II
Fifteenth-century Renaissance art can be seen as a reflection of a calm and
stable epoch in search of harmony. The often grandiose and dramatic art of the
Cinquecento (sixteenth century) symbolizes a different century, one torn by
wars, troubled by profound doubts and shaken by new religious movements. While
some nation states (Spain, France, England) consolidated themselves, new routes
were opened up by overseas discoveries and whole new worlds were discovered.
Meanwhile Martin Luther's Reformation tore central Europe apart, the Ottoman
Empire of Turkey continued its advance up to the gates of Vienna and the plague
recurred again and again. These were events that shook the Continent
politically, economically, and culturally, and changed Europe for ever. It is no
coincidence that historians often classify the fifteenth century as part of the
Middle Ages, whereas the sixteenth century is considered the beginning of the
Modern Age. In Italy there could no longer be anv doubt that foreign powers were
there to stay (the whole of the South as well as the former Duchy of Milan fell
under Spanish rule and only Venice retained a real independence). At the same
time, the old-established patterns of trade across the Mediterranean seemed
threatened by new ocean routes to the East, although this threat was slow to
materialize.
But the century opened splendidly. Its first twenty years are known as the High
Renaissance, when Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian - bitter rivals
but ones who constantly exchanged ideas — produced unprecedented masterpieces,
fulfilling the ideals pursued by artists since Giotto two centuries earlier.
Italian art as a whole reached heights that have never been surpassed, and was
confirmed as by far the richest, most varied, and influential school in Europe.
However, Italy's increasingly troubled political situation (it was the chief
battle ground for the constantly clashing armies of France, Spain, and Germany
up to 1559) meant that both artists and their works sometimes went abroad, lured
by rich monarchs. They took with them the latest in Italian Renaissance art which
spread throughout Europe. Leonardo moved to France where he died, so bringing
the High Renaissance to a still medieval country. Other, lesser painters such as
Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio followed, founding the Fontainebleau school of
painting. Great rulers such as the Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II
became Titian's main patrons, partlv supplanting the old-established families of
small Italian courts. At the same time there were already the first signs of the
economic and historical decline that would undermine Italian art in the very
long run, although the Seicento (seventeenth century) saw another golden age in
the arts.
The Cinquecento was also a century of self-portraits. The great
Italian masters had already acquired the same high cultural status
enjoyed by Renaissance scholars, and were no longer regarded as
menial craftsmen. Their interest in self-portraiture (the cheapest
type of portraiture, after all) partlv reflects their new-found
status. Leonardo drew his own aging self in the wrinkled and
meditative psychological self-portrait in his Merlin-like drawing
done in extreme old age. At the apex of the High Renaissance,
Raphael's self-portrait depicts him at case among scholars and
philosophers in "The School of Athens." Decades later, utterly
disillusioned with history and life, Michelangelo produced his
self-portrait as St. Bartholomew, a ragged old beggar with flayed
skin in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The Mannerist
painter Parmigianino turned his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
into a prodigious virtuoso exercise. Titian's great series of
self-portraits show a painter physically growing older but whose
understanding grew ever more vigorous — an artist ready to meet
eternitv with paintbrush in hand.
Without simplifying art history too much, we can say that in the
sixteenth century major changes occurred about every two decades.
Each change was, often deliberately, part of the process of constant
renewal, for artists were still keen to experiment in any way they
possibly could, untrammelled by the past. Each period contained an
abundance and variety of art forms without parallel in any other
century of art history, save perhaps our own. Up to 1520 the High
Renaissance sparkled with the splendor of its Golden Age. From 1520
to 1540 new religious doubts and questionings on the destiny of man
opened the way to new concepts in painting which later culminated in
Michelangelo's Last Judgment. From 1 540 to 1 560 a dichotomy
emerged between the hyper-sophisticated Mannerism of Tuscany and
Rome and the sensual depiction of reality of the Venetian and
Lombard schools. Between 1560 and 1580 Titian, Tintoretto, and
Veronese brought Venetian painting to a triumphant and dramatic
climax. The last twenty years of the century were, by comparison,
years of relative stagnation artisticallv until Caravaggio
rediscovered the natural world with his revolutionary realism and
the Carracci dynasty revitalized the classical tradition.
Michelangelo and Titian were both particularly long-lived. If we
compare the two great masters' early work with that of their old
age, we are instantly struck by the chasm between the generally
sunnily optimistic art of the early sixteenth century and the often
work tortured of the second half.
Among the key events shaping much of the cultural pattern of the
first half of the Cinquccento, some occurred before the turn of the
century. In 1492 Christopher Columbus had inadvertently discovered a
new continent. This spelled the end of the old map of the world,
which the fifteenth century had shared with Antiquity. The Earth was
found to be bigger than the supposedly omniscient Greek philosophers
had ever guessed. Also Florence, capital of the earlv Renaissance,
was in turmoil after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492,
terrified by the admonitory sermons ot Fra Savonarola. Although four
years later the Dominican monk was burned at the stake, his
condemnation of the vanities of pleasure-seeking and paganism shook
the conscience of many, including artists. The charming style in
which some painters had worked throughout their long careers (Botticelli,
Pcrugino) was now found inadequate.
