The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  Verrocchio was an organized man. Leonardo was not. He was an intellectual, more interested in ideas than people. He came from a background of well-to-do Tuscan notaries, though he was illegitimate and brought up by grandparents in a large extended family. We do not know much about his education, but it was clearly extensive, and in Verrocchio’s shop he was well trained to make his living in a variety of ways. Leonardo’s gifts were enormous, and nobody ever doubted them, at the time or since. He was the universal man, the epitome of the questing spirit of the Renaissance and its desire to excel in every possible way. As he grew older, people held him in awe: he was the sage, the magus, the Man of Genius. He was also difficult to work with or employ. His weaknesses were twofold, and they were important. Leonardo was interested in every aspect of the visible world—his earliest surviving work is a brilliant Tuscan landscape drawing—and he was fascinated by the varieties of nature, above all by the human body in all its forms and moods. But he was interested in these things as phenomena, and viewed them with scientific detachment. There was not much warmth to him. He may have had homosexual inclinations, for in 1476, when he was twenty-four, he was accused of sodomy, though this does not necessarily imply the practice of unnatural vice (the accusation was anonymous and nothing came of it).

  Furthermore, although Leonardo’s interest in the human body was paramount, as befitted a Renaissance humanist-artist, his huge range of other preoccupations—with weather and waves, animals and vegetation and scenery, machines of all kinds but especially weapons of war and fortifications, all of them expressed in elaborate drawings as well as expounded in his Notebooks—meant that his time and energy were thinly spread. His priorities were unclear. No one can say for sure whether he regarded painting an easel portrait like the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper wall painting in Milan, or designing an impregnable fortress as the thing he most wanted to do, or felt was most worth doing.

  Moreover, with such a range of interests, he lacked the ferocious concentration on any particular one, at any one time, that his younger contemporary Michelangelo could bring to bear. As we have seen, Michelangelo sometimes left things unfinished. Leonardo was a much more extreme case of the distracted and ill-disciplined polymath. As early as 1478, when he was still working in Verrocchio’s shop, he was given a personal commission to do an altarpiece in a chapel off the Piazza della Signoria. But he never got around to it or never seriously began work, and Filippino Lippi had to be called in to carry it out. No one who saw anything done by him, even a mere drawing, failed to admire him, and he was in constant demand by the mightiest patrons, from leading Florentines to the Sforzas of Milan, Pope Leo X and kings Louis XII and François I of France. But his glittering career was punctuated by rows over intolerable delays, disputes over money, presumably arising from his unbusinesslike methods, and repetitive simple failures to do what he had promised. He was not in the least lazy, as some artists are, or tiresomely perfectionistic. But his final public output was meager. There are only ten surviving paintings that are generally accepted as his. Three others are unfinished. Yet more were completed by other artists.

  It is true that, at his finished best, Leonardo produced work of the very highest quality, interest and originality. Opinion may remain divided over the Mona Lisa, a portrait he worked on over many years and that shows the defects of his slovenly method of working—the face and the hands are woefully inconsistent—or the London National Gallery’s Virgin of the Rocks, which also had a long and distracted history. The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre likewise has its critics as well as a host of admirers. Yet the Lady with an Ermine (1490), an oil on panel now in Kraków, Poland, is as close to perfection as a painting can well be: beautifully composed and full of fascination—the woman was a favorite mistress of his Sforza patron—it combines charm, dignity, indeed majesty, and mystery in equal proportions. The right hand, and the exquisite creature it is stroking, are painted with a decisive skill that testifies to Leonardo’s patient devotion to nature, and the gaze of the girl, enigmatic as always with Leonardo, is unforgettable.

