The intellectual education of the Italian Renaissance artist 9781108831321, 9781108916899, 2021024956, 2021024957, 9781108932738, 110883132X, 1108916899, 1108932738

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Content and Method
Knowledge Periodization versus Style Epoch
Artifex - Artista - Literato
The Artist's Advisor versus the Learned Artist
Mediators
One Mechanical Arts versus Liberal Arts and Recommendations for the Artist's Education
The Original Form of Paragone: A Competition among the Artes
Laying the Grounds for Categories and Theory at the Beginning of Art History (the Paragone Debate)
Recommendations on the Artist's Education by Literati and Artists
Drawing within a Liberal Arts Education
The Situation of the Artes and the Artist's Learning
Two Educational Places and Opportunities
Institutional Education for the Artist
From Medieval Artistic Education toward Universities and Academies for the Visual Arts
Academies for Artists
Public and Private Education in the Renaissance and Its Relevance for the Artist
The Demand for Public Education Following the Ancient Model
Elementary Schools
Latin Grammar Schools
Abacus Schools
Private Schools
Poor Students
Oral Apprenticeship for the Artist: Private and Public Teaching
Literary Academies Providing Intellectual Education for the Artist
Three The Mediating Texts
The Question of Language: Vernacular versus Latin
Commentaries
Key Early Renaissance Mediating Texts
Dante Alighieri's Convivio
Cristoforo Landino's Commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy
Religious Literature for Popular Use
Literature from the Vernacular Curriculum
Vite dei Santi Padri
Fior di virtu
Ancient and Medieval Literature from the Beginner's Latin Grammar Curriculum
Auctores: Aesopus and Theodolus
Physiologus
Classical Literature from the Intermediary and Advanced Curriculum
Ovid
Vergil
Lucan
Apuleius
Lucretius
Levels of Learning
Weaving Mediating Texts into Allegories: Botticelli's Primavera and Contemporary Commentaries
Landino, Ficino, and Marsi as Mediators for Dante, Plato, Ovid, and Horace
The Relevance of Renaissance Commentaries and Vernacular Interpretations for the Renaissance Artist
Four Vitruvius and Pliny as Sourcebooks, Educational Landmarks, and Intellectual Challenge
Pliny as the Ancient Sourcebook
The Artist as Reader, Translator, and Commentator on Vitruvius
Conclusion
Education and Society
Allegories, Mythologies, Commentaries
Knowledge Periodization versus Style Epoch?
Appendix A Printed Editions as Editio Princeps and Shortly after, Divided by Editions, Translations, and Commentaries
Ancient Texts in Early Latin Editions
Ancient Texts in Early Vernacular Editions
Commentaries
Appendix B Oral Lessons in Private and Public Environments
Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

THE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ARTIST

Scholars have traditionally viewed the Italian Renaissance artist as a gifted but poorly educated craftsman whose complex and demanding works were created with the assistance of a more educated advisor. These assumptions are, in part, based on research that has focused primarily on the artist’s social rank and workshop training. In this volume, Angela Dressen explores the range of educational opportunities that were available to the Italian Renaissance artist. Considering artistic formation within the history of education, Dressen focuses on the training of highly skilled, average artists, revealing a general level of learning that was much more substantial than has been assumed. She emphasizes the role of mediators who had a particular interest in augmenting artists’ knowledge, and highlights how artists used Latin and vernacular texts to gain additional knowledge that they avidly sought. Dressen’s volume brings new insights into a topic at the intersection of early modern intellectual, educational and art history. Angela Dressen is the Andrew W. Mellon Librarian at I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and faculty member at the University of Dresden. She is the author of Pavimenti decorati del Quattrocento in Italia (2008) and The Library of the Badia Fiesolana: Intellectual History and Education under the Medici (2013).

THE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ARTIST ANGELA DRESSEN I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108831321 doi: 10.1017/9781108916899 © Cambridge University Press 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Dressen, Angela, author. title: The intellectual education of the Italian Renaissance artist / Angela Dressen. description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2021024956 (print) | lccn 2021024957 (ebook) | isbn 9781108831321 (hardback) | isbn 9781108932738 (paperback) | isbn 9781108916899 (epub) subjects: lcsh: Education, Humanistic–Italy–History. | Artists–Education–Italy–History. | Artists–Italy–Intellectual life–History. | Books and reading–Italy–History. | Italy–Intellectual life–1268-1559. | BISAC: ART / General | ART / General classification: lcc la106 .d74 2021 (print) | lcc la106 (ebook) | ddc 370.11/2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024956 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024957 isbn 978-1-108-83132-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Preface INTRODUCTION 1

page vii ix 1

ME C H A N I C A L A R T S VE R S U S L I B E R A L A R T S A N D RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE ARTIST’S EDUCATION

26

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E D U C A T I ON A L P L A C E S A N D O P P OR T U N IT I E S

70

3

THE MEDIATING TEXTS

133

4

VI T R U V I U S A N D P L I N Y A S S O U R C E B O O K S , EDUCATIONAL LANDMARKS, AND INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE

283

CONCLUSION

322

Appendix A: Printed Editions as Editio Princeps and Shortly after, Divided by Editions, Translations and Commentaries

341

Appendix B: Oral Lessons in Private and Public Environments

355

Selected Bibliography

365

Index

379

v

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Botticelli, Calumny, ca. 1482 Cristoforo Landino, Formulario di epistole, 1490 Nicola Pisano, Liberal Arts at the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia (Geometry and Music), 1275–1277 Luca della Robbia, Orpheus, 1437–1439 School of Andrea Mantegna, Hercules and Antaeus, ca. 1497 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules, ca. 1490 Andrea Pisano, Daedalus, 1340s Andrea Pisano, Hercules, 1340s Andrea Pisano, Architecture, 1340s Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Peleus and Thetis (The Arrival and Procession), ca. 1490–1500 Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Peleus and Thetis (The Wedding), ca. 1490–1500 Luca Signorelli, Ovid and Vergil, 1499–1502 Luca Signorelli, Ovid, 1499–1502 Luca Signorelli, Lucan, 1499–1502 Bachiacca, Eve (and Adam) with Cain and Abel, 1520s Artist from Pesaro, Bowl with the Virgin and the Unicorn and Arms of Matthias Corvinus and Beatrice of Aragon, ca. 1486–1488 Artist from Castel Durante, Tazza with Ganymede and the Eagle, ca. 1535–1540 Vittore Carpaccio, Christ Showing the Instruments of Passion, 1496 Vittore Carpaccio, The Meditation on the Passion, ca. 1490 Piero di Cosimo, Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1510–1513 Piero di Cosimo, Procris and Cephalus (also called Satyr Mourning over a Nymph), ca. 1495 Piero di Cosimo, Forest Fire, 1497–1501 Piero di Cosimo, Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, ca. 1500–1515 Giulio Romano, Sala dei Giganti, 1532–1535 Piero di Cosimo, The Misfortune of Silenus, ca. 1500 Francesco di Giorgio, The Story of Oenone and Paris, 1460s Paolo Uccello, Battle of Greeks and Amazons before the Walls of Troy, ca. 1460 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Deianira, ca. 1475–1498

page 9 23 30 153 155 156 159 160 161 166 170 175 177 180 185 191 199 202 203 208 214 216 218 222 226 230 232 232 vii

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Pinturicchio, Odyssey of Penelope and Odysseus, 1509 Apollonio di Giovanni, Shipwreck of Aeneas, ca. 1450–1460 Apollonio di Giovanni, Aeneas at Carthage, ca. 1450 Giulio Romano and workshop, Sala di Troia, 1538–1539 Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono di Marco, Battle of Pharsalus and the Beheading of Pompey, ca. 1456–1465 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon, ca. 1470 Jacopo del Sellaio, Story of Psyche, ca. 1490 Raphael, Council of the Gods, 1517–1518 Raphael, Wedding Banquet of Armor and Psyche, 1517–1518 Giulio Romano, Story of Psyche, 1526–1528 Giorgione, Tempesta, ca. 1510 Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Mars and Cupid, 1511 (formerly ca. 1505) Botticelli, Primavera, ca. 1482 Giovanni Battista Caporali, Architettura , 1536 Luca Signorelli and his workshop, Libreria Albèri, 1501–1503

233 238 240 243 248 250 260 263 264 266 270 273 276 312 324

PREFACE

Lifelong learning is a question now as much as it was in the Renaissance. At that time, it was the introduction of print and the availability of free and open lectures which changed a society. Today this is guided by the digital transformation and open educational resources, which are aiming at the same, providing a stimulus for the society as a whole, and the intellectual curious individual in particular. Both foster guided and autodidactic learning alike. The artists belonged to both groups and the intellectually curious artists took advantage of the possibilities of the time. I feel grateful too, to participate in lifelong learning myself, and to help others to do so. This book manuscript has been accepted as a Habilitation thesis at the TU Dresden in 2019, and I would like to express my esteemed gratitude to my committee Jürgen Müller, Lina Bolzoni, and Alexander Nagel, as well as to Bruno Klein for the oral exams. I would like to thank them all for their support, readiness, and appreciative comments. The University of Dresden has accepted me as a faculty member (Privatdozentin) the same year. Collegial warm thanks go also to Darrel Rutkin, who helped getting the manuscript into style. Many stimulating evenings spend with Thomas Leinkauf discussing on the little terrace in Viale Petrarca helped to shape some arguments, especially as the book manuscript was taking its first shape. My mother has looked after my mental health with many care boxes, or all kinds of “Nervennahrung.” I would like to thank both my parents for the intellectual curiosity they passed down to me, a curiosity that is able to strive in many directions and does not know boundaries. May this book be a stimulus for many curious minds too!

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INTRODUCTION

CONTENT AND METHOD

Scholarship has often claimed that a complex and demanding work of art had been created by a minimally educated artist helped by a humanist advisor. Although this is occasionally true and documented, the majority of more demanding or literature-derived topics sprang out of the artist’s own invention. It is neither comprehensible that a humanist advisor was flanking the artist for an entire creation process, nor is it perceivable that an artist was intellectually gifted for one or two demanding works and otherwise little educated. This study aims to show how the educational process worked in the Renaissance in order to better understand and thereby judge the artist’s intellectual capacities and engagement. Participating in education was not as luxurious as we think today, and knowledge of Latin was also more widespread than is usually assumed. Also, the artists received help from a society that made significant efforts to bring learning to the populace. Ultimately relying probably on Aristotle’s Politics, the Renaissance had an open educational system that provided learning for different requirements. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the range of educational opportunities for the Renaissance artist. This research deliberately focuses not on the most famous and outstanding artists, but on the very skilled average artists in order to reveal a general level of learning that was much more substantial than is usually assumed. This study wants to show how education took place in the 1

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INTRODUCTION

Renaissance, and how and where the artisan class in general and the artist in particular fit into it. I therefore intend to show what elementary and advanced education could offer to an artist’s intellectual background. Also, rather than discussing humanist advisors, this book more importantly emphasizes the mediators who had a particular interest in furthering the knowledge of artists in general. Other emphasis is laid on the mediating texts that transmitted the desired knowledge in a more easily accessible manner. Making knowledge available to the less educated significantly augmented artistic possibilities. The sources used for establishing an artist’s learning are therefore printed sources on ancient or contemporary Latin or vernacular literature, translations, commentaries and paratexts, often using editions that did not receive another print run after the Renaissance and are little known today. These are then confronted with the artists’ literary expressions and the artistic works themselves. By tracing works of art back to their specific sources, one may investigate the learning a specific artist possessed: Did he access a Latin text, a vernacular translation or even a commentary? Some artists engaged with all of these categories, and even, as learned as they were, occasionally used a vernacular text. Some artists even faced the topic of executing paintings for almost all of the discussed texts, which shows that they were substantially knowledgeable about the literature of the Latin curriculum. Other exceptional artists received a complex humanist education, which enabled them to express themselves verbally on the same level as a literato. In linking the artists’ oeuvre with elementary and specific secondary education, one may show what the common texts were that an artist could easily access, and what the exceptional cases looked like that were left for the well-educated artist. Consequently, this process permits some general conclusions about how much the artist participated in general education. This book wants to show how the artist himself could participate in knowledge through his own engagement by exploring the period before the artists’ academies opened, that is, before intellectual learning for artists became institutionalized. Nevertheless, one should clarify immediately that, even with the academy’s opening, intellectual education was not one of its principal aims, becoming an additional goal only toward the last quarter of the sixteenth century. If we presume that Renaissance humanism did not consider a division into disciplines, but always followed an interdisciplinary approach, we have to look beyond the visual arts to see the influences and the possibilities of an intellectual background for both the society and the artist himself. This book seeks to apply methods and research done in the fields of the history of education and of literature, and in intellectual history. The author firmly believes that opening up to these other disciplines permits one to answer questions about an educational status quo for the Renaissance artist, which it may not be possible to answer when limiting one’s research to the original discipline.

CONTENT AND METHOD

Research published so far has not sufficiently expanded the field, but, rather, has tried to narrow it down to the discipline of art history alone, as if the solution must be found solely in the discipline itself – even when these studies were pursued by historians. Nevertheless, we cannot gauge the learning of a Renaissance artist without knowing about both the normal patterns of Renaissance education and, more broadly, what the society had to offer. Many researchers have taken art theory as produced either by artists themselves or by literati as the basis of their assumptions on the artist’s intellectual capacities and possibilities of outreach. This literature is of course a fundamental piece of information, but in the end, it is only one piece in a much more complex mosaic, which has more to offer if we look into the situation offered by the society and at the single artwork itself. Looking at recent scholarship, two important books by Francis Ames-Lewis and Bernd Roeck have been published on the topic of the learned artist. Neither of them, however, considers the artist’s education within the context of the history of education, with both focusing primarily on the artist’s social status, which is not necessarily connected to his education, not even for a court artist. Ames-Lewis’s groundbreaking introduction to The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist1 opened the argument onto a broader scale, thus moving away from the individual cases of highly gifted artisans. He wants to show that painters and sculptors were not merely craftsmen. Ames-Lewis lays much importance on contemporary Renaissance texts, an approach which will also be pursued in this book, although from a different angle. Despite the title, Ames-Lewis includes a significant amount of workshop training and figural composition, and he lays major importance on the social rank to which an artist could attain, laying almost more emphasis on the fact that an artist was famous and well connected rather than on his actual education. But he also includes image/text comparison and the importance of literary foundations. Despite being written by a historian, Bernd Roeck’s Gelehrte Künstler – Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten der Renaissance über Kunst2 hardly takes the history of education into account. Roeck is very interested in expressions made by artists about artistic theory and beauty, including anecdotes. Therefore, he deals exclusively with artists who have left their own literary expressions. Also Martin Kemp, who followed up on this topic in several publications, offers noteworthy questions about how an artist was able to transform a topic or a text and if he was able to invent the scheme by himself, in the end hardly goes

1 2

Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven 2000. Bernd Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler – Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten der Renaissance über Kunst, Berlin 2013.

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INTRODUCTION

beyond single examples.3 Although Kemp would like to assign the artist competence, he finds mostly examples of artists’ advisors and presumed little education for artists like Botticelli and others. He therefore focuses on examples of “the ‘super artist,’ the painter-intellectual” and his reputation.4 But reputation and artistic skills do not necessarily go in congruence and Kemp does not explain how and why even these exceptional artists were able to perform their art and skills. Robert Williams’s focus on the “superintendency of knowledge” which can be “understood as no more than knowledge ‘for use’” is anticipating the direction, this book will take, although with some different means. Williams sees superintendency as “the painter’s sense of having to know only as much about something as he will need for a particular representation of it,” as a “knowledge of knowledge” as well as “knowledge for use” as philosophical, rhetorical, or scientific concepts.5 Williams’s questions will be partially answered in this book, although from a different angle, looking more concrete into the situation of the society and the availability of knowledge, and its conquest by the artists. Many researchers have focused on the reception of ancient literature in Renaissance art, starting with prominent authors like Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky, and many more.6 But they are all principally concerned to mention authors and their works or philosophical concepts, without asking how these works got to the artist. In the few cases where they have, they proposed the so-called humanist advisor in the figure of Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano. Both of these humanists will play subordinate roles in the question of this book, since they were indeed little important as advisors. The majority of important works on Italian history and humanism give little significance to the intellectual education of the Renaissance artist because they suppose that artists attended school very briefly, if at all, and that the rest of their education happened during their manual apprenticeship.7 There are, however, some case studies on the learning of individual artists, most prominently on those painters connected to the Florentine literary academy. They

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Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New Haven 1997, p. 25. Kemp, Behind the Picture, p. 227. A contrary view is expressed by Lee, who considers the learned painter “a highly theoretical personage” (Rensslear W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis. The Humanistic Theory of Painting, New York 1967, pp. 41–42). Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy. From Techne to Metatechne, Cambridge 1997, pp. 7–8. For example: Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Los Angeles 1999; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London 1958; Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Uppsala 1960. See for example Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance. Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1999, pp. 51–63.

KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH

will not be explored in this context for two reasons: first, because there is already extensive literature on them;8 second and more importantly, they add little to the general question of the artists’ learning. The focus of this book lies chronologically in the century 1450–1550, but includes the opening of the Florentine Accademia del disegno (1563), while the geographical focus is likewise concentrated on Tuscany, with excursions to Rome, Venice, Bologna, and other cities. With the focus of the book upon the average learned artist, this naturally leads to Tuscany, which is confirmed by Peter Burke in his chapter on “Artists and Writers”: “Tuscany had 10 per cent of the population and 26 per cent of the elite.”9 Tuscany certainly provided a fertile ground for personal development, much more overtly than in other regions of Italy. Furthermore, the visual arts were exceptionally well developed in Tuscany. By contrast, Rome accumulated artists from other cities.10 For Rome, this does not exclude the possibility that the artists could have participated in education as boys or in their adult lives, and specific cases will be discussed later where this is true, but circumstances were certainly easier in Tuscany. KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH

Works of art reflect the general knowledge of their time. Regardless of the fact that, if a Romanesque sculptor was ordered to make a crucifix and executed it with four nails and without affects and the Gothic sculptor with three nails and with affects,11 if a Renaissance painter was ordered to paint a mythological story or an illustration of ancient poetry, he had to know about the story and the best way to present and interpret the topic. This is what Baxandall is calling “pictorially enforced commitment” which would be enforced by “a period style and personal idiom” and access to literary exegesis enforced with

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For example: Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet, Cambridge 2000; Bronzino: pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, ed. Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, Florence 2010; Ambra Moroncini, Michelangelo’s Poetry and Iconography in the Heart of Reformation, Abingdon 2017; Michelangelo Buonarroti: Leben, Werk und Wirkung: Positionen und Perspektiven der Forschung = Michelangelo Buonarroti: Vita, opere, ricezione : approdi e prospettive della ricerca contemporanea, ed. by Grazia Dolores Folliero-Metz and Susanne Gramatzki, Frankfurt 2013; Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, ed. Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi, Cambridge 2004; Benvenuto Cellini, artista e scrittore, ed. Pérette-Cécile Buffaria and Paolo Grossi, Paris 2009. Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance. Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1999, p. 45, note 4. See Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 45, see also p. 47. An example for the Romanesque four nail crucifix is the Volto Santo in the cathedral of Lucca (ca. 1200–1220) and for the Gothic three nail crucifix Nicola Pisano’s lecterns in Siena cathedral (1266–1268) and in the Pisan baptistery (ca. 1260).

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INTRODUCTION

symbolic meaning.12 This involved the knowledge of either theological questions, literary sources or natural phenomena. It is not likely that the artist got a detailed prescription for every commission, nor that he would ask a learned person continually for help. Many commissions, not only the highly demanding, needed a thorough preparation of the artist, including at least a basic training in literature, in the Bible and in theological questions, and some rudiments in the sciences. How much preparation an artist actually needed was an ongoing discussion from antiquity onward. In many cases we need to revise our opinion about the artist’s knowledge. Increasing over the centuries, education was available on different levels, and even the basic level in elementary schools provided much more knowledge than we would nowadays offer to a six- or seven-year-old. As Baxandall is saying, Trecento painters like Simone Martini and Lorenzo Monaco were not requested to know much about interpretative circumstances, while a mid-Quattrocento painter like Fra Angelico “was set a different task and had different resources.”13 Baxandall wants to sensibilize us regarding the “pictorially enforced signification,” whereas the painter consults significant literature regarding the topic of his painting. He examines the relationship of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation and Antonino Pierozzi’s Summa theologica and his exegesis of the gospels of St. Luke and his theological concept, which transmits interpretations, knowledge, and symbolic meanings, belonging to a theological concept for the author and a practical knowledge of specific parts and their visualization for the painter. Antonino offered interpretations of the original text, which were interesting for a pictorial rendering, of which the painter was able to grasp some basic symbolic meanings to give his picture a sophisticated new way of visualization. Therefore, Baxandall supposes “a running relation between theology and painting” (which should actually be opened up to literature and painting) even though both categories had different interests, means, and levels of in-depth applications.14 Since Wölfflin, art has been categorized into either the style of an artist, a national style, or the style of an epoch with its contemporary cultural influences. Wölfflin worked with the perception of art, aesthetic categories, and compositions. Including the philosophico-aesthetic concept of beauty, an artist like Botticelli was therefore seen mainly within the perspective of beautiful

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Michael Baxandall, Pictorically enforced signification: St. Antonius, Fra Angelico and the Annunciation, in: Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg, ed. Andreas Beyer, Vittorio Lampugnani and Gunther Schweikhart, Alfter 1993, pp. 31–39. Baxandall, Pictorically enforced signification, p. 33. Baxandall, Pictorically enforced signification. On a similar vein see Peter Howard, Painters and the visual art of preaching: The exemplum of the fifteenth-century frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 13, 2010, pp. 33–77.

KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH

representations of women in either sacred or profane settings.15 Panofsky will later try a general critical approach to periodization; also he recognizes a connection between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism between 1130/ 40 and 1270 as evinced through a “monopoly in education” in cathedral schools and universities. Gothic architects, as Panofsky assumes, came in contact with Scholastic education through schools, letters, and oral learning.16 Panofsky and the generations after him see style periods as being determined by influences from outside the artist, mostly culture in general, but not the artist’s education and access to information in particular.17 But what determines the artist’s oeuvre is style, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other. Both categories, however, do not necessarily need to develop together. Knowledge gives access to topics, literature, and interpretations, whereas style can come from regional influences, the study of ancient or medieval predecessors, personal taste, etc. I would like to propose – albeit briefly as a first rudimentary advancement – a periodization based on knowledge rather than one judged on style. The major differences between the Romanesque period, followed by the Gothic and the Renaissance, depended largely on the knowledge available either to certain social classes or to the society as a whole. When specific knowledge entered the society, it defined an epoch. The availability of this knowledge concerned everyone: the learned academics and humanists as well as patrons and artists. Coming back to our Roman sculptor being ordered to make a crucifix, he would follow the dogma of showing a convincingly dead Christ up to the middle of the thirteenth century. The source most likely would have been Augustine’s City of God, where the patristic author declared that God sent his Son who was nailed on the cross by unbelievers, where he definitely died, before his resurrection took place. Therefore, showing a dead Christ hanging motionless on the cross would be the required visualization. From the middle of the thirteenth century onward, however, the dominant theological questions changed. For example, in his Summa contra gentiles, Thomas Aquinas referred to Aristotle’s De anima, where the ancient theory of the soul entered. Now converted into a Christian soul, which was supposed to be immortal, it was crossed again with the ancient soul (referring to Aristotle’s anima rationalis),

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Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: das Problem der Stilentwickelung in der neueren Kunst, Munich 1920, pp. 1–44. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Latrobe 1951, pp. 1, 20–23; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 1. See the chapter “Renaissance – Self-definition or self-deception?” in: Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, pp. 1–41.

