Viewing Renaissance Art

Introduction
Important that art is viewed with the 'period eye' which encompasses, cultural, religious, political and status of the time.

1. Renaissance art, prestige and social class.
A 'crucial tool' of the time was the writings of Aristotle who offered a sort of social code of expenditure which he called 'magnificence'. (p.14) The concept of magnificence is a 'crucial tool' for us in understanding the way in which Renaissance art is viewed. Within all societies there were boundaries to the amount of expenditure and 'show' that an individual could make, according to their social status e.g. the sumptury laws. For the Medici family their public expression required some caution, whilst in private they would go to excess.

2. Viewing religious art in the Renaissance period.
Privatisation of the church describes the increasing expenditure of lay people on religious art, artifacts, buildings e.g. chapels, chancery's, tombs etc. This must be considered in the light of the 'period eye' and of the religious hold on everyday life including the fear of purgatory. There were divisions within Europe as to the way in which religious art should be viewed treated or regarded. These range from the Protestants view that they were just paint and canvas that detracted from worship, and the iconoclasm which saw the destruction of many works during the Reformation, to the Western Catholic view that the works aided meditation and had a didactic role, to those who considered icons to have miraculous powers in themselves.

Conclusion
This introduction highlights the necessity to view art and objects in the context of the time, society, and the culture in which they were produced. The book seeks to build a bridge between our viewing and that of a Renaissance person.

Chapter 1 - Art, Class and Wealth. Rembrant Duits

Introduction
The following chapter seeks to examine Renaissance art as material possession and commodity, and how its ownership permeated every level of society.

1. Catchphrases and concepts.
We are introduced to a number of expressions used by art historians in relation to the Renaissance particularly to the role of patrons. 'Conspicuous waste' and 'conspicuous consumption' were phrases coined by the American economist Thorstein Veblan a follower of Kal Marx. 'Conspicuous waste' refers to the deliberately excessive use of resources e.g. time, labour, money, goods to signify wealth and to keep others from gaining access to the same resources. (Story of Agostino Chigi throwing silver tableware into the Tiber after a banquet. However, this was an act and silverware was retrieved next day having been caught in a net!).

'Conspicuous consumption' refers to the acquisition of commodities beyond the purchasers elementary needs e.g. Chigi's construction of a pleasure villa. He argues that the leisure classes cultivated a certain fastidiousness however, regarding the luxury goods they invested in. It was as much about displaying taste as it was about displaying wealth. They calculated their 'kind' in the distinction between 'right' and 'wrong' in the display of wealth and social status. Adhere to the established pattern and you manifest a sense of class, deviate from it and you expose yourself as a parvenu (dictionary definition - a person who, having risen socially or economically, is considered to be an upstart) with money but no taste.

The expression 'material culture' originates in the field of anthropology where it stands for all material aspects of human civilisation. Its use by historians of Renaissance art is to help them circumvent questions of the artistic status of artifacts raised by the way we view art in our own time. 'Nowadays we are quite used to distinguish between Art with a capital A and the decorative or applied arts' (artisan and craft work) 'the former (Art) a profound emotional and intellectual medium for communication'. For example engaging in Rothko's Seagram murals is art with a capital A, whereas going to the jewellers is the decorative or applied arts. So the idea of 'material culture' embraces all of these items that may have been owned or collected by the Renaissance patron without having to put today's status on the objects.
maiolica = a variant of majolica
maiolica - noun - highly decorated earthenware with a glaze of tin oxide
majolica = –noun 1.Italian earthenware covered with an opaque glaze of tin oxide and usually highly decorated. 2. any earthenware having an opaque glaze of tin oxide.

2. The Working Classes
The working class which represented about 95% of the population earned very little and unlike many of the representations of them in art, were poorly and drably dressed. However, there was opportunity to take part in pilgrimages and to purchase or acquire Pilgrims badges such as scallop shells from Santiago da Compestela and Veronica in St. Peter's in the Vatican. The ownership and wearing of which displayed both status and offered the opportunity to shape a more interesting identity for themselves. This section included pictures from Sodoma (1477-1549) (plate 1.4 Saint Benedict Appears in a Dream of Two Monks and Gives Then the Plan for a New Monastery 1505-08 fresco with added tempera) and the Netherlandish artist Lucas Van Leyden (c.1494-1533) (plate 1.6 The Pilgrims 1508, engraving).

3. Artisans
The section on artisans is based around Petrus Christus (c.1410-75/76) Portrait of a Goldsmith (Willem van Vlueten?), 1449 oil on panel (Plate 1.8) and The Master of Frankfurt Portrait of the Artist and his Wife, 1496 oil on panel (Plate 1.9) Both of which project the image of the artisans through displays of owned objects, cloths, suggested patrons and in the case of the artist a display of his artistic skills. Artisans earned considerably more than workmen such as bricklayers and their enhanced social status allowed them more opportunity for 'conspicuous consumption'.

4. Doctors
Once again this section talks of the ways in which through depiction in portraits doctors showed their status, wealth, pride and claims of proficiency. As in the previous sections comparisons are made as to the earnings of doctors compared to labourers and masons etc. Special mention is made of the value of gold brocade and how this was simulated by painting on a four poster bed. This section concluded by referring to portraits struck on bronze medals, far more expensive than painting and an even more pretentious claim to status and display of wealth. (Plate1.13).

5. Entrepreneurs
This section reviews the material culture of self made merchants and their sponsorship and purchase of works of art such as the Primavera, and church frescoes as memorials and funerary chapels such as The Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita, Florence. The actual worth and value of their possessions is discussed often comparing the value of the work of art against other possessions which at the time were seen to have a higher worth noted in florins and ducats.

6. Women
Women as such are not highly regarded or recorded as patrons, particularly of printing, architecture and sculpture. It is likely however, that they were patrons and commissioners of works such as jewelry, manuscript and tapestry. The role of the woman within the material culture was almost akin to a possession and were often seen as objects of 'conspicuous consumption' showing off their husbands and male relations status and wealth.

7. Bankers and Collections

Here we read of the merchants and entrepreneurs who as well as investing in businesses themselves such as silk production, also entered the world of banking, providing loans to third parties and charging interest. They became extremely wealthy, the most well known being the Medici's in Florence. This wealth allowed them to indulge in 'conspicuous consumption' in the purchase of items of no practical use e.g. Tazza Farnese (pl 1.19 p.43) Illustrated above. The competition for these items increased their value, and their display in the homes and studies of their owners was part displaying status and identity, and part identity creation itself.

