Re-thinking Renaissance Objects

Design, Function and Meaning

Peta Motture, Michelle O'Malley, Peta Motture, Michelle O'Malley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444396768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Inspired by research undertaken for the new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Re-thinking Renaissance Objects explores and often challenges some of the key issues and current debates relating to Renaissance art and culture.

• Puts forward original research, including evidence provided by an in-depth study arising from the Medieval & Renaissance Gallery project
• Contributions are unusual in their combination of a variety of approaches, but with each paper starting with an examination of the objects themselves
• New theories emerge from several papers, some of which challenge current thinking
  

1

Finding fame: painting and the making of careers in Renaissance Italy

Michelle O’Malley

The following studies in this collection address central issues about the design and function of works of art and they bring to light crucial findings concerning the appearance of works, their intended sites, the requirements of their owners and the import they held for their users. These are essential for understanding the meaning that works of art had in the world. It is worth noting, however, that the objects made by artists and artisans also had an important meaning for the professions of their makers: they were the materials that constructed their careers. By the end of the fifteenth century, works of art stood as much for their creators as for their purchasers. What this meant in practice is evident in the panel of the Madonna di Loreto altarpiece, now installed in the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 1).¹ Pietro Perugino painted the altarpiece in 1507, when he was arguably at the height of his fame as one of the most important artists in Italy. Despite this, he took on the commission for a fee much lower, in real terms, than he commonly accepted.² The clients were the heirs of a Perugian carpenter, perhaps a former colleague, and this may explain the low payment. The manufacture of the work, however, reflects a higher level of attention than the cost might lead us to expect. In particular, aspects of the underdrawing, probably made from existing cartoons, were corrected freehand, and the relatively inexpensive pigments used to colour the robes of the Madonna and St Jerome were carefully glazed to look more expensive. This suggests that one of the requirements of fame was to turn out objects of excellence, whatever their price, and that Perugino was well aware that the works of art that his business produced reflected directly upon him: he could not afford to be associated with a cheap-looking product.

Fig. 1 Pietro Perugino, Madonna di Loreto, c. 1507, oil on panel, 189.1 × 157.5 cm, London, National Gallery

(© The National Gallery, London)

The production values of the Madonna di Loreto are evidence of one of the ramifications of fame, while the commission itself suggests the breadth of the human associations that painters, even painters to the elite, established in the period. But how did Perugino and other especially sought-after artists and artisans acquire their reputations and become well known in the first place? While much of the precise information about the dating, ownership and original location of works that is necessary for tracing the steps of the careers of artisans such as the tile designers, master woodworkers and silversmiths treated in this volume is now lost, such material often survives for painters, especially those with significant reputations in the late fifteenth century. The information allows us to speculate on the role key individuals and the works they commissioned played in the creation of artists’ reputations and the launch of stellar careers.

This study considers the early careers of Alessandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino, who were to become among the most well-known painters in late fifteenth-century Italy, and it draws on our understanding of the importance of human relationships in all aspects of life in the Renaissance. It argues that connections among people – between individual patrons and potential patrons as well as between painters and particular clients – were crucial for the development of careers, and it contends that certain works, because of their ownership and often their site, directed the trajectory of each artist’s professional life.

Central to this analysis are findings in Renaissance history and art history that underscore the cohesion of neighbourhoods across social levels, highlight the importance of networks for business and political advancement, and emphasize the complexity of social interaction in the period.³ The evidence is that networks worked dynamically: they crossed social divides and were mutually reciprocal. This suggests that tracing the networks behind works of art is a way toward understanding career development.

The ideas proposed here are necessarily speculative, but it is especially worth considering the early commissions of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino because in 1481 they were awarded one of the most important jobs in fifteenth-century Italy: the painting of the Sistine Chapel walls. It was a commission that solidified their reputations and ensured their professional success. The same cannot be said with such force, though, of the fourth member of the team, the Florentine painter Cosimo Rosselli. While Rosselli produced a large body of work, he was never famous, neither before nor after the Sistine. For this reason, he provides a control for the study. He can aid in defining fame, and his relationships may help in understanding the route the Sistine painters followed to the papal commission.

