The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  But where to? Michelangelo lived on into the mid-1560s, and the Renaissance lived on with him. Had it anything more to say after his glory years? The answer must be “A great deal,” and in two important respects. Michelangelo was a realist in that he drew the human shape from actual bodies with a high degree of truth to nature. But he also sought to idealize, to present human figures in their superlative ripeness, on the very verge of apotheosis. To him, the assertion that man was made in God’s image was not a symbolic truism but the simple truth.

  Other painters saw humanity differently, and they asserted the right to contribute their own offerings to the pool of visual perception. Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557) was a product of Andrea del Sarto’s Florentine shop and was brought up to paint the ideal or the normative. But he saw people differently, or rather they had their own peculiar faces and expressions that were normative to him. This is not so disturbing in his mythological works, which can be delightful—the fresco Vertumnus and Pomona, which he did around a lunette in the grand salon of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, is one of the most blissful entertainments of the Renaissance, though thought-provoking on close inspection. But his sacred scenes invite comparison with the established versions, and the results are worrying. In his Visitation (Santissima Annunziata, Florence) three holy ladies are closely grouped in swirling unity, an indelible image. The bigger group of the Deposition in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence is also enmeshed. It is beautiful and moving; the faces are tender and sorrowful, the colors radiant—he took the high colors of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling and made them glow—but it is not natural. Pontormo’s figures are not located in space. Their eyes are deep-set and often upright ovals. These figures are not real. They are creatures of Pontormo’s imagination.

  His fellow pupil in Andrea’s shop Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540) showed a similar itch to get into a different world of his own. His great oil on panel, The Deposition (Volterra), is a fantastic composition, elegantly conceived and tenderly painted, but bears no relation to what actually happened. The setting is abstract, the faces are peculiar though quite different from Pontormo’s, the bodies are whimsical. It is Rosso’s way of seeing things, his maniera. These languid and strange reactions to the hyperactive energy of Michelangelo and the self-confident serenity of Raphael would in a different context—say, the nineteenth century—be described as decadence. Art experts used the term Mannerism, a confusing label that no one can define.

  These painters could be peculiar, Pontormo especially. He was a recluse to the point of hermitry. He built for himself an upper-room studio to which the only access was a ladder and, having stocked it with food and water, would pull the ladder up after himself. Even his favorite pupil, Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72), was sometimes denied access or even a response when he howled up his greetings. The pupil was more “normal” than the master and became the most successful painter of his generation, at least in Florence. He was court artist to the Medici dukes and painted fashionable society portraits for thirty years. His draftsmanship was superb, his finish spectacularly lucid and transparent, the garments he put on his subjects were gorgeous, but his flesh tones were light and chilly. He froze faces in time and paint and made them peer out at us through an ice age. The rich of his age, which coincided with the ravages of the Reformation and the early religious wars, seem stiff, inhuman, armored, bloodless. But they liked being seen that way, and now, again, we like to see them thus, so Bronzino is popular once more. Moreover, he could show a different side. His oil in London’s National Gallery, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, whatever it is supposed to mean or say—argument continues among the art historians, and Bronzino himself altered its scheme radically in the course of painting it—is one of the most intriguing, erotic and lovable works to emerge during the entire Renaissance, hot blood racing through its rosy limbs and naughtiness in every inch. No wonder the Medici, anxious to suck up to France, gave it to the lustful François I!

  One suspects that many painters of the maniera (Mannerist) period produced erotica, for which there was a rising demand at the time. Certainly Francesco Mazzola, or Parmigianino, as he is known (1503–40), did so. He made vast numbers of drawings of everyday scenes, including love-making, and many survive. His religious scenes sometimes appear frigid or, worse, frigidly sentimental, but his brilliant Cupid, now in Vienna, is a lubricious piece of work, calculated to appeal strongly to both sexes. Parmigianino was a prodigy who died young, and we cannot say where his alarming talents would have taken him if he had lived. Nowhere, perhaps. His last major work, and his most celebrated, is a Virgin and Child attended by a group of beautiful female angels. The Child is an elongated four-footer and the Virgin’s head is so far from her shoulders that this oil on panel (Uffizi) has always been known as the Madonna of the Long Neck.

  Parmigianino came to maturity in Parma under the shadow of the great Antonio Allegri (1489–1534), known as Correggio after the town where he was born. He does not fit into a schematic presentation of the painters of the early sixteenth century because his work projects the future. We know so little about him (Vasari says he was miserly and virtuous and led a frightened life of devotion) that we cannot tell what he aimed to do. So his works have to speak for themselves. At one time he was ranked alongside Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian as a member of the Big Five of the Renaissance. Today his position is more precarious but rising again. He was not a Mannerist, painting real people from nature. But he was sui generis, an original. He did things no one had thought of doing before, either because they could not be done or were not worth doing perhaps. He painted the female nude with extraordinary skill and grace, and used his extensive interest in mythology, as was right for a man of the Renaissance, to present naked women in interesting situations. His Io (now in Vienna) shows an ecstatic woman in the act of being seduced by Jupiter, who appears as a furry cloud. It is painted as well as it could be, in the circumstances, but it requires a strong effort of imagination to find it erotic, which presumably was Correggio’s intention. He decorated part of the Convent of San Paolo in Parma with an elaborate umbrella vault, in which ovular glimpses of busy putti appear over semicircular classical statuettes. It is entirely original and done with ingenuity, and it gave ideas to successive generations of artists right into the eighteenth century. It was commissioned by a bluestockinged intellectual abbess, Giovanna da Piacenza, which explains its incongruity in a house of nuns.

