The Ugly Renaissance (36 page)

A new breed of condottieri started to emerge. They increasingly came to be landed Italian natives, often the younger sons of noble houses in search of betterment. With land at their disposal, men like
Jacopo dal Verme (1350–1409),
Facino Cane (1360–1412), and
Muzio Attendolo Sforza (1369–1424) could count on a ready supply of men, had the steady revenues to equip their troops, and could be relied upon to put a dependable number of soldiers into the field. This being so, the nature of their relationship with their employers also changed. The increasing weight and professionalism of mercenary armies made them more valuable, and not only did certain condottieri gain appointment as captains general for life, but a great many commanders were also offered unprecedented rewards in an effort to guarantee their fidelity in the long term.
Quite apart from the vast sums of money conventionally paid to skilled generals, cities and
signori
began to hand over entire palaces (sometimes even towns) and to bestow noble titles on their most senior condot- tieri (a practice technically known as
infeudation). By giving them land, wealth, and a quasi-feudal link to the employer-lord, cities and
signori
hoped they would have a powerful reason to remain loyal and to serve well. In a sense, it was an attempt to turn mercenary companies into citizen armies.

Federico da Montefeltro seemed to demonstrate just how effective the results of these changes could be, and
Berruguete’s depiction of him in all his finery is a testament to the impressive success he came to embody. The illegitimate son of Count
Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Federico had taken up arms as a mercenary for the first time when he was only sixteen and, having found himself naturally suited to the art of war, racked up a string of brilliant victories, often against almost overwhelming odds. He single-handedly saved Milan from being overrun by the Venetian forces led by
Bartolomeo Colleoni at the Battle of Riccardina (Molinella) in 1467, earned the gratitude of
Pope Pius II for checking the ambitions of
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and was lauded to the skies for successfully besieging
Volterra on Florence’s behalf in 1472.
So towering a figure did he become that he was often paid huge sums of money simply to refrain from fighting: during a war against Ferrara in 1480–82, for example,
Venice offered him 80,000 florins
just to stay at home. Military success brought Federico enormous wealth, a raft of coveted honors, and the admiration of Europe’s greatest potentates. By the close of his mercenary career in 1474, he had been raised to the ducal dignity, granted the title of apostolic vicar, named commander in chief of the armies of the Church, and inducted into some of the highest orders of chivalry in existence.

As
Berruguete’s portrait indicates, Federico had acquired a dazzling reputation as one of the foremost military commanders of his day and seemed to have epitomized all that was good about the fifteenth-century condottiere.
As early as 1464,
Gianmario Filelfo—the son of Francesco—had hailed him as a new Hercules and had devoted his epic poem, the
Martiados
, to celebrating Federico’s near-mythical status as a warlike hero, an image that was repeated in magnificent style in
Pierantonio
Paltroni’s laudatory biography. Even the Florentine
Cristoforo Landino observed in his
Disputationes Camaldulenses
that he was certainly “
worth comparing to the best captains of the ancient era.” After his death, Federico was singled out by
Baldassare Castiglione for having been “the light of Italy.” There was, he claimed, no lack of witnesses

to his prudence, humanity, justice, generosity, and unconquerable spirit, and to his military skills, which was brilliantly attested by his many victories, his ability to capture impregnable places, his swift and decisive expeditions, his having routed many times with few troops great and formidable armies, and his never having lost a single battle. So we can fairly compare him with many famous men of the ancient world.

Federico was, indeed, almost a walking advertisement for the “modern mercenary general.”

What was more, the fact that Berruguete portrayed Federico reading a codex clearly revealed the duke’s passionate interest in
learning and the arts, and in this respect, too, the artist proved himself to be an acute observer of the changes that military advancements had wrought on the cultural outlook of condottieri in the fifteenth century. Now that they were wealthy, titled individuals, they found they wanted to legitimate the social position they had acquired through force of arms by using art to cloak themselves with an aura of respectability. And
to do this, they needed to ensure that their art would celebrate their strengths and gloss over the more questionable side to their occupation.