  Yet the fact remains that this panel is one of the rare occasions that a patron got what he had ordered. Leonardo’s reputation for nondelivery—as one pope put it: “Leonardo? Oh, he is the man who does not finish things”—was compounded by his passion for experiment, which produced disasters of a different kind but equally infuriating to those who paid. The Sforzas asked him to paint scenes on the walls of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and he actually completed the Last Supper, which was instantly admired for its highly original composition and the striking interest of the faces. But his experimental techniques led to its rapid deterioration, and the other scenes never emerged. Other ambitious wall scenes, in Milan and Florence, came to nothing, or little has survived. On the other hand, Leonardo produced a design for the crossing tower of Milan Cathedral, worked on a huge bronze equestrian statue, accepted the appointment of “architect and general engineer” to the ruffianly warlord Cesare Borgia and produced various large-scale cartoons, one of which survives, for projected paintings. He worked on muscular power, optics, hydraulics, articulated flying machines, bastions and siege engines, facial expressions and human psychology, all of these preoccupations being lavishly illustrated in notebooks and detached sheets. The comparison with Coleridge is irresistible: notes took the place of finished work. As with Piero della Francesca, Leonardo’s interest in geometry grew. It was, perhaps, the dominant theme of the last years of his life, though he also seems to have dwelt obsessively on the pros-pects of catastrophic storms and other extreme weather conditions. These years were spent in or near the French court, where François I became his ideal patron: reverential, generous, unharassing, content merely to have in attendance this great Italian seer, who could do so many remarkable things when he chose and whose conversation was a Renaissance in itself.

  Leonardo’s influence on his immediate successors or near contemporaries, including Raphael, was immense, both in the organization of large-scale painting and in painting techniques. He wrote extensively on painting, though nothing was actually published until the mid–seventeenth century. But his views were known—that, for instance, “correct” mathematical perspective did not actually produce what we think we see and required correction. Where as the Greeks used a special curvature or entasis, Leonardo blurred outlines, a technique that came to be known as sfumato and that the adoption of painting in oils made highly effective. He was therefore behind the shift away from the strong outlines preferred in the fifteenth century, of which Botticelli, for example, made such brilliant use, to the rounded, more painterly techniques of the sixteenth century, involving a large degree of shadowing, the systematic use of highlights and chiaroscuro.

  This was one of the most significant and lasting innovations in the history of Western painting. Leonardo also introduced, or at any rate made famous, the practice of drawing in black and red chalk, often with white highlights, on various shades of paper. Thousands of artists made use of it after him, often with spectacular results. Leonardo’s influence was progressive and cumulative, as prints that he inspired were published, his drawings circulated and the texts of his writings gradually became available. It is hard to think of any artist of stature who has been impervious to his work. Hence, despite the unsatisfactory state of his output at his death, he has been regarded as the founder of the period known as the High Renaissance, in the years around the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, when the progress of the movement to restore and excel antiquity came to a climax at the highest level of achievement and with the greatest impact on the future.

  If Leonardo encompassed the Renaissance intellectually, Raphael or Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) epitomized its quest for beauty and its success in finding it. For if his life was short (he died when only thirty-seven) his output was large, continuous, invariably of the highest possible quality and finished. Patrons found him the perfect painter: affable, reliable, always d
oing what he said he would do and delivering on time. He ran what became a large studio efficiently, using his assistants intelligently and in ways that were fair both to them and to his patrons. He was born in that leading center of culture Urbino, but trained in Perugia, under Pietro Vannucci or Perugino, as he was known (c. 1446–1523). Perugino was a product of the Verrocchio shop and of the college of painters Sixtus IV set up to do the lower walls of his Sistine Chapel. He had a sentimental eye and a lush contour, but he could paint a lovable Madonna and an elevating saint as well as anyone else of his generation, and he also taught the young Raphael most of what he knew. It says a lot for Raphael’s aesthetic and emotional integrity and cool, calm taste that he avoided all Perugino’s faults while absorbing his undoubted strengths and building on them.