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INTRODUCTION

the place of affects.18 This led sculptors like Benedetto Antelami to provide a scene where the dead body of Christ is taken from the cross, but the soul is still able to show affects, as here directed toward Mary. The distinction between the dead body and the soul that lives on was something that a knowledgeable artist would want to address, in order to show that he himself is aware of the discussion. Comparing Benedetto Antelami’s crucifixion in the cathedral of Parma with Nicola Pisano’s crucifixion on the pulpit in the cathedral of Pisa, which were both created at roughly the same time that Thomas Aquinas was composing his Summa contra gentiles, we can notice an increasing demonstration of affects, the vivid representation of emotions and characters, which leads to the question of how much the artist knew about ancient writers like Horace and Plutarch. Also a patron, most likely a church or monastery, would have wanted the artist to be able to make such distinctions. Pisano showed the dead Christ inclined with his head toward St. John, as if the two were looking at each other. His body, obviously dead, still shows signs of life, like the thumbs on both hands showing upward. The solders on the right are either holding their arms up, as if they wanted to protect themselves against this dead but vivid body, or showing signs of wonder and thoughtfulness. The idea of presenting affects in art had been addressed in antiquity, for example, in Horace (Ars poetica, 361–365) and in Plutarch (De gloria atheniensium 3, 346f– 347a), who praised a vivid representation of emotions and characters. Only a few artists would have known about these ancient sources, whereas Thomas Aquinas’s book was present at any major library. The affects presented in these scenes are therefore a product of theologico-philosophical debates. They would ultimately be connected to the rising gothic movement, where sentiments and emotions came into statues that had previously been fixed. This was ultimately only a secondary expression of acquired knowledge. The question of style is therefore secondary to the question of knowledge, which itself depends on the artist’s education. Access to literature was fundamental. If we look at the Renaissance, we realize that in the first half of the fifteenth century, humanists were involved in discovering the antique, but artists still had limited access to this knowledge; only those who managed Latin could participate. Then, with the three major translation periods, the 1470s and ’80s, the 1520s and ’30s, and the 1540s and ’50s, almost all important literature became available in translation and in print (see Chapter 3 and the Appendix). Consequently, there was a big step forward in iconographical content from the 1470s onward (e.g., Botticelli’s Calumny, Fig. 1; see also Chapter 3), followed by its passing to the high Renaissance 18

Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, trans. Karl Albert, Karl Allgaier, Leo Dümpelmann, Paulus Engelhardt, Leo Gerken and Markus H. Wörner, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 281–285, 297–305, 371–377 (book 2, chapters 65, 66, 70–72, 79).

KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH

1 Botticelli, Calumny, ca. 1482. Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

around 1520, when artists felt more self-confident about ancient sources. Then, from the 1540s onward, when new translations were mainly concerned with philological aspects rather than content and a lot of educational support was available from learned men, the artists started to focus differently on their métier. This opened a discussion on their own theory of the discipline, while refining later a maniera, a question of style, which grew out of the theoretical debates as a personalized style became their distinguishing and promotable feature. Mannerism happened at precisely the time when all necessary knowledge was available in the vernacular, when the visual arts finally gained an organized educational structure, and when the educated artist was becoming the norm. Nevertheless, the artists felt a need to express what was singular to their own category, freed from every input from the humanities and sciences, which otherwise took up a large part of their own educational programs. The period circumscribed in this book (1450–1550) testifies to the evolution from the artists’ manual labor and physical efforts to their conceptualization of the work process, their intellectual efforts in invention that placed them closer to the speculative sciences, and their grounding theories for the visual arts. All of these topics had a centuries-long if not a millennial history, but it happened in the Renaissance that public recognition finally and definitively changed. The artifex became a skillful inventor and knowledgeable promoter of his own labor. In the same period, the historical discussion about the standing of the visual arts among the liberal arts took place and was finally grounded in the

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opening of the artistic academies. All of these processes evolved either due to remarkable artists going beyond the tradition and seeking out education and recognition or through dedicated literati who served as mediators. For example, the two most important (and, in fact, almost the only) texts on the visual arts surviving from antiquity were Vitruvius’s De architectura and Pliny’s Natural History.19 Both texts contained a broad range of topics important for artists and architects. Both texts were also widely read by most of the learned people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The artists themselves came second, as their access to these texts was made difficult by both language problems and availability. It was probably from Alberti’s artistic treatises that the artists realized the significance and importance of these texts for their own works. But, although Alberti liberally cited from both texts, he provided neither a full version nor a translation. Once translations of these works became available in print at the end of the fifteenth century, the visual arts might have felt that now, finally, they had better foundations for talking about their own métier with greater authority, since they now had proper access to the ancient authorities. This is similar for the availability of Euclid’s Elements, another fundamental text for artists, which received its first translation shortly after 1500. The people responsible for these early and important translations were either humanists with a considerable affinity for the visual arts, the mediators, like Cristoforo Landino and Luca Pacioli, or the first artists with significant intellectual training, like Francesco di Giorgio and Cesare Cesariano. The availability of these texts marked an epoch, which we call the Renaissance – the rebirth of ancient knowledge – on which contemporary capabilities could build. ARTIFEX – ARTISTA – LITERATO

When reading about arte in Renaissance texts, one has to carefully bear in mind that art was considered to comprise all of the manual and the liberal arts, which were the intellectual arts. Likewise, the term artista referred originally to a student of the liberal arts, but was then increasingly used also for a visual artist. In his Vitruvius commentary (1556), Daniele Barbaro used the term “art” in the first place for the visual arts, but also, secondarily, for the liberal arts. He does not make a clear terminological distinction, probably because he placed architecture within the ranks of the liberal arts (see Chapter 4). In the Middle Ages, an unambiguous term for a visual artist was artifex. As we will see in Chapter 1, Thomas Aquinas distinguished between the wise architect, a real artist (artifex) who had created an architectural plan, on the one hand, and the 19

Philostratus’ Imagines still played a much lesser important role in Renaissance literature (see Chapters 3 and 4).

ARTIFEX – ARTISTA – LITERATO

inferior stonemason working under the architect, on the other (Summa theologiae, 1.6).20 In the same vein, Dante confirms in his Convivio that human nature may itself be praised as an artifex, since it is enabled to produce beauty (Convivio III.4).21 Both Thomas Aquinas and Dante described the skilled artisan working in the visual arts as an inspired person able to create something new, and not as a simple artisan who merely reproduces. Both ultimately relied on Aristotle, but assigned to the artist more creative capacities than Aristotle had done in his division of the liberal and mechanical arts (see Chapter 1). Then, in the Renaissance, the encyclopedist Ambrogio Calepino confirmed that the artifex is technically a creator in his science (artifex, dêmiourgos, technitês).22 When the visual arts demanded to be considered as part of the liberal arts during the Renaissance, the term artista was increasingly used for the visual arts, whereas a person with a higher arts education would often be called a literato, someone who had studied letters (Latin literature) and therefore had access to scientific literature as well as to other literature from the curriculum of higher education.23 As Black writes, “the vocabulary for learning to write was idiosyncratic. The key word was littere – lictere – lettere,”24 which meant being able to deal with Latin on a basic level. But a literato then was more capable than that. This division between artista and literato was an established terminology by the middle of the sixteenth century, when both visual artists and literati were organized in academies. The encyclopedist Calepino confirmed at the beginning of the sixteenth century that the literato is someone who had gone to school, engaged with the curriculum, and therefore studied the relevant literature. For Calepino, the result was connected to ingenium, memory, ratio, and diligence.25 But the two poles kept growing together, and the architect Cesare Cesariano urged his fellow architects to become “literati.” He explained that, in the end, this was the path that would open up to other sciences too, and that no science was accessible to anyone who was

20

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Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Dominicians and Benedictines in Germany and Austria, Graz 1982, vol. 1, p. 17. Dante, Convivio, ed. Giorgio Inlese, Milan 1993, p. 159. Ambrogio Calepino, Ambrosii Calepini Bergomatis lexicon, Lyon 1538, col. 176. In recent research, literato has been used as a synonym for someone who worked as a secretary of state, or a man knowledgeable about art, without questioning the category itself. See: Essere uomini di “lettere”: segretari e politica culturale nel Cinquecento, ed. Antonio Geremicca and Hélène Miesse, Florence 2016. Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, ca. 1250–1500, Leiden 2007, p. 59. Since Coluccio Salutati, the term “scientia litterarum” referred to the knowledge of texts, since texts incorporated knowledge (Rainer Stillers, Humanistische Deutung. Studien zu Kommentar und Literaturtheorie in der italienischen Renaissance, Düsseldorf 1988, pp. 282–283). Ambrogio Calepino, Ambrosii Calepini Bergomatis lexicon, Lyon 1538, col. 1112.

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INTRODUCTION

not a literato.26 Cesariano was relying here on the ancient authority Vitruvius, who had demanded the same, since literature was one of the main subjects to be studied.27 During the sixteenth century, this intellectual gap was bridged, and, since Panofsky, research has acknowledged that “the Renaissance produced . . . the artistically-minded humanists and the humanistically-minded artists of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”28 Nevertheless, throughout the Renaissance the artist is set in opposition to the so-called literato, a term which, in recent years, has been interpreted in many ways. Often based on Leonardo’s self-declaration as being an “uomo senza lettere,” both historians and art historians have thought that the painter did not go to school and therefore did not learn how to read and write in Latin.29 This has often led to the conclusion that Leonardo did not read the Latin books he possessed in his library,30 an extravagant notion given both that he possessed quite a few of them and that books were valuable possessions in the manuscript era and in the early days of printing. Through other channels, however, we know that this supposition is simply not true, and that Leonardo had likely studied more than just the basics of Latin (see Chapter 2). Following Vasari, Leonardo had a solid and profound preparation in “lettere,” a subject he benefited from substantially, and Vasari only criticized Leonardo’s inability to stick with one topic or task.31 His striking intellectual curiosity certainly carried him off in many directions. Still known through various inventories, Leonardo’s substantial library speaks volumes about his vast learning. And when, around age twenty-five, he owned a Latin translation by Giovanni Argiropulo of Aristotle’s works, one of the most desirable books with regard to 26

27

28 29

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Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura libri decem traducti de latini in vulgare affigurati, Como 1521, ff. 3r–v. On Cesariano’s explanation of the literate architect, see also Alessandro Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesariano, in: Cesare Cesariano e il classicismo di primo Cinquecento, Milan 1996, pp. 247–308, see pp. 302–303. Vitruvius, Architettura con il suo commento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato, Perugia 1536, p. 4 v. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 9. Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance. Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1999, p. 61; Carlo Dionisotti, Appunti su arti e lettere, Milan 1995, p. 44; Pietro C. Marani, Per la ricostruzione della biblioteca di Leonardo. Una breve introduzione, in: La biblioteca di Leonardo. Appunti e letture di un arista nella Milano del Rinascimento, ed. Pietro C. Marani and Marco Versiero, Milan 2015, pp. 1–3; Carlo Vecce, La biblioteca perduta. I libri di Leonardo, Rome 2017, p. 17, see also p. 124; Barbara Fanini, La biblioteca di lettere di un uomo “senza lettere,” in: Leonardo e i suoi libri. La biblioteca del genio universale, ed. Carlo Vecce, Florence 2019, pp. 33–41, see pp. 33–35; Carmen C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, New Haven 2019, vol. 2, pp. 3–10 (although Bambach suggests not to take this utterance as “face value”). For example: Dionisotti, Appunti su arti e lettere, p. 22; Pierto C. Marani, Per la ricostruzione della biblioteca di Leonardo. Una breve introduzione, in: La biblioteca di Leonardo. Appunti e letture di un arista nella Milano del Rinascimento, ed. Pietro C. Marani and Marco Versiero, Milan 2015, pp. 1–3; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 102, 114. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, Florence 1550, p. 563.

ARTIFEX – ARTISTA – LITERATO

a humanist education, we should not assume that he was unable to read it.32 Instead, Leonardo constantly added to his library more and more demanding Latin grammars, starting with the Donatus minor in a bilingual Latin/vernacular edition, moving on to Niccolò Perotti’s Rudimenta grammatices and then to Francesco da Urbino’s Regulae latinae, Priscian’s grammar, and Guarino Guarini’s Regulae grammaticales.33 His collection amounted to a virtually complete selection of Latin grammars, and no learned humanist would necessarily have possessed more than these. Leonardo, of course, was an outstanding artist who was exceptionally learned, as his library testifies, and he can even be seen as an example of those artists who frequented university lectures (see Chapter 2). In his popular Academy lessons on Dante’s Comedy, Giovanni Battista Gelli explains what he understands by the term “uomini litterati”: “I do not intend under literati those who only understand languages; they should be called precisely ‘dragomanni.’ Rather, I intend those who want to understand the sciences, the arts, the secrets of nature, and therefore learn languages to understand these.”34 In these terms, Leonardo was certainly a literato and his own expression has to be understood as deriving from a perverse mood, as a way to challenge others, a habit he will demonstrate more often. Similar confusion also occurred regarding other artists. About Brunelleschi, Vasari said that he did not have “lettere,” although he first mentioned that Brunelleschi’s father wanted to make him a notary and send him to (Latin) grammar and abacus school.35 Brunelleschi certainly learned Latin, but what Vasari – like others – wanted to say is that he was not a person who had pursued higher education. When Vasari then tells us that Brunelleschi studied with the famous mathematician Paolo Toscanelli, even though he did not have “lettere,” this means that he did not possess knowledge of the classical and scientific texts and methods on a higher level of learning. In Brunelleschi’s case, the simple fact that he learned geometry was not surprising, in that this subject often belonged at the abacus level, but that he studied it with the university teacher Toscanelli was indeed worth mentioning. As another case, Giuliano da Maiano was sent to grammar school by his father (a stonemason) with the desire that his bright boy should become a notary. But that he turned

32

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35

Vecce offers a contrary opinion: Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 63–64. Following Bambach Leonardo had a variety of friends on which he could rely for a translation (Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, pp. 3–5). See inventory: Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 83, 189–199. Giovanni Battista Gelli, Letture edite et inedite di Giovanni Battista Gelli: sopra la Commedia di Dante, raccolte per cura di Carlo Negroni, Florence 1887, vol. 2, p. 372. Gelli names Homer as an example of those who had left behind all those “uomini litterati” because of his capacities in energetic and efficient representation. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, Florence 1550, pp. 294–296.

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INTRODUCTION

out to not be interested in those studies, as Vasari says,36 does not indicate that he did not learn Latin. This intelligent boy evidently did so, and later possessed a remarkable library for an artist, with several Latin texts.37 Vasari himself was also labeled as a non-literato, this time for linguistic reasons. His defense shows that being a literato or not was not primarily connected to a knowledge of a language, but went beyond this: “Since I am not a man of letters, I know that certain presumptuous persons will feel justified in censuring me, alleging that I am ignorant of all learning in matters of writing. Fools! . . . They maintain that because of my lack of literary learning, I cannot properly express the subjects I wish to treat. They do not realize that my subjects do not require the words of others for their expression but only experience, the mistress of whoever wishes to write well. I have taken her as my mistress and will not cease to state it.”38 Whoever among the artists was a literato had broader access to knowledge and to textual authorities. This circumstance categorized the transition from being among the merely mechanical arts toward art itself, where the artist had an intellectual education. Being a literato was the crucial category for this distinction. It meant that one was capable of accessing important authoritative textual sources, which until the early sixteenth century were mainly in Latin, and consequently one could engage with them in one’s artistic, and now intellectual manual work. Pamela Long describes the gradual approach that the Renaissance artist took toward learned people: “Some learned men undertook practices in which they became skilled, and some artisans took up writing, tried to learn Latin, and in one way or another absorbed humanist learning.. . . Substantive communication between the skilled and the learned, both person-to-person and through writing and reading, became increasingly common.”39 Furthermore, the wording and organization of artistic education underwent changes. Artistic congregations could be called a universitas in the middle ages, as in Rome and in Florence (see Chapter 2). This university had little to do with higher education and basically organized religious meetings and practical exercises. When the artists then opted for an institution of higher social standing, they opened an Accademia in the middle of the sixteenth century. This term had been used for an institution like a university in the

36 37

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Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 355. Lorenzo Cendali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, Sancasciano 1926, pp. 178–186; Creighton Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, Florence 1988, pp. 75–76; Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano: A Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance, Turnhout 2006, p. 462. Quote from André Chastel, Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Art and the Artist, Mineola 2003, p. 30. Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Corvallis 2011, p. 62. See also Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 18.

THE ARTIST’S ADVISOR VERSUS THE LEARNED ARTIST

medieval Latin world, but it was then adopted during the Renaissance for groups of humanists and their gatherings for the attainment of knowledge.40 Having this example right in front of their eyes, the Florentine artists decided to follow this direction, although their organization was still somewhat different. THE ARTIST’S ADVISOR VERSUS THE LEARNED AR TIST

It has commonly been assumed that highly gifted painters like Botticelli had a humanist advisor to interpret ancient literary sources for them. This (imagined) advisor would help the artist to select and understand critical texts, and to clothe the ancient source in an appropriately neoplatonic and Christian vestment. In Botticelli’s case, the name of Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) in particular has been proposed, largely on the grounds that both belonged to the Medici inner circle. Poliziano would have helped the painter to understand ancient texts and interpret them in a contemporary way.41 Also, in the case of Michelangelo, it has been proposed that at the age of sixteen (around 1491–1492), he received literary advice from Poliziano, who helped him to compose the famous relief with the centaurs. Several sources from the sixteenth century regarding Michelangelo confirm this contact.42 By contrast, Lisner presents a literary source for the relief and points to Landino’s Dante commentary.43 Although we are not dealing here with proper teaching and lessons, the case of Michelangelo suggests that there were fruitful exchanges between humanists and artists, even when they were young. This happened in most cases, or certainly more easily at the courts with an open intellectual atmosphere and colloquial debates (in vulgare), as at Florence, Milan, Ferrara, and Mantova, where artists met with humanists and scientists and found an

40

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For example, in Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, Paris 1641, vol. 1, p. 607; Angelo Poliziano, Opera omnia, Basel 1553, pp. 25, 43. See on the term also James Hankins, The myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Renaissance Quarterly, 44:3, 1991, pp. 429–475. On Poliziano as Botticelli’s advisor, see, for example, Aby Warburg, Sandro Botticellis Geburt der Venus und Frühling: eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance, Hamburg 1893, pp. 2–5; Stanley Meltzoff, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola: “Theologia Poetica” and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano, Florence 1987, pp. 225, 230 note 230, 234–283; Fosca Mariani Zini, Le judgement suspend: la calomnie à Florence, Traditio, 53, 1998, pp. 231–249, see p. 248; Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli, Milan 2005, p. 298. Peter Burke sees Poliziano and Ficino as advising Botticelli on his Primavera (Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1999, p. 111). Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 111; Creighton Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, University Park 2003, pp. 107 and 177, note 68. Margrit Lisner, Form und Sinngehalt bei Michelangelos Kentaurenschlacht, mit Notizen zu Bertoldo di Giovanni, in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24:3, 1980, pp. 299–344, see pp. 300–304, 310–311; also Michael Hirst, The Young Michelangelo, London 1994, pp. 14–16.

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INTRODUCTION

easily approachable atmosphere of intellectual exchange.44 There were numerous artists interested in the other arts and sciences, as well as scientists eager to support the artists and their needs. Humanists and scientists could help the artist in finding new topics, in representing nature and naturalistic effects more effectively, in dealing with complex stories of ancient or contemporary literary culture, and in shaping their ideas to include neoplatonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, or Epicurean arguments, to name only a few. Artists could help scientists in representing their new ideas and discoveries, and in putting them into practice. In his thorough article on artist’s advisors, Charles Hope had supposed: “As a result, virtually every work of art from this period known to have been based on a learned program is immediately recognizable as such, either from the unusual subject matter or from the proliferation of obviously meaningful detail.”45 But as we will see, the artist did not necessarily need to rely on expert help when he had translations and commentaries at hand that provided him with sources otherwise inaccessible. Hope also points out that whether a painter was given a program or not largely depended on the character of the patron and his willingness to give freedom to the painter or to control him completely. He then draws the conclusion: “If one examines the very few works of art of the early and high Renaissance known to be based on programs devised by humanists, one finds the content straightforward and even banal.”46 In a variety of cases, an advisor does seem plausible, or is even attested. Already for the Middle Ages, advisors have been proposed for more complex programs. Following Max Seidel, the advisor for Nicola Pisano and his artes liberales cycle on the pulpit in Siena might have been the grammar professor Teobaldo di Orlando, who suggested texts by Martianus Capella (De nuptiis philosophiae et Mercurii) and Alano delle Isole (Anticlaudianus).47 Gerd Kreytenberg believes that Giotto’s program for the Florentine campanile reliefs showing the mechanical and liberal arts was influenced by a Dominican from Santa Maria Novella, who was learned in scholasticism.48 For the third pair of

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46 47 48

See, for example, Leo Olschki, Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften, 1965, pp. 242–248; Marianne Pade, La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo 1441–1598, Kobenhavn 1990; Stephen John Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este, New Haven 2006; Charles M. Rosenberg, The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, New York 2010; Elisabeth Mantovani, Estensi: storia, simboli e magie di corte, Modena 2014; Alison Cole, Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power, London 2016. Charles Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors in the Italian Renaissance, in: Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, Princeton 1981, pp. 293–343, see p. 298. Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 304–306, 339 (citation). Max Seidel, Padre e figlio. Nicola e Giovanni Pisano, Venice 2012, pp. 175–211. Gert Kreytenberg, Andrea Pisano und die toskanische Skulptur des 14. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1984, pp. 60, 77–78.

THE ARTIST’S ADVISOR VERSUS THE LEARNED ARTIST

doors for the Florentine baptistery, Ghiberti indirectly received some instruction from Leonardo Bruni. In his letter from 1426 to Niccolò da Uzzano, he described the circumstances of the program, although he did not note to whom the commission would be going. It was, therefore, anonymous advice on behalf of a committee in the context of a competition set by the comune. Bruni describes that he had chosen twenty stories and eight prophets.49 In 1503 Isabella d’Este gave through Francesco de’ Malatesta a detailed description of a program, probably composed by Paride da Ceresara, to Perugino that she had set out by herself. She provided not only the topic but also the details for the individual figures: Our poetic invention, which we greatly want to see painted by you, is a battle of Chastity against Lasciviousness, that is to say, Pallas and Diana fighting vigorously against Venus and Cupid. And Pallas should seem almost to have vanquished Cupid, having broken his golden arrow and cast his silver bow underfoot; . . . I am sending you all the details in a small drawing, so that with both the written description and the drawing you will be able to consider my wishes in this matter. . . . you are free to reduce them, but not to add anything else.50

This commission should be understood to be extraordinary, and was certainly not the rule. In most cases, the artist would have to follow his own invention, and this is precisely why he was chosen as a capable artist. Highly praised painters were expected to deal with complex programs of their own devising, and to use their creative and skilled minds to compose a suitable topic and setting. This is mentioned, for example, in the contract with Gentile and Giovanni Bellini from 1492 for the decoration of the Scuola di San Marco in Venice, which simply referred to the quality of the painters: “No arrangement is made concerning the fee, nor shall any other arrangement be made, save with reference to their work, their consciences and the discretion of experienced and intelligent persons.”51 And indeed, as confirmed by Bembo, when working for Isabella d’Este, she was told: “He does not like to be given many written details which cramp his style.”52 Normally, an artist was given a very general topic, which either he was completely free to compose or he would

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Letter in: David S. Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, London 1970, pp. 47-48. See also Richard Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton 1982, vol. 1, pp. 14, 171–176; Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors, pp. 323–324. Letter in: Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 135–138; Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors, pp. 293–294, 308–309; Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art, University Park 1994, pp. 102–104; Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 64, 236–237. Letter in: Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 56–57. Quote in: Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors, p. 309.

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INTRODUCTION

present a drawing to show the invention and the composition.53 Creighton Gilbert confirmed that in many cases only a general topic was confirmed in the contract. The rest was the choice of the artist. Gilbert seems not to have known about a document from the fifteenth century that would establish more, although some information might have been given orally.54 Increasingly, the artist became involved with a learned environment and learned patrons, and new and demanding topics to deal with – and also in an intellectual debate about artistic practices and core arguments.55 Also, patrons came to recognize the increasing skill and learning of their artists, and they did not hesitate to acknowledge that this art is similar to the liberal arts. Thus, for example, at Urbino in 1468, Luciano Laurana was praised for his architecture, which skills were based on arithmetic and geometry, and were therefore grounded in the liberal arts.56 When Hope states that “by the mid-sixteenth century, then, the practice of consulting learned advisers was well established, but by no means an invariable rule,”57 we can go further and ask ourselves whether this happened through direct advice or through knowledge that they made available by other means (see Chapter 3). In general, it has always been supposed that “artists and writers belonged to two different cultures, the cultures of the workshop and the university,” which belonged to “two cultures and two systems of learning: manual and intellectual, Italian and Latin.”58 While this is certainly true for most cases, there is also the category of the learned artist that arose in the early Renaissance. It is only in the fifteenth century that the artist gets pointed toward a kind of intellectual training that would help him shape his creative ideas and put them into practice. Therefore, this study will emphasize the point that, instead of relying on a learned advisor, the painter’s own literary choices could have been aided by existing vernacular translations of classical and humanistic texts, and also by Latin or vernacular philological commentaries on ancient sources. These sources would have provided useful explications and guidance, weaving ancient, medieval, and contemporary literary sources into a sophisticated allegorical tapestry. Well-known themes were presented as topical issues already incorporating the new vein of humanist interpretation. Such secondary 53

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56 57 58

See, for example, the contract with Vincenzo Foppa, Bonifacio da Cremona and Jacobino Vicemala in 1474, where the painters were asked to make a drawing first, together with an estimate of costs (Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, p. 156). Creighton Gilbert, The Archbishop of the painters of Florence, 1450, The Art Bulletin, 41:1, 1959, pp. 75–87, see p. 85; Creighton Gilbert, Italian Art 1400–1500: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs 1981, pp. xviii–xxvii, 36–40, 112–116, 133–135, 163–165, 171–173. For the change in social standing which the artist achieved at the same time, see, for example, Martin Warnke, Artisti di corte, Rome 1991, especially pp. 64–100. Quote in: Warnke, Artisti di corte, p. 93. Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors in the Italian Renaissance, p. 307. Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1986, pp. 51, 58.

