Social History of Art, Volume 2

Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

Arnold Hauser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134637522
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

First published in 1951 Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced.
This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hauser's narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

1.
THE CONCEPT OF THE RENAISSANCE

How arbitrary the usual distinction between the Middle Ages and the modern age is and how fluid the concept of the ‘Renaissance’ is best shown by the difficulty there is in assigning such personalities as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, Jean Fouquet and Jan van Eyck, to one or other of these categories. If one likes, one can even consider Dante and Giotto as belonging to the Renaissance and Shakespeare and Molière to the Middle Ages. In any case, the idea that the real turning-point does not occur until the eighteenth century and that the modern age really begins with the enlightenment, with the idea of progress and with industrialization, is not to be lightly dismissed.¹ But it will probably be best to place the crucial dividing-line between the first and second half of the Middle Ages, that is to say, at the end of the twelfth century, when money economy comes to life again, the new towns arise and the modern middle class first acquires its distinctive characteristics— it would be quite wrong to place it in the fifteenth century, in which, it is true, a number of things come to fruition but as good as nothing absolutely new begins. Our naturalistic and scientific conception of the world is certainly in essentials a creation of the Renaissance, but it was medieval nominalism that first inspired the new direction of thought in which this conception of the world has its origin. The interest in the individual object, the search for natural law, the sense of fidelity to nature in art and literature—these things do not by any means begin only with the Renaissance. The naturalism of the fifteenth century is merely the continuation of the naturalism of the Gothic period in which the individual conception of individual things already begins to be clearly manifest. And if those who sing the praises of the Renaissance profess to see in all the spontaneous, progressive and personalist tendencies of the Middle Ages a heralding or a proto-form of the Renaissance, if for Burckhardt even the songs of the wandering scholars are proto-Renaissance and Walter Pater sees an expression of the Renaissance spirit in such an absolutely medieval creation as the chante-fable ‘Aucassin and Nicolette’, then this conception only sheds light on the same state of affairs, the same continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the opposite angle.

In his description of the Renaissance, Burckhardt laid the greatest stress on the naturalism of the period, and represented the turning to empirical reality, ‘the discovery of the world and of man’, as the most fundamental factor in the ‘rebirth’. In so doing, he, like most of his successors, failed to see that in the art of the Renaissance not naturalism in itself but merely the scientific, methodical, totalitarian character of naturalism was new, and that not the observation and analysis of reality, but merely the conscious deliberation and consistency with which the criteria of reality were registered and analysed were in advance of medieval conceptions—that the remarkable thing about the Renaissance was, to put it briefly, not the fact that the artist became an observer of nature, but that the work of art became a ‘study of nature’. The naturalism of the Gothic period began when pictures and sculpture ceased being exclusively symbols, and began to acquire purpose and value as mere reproductions of the things of this world, apart from their connection with transcendental reality. The sculptures of Chartres and Rheims, obvious as their supernatural relationships are, differ from the art of the Romanesque period by reason of their immanent purpose, which is separable from their metaphysical significance. On the other hand, the real change brought about by the Renaissance is that metaphysical symbolism loses its strength and the artist’s aim is limited more and more definitely and consciously to the representation of the empirical world. The more society and economic life emancipate themselves from the fetters of ecclesiastical dogma the more freely does art turn to the consideration of immediate reality; but naturalism is no more a new creation of the Renaissance than the acquisitive economy.

The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’ was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.

The connection between the concept of the Renaissance and the ideology of liberalism is even more striking in the work of Michelet, who coined the slogan of the ‘découverte du monde et de l’homme’,² than in that of Burckhardt. Even the way he chooses his heroes, and brings together Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare and Cervantes with Columbus, Copernicus, Luther and Calvin,³ his characterization of Brunelleschi, for instance, as the destroyer of the Gothic and his conception of the Renaissance in general as the beginning of a development which finally secures the victory for the idea of freedom and reason, shows that the main interest in his analysis is to establish the genealogy of liberalism. He is concerned with the same struggle against clericalism and intellectual authoritarianism which made the enlightened philosophers of the eighteenth century conscious of their opposition to the Middle Ages and of their affinity with the Renaissance. For both Bayle (Dict. hist, et crit., IV) as well as Voltaire (Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, chap. 121) the irreligious character of the Renaissance was a foregone conclusion, and the Renaissance has remained encumbered with this feature until our own day, although it was in reality merely anti-clerical, anti-scholastic and anti-ascetic, but in no sense sceptical. The ideas about salva tion, the other world, redemption and original sin, which filled the whole spiritual life of medieval man, became, it is true, merely ‘secondary ideas’,⁴ but there can be no question of an absence of all religious feeling in the Renaissance. For if, as Ernst Walser remarks, ‘one tries to inquire into the life and thought of the leading personalities of the Quattrocento, a Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Lorenzo Magnifico or Luigi Pulci, inductively, then the result will always be that, strangely enough, the established characteristics of scepticism are absolutely inapplicable to them….’⁵ The Renaissance was not even so hostile to authority as the enlightenment and liberalism asserted. Clerics were attacked, but the Church as an institution was spared, and as its authority diminished it was replaced by that of classical antiquity.

