Introduction: To understand the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and

learning of Renaissance Italy in their original environment, the society of the time, it is
advisable to begin with a brief description of the main characteristics of the arts at this time.
In this description the stress will fall on the viewpoint of posterity rather than that of
contemporaries.
The conventional nineteenth-century view of the arts in Renaissance Italy was that the arts
flourished, and their new realism, secularism and individualism all show that the Middle
Ages were over and that the modern world had begun. However, all these assumptions have
been questioned by critics and historians alike. To say that the arts 'flourished' in a particular
society is to say, surely, that better work was produced there than in many other societies,
which leads one straight out of the realm of the empirically verifiable.
All the same, few would quarrel with the suggestion that Renaissance Italy was a society
where artistic achievement 'clustered'. The clusters are most spectacular in painting, from
Masaccio (or indeed from Giotto) to Titian; in sculpture, from Donatello (or from Nicola
Pisano in the thirteenth century) to Michelangelo; and in architecture, from Brunelleschi to
Palladio. Literature is a more difficult case. After Dante and Petrarch, comes what has been
called the 'century without poetry' (1375-1475), which is in turn followed by the
achievements of Poliziano, Ariosto and many others. The fourteenth and the sixteenth
centuries are great ages of Italian prose, but the fifteenth century is not (partly because
scholars preferred to write in Latin). In the realm of ideas, there are many outstanding figures
- Alberti, Leonardo, Machiavelli - and a major movement, that of the 'humanists', most
exactly defined as the teachers of humanities according to Peter Burke.
The most conspicuous gaps in this account of Italian achievements are to be found in music
and mathematics. Although much fine music was composed in Renaissance Italy, most of it
was the work of Netherlanders, and it is only in the sixteenth century that composers of the
calibre of the Gabrielis and Costanzo Festa appear. In mathematics, the famous Bologna
school belongs to the later sixteenth century.
Innovations: In Italy, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were certainly a period of
innovation in the arts, a time of new genres, new styles, new techniques. The period is full of
firsts- the first oil-painting, woodcut, copperplate and printed book (though all these
innovations came to Italy from Germany or The Netherlands). The rules of linear perspective
were discovered and put to use by artists. In sculpture we see the rise of the free-standing
statue, and more especially that of the equestrian monument and the portrait- bust. In
painting, too, the portrait emerged as an independent genre followed rather more slowly by
the landscape and the still-life. In architecture, the development, or even, perhaps, the
'invention', of conscious town planning took place in the fifteenth century according to
Westfall (1974). In literature, there was the rise of the comedy, the tragedy and the pastoral
(whether drama or romance). Art theory, literary theory, music theory and political theory all
became more autonomous in this period. In education, we see the rise of what is now called
'humanism' and was then called 'the studies of humanity'.
Innovation was conscious, though it was sometimes seen and presented as revival. The
classic statement about innovation in the visual arts is that of the mid-sixteenth-century artist-
historian Giorgio Vasari, with his three-stage theory of progress since the age of the
'barbarians'. The same pride in innovations is noticeable in his description of his own work in
Naples, the first frescos 'painted in the modern manner. He makes contemptuous references to
'Greek style' and the 'German style', in other words, Byzantine and Gothic art, according to
Burke. This disrespectful attitude to the past suggests the possibility that one reason for the
central place of Italy in the Renaissance was the fact that Italian artists had been less closely
associated with the Gothic style than their colleagues in France, Germany or England.
Innovations often take place in regions where the previously dominant tradition has
penetrated less deeply than elsewhere. For example, it may have been easier to develop a new
style of architecture in Florence in the fifteenth century than in Paris or even Milan.
Tradition and Renaissance: All the same, Renaissance Italians had not lost their reverence
for tradition altogether. What they did was to repudiate recent tradition in the name of a more
ancient one. Their admiration for classical antiquity allowed them to attack medieval
traditions as itself a break with traditions. When, for example, the fifteenth-century architect
Antonio Filarete referred to 'modern' architecture, he meant the Gothic style which he was
rejecting.
In any case the enthusiasm for classical antiquity is one of the main characteristics of the
Renaissance movement. In architecture, this tendency to imitate the Greeks and Romans is
particularly obvious. The treatise by the Roman writer Vitruvius was studied, and ancient
buildings were measured, in order to learn the classical 'language' of architecture, not only the
vocabulary (pediments, egg-and-dart mouldings, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns and so
on), but also the grammar, the rules for combining the different elements. In the case of
sculpture, such innovations as the portrait-bust and the equestrian statue were ancient genres
revived. In the case of literature, it is again easy to see how writers of comedy imitated the
Romans Terence and Plautus, writers of tragedy, Seneca, and writers of epic, Virgil.