8. Princes

In the previous sections the chapter has led us through a progression of social orders each more wealthier than the previous. The very top of this order were the princes. The families that provided the kings, emperors and rulers of Europe, their wealth maintained and increased through taxes. Their position and wealth comparable today to only that of nation states. The big difference being however, that a large proportion of this wealth was for the personal use of the ruler and his family members. In art terms this led to 'conspicuous consumption' of an incredible order, such as, the gold statue on display today in the Cathedral of Leige (pl 1.20 p.45) which shows Charles the Bold and promotes his position and image. It becomes apparent within this section that painting was not seen as the highest of art forms. Textiles, altar cloths, and church ornaments and vestments carried a very high status, which in turn often gave these princely families a comparative status with figures from Christianity and Christ's family.

9. Institutions

Outside of the normal social hierarchy institutions such as the church, the military or affinities to one's city or state were the only ways in which many could jointly take part in any form of material culture or conspicuous consumption. In art history terms, this has traditionally focused on guilds and scuola's particularly in Italy, but this was a phenomena that was widespread across Europe as can be seen in the Banner made for the City of Ghent. (Pl.1.26 p.51). Within the military and the church was the opportunity for individuals to rise in social status and hence display more conspicuous consumption to promote their own status and identity. Mercenary soldiers developed a taste for flamboyant and colourful uniforms (pl. 1.27 p.52) and Richard Fox rose from obscurity to become Bishop on Winchester and commissioned a bishop's crosier of silver gilt and enamel (pl.1.30 p.54) which incorporated the pelican as his own personal emblem.

10. Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to show that Renaissance art was a far wider ranging concept from that generally considered today. Today we focus historically on just a select few painters and sculptors, but the Renaissance patron regarded goldsmiths, weavers, armour makers, carpenters, architects of equal importance when it came to material culture and conspicuous consumption. The final thoughts of this chapter focus on the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, designed by Donato Bramante (1443/4 - 1514) worked on by Raphael and concluded by Michelangelo as 'quite possibly the most influential and expensive project of conspicuous consumption devised by man'(p.55).

Appendix : Types of money and exchange rates

Important information regarding different European currencies and exchange rates.

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon Chapter 6.

The End of the Renaissance.

Michelangelo's Example.
In this final chapter, A G-D introduces the thought that all movements and periods of history eventually decline, often as a result of the ideas and the people who themselves are key factors within the movements. He introduces us to, Brunelleschi's Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, within which there are two outstanding works by Michelangelo, the Laurentian library vestibule, which takes so many ancient architectural forms and converts them into a work of art which takes away from these forms their true use and somehow seem to devalue the ideals of the Renaissance in its attempt to rediscover the values of the past. Within the church is also the mortuary chapel dedicated to the members of the Medici family. The two leading Medici family members are depicted as Roman generals set in a classical facade and surrounded by statues. However, the sense within the chapel is not one of glory but rather of the decay, the change and the passing away of all things. Michelangelo's work itself seems to spell an end to certainties. Every work of his seems to reinvent his style and helps to 'create a climate in which every sculptor or painter had to have his own distinctive manner' (p.281). He also seems to establish the notion 'that art should express the higher aspirations of spirit and intellect' (p.281). It appears that to be an artist is not just to be a craftsman.

Pontormo's Introspection

Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1556) A G-D writes of this artist as one of the greatest Renaissance painters, and of his paintings in the Capponi Chapel in the Church of Santa Felicita, Florence. A G-D writes a detailed description of his painting The Entombment stating that he 'built on Michelangelo's achievements with fierce originality' (p.281) Pontormo created an art of agonised introspection capturing moments of loss as seen in The Entombment.

Correggio's Theatre

Correggio (1489-1534) in contrast to Pontormo gives his religious painting The Martyrdom of Four Saints c.1522 'a transfusion of erotic appeal from the body of secular, mythological Renaissance painting: the saints are depicted as if enjoying the sensual raptures of libidinous classical gods and goddesses' (p.285). 'Corregio was a more theatrical artist than Pontormo. Whereas Pontormo created an art of agonized introspection, Correggio set out to paint the human face and body in the throes of mystical religious experience. He wanted to convey, not the vision itself - which remains opaque, hidden for ever behind the clouded dying eyes of his hero and heroine - but the experience of having it. His method was to make that experience seem like a form of displaced sexual rapture. Virtuous death had never been depicted in this way before'. (p.285).

His The Assumption of the Virgin, in the Dome of Palma Cathedral c.1530, has the theme of joy unbound, it whirls the viewer upwards as if to join the virgin in her ascent to the vault of heaven.

Absolute Artfulness

This section highlights the work of Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te in Mantua and the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in which the Renaissance ideals become an entertainment and a variety show 'a Renaissance harbinger of modern civilisation intolerant of boredom, channel hopping, saturated with imagery designed to amuse and advertise' (p.289/90) Ceiling, Room of the Giants, Palazzo Te, Mantua 1530-32 and Fountain of Diana of Ephesus, Villa d'Este, Tivoli, late 16th Century.

Artful Absolutism
A consideration of how art and the work of the artists such as Vasari and Benevuto Cellini were used by Cosimo de Medici in his transformation of Florence from the ideas of democracy to his autocratic rule. As can be seen in Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa 1545-53 sculpture. A D-G writes 'It is the image of a leader, set above the people, exulting in his own beauty and power. Obey or die'. (p.301)

The French Renaissance (with a pinch of salt)

Francis I brought Italian Renaissance influences to the french court, and established a tradition within France that runs through to the present time, of classical styles and triumphalism. He brought to France Benvenuto Cellini as his goldsmith and this section includes reference to and a description of his famous salt cellar. Frances I transformed the Chateaux of Fountainbleu, a hunting lodge into an Italianate palace although with many distinctly French architectural features. Its decoration includes work by the Florentine painter Rosso Fiorentino. 'In few other countries would the nation-state come to be so boldly identified, by its rulers, with the grandeur of ancient Rome'. (p.305) Napoleon and his Arc d'Triomph, Francois Mitterand and his glass pyramid at the Louvre and the huge Arch de la Défense. 'But there is a sense in which the country's political leaders have never grown out of it' (p.305)

Benvenuto Cellini Salt Cellar of Francis I 1540-43

Little Italy

Little of the Italian Renaissance can be found in Britain, although Henry VIII sought in some ways to match his French rival Francis I. The work mentioned is the tomb of Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York in Westminster Abbey created by Pietro Torrigiano, an artist who had broken the nose of Michelangelo in a fist-fight in Florence. Britain was separated from Italy by the Reformation and its Protestant religion, although it was influenced by the Northern European Renaissance.

