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)