Painting and music are more intriguing cases because classical models were not available, for
Roman paintings were only discovered in the 18th century. The lack of concrete exemplars
did not rule out imitation on the basis of literary sources. Botticelli's Calumny and his Birth
of Venus, for example, are attempts to reconstruct lost works by the Greek painter Apelles.
The literary criticism of classical writers such as Aristotle and Horace was pressed into
service to provide criteria for excellence in painting on the principle that 'as is poetry, so is
painting'.
Contemporaries generally claimed to be imitating the ancients and breaking with the recent
past, but in practice they borrowed from both traditions and followed neither completely cites
Burke. As so often happens, the new was added to the old rather than substituted for it.
Classical gods and goddesses did not drive the medieval saints out of Italian art but Coexisted
and interacted with them. Botticelli's Venuses are difficult to distinguish from his Madonnas,
while Michelangelo modelled the Christ in his Last Judgement on a classical Apollo. A
Renaissance prince would be as likely to read or listen to the medieval romance of Tristan as
to the classical epic of Aeneas, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is a hybrid epic - romance set
in the age of Roland and Charlemagne.
Again, the rise of humanism did not drive out medieval scholastic philosophy Lorenzo
de'Medici, the ruler of Florence, can be found writing to Giovanni Bentivoglio, the ruler of
Bologna, asking him to search the local bookshops for a copy of the commentary on
Aristotle's Ethics by the late medieval philosopher Jean Buridan, while Leonardo da Vinci
studied the work of Albert of Saxony and Albert the Great.
Trends: Realism, secularism and individualism are three features commonly attributed to the
arts in Renaissance Italy. All three characteristics are problematic.
In the case of the term 'realism', several different problems are involved. In the first place,
although artists in a number of cultures have claimed to abandon convention and imitate
'nature' or 'reality', they have nevertheless made use of some system of conventions. In the
second place, since the term 'realism' was coined in nineteenth-century France to refer to the
novels of Stendhal and the paintings of Courbet, its use in discussions of the Renaissance
encourages anachronistic analogies between the two periods. In the third place, the term has
too many meanings, which need discrimination. It may be useful to distinguish three kinds of
realism: domestic, deceptive and expressive.
 'Domestic' realism refers to the choice of the everyday, the ordinary or the low status
as a subject for the arts, rather than the privileged moments of privileged people
 Deceptive realism refers to style for example to paintings which produce attempt to
produce the illusion that they are not paintings.
 'Expressive' realism also refers to style, but to the manipulation of outward reality the
better to express what is within as in the case of a portrait where the shape of the face
is modified to reveal the sitter's character or a natural gesture is replaced by a more
eloquent one.
Expressive realism can be identified in Leonardo's Last Supper, or in the paintings of Raphael
and Michelangelo. More of an innovation in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance (as in the
Flemish art of the period) is the domestic realism of the backgrounds like in Carlo Crivelli's
Annunciation, (lingers lovingly on carpets, embroidered cushions, plates, books and the rest
of the interior decoration of the Virgin's room).
In literature, however, unlike painting, there were genres in which domestic realism filled the
foreground. There was the novella, for example, the short story dealing with the lives of
ordinary people, a favourite Italian genre. between Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and
Bandello in the sixteenth. The comedy might portray peasant life, as in the case of the plays
in Paduan dialect written and performed by Antonio Beoico il Ruzzante ('the jester'). Music
too might attempt to recreate hunting or market scenes.
More difficult is the question of deceptive realism. From Vasari to Ruskin and beyond, the
Renaissance was generally seen as an important step in the rise of more and more accurate
representations of reality. Heinrich Wolfflin, for example, suggested that 'it is a mistake for
art history to work with the clumsy notion of the imitation of nature, as though it were merely
a homogeneous process of increasing perfection' while celebrated art historian, Alois Riegl,
wrote more dramatically still that 'Every style aims at a faithful rendering of nature and
nothing else, but each has its own conception of nature'.
The evidence of an artist's conception of nature comes from his paintings, but the paintings
are then interpreted in terms of that same conception. It seems more useful to start from the
empirical fact that some societies, like some individuals, take a particular interest in the
visible world, as it appears to them, and that Renaissance Italy was one of these. Wax images,
often life-size and dressed in the clothes of the person they represented, were placed in
churches, life- masks and death-masks were frequently made, and some artists dissected
corpses in order to understand the structure of the human body.
