Not since the days of the Sophists had scholars risen to so high a place in society and politics. The humanists became secretaries and advisers to senates, signories, dukes, and popes, repaying their favors with classic eulogies, and their snubs with poisoned epigrams. They transformed the ideal of a gentleman from a man with ready sword and clanking spurs into that of the fully developed individual attaining to wisdom and worth by absorbing the cultural heritage of the race. The prestige of their learning and the fascination of their eloquence conquered transalpine Europe at the very time when the arms of France, Germany, and Spain were preparing to conquer Italy. Country after country was inoculated with the new culture, and passed from medievalism to modernity. The same century that saw the discovery of America saw the rediscovery of Greece and Rome; and the literary and philosophical transformation had far profounder results for the human spirit than the circumnavigation and exploration of the globe. For it was the humanists, not the navigators, who liberated man from dogma, taught him to love life rather than brood about death, and made the European mind free.
Humanism influenced art last because it appealed rather to intellect than to sense. The chief patron of art was still the Church, and the chief purpose of art was still to convey the Christian story to the letterless, and to adorn the house of God. The Virgin and her Child, the suffering and crucified Christ, the prophets, Apostles, Fathers, and saints remained the necessary subjects of sculpture and painting, even of the minor arts. Gradually, however, the humanists taught the Italians a more sensual sense of beauty; a frank admiration for the healthy human body—male or female, preferably nude—permeated the educated classes; the reaffirmation of life in Renaissance literature, as against the medieval contemplation of another world, gave art a secret secular leaning; and by finding Italian Aphrodites to pose as Virgins, and Italian Apollos to serve as Sebastians, the painters of Lorenzo’s age, and later, introduced pagan motives into Christian art. In the sixteenth century—when secular princes rivaled ecclesiastics in financing artists—Venus and Ariadne, Daphne and Diana, the Muses and the Graces challenged the rule of the Virgin; but Mary the modest mother continued her wholesome dominance to the end of Renaissance art.
V. ARCHITECTURE: THE AGE OF BRUNELLESCO
“Cursed be the man who invented this wretched Gothic architecture!” cried Antonio Filarete in 1450; “only a barbarous people could have brought it to Italy.”35 Those walls of glass hardly suited the sun of Italy; those flying buttresses—though at Notre Dame de Paris they had been forged into a frame of beauty, like fountain jets petrified in their flowseemed to the South unsightly scaffoldings left by builders who had failed to give their structures a self-contained stability. The Gothic style of pointed arch and soaring vault had well expressed the aspirations of tender spirits turning from the laborious soil to the solacing sky; but men new dowered with wealth and ease wished now to beautify life, not to escape or malign it; earth would be heaven, and they themselves would be gods.
The architecture of the Italian Renaissance was not basically a revolt against Gothic, for Gothic had never conquered Italy. Every kind of style and influence spoke its piece in the experiments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the heavy columns and round arches of Lombard Romanesque, the Greek cross of some ground plans, the Byzantine pendentive and dome, the stately grace of campaniles echoing Moslem minarets, the slender columns of Tuscan cloisters remembering mosque or classic porticoes, the beamed ceilings of England and Germany, the groined vault and ogive and tracery of Gothic, the harmonious majesty of Roman façades, and, above all, the simple strength of the basilican nave flanked by its supporting aisles: all these, in Italy, were mingling fruitfully when the humanists turned architectural vision to the ruins of Rome. Then the shattered colonnades of the Forum, rising through the medieval mist, seemed to Italian eyes more beautiful than the Byzantine bizarreries of Venice, the somber majesty of Chartres, the fragile audacity of Beauvais, or the mystic reaches of Amiens’ vault. To build again with columns finely turned, firmly mortised into massive plinths, gayly crowned with flowering capitals, and bound to stability by imperturbable architraves—this became, by the groping emergence of the buried but living past, the dream and passion of men like Brunellesco, Alberti, Michelozzo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