In the first years of the sixteenth century, Florence was again the
center of artistic excitement, as Leonardo and Michelangelo competed
to decorate the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio with huge battle
scenes, which impressed all contemporaries, including the young
Raphael. At the same time Michelangelo carved his David, the supreme
emblem of High Renaissance heroism. But it was Rome which was to be
the real center of Cinquccento art, as the popes began their
grandiose project of rebuilding St. Peter's. Michelangelo was
summoned there in 1505 to build Pope Julius II's tomb — a gigantic
project never to be finished. Instead, in 1508 he began decorating
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with his back-breaking and
breathtaking masterpiece, the fresco cycle of The Creation, where
the fall from the Garden of Eden is portrayed with passionate
intensity. The same year saw Raphael start work on another part of
the work of the Vatican, the Stanza della Scgnalura, where he
created an enchanted equilibrium. In contrast to the grandiose power
to be found in Michelangelo, the frescos in the Stanze di Raffaello
(or Raphael Rooms as they are now often known), show a combination
of majestic grandeur with sweet gracefulness which seemed to
incarnate the ideals of the High Renaissance. Plato (a portrait
probably of Leonardo) and Aristotle dispute in the fresco The School
of Athens as though they were members of the papal court — a court
which sometimes felt itself more pagan Greek than Christian, but
where pagan and Christian thought united in general harmony. What
united both Michelangelo's and Raphael's art was their immense,
supremely assured, grandeur.
The change in style and generation, however, was not felt only in
central Italy. Milan was being fought over by the French and the
Spanish when Leonardo returned to put his own seal on the local
school. In Venice the narrative and analytical tradition of
Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini was replaced, first by the melancholy,
poetic dreamy sweetness of Giorgione and then by Titian's first
explosions of color which characterize The Assumption on the high
altar of the Venetian church of the Frari. These new leaders of art
were quickly surrounded by schools, assistants, and lesser
imitators. They were also supported by a lively output of writings
and treatises on art. These theoretical essays (which culminated in
the famous Lives of the Most Excellent Artists from Cimabue to
Michelangelo published by Giorgio Vasari in 1550) began to uncover
an ever-more marked contrast between the supremacy of
draughtsmanship venerated in Florence and Rome and the rich,
dramatic love and use of color that the Venetians adored. At the
same time a few painters who lived highly individual lives, such as
Lorenzo Lotto, raised the question of whether other, more
personalized, ways of painting might not be possible.
Raphael's death (1 520) coincided with the rapid growth of the
Lutheran schism which the highly cultured, peace-loving Pope Leo X
(Lorenzo the Magnificent's son) could not halt. A few years later
the Eternal Citv was dealt a seemingly mortal blow by the Sack of
Rome (1527), and the High Renaissance was finally over, except for
some artists in Venice. In such a changed world, painters perceived
the urgent need to rethink the forms and rules of their art. The
most thoroughgoing proposals came out of Florence where Pontormo and
Rosso Fiorentino started by studying and faithfully emulating the
works of Michelangelo and Raphael and ended by violently distorting
such traditional forms. Their frozen figures flaunted wildly
contorted poses and nervously melodramatic expressions, far removed
from Raphael's serenity. A new movement was born: Mannerism. During
the course of the century this was to become the dominant artistic
current in central Italy and, through the export of works of art and
of artists themselves, much of Europe. In northern Italy, however,
they had different ideas. At about the same time, that is to sav
around 1 520, provincial artists began working on large-scale
decorative projects. These were much appreciated by the public.
Instead of the tormented estheticism of the Tuscan Mannerists these
moving works blended all the elements together in harmonv. The
frescos painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo, bv Pordenone in
Cremona and above all by Correggio in Parma provide a daring
foretaste of the most thrilling compositions of Baroque art.
There is no doubt, however, that in their respective cities of Rome
and Venice it was Michelangelo and Titian who determined how art
developed. After almost 30 years Michelangelo returned to the
Sistine Chapel to paint The Last Judgment, the final and most
terrible epic in the history of the human race. By then, Titian was
the international artist par excellence. He painted a host of
memorable portraits which captured the faces and characteristics of
the most powerful people in Europe. In 1 545 the two great artists,
by then both growing old, met in Rome and failed to agree. Both had
been commissioned by the Farnese Pope Paul III, who also called the
Council of Trent at the start of the Counter-Reformation.
