Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art

Mary Rogers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351777698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Originally published in 2000. Fashioning Identities analyses some of the different ways in which identities were fashioned in and with art during the Renaissance, taken as meaning the period c.1300-1600. The notion of such a search for new identities, expressed in a variety of new themes, styles and genres, has been all-pervasive in the historical and critical literature dealing with the period, starting with Burckhardt, and it has been given a new impetus by contemporary scholarship using a variety of methodological approaches. The identities involved are those of patrons, for whom artistic patronage was a means of consolidating power, projecting ideologies, acquiring social prestige or building a suitable public persona; and artists, who developed a distinctive manner to fashion their artistic identity, or drew attention to aspects of their artistic personality either in self portraiture, or the style and placing of their signature, or by exploiting a variety of literary forms.

1

Introduction: collective identity/individual identity

Joanna Woods-Marsden

Stephen Greenblatt cannot possibly have envisaged the unparalleled success of the title, Renaissance Self-Fashioning…, of his now classic study of the Renaissance self, when choosing it some twenty years ago. ‘To fashion’, an early modern term for the process of creating a distinct, personal style, took on special connotations in the sixteenth century as a way of designating the shaping of a given person’s identity, as revealed in his or her personality or mode of behaviour. The result, in Greenblatt’s frequently quoted words, was an ‘increased [Tudor] self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’, and about the internal self as an agent or subject.¹ Greenblatt’s application of this concept to the study of literature was fundamental for the development of the New Historicism, a methodologically self-conscious movement that sought to read literary texts as embedded in a network of material practices related to the institutions of the culture in which they were produced. In focusing their analysis on the behavioural codes and motive forces that control a society, the New Historicists could claim to have established a new awareness of the unavoidable exchanges between literary culture and power.²

Today few historians of visual culture need to be reminded that all artefacts are culture-specific, and hence cannot be analysed prior to being reintegrated into the socio-economic context in which they originated. Indeed, the practical, social function of Renaissance art and artefacts in particular is more or less impossible to erase. Nevertheless, historians of Renaissance art have been slow to pay attention both to the methodological self-consciousness inherent in the New Historicism and to Greenblatt’s concept of ‘self-fashioning’, which has become a central theme in the scholarly investigation of many other aspects of Renaissance culture. Given that its implications for the visual Renaissance in Italy are only beginning to be explored, the present volume is all the more welcome.

Several consistent themes run through these essays on early modern identity and subjectivity and their fashioning in visual and literary form within the differing cultures of sixteenth-century Italy and England. Many of them address the traditional question of the self-fashioning undertaken by an individual – patrician, ruler, woman or artist – whether identified or anonymous. In their investigations the authors use as primary sources images (portraits and altarpieces) and texts (treatises and signatures) that they relate to the Renaissance ideologies of religion, social status, political power and gender. Here I quote from the best definition of ideology that I know:

The important function of ideology is to veil the overt power relations obtaining in society, by making them appear to be part of the natural, eternal law of things. Power can only be exercised with the complicity of those who fail to realize that they submit to it … Ideology is successful precisely to the degree that its views were shared by those who exercise power and those who submit to it.³

Some of the chapters in the volume, however, take a more ‘anthropological’ approach to the issue of self-fashioning by investigating collective or communal identity. Such a strategy is especially effective for a period when sources for individuals low in the hierarchy of power are usually sparse. The groups in question may be comprised of those who share an occupation or role in society, such as intellectuals, merchants, military commanders or artists; a religious faith; or a similar social rank within the structures of power. In Renaissance scholarship, the groups are usually implicitly gendered male, but the identity fashioned by and of the (often anonymous) sixteenth-century female can also be effectively considered in terms of women’s shared roles within society, such as the courtesan, the patrician’s wife, the female religious donor, etc.

Before considering the chapters, I wish to establish a framework for their analysis by exploring briefly the collective identity of a group of Florentine artists who worked for the mid-sixteenth-century court of Cosimo I de’ Medici. In so doing I shall take an approach that was not followed in my recent book on autonomous self-portraiture in Renaissance Italy.⁴ Independent selfportraits were there defined as self-sufficient easel paintings whose primary function was to construct the appearance of their makers apart from any narrative context, and were interpreted as embodying the artists’ aspirations for a change in the status of art and hence their own social standing. The issue not previously addressed was the collective paucity of this kind of independent visual self-fashioning by artists at Cosimo’s court.