  Raphael’s work falls into two main categories: the large-scale frescoes and decorative work that he did for the Vatican Palace at the direction of Pope Julius II, and his devotional easel works and altarpieces mainly of the Virgin and Child, sometimes with minor figures. He did a few portraits too, especially a masterly presentation of Castiglione, which has taught generations of portraits how to set about it. His range, then, was selective, though it should be added that he succeeded Bramante as architect of St. Peter’s, was a decorator of genius and was also branching out into new directions in painting at the time of his sudden death.

  With Raphael, what you see is what you get. His paintings in the Vatican, such as The School of Athens, are intelligent, large-scale organizations of superbly painted figures, which have guided “history painters,” as they call themselves, throughout Europe from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. There are no obscurities or mysteries, no hidden meanings, no ambiguities, no shocks, no nastiness, no horror, no thrills. There is not much to be said about them except that they are extremely good of their kind. His Madonnas are rather different. They too contain no hidden agendas or arrières-pensées, no adumbrations of Freudianism, nothing indeed for modern academics to get their suspicious teeth into. On the other hand, they are a wonderfully inventive set of variations on a theme that is absolutely central to Western religious art. They do exactly what they set out to do: inspire devotion in the religious-minded and rapture in the aesthete. These Madonnas are real, living women who are also queens of heaven, painted with astonishing skill, never repetitious, without the smallest hint of vulgarity, always serene and tender, devoted and reverent. Julius II summoned Raphael to Rome to do God’s work in paint, and that is just what he did, supplying through copies and prints the devotional decoration for the walls of countless convents, seminaries, presbyteries and Catholic colleges from that day to this. They are familiar enough to risk boring us but never actually do so, and to study these noble paintings from close to, as they still exist after half a millennium, is to appreciate what enduring art is all about.

  There was, however, one additional element in Raphael’s art that does not fit neatly into this picture of superb and decorous proficiency. A part of Raphael rejected serenity and sought transcendence. One of his Vatican frescoes, Fire in the Borgo (c. 1514), presents terror and anarchy and the mob appealing for a miracle. Raphael was a materialist who longed to believe in the supernatural, and in this sense regretted the medieval world, with its absolute credulity, which was now slipping away. Medieval painters could present the supernatural, and did it all the time. But they could not convey it by painterly techniques of atmospheric light and subtle suggestiveness. Raphael could. Normally he did not choose to do so. His Madonnas and “sacred conversations,” with saints posed together in seemly adoration of the divine, are tender and elevating but stick to nature. However, in the Sistine Madonna (now in Dresden), Raphael depicts a Virgin and Child of astonishing beauty and absolute solidity and reality, who nevertheless are not of this world and seem to be levitating upward by supernatural power, poised between this earth and heaven. It is the painting of a vision and astonishingly successful.

  Raphael follows this trend in his magnificent last painting, the huge Transfiguration, completed in the year he died, 1520, and now in the Vatican Museum. Christ floats above the astonished apostles, realistically painted but a mass of light and air, while at the bottom of the picture a scene of chaos shows his disciples trying and failing to cure a frantic boy whom demons have seized. It is not surprising that this work awed contemporaries and made them ponder. It hints of a new world of art to come, and makes the tragedy of Raphael’s early death seem even more poignant.

  The “divine trio” of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, though of different ages, were all alive and working at the same time, and there must have been interactions among their powerful artistic personalities, though this is largely conjecture. The impact of Leonardo can be clearly traced in many of Raphael’s superb drawings. He adopted red chalk and replaced the boy or male models he used for female figures (a practice also followed by Michelangelo) by women models, and the results are spectacular. They ravished young artists at the time, for Raphael was generous and open in showing work in progress to his colleagues, and they have inspired emulation in the greatest figure painters ever since. Raphael’s relationship with Michelangelo, on the other hand, was different. They were both working in Rome together. There is no evidence that Raphael was ever jealous of a fellow artist—quite the contrary—but Michelangelo was introspective and secretive and could be mean-minded. His friend Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547), also in Rome from 1511 and a considerable painter in his own right, used to feed Michelangelo with anti-Raphael anecdotes, presumably because the master wished to hear them.

