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)