'Let Division Be Made'

This section examines Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors describing it as '...the pictorial equivalent of a Renaissance nobleman's cabinet, the most precious piece of furniture in the house, a repository of secrets and of special knowledge, reserved only to those who understand the trickery of its construction'. (p.308)

The section continues to tell us of the identity of the two figures Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur who found themselves in Britain at the time of the establishment of the Church of England and Henry VIII marriage to Anne Boleyn. A G-D writes 'The objects heaped on to the shelves on which both men rest their elbows symbolize the disarray into which their world had fallen. The various astronomical instruments on the upper shelf of the table in the picture, which include a celestial globe as well as a number of different mechanisms for telling the time by the motions of the sun - a cylindrical shepherd's dial, two quadrants, a polyheral sundial and a torquetum - are all misaligned for use in a northerly latitude. This is unlikely to have been an oversight on the artist's part, since one of his closest friends in London was the astronomer Nikolaus Kratzer. The misaligned instruments are emblems of chaos, of the heavens out of joint - a disharmony to which the lute with a broken string, conventional symbol of discord, also alludes'. (p.309/10) 'The open book immediately below the globe (literally, its subtext) is an apparently innocent work of practical mathematics, Peter Apian's New and Reliable Instruction Book of Calculation for Merchants. But it is open at a most un-innocent page, which begins with the word 'Dividirt' : 'Let division be made'. To those with sharp eyes and the ability to think laterally - or to those let in on the secret by the Dinteville clan in Polissy - this was a reference to the religious schism that was tearing Europe apart in the 1530's. Division was indeed being made'. (p.310/11). The strangest and most unusual feature of the painting is the blur of a skull painted in 'anamorphic perspective' which can only be seen when viewed at the correct angle, and thus taken with the almost hidden crucifix suggests the larger concern of eternal life and the resurrection that will take precedence over these divisions in the world.

'Th' Intertraffique of the Mind'.

As the title indicated there is a consideration of the expansion of European trade with the wider world that brings with it an exchange and a flow of ideas. It is suggested that the new ideas of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the values of the ancients are now flowing into the everyday culture of the wider Europe. Antwerp is noted as the principle European port and it is through this city that many of these ideas are flowing, particularly with the early printing establishment of Plantin. This section also considers the work of Pieter Breugal the Elder (c.1525/30 - 69), who in his work captures much of the everyday existence of peasant life. Like his more formal fellow artists however, he draws from the ancients, but this time on their satirical, comical tradition, from authors such as Horace and Martial. A G-D observes that 'The humanity that runs right through Renaissance art and literature seems to broaden yet further during the second half of the sixteenth century. This is true of Bruegel, and more so of Shakespeare, gifted with the broadest imagination of any author, prepared to explore the world of the gravedigger as well as the prince, the buffoon as well as the philosopher, the savage as well as the Magus. There is no such thing as a life not worth noticing'. (p.316).

Counter-Reformation

The end of the Renaissance, if there could be such a thing, is probably brought about by the Roman Catholic Council of Trent which set out a manifesto to counter the Reformation. It particularly dictated styles of art that should be used in a religious context, moving against the individual freedoms and artistic licence that artists had taken and developed from the classical styles and ideas. It sought to rid religious art of any link to pagan myths and legends, and 'excessive' nudity. A G-D writes 'The reformers of the 1560's dreamed of doing away with a large part of the Renaissance because they believed it had clouded the Christian picture. What they were attempting to do, in a sense, was to wind the clock back to the very beginnings of the Italian Renaissance. It is as if they were trying to go all the way back to what might be called the innocent Renaissance, the Renaissance of Giotto, Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni - who had found, in Greco-Roman naturalism, a vocabulary with which to express a new and vivid piety, but who had not fully opened the Pandora's box of antiquity'. (p.318)

Epilogue

A G-D sums up his book and the Renaissance and seeks to pin-point the essence of what was discovered and the legacy this period has left on Western Civilisation as he writes 'But perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Renaissance lies not in any form of revival - whether of classical ideas, or of realistic depiction - but in the new way in which it taught people to think about their own nature'. (p.324). He returns to Donatello's statue of St John the Baptist (1438) 'The miracle is not just the conjuring up of humanity, of the life force or living presence. The miracle lies in the delicacy and precision with which a moment of feeling has been caught - and in the magnitude of the revelation communicated by this capturing of something that seems so fugitive and, at once, so endlessly fascinating. The message forever trembling on the Baptist's lips is the message of the Renaissance itself. What is inside a man can be a whole world'. (p.324).

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon Chapter 5.

Light and Liberty

Love at First Sight.
If Florence was the Renaissance capital of sculpture then Venice was the capital of painting. A.G-D writes ' Venetian painters looked at the overlooked. They painted sexual desire. They found new ways of depicting death. They painted the human face with unparalleled sensitivity. They painted landscape, and the fall of light. In painting all of those things, they changed the way in which people thought about painting itself'. (p.224)


This chapter is introduced with the painting by Titian (or Tiziano Vecellio c.1485-1576) Bacchus and Ariadne which captures the moment of love at first sight.

Built on Mud

A brief history of the founding of Venice and its long association with independence and practical thinking.

Looking Outwards
Built in the lagoon its feet in the sea, Venice is a world of sailors, voyagers and trading, and into the city came the influences from the Byzantine east. 'The multi-racial, market-oriented, outward-looking nature of Venetian Renaissance society - together with its fondness for textures and colours of the bazaar - is reflected in the surfaces of its art'. (p.228/9).

Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460-1525/6) painted a number of pictures telling the story of St. Ursula's life in which he captures the maritime adventure of Venice with successive panorama's of departures and arrivals, richly dressed delegations, ships, pennants and sails swelled by the wind. (Miss Garnet's Angel!!!).

The Cult of Impersonality
Venice was a republic (a state which continued until its eventual capitulation to Napoleon), and from it's leading aristocrats elected a governing body and a symbolic head of state, the doge. Venetians mistrusted the promotion of self, preferring to belong to corporate groups within their society. In about 1501 Giovanni Bellini painted a head and shoulders portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan. Here we see the fine robes and hat of office, but the face is almost expressionless, and the individual unglorified.