The radicalism of the eighteenth-century rationalist conception of the Renaissance was markedly intensified by the spirit of the fight for freedom in the middle of the last century.⁶ The struggle against reaction renewed the memory of the Italian republics of the Renaissance and suggested the idea of connecting the splendour of their culture with the emancipation of their citizens.⁷ In France it was anti-Napoleonic, in Italy anti-clerical journalism which helped to give final point to and spread the liberal conception of the Renaissance,⁸ and both middle-class liberal, as well as socialistic historians have adhered to this conception. Even today, the Renaissance is still celebrated in both camps as Reason’s great war of liberation and as the triumph of individualism,⁹ whereas in reality the idea of ‘free research’ was not an achievement of the Renaissance,¹⁰ nor was the idea of personality absolutely foreign to the Middle Ages s; the individualism of the Renaissance was new only as a conscious programme, as a weapon and a war-cry, not as a phenomenon in itself.

In his definition of the Renaissance, Burckhardt combines the idea of individualism with that of sensualism, the idea of the self-determination of the personality with the emphasis on the protest against medieval asceticism, the glorification of nature with the proclamation of the gospel of the joy of life and the ‘emancipation of the flesh’. Out of this association of ideas there arises, partly under the influence of Heine’s romantic immoralism and as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s a-moral hero-worship,¹¹ the well-known picture of the Renaissance as an era of unscrupulous brutes and epicures—a picture the libertine features of which are, perhaps, not directly related to the liberal conception of the Renaissance, but which would be inconceivable without the liberal trend and individualistic approach of the nineteenth century. The discomfort with the world of middle-class morality and the revolt against it produced the exuberant paganism which tried to find a substitute for pleasures beyond its grasp by depicting the excesses of the Renaissance. In this picture, the condottiere with his demonic lust for pleasure and unbridled will to power was the stock figure of the irresistible sinner, who committed, as a proxy, all the monstrosities conjured up in the middle-class day-dreams of the happy life. It has been asked, justifiably, whether this infamous brute, as described in the histories of Renaissance morals, ever existed at all in reality, and whether this ‘wicked tyrant’ was ever anything more than the result of memories derived from the classical reading of the humanists.¹²

The sensualistic conception of the Renaissance is based more on the psychology of the nineteenth century than on that of the Renaissance itself. The aestheticism of the romantic movement was far more than a cult of the artist and of art; it led to a revaluation of all the great questions of life according to aesthetic standards. All reality became the substratum of an artistic experience and life itself a work of art, in which every element was merely a stimulus of the senses. This aesthetic philosophy characterized the alleged sinners, tyrants and villains of the Renaissance as great picturesque figures—the fitting protagonists for the colourful background of the age. The generation which, drunk with beauty and longing for disguise, wanted to die ‘with vine-leaves in the hair’ was only too ready to exalt a historical epoch which clothed itself in gold and purple, which turned life into a gorgeous feast, and in which, as this generation desired to believe, even the simple folk delighted enthusiastically in the most exquisite works of art. The historical reality was, of course, no more in accordance with this aesthete’s dream than with the picture of the superman in tyrant’s form. The Renaissance was hard and business-like, matter-of-fact and unromantic; in this respect, too, it was not so very different from the late Middle Ages.

The characteristics of the individualistic-liberal and of the sensualistic conception of the Renaissance apply only in part to the actual Renaissance, and almost as much as they apply to it, they also apply to the late Middle Ages. The frontier here seems to be more geographical and national than purely historical. In the problematical cases—as for instance in that of Pisanello or the van Eycks—as a rule, one will assign southern phenomena to the Renaissance and northern phenomena to the Middle Ages. The spacious representations of Italian art, with their freely moving figures and the spatial unity of their settings, seem to be Renaissance in character, whilst the impression made by the confined spaces of Old Netherlandish painting, with its timid, somewhat awkward figures, its laboriously assembled accessories and its delicate miniature technique, is wholly medieval. But even if one is prepared to grant a certain relevance here to the constant factors of evolution, particularly the racial and national character of the groups which make the decisive contribution to the culture of the age, one should not forget that in so far as one accepts the validity of such factors one thereby abdicates as a historian, and one should strive to postpone the moment of such resignation as far as possible. For usually it turns out that the allegedly constant factors in evolution are merely the outcome of stages in the historical development or the premature substitute for hitherto unexplored but thoroughly explorable historical conditions. At any rate, the individual character of races and nations has a different significance in the different epochs of history. In the Middle Ages it has hardly any importance at all; in that age the great collective of Christendom has an incomparably higher degree of reality than the separate national individualities. But at the end of the Middle Ages the place of the universal Western feudal system and of international chivalry, of the universal Church and its uniform culture, is taken by the nationally and civically patriotic middle class with its economic and social forms subject to local conditions, by the narrowly confined spheres of interest of the towns and countrysides, by the particularism of the territorial principalities and the variety of national languages. The national and racial elements now come more strongly into the foreground of the picture as differentiating factors, and the Renaissance appears to be the particular form in which the Italian national spirit emancipates itself from universal European culture.