We need first to establish what constituted the social status of the artist, an account that will also serve as a useful introduction to those chapters which explore the artistic identities of Michelangelo, Vasari, Gozzoli, Cellini, Lotto and, indirectly, Parmigianino. The single most important factor determining an individual’s personal standing in the Renaissance was the rank attached to his or her occupation, and this occupation was always evaluated socially on the basis of its proximity to, or distance from, physical labour. The visual arts belonged in the category characterized as ‘manual’ and were thus classified among what were known as the ‘mechanical’ arts. Those with sufficient education to engage in the literary arts had a much higher social standing, in that Rhetoric and Poetry were characterized as ‘intellectual’, and therefore defined as belonging among the ‘liberal’ arts.

The two main components underlying the creation of a painting or sculpture, conception and execution, were characterized by Vasari in 1568 as il mio pensiero, ‘my thought or idea’, and le mie mani, ‘my hands’. Renaissance society focused almost exclusively on the latter component, the skill of hand required to execute the work, whereas the makers themselves preferred to emphasize the ingegno, the creative intellect needed to conceive the work in the first place. Indeed, members of the artistic community frequently denied the role played by manual execution in the work’s production. Pittura è cosa mentale, ‘painting is a mental occupation’, wrote Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo stated equally firmly, si dipinge col cerviello et non con le mani, ‘we paint not with our hands but with our brain’.

A number of artists who worked at courts revealed this yearning for elevated rank by producing an autonomous self-portrait. In the Quattrocento, Filarete and Mantegna worked at, and Alberti visited, the north Italian courts of Milan, Mantua and Ferrara. In the sixteenth century, Raphael and Parmigianino worked for the papal court in Rome; Bandinelli and Allori at that of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Florence; and Titian, Zuccari and Leoni produced art for the Habsburg dynasty.

Differing significantly from other contemporary courts, the visual record at that of Cosimo I de’ Medici (ruled 1537–64) does not conform to this picture: autonomous self-portraits were few in number in a centre that might have been thought to have encouraged them.⁵ Of the major artistic figures who worked for the Florentine court – Bandinelli, Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, Cellini and Allori – only the first and the last felt the need to promote the isolated self visually in autonomous likenesses.

The only Medici court artist to indulge in multiple independent selfimages was the sculptor Bandinelli. His full-length painted self-presentation c.1530 in the Gardner Museum, Boston, far from revealing the artist as a skilled manual worker, focused instead on such prestigious attributes as the chivalric Order of Santiago conferred on him by Charles V, and the hero Hercules with whom both the Emperor and Cosimo identified.⁶

Pontormo, on the other hand, only portrayed the self as witness to the holy stories in works commissioned by others.⁷ In the Entombment of Christ altarpiece of c.1528 for Lodovico Capponi, the artist is identified as the figure at the extreme right, who entreats the worshipper to emulate his own intense emotion at the sight of the figure who is both the dead God and the living Eucharist.⁸ In the Benintendi Adoration of the Magi of c. 1522, Pontormo is said to be the apparently traumatized figure at the extreme left who again urgently seeks the viewer’s attention.⁹ This kind of self-construction within religious narrative was a Florentine tradition, for example those by Benozzo Gozzoli considered in this volume by Francis Ames-Lewis. The earliest surviving instance is Orcagna’s self-inclusion in 1359 among the peripheral witnesses to the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin on the Tabernacle in Orsanmichele, in which the artist, his face relatively unidealized, his clothing contemporary, sought recognition from his peers.¹⁰ That a number of these early self-portraits as pious witness turn up in narratives of the Virgin’s assumption and coronation accords with the growth of her importance as intercessor at the end of the Middle Ages. Epiphany was another popular subject with which Florentine artists sought to identify. In the 1470s Botticelli included himself on the usual heraldic sinister – but, unlike Orcagna, posed alone and at full length in front of the crowd – in an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi in which quondam members of the Medici family re-enact the roles of the three kings.¹¹ Some forty years later, Andrea del Sarto positioned the self with two friends in the same location at the front of the Procession of the Magi in the atrium of SS Annunziata.¹²

Surprisingly, no more than Pontormo did the portraitist Bronzino display his own features within a portrait frame, despite his consistent use of portraiture and self-imaging in sacred drama.¹³ Twenty years after Pontormo, Bronzino portrayed himself and others in a number of altarpieces, such as the trio in the background of the Lamentation for Eleonora da Toledo’s chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio: the artist as Nicodemus, his friend Bandinelli in the guise of Joseph of Arimathea, and, between them, one of the many portraits of Pontormo that Bronzino included in his religious work.¹⁴ Bronzino introduced a new element by presenting the artists as enacting the roles of recognizable protagonists in the holy drama.