  Later, Correggio, who was obviously conscientious and very hardworking, as well as superlatively gifted and skilled, won a prize contract to fresco the dome, apse and choir vault of Parma Cathedral. For the dome he chose the Assumption of the Virgin and worked it out in immense detail, with huge supporting apostles, tiers of clouds and hundreds of swirling figures carrying the Virgin upward. The immense work, which might have daunted even Michelangelo himself, is of course meant to be seen from beneath the dome at floor level, and Correggio used a range of illusionistic tricks and special perspectives to create his visual effects. The technical ingenuity and inventiveness are overwhelming, and the scheme made later artists marvel and seek to imitate. But it requires a willing suspension of disbelief, indeed of mirth, to get by, and one of the cathedral canons, when it was first unveiled, said it “looked like a dish of frogs’ legs.” More generally acceptable, and also widely imitated by Correggio’s successors, are his lighting schemes in altarpieces and similar works, as for instance the Adoration of the Shepherds (Dresden), where the immensely powerful source of light appears to be the Christ child himself. This is done with enviable skill and still leaves a strong impression, so its impact in its own time, the early 1530s, must have been prodigious. But at the top left of the painting a distinct floating cloud of heavenly bodies is awkward and incongruous (as well as unnecessary). It is a melancholy fact that Correggio’s magic often teeters on the cliff edge of the absurd, and some of his finest canvases, on which he labored so lovingly, are liable to provoke schoolboy hilarity.


  No such improper ridicule is possible with Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco, c. 1475–1510), though his most famous painting, the oil on canvas known as The Tempest (Accademia, Venice), showing an almost naked beauty suckling a babe and watched by a soldier, is peculiar, even bizarre. It was Byron’s favorite painting, and it has invited endless speculation as to what it means or is—to no effect, since the problem is now insoluble. In fact, Giorgione is one of the least documented of all the great masters, and this work is one of only four that we can be sure are his. The others are a grimly pensive portrait of a girl, Laura (Vienna), a wonderfully supercilious Portrait of a Young Man (San Diego) and another work in Vienna, Boy with an Arrow. Half a dozen other pictures are usually credited to him. They include what is perhaps the finest of all female nudes, the Sleeping Venus (Dresden); The Three Philosophers (Vienna), another mysterious work; and the delightful Fête Champêtre (Louvre), a joyful congress of two luscious nudes with two clothed musicians in a bosky setting, which however is also attributed to Titian, or both. Giorgione died suddenly of the plague, aged thirty-three, and his work in progress was finished by Titian or by Sebastiano del Piombo, who probably worked in his shop.

  The fact that we know so little about Giorgione, and that of the sixty-six works once attributed to him only a handful survive modern critical scrutiny, makes it difficult to evaluate his contribution to the history of art. But he was clearly important, for various early authorities call him the founder of the “modern” (that is, post-Bellini) Venetian school. His unusual range of subject matter, his originality, his fine sense of color, the striking way in which he composed a picture, his rendering of human, especially female, flesh, so totally different from the muscularity of his contemporary Michelangelo, all these qualities—and others—mark him out as a pioneer. He seems to have worked under Giovanni Bellini, as did his partner, Vincenzo Catena (c. 1475–1531), and Bellini gave him the passion for landscape that infuses The Tempest and almost dominates The Three Philosophers, so that the trees and rocks, painted from nature with wondrous skill, are an integral part of the composition. Even when Giorgione takes on a straightforward subject, he creates enigmas. His altarpiece in Castelfranco, done in tempera on panel, is of the Virgin Enthroned with St. George and St. Francis. Why is she thrust onto an enormous stone-and-wood edifice, twenty feet high, so that she is pushed to the top rear of the picture, leaving the two saints to dominate the foreground, which is set on an al fresco marble floor? The lady and her attendant landscape, rendered beautifully, are almost a separate picture. And there is a sinister male figure in the background, casting a huge shadow. But there is no end to the puzzles that this painter sets. He fills us with delightful speculation.

  Without Giorgione, certainly, there could have been no Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c. 1485–1576) as we have him. He built industriously on his Venetian heritage, worked hard all his long life, performed well in all its various departments— history, sacred art, portraits, mythology and allegory—and came to dominate not just Italian but European painting in the mid–sixteenth century. Working not only for the leading Italian patrons (from his base in Venice) but for such world figures as the emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain, he was the first master to bind European art together and enable us to consider it as a whole. Indeed, his work, especially in its earlier stages, was a compendium of Italian Renaissance art as it existed at the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century.

