The Ugly Renaissance (46 page)

In a similar vein, Julius’s successors habitually commissioned depictions of historical victories as a means of celebrating or justifying their own actions or plans. One of the more striking examples is provided by the
Battle of Ostia
, one of the scenes painted by
Raphael’s workshop in the Stanza dell’Incendio del Borgo in the Vatican. Commemorating the victory of Leo IV over Sicilian Saracens in 849, this scene is remarkable for the fact that Leo X had himself depicted in the role of his eponymous forebear. This associated the first Medici pope with a triumph from the distant past and served to provide a striking visual justification for Leo X’s military actions.

However brutal and savage the popes were after their return from Rome, and however many lives their ambitions claimed, their careful manipulation of artistic patronage glossed over their sins and claimed violence, murder, and conspiracy as laudable necessities for the greater glory of the Church. A patent lie, of course, but in a sense, that was what the papal Renaissance was all about.

PART THREE

T
HE
R
ENAISSANCE AND THE
W
ORLD

10

F
ILIPPO AND THE
P
IRATES

A
LTHOUGH HE TOOK
his vows as a Carmelite friar at the tender age of seventeen, Fra Filippo Lippi was not suited to the religious life. In contrast to his calm, pious brethren at the convent of Santa Maria del Carmine, he had a wild and restless spirit, and chafed at the routine lessons prescribed for novices in the years before being received into the Order. An excitable teenager, “
he never spent any time studying his letters, which he regarded with distaste … but instead … spent all his time scrawling pictures on his own books and those of others.” Even when he was given the opportunity to devote himself completely to painting, his imagination roamed far beyond the narrow confines of his cloister. Inspired by
Masaccio’s frescoes and conscious of his burgeoning artistic talent, he seems to have begun thinking about leaving his parochial life far behind and exploring the world.

Before turning eighteen (that is, in about 1423), Filippo made up his mind. “
In response to the praises which he heard from all sides … he boldly threw off his friar’s habit” and fled the convent. No records have survived to give any clue as to the roads he may have trodden, but—if Vasari is to be believed—he ventured east, through Umbria, and toward the tantalizing expanse of the Adriatic Sea.

Filippo’s wanderlust was, however, to take him much farther than he might have expected. One day, he and a few friends were out in a little boat off the coast of Ancona and were no doubt having a whale of a time. Yet they were ignorant of the pirates who habitually haunted those waters. Accosted by a Moorish galley, they were taken captive and clapped in chains.
Carried across the Mediterranean to the
Barbary Coast, they were sold as slaves in the dusty markets of the
Hafsid kingdom.

Filippo’s life was “wretched.” Far from his homeland and bereft of any rights, he would have been forced to endure backbreaking manual
labor in the scorching heat of North Africa, and even though he had become “very familiar” with his master, it is difficult to believe that he did not long for Florence and the life he had left behind.

Yet even as a slave, Filippo was unable to repress his artistic instincts. One day, he picked up a piece of coal from the hearth and began drawing on a whitewashed wall. Before long, he had sketched out a full-length portrait of his master, dressed in typical Moorish clothes.

Catching sight of what Filippo had drawn, the other slaves hurried to tell the very man he had depicted. Given the status of slaves in the Hafsid kingdom, Filippo could well have expected to be punished severely for defacing the walls of his master’s house. But it proved to be his salvation. As Vasari later recorded,

Since neither drawing nor painting were known in those parts, everyone was astounded by what he had accomplished and he was, as a result, freed from the chains in which he had been kept so long. It was a glorious thing for the art of painting that it caused someone with the lawful authority to condemn and punish to do the opposite, giving his slave affection and liberty in the place of torture and death.

Released from the burdensome drudgery of household labor, Filippo was now charged only with painting and, delighting his erstwhile master with each fresh work, soon earned a position of honor and respect among the Berber people.

Eighteen months after his capture, Filippo was finally allowed to leave the Barbary Coast. Hopping on board a ship, he bade farewell to Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, finally disembarking in Naples, and from there he gradually worked his way back up through Italy to his native Florence. But while he had left the searing sun of the “Dark Continent” behind and was never again to smell the fetid aroma of crowded souks or hear the muezzin’s haunting call to prayer, he had acquired an acute sensitivity for the exotic that would remain with him until his dying day. As he traveled north through the Italian peninsula, he would have been more alert to the “foreignness” of his own land than he had been as a mere boy.

Although Filippo may not have recognized it in his youth, fifteenth-century Italy possessed a profoundly “international” character that it
would have been difficult for him to ignore after his captivity in North Africa. In Naples—still a meeting place for the religions, cultures, and trades of the Mediterranean—Arabic was spoken by Moors from Spain, Hebrew was studied by scholars hungry for knowledge, and churches were heavy with the mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy. In Florence, the “foreign” was, if anything, even more clearly evident. By the time Filippo returned to the city, it had become one of the most important crossroads of the world. Florence was a flourishing entrepôt: its markets bristled with pungent spices and luscious fabrics from the distant East; its merchants knew Constantinople, Moscow, and the Levant every bit as well as their native city; its palaces housed servants and slaves of every creed and color; and its streets and squares were abuzz with tales of strange and wonderful places far away. What was more, at the time Filippo reentered
Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence was on the brink of playing host to the great Ecumenical Council that Gozzoli later celebrated in the
Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem
. Already, the streets would have been thronging with the bearded priests of Byzantium and the brightly colored silk caftans of the Eastern Empire’s highest officials, while the taverns would have been filled with the buzz of Greek chatter and talk of the rapidly advancing Ottoman Turks.

