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)