Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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 facade 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. `050339

-

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. `050340 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 facade (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." `050341 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 Niccolo 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 to 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." *05011 `050342

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.

He was not so successful with the Baptist; it was a dour subject

alien to his earthly spirit; the two statues of John in the Bargello

are lifeless and absurd. Far finer is a stone relief of a child's

head, named for no good reason San Giovannino - the youthful St.

John. In the same Salone Donatelliano St. George unites all the

idealism of a militant Christianity with the restrained lines of Greek

art: a figure firmly and confidently poised, a body mature and strong,

a head Gothically oval and yet prefiguring the classic Brutus of

Buonarroti. For the cathedral facade at Florence he made two

powerful figures- of Jeremiah and Habbakuk, the latter so bald that

Donatello called him lo Zuccone, "the big pumpkin." On the Loggia

dei Lanzi Donatello's bronze Judith, commissioned by Cosimo, still

brandishes her sword over Holofernes; the wine-drugged general

sleeps placidly before his decapitation; he is masterfully conceived

and cast; but the young tyrannicide, overwhelmed with drapery,

approaches her deed with inopportune calm.

On a brief trip to Rome (1432) Donatello designed a classic

tabernacle in marble for the old St. Peter's. Probably in Rome he

studied the portrait busts that had survived from the days of the

Empire; in any case it was he who developed the first significant

portrait sculpture of the Renaissance. His chef-d'oeuvre in

portraiture was his bust, in painted terra cotta, of the politician

Niccolo da Uzzano; here he amused and expressed himself with a realism

that offered no compliments but revealed a man. Donatello made his own

discovery of the old truth that art need not always pursue beauty, but

must seek to select and reveal significant form. Many dignitaries

risked the veracity of his chisel, sometimes to their discomfiture.

A Genoese merchant, dissatisfied with himself as Donatello saw him,

haggled about the price; the matter was referred to Cosimo, who judged

that Donatello had asked too little. The merchant complained that

the artist had taken only a month for the work, so that the fee

demanded came to half a florin ($12.50) per day- too much, he thought,

for a mere artist. Donatello smashed the bust into a thousand

pieces, saying that this was a man who could bargain intelligently

only about beans. `050343

The cities of Italy appreciated him better, and competed for his

services. Siena, Rome, and Venice lured him for a time, but Padua

saw him fashion his masterpiece. In the church of St. Anthony he

carved a marble screen for the altar that covered the bones of the

great Franciscan; and over it he placed moving reliefs and a bronze

Crucifixion most tenderly conceived. In the piazza before the church

he set up (1453) the first important equestrian statue of modern

times; inspired, doubtless, by the mounted Aurelius in Rome, but

thoroughly Renaissance in face and mood; no idealized

philosopher-king, but a man of visibly contemporary character,

fearless, ruthless, powerful- Gattamelata, "the honeyed cat," the

Venetian general. It is true that the chafing, foaming horse is too

big for his legs, and that the pigeons, innocent of Vasari, daily

bespatter the bald head of the conquering condottiere; but the

pose is proud and strong, as if all the virtu of Machiavelli's

longing had here passed with the fused bronze to harden in Donatello's

mold. Padua gazed in astonishment and glory at this hero rescued

from mortality, gave the artist 1650 golden ducats ($41,250) for his

six years of toil, and begged him to make their city his home. He

whimsically demurred: his art could never improve at Padua, where

all men praised him; he must, for art's sake, return to Florence,

where all men criticized all.

In truth he returned to Florence because Cosimo needed him, and he

loved Cosimo. Cosimo was a man who understood art, and gave him

intelligent and bountiful commissions; so close was the entente

between them that Donatello "divined from the slightest indication all

that Cosimo desired." `050344 At Donatello's suggestion Cosimo

collected ancient statuary, sarcophagi, arches, columns, and capitals,

and placed them in the Medici gardens for young artists to study.

