Week 29: Italian Renaissance Artists

After three weeks of Shakespeare…or four because wow I’ve been a slow reader…we somewhat relunctantly leave the Bard for Italy. This project has expanded my mind and heart in ways I was not prepared for. Falling in love with Shakespeare may be at the top of my list of surprises. But the list continues, and I must go with it.

As it turns out, this was a wonderful week! Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List serves up a week of artists with Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists and Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, two wonderful books that I had never heard of before this project. Given that we have a 250-page limit every week, Ted only assigned a few artists out of the former and a few chapters of the latter; suffice to say I will gladly finish these books when the year is over.

Vasari himself was a Renaissance artist and architect of some renown. While his book starts with artists in the 13th century, he really writes what (and who) he knows best. Ted selected the biographies of Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo for this week’s reading. Vasari paid them varying amounts of attention, since the biographies range from eight to eighty pages long.

The Lives reminded me so much of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (week 12), another near-contemporaneous history. Vasari isn’t as tempted to gossip as Suetonius is, but he still manages to make each artist a real person, much more than a signature at the bottom of a painting (or across a sculpture). Vasari is engaging, although sometimes he leaves out details that I’d like to know. Maybe it was just obvious how the apprentice system worked? Was it normal to support your family as an apprentice? How many people were working under the direction of someone like Michelangelo, for instance, on all that marble?

Vasari ends up accomplishing something bigger, though. His beautiful descriptions of the gifts of each artist are a primer in how to consider the art ourselves. It reminded me that this was a screen-free world, one where the viewer would know the story depicted in the art. Vasari describes the figures in various paintings, positions that were chosen just so the artist could show off his skills, lighting and shading that created effects more beautiful than the real world. These works of art weren’t merely to prove what the artist could do. They were prizes for the patrons, confirmation of their standing in a world where great art was the currency of power. I often feel like we live in a world governed by the tyranny of minimalism; what a different world that was.

Lives also bears witness to the absolutely remarkable riches of the world of the Italian Renaissance. I often marvel at the blessing the United States had in its remarkable group of “Founding Fathers.” After reading Lives, I feel the same way about Florence in the 16th century. How is it possible to have that much deep, deep artistic skill in one place? What system was in place that allowed that kind of inspired artistry to flower? I’m ending this book with more questions that answers.

I have a few thoughts about each of the artists assigned; I’ll just take those one-by-one:

• Giotto (1267-1337): He was an artist and architect, a pretty common combination if you could manage it. According to Vasari, he was funny, kind and devoted to the Church. His paintings were largely frescoes, which is unfortunate because they degrade; even in Vasari’s time they had deteriorated. An all-around nice guy (my words of course), he was very close friends with Dante. Some of his architectural work included the Uffizi and a renovation of Santa Croce in Florence.

• Botticelli (1445-1510): The Birth of Venus is one of his best-known paintings, and it’s that “look” of the light that made him stand out. He was prolific, but he did more work for private patrons (like the Medici family) than he did for the Church. He was known as a practical joker, well-loved, light-hearted, but also absolutely terrible with money. Towards the end of his life, he joined a sect of the church that demanded more of his time, so he painted much less. He died penniless.

• Da Vinci (1452-1519): Vasari describes da Vinci as handsome, strong, smart, and gifted in every way. Honestly, he sounds like Superman! He was intensely interested in many, many things, but Vasari points out that even as he took up and cast off other interests, he was always excellent at and pursued drawing. He’s well-known for his anatomical notebooks, sketching the structure of muscles and tendons. You can see this reflected in his paintings and drawings elsewhere, and he was extremely influential in this way. If you look at Botticelli’s Venus, none of the figures are very muscled; later artists all have figures with beautiful musculature. But he was also a prolific inventor and tinkerer. Vasari tells about him finding a lizard and ATTACHING WINGS to it made of the scales of another insect! Crazy. He had a heated rivalry with Michelangelo which led to him completely leaving Italy. He was not Christian until his deathbed, when he converted and took communion. King Francis I of France was on hand for that, in Amboise.