Another artwork within this section is the equestrian monument of Bartolommeo Colleoni by the Florentine Andrea del Verrochio. This monument to a soldier who served Venice was created as a result of Colleoni's will, and he requested that the monument be positioned outside St. Mark's cathedral. This self-aggrandisement however, did not sit easy with the Venetians, who eventually allowed the statue to be erected at the edge of the city.

The corporate nature of Venice is captured by Gentili Bellini's Procession in the Piazza St. Marco 1496, in which all the participants share an equality in fact looking like clones of each other.

Victor Carpatius Fingebat
The comporate identity within Venice was encouraged and developed by the various scuola, centres for devotion and debate within the city and the Republic. The scuola founded by the colony of Dalmatians in Venice in 1451 boasts paintings by Vittore Carpaccio. There is a series of three paintings on the life of St. Jerome including The Vision of St. Augustine c.1502 in which St. Jerome is depicted only as light entering the room and bathing St. Augustine, various objects and his small dog in a naturalistic gentle illumination.
A G-D writes 'This illumination is at once physical and metaphysical, both the light of the everyday world and the light of God. Yet because Carpaccio treated the light naturalisticly, resisting the temptation to place some phantasm of St. Jerome standing in the sun, the gentle glow which bathes the saint's face symbolizes all that we cannot see but can only sense. This light seems to irradiate Augustine from within as well as illuminate him from without, transfiguring him even as it models his features with such objective clarity. Carpaccio signed the picture in Latin, suggesting his own humanistic learning: 'VICTOR CARPATIVS FINGEBAT'. 'Fingebat' not 'pingebat' -created, not painted - as if the artist wanted to hint at his own belief that in making it he had, Leonardo-like, created something magical and even god-like'. (p.236)

Father and Son
The artists workshops in Venice were less competitive that those of Florence, and rather than rejecting what had gone before for something new, sought more to learn from the past and to build upon it. Jacob Bellini one of the unsung heroes of Venetian art was the father of Gentile (1429-1407) and Giovanni (1431/6 - 1516). Jacobo has left two precious albums one in the British Museum, the other in the Louvre which illustrate his own ideas and his wide learning on artistic styles and perspective etc. His two sons built on their fathers foundation, and their work can be seen, Gentile in The Procession in the Piazza St. Marco (as seen above) and Giovanni in his altarpiece The Baptism of Christ. His work recalls that of Leonardo da Vinci, but whereas Leonardo's landscapes display his science and knowledge about the world, Bellini's are more the realms of poetry. Of the 'Baptism' AG-D writes '...it is evident that the picture is not driven by empiricism but by the force of religious emotion'. (p.247)

In Arcadia
In 1505 Giogione painted La Tempesta, a secular landscape which appears linked to the re-emergence in the second half of the 15th Century of the classical literacy genre of the pastoral. In the late 1480's Jacobo Sannazaro had published a pastoral romance called L'Arcadia, which was to influence European literature for the next two hundred years. Both this work and the painting suggest a retreat to the pastoral in the classical and the Renaissance mind alike to a 'lost golden world of untroubled rustic simplicity'. (p.248). Written around 1470 by the Dominican friar Franceco Colonna and printed in 1499 was the pastoral Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli which includes a hundred and sixty-five woodcuts. Part romance, part pastoral, part achitectural fantasy, it seems to take us closer than any other literary source to the meanings of Giogioni's Tempesta. A meditation on the transience of love and all the things of this world. In the lightening and storm in the background 'you may even hear the distant thunder of romanticism'. (p.249)

The Decisive Moment.
This section is primarily about Titian and follows on from the development of the landscape and secular painting. Titian seemed to share a close affinity with the work of Giorgione as can be seen in both their paintings of Venus. Giorgione Sleeping Venus and Titian Venus of Urbino. Titian seems to embody the move of the artist to that of entrepreneur and more than any other artist seems to have created the 'art market'. The buying and collecting of art works saw his work owned by kings, princes and popes. AG-D writes 'More than any other Renaissance artist, he [Titian] shaped the future of painting. Rubens, Poussin, Rembrandt, Veláquez, Watteau, Chardin, Delacroix, Constable, Monet, Degas - all learned to paint in the school of Titian. His painting became the raw material of painting itself'. (p.257)

The Return to the Land

From the mid fifteenth century the Venetians expanded their inland empire with cities such as Vincenza and Padua. In their inland empire know as the Veneto, rich Venetians built a new form of architecture developed by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). In his architecture a notion gathered momentum that a building might itself be as perfectly formed and as covetable as a work of art. Within these buildings they sought to recreate some of the trompe l'oeil images found in Roman villas. Paolo Veronese (c.1528-88) created such scenes and opened up ceilings into skies and peopled the house with figures.

The Uses of Spectacle
The work of both artists and architects embraced the use of spectacle in the second half of the 16th Century. This featured artists such as Veronese. Increased theatricality can be seen in the paintings of Tintoretto (real name, Jacobo Robusti 1519-94) in his cycle of paintings for The Scuola Grande di San Rocco include his powerful twelve metre wide depiction of the crucifixion.


AG-D writes 'The most engulfing of all Tintoretto's works is the vast billowing vision of Paradise which he and assistants created on the far wall of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doges' Palace between 1588 and 1592. It is a cauldron of saints, divinities, angels and the blessed. A painting so large that it cannot be taken in at a single glance, a picture which exceeds the range of the human optic, can seem to swirl us into its very structure. This was a truth on which the greatest artists of the Baroque and Rococo would build. But Tintoretto's painting also seems to look forward further in time, to anticipate the panoramic scale of so much modern painting. Jackson Pollock's 'allover' canvases of the 1940's and 1950's - pictures infused perhaps not with a dream of paradise, but with inchoate pantheist yearning - are variations on a Tintoretto theme'. (p.264)

Venice as Idea
The independence of the Venetian artists can be seen typified in the work of El Greco (real name Domenikos Theotokopoulos 1541-1614), who spent some of his formative years in the city. He rejects the styles of Michelangelo, Raphael and others. AG-D writes 'El Greco spent his maturity in Spain but was always, essentially, a painter formed by Venice. He was the first artist of his kind - a moral rather than geographical Venetian, so to speak - but he was only the first of many. Rubens was to be a Venetian living in Antwerp. Delacroix was to be a Venetian living in Paris. Turner was to be a Venetian living in London. By the end of the sixteenth century and perhaps ever afterwards, Venice was no longer a place. It had become an attitude: a state of mind'.(p.165/6)

Pieta
This chapter closes with Titian's Pieta and highlights the divisions between the artists of Rome and Florence who favoured drawing and the Venetians who favoured colour, but concluded that both are part of the same and that 'The power and the depth of painting comes from the fact that it is, indeed, made by man using his hands'. (p.269)

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon. Chapter 4

Apocalypse.
The High Renaissance and its Enemies.
1500 -1525 is often seen as a golden age for the Italian Renaissance sometimes called High Renaissance, the time of Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome and the buildings of Bramante. But even as the Catholic church was commissioning these artists, in Northern Europe a challenge to the supremacy of the Catholic church was emerging inspired by the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536). At the same time throughout Europe there was a widespread fear of impending apocalypse - a millennial anxiety that the world was about to end.