THE ARTIST’S ADVISOR VERSUS THE LEARNED ARTIST

sources importantly allowed artists to reflect on ancient themes in a newly considered neoplatonic and Christian light. Some of these commentaries were even written in the vernacular, which made them ideally accessible to both painters and their patrons. There has already been some discussion about the artists’ erudition, which mainly led to the conclusion that an artist would have visited a primary school for reading and writing, and probably also an abacus school to learn the basics of accounting. Both skills were certainly needed in a workshop. This basic education could have taken place in either Latin or the vernacular. Artists, of course, had no immediate need for Latin, although quite a few of them managed to use the language with more or less facility. Filarete mastered it fluently; other painters like Benozzo Gozzoli with sufficient capacity,59 whereas Dürer declared it a necessity for the youth60 and Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo learned Latin both in their youth and as young adults around the age of twenty-five. The intellectual artist had been a topic ever since the time of Plato and Vitruvius, and it was followed up by Thomas Aquinas and others. For Alberti, the “studioso pittore” (Della pittura) was the one he addressed in his treatises. Some artists were trained as humanists and in some university topics as well, like Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, Piero della Francesca, and Leonardo, who themselves left literary works to posterity. These artists started their apprenticeship later than one usually did at those times, where at the age of seven to ten the boy usually started to help out in a bottega (workshop). But Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo were already between thirteen and fifteen when they started their apprenticeships.61 This advanced age would have left time for them to complete their primary and secondary education. These were a few of the more fortunate artists who came from backgrounds that could have encouraged and facilitated their intellectual education. Regardless, an elementary and secondary education up to the age of twelve or fourteen became increasingly common even among the poorer members of society, and it allowed the young pupil access to literature that already included important topics he would engage with later in life. Education, of course, did not take place only during childhood. In fact, from many descriptions and depictions, we know that education at schools monastic, cathedral, or civic was often directed toward people of different ages.

59

60

61

See the Latin phrase on the front page of his personal sketchbook: “Pictoribvs atqve poetis semper fvit et erit eqva potestas.” See Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven, 2000, p. 167; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 58. See Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 52; see also Albrecht Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. Hans Rupprich, Berlin, 1956–1969, vol. 2, p. 92. See Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 52. For a discussion on Leonardo’s age when he entered the workshop see Bambach, who believes the artist was 14 or 15 years old (Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 1, pp. 87–88 with further literature).

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INTRODUCTION

Furthermore, there were also private meetings and discussion groups, which at times had a semi-open character and could include artists as well. We should, therefore, ask ourselves whether it was possible for an artist to achieve more learning, for example, through public and private educational systems or through private gatherings, and more recent publications have attempted to revise the earlier conviction that artists’ educations were limited mainly or only to their apprenticeships.62 Or, according to Burke: “If artists were such ‘early leavers’ [in education], how did they acquire the familiarity with classical antiquity that is revealed in their paintings, sculptures and buildings?”63 Both public and private educational systems offered a broad range of teaching opportunities on different levels. Paul Grendler already mentioned the variety of schools between 1300 and 1600, including church, communal, and independent schools, which offered both Latin and vernacular education. While Rome had more communal schools, Venice and Florence offered more private schooling. Some schools had clear orientations in offering only Latin, vernacular, abacus, or other skills, whereas other schools intentionally taught everything together, like the Venetian combination schools, which offered “reading and writing, Latin grammar, advanced vernacular reading, abbaco, and bookkeeping to . . . pupils aged 6 through about 14” (example for the year 1587). And the variety of schools and of private efforts certainly increased during the Renaissance. Following Giovanni Villani’s account for 1338, Grendler argues for a literacy rate of between 37 and 45% among the young boys (and some girls) who attended school, which in cities like Florence could rise to 67–83% (although Grendler expresses some doubt about this figure).64 Examining the Florentine cadastre (housing registry) of 1480, Grendler concludes that Latin school was attended by not only all of the sons of wealthy or noble families, but also many sons of master craftsmen and major shopkeepers. From the next lower social level, including artisans, shopkeepers, and workers, there were still a notable number of boys attending school. Often, even in very poor families, boys would learn reading and writing, even when there was no father anymore and fees had to be provided by their mothers, and sometimes even by siblings. If a family was too poor to pay the fees, the city or the teacher would accept the boy without payment, and this boy would attend the same class as did all the merchants’ and nobles’ sons. This situation was not typical only for

62

63 64

For example: Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance; Martin Warnke, The Court Artist, Cambridge 1993; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. ix. Burke, The Italian Renaissance, p. 58. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore 1989, pp. 71–72.

MEDIATORS

Florence. Many communal schools would pay for the teacher, who would then not charge the pupil (see Chapter 2).65 MEDIATORS

Despite Dante’s early efforts with his Convivio to bring knowledge of the sciences and of literature to the less learned, the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) may be seen as the first mediator between the literati and the world of artisans. After Alberti’s early efforts in the vernacular that led to the first grammar composed therein, he became the mediator who dug most deeply into the artist’s world in both theory and practice. Although he benefited from a complete university and humanist education, he tried to reflect the artist’s horizon and the intellectual level he could apply in his explanations. Therefore, he said in his treatise on painting that he would not suggest things beyond the artist’s reach, and he had chosen a confrontation with topics and sciences from the standpoint of an artist and not that of an expert in those other subjects (Prologus della pittura).66 Alberti practiced a variety of artistic orientations himself, namely, architecture and sculpture, and for the first time laid down the theoretical foundations for all three artistic orientations – a concept which would be picked up a century later by members of the Accademia Fiorentina. While some of these, like his vernacular treatise on painting, could likewise serve as an easily accessible manual for the artists themselves, all three treatises were first made available in Latin because this facilitated them becoming the authoritative standard as recognized by the literati, and underlined that they provided the first comprehensive theory for the visual arts. Alberti himself functioned as an auctor in both ancient and medieval senses, namely, the most authoritative source on a topic.67 A number of Quattrocento humanists had contributed to make knowledge available for all. But the question of language and access is manifold and it would be too easy to think that his Latin treatises were not accessible to artists because, as we will see, a number of artists especially in the first half of the fifteenth century were able to read Latin, and Alberti did not use the most sophisticated variant of the idiom. 65 66

67

Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 102–105. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda, Darmstadt 2002, p. 67. Celenza rightly observes on Alberti’s treatise On Painting and his two Latin and vernacular versions, “This Latin-Italian bilingualism is important. To understand Alberti, it is crucial: the need to have an Italian version in circulation highlighted his belief, which would become ever more persistent with time, that the vernacular could serve as an adequate vehicle of culture, alongside and sometimes instead of Latin.” (Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning, New York 2018, p. 121).

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INTRODUCTION

The university teacher Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) follows Alberti some decades later and embarks on the mediatory road from the standpoint of a literato who never engaged with art practically, but provided useful advice for artists on several levels, most explicitly by dealing with the two most useful books on mythology and iconography, his commentary on Dante, and the translation of Pliny. He was not the first mediator to specifically recommend the choice of the vernacular for the arts, which happens, for example, in his preface to the Dante commentary, where also a brief summary genealogy of important Florentine painters and sculptors is contained. To this end, he translated one of the most important sources for the artisan world, Pliny’s Natural History. In the proemio dedicated to Ferdinando I, king of Naples (the patron of this commission), Landino describes the motivations for his efforts, which followed the ideas of Dante’s Convivio. It would be necessary to have knowledge of all the sciences, he said. This includes the sciences regarding living, culture, and decoration, which meant all the knowledge which came from both the mind and from manual works. And he commented on Dante’s Divine Comedy in the vernacular, where he punctuated his philological comments with many examples from ancient mythology. These were translated into a humanist perspective, and explained the idea of allegories, which would turn out to be very useful for iconography. That this idea was intentional is underlined by the fact that he provided one of the first summaries of lives of important artists in his proemio. His engagement with the artists would even lead him to write an exemplary recommendation letter for an artist on how to address a patron, which the artist could simply use as a template for his own intentions. This recommendation was the opening letter in his Formulario di epistole (Fig. 2),68 which must have found wide distribution and was even possessed by Leonardo.69 Subsequent mediators often came from the Florentine literary academy. Giovanni Battista Gelli (1498–1563) became one of the most important mediators for artists for several reasons: as mentioned in Chapter 2 he himself emerged from the artisan class; he gained an exemplary education without financial resources and family support; and, despite his remarkable learning and generous offers, he chose to remain an artisan for his entire life, all the while helping others from the artisan class to follow an educational path. It appears that Gelli’s commentaries on Dante and Petrarch were offered as lectures at the Accademia Fiorentina, and that they were written especially with an eye

68

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Cristoforo Landino, Formulario da ditare littere a ogni persona, Venice 1492; Cristoforo Landino, Formulario di epistole vulgare missive e responsive e altri fiori de ornate pariamenti, Milan 1500. See the inventories: Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, pp. 35–36; Dionisotti, Appunti su arti e lettere, p. 23; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 71.

MEDIATORS

2 Cristoforo Landino, Formulario di epistole, 1490. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain (BEIC Foundation)

toward artists. And even though he addresses all the artists, he had a special interest in painters. This is manifested in the plenitude of comparisons between poetry and painting that recur on the ancient topoi. Like Cristoforo Landino and Paolo Giovio, Gelli was also concerned to elevate the historical reputations

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INTRODUCTION

of artists. His Vita de’pittori di Firenze show a dedication toward the visual arts, with painting, sculpture, and architecture all included. Most important are probably Gelli’s two opuscula on the lives of Florentine painters. One is a very short version that was combined with his lectures on Petrarch (Vita de’pittori di Firenze, published as his sixth lesson on Petrarch, ca. 1549).70 Benedetto Varchi (1503–1565) was a key figure, both for the academy and as a link between the literati and the artists. Like Alberti, he was concerned about finding categories and a theoretical foundation for the visual arts. In Varchi’s two lessons held at the Accademia Fiorentina, the first was dedicated to the concept and realization of an artwork (addressed through Michelangelo’s sonnet), the second to the paragone debate between painting and sculpture, while pointing to different techniques. Varchi and others (like Baldassare Castiglione and Anton Francesco Doni) were trying to define the differences between the artistic genres, a first step for necessary definitions. On the occasion of his first public lectures on art, when Varchi asked the leading Florentine artists themselves to address the question of artistic methods and how to define their categories, many of the artists used this as either a polemical debate or for simplemindedly praising their own category. Evidently, the sense to think in broader categories, like the visual arts, did not yet exist; every category was looking for its own fortune. The same is true for literature, where rhetoricians, grammar teachers, and poets would not integrate with each other to construct one category. Nevertheless, with the help of people like Varchi, artists could find a common ground for a mutual academy, which was based on disegno, a method proven to be common to all three categories. Also Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574) was very well connected to artists and scholars of every type, and likewise lectured at the Accademia Fiorentina. Among the prolific literary oeuvre of Doni, a widely read man who even wrote two books on literary vernacular recommendations (around 1550), there are also two books for the artist: Disegno del Doni Fiorentino (1549), and Pitture del Doni Academico Pellegrino (1564). His Disegno was written two years after Varchi had held the famous lezzioni in Florence, and it picked up on important points that Varchi would publish a year after Doni. Anton Francesco Doni likewise declared that disegno is the most important foundation for both sculpture and painting. It would explain what art is about, and that it was composed with the intellect. After having declared drawing as the foundation of every art, Doni, with the help of two artists, a sculptor and a painter, works

70

Armand L. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence 1976, pp. 311–312; Girolamo Mancini, Vite d’artisti di Giovanni Battista Gelli, Archivio storico italiano, serie V, 17, 1896, pp. 32–62; Stefano U. Baldassarri, Lorenzi Ghiberti e Giovan Battista Gelli tra autobiografia e biografia, Viator, 43, 2012, pp. 299–313.

MEDIATORS

out the characteristics of these two orientations (tactile, color, etc.).71 The result of discussions among the literati since antiquity, which were then furthered by the artists themselves, was the value given to drawing, a preparatory stage common to all three of the visual arts, which could therefore agree in a shared opinion on its importance. In the preparatory stage – less as a category on its own – it also showed the intellectual virtuosity of an artist, as it belonged to the creative and inventive phase of his working process. But drawing also had a separate standing in humanist education, which rightly paved the way to its greatest acknowledgment (see Chapter 1). The mediators of the Renaissance helped the artist to access knowledge in different ways and to make available relevant literature that they needed. It was likewise important that they helped to define a theory for their discipline and to shape the field (architecture, sculpture, painting). Nagel and Wood have pointed out that the artist now became institutionalized and considered a “protagonist in histories of art and theories of art.”72 The mediators finally included the artist within the history of important personalities and notable representatives of their subjects. The visual arts had finally gained full acceptance by the liberal arts, which themselves had played a distinctive part toward this goal. As mentioned above, the studies most closely comparable to this book all lack an interdisciplinary approach, and thus provide examples of how far we can get – or not get – within the discipline. Therefore, if the present study opens up far beyond the field of art history, this is done in order to provide a fuller and better picture of the artist’s social environment that defined his life, his commissions, his possibilities for expression and invention, and his intellectual and social acceptance. The author thus aims to provide a study that will be useful for students of early modern art and intellectual history at the university level and beyond. This book is deliberately written as a (preliminary) compendium, and given the broad nature of the topic, it can only be a first introduction. It is intended, however, to open up a new field of research that leaves many possibilities for a variety of more detailed studies in theses, articles, and books.

71 72

Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno del Doni, Venice 1549, ff. 7r–v, 10v–15v. Alexander Nagel and Christropher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010, p. 16.

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ONE

MECHANICAL ARTS VERSUS LIBERAL ARTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE ARTIST’S EDUCATION

T

he Renaissance inherited an epoch-making discussion on the value of the mechanical arts versus the liberal arts, on the ranking of the three visual arts in comparison with the liberal arts resulting in an early paragone debate, and on the intellectual education required for the three visual arts that derived from the other two debates. The painter and printmaker Jacopo de’Barbari, active in Italy and Saxony, and the Italian encyclopedist Ambrogio Calepino epitomized the two extreme ends of the possible spectrum of opinions regarding these three topics. Jacopo de’ Barbari (ca. 1460/70–ca. 1516) included the most fervid discussion of his time in a letter, De la ecelentia de pictura, to Duke Frederic III of Saxony, in which he elevated painting into the canon of the liberal arts, and even into its top place, by asserting that painting required knowledge of all the liberal arts. Barbari praised the seven classical liberal arts (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric [the trivium]; and music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy [the quadrivium]), and the ultimate subjects of the curriculum, namely, theology, philosophy, and the two laws (canon and civil), which were practiced only by noble men, and would enrich a man with every prudence.1 Connected with his demand to see painting as a liberal art, he elaborated the liberal arts necessary for the artist. In this light, he wrote to the duke of Saxony 1

26

Iacopo de’Barbari, De la ecelentia de pitura. Citation in: Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Milan 1971, vol. 1, p. 66.

MECHANICAL VS. LIBERAL ARTS & ARTIST’S EDUCATION

that art required great genius, and in antiquity had been praised for its requisite skills, and its dependence on the liberal arts and on nature. The painter in fact required all of the abovementioned arts, most of all geometry and arithmetic, which were both essential for the representation of nature. Furthermore, architecture also depended on music and philosophy. But literature too was important for artists, as it aided the invention of the work, together with its parts: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Likewise, history and the science of the stars (astronomy)2 would lay important foundations for the artist. Then Barbari revealed his learning by referring to Aristotle (particularily to his De Anima), where the Greek had placed philosophy above every science in order to understand nature and its composition. Citing Pliny, Barbari claimed that the painter needed to know about all of these arts; otherwise, his art would be deficient. The great ancient painter Apelles had reached his level of excellence only because he was learned, and because painting at that time was practiced only by noble and learned men. With this preparation, a painter was able to create a second nature.3 Due to all of these learned requirements, painting would deserve to be the first among the arts because it depended on all of them and would embrace them all.4 As will be shown below, Jacopo de’Barbari touched on important points mentioned by others: Pliny, Petrarch, Villani, Michele Savonarola, Leon Battista Alberti, and Leonardo. His letter showed a respectable summary of the artist’s point of view touching on the artes debate, the paragone question among the visual arts, and the artist’s education. His primary intention was to see all of these fundamental points for the artist’s formation and reputation accepted by his patron, the duke of Saxony. The summary of public opinion on the relationship between the practical arts and the liberal arts provided by the lexicographer Ambrogio Calepino (1435–1510) in his almost contemporary text to the beforementioned letter, his Lexicon of 15385, offers a different example of the judgments held in the early sixteenth century. We are approaching a time of the third important translation effort of the Renaissance in the 1530s, which made almost all of the major literary texts from antiquity accessible in the vernacular. Knowledge penetrated into many social ranks. Artists were able through their own engagement to participate in literary studies, which, only a century before, had belonged

2 3

4

5

The premodern term “astronomy” refers to both astronomy and astrology. Iacopo de’Barbari, De la ecelentia de pitura. Citation in: Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Milan 1971, vol. 1, pp. 66–70. Barbari’s letter has been discussed from a liberal arts perspective before: Ulrich Pfisterer, Die Kunstliteratur der italienischen Renaissance: Eine Geschichte in Quellen, Stuttgart 2002, p. 269; Bernd Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler. Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten der Renaissance über Kunst, Berlin 2013, p. 91. Ambrosii Calepini Bergomatis lexicon, Lyon 1538 (first edition 1502).

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only to the very well educated. Soon the academies will open and make their own contributions to disseminating knowledge throughout the populace. Calepino’s judgment combined traditional opinions with changing views of society. He said that the liberal arts were led by ingenium (inventive and intellectual creativity), whereas the practical arts, which are the mechanical arts, could not be liberal, but consisted of works made by the hand. He called them the service branches (col. 1091). Therefore, the liberal arts worked with the mind and the practical arts were manual. No overlaps between them were even contemplated. On the other hand, the artist did not work without science; he had his particular manual science as expressed through his hands (col. 176). The artificium was therefore a combination of techniques and science (col. 174). Taking up a long and still ongoing discussion, Calepino declared that the arts (artes, technai) can be manifold. For example, there are speculative arts founded on observation, knowledge, and the intellect; practical and active arts, like sports; and arts expressing affects, like painting. Each art was based on its own virtues, competences, and sciences (col. 174). Placed by Calepino on the same level as medicine, architecture instead was a manual art expressed by the hands and the intellect. The wise architect would be praised for his works (col. 156). As we will see, Calepino’s summary reflected an age-old discussion, following up on Aristotle, Pliny, Thomas Aquinas, and others. Before the practical arts entered the academies and, in the end, also the universities, there was a gradual approach of the practical arts toward the liberal arts and sciences, which is documented in contemporary literature. The discussion about the visual arts being part of the mechanical arts or the liberal arts, and being on the same intellectual level, enriched the discussion of the relationship between painting and literature, architecture, and medicine, that is, between the visual arts and traditional university topics. Kristeller saw that this discussion was particularly vivid among the early humanists,6 although one needs to add that the middle of the sixteenth century was a high point for disputes among the artists, and between the visual arts and literature.7 In addition, Ames-Lewis set the beginning for painting and sculpture having 6

7

Kristeller’s fundamental essay from 1951 touches from a one-dimensional perspective on aesthetics and thus on beauty as the main factor for the visual arts, and excludes other important aspects like the participation in education. This concept was then carried on by researchers like Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind, making the concept of beauty in relation to the visual and the liberal arts the principal topic (Paul O. Kristeller, The modern system of the arts: A study in the history of aesthetics, part 1, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12:4, 1951, pp. 496–527; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd edition, London 1968; Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Uppsala 1960). On the relationship between liberal and visual arts, see for example: Paul Oskar Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, Munich 1974–1976, vol. 1, pp. 95, 253, note 27; Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Princeton 1986, pp. 74–82; Christiane Hessler,

MECHANICAL VS. LIBERAL ARTS & ARTIST’S EDUCATION

entered the liberal arts with Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (composed 1516–1518).8 But the discussion started much earlier and was ongoing and fluid, as we will see. Furthermore, this discussion also influenced, or perhaps even initiated, the paragone debate between the visual arts, disputing which of the visual arts was more appropriate for becoming a member of the liberal arts and had a higher ranking. The paragone debate in the visual arts was in the end not only a discussion among artists, but the reflection of a dispute on a much broader scale. Although the first known discussion on the liberal arts goes back to Vitruvius (paideia),9 the humanists in the early Renaissance also looked at the definition of the late antique Roman encyclopedist Martianus Capella (fifth century) and his allegorical and encyclopedic masterpiece, De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii. He was the first to divide the seven liberal arts into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, musical theory, and astronomy), a division which, in the later Middle Ages, would be taken over by the universities (Fig. 3).10 But Capella had no place for the practical arts. In the university curriculum, theology, medicine, and law came above the liberal arts. This system is what the visual arts were ultimately competing with, while declaring at the same time that they are also the basis of their education. Parallel to the discussion on the visual arts, there was a more vibrant discussion on related humanist topics. Many topics important to the humanists likewise did not belong to the classical artes liberales tradition, and therefore the humanists battled for their acceptance. To these belonged poetry and history. Only from the fourteenth century onward did poetry and classical literature slowly enter Italian schools and universities, although they were initially not an independent topic, but belonged to the teaching of rhetoric and poetics. Before history did so, literature became a fixed university topic during the middle of the fifteenth century, when Cristoforo Landino in Florence was

8

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Zum Paragone: Malerei, Skulptur und Dichtung in der Rangstreitkultur des Quattrocento, Berlin 2014, pp. 99–108. Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven 2000, p. 1. Other authors have taken the opportunity to use the discussion exclusively to talk about the social status of the artist (see Burke, The Italian Renaissance, pp. 75–84). See the introduction and commentary in Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Howe, Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, New York 1999 (I am grateful to my anonymous peer-reviewer for pointing this out). The classical division had no place for the visual arts or other mechanical arts. On the history of the liberal arts, see, for example, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, Princeton 1980, p. 173; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge 1986; Thomas Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), Hamburg 2017, vol. 1, pp. 117–121, 284–286.

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3 Nicola Pisano, Liberal Arts (Geometry and Music), 1275–1277. Perugia: Fontana Maggiore. Photo: Courtesy Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome

innovative and influential there. The humanists eventually created an alternative education to the medieval canon of the artes liberales, now called the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy).11 The discussion about the acceptance of topics on a scientific level was much debated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the visual arts no longer wished to stay to the side. The visual arts developed their own theoretical discussions, and with these they laid the groundwork for future academic acceptance. The visual arts also increasingly made use of topics from the curriculum of higher education, and the ability to skillfully picture these topics or to create visual counterparts fostered their acceptance by the other sciences.12 A new and particularly important development in the early Renaissance is the competition between artists and poets to attain the same intellectual

11

12

In the Middle Ages, poetry was considered to be a part of theology or philosophy, and thus topics of higher education, but it served the trivium as well in order to teach grammar and rhetoric. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, Munich 1974, vol. 1, pp. 100–103; August Buck, Die Rezeption der Antike in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance, Berlin 1976, pp. 25f.; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, Princeton 1980, pp. 1–5; Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore 1989, p. 235; James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden 1991, pp. 14, 30–32, 86. Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, vol. 1, pp. 108–109; Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie. Realtà sociale e teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo, Milan 1980, pp. 15–34.

MECHANICAL VS. LIBERAL ARTS & ARTIST’S EDUCATION

standing.13 Although neither the visual arts nor literature belonged to the classical canon of the liberal arts, poets could still refer to the trivium with grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic as their basis, whereas artists increasingly referred to the quadrivium, that is, the knowledge of geometry, mathematics, and even sometimes music and astronomy as theirs. Arithmetic and geometry were seen as the proper foundations of a good general education (and were taught in advanced abacus schools), while painting, for example, gradually tried to identify itself with literature and with philosophical questions. This debate certainly challenged the painters, who saw themselves no longer merely as illustrators but as working with similar means of allegorical and symbolic content and potentiality of meaning as literature and philosophy did. Painters were now themselves developing complex structures of moral, philosophical, or allegorical content, while also incorporating important literary sources to convey new sophisticated meanings. It is certainly no coincidence that the discussion of the intellectual standing of the visual arts took place at the same time as the visual arts were finally establishing their own theoretical foundations in treatises and commentaries.14 Although these discussions were not always obviously connected to each other, they nevertheless depended on one another. The fact that the visual arts were able to demonstrate a theory of their own was certainly helpful for their academic acknowledgment. Not by chance the literato Leon Battista Alberti turned out to be the first to address this topic on a comprehensive scale. As it turns out, many humanists in the early Renaissance became quite interested in both literature and the visual arts, and often did what they could to help both realms. The artists were also striving for higher social standing. As much as they looked to antiquity to ground their skills and literary knowledge, the social standing they desired sprung from the evolving notion of the Renaissance man and his search for individuality. The following discussion intends to shed light on two significant topics in a deeper and more comprehensive manner than has been attempted so far: first, the position that the practical arts held in relation to the liberal arts and sciences; second, the amount of academic learning that artists might have benefited from. These two topics are illuminated by comparing contemporary writings. To this end, we will first look at what humanists and scientists thought about the education of artists and the ranking of the practical arts in

13

14

Horace‘s topic “Ut pictura poesis” as a theoretical debate, the analogies in Artistole and Plutarch and references among Renaissance literati will not be treated in this book, while the reader is referred to the still valid introduction in Rensslear W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, New York 1967. See on the relationship of the visual arts to the sciences also: Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 46.

