The Ugly Renaissance (3 page)

Regardless of his ability, the artist’s social status was not high.
Although some early Renaissance artists occasionally occupied positions in communal government or came from magnate families, they were the exceptions rather than the rule. Most came from fairly humble backgrounds, as can be gauged from how little we know about their parents. Later biographers, like the snobbish Vasari, often skip over such details, and their silence suggests that carpenters, innkeepers, farmers, and even unskilled laborers may have sired some of the great names of early Renaissance art. What evidence we have seems to confirm this impression. Some artists were from very modest backgrounds
and came from families engaged in the lowliest crafts.
Giotto di Bondone, for example, was rumored to have been raised as a poor shepherd boy but was most probably the son of a Florentine blacksmith. For others, art—like carpentry—was a family business.
Three of
Duccio di Buoninsegna’s sons became painters, and
Simone Martini’s brother and two brothers-in-law were all artists.

From the mid-fourteenth century onward, however, the social world of art and the artist had gradually undergone a series of radical changes. In step with the growing popularity of classical themes and the naturalistic style, artists were progressively recognized as
autonomous creative agents endowed with learning and skill that set them apart from mere mechanics.
When Giotto was made
capomaestro
of the Duomo in 1334, the priors of Florence acknowledged not only his fame but also his “knowledge and learning,” terms that clearly distinguished the artist from mere craftsmen.
Similarly, writing in his
De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus
(ca. 1380–81), the Florentine chronicler
Filippo Villani felt able to compare painters not with mere mechanics but with the masters of the liberal arts.

Although still reliant on the favor of patrons and bound by contractual agreements, painters and sculptors had seen their social position improve dramatically by the mid-fifteenth century. With art coming to be seen as a status symbol, artists themselves attained a higher status. Now it was not merely those from families of craftsmen who became artists. Although some continued to come from humble stock—such as
Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)—artists were increasingly the sons (and, in very rare cases, the daughters) of skilled tradesmen, affluent merchants, and well-educated notaries. Even those who could lay claim to noble origins—such as Michelangelo—could take up the brush or chisel without undue shame. Their social standing was measured not against their birth but against their ability. They could treat with their patrons on the basis of mutual respect, if not always with perfect equality. And their achievements could be celebrated by historians like Vasari in a manner previously reserved only for statesmen. Indeed, so high had artists risen that
Pope Paul III is reported to have remarked that artists like
Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71) should “
not be subjected to the law.”

But if Michelangelo embodied both the stylistic transformations and the social changes that had come to characterize the art of the period, he also exemplified another important dimension of the life of
the Renaissance artist. Though the “rise of the artist” had improved both the esteem in which the visual arts were held and the social status of artists, it had not elevated artists themselves to a higher and more refined plane of existence. Artists like Michelangelo still had feet of clay. He had, after all, just had his nose broken in a childish brawl prompted by envy and exacerbated by arrogant boasting.

It was typical of his life. Entirely at home in the reception rooms of the mighty, he could be kind, sensitive, courteous, and funny. But he was also proud, touchy, scornful, and sharp-tongued. He was a frequenter of inns and no stranger to fights. Indeed, despite being a friend to popes and princes, he was no refined gentleman.
As his biographer
Paolo Giovio recorded, he was notoriously slovenly in his appearance and seemed almost to rejoice in living in the most squalid conditions. Scarcely ever changing his clothes, he was constantly accompanied by the noxious smell of the unwashed and seldom, if ever, combed his hair or cut his beard.
He was a man of undoubted piety, but his passionate nature inclined him toward relations with both sexes. Although he later enjoyed a long and apparently romantic relationship with Vittoria Colonna, marchesa of Pescara, his surviving poems also address homoerotic themes. One of the many poems addressed to
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, for example, begins with a striking and faintly blasphemous verse:

Here in your lovely face I see, my lord,

what in this life no words could ever tell;

with that, although still clothed in flesh, my soul

has often already risen up to God.

As arrogant as he was talented, he was a dirty, disorganized, and tormented individual who was as easily embroiled in fights as he was bound to the will of popes, and as susceptible to Neoplatonic homoeroticism as he was to the reassurances of the Church and the blandishments of a cultured and elegant lady.

Michelangelo was not unusual in this respect.
A devotee of illicit magic, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomizing a well-known gigolo named Jacopo Saltarelli on April 9, 1476.
Benvenuto Cellini was convicted of the same offense twice (in 1523 and 1557) and was only narrowly saved from a lengthy prison sentence thanks to the intervention
of the Medici; on top of this,
he killed at least two men and was also
accused of stealing the papal jewels. So, too, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)—often described as the father of Renaissance humanism—fathered at least two children while in minor orders, and
the music of the aristocratic composer
Carlo Gesualdo reached its most sublime heights only after he had murdered his wife, her lover, and possibly also his son.

When its implications are unpacked, therefore, Michelangelo’s broken nose appears to present something of a challenge. Superficially, it seems difficult to reconcile the idea of Michelangelo as the paradigmatically “Renaissance” artist with the image of Michelangelo the cocky and arrogant kid fighting in church. There is no doubt that these represent two sides of the same man, but the question is, how should the peculiar and apparently contradictory nature of Michelangelo’s character be understood? How could the same personality create such innovative, elevated art and indulge such base habits? How, indeed, can Michelangelo’s broken nose be reconciled with familiar conceptions of the Renaissance itself?

T
HE
R
ENAISSANCE
P
ROBLEM

The problem lies not with Michelangelo and his nose but with how the Renaissance itself is viewed. This might seem rather surprising at first. The word “Renaissance” has become such a commonplace that its meaning might appear obvious, even self-evident. Imaginatively linked with a time of cultural rebirth and artistic beauty, the very term “Renaissance” conjures up images of the rarefied world of the Sistine Chapel, Brunelleschi’s dome, the Grand Canal, and the
Mona Lisa
and visions of artists like Giotto, Leonardo, and Botticelli.

