall of the Brancacci Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Figures, houses and background mountains do not blend with the perfection of nature. But the artist is almost there. This was painted in 1427, nearly a century after Giotto’s best work, and it shows that a great deal had been learned in those hundred years. It is not surprising that Alberti almost certainly had Masaccio in mind as the model painter of the age (1436), though by then he had been dead eight years.

  Indeed, with the passing of Masaccio it becomes impossible to see Italian painting simply as an apostolic succession. So much by now had been learned, and so many had learned it, that art was branching out in different, sometimes rival and even contradictory directions. The new freedom conveyed by knowledge, to place realistic figures in convincing space, allowed individual artists to develop their own personalities with an energy and imagination that had been impossible before 1420.

  There was, for instance, Paolo Uccello, who was a little older than Masaccio and lived a great deal longer, 1397–1475. He developed a lifelong fascination with perspective, and acquired a remarkable mastery of it. He loved foreshortening to the point of frenzy and geometry as a science as well as an art. Nature he was much less interested in, however, though he was lucky enough to work under Ghiberti. His three great panels, The Battle of San Romano, now split up and in Paris, Florence and London, are almost a demonstration, like Brunelleschi’s panels, of the techniques of perspective and foreshortening. But the knights look like toy soldiers riding rocking horses, and the battleground is a floor rather than a field. Yet the images are memorable, indeed stunning, and there is an engrossing charm in the best of Uccello’s work, such as the Hunting Scene in the Oxford Ashmolean. It is not nature; it is art, of a highly individual kind. Uccello was a medieval painter in some ways, striving for patterned, decorative effects rather than the humanistic purity of line that the tradition of Giotto represented and that Masaccio embodied.

  The decorative impulse was strong, not least because so many patrons relished it. In the 1420s the Venetian painter Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370–1427) was brought to Florence by the head of the Strozzi banking family to create a magnificent altarpiece for their private chapel. The central panel, The Adoration of the Magi (1423), is one of the jewels of the Renaissance—almost literally, for it glitters with gold and sumptuous filigree work, reminding us again that many painters started off in jewelers’ workshops and used paint to produce for their patrons huge, two-dimensional jewels to hang on their walls, the sacred subject matter being an antidote to luxurious worldliness. The three kings, with their scintillating garments, gave Gentile an excuse for a virtuoso display of his technique. But this glorious painting, which delights us as much as it clearly pleased contemporaries—it was widely influential—is also an exercise in perspective, as the royal procession meanders away into the distance, and in lighting, which is brilliantly rendered and highly naturalistic. There is another factor. Though the principal figures are idealized, the crowd of courtiers and followers behind them is, as it were, picked out from the streets of Florence and the canals of Venice, a wonderful collection of faces drawn from life in the third decade of the fifteenth century, coarse, shrewd, cunning, curious, smug and happy—the physiognomy of life.

  This interest in people, who could be fitted into the demands of religious iconography, became a salient characteristic of Renaissance painting. Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–69) was an orphan brought up in a convent who was persuaded to take vows and then caused an immense scandal by running off with a nun. The Medici family, who had already recognized his talent, intervened to get him laicized, and the child born to the couple, Filippino Lippi (1457–1504) also became a highly successful painter. Filippo’s majestic frescoes in the cathedrals of Spoleto and Prato gave him the opportunity to paint some splendid crowd scenes. His Madonnas and saints are holy, serene and unworldly, but his crowds are common clay, men and women as he saw them. There is the same dichotomy in his contemporary Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455), who painted the Virgin and Child with impressive tenderness and holy simplicity (though with sumptuous color effects). His ability to inspire devotion brought him a multitude of ecclesiastical clients. Though a Dominican friar by vocation, he ran the busiest workshop in Florence, and was eventually summoned to Rome to work for the popes. Yet every face he painted is that of an individual character. His St. Peter Preaching (1433), part of what is known as the Linaiuoli Altarpiece (now in the Museo di San Marco in Florence), shows a group of people, each wrapped in his or her own thoughts—none actually listening to the sermon—as though all were sitting for portraits. There is a closely observed group of beggars in St. Lawrence Distributing Alms (1448) in the Vatican, which shows the same determined grasp of personality. But it has to be said that St. Lawrence’s splendid vestments are a work of art in themselves, and the architectural background, rendered in dazzling perspective and ornate detail, demonstrates other Renaissance obsessions, which preoccupied the saintly Angelico as much as they did more mundane practitioners of the art. Behind the new Renaissance sophistication, there is often a hint of medieval childishness.

  That is particularly apparent in the masterpiece of Fra Angelico’s most gifted pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1420–97), whose Journey of the Magi (1459–61) occupies three walls of the
Chapel of the Medici in their Florentine palazzo. This is more than a repeat of Gentile’s Magi, though clearly inspired by it, for there are three separate processions, one for each king, all presented in sumptuous detail, in gold, vermilion, purple and olive green—and a variety of other colors—meandering through fields and towns, with camels, horses, asses, mules and dogs, leopards chasing deer, birds and flowers, exotic trees and castles, all done to astonish and dazzle. Many of those presented in the processions are portraits of Medici family members and their followers, and there is a head of Benozzo himself. This room, which has other works by Benozzo in its sanctuary, is one of the finest achievements of the Renaissance, for the frescoes, now restored, are well preserved and near enough to the visitor for the details to be relished. No one who has been in this enchanting room is likely to forget it. It is Renaissance religious entertainment at its innocent best, a celebration of the joy of living in a world of beauty and fun.

  A similar but far more formidable work in Mantua, the Camera degli Sposi of Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), finished in 1474, indicates the rapid progress that Italian painting was now making, and also the difference between an accomplished artist of the second rank, like Gozzoli, and a great master. Mantegna was a difficult man and a slow worker, for nearly half a century the court painter to the Gonzagas of Mantua, who coped with his shortcomings in saintly manner. (One of the sources of Renaissance strength, it is worth repeating, was the willingness of proud princes to submit to the artistic temperament.) He had worked in Padua, where he met Donatello, then creating his great equestrian statue, and learned from him not only the secrets of Florentine scientific artistry but his passion for character seen in the raw. Perhaps he should have been a sculptor: the man who taught him painting, Francesco Squarcione, criticized his painted figures for looking as if they were made of marble or stone. His famous Dead Christ, now in Milan, a daring exercise in foreshortening, looks as if it were carved with a chisel rather than painted with a brush, and his autobiographical Presentation at the Temple, showing—so legend has it—his own wife and their firstborn, though done in tempera on canvas, is as solid as granite. In Mantegna’s grand altarpieces, like the Crucifixion in the Louvre and the Agony in the Garden in London’s National Gallery, the figures seem to spring out of, and be anchored in, the rock on which they are placed. Their petrification gives them an awesome presence, as though they were harder as well as larger than life, and there is an undertone of terror and fear in some of Mantegna’s religious imagery that hints at the wrath of God. He was one of the most learned of Renaissance artists, an expert on Rome, its architecture, its decorative motifs and its armor and weaponry, and his strong historical sense led him to present his scenes from the Bible against an antique background authentic in every detail— thus distancing his superhuman figures still more from everyday fifteenth-century life.