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the curriculum, followed by a survey of artistic treatises, in which artists articulate their own views on the required level of learning. THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE: A CO MPETITI ON AMONG THE ART ES

Starting with Plato and Aristotle, there was an ongoing discussion about the standing of the mechanical arts in comparison to the liberal arts. This concerned their general evaluation as well as the evaluation of individual visual arts, each of which was judged differently. Also connected is the question of what the intellectual education of the artist should look like, and whether this included topics from the liberal arts. The first two points will eventually lead to the paragone debate, whereas the artist’s education became increasingly important for the artist’s intellectual level, but depended likewise on the evaluation of the individual visual arts. All of these three points were constantly connected with one another. Kristeller claimed that the intellectual value of the visual arts had an increasing recognition only from the Renaissance onward. Following Kristeller and Roeck, no ancient author assigned the visual arts a particular place among the arts.15 Nevertheless, the following discussion departs from these “occasional enthusiastic remarks” and should not be underestimated. They laid the foundations for a positive evaluation, and also the directions concerning which of the three arts should be preferred. The following overview allows for a logical summary of opinions and positions in the Renaissance concerning the discussion of the liberal arts in relation to the mechanical arts, including the evaluation of the individual arts and relevant educational topics. The discussion starts at a time before the system of the liberal arts was established, that is, when all of the arts were distinguished by their intellectual and practical values. The starting point for a discussion on the liberal and mechanical arts was Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his idea that the arts included both liberal arts and manual crafts (Nicomachean Ethics 6).16 Although Aristotle did not yet offer a viable approach for integrating the visual arts into a complex system of knowledge, he nevertheless saw some kind of participation between art and knowledge to the extent that he listed the visual arts among the intellectual virtues.17 In the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, the practical arts were included among the dianoetic practices. The practice of art (techne) was

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Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, vol. 2, pp. 169f.; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 94. Aristotle defines his view of the arts with the examples of the architect, the shipbuilder, the doctor, the rhetorican and the poet. See on this, William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, New York 1966, pp. 38–71, esp. p. 46. On this, see Kristeller, The modern system of the arts, p. 499; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 51.

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE

declared to be a part of contingent circumstances, such as possibilities and chances, in contrast to necessary circumstances. In this context, Aristotle referred to the kind of wisdom that an artist could appeal to. Acknowledging the presence of wisdom in the practical arts would certainly be granted to the most skillful masters, taking the sculptors Phidias and Polyclitos as examples. But Aristotle made clear that wisdom should be understood as perfect skills and not as erudition, perception, or knowledge (Ethics 6).18 For Aristotle, the visual arts had first of all to be learned through practice. In fact, whoever wanted to become a good architect had to practice in the field (Ethics 2.1).19 This is probably because Aristotle acknowledged that practical arts like the art of building have a material dimension that is simply not necessary for the sciences. In architecture, for example, the material used is chosen deliberately and is of a certain substance (Metaphysics 3).20 Furthermore, Aristotle distinguished between practical and intellectually learned knowledge. Both painters and physicians would train their pupils by means of practice to become experts in their field, and thereby gain expertise in judgment (Ethics 10.10).21 This summary makes evident that, although Aristotle offered a clear distinction between practice and the mind, this did not indicate a difference in their appreciation. Aristotle was highly influential in his division of the liberal and mechanical arts, and he made a strong case for the manual arts and their value in society. Like the medieval works by Hugh of Saint Victor, Vincent of Beauvais, and Thomas Aquinas to be discussed below, Aristotle’s Ethics were a part of every curriculum of higher education. They were all concerned to develop systems of manual and intellectual arts that differed slightly from one another. Their opinions in this regard were highly influential for any discussion among the Renaissance literati. The monk Hugh of Saint Victor (ca. 1096–1141) was a teacher at the abbey school of Saint Victor in Paris, where in the 1120s he composed the manual Didascalicon (On the study of reading),22 a guide full of useful advice for students about what to read and how to study, including both secular and sacred literature, and with comprehensive reading lists and explanations. The only text on manual arts that Hugh recommends in his reading list is Vitruvius’s On Architecture (Didascalicon, III.2).23 Hugh builds in his Didascalicon on Aristotle’s 18

19 20 21 22

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Aristotle, Nikomachische Ethik, trans. Franz Dirlmeier, Stuttgart 1969, book 6, pp. 153–176, see p. 161; Aristotle, Metaphysik, trans. Franz Schwarz, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 17–20 (book 1, 980981). Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 34–35. Aristotle, Metaphysik, pp. 61–62 (book 3, 996b). Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik, pp. 300–301. There existed numerous manuscripts of Hugh’s work during the later Middle Ages. It was first printed in 1483 in Basel as an appendix to Wenceslaus Brack’s Vocabularius rerum. Brack was a teacher at the cathedral school in Konstanz. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, translated from the Latin with an introduction and notes by Jerome Taylor, New York 1991, p. 84.

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and Al-Farabi’s schemes and integrated them. The first chapter was dedicated to the arts, with a subdivision into four categories: theoretical, practical, logical, and mechanical. Like Aristotle, he attributed to philosophy the guiding principle for all the arts, which was later taken up by Angelo Poliziano. Hugh’s work was seminal in opposing the seven liberal arts to seven mechanical arts, and in broadening the discussion on the arts.24 Using the example of architecture, Hugh made it clear why the creative process of manual labor belongs to the arts, which is based on human effort, the material, and its creation: the original material necessary for building needed to be manipulated in order to create something new. Thus, the mechanical arts would always be constituted by human work (Didascalicon II.1). It followed a distinction of the mechanical sciences, in which Hugh counted all of the handcrafts, like knitting, hunting, and medicine. These mechanical sciences deal with the “artificer’s product, which borrows its form from nature,” whereas the liberal arts require independent minds (Didascalicon II.20–21).25 Although his definition was borrowed to some extent from Aristotle and his material qualities, the artificer’s product had more value in Hugh than in Aristotle, with both having an impact on Thomas Aquinas. Hugh’s division of the arts was important because he included the manual arts as well, but – and although they would all count as philosophy – he made a clear distinction between intellectual and manual labor, and left manual arts like painting, sculpture, and architecture somewhere in between: they were creative, but only to a certain extent, since, in the end, they all followed God and nature. Hugh’s work was highly influential in that it was present in most major libraries and served students in higher education. Therefore, the value he gave to the mechanical arts (also including the visual) and their creative processes would make a strong impression on many literati and artists. Vincent of Beauvais’s (ca. 1190–ca. 1264) work, Speculum doctrinale, was also present in most major libraries and served likewise as a guidebook for students. He dedicated his Speculum to general education by providing a summary of knowledge up to his time, citing, among others, from Aristotle, Hugh, Richard of Saint Victor, Duns Scotus, Alpharabius, and many others. In his chapter on the mechanical arts, for example, he took from Aristotle the division of the liberal and mechanical sciences,26 but he also cites Augustine (De civitate dei 22.5), where the arts were praised for facilitating good living and 24

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For Hugh, poetry is already linked with the trivium. See: Kristeller, The modern system of the arts, pp. 507–508; The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, p. 8. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, pp. 62, 74–75. Along with moral philosophy, the mechanical sciences were likewise oriented toward action, which could be corporeal, moral or coming from the soul. From antiquity onward, these were directed toward monastic, economic and political sciences. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, Graz 1965, book 1, col. 17.

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE

endless happiness. To men’s enterprise belonged agriculture and navigation as much as painting and sculpture. After having explained a variety of manual labors, he concentrated on architecture, giving its six fundamental parts: arrangement, display, congruency, symmetry, decorum, and distribution, which had been introduced by Vitruvius, and also sounds very close to what Alberti would propose two hundred years later in his treatise on architecture.27 Vincent discussed the different purposes, parts, and ornaments of buildings, but he did not directly address the architect’s education. Alberti will also be very brief about this. Painting is subordinate, and is mentioned as being a part of architectural ornamentation. Consequently, painting and sculpture are not addressed as disciplines in themselves, but only in their final appearance. Therefore, the artificer does not play a significant role. What follows owes a lot to Pliny’s Natural History and its enumeration of created and natural objects, and elements.28 Although both Hugh and Vincent were similarly important for a student’s general education, Hugh was specifically more influential for the value of the visual arts. For the third important author of the standard medieval curriculum, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), artistic skills (techne = ars) of whichever orientation (mechanical or liberal arts) constituted one of the three primary forms of knowledge: experience (empeiria), artistic skills (techne), and science (episteme).29 In Thomas we find the fundamental description of architecture as an intellectual science. He had an astonishingly strong view about architecture, and this he developed in his most influential encyclopedia, the Summa theologica. He argued strongly that those who would be wise in everything must certainly be wise in medicine and architecture (Summa theologica, Secunda secundae, 45.1), for which reason he postulated the wise architect (sapiens architectus). Thomas claimed to have taken the topos of the wise architect from the Bible, where he referred to 1 Cor 3:10 (Summa theologica, 1.6). The wise architect Thomas described found his inspiration through God as his master architect (Summa theologica, Secunda secundae 45.1).30 The same topos also occured in ancient treatises, which were likewise important as sources for Thomas, for example, Vitruvius’s architectural treatise and Pliny. The topos will eventually also have an important impact on Alberti. Thomas distinguished between the wise 27

28

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Leon Battista Alberti, Zehn Bücher über die Baukunst, trans. Max Theuer, Darmstadt 1975, pp. 489–493 (book 9.5). Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum doctrinale, book 11, cc. 993–1072. On Vincent’s general educational ideas, see Achille Pellizzari, I Trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola Iberica, Naples 1915, vol. 1, pp. 362–379; Astrik L. Gabriel, Vinzenz von Beauvais. Ein mittelalterlicher Erzieher, Frankfurt 1967. On this, see Bernhard Stengel, Der Kommentar des Thomas von Aquin zur “Politik” des Aristoteles, Marburg 2011, pp. 126–127. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Dominicans and Benedictines in Germany and Austria, Graz 1982, vol. 1, p. 17.

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architect, namely, the real artist (artifex) who had created the architectural plan, and inferior stonemasons, who worked under the architect (Summa theologica 1.6).31 Architecture also played a role in Thomas’s comments on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (in the prologue to the Expositio libri Posteriorum), where he determines that the artes should be led by reason, which is connected to the intellect. This established their qualifying category. The manual arts, the art of building and the handcrafts (ars aedificativa vel fabrilis) explicitly formed by means of the hand, were part of the creative act of reason, which guides them. But reason itself was also guided generally by art, and explicitly by logic, which guides all the arts (prologue to Aristotle).32 Thomas mentioned architecture in the first place, but he implicitly included painting and sculpture as well in the description of his complex system of artes liberales and artes mechanicae, where he took architecture as an example of an art, which by means of reason is able to create something. To resume, Thomas included the visual arts in his system of artes, which is based on Aristotle’s, Hugh’s, and Vincent’s system of the liberal and mechanical arts, but he deliberately distinguished the visual arts from the intellectual liberal arts, calling them mechanical and practical, as they create an opus. The idea of an opus, which implies a substantial, unique work, and the creative process that stands behind it, will deeply affect both late medieval art and literature. This was anticipated in Hugh’s product by an artificer. Also, the material qualities are reflections on Aristotle and Hugh. Thomas was also a predecessor for the idea of forging a link with natural philosophy, for which the practical arts could help with visualization. Thus, it is interesting to note that Thomas was speaking not about nature itself but about science. Art therefore helped to visualize intellectual processes related to philosophy and science – hence the importance of painting and sculpture (the idea of visualization is taken from Aristotle; see below). Thomas’s ideas were both groundbreaking and influential, neither of which can be overestimated. Whereas the idea of the opus would influence late medieval works, the visualization of natural philosophy begins to be practiced only around 1500 (for example, with Leonardo). The three points that Thomas developed – namely, the wise architect, the hierarchical relations between the architect and the stonemason, and the artistic skills derived from experience, skills, and sciences – will have a fundamental impact on the discussions of the following centuries.

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Aquinas, Summa theologica, vol. 1, p. 17. Thomas Aquinas, Prologe zu den Aristoteleskommentaren, transl. by Francis Cheneval and Ruedi Imbach, Frankfurt 1993, pp. 12–15. Thomas returns to the relationship between reason and architecture in his prologue to Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo expositio, where he explains the different steps that the architect needs to take to create his building. See Thomas Aquinas, Prologe zu den Aristoteleskommentaren, trans. Francis Cheneval and Ruedi Imbach, Frankfurt 1993, pp. 26–27.

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE

The aforementioned discussion of authors in the late medieval curriculum who were read by almost everyone who studied at university during the Renaissance had an important impact on Renaissance humanism. In his books De vero falsoque bono (1442)33 and Elegantia (1441–1449),34 Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1405–1457) explicitly mentioned painting, sculpture, and architecture as being very close to the liberal arts. Apart from the liberal arts, there would also be plenty of other arts, which were characterized by utility or beauty, and enriched people’s lives. To these would belong architecture, painting, and sculpture, but also other manual arts like agriculture, textiles, dyeing, and navigation. Valla continues that with Horace we may say that they want to be either useful or delightful to the spectator, but for themselves they were primarily seeking glory. Arts seeking glory presume an artist looking for it likewise. And these artists were now considered almost equal to higher educated people.35 Another decade later, the humanist and historian Bartolomeo Facio (c. 1400–1457) elevated the social ranking of the artist to the status of eminent people. Facio himself had the benefit of one of the most highly desired private humanist educations with Guarino Guarini in Verona, and additionally in 1429 he stayed in Florence to study Greek.36 Although Facio did not express himself directly about the standing of the visual arts among the liberal arts, he was one of the first to publicly acknowledge that the visual arts were on an equal social standing. In his De viris illustribus (1456), Facio dedicated two chapters to painters and sculptors, including them among the ninety famous persons and their lives who were organized by professions, including princes, citizens, humanists, and scholars.37 This appears to be the second time in this literary genre that artists received a prominent treatment like many of the academic professions and famous personalities, after Filippo Villani’s brief inclusion of only painters in his history of important Florentine

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Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. Maristella de Panizza Lorch, Bari 1970, p. 87 (book 2. XXXII.1). Lorenzo Valla, Elegantia, Basel 1571, p. 11 praefatio; see also Martin Warnke, Artisti di corte, Rome 1991, pp. 93–94, 99; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The sovereignty of the artist: A note on legal maxims and Renaissance theories of art, in: Selected Studies, ed. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, New York 1965, pp. 352–265, see p. 363, note 67; Stefano Pagliaroli, Lorenzo Valla e la “Poetica” di Aristotele, Studi medievali e umanistici, 2, 2004, pp. 352–356. On Valla’s system of the artes, see also Thomas Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), Hamburg 2017, vol. 1, p. 346. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Humanist Bartolomeo Facio and His Unknown Correspondence, New York 1965, p. 59. On Bartolomeo Facio and his compendium, see for example Michael Baxandall, Bartholomaeus Facius on painting: A fifteenth-century manuscript of the De Viris Illustribus, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27, 1964, pp. 90–107; Paul Oskar Kristeller, The humanist Bartolomeo Facio and his unknown correspondence, in: From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter, New York 1965, pp. 56–74; Warnke, Artisti di corte, Rome 1991, p. 94.

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people that was much later taken up by Cristoforo Landino, Paolo Giovio, and Giorgio Vasari. In the category of the artists Facio covers, he talked about the lives of Gentile da Fabriano, Jan van Eyck, Pisanello, and Rogier van der Weyden among the painters, and Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello among the sculptors.38 In 1456, apart from Filarete and Leonardo, a number of treatises on art and artistic education had already been written, and indeed one finds many hidden references to Alberti and Pliny. Strangely, Facio seems to have ignored Ghiberti as an author, although (or perhaps because) he acknowledged him as an artist.39 The absence of literary careers for artists is astonishing, and it seems that Facio wanted to make a sharp distinction. He made a deliberate choice to exclude literate artists, and to concentrate on artists who could not be perceived in a second way, with the sole exception of Ghiberti. By no means was this intended to diminish their artistic achievement. Another new and influential division of the arts was made by Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), a well-known teacher of poetry and philosophy at the University of Florence. Poliziano focused in several texts on the value of the mechanical arts within a scientific system, an argument he had obviously borrowed from Aristotle, Hugh, and Thomas. The most detailed analysis is in the opening lecture of his course on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1490–1491) with an introduction (prolusioni) called Panepistemon (The universally educated man).40 Here he categorized the disciplines (which could also be understood as sciences) and developed his subsystem of philosophical orientations, where the practical arts were also included. Following Poliziano, philosophy could be split up into the following disciplines or arts: the liberal arts, the mechanical arts, and minor/lower arts (artes sordidae), therefore following Hugh, who offered philosophy as the guiding principle for all the arts.41 Not only did Poliziano include the mechanical and minor arts among the sciences, but he also framed them as being under the discipline of philosophy, and thus confronted them with philosophical questions. On the basis of Aristotle’s, Hugh’s, and Thomas’s ideas, Poliziano developed a new and quite complex system of the sciences, based on three different orientations of teaching: theology, philosophy, and prophecy. Philosophy, however, was the mother 38

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It has already been noticed that Facio’s knowledge of Middle and North Italian artists derived from the 1430s and early ’40s. See Michael Baxandall, Bartholomaeus Facius on painting, pp. 90–91. Michael Baxandall, Bartholomaeus Facius on painting, pp. 90–91. Baxandall edits the two chapters on art from a fifteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library, Vat.Lat. 13650, ff. 37v–44v. Angelo Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, Basel 1553, pp. 462–473; Angelo Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, trans. Otto and Eva Schönberger, Würzburg 2011, pp. 51–71. Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, p. 462. On the division of the disciplines in the Panepistemon, see Thomas Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), Hamburg 2017, vol. 1, pp. 218–219, 464–471.

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE

of the sciences, and could be split up into three categories: speculative/ theoretical, actual/practical, and rational. The first speculative/theoretical part included many topics of the quadrivium, namely, mathematics, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy/astrology, and optics. Actual/practical philosophy included moral and rational philosophy, but also economics. The rational part of philosophy was used to demonstrate, consult, or delight the man, and therefore included topics from the trivium, such as grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, but Poliziano also added poetics and history, topics much in vogue at the time.42 When Poliziano then came back to explain the artes mechanicae, he divided them into two categories: the rational and the handcraft (chirurgica). The second category included farming, architecture, working with wood, and painting.43 Poliziano used many of his university lectures on Aristotle (1490–1492) and Homer (1485–1490) to return to the question of the artes. For example, he called Homer the creator of all the sciences, who had likewise created painting, since painting and poetry were so close to each other.44 Poliziano cited Homer once again when he said that the illustrious poet would declare as wise those who worked with wood, since for people in antiquity the manual labors had always belonged to those who were wise (although Plato had neglected this). This happened, for example, at the beginning of Poliziano’s lecture on Aristotle’s Analytica priora (1492), where he elevated the manual arts in his system of universal sciences.45 Poliziano’s evaluation was an important indication from the humanists that would eventually allow the artist to achieve a different intellectual standing. The way that Poliziano developed the system of disciplines in his academic lectures on the Ethics, which also deliberately embraced the practical arts, thus included them (theoretically) as a topic at the university on an equal footing with other more obvious disciplines from the trivium and quadrivium. This could thus lead to the supposition that they were actually considered to be legitimate academic topics in this environment, at least tangentially. That Poliziano stressed architecture rather than painting and sculpture, however, might be due to the fact that he was probably better informed on this topic, since he had edited Alberti’s treatise on architecture some five years before. For Marsilio Ficino, on the other hand, painting, 42 43 44

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Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, pp. 462–463. Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, p. 467. This passage is in Poliziano’s inaugural lecture on Homer. See the citation in Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, p. 89. At this time, Poliziano was already engaged with questions concerning education and the division of the liberal arts for quite some time. Already in the 1480s, he had tried out a division of the liberal arts for his students in Pisa. See Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, p. 140; see also Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, De poesi et poetis: Uno schedario sconosciuto di Angelo Poliziano, in: Tradizione classica e letteratura umanistica per Alessandro Perosa, ed. Roberto Cardini, Rome 1985, vol. 2, pp. 455–487. Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, p. 36.

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sculpture, and architecture all belonged likewise to the liberal arts,46 following Lorenzo Valla and Alberti’s treatise on painting. The acceptance of the visual arts among the system of the artes received increasing attention at the end of the fifteenth century. The university teacher and mathematician Luca Pacioli (1445–1517) saw the three visual arts on the same level as the quadrivium, and made no distinction between the manual and intellectual sciences,47 a point he shared with Lorenzo Valla and Hugh of Saint Victor. A Franciscan friar, Pacioli was one of the foremost and bestknown mathematicians of his time, who often collaborated with artists. He taught at Pisa, Bologna, Florence, Venice, and Rome, and wrote several highly influential treatises,48 where he addressed a readership at university level, artists included. As a mathematician, he did not fail to stress the importance of geometry, and therefore Pacioli made mathematics and geometry the foundation of every curriculum. When he talked about scientific disciplines and their orders, he counted arithmetic, geometry, astronomy/astrology, music, perspective, architecture, and cosmography as belonging to the mathematical disciplines when referring to the subjects of the quadrivium already discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and Isidore in his Etymologies.49 Pacioli was neither the first nor the last university teacher to see the three visual arts on an equal level with the quadrivium. Some explicit mentions had already been made since the middle of the fifteenth century. For example, Michele Savonarola (1385–1468), a humanist and physician at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, compared an apprenticeship for painting to university study in 1447. For him, painting was at the same level as literary studies, and both formed part of the curriculum of philosophy,50 a conviction that will later be supported by Poliziano and others. These theoretical discussions on the 46

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Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, Basel 1576, p. 984, see also p. 944. See also André Chastel, Arte e umanesimo a Firenze al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Torino 1964, p. 195; Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie. Realtà sociale e teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo, Milan 1980, p. 57; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 50. On the integration of the visual arts into the liberal arts in Pacioli, see Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci e il “Paragone” delle arti nella Divina proportione, in: Luca Pacioli a Milano, ed. Matteo Martelli, Sansepolcro 2014, pp. 89–100. Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli e la matematica del sapere nel Rinascimento, Bari 2003, pp. 15–18; Giorgio Tomaso Bagni, Luca Pacioli e la matematica del suo tempo, in: De viribus quantitatis, ed. Furio Honsell and Giorgio Tomaso Bagni, Sansepolcro 2009, vol. 1, pp. 27–42; Elisabeth Tiller, “Peroché dal corpo umano ogni mesura con sue denominazioni deriva.” Luca Paciolis De divina proportione (1509) und die mathematische Aneignung des Körpers, kunsttexte.de, 3, 2011 (21 pages); Ciocci, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci e il “Paragone” delle arti nella Divina proportione, pp. 89–100. Euclidis Megarensis philosophi acutissimi mathematicorumque omnium (trans. Luca Pacioli), Venice 1509, ff. 30 r and v. On Michele Savonarola and this quotation, see Creighton Gilbert, Italian Art 1400–1500: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980, p. 210, and Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven 2000, pp. 57–58.