“Of Filippo Brunellesco,” wrote the patriotic Vasari, “it may be said that he was given by heaven to invest architecture with new forms, after it had wandered astray for many centuries.”36 Like so many artists of the Italian Renaissance, he began as a goldsmith. He graduated into sculpture, and for a time entered into friendly rivalry with Donatello. He competed with him and Ghiberti for a commission to sculpture the bronze doors of the Florentine Baptistery; when he saw Ghiberti’s sketches he pronounced them superior to his own, and with Donatello he left Florence to study perspective and design in Rome. He was fascinated by the ancient and medieval architecture there; he measured the major buildings in all their elements; he marveled above all at the dome of Agrippa’s Pantheon, 142 feet wide; and he conceived the idea of crowning with such a dome the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in the city of his birth. He returned to Florence in time to take part in a conference of architects and engineers on the problem of roofing the cathedral’s octagonal choir, 138½ feet across. Filippo proposed a dome, but the expansive pressure that so immense a cupola would exert upon walls unsupported by external buttresses or internal beams seemed to the conferees a forbidding obstacle. All the world knows the story of Brunellesco’s egg: how he challenged the other artists to make an egg stand on end, and, after all the rest had failed, himself succeeded by pressing the blunt and empty end down upon the table. When they protested that they could have done the the same, he answered that they would make similar claims after he had domed the cathedral. He received the commission. For fourteen years (1420–34) he labored intermittently at the task, fighting a thousand tribulations, raising the cupola precariously 133 feet above the summit of its supporting walls. At last it was finished, and stood firm; all the city gloried in it as the first major achievement—and with one exception the boldest—in the architecture of the Renaissance. When Michelangelo, a century later, planned the dome of St. Peter’s, and was told that he had an opportunity to surpass Brunellesco’s, he answered: “I will make a sister dome, larger, but not more beautiful.”37 The lordly colorful cupola still dominates, for leagues around, the panorama of a red-roofed Florence nestling like a bed of roses in the lap of the Tuscan hills.
Though Filippo had taken his conception from the Pantheon, he had compromised gracefully with the Tuscan Gothic style of the Florentine cathedral by curving his dome along the lines of the Gothic pointed arch. But in buildings that he was allowed to design from the ground he made his classic revolution more explicit and complete. In 1419 he had begun, for Cosimo’s father, the church of San Lorenzo; he finished only the “Old Sacristy”; but there he chose the basilican form, the colonnade and entablature, and the Romanesque arch as the elements of his plan. In the cloisters of Santa Croce he built for the Pazzi family a pretty chapel again recalling the dome and colonnaded portico of the Pantheon; and in those same cloisters he designed a rectangular portal—of fluted columns, flowered capitals, sculptured architrave, and lunette reliefs—which formed the style of a hundred thousand Renaissance doors, and survives everywhere in western Europe and America. He began on classic lines the church of Santo Spirito, but died while the walls had barely left the ground. In 1446 the corpse of the passionate builder lay in state in the cathedral under the dome that he had raised; and from Cosimo to the simple workingman who had labored there the people of Florence came to mourn that geniuses must die. “He lived as a good Christian,” said Vasari, “and left to the world the savor of his goodness…. From the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans until now there has been no man more rare or more excellent.”38
In his architectural enthusiasm Brunellesco had designed for Cosimo a palace so extensive and ornate that the mod
est dictator, fearing envy, denied himself the luxury of seeing it take form. Instead he commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1444) to build for him, his family, and his offices, the existing Palazzo Medici or Riccardi, whose thick stone walls, bare of ornament, reveal the social disorder, the family feuds, the daily dread of violence or revolt, that gave a zest to Florentine politics. Immense iron gates opened to friends and diplomats, artists and poets, access to a court decorated with. statuary by Donatello, and thence to rooms of moderate splendor, and a chapel brightened by the stately and colorful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. There the Medici lived till 1538, with interludes of banishment; but surely they often left those gloomy walls to take the sun at the villas that Cosimo built outside the city in Careggi and Cafaggiolo, and on the slopes of Fiesole. It was in those rural retreats that Cosimo and Lorenzo, with their friends and protégés, took refuge from politics in poetry, philosophy, and art; and to Careggi father and grandson retired for their rendezvous with death. Glancing now and then beyond the grave, Cosimo gave substantial sums to raise an abbey at Fiesole, and to rebuild more commodiously the old convent of San Marco. There Michelozzo designed graceful cloisters, a library for Niccoli’s books, and a cell where, occasionally, Cosimo withdrew even from his friends, and spent a day in meditation and prayer.