  The difficulty for Michelangelo, in his relations with Raphael, is that he considered himself, and was, primarily a sculptor. He painted little before he came to Rome to produce his three great series of frescoes (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Last Judgment of the altar end wall, and the Pauline Chapel). His only authenticated and documented painting on panel, the Holy Family of the Doni Tondo (now in the Uffizi), is a powerful work, quite unlike Raphael’s Madonnas but obviously seen as competitive. Controversy and mystery surround other attributed works, which are in any case few. His drawings are numerous and often magnificent. The Sistine Ceiling is a great physical achievement apart from anything else, given the intrinsic difficulties of fresco, the area to be covered and the awkwardness and height of the location. It took four years, with one long and other minor interruptions, so it was painted at speed, which produced both simplicity and crudeness—but then it was done to be seen from the ground, not in close-up color photographs. Looking up at this huge mass of biblical adventures, smiling sibyls and bearded prophets, one sometimes feels that it fits Dr. Johnson’s description of the dog walking on its hind legs: “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

  Julius II’s idea, when he first asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling, was much simpler and maybe more appropriate. The painter replied that it was a “poor” idea, meaning it did not allow him to cut a bella figura. So he was hoist with his own spectacular complexities. However, he completed it in two vigorous campaigns, the second much more successful. The scheme has power, and in places noble beauty. Everyone liked it or said they did, a mark of conventional approval that has continued to this day. (There is more dissent on whether it was finer before its recent restoration or after.) Artists admired it, then and ever since, relieved that they themselves were spared such a horrible and difficult task, glad that a great spirit like Michelangelo took it on and made it work. It has all Michelangelo’s terribilità and set new standards of heroic history painting in the grand manner. As such it was an important event in European art. What more can one reasonably ask?

  The Last Judgment is a different matter. It makes perfectly good sense as a major scheme on a single vertical wall, like a giant canvas with one subject. The congregation of cardinals et al., attending mass, would find their eyes drifting upward during the longueurs of the ceremony and exploring the writhing pyramids o
f bodies ascending the wall or tumbling down it. The impact is frightening, as it should be. The color is gruesome, as is also right. The great work is the apotheosis as well as the damnation of the human form, or perhaps one should say the human male form. Michelangelo worked with a determination and energy that give a forceful dynamic to the work and even a certain sinister glory. It cannot be judged from photographs and must be seen and studied and endured, no easy task in view of the jostling crowds that are there at all times. The general effect of the Last Judgment is to make most people think seriously about what is likely to happen to them when they die, and though they may not accept Michelangelo’s version of the likely events, they are wiser for having studied it. That is exactly the effect he sought to achieve, and the work must therefore be considered successful. By comparison, the big frescoes in the Pauline Chapel, The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter, though they contain many mysteries, are routine efforts by an aging man who no longer needed to prove himself but was anxious to justify his large stipend.

  One weakness, or self-imposed limitation, emerged in all these grand projects. No one has ever devoted such attention to the human body as Michelangelo or so little to the earth on which it is placed. He never showed any interest in locating his figures. While Leonardo was fascinated by all natural phenomena and used realism and dreamworlds for backgrounds, and while Raphael gives us some fascinating glimpses of early sixteenth-century Italy peering out from behind his Blessed Virgins, Michelangelo despised landscape and declined to paint it. In this restricted sense he was the quintessential Renaissance artist—art was about humanity and nothing else. But it means something is missing. On the Sistine ceiling, God creates the sun and moon as geometrical abstractions, round lumps. In the Last Judgment, the blessed float up to nothing and the damned descend into a virtual vacuum. All these great decorative schemes consist of closely woven human vignettes existing in ether. It is a point of view, but not one easy for all of us to share. Dr. Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “No one ever wished it longer.” One might add, of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, “No one ever wished it bigger.” In the end the sheer quantity of human musculature makes you wish to pass on.