Italian Renaissance Learning Resources

Much of our contemporary picture of “the artist” as a misunderstood genius who chooses to stand outside a society that does not appreciate him (or her) is based on romantic stereotypes dating to the nineteenth century. This characterization, as we have seen, is not applicable to the Renaissance (although, of course, there were eccentrics like Piero di Cosimo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Pontormo). In other ways, however, it was the Renaissance that made the modern notion of the artist, and art, possible. As artists grew more self-conscious, they sought to establish for art its own set of theoretical foundations—for example, Vasari’s notion of disegno as a unifying constant and his description of artistic progress (see Drawing, Vasari, and Disegno and Vasari and Art History). The idea of art as an end in itself—art for its own sake—became imaginable.

 

So, we find Michelangelo creating drawings, not as preparatory tools, but as finished works for presentation to friends. Important patrons such as Isabella d’Este began to look for paintings and sculpture by a particular artist simply to own his work, rather than to have a certain subject painted by him. Isabella, for example, wanted a painting by Giovanni Bellini and was willing to let him decide what it would be. He reserved the right, he told her intermediary, Pietro Bembo, “to wander at will in his pictures, so they can give satisfaction to himself, as well as the beholder.”¹¹ At the end of our period, in the 1580s, Giambologna devised a complex sculptural group with three figures, a challenge with which Michelangelo had struggled. The work was attached to a subject only after its creation, when a colleague in the Accademia del Disegno suggested the title—Rape of the Sabine Women. Giambologna did not set out to represent Sabines; he simply made a sculpture. He wrote to his patron that the subject was chosen “to give scope to the knowledge and a study of art.”¹² There was no requirement that it be justified by a story.

 

Competing for Status 1: Art versus Poetry

“Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture.”

—Plutarch, Moralia 346¹³

“Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting.”

—Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone¹⁴

When Plutarch, writing in the late first and early second centuries CE, linked poetry and painting, he was repeating ideas already voiced by the Greek poet Simonides, who had lived some six hundred years before. The most famous formulation of this association came to be the one made by Horace (65–8 BCE): ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry). His point was that both arts merited the attentive appreciation of audiences (and that good and bad examples of each could be found). While most ancient authors used such comparisons as a way to help explain the nature of literature—and not the other way around—the very existence of these writings, given the authority ancient sources commanded for Renaissance theorists, helped propel the status of the visual arts higher. By the sixteenth century the comparison of painting with poetry was commonplace in theoretical discourse. Even Shakespeare took it up (in Timon of Athens, I, i).

It was an easy next step to consider the superiority of one art over another. In the minds of most humanists, it was literature that could most fully capture the range of emotion and the realm of the imagination. Artists, not surprisingly, took a different view. Leonardo, for example, closely paraphrased Plutarch in the quote above, but made his own opinion clear through a subtle difference in the text. Because he saw sight as the most noble of the senses, Leonardo judged painting to be superior to poetry, which was recited and heard fleetingly. He accorded painting, which he held to be a science because it was based on a principle (perspective), a place just after geometry and before astronomy and optics (see “Leonardo on painting versus poetry”).