The most striking feature of the art of the Quattrocento is, in contrast both to that of the Middle Ages and that of Northern Europe, the extraordinary freedom and effortlessness of expression, the grace and elegance, the statuesque weight and the great, impetuous line of its forms. Everything here is bright and serene, rhythmical and melodious. The stiff and measured solemnity of medieval art disappears and gives place to a vivid, clear, well-articulated formal idiom, beside which even the contemporary Franco-Burgundian art seems to have ‘a mood of fundamental gloom, a barbaric splendour, and bizarre and overladen forms’.¹³ With its lively feeling for important and simple relationships, for limitation and order, for monumental forms and firm structures, the Quattrocento anticipates, in spite of occasional harshnesses and an often unchecked playfulness, the stylistic principles of the high Renaissance. And it is precisely the immanence of the ‘classical’ element in this pre-classical art, which distinguishes the style of the early Italian Renaissance most incisively from late medieval art and the contemporary art of Northern Europe. The ‘ideal style’, which connects Giotto with Raphael, dominates the art of Masaccio and Donatello, Andrea del Castagno and Piero della Francesca, Signorelli and Perugino; probably not a single Italian artist of the early Renaissance entirely escapes its influence. The basic element in this conception of art is the principle of uniformity and the power of the total effect, or at least the tendency towards uniformity and the striving, despite all the fullness of detail and colour, to make a total impression. Seen beside the artistic creations of the later Middle Ages, a work of the Renaissance always seems to be an unbroken and perfect whole, and, however rich its content, fundamentally simple and homogeneous.

The basic form of Gothic art is juxtaposition. Whether the individual work is made up of several comparatively independent parts or is not analysable into such parts, whether it is a pictorial or a plastic, an epic or a dramatic representation, it is always the principle of expansion and not of concentration, of co-ordination and not of subordination, of the open sequence and not of the closed geometric form, by which it is dominated. The beholder is, as it were, led through the stages and stations of a journey, and the picture of reality which it reveals is like a panoramic survey, not a one-sided, unified representation, dominated by a single point of view. In painting it is the ‘continuous’ method which is favoured; the drama strives to make the episodes as complete as possible and prefers, instead of the concentration of the action in a few decisive situations, frequent changes of scene, of the characters and the motifs. The important thing in Gothic art is not the subjective viewpoint, not the creative, formative will expressed in the mastering of the material, but the thematic material itself, of which both artists and public can never see enough. Gothic art leads the onlooker from one detail to another and causes him, as has been well said, to ‘unravel’ the successive parts of the work one after the other; the art of the Renaissance, on the other hand, does not allow him to linger on any detail, to separate any single element from the whole composition, but forces him rather to grasp all the parts at one and the same time.¹⁴ Just like central perspective in painting, the spatially and temporally concentrated scene in the drama makes it possible to realize this simultaneity of vision. The change that takes place in the conception of space, and therefore in the whole conception of art, is perhaps expressed most strikingly in the fact that the stage scenery based on separate unconnected settings is suddenly felt to be incompatible with artistic illusion.¹⁵ The Middle Ages, which thought of space as something synthetic and analysable, not only allowed the different scenes of a drama to be set up alongside one another, but allowed the actors to remain on the stage even when they were not taking part in the action. For just as the audience simply did not take any notice of the scenery in front of which no acting was taking place, so they took no notice either of the actors who were not engaged in the scene being played. To the Renaissance, such divided attention seems impossible to justify. The change of outlook is probably expressed most clearly by Scaliger, who finds it quite ludicrous that the ‘characters never leave the stage, and those who are silent are regarded as not present’.¹⁶ For the new conception of art, the work forms an indivisible unity; the spectator wants to be able to take in the whole range of the stage with a single glance, just as he grasps the whole space of a painting organized on the principles of central perspective, with a single glance.¹⁷ But the development from a successive to a simultaneous conception of art implies, at the same time, a lessened appreciation of those silently accepted ‘rules of the game’ on which, in the final analysis, every artistic illusion is based. For, if the Renaissance regards it as nonsensical ‘to behave on the stage as if one could not hear what one person is saying about another’,¹⁸ although the persons in question are standing next to each other, this can perhaps be described as a symptom of a more highly developed naturalistic approach, but it also no doubt implies a certain atrophy of the power of imagination. However that may be, the art of the Renaissance owes the impression of totality, that is to say, the appearance of a genuine, self-dependent, autonomous world, and with that its greater truth as compared with the Middle Ages, above all, to this uniformity of the artistic presentation. For the genuineness of the description of reality, its trustworthiness and power to convince, is here, as so often, dependent on the inner logic of the approach, on the mutual conformity of the elements of the work, to a greater extent than on the conformity of these elements with the external reality.

With the principles of unity which inspire its art, Italy anticipates the classicism of the Renaissance, just as it anticipates the capitalistic development of the West with its economic rationalism. For the early Renaissance is an essentially Italian movement, as opposed to the High Renaissance and mannerism, which are universal European movements. The new artistic culture first appears on the scene in Italy, because this country also has a lead over the West in economic and social matters, because the revival of economic life star...