Revelations.
From this time there dates many works that feature the last judgement, the apocalypse, the raising of the dead, and even the anti-christ as in the work of Luca Signorelli The Stories of the Antichrist (1499-1502) in Orvieto Cathedral. Here the devil is seen whispering into the ear of a christ-like figure - the anti-christ.
In Florence following the invasion of Italy by France, the Medici family were for a time deposed and the city was influenced by an extreme religious fanatic Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) who played on apocalyptic fears, he was excommunicated by the pope and a year later hanged and burnt at the stake.
From Northern Europe at this tine came works from the artist Hieronymus Bosch, showing fantastical scenes of demons torturing the damned, as seen in The Last Judgement c.1500.

Rome Rebuilt.
In 1503 Julius II became pope. He saw himself as a Caesar and led successful military campaigns to regain parts of the Italian peninsular from France and thus expanded the papal territories. He was also anxious to improve Rome itself which was something of a shantytown. One of his predecessors, pope Nicholas V, had been influenced by the ideas of Leon Baptista Alberti, and had dreamt of a Roman renaissance. Nicholas spelt out his vision in 1455 arguing that if the roman papacy were to prosper then Rome itself must be made to seem as majestic, as flawless and as permanent as the Christian faith itself. '...to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye: a popular faith, sustained only in doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would revere it'. (p.178 Eamon Duffy Saints and Sinners (London and New Haven,1997), p.139).
Julius brought to Rome as chief architect and town planner Donato Bramante (1444-1514) to lead this rebuilding of the city.

An Ideal World.
At Bramante's prompting, Julius II brought to Rome the young artist Raffaello Sanzio,known as Raphael,whose frescoes within the Vatican are today regarded as priceless treasures. (I've seen these rooms several times and they are outstanding!). Amongst them are The School of Athens and the Disputa, showing classical and theological scenes of learning and debate. In truth however, at this time Julius II adopted a totalitarian and dictator like approach stifling debate within the Church.
Within Northern Europe the influence of Rome was on the decline as the religious culture evolved separately and distant from the papal court in Rome.

Northern Europe and its Discontents.
Behind the separate thinking of Northern Europe lay the intellectual force of Erasmus. A G-D writes: 'Like all humanist scholars, Erasmus was an intellectual heir of Petrarch. But he recast Petrarch's thought. He called not for a Renaissance of classical learning but for a spiritual Renaissance. While Petrarch had called for the rebirth of ancient Greece and Rome, Erasmus demanded the rebirth of the church'. (p.185).

Erasmus had grasped the new discipline of philology realising that language had changed over time he sought to go back to the earliest texts of the Word and to discover original and purer ideas free from the 'accretions with which they (the church of Rome) had barnacled it. He wanted to recover God's message in its purity' (p.186). This simplified piety fitted well with the feeling for a religious extremism linked to the apocalyptic expectations of the time, and becomes manifest in the stark art works such as Mathias Grunwald's Isenheim Altarpiece (closed position) c.1515, made for the leprosy hospital in the monastery of St. Anthony of Isenheim in Alsace,and in Tilman Riemenschneider's undecorated wooden carving of The Last Supper c.1499-1505.

In the city of Nuremberg at the time of the emergence of these ideas of a more austere and less ceremonial religion, there emerged the artist Albrecht Durer (1471-1528). His sense of vocation is reflected in some of his self-portraits, the most striking being painted in 1500 in which he is seen full faced, in almost Christ-like pose normally reserved for depictions of God. It could be seen as self-promoting and it can also been seen as reinforcing the more radical ideas that each Christian should have a direct relationship with God and not rely ceremony. Durer like Erasmus used the new invention of printing to spread his works to a larger audience, and many of them (such as the The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) have religious significance and subversive connotations that in judgement all will be equal.

The Divine Michelangelo.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was a young sculptor from Florence whose statue of David so impressed Julius II that he called him to Rome to work on his planned mausoleum. Michelangelo worked at this project on and off, for forty years, and it was never completed. But from it there remain several partly finished,male nude sculptures,the most complete of which is The Dying Slave now in the Louvre. Decorating Julius II's eventual tomb (a much reduced affair) is a large sculpture of Moses.
With the cancellation by Julius of the planned tomb, he managed to retain Michelangelo by giving him the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel. It took Michelangelo from 1508 - 1512 to decorate the ceiling, and the work reflects his belief that sculpture was a higher art form than painting as he creates sculptural figures in paint, and a complete trompe l'oiel architectural structure. With the numerous male nude figures (ignudi) it is as if he has created in the ceiling the temple structure that Julius had envisaged for his tomb. Within ten years after completion Pope Hadrian VI condemned it as 'a bathroom of nudes'. A G-D writes: 'Together with Giotto's paintings on the walls of the Arena Chapel, Michelangelo's paintings for the Sistine Chapel are the most celebrated frescos of the Christian painting tradition. Yet they mark a very different moment. A great gulf separates Michelangelo from Giotto. The Sistine Chapel is grander than the Arena Chapel, but it touches the heart less directly. Pathos has been replaced by aesthetic beauty. Intimacy has been replaced by sublimity'. (p.202)

Julius Triumphans
In the last years of Julius II papacy both Michelangelo and Raphael were at work within the Vatican, and some of the figures in Raphael's frescos at this time seemed to mirror the figures of Michelangelo. Raphael's frescos celebrate through allegory the success of Julius,and his final work The Liberation of St.Peter from His Chains, actually unfinished at the time of Julius's death on 21st February, 1513, shows St. Peter faintly resembling the pope. This became his epitaph, the image of Julius's final release from the prison of mortal existence into the light of God.