In these enterprises Michelozzo was his favorite architect and the unfailing friend who accompanied him into exile, and returned with him. Soon thereafter the Signory gave Michelozzo the delicate task of reinforcing the Palazzo Vecchio against threatened collapse. He restored the church of Santissima Annunziata, made a lovely tabernacle for it, and showed himself a sculptor too by adorning it with a statue of St. John the Baptist. For Cosimo’s son Piero he built a magnificent marble chapel in the hillside church of San Miniato. He pooled his skill with Donatello’s to design and carve the charming “pulpit of the girdle” on the façade of the Prato cathedral. In any other country in that age Michelozzo would have led his architectural tribe.
Meanwhile the merchant aristocracy was raising proud civic halls and palaces. In 1376 the Signory commissioned Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti to build a portico opposite the Palazzo Vecchio as a rostrum for governmental oratory; in the sixteenth century it came to be known as the Loggia dei Lanzi from the German lancers that Duke Cosimo I stationed there. The most magnificent private palace in Florence was built (1459) for the banker Luca Pitti by Luca Fancelli from plans made by Brunellesco nineteen years before. Pitti was almost as rich as Cosimo, but not so wisely modest; he contested Cosimo’s power, and drew from him some sharp counsel:
You strive toward the indefinite, I toward the definite. You plant your ladder in the air, I place mine on the ground…. It seems to me but just and natural that I should desire the honor and reputation of my house to surpass yours. Let us therefore do like two big dogs, which sniff at one another when they meet, show their teeth, and then go their separate ways. You will attend to your affairs, I to mine.39
Pitti continued to plot; after Cosimo’s death he conspired to displace Piero de’ Medici from power. He committed the only crime universally condemned in the Renaissance—he failed. He was banished and ruined, and his palace remained unfinished for a century.
VI. SCULPTURE
1. Ghiberti
The imitation of classic forms was more thorough in sculpture than in architecture. The sight and study of Roman ruins, and the occasional recovery of some Roman masterpiece, stirred the sculptors of Italy to an emulative ecstasy. When the Hermaphrodite that now lies in the Borghese Gallery—with its neutral back modestly turned to the spectator—was found in the vineyard of San Celso, Ghiberti wrote of it: “No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style”; the perfection of such works, he said, eluded the eye, and could be appreciated only by passing the hand over the marble surface and curves.40 As these exhumed relics grew in number and familiarity, the Italian mind slowly accustomed itself to the nude in art; the study of anatomy became as much at home in artists’ botteghe as in medical halls; soon nude models were used without fear and without reproach. So stimulated, sculpture graduated from subservience to architecture, and from stone or stucco reliefs to statues of bronze or marble in the round.
But it was in relief that sculpture won its first and most famous triumph in the Florence of Cosimo’s time. The ugly striated Baptistery that fronted the cathedral could only be redeemed by incidental ornament. Iacopo Torriti had adorned the tribune, and Andrea Tafi the cupola, with crowded mosaics; Andrea Pisano had molded a double bronze portal for the south façade (1330–6); now (1401) the Florentine Signory, in conjunction with the Guild of Wool Merchants, and to persuade the Deity to end a plague, voted a generous sum to provide the Baptistery with a bronze door for the north side. A competition was opened; all the artists of Italy were invited to submit designs; the most successful—Brunellesco, Iacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and a few others—were commissioned and paid to cast in bronze a sample panel showing the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. A year later the completed panels were submitted to thirty-four judges—sculptors, painters, and goldsmiths. It was generally agreed that Ghiberti’s was the best; and the youth of twenty-five began the first pair of his famous bronze doors.