Another distinctive feature of the Italian culture of the Renaissance was that it was, relative to
the Middle Ages, secular. The contrast should not be exaggerated. A sample study suggests
that the proportion of Italian paintings that were secular in subject rose from about 5 per cent
in the 1420s to about 20 per cent in the 1520s. In this case, 'secularization' only means that
the minority of secular pictures grew somewhat larger. In the case of sculpture, literature and
music, it more difficult to use quantitative methods, or to go beyond the obvious point that
several of the new genres were secular: the equestrian statue, for example, the comedy and
the madrigal.
There was another trend called 'crypto-secularizatiom’ which Burke talks about. Pictures
which are officially concerned with St George (say) or St Jerome seem to devote less and less
attention to the saint and more and more to the background; the saints become smaller, for
example. This trend suggests a possible tension between what the patrons really wanted and
what they considered legitimate. The difficulty is that contemporaries did not make the sharp
distinctions between the sacred and the secular that became obligatory in Italy in the late
sixteenth century, following the Council of Trent. Masses were based on the tunes of popular
songs. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino like to call himself a 'priest of the Muses', and there
was a 'chapel of the Muses' in the palace at Urbino. God and his vicar the pope might be
addressed as 'Jupiter' or 'Apollo'. Some people, such as Erasmus were scandalized by
practices such as these, but they persisted throughout the period.
Another characteristic described in detail by Burckhardt is 'individualism'. Like 'realism',
'individualism' is a term which has come to bear too many meanings. It will be used here to
refer to the fact that works of art in this period (unlike the Middle Ages) were made in a
personal style. However, this is disputed. To twentieth-century observers, medieval paintings
look much less like the work of different individuals than Renaissance paintings do, but this
may be an illusion or a hasty generalisation. At all events, the testimony of contemporaries
suggests that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists and public alike were interested in
individual styles. In his craftsman's handbook, Cennino Cennini advised painters 'to find a
good style which is right for you’. In his discussion of the perfect courtier and his
understanding of the arts, Baldassare Castiglione suggested that Mantegna, Leonardo,
Raphael, Michelangelo and Giorgione were each perfect ‘in his own style’. In literature, the
imitation of ancient models was a matter for debate, in which some protagonists, notably
Poliziano, attacked the ideal of writing like Cicero, and argued the value of individual self-
expression.' There was, of course, much imitation of classical and modern artists and writers.
Indeed, it was probably the norm. The point about individualism, like secularism, is not that it
was dominant, but that it was relatively new, and distinguishes the Renaissance from the
Middle Ages.
Some other general characteristics of more than one art may be worth a brief mention. There
was, for example, a trend towards greater autonomy, in the sense that the arts were becoming
increasingly independent from practical functions and from one another. Sculpture was
becoming more independent from architecture, thestatue from the niche. There are even a few
sculptures, like the battle scene made by Bertoldo for Lorenzo de'Medici, which have no
subject in the sense that they do not illustrate a story, and a few paintings at least which
appear to be independent of religious, philosophical or literary meanings.
Another general characteristic of Italian culture at this time was the breakdown of
compartments, the cross-fertilization of disciplines. The gap between theory and practice in a
number of arts and sciences narrowed at this time, and this was a cause or consequence of a
number of famous innovations. The humanist Leon Battista Alberti was a man of theory, a
mathematician, as well as a man of practice, an architect, and each kind of study helped the
other. His churches and palaces were built on a system of mathematical proportions, while he
told scholars that they could learn from observing craftsmen at work. Again, Leonardo's
studies of optics and anatomy were used in his paintings.
Another gap which was closing was the one between the culture of the different regions of
the peninsula, as Tuscan achievements became the model for the rest. The reception of the
Italian Renaissance abroad was preceded by the reception of the Tuscan Renaissance in other
parts of Italy. Florentine innovations were introduced by Florentine artists, such as Masolino
in Castiglione Olona (in Lombardy), Donatello in Padua and Naples, Leonardo in Milan, and
so on, while the dialect of Tuscany established itself as the literary language of the entire
peninsula.
Marked regional variations continued to exist throughout the period; Venetian painting, for
example, stressed colour where Tuscan painting stressed form {disegno), and Lombard
architecture emphasized ornament where Tuscan architecture emphasized simplicity.
However, the minor art centres, such as Siena or Emilia were gradually attracted into the
orbit of the greater ones. The rise of Rome, a city which lacked a strong artistic tradition of its
own but became a major centre of patronage in the early sixteenth century, encouraged an
inter-regional art. Like literature, the visual arts were more Italian in 1550 than they had been
a hundred or two hundred years before.
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