  This epitomizing spirit is beautifully illustrated in his great painting in London’s National Gallery, Bacchus and Ariadne. It was one of three that Titian created for Alfonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara, for a camerino (small room) in his castle there. The duke had wanted the room to contain work from all the leading painters of the day, but for one reason or another Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo and Michelangelo did not contribute, and Titian incorporated their ideas in the three paintings (oil on canvas) he supplied, as well as what he had learned from Giorgione. The Bacchus is an amazingly vivid and accomplished work: vigorous figures and plenty of action, an enchanting child faun, dogs and leopards and a snake, rich colors for vestments, magnificent trees, a subtly painted landscape, a dazzling sky that was to become an overworked cliché in the hands of later practitioners, such as Poussin, but was then new and fresh—the whole worked cunningly into a composition of magical variety, balance and unity. This was the Renaissance at its opulent maturity, serene and self-assured, fascinating in detail, powerful in its central thrust. It and similar works became the standard against which the best painters measured themselves for two centuries.

  Titian also laid down the parameters within which portraiture would be conducted. He moved from the typical Renaissance head and shoulders (often in profile) to the half length, three quarter and even full length. He painted the face from all angles. He got the most out of the richest possible draperies and garments in strong, warm colors. He painted the emperor Charles V on his warhorse with huge success, thus setting another fashion that lasted until the age of Bonaparte. He painted Pope Paul III, specialized in conveying shiftiness, piety and austerity. He painted scores of beautiful women, clothed and unclothed, dwelling on their voluptuousness, their sensuality and occasionally their intelligence. His portraits filled the rich, the powerful and the famous with awe and made them queue to sit for him, and drove other painters back to their studios itching to use the brush in emulation. The brushwork was the key, because although Titian drew well in his youth, few drawings from later periods survive. He worked directly on the canvas, with only slight underdrawing and often with no preliminary sketches at all. This was contrary to all the best practice in the view of the Florentines, who thought that a work should be composed in line and underlay, then completed by applying paint on top of the already existing tonal structure. But Titian might well have argued that the real world is composed not of lines but of forms and that color is part of the forms, intrinsic to them. He built up the forms with color, not lines. It allowed for spontaneity, abrupt changes of mind or atmosphere; it unleashed the genius of a master painter. In a way, it was as great a change as the use of oil paint itself. It is the method most painters have followed ever since. But it is open to abuse, and as he became an old man, Titian abused it. He stopped using underdrawing at all and laid down layers of paint on which to build his structures. His brush strokes became thicker and cruder, and he used his fingers as well as his brushes. Sometimes the effects he thus achieved were sensational, but more often they make you long to get back to the time of Giorgione.

  The golden age of Venetian Renaissance painting was brought to an end and the work of Titian complemented by a coda in the shape of Jacopo Robusti, or Tintoretto (c. 1518–94). He came from a family of local painters, worked in the city virtually all his life, adorned many of its chief public buildings, including the Doge’s Palace, and covered vast areas of canvas. His output was huge: there are, for instance, at least eight Last Suppers by him, some on a monumental scale. He carried Titian’s methods of painting still further and developed what is known as the prestezza technique of rapid brush strokes, creating impressions of faces and objects rather than working them out in detail. His major paintings are designed to be seen from a distance rather than minutely inspected from close up. But of course most people, especially patrons, want both: they survey from afar, then move in to inspect the workmanship. Many of them in sixteenth-century Venice considered Tintoretto’s work unfinished. They wanted him to have another go, and he refused. They turned instead to an artist from Verona, Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese (1528–88), who painted on an equally large scale but produced a more finished and smooth effect, and introduced the sumptuous settings and luxurious garments that Venetian high society loved.

  Hence Tintoretto ended his life a comparatively poor man, and his widow had to petition the authorities for help. At his best, however, he achieved tremendous effects, of a kind Titian never even attempted. In his parish church of Santa Maria dell’Orto, where he is buried
, he created a cataclysmic Last Judgment, which in many ways is more impressive than Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. It is the end of the world presented in the most dramatic fashion, and a fit point at which to bring this survey to a close. Within a few years, Caravaggio had introduced his new and spectacular epoch of realism and scattered the last, lingering leaves of the Renaissance to the four winds.

  PART 6

  THE SPREAD AND DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE

  The spread of Renaissance ideas and forms within Italy was initially slow, and outside Italy it was slower still. To northern minds and eyes, what we (not they; they had no name for it, it was normality) call Gothic was immensely satisfying and therefore tenacious. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a gracious flowering in painting, sculpture and architecture in parts of northern Europe, especially in Burgundy and the Low Countries, France and southern Germany. It culminated in the great panels of Jan van Eyck, in the magnificent illustrations by the Limbourg Brothers to the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, and in lofty cathedrals and splendid châteaux. In England, the latest phase of its insular style of late Gothic, Perpendicular, was still absolutely dominant in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It was one of the most creative periods in European history, but what was done was in “the old style”; it was the art of the Middle Ages, refined, improved, more ornate and elaborate, but still medieval. Northern scholars were already avidly reading recovered Greek and Roman texts, but artists did not yet look to antiquity for models.