Julius Exclusus
After the death of Julius his successor Leo X sought to continue the rebuilding of Rome and the commissioning of large projects by selling 'indulgences' throughout Europe, promising forgiveness and redemption for hard cash. This section includes part of a witty imaginary account by Erasmus of Julius arriving at the gates of heaven and his argument with St. Peter and not gaining entry.

This anti-Rome feeling in Northern Europe fueled by the cynical sale of 'indulgences' drew the famous protest from Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) and the division of Christendom began.

Lucan Cranach the elder (1472 - 1553) a life-long friend of Luther became in effect the official artist of the Lutheran Reformation. His altarpiece of 1539 in the church of St. Mary's in Wittenberg is a visual manifesto for the reformed faith. Lucan Cranach the younger's (1515 - 1586) painting hangs in the same church and his allegory of this religious division, The Lord's Vineyard c.1569 depicts a vegetable garden half of which is in chaos and barren being managed by the pope, cardinals and priests, and the other half neat, fruitful and well managed by Luther and his colleagues.

Just as Erasmus was unable to contain the effects of the ideas he put forward, so Luther was unable to hold back or restrain the movement he had started. 'During the 1520's his ideas spread and mutated. Christendom was not merely riven in two, but split into many'. (p.209)

Rome Sacked
The anti-Catholic feeling heightened and manifested itself in works such as Erhard Schon's print Devil Playing the Bagpipes c.1530, the bagpipes in question being a caricature of a priests face. In Rome Raphael continued to paint frescos, a little seen form of propaganda against the widely distributed printed formats of the Lutherans. Works such as Fire in the Borgo continue to promote the papacy as a controlling and saving institution. Although this particular painting would seem to suggest this as ineffective, and highlights the conflagration rather than the papal miracle.

Rome came to face the effects of this division in a brutal and terrible way, when in 1527 many thousands of Charles V's imperial troops who had been based in Northern Italy invaded the city killing some 23,000 out of the total population of 55,000. Having been told that the Pope was the anti-christ many of these Lutheran soldiers believed that any associated with him must also be of the devil.

Luther's name was scratched into Raphael's fresco of the Disputa, and can still be seen today when lit correctly.


Michelangelo's Recantation.
In this section two of Michelangelo's later works are described,The Conversion of Saul 1542-5 and The Crucifixion of St. Peter c.1545-9. Gone now is the aesthetic beauty of his Sistine Chapel nudes and instead a concentration on the relationship between God and man. Nearing the end of his life Michelangelo appears to have had his own reformation in readiness for the 'beyond'. The section concludes with a translation by Elizabeth Jennings of Michelangelo's sonnet.

A Wavering Dance.
The Protestant impact on art in Northern Europe particularly in Britain was the destruction of much pre-Reformation religious imagery which they believed stood in the way of the individuals relationship with God. However, this led to the development of secular art such as landscapes as can been seen in Albrecht Altdorfer Landscape with Castle c.1520-32. Portraits, which suited Protestant introspection, historical and genre paintings. Luther believed sexual arousal was good for the soul and Lucas Cranach the elder gave this visual expression in paintings such as Eve 1528. Perhaps the greatest effect of the Reformation was to destroy the belief in the possibility of absolute truth, whether it be the aspirations of the humanists for their revival of the values of antiquity, or the early Protestants for their simplified faith.

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne 1533-92 is his essay On Books states that his library testifies to mans multifariousness and to 'the diversity of his dogmas and fantasies...Constancy itself is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance'. (p.221)

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon Chapter 3.

The Journey of the Magus.
Quote: The painter is lord of all types of people and things.
If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful,buffoonish or ridiculous, or pitiable, he can be lord and god thereof; if he wants to produce inhabited regions or deserts or dark and shady retreats from the heat, or warm places, in cold weather, he can do so. If he wants valleys, if he wants from high mountaintops to unfold a great plain extending down to the sea's horizon, he is lord to do so; and likewise if from low plains he wishes to see high mountains...
In fact whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hand.
Leonardo da Vinci, notebook entry.

The Court and the Artist
Chapter three, takes us into the courts of the city states of Italy during the fifteenth Century,and introduces us to the rulers and families who became the patrons of artists who changed the direction of art.

The Medici as Magi.
By the 1430's Florence was effectively ruled by the Medici family and a masonic like sect based around the magi. The Medici family showed their wealth by commissioning and building the Dominican monastery of San Marco with a fresco by Fra Angelico in each cell. (Visited this monastery when in Florence a few years ago). The cell reserved for Cosimo de' Medici was decorated with a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico's assistant Benozzo Gozzoli. Gozzoli also painted the fresco of The Journey of the Magi which adorns the four walls of the Medici private chapel in their palace.

The One-eyed Mercenary

One of Piero della Francesca's important patrons was Federigo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, who was recognised as being perhaps the most outstanding military leader on the Italian Peninsula. Based in Urbino he became extremely wealthy by selling his army to opposing sides very successfully. Humanist educated, he constructed his ducal palace to reflect both his military and his intellectual prowess. The palace contains an outstanding range of art works, his studiolo containing 'intarsia' doors and panelling. Although famous in his time it is not he and his fellow rulers who have achieved the highest pinnacles of fame, but the people they employed: artists.

Piero della Francesca's portrait shows Federigo in profile, complete with warts and showing his damaged nose but hiding his missing eye. Being in profile shows him in the manner of the emperors of ancient Rome.

Artist Laureate.
Andrea Mantegna rose from a craftsman to a position of a wealthy courtier in the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua. His deep fascination with ancient Rome is reflected in his works, as can be seen in his painting of St. Sebastian c.1480 where it is unclear whether his sympathies lie with the martyred saint or the Roman ruins martyred by the Christian church. (More artworks by Mantegna in this chapter). He died in 1506 his status such that he was given one of the chapels (which is highly decorated by himself and his studio followers) in Mantua's impressive church Sant'Andrea as his own funerary chapel.

Art for Art's Sake

During the second half of the fifteenth century, there occurred something of a 'sea-change' in painting. There began to appear the idea of art as a diversion or amusement, and not only as illustrations of religious stories or promotions of persons of importance (portraits). Art for art's sake. Isabella d'Este wife of Francesco Gonzaga (Mantua) became a leading patron commissioning a multitude of paintings by leading artists on classical scenes, which she displayed in her studiolo. Mantegna contributed to her collection.