ALESSANDRO BOTTICELLI (c.1445–1510)

Early in his career, Botticelli became embedded in a network of politically powerful Florentine clients. In 1470, after a few years of painting small panels for domestic devotion, he received his first public commission in Florence. It was to paint two panels that contributed to a set of seven images of the Virtues for the Mercanzia, the high commercial court of Florence.⁴ The commission came about through direct, high-level intervention, which was perhaps more complicated, more political and more dependent on webs of social connections than has generally been considered.

The importance of the Mercanzia in Florence’s economic life, as well as the centrality and visibility of its palace, made the commission extremely prestigious, and the job was sought by many painters.⁵ Perhaps because their choice was wide, the magistrates went through a careful procedure in which they first commissioned only the single figure of Charity from Antonio Pollaiuolo (Fig. 2). They then appraised it, reviewed drawings he and other artists made for the remaining six figures, and actively considered the value of hiring numerous painters over one. After this thorough procedure, they re-employed Pollaiuolo, just before Christmas 1469. He was to complete the series in nine months. When nothing was forthcoming by the following June, Tommaso Soderini, one of the operaii overseeing the project, intervened specifically to cause the court to hire Botticelli to paint two of the outstanding Virtues. A terse entry in the Mercanzia’s accounts is specific about Soderini’s contravention of the magistrates’ careful commissioning process.⁶

Fig. 2 Antonio Pollaiulo, Charity, 1470, tempera and oil on cypress wood, 167 × 87 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

(© Photo SCALA, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Attach. Culturali)

In 1470, Tommaso Soderini was among the most powerful men in Florence after Lorenzo de’ Medici, so his intervention is tantalizing. Herbert Horne introduced the idea that Soderini’s motive in introducing Botticelli was friendship. He based his analysis on a jokey exchange recorded between Soderini and the painter, recently traced to Angelo Poliziano’s Detti piacevoli (‘pleasing sayings’).⁷ While this has seemed to explain the statesman’s support of the painter, there are issues with the dating of Poliziano’s text and with the politics of the period that might cast doubt on this contained reading of the situation.

The anecdote is fairly anodyne; it concerned why Botticelli had not taken a wife. Two things are relevant here. First, it seems strong to assert friendship from the remarks, as they have the character of casual male badinage at a worksite. Secondly, and more importantly, the story probably does not date from 1470 or earlier. Poliziano only started his book in 1477, but the first tranche of work, written before April 1478, concerns stories of important Florentines, dating from the second third of the fifteenth century.⁸ These tales were probably gleaned from the Medici and their associates: Poliziano was living in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s house at the time. As Tommaso Soderini was Lorenzo de Medici’s uncle, such stories might have concerned him, but the Soderini/Botticelli exchange only appears in the second group of detti, written in May and June 1478.⁹ In 1478, Botticelli was working both for the Medici and for the Florentine Signoria, and he and Soderini might reasonably have met in the Medici palace or government buildings. The implication is that this was not a story from the past, but a conversation that occurred around the time that Poliziano recorded it. Poliziano’s two other quips of Botticelli’s support this reading. They were both recorded in the period from mid-1478 to late 1479, when the humanist, as prior of San Paolino, was the painter’s next door neighbour and thus had the opportunity to talk with him regularly.¹⁰ The chronology suggests that the exchange cannot be used convincingly to argue for a friendship between Soderini and Botticelli in 1470, so there is probably another reason that Soderini put Botticelli’s name forward.

That reason may have been political. The month of June 1470, when he intervened in the Mercanzia commission, was a particularly complicated time for Soderini because he had just slipped from the highest stratum of power.¹¹ Soderini served, among his many positions, as one of Florence’s ambassadors in the negotiations over the balance of power in Italy occasioned by the crisis of Rimini, begun in 1468.¹² Complicated discussions with Milan, Venice and Naples dragged into 1470, and by April it became clear to Lorenzo that Soderini, a hugely ambitious politician, was supporting alliance with...