Far from being cut off from the excitement of the wider world, cities like Naples and Florence, as Filippo would have recognized, were emporia in which the whole world was at play and in which people and ideas from the farthest-flung places came together. And just as his awareness of cultural exchange became more acute, so his art gradually began to reflect the interaction of the different societies he had encountered.

Painted in ca. 1438, the
Barbadori Altarpiece
(Louvre, Paris) reveals the extent to which Filippo was beginning to think in broader, cross-cultural terms (
Fig. 33
). At first sight, it is a fairly typical example of early-fifteenth-century Italian devotional art. In the center, the Virgin Mary stands on a slightly raised platform holding the infant Christ, receiving the prayers of the kneeling saints Augustine and Frediano. On the left and the right appear a host of angels and cherubs. But a closer look reveals a multitude of other, quite distinctly un-Italian features. There is a clear hint that Filippo was aware of recent developments in northern European art, which he had perhaps encountered through discussions with the many Florentine merchants who traveled there regularly.
In contrast to earlier Italian works, the figures are placed not against an impersonal gilt background but in a well-proportioned, accurately represented room, in the left-hand wall of which can be glimpsed a window looking out onto a rustic landscape, an innovation that was characteristic of the works of artists such as
Jan van Eyck. More important, however, there is also a tantalizing sign not only of Filippo’s continued fascination with the exotic but also of the extent to which he had come to understand religious norms in dialogue with the other cultures. Far from dressing her in a simple piece of cloth, Filippo gave the Virgin Mary a blue mantle with a finely painted golden hem that he adorned with a series of intricate symbols resembling an oriental script. Although meaningless, this lettering—an example of what is known as pseudo-Kufic—was intended to represent Arabic script and to endow the Virgin Mary with what Filippo (who would have encountered genuine Arabic in the Hafsid kingdom) perceived to be an authentically “Eastern” appearance, irrespective of the “Western” dress of the other figures. In that one, simple detail, East and West seem to have been brought together with sensitivity, care, and revealing astuteness.

T
HE
D
ISCOVERY OF THE
“O
THER
”:
T
HE
R
ENAISSANCE
G
OES
G
LOBAL

Filippo Lippi’s supposed experiences in Barbary show that, quite apart from being an age of tremendous artistic innovation, the Renaissance was also a period in which the boundaries of the known world were coming crashing down.

From antiquity through the late
Middle Ages, Italy’s heritage, trading links, and geographical position had brought it into frequent contact not only with other regions of the Mediterranean basin but also with much farther-flung reaches of the earth. From the writings of classical authors such as Pliny and Strabo had come knowledge of Alexander the Great’s campaigns through Persia to the banks of the Indus, and of the distant provinces of the Roman Empire, extending from the northern shores of the British Isles to the scorching deserts of Nubia, and from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the shores of the Caspian Sea. From the commerce, confusion, and warfare of the Middle Ages had come a deeper familiarity with the fading splendor of the
Byzantine Empire—the remains of which are still visible in the South and the former Exarchate
of Ravenna—and an acquaintance with Muslims in
al-Andalus,
Sicily,
Egypt, and the
Holy Land, and with the strange, frozen wastes of
Kievan Rus’. And from the sudden shock of the
Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the medieval Italian mind had recovered the materials to extend the geographical limits of the imagination yet further. Facilitated by the Pax Mongolica, the Spice Road across central Asia to China had been opened up once more, and inquisitive explorers—including the Franciscan
William of Rubruck and the Venetian
Marco Polo—had brought back firsthand accounts of the outer edges of the earth.

Yet while medieval Italy was “wired in” to the wider world, as it were, the erratic, intermittent, and often violent nature of many of the most important routes for the transmission of knowledge not only guaranteed that links with other cultures were patchy at best, but also ensured that perceptions of the non-Italian world during the later Middle Ages remained dominated by the fantastical, the magical, and the downright unbelievable. Despite including a great many accurate and well-observed details, Marco Polo’s account of his travels was, for example, riddled with fabulous inventions that owed more to the author’s overexcited imagination than to any actual experience. Tales are told of unicorns, men with “
tails full a palm in length … as thick as a dog’s,” a valley filled entirely with diamonds, and islanders who have dogs’ faces, while even so recognizable an edifice as the Great Wall of China is shrouded in wild, mythological speculation. Such fanciful absurdities were far from being untypical. The world of the imagination was filled with extraordinary and implausible characters.
The legend of Prester John—supposed to be a supremely virtuous and wealthy king who was descended from one of the three Magi—played a disarmingly prominent role in shaping ideas of the Orient and sub-Saharan Africa, and—thanks to his reputed Christianity—even had a part in international policy making. Similarly, the many versions of the Alexander romance featured the Macedonian king having an affair with the queen of the Amazons in the Near East and being borne aloft in a cage carried by eagles. So, too,
Idrisi, a twelfth-century geographer at the court of Roger II of Sicily, argued that gold was so plentiful in Japan than even dogs wore collars made of the metal, while the (probably fictitious)
Sir John Mandeville drew on earlier writings for his descriptions of lands filled with phoenixes, weeping crocodiles, and men with heads in their chests.

The dawning of the Renaissance, by contrast, is often held up by historians as having signaled a radical break with earlier centuries. Although contact with other lands, peoples, and cultures had not been lacking in the past, the fourteenth century saw the beginning of an unparalleled expansion of the horizons of knowledge that pushed back the boundaries of understanding further than ever before.