In Florence, Sandro Botticelli produced two famous paintings both of which were almost certainly commissioned to celebrate marriages. Primavera ('Spring') and The Birth of Venus.

A.G-D write of The Birth of Venus: 'It's title is misleading, because what the artist has depicted is the moment immediately after the birth of Venus. Having already been born, at sea, the goddess is about to step on to dry land. The wind, Zephyr, appears once more, again twined around his consort Chloris, this time blowing Venus to shore. An attendant, one of the three Hours, or Horae, is about to throw a cloak over the goddess's nudity. Botticelli painted the sea in an almost cursory manner, rendering it - like seas painted by children - as a pattern of wavy lines on a barely inflected ground. Venus standing in her shell, her long hair clasped to her in a gesture of modesty, is the image of fugitive, fragile innocence at the moment of its ending. She is a poetic representation of every bride to be. There is a lapidary quality to Botticelli's treatment of her, which is appropriate, since in stepping into the real world - into the world of love and marriage - she is about to step off her pedestal. He has made her a statue on the verge of becoming flesh.

The picture is about the crossing of a threshold. It is a poetic commemoration of the moment when a virgin becomes a wife and thus enters the world of procreation and reproduction. Botticelli finds cause, in this theme, for a certain wistful regret as well as for wholehearted joy in female fecundity. The Hora who is about to robe Venus's nakedness holds the mantle - the cloak of womanhood, metaphorically - between the fingers and thumb of her right hand. She does so in an arrestingly deliberate manner. The loop of red cloth thus formed, with such pointed care, takes the unmistakable shape of a woman's sex. A leaf, symbol of new growth, is folded within. Venus's golden tresses flicker out towards this charged detail like golden streaks of lightning. Lower down the picture, Botticelli arranged the strands of her hair, which Venus clasps to her modesty, to form another equally explicit image of a pudenda. These details are not so much a case of visual suggestion as of visual insistence. The Birth of Venus is about marriage - it is difficult to think of a picture which takes marriage more seriously - and sex is part of that. Its poetry is robust.

The most beautiful part of this picture is the face of Venus herself. Shaded by sadness, her expression recalls that of the Virgin Mary in much devotional art, lost in solemn contemplation of the fate which she knows will befall her son. Botticelli's Venus reflects a different kind of sadness, however. Her regret is for the loss of virginity. The translation to another stage of life carries with it the sadness for the life that was before'. (p.149-50)

These paintings mark a time of new freedom for the artist, but with this freedom came new anxieties and problems, artists had a new aim to play an active part in the life in the élite of society, which separated them from their predecessors.

Universal Man.

This section devoted to Leonardo da Vinci, contains a brilliant chapter describing many of his works, philosophies and his quest for knowledge. His belief that to be a painter was the highest calling, but that to be a painter he needed to fully understand whatever it was he was attempting to paint. This sets him aside and possibly points in the direction of scientific enquiry that was to come in later centuries.

A G-D writes : Another reason, besides, may lie behind the chronic, unproductive procrastination of his later years. This is the sense he may have had that any painting he might create would be likely to expose the gaps in his would-be universal knowledge. To attempt to paint the figure of a man might remind Leonardo that he had not yet got around to perfecting his knowledge of the way the tendons in the arm control the movement of the wrist; to attempt to paint a stretch of water in a landscape might remind him he had not yet quite got to the bottom of the dynamic principles governing the motion of whirlpools. Thus was art displaced to a life of endless study. The paradox of his position was that he had elevated painting to such a position of epistemological eminence, so far above mere craft, that he almost could not bear to practise it for fear of failing to live up to his own ideal'. (p. 169)

Self-Portrait c.1513

'In a self-portrait drawn in his old age, we see Leonardo with a long flowing beard which makes him look like the magus he had always dreamed of becoming. He even looks a little like traditional representations of God the Father. But his brow is creased and he looks infinitely sad. At the last, his ambitions for painting finally set aside, Leonardo perhaps knew enough to know that there were an infinity of things that he did not know, and could never know, about the universe in which he lived. He knew that he could not be a second God, in the end, nor even a universal man. He could only be a man. The final fruit of all his aspirations appears to have been an unshakeable melancholy'. (p.169)

Tutorials

Sample of tutorials last year:
Feb - intro tutorial 2 hrs
March - tutorial - looking at tma 1 - 2hrs
April - trip to Natioanl Gallery (this will differ around the country but is intended for you to have guided viewing of Ren Art)
late April - tutorial looking at tma 2 - 2 hrs
June - day school mainly focusing on IE's and preparation of pro form (aka tma 3)- 4hrs
July - tutorial - looking at tma 4 - 2hrs

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon. Chapter 2

The Pure Radiance of the Past.

This chapter concentrates on Florence and its pre-eminent position in the Renaissance and some of the early Renaissance artists who brought about much of the early impetus for change. Artists included in this chapter are Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio and Donatello.

Florence had become wealthy and influential throughout the whole of Europe and into the Byzantine east. During the 14thC in Florence schooling was given based on a curriculum from the ancient Romans. These teachers and students became known as the humanists and particularly under the influence of Petrarch there emerged a division of history into

1. The golden times of the civilisations of Greece and Rome

2. The Middle or Dark Ages.

3. The new golden era (which was to become the Renaissance)

Following taken from video:
Petrarch argued that time was not a continuous undifferentiated flow, but could be divided up into distinct periods. He believed that the classical civilisations of the ancient world had been the first age, a golden age, a pinnacle of human achievement, and that since the crumbling of the Roman Empire the world had fallen into a second dark age of barbarism and ignorance. If that barbarism and ignorance could be cast aside then the intellectual and political life of his own time would be re-awakened to bring about a third age. It was to prove an extraordinary potent idea, Petrarch wrote 'after the darkness has been dispelled our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past'. In Florence, Petrarch became a cult. As an exile himself Petrarch adopted antiquity as a homeland of the mind. (AG-D)

The humanists and their curriculum based themselves around the writings of the Roman writer Marcus Tullis Cicero.

Florence's prominent position within the Renaissance can in some ways be attributed to the Swiss Professor Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) who in 1860 published The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy which together with Vasari's Lives of the Artists form the 'bible' of Renaissance studies. Burckhardt being, so to speak, the New Testament to Vasari's Old.