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visual arts would also eventually lead to academic practice, after the visual arts received regular mention at the universities. From around 1500 onward, Fra Giovanni Giocondo lectured on Vitruvius, therefore on architecture and sculpture as its integral part (first in Paris; see the Appendix). Around the middle of the sixteenth century, members of the Florentine literary academy recognized the demand coming from the visual arts to participate in education, and therefore began to include helpful topics in their academic program (see Chapter 2). It is astonishing to see that around 1480–1490 in Florence, Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano all failed to mention sculpture as being worthy of the liberal arts.51 Not everyone, however, shared this view, especially Pomponio Gaurico (1480–1530) in Padua, who took up Ficino’s idea to open up the liberal arts to the visual arts, but with a new idea. Pomponio Gaurico is probably one of the most illuminating humanists to have written on the artist’s education. As the son of a grammaticus, a grammar teacher, a profession he would himself take on later in life in Naples, he was well acquainted with ancient literature, and had dedicated himself to making important translations and commentaries. But before he started his important literary career, at the young age of not yet twenty he went to visit Constantinople, and thereafter moved on to Padua to study at the university (1501–1509).52 In his spare time from university studies, and probably still under the impression of Byzantium, he dedicated himself to manually exploring the art of sculpture, especially the work of bronze, and declared himself to be a passionate autodidact.53 From his passion for sculpture, he wrote a treatise in dialogue form that was printed in Florence in 1504 (De sculptura).54 With this discourse, he took part in a long-standing discussion on

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See André Chastel, Marsile Ficin e l’Art, Ginevra 1953, p. 61; Oscar Schiavone, Michelangelo Buonarroti. Forme del sapere tra letteratura e arte nel rinascimento, Florence 2013, p. 31. On Gaurico’s life see Pasquale Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, in: Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, Naples 1999, pp. 11–48; Paolo Cutolo, Il De sculptura di Pomponeo Gaurico, in: Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, pp. 81–82; Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, New Haven 2013, pp. 259–261. Gaurico declared that he had many friends among the sculptors: the Venetian sculptors Antonio and Tullio Rizzo (also friends of Raffaele Regio), and Severo da Ravenna, active in Padua. Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, pp. 251, 255. See also McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 259–261. Pomponio’s dialogue takes place in Gaurico’s atelier, where he was visited by two humanist friends and teachers at the University of Padua, Raffaele Regio, a professor of Greek and Latin literature and an important commentator on ancient texts, and Leonico Tomeo (1456?– 1531?) with the same profession (1497–1504 in Padua), who also was a collector of antiquities. Although Regio is Gaurico’s main correspondent in the dialogue, the teacher appears to be mainly concerned with approving the student’s ideas. Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, pp. 121–125 (preface), 131 (book 1).

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the twin arts of painting and poetry going back to Horace and Plutarch.55 This discussion certainly helped him to justify why the manual arts should have the same intellectual standing as the liberal arts and poetry.56 The dialogue opens with a highly significant passage: while the Bolognese university literature teacher Raffaele Regio teased Gaurico about neglecting his university studies, he approved his decision to dedicate himself to sculpture, an art as worthy as the others and proper for a free man. Gaurico responded promptly that he indeed considered this art part of the liberal arts, and he goes on to explain why it would be justified to talk about an eighth art. To explain the value of the visual arts, he named several famous sculptors from antiquity and one painter: Apelles. He then started a discourse on the capacities of literature and art – specifically sculpture – where the poets narrate and appeal to the ear, but the artists represent the facts to the eyes and explain them, while capturing the people’s attention.57 Nevertheless, both literature and sculpture or painting had the same origin in the graphic arts (graphéas), and could therefore not be split up. Gaurico said that he would feel honored to practice an art that even Socrates himself had the pleasure to exercise. Regio instead praised the student primarily for being the first to have unified sculpture with wisdom.58 It is appealing that Gaurico (and Regio), with the competence of being literati, in the end evaluated the practical arts more highly than literature, which evidently had more capacities on the practical side, in both expression and visualization. Sarah Blake McHam supposes that Gaurico probably did not write the treatise for his sculptor friends, as the text was written in Latin, and likewise Field sees Alberti’s De pictura as patron oriented.59 This is not necessarily true. Gaurico (and Alberti) were trying to lay the practical and theoretical foundations for lifting the art he was concerned with into the ranks of the liberal ranks. Therefore, he wrote the treatise in Latin for his fellow artists because he was more capable of doing so than many others were. The existence of this treatise should be viewed in the light of the artes debate, which addressed both literati and artists.

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See also Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New Haven 1997, p. 81; Francesco Divenuto and Pasquale Sabbatinino, Presentation, in: Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, p. 7; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 113. On this argument, see Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, pp. 24–25; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 113. We should recall that poetry was not part of the classical division of the liberal arts, although the trivium obviously had a lot to do with poetry. By Gaurico’s time, however, poetry was already an established university subject. Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, pp. 125–129 (book 1). On the origins of the graphic arts in Gaurico, see also Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, p. 33. McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 259–261; Judith Veronica Field, Piero Della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art, New Haven 2005, p. 35.

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF PARAGONE

The discussion about the value of sculpture had only a few supporters, but after Gaurico’s treatise, and some demonstrable excellence in its practice, it took the same direction that architecture had done since Thomas Aquinas. Now sculptors saw themselves being on a different intellectual level than stonemasons were, and this position received official support. Pope Paul III Farnese (1534–1549) wrote in a papal document (Motu proprio) of 1539 about the nobility of sculpture, and distinguished it from manual work with stone, the service side of art, which could only reproduce, and thus belonged to the mechanical arts. He claimed instead that sculpture should not be an art but a science. By imitating nature, it therefore belonged to the liberal arts. This happened after Michelangelo unsurprisingly had refused to inscribe himself into the congregation of stonemasons, to which sculptors also belonged, although their craft was certainly more intellectually demanding.60 The overview presented here shows the gradual approach that the visual arts took toward the liberal arts, and their growing appreciation until they were considered topics equal to those at university level, which happened shortly before the opening of the Accademia del disegno in Florence (in 1563). A similar development occurred in the demand for the artist’s education, which increasingly included university-related topics as well, and finally moved toward an institutionalized academic environment for artists. The overview likewise makes it clear that the three visual arts were not always discussed on the same level. In this epoch-making discussion, authors often had preferences for one of the three visual arts, and argued for their particular reputation in relation to the others. This point touches on the perception and recognition of the three arts, the education of the artist, and the evaluation of the arts, and will finally lead to the paragone debates of the sixteenth century. The humanists cultivated a high appreciation for the visual arts, which ultimately derived from antiquity: Pliny’s appreciation of drawing as a liberal art and Aristotle’s division of the liberal and mechanical arts, to which the visual arts belonged, but which also figured among the intellectual virtues. The core discussion about the value of these secondary mechanical or practical arts among the liberal arts had as its main authors Aristotle, Hugh, and Thomas, who were then picked up by most Renaissance authors. This discussion received new input in the Renaissance and will be constantly disputed between 1440 and 1500, to such an extent that, in the end, it seemed quite plausible to the humanists that the visual arts had the same intellectual standing as the liberal arts and should thus be officially acknowledged. Following Roeck, around 1500 the standing of the three visual arts among the liberal 60

See Melchior Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Lucia fino alla morte di Antonio Canova, Rome 1823, pp. 9–10; Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma, 1478–1588, Rome 2012, p. 49.

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arts had become equivalent, at least from the artists’ perspective.61 This is certainly true from the humanists’ point of view as well. It was still some fifty years too early to see the visual arts become a proper subject in an academy, but these intellectual discussions had effectively prepared the path thereto. While humanists and artists were both discussing the value of the visual arts in comparison with the liberal arts, they were also discussing the appropriate education of an artist, and which disciplines he should study in addition to manual apprenticeship. This question arose likewise in antiquity, and was introduced by Vitruvius. At times, there was also the question as to whether one visual art should be singled out and given more prestige. Especially painting found much support for being thought worthy of the liberal arts, first indirectly by Pliny, then explicitly by Petrarch, Villani, Savonarola, and Castiglione. The 1601 papal declaration from Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592–1605) for the Roman academy of disegno now officially declared painting to no longer be an arte meccanica, but a professio nobilis.62 Architecture found less direct support on this particular question, mainly from Vitruvius, Varro, Pacioli, and Poliziano; sculpture only by Gaurico; while even Alberti in his treatise had focused on the manual aspects. Regardless, many authors agreed on the importance of drawing for a general education and for the artist, especially Aristotle, Pliny, Alberti, Ghiberti, Filarete, Facio, Castiglione, and Varchi. These discussions established the foundations for what would emerge as the paragone debate of the sixteenth century. LAYING THE GROUNDS FOR CATEGORIES AND THEORY AT THE BEGINNING OF AR T HISTORY (TH E PARAGONE DEBATE)

The paragone debate has so far been primarily conceived of as an internal debate among the parties representing the different visual arts. It should actually be seen as a result of the discussions between the liberal and mechanical arts, and the positions each of them had in this ranking. While this chapter is logically required to touch upon the paragone debate, there is no intention here to go into depth and repeat common topoi. The primary intention is to sharpen our awareness of the paragone debate in light of the discussion on the artes in general, and the artist’s education in particular.63 What arises in the first half

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Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 91. On this papal declaration, see Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma 1478–1588, Rome 2012, p. 7. Most authors focus on the aspect of an artistic competition among the visual arts, and start the paragone debate with Leonardo. Christiane Hessler’s book is one of the very few to introduce the topic and its vast range of sources beyond the usual discourse, although she insists nevertheless on the competition among the visual arts since Leonardo. On the paragone debate in the sixteenth century, see, for example, some recent publications: Paola Barocchi,

THE BEGINNING OF ART HISTORY (THE PARAGONE DEBATE)

of the sixteenth century as the so-called paragone debate is actually a by-product of an ongoing discussion among literati. The first art critics arose from these circles of eloquent men discussing artistic styles and comparing artistic oeuvres. They also talked about artistic categories, which laid the first theoretical foundations for a discipline desiring academic acknowledgment. Vasari was not the first art critic, but he readily jumped into this discussion and greatly benefited from his literary friends, who helped him in shaping his Vite degli artisti (1550, 1568). The artists themselves responded to this discussion with what we call the paragone debate, a comparison between the three different orientations in the visual arts, each advocate pleading for the skillfulness of their own profession and thus of their ranking within the arts. The following discussion hopes to shed light on the origins of the paragone debate as it springs out of discussions on all of the artes, while singling out specific ones. There are many important predecessors to the official paragone debate who found good arguments for individual visual arts. By discussing these arguments, they helped to shape the characteristics of the three different categories. Although in ancient times and in the Middle Ages authors had preferences regarding the visual arts, the discussion only really starts with Petrarch (1304–1374) at the cusp of the Renaissance. With Petrarch, artistic knowledge became more important, and he was building a bridge toward some of the most important literature of antiquity in order to explain his idea of the level of erudition proper for an artist. As has already been noticed, with respect to painting he relied on two important topics taken from Pliny, whom he cites explicitly. In his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul (De remediis utriusque fortunae, ca. 1360), with regard to painting’s rank, Petrarch referred to the Greeks, who separated painting from manual labor, and assigned it to the ranks of the liberal arts – but he also did not include sculpture and architecture. Therefore, in Petrarch only painting had an intellectual dimension.64 Regarding the

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Benedetto Varchi, Vincenzio Borghini. Pittura e scultura nel Cinquecento, Livorno 1998, pp. viii– xvi; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, pp. 141–161; Rudolf Preimesberger, Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Los Angeles 2011; Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen, Benedetto Varchi, Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 9–20; Sefy Hendler, La Guerre des Arts. Le paragone peinture-sculpture en Italie Xve–XVIIe siècle, Rome 2013; Hessler, Zum Paragone: Malerei, Skulptur und Dichtung in der Rangstreitkultur des Quattrocento; Paragone als Mitstreit, ed. Joris van Gastel, Yannis Hadjinicolaou and Markus Rath, Berlin 2014; Marco Collareta, Nouvelles études sur le paragone entre les arts, Perspective, 1, 2015, pp. 153–160; Christopher J. Nygren, Titan’s Ecce Homo on slate: Stone, oil, and the transubstantiation of painting, The Art Bulletin, 99:1, 2017, pp. 36–66. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, Bloomington 1991, p. 127. On Petrarch’s dependance on Pliny and knowledge of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, see also Achille Pellizzari, I Trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola Iberica, Naples 1915, vol. 2, pp. 94–95; Norberto Gramaccini, Cennino Cennini e il suo “Trattato della Pittura,” Studi umanistici piceni, 7, 1987, pp. 143–151, see p. 144. On Petrarch’s understanding of the

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comparison of painting and poetry and their equal value, Petrarch was certainly referring to the ancient paragone debate of Aristotle, Horace, and Plutarch. The same is true for the almost contemporary edition of the Florentine chronicle by the historian Filippo Villani (ca. 1323–ca. 1405), who not only included some painters in his history of important people, but even placed painting in the realm of the liberal arts because it required a lot of fantasy and a good memory, the same qualities that were also necessary for literature. Both of painting’s modernizers, Cimabue and Giotto, were praised for their artistic skills and their “ingegno” (inventive and intellectual creativity).65 Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) turned to the issue of comparison in his inaugural lecture for the academic year 1455–1456 in Rome, while talking about the value of all the liberal arts and sciences, and how they would be improved by competition. He suggested this also for painters and sculptors, since any art would need input for imitating, developing, and improving what was contributed by others.66 Valla can therefore be seen as the originator of the following paragone debate, which thus started a century before its climax! Other authors focused less on direct competition than on personal preferences for one visual art over the others. As we had seen, only five years after Valla there was a proposal by Michele Savonarola at Padua, which had already given full academic acknowledgment to painting. And Luca Pacioli, who had placed the three visual arts on a level equal to the quadrivium, nevertheless saw different qualities in architecture and painting. To architecture he attributed a place among the sciences of the quadrivium, whereas painting had a lower rank, deriving only some benefits from mathematics and geometry, but in general basing itself on naturalistic capacities.67 Therefore, in Pacioli, architecture achieved a higher academic and intellectual standing than painting. Angelo Poliziano was one of the first to discuss different artistic methods and predispositions for the visual arts. Although stated briefly, this was similar to the level proposed by Benedetto Varchi and his friends more than fifty years later. For Poliziano, planning and execution belonged to architecture, and the architect needed scenography, harmony, and symmetry.68 Painting and

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sciences and the arts, see Thomas Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), Hamburg 2017, vol. 1, pp. 282–286. Filippo Villani, Le vite d’uomini illustri Fiorentini, Venice 1747, pp. lxxx–lxxxii. Quotation in Silvia Rizzo, Lorenzo Valla – Orazione per l’inaugurazione dell’anno accademico 1455–1456 (Oratio in principio studii), in: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1994, pp. 194–195. Valla might have thought about Pliny’s suggestion (Natural History, 35.10) of an artistic competition for painting and drawing. For the insertion of painting and architecture in the arts, see also Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci e il “Paragone” delle arti nella Divina proportione, in: Luca Pacioli a Milano, ed. Matteo Martelli, pp. 89–100, see pp. 92–94. Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, p. 469.

THE BEGINNING OF ART HISTORY (THE PARAGONE DEBATE)

sculpture instead belonged to the graphic arts, and were based on symmetry and geometry, which they shared with architecture. But for Poliziano, painting was superior, as it had more possibilities for expressing itself. It could use colors and shadows to depict details or landscape, but it could also express emotions and render souls visible, which Poliziano mentioned as praiseworthy.69 Poliziano certainly owed a lot to Alberti’s treatises that were well known to him, especially the treatise on architecture, which he edited for printing (Florence, 1485), and that on painting, with the influence of Pliny’s Natural History and its discussion of topics and methods. With his Treatise on Painting, it seems plausible that Leonardo picked up on Lorenzo Valla, who had used the term “paragone” while comparing painting with sculpture, poetry, and music, when he defined the first as superior. Although some authors have claimed that Leonardo was the initiator of the paragone debate,70 it should be presumed that Leonardo was familiar with the aforementioned discussion starting with Valla, and the preferences for painting discussed by Petrarch, Filippo Villani, and Poliziano. The question as to which of the three artistic orientations should be considered more elite, intellectual, and demanding, on the one hand, should help to assure them a secure place among the higher educational categories, and also display knowledge of the history of the debate. But, on the other hand, and even more importantly, it could also help to make nonartists – like the fellows of the Accademia Fiorentina, but also everyone else – understand better the characteristics of the three visual arts. Discussing their methods and approaches helped to categorize the visual arts, and to develop a methodology and a theory for each of them. This discussion was therefore intended to shape an educational field, just as other university subjects would be doing in the sixteenth century, although this latter didactic approach did not yet seem at this stage to have entered the artist’s mind. One of the most fundamental and influential discussions that helped shape the field for a history of art took place in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Il cortegiano), which was published in 1528 but written considerably earlier. It incorporated a discussion on the value of the visual arts in the context of life at court, in this case the court of Francesco Maria Della Rovere in Urbino. In this fictive dialogue, the count explained that, although today

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Poliziano, Angeli Politiani Opera, p. 470. On the inclusion of the visual arts in the knowledge system of Politian’s Panepistemon and the importance of drawing, see also Charles Dempsey, Disegno and Logos, Paragone and Academy, in: The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590–1635, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, Washington 2009, pp. 43–53, see pp. 48–49. See, for example, Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. xx, see also p. 37; Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 27–28, 111–112; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 142; Dempsey, Disegno and Logos, Paragone and Academy, pp. 46–47.

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drawing and painting may be recognized as mechanical arts, this had certainly been different in antiquity, where these arts counted among the highest of the liberal arts (and due to its high ranking, teaching it to slaves was forbidden), and painters often came from important families. Sculpture and painting were both considered inspired arts, although the fictive dialogue dealt to some extent with the question of whether one or the other was to be seen as more valuable, thus requiring more artistic skill. This discussion was now developed with the knowledge of the artistic production by Raphael and Michelangelo. Although sculpture was judged to have the benefits of being more durable and threedimensional, in the end painting should be recognized as superior because it had perspective and color, and was able to express emotions, thus taking up the views of Horace and Plutarch. This judgment would be confirmed by ancient literature.71 This summary makes clear how Castiglione placed himself within several traditions: the rising paragone question starting from Valla; the question of painting among the liberal arts following Pliny, and developed by Petrarch, Villani, and Savonarola; and the question of drawing as the basis of education starting with Aristotle and Pliny, and followed up by Alberti, Ghiberti, Filarete, and Facio. The paragone debate both culminated and restarted around 1550 with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives and Benedetto Varchi’s Lezzioni. A member of the Florentine Literary Academy, Benedetto Varchi (1503–1565) was one of the most important humanists in Florence in the middle of the sixteenth century. He helped the artists shape the theoretical foundations for art as a science, especially painting and sculpture, which took place in two important public lectures in 1547, which were then printed in 1549.72 Varchi’s first lecture reflected on Michelangelo’s poem, “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto,” which is based on an artist’s initial idea and its subsequent execution, where Michelangelo states that manual work follows the intellectual concept. Varchi took the occasion to sharpen Michelangelo’s vocabulary, especially for the word “artist.” He discusses whether the word should be limited to inclusion within the liberal arts (together with philosophy and medicine), which would then not include the manual arts and the artificer, who should therefore not declare himself to be an artist.73 In Varchi’s second lecture, he departed from

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Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Milan 1971–1973, vol. 1, p. 113; Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Carol M. Richardson, Kim W. Woods and Michael W. Franklin, Malden, MA, 2007, pp. 152–156; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 51; McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, p. 264. Benedetto Varchi, Due lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, Florence 1549. On the definition of “artist,” see Sergio Rossi, who says that Varchi adheres to this definition, namely, that the artist is someone from the liberal arts. Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie. Realtà sociale e teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo, Milan 1980, pp. 103–107.

THE BEGINNING OF ART HISTORY (THE PARAGONE DEBATE)

many of the classical sources already mentioned, which he summarized mostly without mentioning their derivation. Most importantly, he started from Aristotle (De anima) and explained the philosopher’s system of the liberal and the mechanical arts, which he now called practical. He also incorporated the visual arts, and with more detail than in his models. Varchi started out by explaining, in general, that science should comprise all the arts, while the arts should also comprise all science. Referring to Aristotle (De anima), he then explained how they all depended on reason, and that contemplative action would comprise reason, wisdom, and science. To the lower reason belonged intelligence/cleverness and the practical arts.74 Varchi explained that the word “art” could sometimes be intended not for all of the sciences but only for the practical sciences.75 Next he explained the seven liberal arts and the adjunct arts that were all practical, picking this up from Aristotle’s mechanical arts. Among these, all of the visual arts, which included architecture, sculpture, and painting, could produce a work that also lasted after its completion. They were handcraft works, which required greater or lesser physical effort.76 Here Varchi followed up on Plato’s definition of art based on handcraft, Hugh’s artificer’s product, and Thomas Aquinas’s concept of opus. Then Varchi demanded, after Varro and Alberti, that one should recognize architecture as the highest art, which resulted both from its praiseworthy and useful end and from the manifold capacities of its producer. Architecture was also the first thing to be created, as sculpture and painting could consequently be seen as its decoration,77 a phrase he might have taken up literally from Vincent of Beauvais. Many other academy members and artists will continue the paragone debate after Varchi’s Lezzioni, and they will further define the characteristics of the three visual arts. By shaping the three categories and their presuppositions in theory and practice, the visual arts adhered to the academic requirements of setting both standards and methods. This was a big step away from dealing with artistic production simply by means of perception. Placing art within categories and theoretical models was a definitive step toward the opening of artistic academies. It is thus no coincidence that the paragone debate among the

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Benedetto Varchi, Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 80–91. See on this topic also Francois Quiviger, Benedetto Varchi and the visual arts, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50, 1987, pp. 219–224, see p. 222; Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in SixteenthCentury Italy: From Techne to Metatechne, Cambridge 1997, pp. 36–40. Varchi, Paragone, pp. 100–101. Varchi, Paragone, pp. 104–109. On this passage, see also Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 110–122. Varchi, Paragone, pp. 118–121. On the precedence of architecture over painting and scultpure, see also Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 106–108; Quiviger, Benedetto Varchi and the visual arts, p. 222; Marco Collareta, Varchi e le arti figurative, in: Benedetto Varchi, 1503–1565, ed. Vanni Bramanti, Rome 2007, pp. 173–184, see p. 180.

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three visual arts had its most vibrant expression precisely at those times when an academic setting and the competition with the liberal arts were discussed. RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE ARTIST’S EDUCATION BY LITERATI AND ARTISTS

Recommendations on the intellectual learning of the artist appeared to be a phenomenon parallel to discussions on the intellectual value of the visual arts among the liberal arts, and on preferences for single visual arts having a higher ranking. Treatises by artists on art are at least as old as ancient Greek art, and there are plenty of documents. However, remarks on education proper appear only with the architect Vitruvius (ca. 80–ca. 15 BCE), who already had a very clear idea about his fellow artists’ education. Dedicated to the Emperor Augustus and his patron Caesar, his treatise on architecture (Vitruvii de architectura libri decem) could actually serve as a model for Renaissance treatises. Vitruvius dedicated his first chapter to the architect’s formation by stating explicitly that this discipline requires interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, which could be learned through manual practice and intellectual work (ratiocinatione). Only these two together would form a distinguished architect. The artist would need talents (ingenium) in both disciplines to make the manual skills and intellectual knowledge work fruitfully together. This first approach is close to Aristotle’s demand in the Ethics that an architect, who had also gained wisdom, be trained in the field. But Vitruvius went further and clarified that he strongly preferred an architect with a real talent for the sciences, and not one trained only by study. The first disciplines to be learned would be a capacity for writing and literature, and also for drawing. These fields would then be enhanced by geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy. Well aware of his list’s demands, Vitruvius immediately felt the need to explain his extravagant request for learning: first of all, the artist would need literature in order to express himself properly about his creation. Drawing skills would help to illustrate his work. Geometry and arithmetic form the solid foundation to make his work a reality. History would help to explain the choice and evolution of the forms and ornaments used. Interestingly, he then turned to philosophy to perfect the architect in terms of morals and virtue. Music helped him to understand sounds and mathematical proportions, medicine to recognize the appropriate climate and environmental issues for buildings, and law to recognize problems with neighborhood buildings and patrons. These disciplines needed to be learned from childhood onward by gradually exploring literature, the sciences, and the arts. This way furnished the future architect with the means to build the most accomplished temple of architecture. All sciences would be linked among themselves, and not a profound but an encyclopedic education was required to gain a real understanding, and this

RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE ARTIST’S EDUCATION

especially for the architect.78 Therefore, for Vitruvius, architecture should be situated among the liberal arts. Vitruvius himself had enjoyed a broad education that seems to approximate his demands. His parents supported his education, which included literature as well as technical studies.79 Vitruvius’s justifications for his demanding program seemed, on the one hand, to explain what could be criticized as excessive; on the other hand, he formulated his justifications well and plausibly. If such an education were to be transmitted to the artists of the Renaissance, it would certainly go well beyond elementary education and the abacus school, which offered some basic reading and writing formation, and concentrated otherwise on algebra. The variety of topics mentioned by Vitruvius could be addressed only in a university, engaging practically with the entire liberal arts curriculum, including the trivium and quadrivium, and the additional specialized education of philosophy and law (see Chapter 2). Vitruvius’s treatise was widely known in manuscript versions throughout the Middle Ages. The first printed version appeared in Rome in 1486–1487. It has rightly been said that Vitruvius and Alberti became available in print at exactly the same date, and therefore in a certain sense appeared as “contemporary” texts.80 The foreword to Vitruvius speaks about making available a heritage text for both scholarly and public use. Although Vitruvius was widely read in the Renaissance, and mostly by humanists, only a few authors will fully pick up on Vitruvius’s complex educational proposals for a well-rounded education for the artist. The closest are Leon Battista Alberti, but only in his treatise on painting, the artists Lorenzo Ghiberti and Francesco di Giorgio, and, of course, the Vitruvius commentators Cesare Cesariano and Giovanni Battista Caporali (see Chapter 4). Only a few nonartists in antiquity made important remarks on the artist’s education, and these would have a long-lasting afterlife. Plato (428/427–348/ 347 BCE) accepted the Pythagorean view that art relying on mathematics was more praiseworthy than art relying on feelings because mathematics as a grounding for art depended on a cosmic model that closely followed the master creator. In the same vein, he added the further aspect of divine inspiration as likewise important. Centuries before Vitruvius, Plato opted for an educated, intellectual craftsman to put mathematical values into practice,

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Vitruvius, Zehn Bücher über Architektur, trans. Curt Fensterbusch, Darmstadt 1991, pp. 22–37 (liber primus I); Vitruvius, Ten Books on architecture, trans. Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Howe, New York 1999, pp. 21–24; Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum, ed. Ingrid Rowland, Rome 2003, pp. 2–6. Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Corvallis 2011, p. 64. Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture, Cambridge 1999, pp. 70–71. On other Latin translations of ancient texts available to architects, see p. 53.