The work of this huge religious council was closely linked to the
more strictly political tasks demanded by the Emperor Charles V and
the Diet of Augsburg, which Titian also attended while painting the
Emperor. From the middle of the century, the end of over 30 years of
conflict in Germany between Catholics and Protestants meant that the
way religious images had long been used needed to be reassessed. As
had happened two centuries earlier after the Black Death of 1 348,
the century divided almost into two halves. On the one hand, and
especially in Florence and Rome, Mannerism became ever-more
sophisticated and intellectual, striving toward the artificial
creation of a new-painting and celebrating the rule of often
despotic dukes. Bronzino's portraits arc a perfect example of this,
but they were nonetheless outdone by the bizarreness of some the
richest and most fancilul foreign collectors, such as the Hapsburg
Emperor Rudolf II who was Arcimboldo's patron. On the other hand, in
the smaller centers, such as Brescia, Bergamo and the Marches, there
was a rediscovery of the human dimension in direct touch with
reality. Here we have forerunners of Caravaggio's radical realism
and of the return of simple treatments of religious subjects.
The expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean
posed a real threat to Venice whose island empire was being
continually attacked. Not even victory in the Battle of Lepanto
(1571) removed the ever-present Turkish danger. Despite this, in the
sixteenth century as a whole Venice put on a glittering display,
building classically-inspired palaces, churches, libraries, and
villas designed by Sansovino and Palladio. It also boasted a
glittering list of magnificent painters. Titian had embarked on a
solitary and wonderful adventure. In his extreme old age he painted
some of the most striking images ever produced in art, works so
unfinished and evanescent that they move almost toward abstraction.
These were not the works which made him famous but they appeal to us
now more than ever. Generally, the Venetian school produced artists
who were at ease in any situation, always willing and able to take
on decorative cvcles of enormous size. In the 1560s and 1570s
artistic activity in Venice reached levels of the very highest
creativity. You can choose the sunlit, sumptuous, spectacular scenes
created bv Paolo Veronese, where no touch of religious controversy
and doubt is permitted to darken scenes of franklv pagan sensuality
— but a sensuality transmuted by the power of art to a higher plane.
Or you can choose the intensely spiritual, highly dramatic canvases
of Tintoretto, which rival Michelangelo's greatest works, or turn to
Jacopo Bassano's marvelously realistic views of peasant life in the
mountains.
Bv the close of the century, however, the great stream ol Iresh
geniuses seemed to have dried up. One after another the greatest
painters had died: Michelangelo in 1 564,Titian in 1 576, Veronese
in 1588, and Tintoretto in 1594. A new generation of artists would
have to make its mark on a very different artistic landscape. It
would also have to stand up to ever fiercer international
competition from new schools of painting, themselves often
originallv inspired bv Italy. Little by little, Italy was destined
to lose its central position in the world of European art, although
for centuries to come it would remain a place of artistic
pilgrimage. In the seventeenth century artists as different as
Rubens and Poussin would visit Italv, and Poussin, the founder of
French classicism, would choose to spend his lite in Rome. Even so,
the last years of the century saw Italian art adrift and
directionless. The narrow puritanism of the early
Counter-Reformation, with its distrust of all exuberance and
artistic independence, had blighted even the art of Venice. The most
luminous period of Italian art and culture therefore closed on a
note of muted tragedy.This is all the more striking because it came
after such an extraordinary era of the human spirit.
The adventurous path pursued by Renaissance man was first trodden in
the proud citv of Florence by Dante and Giotto. They set out to
claim a new role for humanity to play in the world ("fatti non foste
a viver come bruti/ ma per scguir virtute c conoscenza" ["you were
not made to live like savages/ but to follow virtue and knowledge").
Over the generations the Renaissance had taken on a scale and depth
that could not possibly have been foreseen at the start. At its
zenith, it produced a unique generation of the greatest masters, all
of them born between the middle and the end of the fifteenth
century. It was in the centuries of the Renaissance that our own
modern wav of living in the world was first hinted at and shaped.
With that came our modern ability to relate to our own history and
destiny, our wav of interpreting the present as a link in the chain
between a passionately-studied past and a future that we can face
with equanimity. With the Renaissance came also a new awareness of
the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans and with that a slowly
achieved awareness quite lacking in the Middle Ages — that such a
world was over and past. The Renaissance also gave us a new taste
for beauty, a new love of nature, and a new passion for life and for
art. This, more than the individual masterpieces of even the
greatest painters, is the true inheritance of the Renaissance, ft is
undoubtedly something for Italy to be proud of, but it also has
produced an abundance of works of art, many of them of the highest
quality, that are difficult to preserve and to keep intact for the
world.
In its dying days the Renaissance gave way to a new attitude toward
man, nature, the mysteries of the cosmos, and the divine mystery.
This was the generation of Caravaggio and Galileo. Each in his own
way built a telescope to look fearlessly into the depths of the soul
or into the dark of the night. They looked toward a humanity and a
universe which, a century earlier, Leonardo had more joyously been
the first to explore.
Stefano Zuffi