Berruguete’s decision to portray Federico in full battle dress testified to the condottieri’s preoccupation with recasting the undeniably militaristic side of their lives. No matter how successful or powerful they may have been, they were aware that most people viewed the way they earned their daily bread as dreadful. A soldier’s life may not have been a happy one, but a mercenary’s life was—as Machiavelli’s comments in
The Prince
alone illustrate—at best, one of unreliability and treachery, and, at worst, one devoted to the science of slaughter. As their social position improved, condottieri naturally wanted some way of overcoming this unfortunate, if entirely justified, public image.

The humanists’ preoccupation with the classics offered a way forward. Ancient history and mythology were replete with emperors, generals, gods, and heroes who were certainly not whiter than white but who were nevertheless lionized purely for their strength and fighting abilities. In spite of attempts to see certain tales as allegories of Christian morality, might was generally right, and displays of courage—in almost any context—could be equated with virtue. Hercules, Cadmus, Perseus, and Theseus were acclaimed by the humanists as models of aggressive, muscular goodness, while the emperors Hadrian and Trajan—along with Julius Caesar, whose monarchy/tyranny was otherwise open to debate—were held up as the acmes of the warlike prince.

However, such texts often had a relatively limited audience. Mercenary generals wanted a bigger public. The patronage of art offered the ideal opportunity to make the desired connections with ancient heroes more explicit.

One of the most obvious and highly favored vehicles for this was
funerary art, and there is no more dramatic or impressive example than the chapel constructed by
Bartolomeo Colleoni in his native town of
Bergamo at some point in the 1470s. As all of his contemporaries knew, the project had been dear to Colleoni’s heart for a long time. Indeed, he was so hell-bent on building the chapel that he was reputed to have marched his troops into the town and demolished the old sacristy abutting Santa Maria Maggiore so that the chapter of the church would have no opportunity to object to the site he intended for his monument.
Apocryphal though the tale may be, there was no doubt that Colleoni
had his heart set on making the chapel the perfect testament to his “virtuous” character and worked closely with his architect,
Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, to ensure that iconographical details would be included that would speak to the “goodness” of all he had achieved. The facade is particularly revealing. On either side of the great rose window, Colleoni had placed two tabernacles, one containing a bust of Julius Caesar, the other a bust of Trajan. The implied parallel was clear. He was an “undefeated general” (as the inscription on his tomb claims), and his military genius matched that of both Caesar and Trajan, whose moral rectitude and feats of arms no one would deny and whose authority seemed beautifully to gloss over the bloody and unpleasant side of Colleoni’s mercenary life.

A more subtle method of underscoring the parallel with ancient models was the
equestrian statue. Although the statue of Marcus Aurelius now standing in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome is the only complete surviving example, such works were frequently used in antiquity to emphasize the active military leadership, triumphant record, and justice of a particular figure, and—having fallen out of favor during the Middle Ages—they reemerged with renewed vigor as a mode of portrayal during the early Renaissance. With its implied associations with outstanding Roman emperors of the past, the equestrian statue (tried out earlier in pictorial form in Uccello’s monument to
Sir John Hawkwood) became a particular favorite of condottieri eager to cloak themselves in an unrealistic mantle of virtue. In 1475, Colleoni bequeathed a huge sum of money to have an equestrian statue of himself erected in
Venice, and although his wish to be commemorated in the Piazza San Marco was ultimately unrealized, an imposing—even fearsome—piece designed by
Andrea del Verrocchio still stands in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. His fellow general
Erasmo da Narni (Gattamelata; 1370–1443) had a similar, if more placid-looking, statue by
Donatello erected outside Il Santo in Padua, a city he had briefly ruled on Venice’s behalf.

But other, yet more sophisticated and clever methods of linking condottieri with ancient paragons were also available, and no one was more willing to explore them than Federico da Montefeltro. Apart from Berruguete’s painting, one of the more inventive approaches appears in
a double-sided portrait of the duke and his wife painted by
Piero della Francesca ca. 1474 (Uffizi, Florence). On the reverse of the panel showing Federico’s profile, he is depicted being borne along on a triumphal
chariot, seated in a folded chair in full armor and carrying a scepter. The allegorical figure of Victory holds a laurel crown above his head, while personifications of the four cardinal virtues sit in attendance at the front of the chariot. Heavily influenced by classical histories, it was a clever attempt to portray the “triumphant” Federico as the direct heir of the heroes of ancient Rome while simultaneously stressing that “victory” was as much a proof of the duke’s moral rectitude as it had been for the Roman generals whom all admired. As the inscription below the scene expressed it: “He rides illustrious in glorious triumph—he whom, as he wields the sceptre in moderation, the eternal fame of his virtues celebrates as equal to the greatest generals.”