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adding inspiration as a higher gift. He valued this for every artist, either in literature, music or the applied arts.81 Plato, however, did not yet provide a proper division of the arts, nor would it be his intention to engage with such a topic. When he spoke in the Gorgias about a division of the arts, however, he made a resounding distinction between rhetoric and all the other arts. The first would deal with speech, which may be assumed to be superior, while all the others would deal with handcrafts and similar matters, which may also be practiced in silence, to which belonged painting and sculpture. Furthermore, there would also be intermediate arts, such as arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and others, which would be practiced with speech and handcrafts.82 In the Republic, Plato gives an overview of the arts in the seventh book, mentioning five of the seven classical categories. Nevertheless, among these there is no place for the visual arts. The situation changed with Pliny (23–79 CE), a Roman historian and natural philosopher, and one of the first to place major importance on the visual arts, their manufacture and social standing within an encyclopedic system of knowledge in the world. Since Pliny had access to Vitruvius’s treatise, this influenced his view of artisans and of the visual arts as a whole. In the thirty-fifth book of Pliny’s Natural History, there are only a few hints regarding the artist’s education, but they are clear. For Pliny (as for Vitruvius), an artist had to be trained in the liberal arts, and likewise he expected the visual arts to have a similar reputation to theirs. Among his examples figure the Greek painter Metrodorus, who was also known as a philosopher. Pliny’s list of recommendations is similar to Vitruvius’s, including grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology, history, and arithmetic, topics that traditionally belonged to the liberal arts, but as enriched by perspective and anatomy, and also drawing.83 At any rate, arithmetic and geometry were the most important. Here Pliny cited Pamphilius as an authoritative source, who had cited these as the basis for every artist’s education (book 35.75–77). He also received praise for being the first painter with a thorough knowledge of science, above all arithmetic and geometry, which were thought to be essential for a good painter. Pamphilius was a well-known teacher – his most famous pupil was Apelles – and he also taught drawing to very young boys, since this

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For the theory of ancient art and especially Plato’s, see Rupert C. Lodge, Plato’s Theory of Art, New York 1953, pp. 34–45, 167–169, 297. In Plato’s philosophical school, the main topics were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and harmony, thus topics from the later quadrivium cycle, cfr. Plato, Politics VII; and Franz Schwarz, Aristoteles Metaphysik, Stuttgart 2000, p. 5. Plato, Gorgias, in: Platon. Sämtliche Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Erich Loewenthal, trans. Julius Deuschle, Darmstadt 2004, vol. 1, pp. 301–410, see pp. 305–308 (448C–450C). McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 110, 308; Peter FaneSaunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, New York 2016, pp. 13, 18–19.

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was the first step into the liberal arts (book 35.75–77).84 Pliny was also important for introducing the genre of treatises on painting and for recommending subjects in the quadrivium for the artists (especially painters) to learn. Pliny’s text was very well known in the Renaissance, especially after Cristoforo Landino rendered the text into the vernacular; it was printed in Venice in 1476 (see Chapter 4). The few existing texts from the Middle Ages were not very illuminating about artists and their educational preparation, and, in fact, one may suspect that manual training existed only in a shop or monastery. These medieval texts spoke in a step-by-step manner about artistic techniques and production. These books served to supplement the practice gained in a workshop with a treatise on relevant techniques, which went along with the reevaluation of the mechanical arts and their apprenticeships. During the Middle Ages, both manual and intellectual training occurred mostly in monasteries. It is thus not surprising that one of the very few medieval handbooks on artistic techniques was written by a Benedictine monk, Theophilus Presbyter, in the twelfth century (De diversis artibus),85 at a high point of monastic education. He explained in detail the manufacture of paintings and glass and the goldsmith’s art. Although Theophilus Presbyter did not give specific recommendations of higher learning for the artist in his treatise, he found it reprehensible to be unwilling to study. On the other hand, he disapproved of studies that led not to a proper profession but to idleness and laziness. Instead, he approved of intellectual studies made toward the practice of manual labor, thus affirming Solomon’s saying that knowledge improved work. Knowledge was intended to perfect work, and moral values were also helpful to this end.86 Two centuries later, an artist will give written evidence of how important intellectual stimulation and literature are, and he was writing at a time when the first universities had already opened and a dual higher education track in the monasteries and in universities was available. Cennino Cennini (c. 1370–c. 1440) is an early example of a change that was only to fully arrive almost fifty years later. As has already rightly been pointed out, in his book Il libro dell’arte Cennino took one significant step away from medieval workmanship toward art as an intellectual enterprise, which required manual labor as much as the mind together with “fantasia,” namely, creativity.87 The manual work and the

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Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge 1952, pp. 317–319; Gaio Plinio Secondo, Storia naturale, Torino 1988, vol. 5, pp. 375–377. Therefore, Kristeller assumes that Pliny had put painting among the liberal arts. See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, p. 170. Erhard Brepohl, Theophilus Presbyter und das mittelalterliche Kunsthandwerk, Cologne 1999. Brepohl, Theophilus Presbyter und das mittelalterliche Kunsthandwerk, vol. 1, pp. 49–52, 145–146 (Prologus libri primi, prologus libri secundi). Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, ed. Fabio Frezzato, Vincenza 2003.

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mind hearken back to Vitruvius’s demand for the architect to gain knowledge through manual practice and intellectual work. The category of fantasy refers to Quintillian and to Cennini’s influential contemporary Filippo Villani’s suggestion of fantasy, memory, and invention.88 Compared with the results above, when Cennini saw painting among the liberal arts and as following directly on science, on which it should be based, he was following Pliny, Petrarch, and Villani. In order to compose a work, the artist is asked to use his mind, and to complete it with poetry, which was likewise based on science but used fantasy for the creative part.89 Cennini’s remarkable words located the manual arts in relation to the disciplines of higher education as taught at the universities. But some also located painting in relation to poetry, which probably went back to Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, and Francesco da Barberino’s Documenti d’amore, which was a very popular text that was certainly known to Cennini. Furthermore, it has been proposed that Cennini, who was born in Tuscany in Colle Val d’Elsa, worked in Padua between 1398 and 1401, where this treatise might have been written. Padua had one of the leading universities, certainly more important than the one in contemporary Florence, and was frequented also by the foremost humanists, like Pier Paolo Vergerio and others.90 This dynamic and learned atmosphere, by which Cennini must have felt influenced, had a not unimportant impact on his own view of himself as a painter who was now competing with the liberal arts. In fact, as we have seen, only a few decades later, in 1447, the Padua university teacher Michele Savonarola will claim that painting should be a university subject. However, Cennini’s treatise itself follows the general outline already provided by Theophilus. Cennini’s treatise on painting is therefore a proper manual for a pupil in an apprenticeship, and it contained all of the theory necessary for painting that a workshop boy needed to learn. And this happened now for the first time in the vernacular. In Theophilius and Cennini we see the artist as an

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Most authors propose Quintilian and Petrarch. On this, see (selectively) Norberto Gramaccini, Cennino Cennini e il suo “Trattato della Pittura,” Studi umanistici piceni, 7, 1987, pp. 143–151; Norberto Gramaccini, Das genaue Abbild der Natur: Riccios Tiere und die Theorie des Naturabgusses seit Cennino Cennini, in: Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, ed. Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol, Frankfurt 1985, pp. 198–225; Ulrich Pfisterer, Cennino Cennini und die Idee des Kunstliebhabers, in: Grammatik der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Hubert Locher and Peter J. Schneemann, Zürich 2008, pp. 95–117; Latifah Troncelliti, Cennino Cennini and Leon Battista Alberti: Two parallel realities in the Latin Quattrocento, PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2001, pp. 130, 206–235; Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, “Disegnia sechondo che huoi.” Cennino Cennini e la fantasia artistica, in: Linea I. Grafie di immagini tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento, ed. Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf, Venice 2008, pp. 163–190. Kemp, Behind the Picture, pp. 84–89; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, pp. 60–63. The treatise was finished only in 1437, as mentioned in the explicit of the work. On Cennini’s stay in Padova, see Fabio Frezzato: Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, ed. Fabio Frezzato, Vincenza 2003, pp. 11–21; Pfisterer, Cennino Cennini und die Idee des Kunstliebhabers, pp. 95–117.

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artificer, who created after God, the starting point for every creation, thus perpetuating the idea proposed by Thomas Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was the first to lay theoretical groundwork for all of the three visual arts – architecture, sculpture, and painting – therefore anticipating what would arise as a serious question only in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was also the first to break down the intellectual differences between the three arts, making them intellectually almost equal and worthy of theoretical discussions. As we have seen, this inspired the considerations of another of the most influential humanists, Lorenzo Valla; in particular, in his two books from around 1440, Elegantiae and De vero falsoque bono, Valla declared that all three visual arts are close to the liberal arts, and mentioned their utility, beauty, and glory. Alberti was most explicit about an intellectual education for the artist in his treatise on painting (De pictura 1435, Della pittura 1436) in order to make his demanding educational list look more convincing and realistic. Therefore, he underlines that this approach toward the sciences would be that of an artist, and not of an expert in these other orientations (book 1).91 Although Alberti was not primarily an artist, he nevertheless realized the difficulties an artist would encounter in approaching the sciences without a proper teacher – a suggestion he borrowed from Pliny. The required sciences that Alberti characterized as lost after antiquity were painting, sculpture, architecture, music, geometry, rhetoric, and prophecy/ divination (Prologus).92 Alberti’s impressive list of suggested topics to be learned is close to Vitruvius’s demands for the architect, although Vitruvius also included history and law, whereas Alberti saw a need for the painter to learn about prophecy/divination. Alberti was most specific about the artist’s education in his third book of Della pittura. After having explained the basics of mathematics, geometry, perspective, optics, colors, and some famous topics from antiquity in books 1 and 2, he claimed that a painter should be educated in “buone lettere,” which meant that he should have studied literature at an advanced level, and this in order to get an ethical training and right habits as well. As we have seen above, the importance of virtue and ethics for the visual arts had already been supported by Aristotle and Vincent of Beauvais. Following Pliny’s suggestions, Alberti stated that an artist should study all of the liberal arts, with a special focus on geometry.93 To sum up, literature and perspective should especially be learned, and parts of the quadrivium (geometry and arithmetic).94 Following Pliny, Petrarch, Filippo Villani, and Lorenzo 91

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Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda, Darmstadt 2002, p. 67. Alberti, Della pittura, pp. 63–65. Alberti, Della pittura, p. 151. Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 57–58; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 30; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, pp. 69–78.

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Valla, Alberti made strong arguments for including painting in a liberal arts curriculum,95 but he likewise distinguished between more simple painters, who are able to practice techniques, and more intellectually advanced painters, who are able to pursue more demanding topics. In this he followed Thomas Aquinas’s division of the architects and stonemasons, which was later transferred to sculpture by Pomponeo Gaurico. As we will see in the following chapter, a liberal arts curriculum would have required university training, starting with the trivium and proceeding to the quadrivium, to which geometry also belonged. About fifteen years later, while composing his advice for architects in De re aedificatoria (1451–1453), either his ideas on educational recommendations had changed or he began to see a significant difference between painters and architects (not to mention sculptors). Although Alberti still demonstrated his own vast knowledge in all of the sciences, the only two important fields where the architect should excel would be painting96 and mathematics,97 which are both as important to him as the voice and syllables are to the poet. Despite Alberti’s educational recommendation for the young architect to read as widely as possible in all of the sciences, there was, as it turns out, no real need for him to study law, astrology, music, or oratory, where just some basics would suffice.98 Alberti here took a large step away from Vitruvius’s requirements for the architect’s education, who had explicitly mentioned all of these topics. Once again following Thomas Aquinas, Alberti made a crisp distinction between the architect and the carpenter, or anyone else involved in the execution of a building. For him, only the architect worked on an intellectual level, whereas the actual builders – in accordance with Thomas Aquinas – were mere craftsmen,99 a comparison which has so far been overlooked. Nevertheless, he did not propose a comparable elevation of architecture into the liberal arts. Like Pliny, Vitruvius, and Alberti, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) promoted a course of study similar to a university curriculum. By contrast with Cennini’s practical treatise on painting, however, Ghiberti’s three Commentarii (1452–1455) offered a theoretical approach to painting and sculpture.100 The

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Carol Westfall, Painting and the liberal arts: Alberti’s view, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30:4, 1969, pp. 487–506. He then recommends his Elementa picturae as sufficient introduction into painting (Leon Battista Alberti, Zehn Bücher über Baukunst, Darmstadt 1975, pp. 516–519 (book 9.9)). In his Profugiorum of 1442, Alberti underlined the mathematical basis for painting, where mathematics gained a practical utility for life (Leon Battista Alberti, Profugiorum ab erumna libri, ed. Giovanni Ponte, Genoa 1988, p. 115). Alberti, Zehn Bücher über Baukunst, pp. 516–519 (book 9.9). Alberti, Zehn Bücher über Baukunst, pp. 515–516 (book 9.9). Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli, Florence 1998. On Ghiberti’s educational requirements, see for example Klaus Bergdolt, Lorenzo Ghiberti – Der dritte Kommentar: Naturwissenschaften und Medizin in der Kunsttheorie der Frührenaissance, Weinheim 1988,

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vast knowledge of expert literature included in his Commentarii must have come from Ghiberti’s own erudition, whereas, in Cennini’s case, it derived mainly from his workshop training. Although Ghiberti wrote as an artist himself, he demonstrated clear knowledge of the increasingly popular topic of antiquarianism, and a vast culture in literary studies and the subjects of higher education. Writing toward the end of his life, Lorenzo Ghiberti revealed an educational cultivation that must have been grounded in many years of reading and study. Although contemporary with Alberti’s architectural treatise, Ghiberti’s Commentarii certainly shared more in terms of education with Alberti’s treatise on painting from some twenty years before. What Ghiberti expected the learned painter and sculptor to have studied in the liberal arts – namely, grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology, perspective, history, anatomy, drawing, and arithmetic (Commentarii 1.1) – seems to rely almost entirely on Vitruvius’s requirements for the perfect architect, but he modifies them slightly. Instead of music he suggested arithmetic, which was available in abacus schools, and perspective, which had just been introduced into painting. Knowing about Ghiberti’s own preparation, it is not surprising that he suggested a learned background for the practical arts. Furthermore, he claimed that both painting and sculpture should be sciences made from various disciplines, and he started enumerating these disciplines with literature, followed by geometry, history, and philosophy (Commentarii 1.2).101 All of the disciplines that Ghiberti named would be taken especially to heart by humanistically educated people. Ghiberti likewise promoted a historical and antiquarian approach when he provided examples of successful sculptors, and said that their preparation had primarily been the knowledge of ancient literature and sculpture (Commentarii 1.2). When he then came to famous examples from the past, he almost precisely copies Pliny. Ghiberti’s foremost praise went to those who were well prepared, both as artists and in all the disciplines, like the famous and prolific ancient Greek sculptor Lysippus (Commentarii 1.18) or Ulysses of Macedonia, who was learned in literature, arithmetic, and geometry and who taught young boys, first by instructing them to learn how to draw. His famous pupil Apelles had written treatises on the art of painting (Commentarii 1.21). With this list, Ghiberti expanded the liberal arts beyond the canonical seven. In the Renaissance, this entire curriculum would have gone well beyond any abacus school, and even exceeded the classical components of the trivium and quadrivium. Philosophy and medicine

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p. xxxi; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 30; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, pp. 66–67. Sabbatino interprets Ghiberti’s point on the sciences as being that both painting and sculpture should belong to the same science, which would thus place them on the same level. See Pasquale Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, pp. 11–48, see p. 30.

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belonged to the highest levels of study after the liberal arts, whereas history was just being introduced into the curriculum, and drawing was not yet part of it. The first sprang out of a growing interest by the humanists, and could be found in their circles and in humanistically oriented schools; the second is of fundamental importance for every artist and would be learned in workshops. Bergdolt supposes that Ghiberti’s inclination toward the natural sciences was due to the influence of Toscanelli.102 While Alberti, who was primarily a humanist and only secondarily an artist had no difficulties in claiming this entire educational canon for himself, it is astonishing to see this demand in Ghiberti. The goldsmith and sculptor must have had a remarkable education, judging from the vast literature consulted for his Commentarii. Ghiberti was clearly oriented toward Aristotle and his commentators (and in later years also Pliny), texts he would have encountered in university classes. He stated about himself that he had engaged in studies from his early youth, and that he was seeking not money, but erudition (Commentarii 2.18). In Ghiberti’s first book, as has already been mentioned, he deliberately cited antique sources from Athenaios’s Organiká (proemium), Vitruvius’s De architectura libri decem (books 1, 3, 7), and Pliny’s Natural History (books 35 and 36), whereas in his third book he relies on thirteenth-century authors dealing with perception.103 He also cited Euclid’s Optica and the Arabic mathematician and philosopher Alhazen with his contributions to optics, which were known in the Middle Ages through the Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona and were commented on by Roger Bacon, Vitello (Witelo), and John Peckham.104 In Ghiberti’s time, all these texts were available only in Latin, which means that he himself must have had sufficient knowledge of Latin to read them. Ghiberti’s own text, however, was written in the vernacular to make it accessible to every artist without linguistic obstacles.105 Stimulated by Alberti’s vernacular Della 102

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Although this is probably true, one nevertheless needs to consider that these were the most common university topics. See Klaus Bergdolt, Der dritte Kommentar Lorenzo Ghibertis. Naturwissenschaften und Medizin in der Kunsttheorie der Frührenaissance, Weinheim 1988, pp. xvi–xxxi. See also Klaus Bergdolt, Der Künstler als Literat – Das Beispiel Ghiberti, in: Künstler und Literat. Schrift- und Buchkultur in der europäischen Renaissance, ed. Bodo Guthmüller, Berndt Hamm and Andreas Tönnesmann, Wiesbaden 2006, pp. 31–46, see p. 20. Gramaccini, Cennino Cennini e il suo “Trattato della Pittura,” pp. 143–151; Bergdolt, Der Künstler als Literat – Das Beispiel Ghiberti, pp. 26–29. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 138; Leo Olschki, Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften, Vaduz 1965, vol. 1, pp. 100–102; Graziella Federici Vescovini, Contributo per la storia di Alhazen in Italia: Il volgarizzamento del Ms Vat.Lat. 4595 e il ‘Commentario terzo’ del Ghiberti,” Rinascimento, ser. 2, 5, 1965, pp. 17–49; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, pp. 63–67. Ghiberti’s education has been judged by researchers very differently, from a person in need of help to a highly knowledgable artist. Following Olschki, Ghiberti himself did not benefit from a proper education, but followed the advice and expertise of a humanist, who must have led him to the literary sources, and worked as his translator. Olschki, Die Literatur der

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pittura, the two authors anticipated this tendency by a few decades, after which important literature was made available in the vernacular on a larger scale (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, the architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501) promoted educational ideas that relied on higher university studies and on Vitruvius. The second version of his Trattato di architettura (first version 1481–1484, Codex Saluzziano; revised 1486–1492, Codex Laurenziano106) included ideas from the recently published treatises by Alberti and Vitruvius as well as influences from Bramante and Leonardo in Milan.107 What Francesco required as preparation for a good architect sounds similar to Vitruvius, whom he cited appropriately in this context: Vitruvius would require genius and doctrine from the architect, as genius without doctrine or doctrine without genius would never make a perfect architect, who therefore had to be an expert in various disciplines. The disciplines he listed contained virtually everything from higher education: drawing, geometry, arithmetic, history, philosophy, music, rhetoric, medicine, civil law, and astrology. Francesco offered interesting insights into these subjects and how they were to be learned. He considered drawing as the most important subject, but the architect also needed a thorough knowledge of geometry, arithmetic, and history.108 Then, from his oral apprenticeship, he should have heard whatever about philosophy, music, physics, civil law, and astrology that should be of interest to an architect.109 This means that an advanced abacus school or parts of the quadrivium were necessary, while the rest of the quadrivium and top-

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Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften, vol. 1, pp. 90–91. Bergdolt supposes that Ghiberti (and Masaccio and Donatello) had visited an abacus school and then got training in the natural sciences through the mathematician and geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482) in Padua (Bergdolt, Der dritte Kommentar Lorenzo Ghibertis, pp. xvi–xxxi). Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattato di architettura: il Codice Ashburnham 361 della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze, ed. Luigi Firpo and Pietro C. Mariani, Florence 1979; it contains a complete transcription of Codex Ashburnham 361, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. On the two versions of Francesco’s treatise, see Renato de Fusco, Il codice dell’architettura. Antologia di trattatisti, Naples 1968, p. 269; Massimo Mussini, Il trattato di Francesco di Giorgio Martini e Leonardo: il Codice Estense restituito, Parma 1991, pp. 57–136; Francesco Paolo Fiore, The Trattati on architecture by Francesco di Giorgio, in: Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks, New Haven 1998, pp. 66–85. Trattato di architettura di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ed. Luigi Firpo and Pietro C. Mariani, Florence 1979, pp. xv, xxiii–xxiv. On Francesco’s encounter with Leonardo in Milan from 1490 onward, see for example Mussini, Il trattato di Francesco di Giorgio Martini e Leonardo: il Codice Estense restituito, pp. 1636217. Francesco di Giorgio also wrote, among other works, a book entitled Praticha di Gieometria (Cod. Ashburnham 361, Biblioteca Laurenziana), which is a manual on geometry and its calculations, and contains no further thoughts on educational principles. Trattato di architettura di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ed. Luigi Firpo and Pietro C. Mariani, pp. 19–20 (chapter 39). On the requirements for an architect, see also Long, Artisan/ Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, pp. 80–81.

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level disciplines were to be followed as auditors. History was presumably learned through personal reading. Francesco di Giorgio is an important source for the possibility of the artist to participate in oral learning in the subjects of higher education (see Chapter 2). With Leonardo (1452–1519) we enter a new era. His treatise on painting (Libro di pittura) was composed from 1513 to 1514 onward, with continuations throughout his lifetime; it was finally compiled by a student.110 Leonardo started by loosening art’s bonds from the artes mechanicae, where however – and quite wittily – he placed the manual part of literature, the literal act of writing.111 We may presume that he applied the wit in order to reevaluate literature by using Thomas Aquinas’s and Alberti’s division between intellectual professionals and simple practitioners in the manual arts. Leonardo then included painting but not sculpture or architecture within the sciences.112 By isolating painting from the other visual arts, Leonardo therefore follows the discussion started by Pliny, who had demanded the knowledge of all sciences only for painting. This was followed by Petrarch and Villani and their wish to see painting among the liberal arts. This view reached its climax in the professor Michele Savonarola, who had asked for painting to be a university subject, which was also picked up by Alberti. For Leonardo, within the sciences, painting should by no means play an inferior role, since it outshines poetry and legitimately includes other sciences like geometry and astrology –

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The most well-known manuscript is the Codex Urbinas Latinas 1270 (Vatican Library), written around 1546 by Leonardo’s student Francesco Melzi. For this compilation, he worked through Leonardo’s notes. See, for example, Rodolfo Papa Pedretti, La scienza della pittura di Leonardo. Analisi del “Libro di pittura,” Milan 2005; Anna Sconza, La prima trasmissione manoscritta del “Libro di pittura,” Raccolta Vinciana, 33, 2009, pp. 307–366; Mauro Pavesi, Milano, Firenze, Roma, Parigi: La diffusione del Trattato della Pittura di Leonardo, in: Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al trattato della pittura, ed. Pietro C. Marani and Maria Teresa Fiorio, Milan 2007, pp. 83–97; Mario Valentino Guffanti, La fortuna di Leonardo nelle edizioni a stampa del Trattato della Pittura e nei suoi estratti, in: Leonardo, ed. Pietro C. Marani and Maria Teresa Fiorio, pp. 121–127. On literature and writing among the artes mechanicae, see for example chapters 7, 9 and 31. On Leonardo’s view of artistic skills and the mechanical arts, see also Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 74–86; Kemp, Behind the Picture, p. 7; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the early Renaissance Artist, pp. 1–2. Notes on the predominance of painting over sculpture and architecture are, for example, in chapters 7 and 35–36. Sabbatino notices also that Leonardo placed painting among the sciences, whereas sculpture belonged to the manual arts. However, he does not consider architecture to hold the same place. See Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, pp. 30–32. On Leonardo’s division of the visual arts among the mechanical arts, see also Charles H. Carman, Images of Humanist Ideals in Italian Renaissance Art, Lewiston 2000, pp. 121–123; see further Mendelsohn, Paragoni, pp. 43–44; Paola Salvi, Leonardo da Vinci e il Paragone delle arti: Le vie dell’anima attraverso il “miglior senso,” in: Ut Pictura Poesis. Per una storia delle arti visive, ed. Rocco Sinisgalli, Poggio a Caiano 2012, pp. 59–82, see pp. 62–64.