For Cosimo, with Michelozzo's collaboration, Donatello set up in the

Baptistery a tomb of the refugee Antipope John XXIII. For Cosimo's

favorite church, San Lorenzo, he carved two pulpits, and adorned

them with bronze reliefs of the Passion; from those pulpits, among

others, Savonarola would launch his bolts against later Medici. For

the altar he molded a lovely terra-cotta bust of St. Lawrence; for the

Old Sacristy he designed two pairs of bronze doors, and a simple but

beautiful sarcophagus for Cosimo's parents. Other works came from

him as if they were child's play: an exquisite stone relief of the

Annunciation for the church of Santa Croce; for the cathedral a

Cantoria of Singing Boys- plump putti violently chanting hymns

(1433-8); a bronze bust of a Young Man, the incarnation of healthy

youth (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art); a Santa Cecilia (possibly

by Desiderio da Settignano), fair enough to be the Christian muse of

song; a bronze relief of the Crucifixion (in the Bargello)

overpowering in its realistic detail; and in Santa Croce another

Crucifixion, a gaunt and solitary figure in wood, one of the most

moving representations of this scene, despite Brunellesco's

criticism of it as "a crucified peasant."

Patron and artist grew old together, and Cosimo took such care of

the sculptor that Donatello rarely thought about money. He kept his

funds, says Vasari, in a basket suspended from the ceiling of his

studio, and bade his aides and friends take from it according to their

needs, without consulting him. When Cosimo was dying (1464) he

recommended Donatello to the care of his son Piero; Piero gave the old

artist a house in the country, but Donatello soon returned to

Florence, preferring his accustomed studio to the sunshine and insects

of the countryside. He lived in simplicity and content till the age of

eighty. All the artists- nearly all the people- of Florence joined

in the funeral that laid him to rest, as he had asked, in the crypt of

San Lorenzo, beside Cosimo's own tomb (1466).

He had immeasurably advanced the sculptural art. Now and then he

poured too much force into his poses and designs; often he fell

short of the finished form that exalts Ghiberti's doors. But his

faults were due to his resolve to express not beauty so much as

life, not merely a strong and healthy body but a complex character

or mental state. He developed sculptural portraiture by extending it

from the religious to the secular field, and by giving his subjects an

unprecedented variety, individuality, and power. Overcoming a

hundred technical difficulties, he created the first great

equestrian statue left to us by the Renaissance. Only one sculptor

would reach greater heights, and then by inheriting what Donatello had

learned, achieved, and taught. Bertoldo was Donatello's pupil, and the

teacher of Michelangelo.

3. Luca della Robbia

-

The picture that takes form in our minds, as we read Vasari's

biographies of Ghiberti and Donatello, shows the studio of a

Renaissance sculptor as the co-operative enterprise of many hands,

directed by one mind, but transmitting the art, day by day, from

master to apprentice, generation after generation. From such studios

came minor sculptors who left to history a less imperious fame, but in

their degree contributed to give to passing beauty a lasting form.

Nanni di Banco inherited a fortune, and had the means to be worthless;

but he fell in love with sculpture and Donatello, and served a

faithful apprenticeship under him until he could set up his own

studio. He carved a St. Philip for the niche of the shoemakers'

guild in Or San Michele, and for the cathedral a St. Luke seated

with the Gospel in his hand, and looking out with all the confidence

of fresh faith upon a Renaissance Italy just beginning to doubt.

In another studio the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino

combined their skills in architecture and sculpture. Bernardo designed

a classic tomb in Santa Croce for Leonardo Bruni; then, on the

accession of Nicholas V he went to Rome, and consumed himself in the

great Pope's architectural revolution. Antonio reached his zenith at

thirty-four (1461) with his marble tomb in San Miniato, at Florence,

for Don Jayme, Cardinal of Portugal; here is the victory of the

classic style in all but the angel's wings, the Cardinal's

vestments, and his crown of virginity- for James had startled his time

by his chastity. America has two lovely examples of Antonio's work-

the marble bust of The Christ Child in the Morgan Library, and

The Young St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery. And is there

anywhere a nobler example of realistic portraiture than the powerful

head- corrugated with veins and furrowed with thought- of the

physician Giovanni di San Miniato, in the Victoria and Albert Museum?

Desiderio da Settignano came to Florence from the nearby village

that gave him his cognomen. He joined Donatello's staff, saw that

the master's work lacked only patient finish, and distinguished his

own productions with elegance, simplicity, and grace. His tomb for

Marsuppini did not quite equal Rossellino's for Bruni, but the

tabernacle that he designed for the church of San Lorenzo (1464)

pleased all who saw it; and his incidental portraits *05012 and

reliefs augmented his fame. He died at thirty-six; what might he

have done if given, like his master, eighty years?