In the second place,
Berruguete’s portrait of Federico also indicates that condottieri were eager to make military might not just heroic but respectable, even admirable in some respects. This was, of course, no easy task. As far as the Church was concerned, military might was only justifiable when linked with acts of virtuous heroism or holy war: the butchery favored by soldiers of fortune was categorically immoral, and they themselves were little more than killers for hire. Theologians from the earliest days of the Church had been united in condemning rape, pillage, torture, and murder as among the worst sins imaginable.

Since
mercenaries showed absolutely no inclination to abandon their savage ways, the strictures of the Church were the source of a major image problem.

Quite apart from the lavish amounts of money habitually given to churches and religious institutions, the condottieri sensed that military saints represented a handy vehicle for giving their nefarious deeds a veneer of respectability. There was, of course, no shortage of soldier-saints to pick from. The Church had long celebrated figures such as Saint
George,
Saint Martin, and
Saint Eustace, and had hailed the fighting skills of the
archangel Michael. By nurturing the cult of such warlike heroes, condottieri could implicitly identify themselves with Christian virtue. No one with a deep attachment to such saints, it was thought, could possibly be wicked.

More direct was the technique of having a portrait included in an overtly religious painting. Like contemporary merchant bankers, condottieri were quite keen on having themselves depicted as witnesses to or participants in scenes from religious history. A good example is provided by Piero della Francesca’s
Montefeltro Altarpiece
(Brera, Milan),
which was commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro in 1472–74 (
Fig. 28
). Here, the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ once again take center stage, surrounded by a whole bevy of impressive saints, although none of them military in character. In the foreground, however, kneels Federico himself. Arrayed in full battle gear, his helmet and gauntlets lying on the ground before him, he is the very model of the devout worshipper. The intended implication is clear. Although a soldier by profession, he was a soldier for Christ; faith came first. To anyone acquainted with his nefarious personal history, it was patent nonsense, but it was nonetheless a highly effective visual strategy, and there is no reason to believe it did not get the desired message across to his subjects in
Urbino.

But of all the ways of putting a positive moral spin on killing, none was better—or more exciting—than pure, unalloyed culture. Aping the manners of their signorial masters, condottieri strove to endow themselves with an air of justice and civilized sophistication by nurturing fully fledged courts, the artistic culture of which testified to the respectability they craved so desperately. The master at this was unquestionably Federico da Montefeltro, a fact vividly indicated by the inclusion of the codex in
Pedro Berruguete’s portrait.

After succeeding his half brother, Oddantonio, in 1444, Federico had transformed Urbino into one of the most brilliant cultural centers in northern Italy. He was a classical scholar who had been educated by the renowned
Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, and his passion for the new humanistic trends was well-known.
He was a true bibliophile, as the lavish and telling decorations of his
studioli
in Urbino and Gubbio testify.
According to
Vespasiano da Bisticci, he devoted not less than 30,000 ducats (more than four thousand times the annual wage of a household servant) to assembling the largest library outside the Vatican. He surrounded himself with learned men and made his court a magnet for literary talent.
An acquaintance of
Cristoforo Landino (whose likeness was included in a double portrait), he directly employed the astrologer
James of Spiers, Ficino’s friend
Paul of Middelburg,
Francesco Filelfo and his son, the irascible poet laureate Gianmario, and rising stars such as Porcellio Pandoni, Lilio Tifernate, Agostino Fregoso, and Lodovico Odasio. Orators were unusually highly prized by the warlike duke. Indeed, one Latin oration made by
Antonio Bonfini in 1478 was so esteemed by Federico that he had the event commemorated in a painting by
Justus of Ghent (now in Hampton Court).