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whereas poets worked liberally without fully understanding the meanings.113 Pomponio Gaurico’s idea was similar when he claimed that the practical arts were better than literature, since they had more capacities for expression and visualization. When Leonardo referred to Pliny because he saw that painting legitimately includes the knowledge of all the sciences, he was also taking a decisive step away from his predecessors, who had elevated painting precisely by comparing it to literature. Many authorities – such as Homer, Aristotle, Horace, Plutarch, and Cicero, but also Francesco da Barberino, Michele Savonarola, and Angelo Poliziano – had made a point of the closeness of both literature and painting. Leonardo dedicated a few chapters to artistic formation, but pointed only briefly to intellectual education. The higher education disciplines were important, but he did not mention the entire set. He recommended that one first study the sciences, with a special focus on geometry and astrology. Only after this initial step did he concentrate on learning the technical aspects of how to learn drawing, including how to copy from one’s master, how to copy from nature, and then finally how to copy from other masters.114 This set of topics would require that the future artist undergo first an elementary education, followed by parts of the quadrivium. It seems likely that Leonardo had a conception in mind similar to Francesco di Giorgio’s, which means that some higher education topics could be learned by means of an oral apprenticeship. That higher education was possible in a partial manner will be discussed later (see Chapter 2). A Franciscan friar and the foremost professor of mathematics in his time, Luca Pacioli (1447–1517) confirmed what Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo were pointing at. In his lectures, Pacioli addressed a readership and audience on a university level, artists included, when he taught in Pisa, Bologna, Florence, Venice, and Rome, and in his several highly influential treatises.115 As a mathematician, he did not fail to stress the importance of geometry. Thus, Pacioli placed mathematics and geometry as the foundation of every curriculum. After offering the basics of geometry, the discourses on art occupy a major part of his first book. After explaining the importance of mathematics and geometry using Plato as an authority, Pacioli discussed the scientific disciplines 113

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See for example chapters 14, 23 and 32. On Leonardo’s thesis of the superiority of painting over the Trivio and Quadrivio artes and its unjustified exclusion, see also Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 74–86; Salvi, Leonardo da Vinci e il Paragone delle arti, esp. pp. 59–60. See chapters 47, 48, 53 and 54. See also Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 59; Martin Kemp and M. Walker, Leonardo on Painting, New Haven 1989, p. 200. On Pacioli’s Vita, see Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli e la matematica del sapere nel Rinascimento, Bari 2003, pp. 15–18; Bagni, Luca Pacioli e la matematica del suo tempo, pp. 27–42; Elisabeth Tiller, “Peroché dal corpo umano ogni mesura con sue denominazioni deriva.” Luca Paciolis De divina proportione (1509) und die mathematische Aneignung des Körpers, kunsttexte.de, no. 3, 2011 (21 pages).

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and their relationship to each other. Among the mathematical disciplines, besides architecture he also counted arithmetic, geometry, astrology, music, perspective, and cosmography. Consequently, he placed architecture within the quadrivium, thus following Aristotle and Poliziano. With Luca Pacioli, the discussion of the visual arts being equal to other university topics had found a strong supporter within the university, and from the direction of mathematics. Here we are no longer talking about the level of an abacus education, which would transmit simple geometrical and mathematical training (see Chapter 2), but mathematics and geometry on a university level, where architecture was likewise placed. The importance of the quadrivium, along with higher education in general, was once again confirmed in a conversation by the aforementioned teachers Raffaele Regio and Pomponio Gaurico in discussing the ideal sculptor. The latter responded that first of all a sculptor should be as learned as possible in the entire quadrivium, namely, mathematics with arithmetic, music, geometry, and certainly perspective. He emphasized that the sculptor should be not just technically skilled, but also learned; he even applied the term “erudition.” Gaurico wanted the sculptor to possess a critical approach and to use logic in a manner similar to a university student. He should know about the facts, events, and stories that have happened, and about the criteria behind things.116 Furthermore, he should be learned in antiquity, ancient iconography, and literature, which would help him to find appropriate topics. As sources, they could use Vergil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, and Statius’s Silvae. The artist should consider appropriate ways to present things and emotions. Gaurico insisted on saying that one should not listen to contrary opinions, namely, opinions by those who did not want a sculptor to be learned, since there was no sculpture without culture, and certainly no culture without sculpture.117 Nevertheless, there were no hints as to how they would fulfill this required learning. In terms of the artist’s education, Gaurico went further than Alberti had done some sixty years before because he was not just advocating a general education at university level, but he also wanted to consolidate artistic education on the university level by demanding a place for the practical arts within the liberal arts curriculum, especially for sculpture as the eighth liberal art. As mentioned above, there were precedents in Michele Savonarola, Niccoletto Vernia, and Angelo Poliziano. Furthermore, Gaurico had opened the 116

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Which means to be learned in history, a subject already introduced in the university curriculum by the time of Gaurico. Pomponio Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. Paolo Cutolo, pp. 133–151 (book 1). On Gaurico’s idea of the learned scupltor, see also Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, pp. 36–43; McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 259–261. McHam underlines the fact that Gaurico’s requirements for the learned sculptor went beyond Pliny’s educational list.

DRAWING WITHIN A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

discussion on the artistic paragone, and of drawing being the basis for the visual arts, and even literature, a point which will become increasingly important in the first half of the sixteenth century. DRAWING WITH IN A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

Drawing has a double importance within artistic and humanist education, and played a role in both curricula. For the artists, it was the preparatory study for all three orientations – architecture, sculpture, and painting – and needed to be learned by every young apprentice. Drawing visualizes the figure to be physically prepared, and it also renders the first visualization of the idea, the invention. Drawing therefore has both a practical and an ideological value, on which the discussion around the opening of the first art academies focused, especially with the Accademia del disegno in Florence, and the discussions happening among members of the Florentine literary academy and especially with Benedetto Varchi and Giorgio Vasari. The theoretical discussions helped elevate its acceptance among the liberal arts, namely, by seeing drawing as the academic and intellectual method from which the visual arts flowed. It was, in fact, the intellectual part of the artist’s work. These discussions were facilitated by the fact that many ancient and Renaissance literati also assigned importance to drawing in the general education of youth. Drawing had a standing from antiquity as being part of the educational process of every educated man, not only of artists. Therefore, it was set into a liberal arts education. Starting already with Aristotle and Pliny, this process was picked up in the Renaissance by Vittorino da Feltre, Alberti, Filarete, Baldassare Castiglione, Baccio Bandinelli, Benedetto Varchi, Anton Francesco Doni, Giorgio Vasari, and many more. The two authoritative sources from antiquity about drawing taking part in general education are Aristotle and Pliny. Within Aristotle’s public educational system based on public day schools for different social classes (Politics VIII.3), he envisioned a primary education based on intellectual and practical arts that belonged to both liberal and nonliberal arts. For Aristotle, the nonliberal arts were negative, since they lead to dependencies and not to virtue. Education thus consisted of reading and writing, gymnastics, music, and also drawing for some selected people. Reading, writing, and drawing were regarded as abilities essential for life (Politics VIII.3).118 Aristotle saw drawing’s first aim as to better cope with practical life, a circumstance many humanists would later fall back on, but also to render beauty by drawing, especially beauty in men (Politics VIII.3).119 Drawing therefore had both a practical value and an artistic one. 118

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Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA 1977, p. 639. See also Randall R. Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, New York 2000, p. 89. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA 1944, p. 645.

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Also, Pliny (23–79 CE) in his Natural History (book 35.75–77) envisioned drawing as part of a liberal arts education. His example stems from the education of the well-known teacher Panfilio, the master of Apelles. He taught drawing (graphiké) to very young boys, as this was their first step into the liberal arts, an example which would then be followed all over ancient Greece.120 In the Renaissance, the idea of including drawing in humanist education was picked up, for example, by Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446) in his private humanist school in Mantua. Opened in 1423, he taught drawing in conjunction with geometry, algebra, and measuring. Otherwise, his pupils learned topics from the trivium and quadrivium, with a strong emphasis on literature, mathematics, and natural philosophy.121 There are sources which establish that Vittorino paid a variety of teachers to teach everyone who wanted to attend for free: among them were grammar and dialectic teachers, teachers of arithmetic, musicians, dancers, teachers of Greek and Latin literature, and also painters.122 One should suppose that the painters were actually teaching painting, or rather drawing, which was indeed offered regularly in Vittorino’s curriculum. This program would become a model for Leon Battista Alberti’s recommendations. Alberti is the finest example of the positive results of Vittorino’s teaching approach. Having frequented Vittorino’s humanist school, he learned the basics of drawing as well as geometry and perspective, which later in life inspired him to pursue a career as an architect. In his early work Della pittura (1435/1436, as well as in the Latin version De pictura), Alberti refers to how useful it is to teach drawing to youngsters. Apart from Vittorino’s direct influence, he also relied on Pliny, but probably more on Aristotle’s Politics. Alberti recognizes the practical and artistic value of drawing. Drawing should serve, on the one hand, to help students understand the basics of geometry; on the other hand, it would move the artists closer to the poets because a painter should be educated in “buone lettere.”123 Artists should orient themselves

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Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge MA 1952, pp. 317–319. On Pliny’s importance for the development of drawing and the status among the liberal arts, see for example McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, p. 110. William Harrison Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, Toronto 1996, pp. 42–43; Giuseppe Zago, Vittorino da Feltre e la rinascita dell’educatore, Lecce 2008, p. 73. Giordana Mariani Canova, La personalità di Vittorino da Feltre nel rapporto con le arti visive e il tema dell’educazione nel linguaggio figurativo del Quattrocento, in: Vittorino da Feltre e la sua scuola: Umanesimo, pedagogia, arti, ed. Nella Giannetto, Florence 1981, pp. 199–212, see p. 206. Bätschmann and Gianfreda translated “buone lettere” as “sciences,” but letters certainly refer to literature, and Alberti then turns to the moral aspect of art. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda, Della pittura, Darmstadt 2002, pp. 150–151.

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toward poets and orators because of their great knowledge, their useful sources of great topics, and their ability to compose topics. The reason behind this was that poets compose with letters and syntax, and artists with the lines from drawing (III.52). Thus, the method for studying drawing is the same as that for studying writing; that is, one starts by composing letters, syllables, and words; likewise, the youngster should compose borders, surfaces, etc. (III.55).124 In his Trattato di Architettura (1460–1464), Filarete is the first artist to speak about drawing within general education, and he reveals his knowledge of Aristotle and Pliny, who had both located drawing within a liberal arts education. Filarete’s ideal city and its integrated binary educational system is an idea taken from Aristotle’s Politics, who had already proposed an educational structure with the scientific and mechanical arts side by side, and with drawing as an essential skill to be learned by everyone. Filarete explains that everything done manually would first need a drawing, and that drawing actually should be counted among the sciences, as it used to be in antiquity.125 How this kind of study between the sciences and the mechanical arts might work is shown when Filarete gives specific recommendations for study to the son of his patron: for a certain number of hours per day he should alternate between literature and drawing, giving literature some precedence.126 It is quite possible that Filarete knew Vittorino’s school in Mantua, and there might even be reasons to suppose that he had frequented it (see Chapter 2). He certainly knew the marquis Lodovico Gonzaga, whom he inserted as a knowledgeable person into his architectural treatise. The comparison of painting and drawing, however, is likewise a focused topic in Alberti’s treatise and might have been inspired from there. The sculptor Baccio Bandinelli (1488–1560) probably followed the elite humanist opinion sketched by Vittorino da Feltre and Alberti. In fact, this is what he proposed as the education for his own son, Cesare, evidently not an artist, for learning everything that a gentleman required. This included drawing, geometry, and perspective. Drawing was the most important among the three, since it was useful for every profession and should be learned by everyone.127 Baldassare Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier (1528) is highly aware of the ancient habit of commonly having school pupils learn how to 124

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Alberti, Della pittura, p. 155. As Sabbatino noticed, Alberti here proposes a more intellectual education for the painter than for the sculptor, whose main aim was to rebuild after nature. The painter would likewise observe nature, but his first point of reference would be literature. See Sabbatino, Scrittura e scultura nell’umanista napoletano Pomponio Gaurico, pp. 27–28. Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, ed. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, Milan 1972, pp. 494–496, 502 (book 17), p. 545 (book 18). Piero Pierotti, Prima di Machiavelli. Filarete e Francesco di Giorgio consiglieri del principe, Ospedaletto 1995, p. 115, no. 34. Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, p. 209. Quote in Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Milan 1971–1973, vol. 2, p. 1407.

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draw, and he mainly repeats this point from Aristotle’s Politics. As Castiglione explains, in antiquity they had regular sessions organized for ancient Greek and Roman pupils, but only for free citizens and never for slaves, who were not considered dignified. Although nowadays, in his own time, the visual arts were not considered an independent labor but a subordinate one, he would fully agree that the educated courtier would definitely need to learn how to draw, and should also have some basic knowledge of painting. Apart from being part of a good general education, this would also become useful for sketching images in one’s own mind, or for making plans in case of war. Painting and drawing could in fact be very useful for high office, such as for drawing up military arrangements. This is why drawing should be taught to everyone, a view that probably derived from institutions like Vittorino da Feltre’s school, or directly from Aristotle’s Politics.128 By the middle of the sixteenth century, many important Florentine literati, members of the literary academy involved in academic discussions on the importance of drawing, expressed themselves favorably for including drawing within a general education. Benedetto Varchi, who had opened the public discussion on the value of drawing for the visual arts, which would thereby lay the foundations for all three orientations of visual expression, also referred to the ancient authority Pliny to declare drawing as a part of a liberal arts education. He said, as Pliny had pointed out in his Natural History (35.77), that drawing was practiced by free and noble men, and belonged to the highest of the liberal arts.129 This elevation of drawing within the liberal arts helped facilitate the acceptance of the soon-to-be-opened academy of drawing. Also, the literary academy member Anton Francesco Doni pointed out that drawing is practiced by everyone.130 He refers to the practical utility of drawing, giving examples from everyday life that required drawing, where even writing is regarded as drawing, like everything that requires picking up a pencil.131 Although Lodovico Dolce (ca. 1508–1568) in his Dialogo della pittura (1557) does not see the need for everyone to learn drawing, he does claim that poets were trained in writing and drawing, and therefore that painters should be learned in literature, which helped with invention.132 It appears that poets needed to learn drawing to help likewise with their literary invention. Finally, 128

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Baldasarre Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Walter Barberis, Torino 1998, pp. 103–105 (book 1, chapter 49). Varchi, Paragone, p. 150. On this, see also Marco Collareta, Varchi e le arti figurative, in: Benedetto Varchi, 1503–1565, ed. Vanni Bramanti, pp. 173–184, see p. 180. For Barocchi, this is an exaltation and exaggeration, while she does not consider that drawing was also practiced outside the visual arts. Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, vol. 2, p. 1899. Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, vol. 2, pp. 1908–1909. Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura, intitolato l’Aretino, Venice 1557, in: Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 1, pp. 296–297.

THE SITUATION OF THE ARTES AND THE ARTIST’S LEARNING

in the second edition of Le vite degli artisti (1568), Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) showed himself to be knowledgeable about the ancient topos. Not only did he give drawing a fundamental importance for every artistic orientation, but he also pointed out that drawing should be learned by everyone, especially young noblemen.133 What Vasari is referring to here – and this has always been overlooked – are the discussions initiated by Varchi and in humanist schools like Vittorino da Feltre’s, which actually taught young noblemen and others the art of drawing together with a humanist education. The importance that drawing was receiving from both sides, from artists and from literati, explains once more why the soon-to-be-opened Accademia del disegno focused on drawing as its primary academic aim. It was not only the common foundation for all three visual arts, but it was also an accepted educational step for every future literato, humanist, and nobleman. T HE SITUATIO N O F T HE ARTES AND THE ARTIST’S LEARNING

The epoch-making discussion on the relationship between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts, including the visual arts, has left an increasingly important heritage of the Renaissance humanists and artists. The reflection of this dispute on the value of the practical arts within the arts and sciences curriculum in the majority of artistic treatises is one proof of their importance. The increasing debates on the characteristics and theoretical backgrounds of the three visual arts is the other. The history of the relationship between the visual arts and the liberal arts also touched naturally on some other mainstream topics, which were handled indirectly in the question of the artes. These were an early form of a paragone debate between the visual arts, starting with Valla, and the first theoretical written foundations for all the three visual arts, starting with Alberti – showing that the literati had a decisive impact on laying grounds for the visual arts as an intellectual discipline. It also included the reputation and intellectual standing of individual visual arts, as connected with the artist’s intellectual education in relation to his visual arts discipline, and finally to the artist’s social standing. Together with the rising value of the visual arts, the artist himself was increasingly perceived as a man with reputation and social standing. Starting with Villani, who included painters within his history of famous Florentines, the idea was picked up by Facio and Landino, who included both painters and sculptors, and was then extended to all artists by Paolo Giovio and Giorgio Vasari. As we have seen, the intellectual artist began with Plato and Vitruvius, and was followed up in Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the wise architect.

133

Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più ecellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori, Florence 1568, pp. 43–44.

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Thomas built a bridge to the sciences when he wrote that the practical arts could help in visualizing the sciences. When Angelo Poliziano included the manual arts in his system of the universal sciences, he took up Plato’s intellectual artist and stated that the manual arts were executed by wise people. Aristotle raised the question of the skillful master who gained his expertise through practice and not erudition, whereas Vitruvius made a strong point for both manual practice and intellectual labor. Aristotle also talked about the material qualities of a work as a characteristic that the sciences did not possess. Hugh of Saint Victor picked up Aristotle’s idea of the artificer’s product and the manipulation of the original material to create something new. Thomas Aquinas followed both Plato and Aristotle (and Hugh), and introduced the creation of an opus, which would have a direct impact on the work of art in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A majority of authors claimed that only or primarily painting deserves a place among the artes. Starting with Pliny, this argument had been picked up by Petrarch, Villani, Savonarola, Alberti, Leonardo, Castiglione, and Jacopo de Barbari. Other topics concentrate on the intellectual or skillful master, the material qualities of the work, or the value of the work itself. Architecture found fewer but important supporters. This category tried less to make architecture into a liberal arts subject, although some of its supporters did (like Poliziano and Luca Pacioli). Rather, this category of supporters sought for the intellectual architect, as Vitruvius, Thomas Aquinas, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, and Daniele Barbaro had done. Sculpture had a much weaker social and intellectual standing, and was promoted into the intellectual ranks almost exclusively by Pomponio Gaurico, whereas the Florentine humanists like Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano neglected sculpture altogether. Although most authors considered literature as either on an equal intellectual level or as a source to be followed, we also find preliminary indications of natural philosophy’s influence on art. This could be expressed, as in Thomas Aquinas, where the visual arts aid in visualizing philosophy and the sciences, or as in Francesco di Giorgio, touching on a medieval tradition of mysticism through the meaning and substance of materials, such as stone, being either constructed, carved, or depicted, or through retaining its naturalness. This was quite different from the late medieval search for nature, in that art now strived for effects that included natural features in a surprising and thus mostly unknown way in the work of art, for example, light, shadow, transparency, and air. These were all helped by the knowledge and achievements coming from science, as we find in Leonardo. Finally, both literati and artists expressed themselves about the subjects to be learned from higher education. In many cases, these recommendations were made about almost the entire liberal arts curriculum. They also

THE SITUATION OF THE ARTES AND THE ARTIST’S LEARNING

expressed themselves on how to obtain this knowledge, whether in abacus schools, in higher education, by oral learning, or in special dual school systems that were open to everyone. The next chapter will explain how educational systems worked in the Renaissance, and how a pupil or an adult from the artisan class could participate in them without needing a substantial financial background.

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INSTITUTIONAL EDUCATI ON FOR THE ARTIST

The Renaissance offered many opportunities for public learning, either institutionalized or through personal engagement helped by the possibilities offered throughout society. Elementary education in reading and writing were offered by the guilds and the city, or with private teachers. Advanced reading and grammar classes were available through private teachers. Abacus schools were likewise offered by the guilds or by private teachers. Additionally, there were also private advanced schools and university teaching. In all of these branches, artists were to be found in bigger or smaller quantities. In their own art institutions, for a long time intellectual education played a less important role. Nowadays, many art historical discussions focus on the Renaissance artist’s lack of education, and on the fact that he came from a humble background and had no means to participate in education. Therefore, if access to knowledge was required, his practical workshop education is provided as evidence along with the possibility of finding a humanist advisor. But this picture is often wrong, in fact, especially if we do not consider how education worked during the Renaissance. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to summarize what we actually know from the history of education about how learning was brought to the populace, adding a particular focus on how the artist himself fit into these educational structures. It further discusses the artistic congregations and 70

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their educational offerings, in order to show that these were extremely limited until the end of the sixteenth century. Until then, rather, the enterprise of the individual artist inspired him to participate in the educational offerings of a profoundly participatory society.

From Medieval Artistic Education toward Universities and Academies for the Visual Arts The artistic education of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance connected the pupil closely to his master’s shop. Usually a boy would enter a workshop (bottega) sometime between the ages of seven and twelve. In a span of two to six years, the apprentice would learn the necessary technical skills. Afterward, he was free to move on to another workshop or to go on a journey, both with the intention of learning more and picking up as much as possible about his craft. After some years and before settling himself as a master, he would need to ask for his master’s certificate from a local company or guild. Corporations like these – in Rome the Università dei marmorari (from 1406) or in Florence the guilds – were allowed to assign the degree of magister to an artist, which was a certificate testifying to the quality of his skills.1 Guilds arose in the twelfth century, with a peak in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, as corporations for the arti, the artisans, those who produced handcraft, but also merchants, apothecaries, lawyers, and others. They were organized by the types of trade and labor within an overarching administrative structure, and were also often connected with religious functions. One of the first active guilds in Florence was the powerful mercantile corporation, the Arte di Calimala, a wealthy guild which in successive years would dominate the city’s education. In 1266 all of the seven major guilds were founded in Florence (Arte di Calimala, Arte della Lana, Arte di Por Santa Maria, Arte del Cambio, dei Giudici e Notai, Arte dei Medici e Speziali, Arte dei Pelliciai e Vaiai). The five minor arts were added in 1282 (Beccai, Fabbri, Calzolai, Maestri di pietra e legname, Baldrigari), and nine more in 1287 (Vinattieri, Albergatori, Oliandoli, Galigai grossi, Corazzai e Spadai, Chiodaioli e Ferraioli, Correggiai e Scudai, Legnaioli grossi, Fornai), composing twenty-one arti altogether, who were represented from 1337 with a common religious and administrative headquar-

1

See on the bottega education for example: Sergio Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie. Realtà sociale e teorie artistiche a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo, Milan 1980, pp. 37–53; Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist. Projects and Patrons, Workshops and Art Market, trans. Alison Luchs, Princeton 1981, pp. 299–307; Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge 1999, pp. 51–63; Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven, CT 2000, pp. 35–46; Dario Del Bufalo, L’Università dei Marmorari di Roma, Rome 2007, pp. 33–34.

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ters in the church of Orsanmichele. Later on, it was obligatory for professionals to be a member of their respective guilds in order to be officially acknowledged as qualified artisans.2 Apprenticeship was organized through these guilds, which had a similar structure for all of their different orientations. Handcrafts flowered in the first half of the fifteenth century. With a city of only 37,000 inhabitants in 1427 (after severe outbreaks of plagues), there were about 1,500 workshops engaged in every sector of handcrafts, as a cadastre ordered by the Medici shows.3 In the 1430s Cosimo de’ Medici tried to establish the autonomy of the individual arts, which had the effect on the artists of manifesting their independence and inspiring their intellectual creativity.4 In the difficult and changing political situation after the Florentine Republic, the fourteen minor arts formed four universities in 1534, and the sculptors and architects joined the Università dei Fabbricanti (Fabbri, Chiavaioli, Maestri di pietra e legname, Corazzai, Spadai e Legnaioli). We hardly know anything about the organization of these new artisan “universities,” including their administrative and educational structures. As a subgroup of a major art, the painters were not a part in this change. In Florence, artistic directions were split up by the material they were working with, and therefore architects and sculptors working with stone had to be part of the Arte dei Fabricanti (maestri di pietre e legnami), who met in a house on the main square next to the Loggia della Signoria (nowadays occupied by the Uffizi). Goldsmiths were part of the Arte della seta, as gold and silk had similar mercantile routes. Painters working with pigments had similar mercantile needs as the others in the Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Mercai, who worked with drugs, herbs, and spices. They all met in a house close to San Miniato, but had their shops in Corso Pittori, today’s Via Calzaioli. But the painters managed to form their own subpart of this art in 1360.5 Painters and goldsmiths, therefore, formed a subpart of a major guild, where higher education was not formally obligated, but was in fact often required, whereas architects and sculptors formed a part of a minor guild, the world of manual labor and craftmanship. This circumstance will be reflected in the respective literacy rates mentioned below. The historical administration of the guilds placed architects

2

3 4 5

Edgcumbe Staley, The Guilds of Florence, London 1906, pp. 33–74; Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 37–38; Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist, pp. 207–219; Maria Pilar Lebole, Breve storia dei mestieri artigiani. La tradizione fiorentina, Florence 2003, pp. 17–21. Lebole, Breve storia dei mestieri artigiani, pp. 28, 30–31. Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, p. 49. Staley, The Guilds of Florence, pp. 62–63, 236–273, 320–343; Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 38–39; Lebole, Breve storia dei mestieri artigiani, pp. 18–20, 36–37, 237–300; Marco Giuliani, Le arti fiorentine, Florence 2006, pp. 44–47, 58–60.