Vasari’s self-images, such as that in the tondo from the 1550s of Cosimo I de’ Medici surrounded by his Architects, Engineers and Sculptors in the Palazzo Vecchio, placed him in the company of his artistic peers – located conspicuously on the front plane, just as all the biographies in the second edition of his Lives gave a context for his own very long autobiography as the climax of the book.¹⁵ The three largest figures wearing wispy drapery were all minor architects and engineers who, being dead, presented no competition to the Duke’s capomaestro. Omitting Bronzino, his chief competitor at court, Vasari depicted his other living rivals, Bandinelli and Cellini, poorly lit and at very small scale.

Allori was the only other artist to frame the self in isolation. Artists, for example Titian and Vasari, tended to image the self after a long and productive life in the service of princes but, at the age of only twenty, Allori started his career as portraitist by using the self as model, observing himself observing himself in the mirror.¹⁶ Focusing exclusively on the practice of painting, his self-portrait is one of the earliest to reveal the artistic self as manual worker, a construction of professional identity that could not be further from that offered by Bandinelli twenty-five years earlier.

How to explain the puzzling factor that, of the major artistic figures who worked for Cosimo I – Bandinelli, Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, Cellini and Allori – only the first and the last felt the need to fashion the self in autonomous likenesses? What intellectual and social court imperatives encouraged the artists to neglect a mode of address to the world that was utilized to great effect by their peers at other courts, for example Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian and Leoni, none of whom, perhaps significantly, was Florentine?

I can only offer a tentative hypothesis. Among the most prominent characteristics of those who produced self-portraits was the additional creation of an autobiography, like Ghiberti, or autobiographical treatise, like Filarete, to mention the most important Quattrocento instances. This was, as it happens, another specifically Florentine phenomenon. The well-known literary achievements of Cellini and Vasari in the next century, central to the history of Italian literature, form the subjects of the chapters here by Joan Stack, Paola Tinagli and Victoria Gardner Coates. Among the others working for the Medici court, Bandinelli also fabricated a lengthy account of his great talents and remarkable achievements in his Memoriale, Bronzino was well enough regarded as a poet to be readmitted eventually into the Accademia Fiorentina, Allori wrote a treatise on disegno, and, towards the end of his life, Pontormo recorded daily events in a private diary. Thus, exceptionally for the culture, all these Florentine artists wrote something, most of them for publication. To say that they privileged the word is an understatement. Bandinelli, for instance, declared that his real passion was for literary, not artistic, creation: T wish to immortalize my name with my pen, this being a truly congenial and liberale pursuit’, he wrote.¹⁷ His enemy Cellini did precisely that by producing no visual self-likeness, not even a medal, to place beside his incomparable literary self-presentation.¹⁸ Such cultural values, I would argue, were a key determinant underlying the veritable explosion of artistic biography, autobiography and autobiographical treatises in Florence in the 1550s and 1560s.

There may have been other contributing factors. From a pragmatic stand-point, the audience reached by many autonomous self-likenesses, unlike those included in religious narrative in ecclesiastical sites, was limited. Bandinelli was one of the few Italians sufficiently canny to exploit the new technology of printing in order to increase the dissemination of his likeness. Without question, artistic autobiography and autobiographical treatises with their mythologizing of creative innovation could, if published, reach a far wider audience than any painted or sculpted self-depiction.

The way in which the self-images functioned within their makers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: collective identity/individual identity
• 2 A knight in the Arena: Enrico Scrovegni and his ‘true image’
• 3 Reconstructing Benozzo Gozzoli’s artistic identity
• 4 Patronage and identity in Renaissance Florence: the case of S. Maria a Lecceto
• 5 Art and life in Renaissance Italy: a blurring of identities?
• 6 A preface to signatures (with some cases in Venice)
• 7 Fashioning identities for the Renaissance courtesan
• 8 Beauty and identity in Parmigianino’s portraits
• 9 Problems of identity in an age of change: the viewer of art in Renaissance England
• 10 Moretto and the Congregation of S. Giorgio in Alga 1540–1550: fashioning a visual identity of a religious Congregation
• 11 ‘Ut vita scultura’: Cellini’s Perseus and the self-fashioning of artistic identity
• 12 Artists into heroes: the commemoration of artists in the art of Giorgio Vasari
• 13 ‘Cittadin nostro Fiorentino’: Michelangelo and Fiorentinismo in mid-sixteenth-century Florence
• 14 The identity of the prince: Cosimo de’ Medici, Giorgio Vasari and the Ragionamenti
• 15 ‘Frail flesh, as in a glass’: the portrait as an immortal presence in early modern England and Wales
• Bibliography
• Index