Only those who have closely studied this north portal can understand why it took the better part of twenty-one years to design and cast. Ghiberti was aided, in generous fellowship, by Donatello, Michelozzo, and a large corps of assistants; it was as if all were resolved, and all Florence expected, that these should be the finest bronze reliefs in the history of art. Ghiberti divided the pair into twenty-eight panels: twenty told the life of Christ, four pictured Apostles, four represented Doctors of the Church. When all these had been designed, criticized, redesigned, cast, and set in place on the door, the donors, not grudging the 22,000 florins ($550,000) already spent, engaged Ghiberti to make a corresponding double door for the east side of the Baptistery (1425). In this second undertaking, covering twenty-seven years, Ghiberti had as assistants men already renowned or soon to be: Brunellesco, Antonio Filarete, Paolo Uccello, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and others; his studio became in the process a school of art that nurtured a dozen geniuses. As the first pair of doors had illustrated the New Testament, so now, in ten panels, Ghiberti presented Old Testament scenes, from the creation of man to the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon; in the borders he added twenty figures in almost full relief, and varied ornament—animal and floral—of surpassing loveliness. Here the Middle Ages and the Renaissance met in perfect harmony: in the very first panel the medieval themes of the creation of Adam, the temptation of Eve, and the expulsion from Eden were treated with a classic flow of drapery and a bold exuberance of nudes; and Eve emerging from Adam’s flesh rivaled the Hellenistic relief of Aphrodite rising from the sea. Men were astonished to find, in the background of the actions, landscapes almost as precise in perspective, and as rich in detail, as in the best painting of the time. Some complained that this sculpture infringed too much on painting, and overstepped the traditions of classical relief; it was academically true, but the effect was vivid and superb. This second double door was by common consent even finer than the first; Michelangelo considered it “so fine that it would grace the entrance of paradise”; and Vasari, doubtless thinking only of reliefs, pronounced it “perfect in every particular, the finest masterpiece in the world, whether among the ancients or the moderns.”41 Florence was so pleased that it elected Ghiberti to the Signory, and gave him a substantial property to support his declining years.
2. Donatello
Vasari thought that Donatello had been among the artists chosen to make trial panels for the Baptistery doors; but Donatello was only a lad of sixteen at the time. The affectionate diminutive by which his friends and posterity named him denoted Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. He learned his art only partly in Ghiberti’s studio; he soon struck out for himself, passed from the feminine grace of Ghibertian relief t
o virile statuary in the round, and revolutionized sculpture not so much by adopting classic methods and aims as by his uncompromising fidelity to nature, and the blunt force of his original personality and style. He was an independent spirit as tough as his David, as bold as his St. George.
His genius did not develop as rapidly as Ghiberti’s, but it reached greater scope and heights. When it matured it spawned masterpieces with reckless fertility, until Florence was populated with his statues, and countries beyond the Alps echoed his fame. At twenty-two he rivaled Ghiberti by carving for Or San Michele a figure of St. Peter; at twenty-seven he surpassed him by adding to that edifice a St. Mark so strong and simple and sincere that “it would have been impossible,” said Michelangelo, “to reject the Gospel preached by such a straightforward man as this.”*42 At twenty-three Donatello was engaged to carve a David for the cathedral; it was only the first of many Davids made by him; the subject never ceased to please his fancy; perhaps his finest work is the bronze David ordered by Cosimo, cast in 1430, set up in the courtyard of the Medici palace, and now in the Bargello. Here the nude figure in the round made its unblushing debut in Renaissance sculpture: a body smooth with the firm texture of youthful flesh, a face perhaps too Greek in profile, a helmet certainly too Greek; in this instance Donatello put realism aside, indulged his imagination richly, and almost equaled Michelangelo’s more famous figure of the future Hebrew king.