• Raphael (1483-1520): Raphael and Vasari were good friends, so Raphael gets tender treatment from Vasari. Throughout the biography, Vasari points out how Raphael imitated his current teacher. He because better at drawing than his drawing teacher, and then this happened again and again. He was apparently so good at imitating that it got in the way of his developing his own skills. In fact, that leads to what might be my favorite statement in the book: “…every artist should be content to do willingly those things towards which he feels a natural inclination and should never wish to undertake, in a spirit of competition, those tasks for which he lacks a natural gift, if he is not to work in vain and often to his shame and loss.” Vasari greatly admired Raphael’s exquisite use of color, and seems to mourn his sense of competition that detracted from what could have been. Raphael died rather young, at 37, and this too was a loss, both as a friend and an artist. Raphael was really the “what might have been” in this group of artists.

• Michelangelo (1475-1564): Vasari give Michelangelo epic treatment in his Lives. And it’s a huge story. Michelangelo was epically great at everything he touched; Vasari wasn’t even envious. He was just in awe. His big flaw was his temperamental disposition, always ready to see a slight and suspicious of those around him. It was amazing, though, that in spite of his touchiness and tendency to end up on the wrong side of political fights, his talent always saved him. “But he’s MICHELANGELO!” was enough to get him out of any scrape. Vasari tells a very interesting story of a Cupid that he sculpted rather early in his career. It was perfect, but at that time, old Roman artifacts commanded higher prices than new works. So he “antiqued” the sculpture and sold it to a collector for a huge premium. Later, the buyer found out he’d been duped and was angry. Someone else swooped in and bought the sculpture. The new buyer recognized quality and didn’t care about age. This story highlighted a pretty interesting dispute that was going on, and continues now: is the value in the age of the object, or in the skill and beauty of it?

Now, on to Cellini and his Autobiography. Benvenuto Cellini was born in 1500, and wrote his autobiography around 1558. He was a goldsmith and sculptor, but he really was a man in full, an accomplished musician, sword-fighter, criminal and lover. We only had to read a small part of this autobiography, but this would be high on my list if you are looking for a swash-buckling tale. Cellini is a terrific writer, funny and just honest enough for you to feel you can trust him. I have a few thoughts that I’ll just bullet-point:

• The “Prefatory Sonnet” is charming. I have already admitted that I’m a sucker for all of this sentimentality. Cellini starts on the right note for me!

• He tells an absolutely precious story of his parents’ marriage, and then his own birth. His father was so pleased at the birth of his son that he could also call him “Welcome”—Benvenuto.

• His father was skilled at inventing and was very good with ivory. He created a “Fortune’s Wheel” (there she is again) for Lorenzo de’ Medici, an actual wheel with representations of the virtues surrounding her.

• More than his inventiveness, though, his father loved music. His chief aim was to create in Benvenuto a gifted musician. This was a source of intense conflict between the two, although you can see how it hurts Benvenuto to have so little interest in what his father keenly desires for him.

• He’s rash and brash, prone to angry outbursts, one of which gets him banned from Florence. He could have taken a job with the sculptor Buonaroti in England, but Buonaroti had the gall to brag about punching Michelangelo in the nose. Since Cellini loved Michelangelo, he said no way.

• And that’s all I read! I loved this book and can’t wait to go back and finish it. If I can manage to pair it with a trip to Italy, so much the better.

Art this week is da Vinci’s notebooks, and Ted even gave us a link. But, to be honest, I went back and found YouTube videos of all the artists just so I could admire them. FUN! Here is what I watched:

These were all pretty decent, although I didn’t scour the internet looking for the very best video of each artist. I also found a video about Cellini that was just so weird that I didn’t want to link it. You’re welcome!

Finally, the music was a pure delight to me this week, and a surprise. Guillaume de Machaut (14th Century) and Josquin des Prez (15th century) were both musicians more from the French world than Italian, but it was interesting to listen to this music after reading about the world these artists inhabited. I listened to both composers while I was working it the kitchen (as usual). But this stopped me in my tracks. It’s ethereal and simply lovely—in particular the choral music of des Prez. Take a listen!

Okay! On to the next week where we head to Spain AND France with the first five chapters of Don Quixote and also Moliere’s Tartuffe. The music is piano compositions from Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados, and we look at the (Spanish, I think) artists El Greco, Velazquez and Goya. This should be fun because I know next to nothing about Renaissance Spain.

As always, Ted’s list is here and my Amazon list is here. Thanks for reading!