Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art

Francis Ames-Lewis, Mary Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138611276
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429860546
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

In this Volume, published in1998, Fifteen scholars reveal the ways of preserving, conceiving and creating beauty were as diverse as the cultural influenced at work at the time, deriving from antique, medieval and more recent literature and philosophy, and from contemporary notions of morality and courtly behaviour. Approaches include discussion of contemporary critical terms and how these determined writers' appreciation of paintings, sculpture, architecture and costume; studies of the quest to create beauty in the work of artists such as Botticeli, Leonardo, Raphael, Parmigianino and Vasari; and the investigation of changes functioning of the eye and brain, or to technical innovations like those found in Venetian glass.

1

Introduction

Elizabeth Cropper

In the bonfires of the vanities that took place in Florence on the last day of Carnevale in 1497 and 1498, portrayals of female beauties – of Bencina and Bina, of Lucretia and Cleopatra – were placed at the very top of the burning pyres, together with ancient busts of similarly beautiful women. Below were volumes of Latin and Italian poetry, especially works of lyric content by Petrarch and Boccaccio, together with all the false hair and cosmetics and ornaments of the modern women to whom the words of such poets could be addressed, and all the musical instruments and games that were employed to divert them. At the urging of the Dominican prophet Savonarola, beauty was consigned to the flames as excess, as cosmetic ornament and, in a gesture familiar to students of ancient philosophy and rhetoric, as dissolute and wanton.¹

Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in 1860), recounts the events surrounding the bonfires of the vanities in a chapter devoted to ‘Religion in Daily Life’. For Burckhardt the destruction of the representations and trappings of beauty was one more example of the power of an individual, rather than a display of misogyny, or a manifestation of the historic suspicion of excessive femininity and ornament. Despite his much-criticized blindness to the different and unequal status of women in the Renaissance, however, Burckhardt was deeply conscious of the importance of beauty in Renaissance culture. He examined the beauty of women’s role and appearance, the beauty of the perfection of man and of language, of the description of and response to nature, of philosophy, and of what he called ‘the outward refinement of life’.

In Burckhardt’s essay, in which all aspects of Italian Renaissance civilization are viewed as works of art, artistic purpose and commitment to beauty are defining characteristics of that civilization. It was, for example, ‘that universal education of the eye which rendered the judgement of the Italians as to bodily beauty or ugliness perfect and final’.² The individual, whose emergence famously defined the Renaissance for Burckhardt, was compelled to shape his own demeanour in an artistic way. As a result, ‘even the outward appearance of men and women and the habits of daily life were more perfect, more beautiful, and more polished than among the other nations of Europe’.³ In this civilizing process (as Norbert Elias would later call it), many aspects of social life, from personal hygiene to recreation, and even to war, were made beautiful through conscious reflection.

Burckhardt chose not to discuss the ‘artistic study of the human figure’ in his book, believing that this belonged more properly to the history of art as such.⁴ As William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden have noted, however, Burckhardt’s Kulturgeschichte was informed by ‘a sensibility nursed in art history’.⁵ Burckhardt’s belief that ways of seeing define a particular period would be taken up, they suggest, by his pupil and successor in the Chair of Art History at Basle, Heinrich Wölfflin. For Wölfflin, too, beauty was a defining characteristic of the ‘Classic Art’ of the Renaissance, and it had a history. The shift from the detailed, jocular and natural loveliness of the fifteenth century to the graver antique beauty of the sixteenth century that Wölfflin sought to establish was based on his understanding that stylistic change was indeed cultural change and vice versa:

When we speak of a new style arising … we find that the change is not confined to the environment of man – major or minor architectural features, furniture or costume – but that man himself has changed even in his outward, bodily form; and the real kernel of a style is in the new outlook upon the human body and in new ideas about deportment and movement. This conception of style is a much more weighty one than that which obtains nowadays, when styles change like fancy dresses being tried on for a masquerade.⁶

Wölfflin’s discussion of the ‘New Beauty’ includes one or two youthful male subjects: Verrocchio’s David is compared to Cellini’s Perseus, and to Raphael’s St John the Baptist, for example. But his most telling comparisons are those between the women in Ghirlandaio’s and Andrea del Sarto’s frescoes of The Birth of the Virgin, female figures in the former’s Birth of Saint John and Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo, portrayals of Venus by Lorenzo di Credi and Franciabigio, and the ideal heads of women by Piero di Cosimo and Michelangelo. Beauty for Wölfflin, as for Savonarola, was more easily identified in the feminine.