Despite its familiarity, however, the word “Renaissance” is a very slippery term. Since the very beginnings of modern critical scholarship, historians have agonized over how best to understand this “rebirth,” particularly with respect to the visual arts. A whole variety of different interpretations have emerged over the years, each of which speaks to a different aspect of our snapshot of the young Michelangelo.

For some, the defining characteristic of Renaissance art from Giotto to Michelangelo lies in a pronounced sense of individualism.
While the
Middle Ages could be thought of as a period in which human consciousness
“lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil” of “faith, illusion, and childish prepossession,” the great Swiss historian
Jacob Burckhardt argued that the Renaissance was a time in which, for the first time, “man became a spiritual
individual
,” capable of defining himself in terms of his own unique excellence, free from the constraints of the corporation or community. Although Burckhardt’s words are heavily colored by the now-unfashionable spirit of nineteenth-century Romanticism, this interpretation has proved remarkably enduring. Even though more recent scholars have placed greater emphasis on
the social contexts of artistic production (workshop, guild, and so on) than Burckhardt,
Stephen Greenblatt has recast the essence of his argument in terms of the Renaissance capacity for “self-fashioning” and has thus not only demonstrated the continuing attraction of Burckhardt’s reading but has also given renewed impetus to his understanding of the character of the Renaissance artist.

For other scholars, the distinctiveness of the “Renaissance” is to be found in the achievement of a greater
naturalism in the arts. Proponents of this view need only point crudely to a comparison between the figures in Michelangelo’s youthful
Battle of the Centaurs
, for example, and the facades of Chartres Cathedral to underscore the attractiveness and force of the definition. Within this interpretation,
the elaboration of a complete theoretical understanding of linear
perspective—the mathematical and practical expression of which was pioneered most especially by
Lorenzo Ghiberti and
Filippo Brunelleschi—represented a decisive change not only in the techniques of painting but also in the manner of sculpture.

For others still, the “Renaissance” consists in what is thought to have been a new interest in ornamentation, embellishment, and decoration.
This explosion of enthusiasm for visual exuberance and overelaboration was, it is claimed, the framework within which both individualism and linear perspective emerged.

Yet by far the most important and influential school of thought views the “Renaissance” as a far more literal and even straightforward form of “rebirth” and presents all other developments—individualism, naturalism, exuberance—as the prelude to or corollary of the comprehensive rediscovery of classical themes, models, and motifs that appears to be evidenced by the artful trickery of the young Michelangelo’s lost
Head of a Faun
. As one might expect from a cursory glance at
Michelangelo’s close links with the circle of humanists that gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici, this interpretation presupposes
a close—and even incestuous—relationship between the visual arts and the literary culture of the humanists.

In that it relates most clearly to the literal meaning of the word “Renaissance” and seems to encompass so much that could be described as characteristic of the period, this interpretation is understandably the most attractive. Yet insofar as Michelangelo’s crushed proboscis is concerned, this is exactly where the problems begin.

As a number of eminent scholars have observed, one of the merits of this interpretation of the Renaissance is that it is precisely how the leading intellectuals of the Renaissance saw their own times. The self-conscious writings of “the artistically-minded humanists and the humanistically-minded artists of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries” appear to betray a clear and unambiguous sense of living in a new period defined by the revival of the culture of classical antiquity.

The origins of this self-conscious sense of cultural rebirth can perhaps be traced back to the very beginning of the fourteenth century. While
Dante Alighieri celebrated the renown of
Cimabue and Giotto in the
Purgatorio
, it rapidly became common for readers of
Horace’s
Ars poetica
to employ
the language of “darkness” and “light” to describe what they perceived to be the parallel revival of painting and poetry.
Petrarch is often thought to have inaugurated the idea of a transition from medieval “darkness” to the pure “light” of antiquity in his
Africa
, and it was for his perceived revival of classical Latinity that
he was celebrated alongside Giotto as one of the two harbingers of the new age by his friend
Giovanni Boccaccio.

It is, however, during the fifteenth century that Renaissance “self-consciousness” really comes to the fore and that we see full expression being given to the sense of living in an age of classical “rebirth.” The feeling of pride that accompanied the idea can be glimpsed in a letter written to Paul of Middelburg by Michelangelo’s friend
Marsilio Ficino in 1492:

Our Plato in
The Republic
transferred the four ages of lead, iron, silver, and gold described by poets long ago to types of men, according to their intelligence … So if we are to call any age
golden, it must certainly be our age, which has produced such a wealth of golden intellects. Evidence of this is provided by the inventions of this age. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts that were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre, and all this in Florence.

Ficino’s reference to “golden intellects” is particularly important. Throughout the Renaissance, the idea of a “golden age” relied entirely on the contention that a few “golden” individuals had “restored to light” the cultural achievements of antiquity. Ficino’s sense of pride demanded the celebration of a whole pantheon of great men. Thus, some sixty years earlier, the Florentine chancellor
Leonardo Bruni hailed Petrarch (at Dante’s expense) as “
the first person with a talent sufficient to recognize and call back to light the antique elegance of the lost and extinguished style.” Not long after,
Matteo Palmieri acclaimed Bruni himself as having been sent into the world “as the father and ornament of letters, the resplendent light of Latin elegance, to restore the sweetness of the Latin language to mankind.” So, too, in the arts, Palmieri observed that

before Giotto, painting was dead and figure-painting was laughable. Having been restored by him, sustained by his disciples and passed on to others, painting has become a most worthy art practiced by many. Sculpture and architecture, which for a long time had been producing stupid monstrosities, have in our time revived and returned to the light, purified and perfected by many masters.