Luca della Robbia was granted eighty-two, and used them well; he

raised terra-cotta work almost to the level of a major art, and his

fame out-journeyed Donatello's; there is hardly a museum in Europe

that does not display the tenderness of his Madonnas, the cheerful

blue and white of his painted clay. Beginning as a goldsmith like so

many artists of the Renaissance, and learning in that minuscule

field all the delicacies of design, he passed on to sculptural relief,

and carved five marble plaques for Giotto's Campanile. Perhaps the

wardens of the cathedral did not tell Luca that these reliefs excelled

Giotto's, but they soon commissioned him to adorn the organ loft

with a relief picturing choir boys and girls in the ecstasy of song.

Two years later (1433) Donatello carved a similar Cantoria. The

rival reliefs now face each other in the Opera di duomo or Works

of the Cathedral; both of them powerfully convey the exuberant

vitality of childhood; here the Renaissance rediscovered children

for art. In 1446 the wardens engaged him to make reliefs for the

bronze doors of a cathedral sacristy. These could not rival Ghiberti's

but they saved Lorenzo de' Medici's life in the Pazzi conspiracy.

All Florence now acclaimed Luca as a master.

So far he had followed the traditional methods of the sculptor's

art. Meanwhile, however, he had been experimenting with clay,

seeking to find a way in which this tractable material could be made

as beautiful in texture as marble. He molded the clay into the form

designed, covered it with a glaze of divers chemicals, and baked it in

a specially constructed kiln. The wardens admired the result, and

commissioned him to place terra-cotta representations of the

Resurrection and the Ascension over the doors of the cathedral

sacristies (1443, 1446). These tympanums, though in monochrome

white, made a stir by the novelty of their material and the refinement

of their finish and design. Cosimo and his son Piero ordered similar

terra cottas for the Medici palace and for Piero's chapel in San

Miniato; in these Luca added blue to the dominant white. Orders came

to him now in an abundance that tempted him to rapid facility. He

brightened with a terra-cotta Coronation of the Virgin the portal of

the church of the Ognissanti, and the portal of the Badia with a

tenderly graceful Madonna and Child, between such angels as might

reconcile us to an eternity of heaven. For the church of San

Giovanni in Pistoia he attempted a large terra-cotta Visitation;

it was a fresh departure in the aged features of Elizabeth and the

youthful innocence and diffidence of Mary. So Luca created a new realm

of art, and founded a della Robbia dynasty that would flourish till

the end of the century.

VII. PAINTING

1. Masaccio

-

In fourteenth-century Italy painting dominated sculpture; in the

fifteenth century sculpture dominated painting; in the sixteenth

painting again took the lead. Perhaps the genius of Giotto in the

trecento, of Donatello in the quattrocento, of Leonardo,

Raphael, and Titian in the cinquecento played some part in this

alteration; and yet genius is more a function than a cause of the

spirit of an age. Perhaps in Giotto's time the recovery and revelation

of classic sculpture had not yet provided such stimulus and

direction as they were to give to Ghiberti and Donatello. But that

stimulus reached its height in the sixteenth century; why did it not

lift the Sansovinos and Cellinis, as well as Michelangelo, above the

painters of that time?- and why was Michelangelo, primarily a

sculptor, forced more and more into painting?

Was it because Renaissance art had tasks and needs too wide and deep

for sculpture? Art, liberated by intelligent and opulent patronage,

wished to cover the whole field of representation and ornament. To

do this with statuary would have taken time, toil, and money

prohibitively; painting could more readily express the double gamut of

Christian and pagan ideas in a hurried and exuberant age. What

sculptor could have portrayed the life of St. Francis as rapidly as

Giotto and with Giotto's excellence? Moreover, Renaissance Italy

included a majority of persons whose feelings and ideas were still

medieval, and even the emancipated minority harbored echoes and

memories of the old theology, of its hopes and fears and mystic

visions, its devotion and tenderness and pervasive spiritual

overtones; all these, as well as the beauties and ideals expressed

in Greek and Roman sculpture, had to find vent and form in Italian

art; and painting offered to do it at least more conveniently, if

not also with greater fidelity and subtlety, than sculpture. Sculpture

had studied the body so long and lovingly that it was not at home in

representing the soul, though Gothic carvers had now and then made

spiritual stone. Renaissance art had to portray both body and soul,

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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