The examples of Burckhardt and Wölfflin were before me in the mid-1970s when I began to investigate the theme of female beauty in Italian Renaissance painting. In thinking about Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck in this context, however, it was also clear that certain formalist claims, especially those of classicism, had obscured their arguments. As I wrote ‘On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, I began to see that matters of feminism and formalism, of ornament and content, were inseparable from even broader aesthetic and social distinctions.⁷ These larger problems involved the misogynist suppression of beauty as vanity, and of modern mistrust of ornament itself. In a critical history traceable from Burckhardt and Wölfflin to Lessing, to Dolce, to Firenzuola and Poliziano, to Petrarch and ultimately back to Propertius, Ovid, Homer and Plato, something important was at stake. Many nineteenth-century scholars of art and literature – not only Burckhardt and Wölfflin but also Warburg, Faral and Renier, to mention only some of the most influential – had paid considerable attention to the representation of beauty, and especially female beauty, in the culture of Renaissance Italy. In their analysis of the desiring Petrarchan individual, Kerrigan and Braden point to Freud’s identification of the elevation of the female object as an identifying feature of post-classical culture.⁸ Somehow this thread had been lost in more recent historical inquiries. This loss is perhaps associable with a shift in twentieth-century Renaissance studies away from engagement with the conventions of romantic love (with its close ties to the late medieval tradition) towards a preoccupation with the more ideal terms of Neoplatonism and the revival of ancient theories of harmonious beauty in which women play a minor part.

The shift may also reflect a desire to uphold an idea of absolute beauty in the face of the crucial Enlightenment distinction between absolute and relative beauty, which permitted beauty a history, and allowed for the discovery of the historical perception of art. To reduce the argument to its simplest terms: the philosophical claims of aesthetics were advanced over the historical explanations of taste, judgement and poetic subjectivity. Implicit in that rejection of historical subjectivity was a suppression of the feminine, and it seems logical in retrospect that my own next step in thinking through the rhetoric and poetics of female portrayal in the Renaissance should have been prompted by an invitation to participate in a pioneering conference organized by a group of feminist scholars at Yale University in March 1982.⁹ It is difficult to recall how radical this programme then seemed, and especially because it did not take up the already somewhat stale question of women in the Renaissance. Instead, the focus was on sex/gender arrangements, aesthetic and material questions, issues of class and race, production and reproduction. In the editors’ introduction to the publication of those papers, my essay was characterized as concerning itself with ‘the strategies by which women are rendered marginal in works by male artists and critics’.¹⁰ The marginality that allowed female identity to be suppressed was indeed one issue under discussion, but my main interests were somewhat wider and, I believe, more fundamental. Renaissance critics, I proposed, following their understanding of ancient writers, made the portrayal of a beautiful woman into a synecdoche of painting itself. This understanding led me back to the poetry of Petrarch, where I had begun.

Burckhardt recognized the importance of Petrarch in the discovery of natural beauty in the Renaissance, but he belonged to a realist generation that read Petrarch’s meditations on nature as direct records of his experience. Even though Burckhardt understood that Petrarch was, as he put it, ‘perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature’, his own concern was with Petrarch’s views on fame and his fixing of the forms of the sonnet rather than his expression of lyrical sentiment as such.¹¹ The lyric poetry of Petrarch is, however, of the utmost importance for the understanding of concepts of beauty and its representation in the Renaissance, for the poet invokes a special relationship between love and the imagination, exalting the latter as a means by which to figure memories. The capacity of the imagination to reconfigure the beloved at any time or place is fundamental to his poetry and its images. Petrarch conceives of Love itself as a painter whose many colours paint the ‘bel viso leggiadro’ on his heart (Rime sparse [RS] 71 and 96). His compelling desire to see Laura’s lost beauty deprives him of his freedom, for, as he writes, ‘mal si segue ciò ch’agli occhi agrada’ – or ‘it is bad to follow what is pleasing to the eyes’ (RS 96). But that visual seduction and the desire to recover its joy is what leads the poet to write about the sweet movement of his lady, the memory of which will outlast a statue of solid diamond – or of di-amante (RS 108). The poet revives these memories in his heart through looking at nature, especially the landscape of Vaucluse where he seeks out the traces, or signs, of her passage (RS 108). There, amid the rocks and springs, he can figure with his thought (RS 116), wherever he looks: ‘'I pensier mio figura ovunque io sguardo’. Nature itself is marked by Laura’s appearance, especially the uninhabited mountains and woods. In the key poem ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’ (RS 129), Petrarch characterizes himself as a deer climbing in this wild landscape. Wherever a pine or a hillside casts a shade he is able to draw with his mind the beautiful face of Laura on the first stone (nel primo sasso); keeping his wandering mind fixed on this primo pensier, he senses the presence of Love close by, and his soul is satisfied by its own self-deception. Gazing at her, and forgetting himself, he succeeds in seeing Laura in so many places that if only the illusion (error) could last, he would ask for nothing more. He sees his beloved alive in clear waters, on the green grass, on the trunk of a tree, and in the white clouds. The more deserted and wild the place, the more beautiful does his thought shadow her forth until the truth dispels the illusion, leaving him a mere image of himself, who can only think and weep and write.