Florence's outstanding Renaissance landmark is Brunellesci's dome, constructed between 1420 and 1436. Although the work pays tribute to ancient Rome its size and construction is actually far greater than that of the Pantheon and was the largest dome in the world at the time. Although the dome was the largest symbol of the new Renaissance Florence, Brunelleschi's most influential work was in fact his unified square which included the city's foundling hospital Ospedale degli Innocenti. This design broke with the existing architectural vocabulary and prevailing spirit of architecture.

Within Florence, Brunelleschi was responsible for several churches and the Pazzi Chapel with its mathematical perfection ' Over the chapel floats an eight-ribbed dome with lights let into its sides and an oculus at its centre. A dome within a cube, a circle within a square, it is a geometrical figure of absolute harmony'. (p.81) 'Brunelleschi's dome is less explicit about the meaning of its geometry but it too offers the prospect of a transfiguration: an end to the ordinary and the imperfect in a vision of heavenly symmetry. It is the summary of the space, a frame for divine radiance'. (p.81).

Another outstanding Renaissance feature of Florence are the Bronze Doors cast by Ghiberti for the Baptistry that demonstrate not only advances in techniques, but even more in the way in which the artist became an agent for change. Described by Michelangelo as the 'Gates of Paradise' this work seems to demonstrate 'with exemplary clarity the coming to pass in 15thC Florence of a large change in Western art itself'. (p.88).

Three works of Masaccio from the Brancacci Chapel are discussed. The Tribute Money, St Peter Baptising the Neophytes, and the Expulsion from Paradise. 'Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise is the most extreme expression of his uncomfortable direct imagination [...] A man and a woman have been thrust from paradise. He covers his face with remorse. Hers is tilted up towards the cold light of day - the first postlapsarian day - but her eyes are closed and her mouth is half open in an ugly agonized wail. Her hands cover her breasts and her sex, making her a fifteenth-century equivalent to Roman representations of Venus pudica, the Venus of Modesty. But her misery has over-whelmed the classical source and we do not see her as a piece of art referring to another piece of art. We do not see her as a piece of art at all, but as a woman in anguish. A strong emotion has been made visible in a way that is unforgettable. There is no more wrenching image of human sorrow'. (p.96-97).

Masaccio being his nickname roughly translates as Big Tom suggesting a large man. His full name being Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone.

Donatello

Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi was born in 1386 or 1387 and died in 1466. An outstanding sculptor of Florence he dealt in both realism and in imagination to create both religious and secular works and in them both effect many emotions and human responses and feelings. Several works described in this section reflect this e.g. Mary Magdalene, David, Judith and Holofernes.

Andrew Graham-Dixon describes Donatello's David with humour!

Quote: 'A similar, veiled, mysterious, self-conscious erotic energy characterizes the famous bronze David, now in the Bargello, commissioned by the Medici family and one of the first free-standing naked figures to have been created since antiquity. David the giant-killer was a symbol of giant-killing Florence: small yet perfectly formed, defying imperial foes against all odds. There used to be an inscription on the base of the statue proclaiming that it was a symbol of Florentine liberty, but the truth is probably a little more complicated. This cold but sexy boy, with his strangely feminine figure, is no straightforward emblem of republican resolve. The true nature of his victory is not, perhaps military but erotic. He is evidently too limp-wristed to kill anybody, let alone cut off a head as massive as the one on which he rests his left foot. The figure's kinky state of undress - he wears only a helmet and a pair of very fine boots of sensual floppy leather - makes his nakedness more alluring than would be the case were he simply nude. There is a biblical precedent for it but it's effect is to make him seem entirely lacking in innocence. The erotic decorations on the dead Goliath's helmet, which show a Triumph of Cupid, contribute to the sexual suggestiveness of the work. So too does the plume of bird's feathers on the helmet, which stroke the boy's calf and inner thigh and reaches up to his crotch. This surrogate, feathery caress - it is probably not a coincidence, as Frederick Hartt observed, that uccello or 'bird' was fifteenth-century Florentine slang for phallus - emphasises the boy's desirability but also states his unavailability. The dead man cannot of course possess him, although the expression on the grizzled features of the decapitated head suggests that he might be dreaming just such a sensual dream: and neither can the viewer. David is a tantalus, a work of art not a real boy, an eternal self-absorbed flirt who knows that he will always arouse but never be violated'. (p.105)

Half Right.

A G-D's succinct thoughts on Florence....and Burckhardt.

' Because of the volatile nature of its politics; because Petrarch's revolutionary ideas about the classical world and the need to revive it took root in Florence as nowhere else; because of the genius of its artists, inspired both by the new Petrarchan ideal of rebirth and by the continuing Franciscan imperative to make sacred story seem real; because of the competitive spirit with which life in Florence was permeated - for all these reasons, and doubtless others besides, the city witnessed an extraordinary and sudden evolution in the way men thought and saw and created. There are times and places when mankind has - through some unforeseeable mixture of genius and circumstance - made a great leap in consciousness. Florence, during the first half of the fifteenth century, was one of those places at one of those times. Quite where that leap took mankind is another question, and one that remains open to debate.

Burckhardt's big ideas about a new 'objectivity' and a new spirit of 'individualism' are still extremely influential - even if they are not totally convincing. Considering the wholly religious uses to which Florentine artists put their chief pictorial refinement, mathematically calculated perspective, Burckhardt's notions about the decline of religion require some qualification. The end result of the Renaissance may well have been a certain weakening of the bonds of religious faith, in some places, and among some people. But as the general devoutness of Florentine religious art reminds us, the process was by no means as straightforward as Burckhardt's account made out.

The other side of Burckhardt's proposition - the idea that people became more psychologically self-aware during the Renaissance - stands up better to close scrutiny. Like many bold thinkers, Burckhardt overstated his case. The assumption that people living in pre-Renaissance times did not think of themselves as individuals - that they somehow lacked an interior mental life - is evidently somewhat inhumane, and it is contradicted both by common sense and by all historical evidence. But when one looks at the body of Florentine art, in all its life and vigour, it is plain enough that Burckhardt was on to something when he wrote of Renaissance man as 'a spiritual individual' who 'recognised himself as such'.

Looking back to antiquity, perhaps what the great Florentine artists of the fifteenth century really discovered was themselves. Their legacy to the future was a heightened curiosity about character, identity and motive: an immensely richer sense of what it might mean to be a human being'. (p.109)