In nature the poet projects in both line and chiaroscuro – the word used for the latter is adombrare – the memory image of his beloved, just as in life Laura covered the ground with her shadow or marked it with her foot. Love maintains him through memory, re-membering the pieces that were scattered by the vision and loss of the beloved. In the long poem that begins In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona (RS 127), Petrarch gives an extended version of how this remembering of the past works at different times of day and in different seasons. Whenever he sees snow on hills, whenever he sees the stars after nocturnal rain, he remembers his beloved’s eyes, and the face that seen from afar makes him weep (as the sun melts the snow), but from close by dazzles him and vanquishes his heart. When spring comes he sees his bella giovenetta again, even as in the shortening days he sees her as the donna she becomes. Gazing at the leaves and the violets of the spring, he remembers the weapons of love, and remembers (or is himself re-membered by, given the reflexivity of the verb mi rimembra) the humble deportment of his beloved. In his interpretation of Botticelli’s Primavera, Charles Dempsey has established how the invention of a painting that is about love may be read as an extended series of such metaphors of loss and remembrance.¹²

Petrarch indeed gave a new meaning to looking at nature, one that was founded in human experience, as Burckhardt recognized. But he further conceived his remembering as an artistic practice of drawing and shading, which could satisfy for just as long as the imaginative projection was not interrupted by the truth of loss and absence. What the imagination produced in collaboration with memory was beauty. Petrarch’s search for the beautiful grace of the woman who had made his heart gentle, and his actual physical withdrawal into the mountains and valleys in order to experience moments of illusionistic remembering, in order then to write about them, had a powerful effect on the way that poets and painters looked at nature in the generations to come. The painter’s experience of nature and the remembrance and representation of the absent, beautiful beloved were now inseparable. By extension, in Renaissance painting the representation of a beautiful woman and naturalism, or the representation of nature as vitally alive as a human being, were also inseparable. Painting and woman are equally desired. In both Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Ginevra de’ Benci the figure is set against a landscape of water, hills and trees, with which the figure seems to be one. Leonardo’s practice of projecting into random shapes in plaster walls, or in clouds, is famous. There is an important connection between these two phenomena, between such imaginative projections and the Petrarchan sequence of being seized by beauty through the eyes, followed by loss of the beloved object, followed by the desire to remember through drawing with the mind in nature: that is the connection, again, between the naturalism of these images and their subjects. It was through the portrayal of the beloved that the beauty and value, or meaning, of nature could be unlocked. As Leonardo challenged in his defence of painting, ‘What poet with words will put before you, O lover, the true effigy of your idea with such truth as will the painter? Who is it that will show you the sites of rivers, woods, valleys and fields wherein are represented your bygone pleasures with more truth than the painter?’¹³

Vasari records that among the first of Leonardo’s works on joining the studio of Verrocchio were some gesso heads of putti, and of femmine the ridono. These images of smiling women Freud associated with the mysterious smiling women who come later in Leonardo’s career – with Mona Lisa, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics
• 3 The perception of beauty in landscape in the quattrocento
• 4 ‘Condecenti et netti …’: beauty, dress and gender in Italian Renaissance art
• 5 Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti and a practical definition of magnificence in the context of Renaissance architecture
• 6 Beauty as an aesthetic and artistic ideal in late fifteenth-century Florence
• 7 Defining the beautiful in early Renaissance Germany
• 8 The artist as beauty
• 9 ‘La più bella e meglio lavorata opera’: beauty and good design in Italian Renaissance architecture
• 10 Poetry in motion: beauty in movement and the Renaissance conception of leggiadrìa
• 11 Resplendent vessels: Parmigianino at work in the Steccata
• 12 Michelangelo’s Christian neoplatonic aesthetic of beauty in his early oeuvre: the nuditas virtualis image
• 13 Venetian glass and Renaissance self-fashioning
• 14 Vasari’s interpretation of female beauty
• 15 The notion of beauty in Francesco Bocchi’s Bellezze della città di Fiorenza, I
• 16 The notion of beauty in Francesco Bocchi’s Bellezze della città di Fiorenza, II
• Bibliography
• Index