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and sculptors closer to carpenters and inlayers, whereas painters were associated with paper makers, printers, and editors, as well as physicians; therefore, painters were surrounded by professions associated with literati and other people coming from higher education.6 What intellectual weight the apothecary guild contained is summarized by Edgcumbe Staley: “Matteo Palmieri, (1364–1427), Apothecary and Poet; Leo Battista Alberti, (1404–1475), Physician, Astronomer, Architect, and Writer; Marsilio Ficino, (1433–1499), Surgeon, Philosopher, Writer; Antonio Benevieni, (1453–1542), Physician and Man of Letters; were among those who were matriculated in the ‘Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries.’”7 Painters, printers, and writers were well connected with each other, and also collaborated on different projects. In the conception of the baptistery’s bronze doors, Ghiberti had help from the printer Bernardo Cennini. Botticelli illustrated the printed version of Landino’s Dante commentary, like many other painters who helped with book illustrations.8 The history of the guilds explains why, at the end of the Middle Ages, the three visual arts did not perceive themselves as one common field, but as individuals in other handcrafts who had been divided only on the basis of the material with which they worked. Some collaboration took place in the artists’ organizations outside the guilds. The fifteenth century strengthened the individuum and the artistic oeuvre, while assigning creativity and the capacity for invention to the three visual arts. It is, however, only with the critical discussions about art in the sixteenth century that common conceptual foundations and categories were finally established, and disegno was declared to be their common first principle. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, several private initiatives focused on the manual education and, to a minor extent, also on the intellectual education of the young artist. A kind of practical “academy” arose in Florence with Bertoldo di Giovanni (1420–1491), a former pupil of Donatello’s; with Leonardo in Milan; and with Baccio Bandinelli in Rome. The artistic education in the Medici gardens during the second half of the fifteenth century is a telling example for subsequent developments. Highquality formal training of gifted youngsters, the study after the antique, and ease of access to the intellectual elites and their discussions would eventually be the essential combination on which the finalized education in the middle of the sixteenth century was built. Following Mendelsohn, the two aspects of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s “school” could be described as practical, when the artistic youth was studying the sculpture collection, and theoretical, which they

6

7 8

As Staley recognized, “Literature, Painting and Geographical Discovery alike benefited from the fostering care of the Guild.” Staley, The Guilds of Florence, p. 265. Staley, The Guilds of Florence, p. 266. Staley, The Guilds of Florence, pp. 266–268.

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would have received through the Platonic philosophers in the Medici circle.9 This “academy” was frequented by students like Leonardo and Michelangelo. There are few direct sources describing the range of training the artist could have received in the Medici gardens. In the first editions of his Lives, Vasari talks about a “school” Lorenzo de’ Medici opened for highly skilled artists’ apprentices under Bertoldo as master. From this account, it seems that the school worked only on manual skills (often copying from the many ancient statues present there), with no additional intellectual teaching.10 This would, however, not exclude the youngsters from participating as listeners in an academic setting. That this was probably not just Vasari’s imagination to see here a kind of pre-academy for the arts, as many researchers have claimed, is underlined by the fact that also in humanist schools drawing was a common topic (see Chapter 1). Vasari narrates about Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden school in the way that he perceived it, namely, as an important forerunner of his own academy (the Accademia del disegno), as he entitles it in the second edition of his Vite (“una scuola ed accademia ai giovani pittori e scultori”). Interestingly enough, in his second edition Vasari not only called the Medici artistic school an “academy,” but he also pointed out that drawing would be learned by everyone, especially even young noblemen.11 What Vasari is referring to here (and this has always been overlooked) is the ongoing discussion since antiquity on drawing being part of the general education (see Chapter 1), and, closer to his days, humanist schools like Vittorino da Feltre’s, which actually taught young noblemen and others the art of drawing together with a humanist education (see Chapter 1, section on “Drawing within a Liberal Arts Education”). However, we do not know much about the Medici school, including to what extent the young artists were involved in the intellectual circles and derived benefits from them. Some young artists, like Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Bandinelli, might have gained decisive input for their lives. A few decades later, some artists themselves would try to open artistic academies, which offered more than manual training, like Leonardo and Baccio Bandinelli. Both were interested in workshops with informal intellectual gatherings.12 Baccio Bandinelli called his Roman workshop Accademia del disegno, and it not only shared the name with the future artistic academy, but 9

10

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Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 18. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, Florence 1550, pp. 950–951. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence 1906, vol. 4, p. 256. Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Arist, p. 59; Detlef Heikamp, Baccio Bandinelli scultore e maestro (1493–1560), Florence 2014; Ben Thomas, The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli, Print Quarterly, 22:1, 2005, pp. 3–14; Carmen C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, New Haven, CT 2019, vol. 3, pp. 493–498.

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it also had the direction and subjects for teaching that later academies would have. This academy would differ from workshop education by putting major goals not on practice but on teaching. Pupils primarily learned drawing, the only practical exercise useful for everyone, but also geometry, proportion, and anatomy. The same topics would later be central when the official Accademia del disegno opened in Florence.

Academies for Artists Starting in the 1560s, Renaissance artistic academies were influenced by literary academies that had opened in the 1540s. The first official academy for the visual arts opened in Florence twenty years after the establishment of the first official literary academy. When Vasari put all his efforts into opening an academy for artists, they no longer had a well-functioning organizational background, since both the guilds and the Compania di San Luca had lost their significance. In fact, they were outdated corporations offering inadequate social standing for artists increasingly occupied with their social, artistic, and intellectual visibility. It is therefore not surprising that the artists aimed at a similar congregation to the poets. From 1562, Vasari surrounded himself with other Florentine artists to help shape his idea of an academy. To this first group belonged the painters Angelo Bronzino and Michele Ghirlandaio, the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati, and the architect Francesco da Sangallo. Some of them had already been members of the literary academy. The project was presented to Cosimo I, who approved it on January 13, 1563, and both Cosimo and the aged Michelangelo were to be honorary leaders of the institution. Since this new institution had to serve all of the visual arts, the common integrating foundation was preparatory drawing. Therefore, it had to be opened as an Academy of Drawing (Accademia del disegno), convening once or twice a month. The academy had a twofold organization: apart from its meeting and discussion rituals and the teaching of pupils, it also had a religious function organized through a confraternity.13 Already in its first year, the academy counted seventy-five artists among its members, of whom more than half 13

Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, Cambridge 1940, pp. 43–47, 298, 299; Rossi, Dalle botteghe alle accademie, pp. 164–181; Detelf Heikamp, Appunti sull’Accademia del disegno, Arte illustrata, 5, 1972, pp. 298–304; Karen-edis Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno, Cambridge 2000, pp. 7–8, 11, 29, 49–51; Piero Pacini, Le sedi dell’Accademia del Disegno al “Cestello” e alla “Crocetti,” Florence 2001, pp. 4–6, 88–92; Marco Ruffini, Art without an Author: Vasari’s Lives and Michelangelo’s Death, New York 2011, pp. 2, 12–13; Ian F. McNeely, The Renaissance academies between science and the humanities, Configurations, 17:3, 2009, pp. 227–258, see pp. 252–253; Enrico Sartoni, Gli statuti tra Accademia del Disegno e Accademia di Belle Arti (1563–1873), in: Accademia delle arti del disegno. Studi, fonti e interpretazioni di 450 anni di storia, ed. Bert W. Meijer and Luigi Zangheri, Florence 2015, pp. 55–83.

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were painters, and about a third sculptors, along with some others. As already mentioned, the academy at first did not admit every artist, but only those close to the Medici circles.14 Both the academy and the confraternity used several buildings at the same time. With the opening of the Accademia del disegno on January 31, 1563, the Medici chapel at San Lorenzo immediately became the main meeting point for the academy, which therefore had an additional lay function for artistic gatherings and as an artists’ school, “la scuola delle nostre arti,” as Vasari put it. Therefore, the education of young artists was instantly an idea associated with the new academy. At the beginning, education consisted principally of practical matters like studying Michelangelo’s works and practicing drawing. In addition to the chapel, Vasari also proposed the use of the Laurentian library,15 which would serve as a site for the members’ discussions. Vasari’s description of “una sapienza et uno studio per giovani e allo insegnar loro et ai mezzani il modo dello esercitarsi col fare delle opera” has been interpreted by Wazbinski as referring to the chapel alone,16 although it might refer actually to the two different places, since other sources mention a library. This is indeed what the statutes suggest, which mention both an academy and a studio, the second being the place where the pupils would study the three arts. Once again, Vasari’s idea here is close to that of humanist schools, and to the binary educational system that Filarete described (see section “Private Schools and Poor Students”). Only the second statutes of July 1563 were meant to integrate the visual arts with the introduction of the sciences. The statutes said that men should gain reputation either through “lettere” or through arms, while the first was more desirable and nobler, as it relied on the soul and not on the body. With the word “lettere” all of the sciences were intended, and painting as well with its imitating capacities, which should be directed to imitate nature.17 Vasari is here building on an ongoing discussion that had started in antiquity and was being revived during the Renaissance. The academy had an educational program for artists of every age. The main difference with education in the medieval

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Karen-edis Barzman, The Accademia del Disegno and fellowships of discourse at the court of Cosimo I de’ Medici, in: The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler, Aldershot 2001, pp. 177–188, see pp. 178, 182. Simonetta Bracciali, Alessandro d’Alessandro, L’accademia dell’arte del disegno di Firenze, in: La nascità della Toscana. Dal convegno di studi per il IV centenario della morte di Cosimo I de’ Medici, Florence 1980, pp. 129–158; Zygmunt Wazbinski, L’Accademia Medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento. Idea e istituzione, Florence 1987, pp. 86–95; Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State, pp. 51–52; Pacini, Le sedi dell’Accademia del Disegno al “Cestello” e alla “Crocetti,” pp. 6–9; Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen, Benedetto Varchi – Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, Darmstadt 2013, p. 61. Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, pp. 46–47; Zygmunt Wazbinski, L’Accademia Medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento. Idea e istituzione, Florence 1987, p. 93 (citation). Bracciali, Alessandro d’Alessandro, pp. 143–144.

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associations, in either the artists’ universities or the guilds, was now that intellectual education was increasingly part of the artist’s life. Also, manual education changed, with drawing becoming the most important part. Young boys were usually accepted as apprentices between eleven and fifteen years of age. The statutes of January 1563 give some idea about educational practices in the academy. As Pevsner points out, despite the regulation of supervision and teaching, no fixed classwork was involved. Nevertheless, some additional classes in subjects important for artists originating in the quadrivium were offered. The statues explicitly mention the teaching of mathematics and primarily Euclid, which happened in the monastery of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi (Cestello). Already in Alberti’s time, mathematics was the starting point of an artistic education. Initially, mathematics was taught by academy members themselves, who were elected annually with the obligation to teach gratis, but already in 1569, professional teachers from universities were hired, like Pier Antonio Cataldi, who went on later to be a professor at the University of Bologna. He taught on Sunday evenings. Also, Vincenzo Danti, who taught geometry, perspective, and geography between 1570 and 1574, went on to teach at the University of Florence. One may, therefore, presume that mathematics and geometry at the Academy attained a level close to university teaching. Usually a university topic of advanced mathematics and geometry, Euclid was delivered in 1569/1570 by Giovannantonio Bolognese. He lectured every Sunday at the same hour in the separate Cestello room.18 Teaching at the Academy would naturally be held in the vernacular. A few important works were already available in the vernacular at this point, like translations of Euclid and Ptolemy.19 Therefore, geometry, mathematics, perspective, anatomy, and the study of the nude body were part of the Academy’s teaching from its very beginning.20 Later Federico Zuccari tried to revise the statutes and also the educational aims, which he saw as badly neglected. The reformation in teaching included two modes: giving the young artist training that is more oriented toward studying nature itself and studying the natural sciences. This included a new weekly lesson on drawing after

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Pevsner, Academies of Αrt¨ Past and Present, pp. 47–48, p. 302 (chapter 32). See also Heikamp, Appunti sull’Accademia del disegno, p. 299. On the educational program see: Karen-edis Barzman, The Florentine Accademia del disegno: Liberal education and the Renaissance artist, in: Academies of Art between Renaissance and Romanticism, ed. Anton W. A. Boschloo, Elwin J. Hendrikse, Laetitia C. Smit and Gert Jan van der Sman, ’s-Gravenhage 1989, pp. 14–32, see pp. 15–16; Pacini, Le sedi dell’Accademia del Disegno al “Cestello” e alla “Crocetti,” pp. 8–9, 66, 103; Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, p. 48, statutes on pp. 296–304, see p. 296. Barzman pointed out that Danti’s vernacular works and translations sprang up from the environment of the Academy. Barzman, The Florentine Accademia del disegno: Liberal education and the Renaissance artist, pp. 15–16. Pacini, Le sedi dell’Accademia del Disegno al “Cestello” e alla “Crocetti,” pp. 8–9.

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nature with a newly organized room for life drawing, plus lectures on mathematics and natural philosophy.21 Although this program was never put into place, it revealed a remarkable orientation toward the study of anatomy and the natural sciences. Barzman has given an account of teaching organization toward the end of the sixteenth century, when the artist’s curriculum followed a clear sequence, starting with mathematics, where Euclid and others were read and commented upon, as in the university. Then followed anatomy and life drawing (in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova), natural philosophy, the study of inanimate forms like drapery, and finally the teaching of architectural principles.22 Only around 1600 would the young artist receive a full allaround training that prepared him as an artist with a substantial background in university topics. This becomes particularly clear in Rome under Federico Zuccari. Rome also went through a transitional period before the first artistic academy opened. There had been a preliminary attempt under the name Virtuosi al Pantheon (Congregazione di S. Giuseppe di Terra Santa alla Rotonda), which was founded in 1543. Gregory XIII (1572–1585), a former canon law professor in Bologna, was very much in favor of the Roman academies for the visual arts. For the artistic academy, he wished for interdisciplinary exchange, which would broaden the artist’s knowledge. The artist should learn from philosophers, mathematicians, poets, orators, and physicians. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, however, the statutes do not mention much interdisciplinary exchange, which did not seem to have been a primary occupation within the Academy itself. But the pope himself organized interaction with other subjects. Thus he organized festivities where philosophers, mathematicians, poets, orators, and physicians would meet and discuss the finest works of art that had been produced.23 While this leads to some comparisons with the Florentine literary academy around 1548, which helped the artists to shape their discipline by refining their categories, upgrading the value of drawing, and exploring art criticism, in Rome a kind of

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Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, pp. 51–52. Barzman, The Florentine Accademia del disegno: Liberal education and the Renaissance artist, pp. 14–32; Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State, p. 56. Melchior Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Lucia fino alla morte di Antonio Canova, Rome 1823, pp. 18–23; Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, pp. 57–58; Peter M. Lukehart, Introduction, in: The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590–1635, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, Washington 2009, pp. 1–21, see p. 3; Monica Grossi and Silvia Trani, From Universitas to Accademia: Notes and reflections on the origins and early history of the Accademia di San Luca based on documents from its archives, in: The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590–1635, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, pp. 25–41, see p. 28; Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma. 1478–1588, Rome 2012, pp. 6–8, 225–227.

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symposium on art and the artistic product was judged by the other sciences. The competition which therefore arose among all the arts helped the artists to sharpen their ideas and be part of the scientific community. It is interesting to note how often other sciences in Florence and Rome were invited to judge the visual arts – evidently because they had sharper judgment through training in either rhetoric and dialectic, or the natural sciences. The following pope, Sixtus V (1585–1590), also drew attention to artistic education with a breve from 1588, following up on his predecessor’s work and arguments. Now under Sixtus, the main aim of the Academy should finally be teaching.24 Nevertheless, most of these endeavors existed only on paper. Assisted by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, the painter Federico Zuccari eventually succeeded in establishing a Roman academy for the visual arts. The Accademia di San Luca opened on November 14, 1593, at the church of Santa Martina next to the Forum Romanum. At the end of the sixteenth century thoughts about education had certainly advanced, and the statutes from 1593 and 1596 now clearly mark education as the primary aim. Therefore, Zuccari proposed the study of the three main visual arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture, accompanied by discussion, which he recognized as “madre degli studi e fonte vera di ogni scienza, et arte prattica.”25 This probably meant that now artists were also trained in rhetoric in order to be able to express themselves as eloquently about art as literati before them had done. Zuccari’s educational program owed a lot to the fruitful intentions of Pope Gregory XIII, and in fact Zuccari wanted scientists from all orientations to interact with the Academy, and to have artists learn both the speculative and the practical sciences. This would make them better artists and also prepare them for theory.26 It should also be mentioned that attendees were not only future artists, since around 1600 anybody interested was admitted, including noblemen and other scholars. The teaching program consisted in drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, and perspective.27 Zuccari seems to have incorporated the idea of offering drawing education to everyone, artists or not, as a fundamental principle of general education. He evidently drew here on Aristotle and Pliny, the following discussion led by Anton Francesco

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Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Lucia fino alla morte di Antonio Canova, pp. 23–26; Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, p. 59; Grossi and Trani, From Universitas to Accademia, p. 29; Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma. 1478–1588, Rome 2012, pp. 11–12. See Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Lucia fino alla morte di Antonio Canova, pp. 20, 23, 28–31; Pevsner, Academies of Αrt: Past and Present, pp. 59–62. See quotation from Zuccari in Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Lucia fino alla morte di Antonio Canova, p. 29. Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, pp. 59–62; Lukehart, Introduction, pp. 11–12.

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Doni and Vasari, as well as on the practice of taking drawing into everyday education, as proposed by Vittorino da Feltre and Filarete (see Chapter 1). At the end of the sixteenth century, the statutes (1594) give an idea of the points discussed about the visual arts throughout the century. They try to give definitions for the visual arts, but also recall the paragone debate in a more passionate and outspoken manner. The discussion is driven by the painters, while the architects seek to maintain their separate intellectual standing. Most importantly, a discussion of painting is offered where painting followed the philosophical concept of being at the same time both the mother and daughter of drawing. Painting constituted the real mirror of nature and incorporated techniques. When the architects recall the (recent) diminution of intellectual training in relation to Vitruvius’s proposal that the artist be educated in all the sciences, the painters consequently tried to downsize architecture as a handcraft, whereas sculpture should remain on the side of painting and not give precise intellectual directions as to what should be learned. Nevertheless, the visual arts made a claim to be recognized among the liberal arts, with drawing as their first and common principle embodying the capacity to render and recall forms in an intelligible way, thereby recalling one of the most telling terms in intellectual concepts. All work processes were driven by the intellect. Painting was characterized by the special relationship to drawing and by being close to nature and techniques, sculpture was characterized by techniques and symmetry, and architecture by composition and symmetry, while their representatives still insist on interdisciplinary intellectual training. What would in fact be offered at the end of the sixteenth century in artist’s classes was mostly technique and style. Additionally, there came invention and capriccio, imitation, and at last also some history and mathematics. This overview makes clear how artistic education became formalized and more intellectual during the second half of the sixteenth century. Intellectual education moved away from a single artist’s effort to gain background knowledge in a variety of places open to the public in his search for history, literature, and geometry toward a more institutionalized educational procedure. Both public classes and academy classes were often given on Sundays, holidays, or evenings to ensure that working people could attend. In fact, it became normal practice that adult artists would also attend lessons to broaden their minds. The academies also provided for some intellectual training, mainly in mathematics, geometry, and what was necessary for finalizing the practical work. Otherwise, there was little teaching that artists could use for iconography, namely, for works containing moral, historical, Neoplatonic, Stoic, or Epicurean meanings. They also had a special need to use allegories and mythologies. In short, not every topic that a humanistically educated public or patron could be interested in was offered in the artistic curriculum. Fortunately, there were other means by which the artist could obtain this

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knowledge. He could join literary meetings, in private or at an academy. He could read vernacular academic literature for his own autodidactic studies (see Chapter 3), or he could join in with public or private teaching through a variety of channels, both as a young boy or as an adult (see section “Oral Apprenticeship”). In part, the artistic academy was modeled on the literary academy that had been established twenty years earlier, which also offered lessons and lectures on a broader range of topics than just literature. Also, art criticism and art connoisseurship did not begin with the artists themselves, but in literary circles close to them. There was a strong mutual interest, from which the artists benefited in their education as well as the literati themselves in their knowledge about art. The first art critics among the literati praised themselves for having greater linguistic and scientific skills for talking about art; they both borrowed and invented idioms, which would then enter into the discourse about art. Although some artists during the middle of the sixteenth century started to express themselves knowledgably about art, it was only at the end of this century, in the Roman academy under Federico Zuccari, that art-critical rhetoric and eloquence became a topic of study. In the following, the possibilities society offered for artists and artisans to participate in general education will be explored. There was a broad variety of public and private, voluntary and institutionalized efforts to bring education also to the less well-off classes. Education during the Renaissance became more and more widespread. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EDUCATION IN TH E RENAISSANCE AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR THE ARTIST

The Demand for Public Education Following the Ancient Model Education and its availability changed significantly during the Renaissance, and this is true for general public education for the individual, as well as for the artist. During the late Middle Ages, the change away from monastic education toward communal and private education, which went along with the new desire of parents to give their children at least a rudimentary education, was an important development for the following centuries. The literacy rate immediately rose to significant levels throughout all levels of the population. Education now happened publicly and was the result of one’s choices and willingness to learn. The idea was also associated with public culture in ancient Greece under Plato’s and Aristotle’s influence. As documented in these authoritative sources, education in ancient Greece had been public and was available to everyone. The idea of public and class-less education went back to the two ancient sages, who – at least in theory – developed a functioning social and public life with learned and skilled citizens, who were trained both

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intellectually and manually. This is developed in Plato (Laws, Republic, and Gorgias) and Aristotle (Politics and Ethics). Plato favored a public educational system, and he envisioned education in “a scheme of public day school” (Laws 804c–d). But for Plato, education should also have a transcendental dimension – education without divine inspiration was considered to be of less worth.28 Therefore, in his Gorgias Plato promoted the idea of the intellectual craftsman, led by divine inspiration, who nevertheless needed the intermediate arts (mathematical sciences like geometry and arithmetic; cf. Chapter 1). Aristotle (384–322 BCE) has the most explicit reference about public educational systems in Greek antiquity, which he develops in his Politics. There he describes the ideal city and its political, social, and educational life, demanding a public educational system where everyone receives an education, regardless of profession. For Aristotle, this includes both the scientists and the craftsmen, who would both need a primary education that should be the same for everyone, and therefore organized publicly. This primary education should include some moral training as well (Politics Viii.2 (1337a)).29 These primary studies were made of liberal and nonliberal arts. Nevertheless, for Aristotle the nonliberal arts were negative as they led to dependencies and not to virtue; among them, however, some were regarded as skills essential for life: reading and writing, gymnastics, music, and drawing (Politics Viii.3 (1337b)).30 Therefore, in Aristotle writing and drawing appear to have the same intellectual and social standing, which will greatly influence subsequent discussions (see below). Aristotle’s Peripatos, the manifestation of his ideas on public life and education, including philosophy and the natural sciences, was an academy with a purposely semi-public structure. It can most easily be compared to Renaissance academies, like the Orti Oricellari or the Florentine academies, where also nonmembers and little educated people were allowed to attend, as these institutions had the vision to offer learned discussions and broad public education as well. In his Peripatos, Aristotle promoted the idea of general education, which included both the liberal and the nonliberal arts; he included the visual arts among the intellectual virtues (Ethics) and demanded a skillful master, who had learned his field through practice, but who did not need to be erudite (see Chapter 1). Aristotle’s Politics itself grew out of a (semi-) public lecture series, where he himself explained his system of society and education. In the finalized book version, the relevant ideas went into books VII and VIII. Especially book VIII offered a description of the necessity for and content of public education, including common schooling for students of different social groups. A liberal arts education including moral and intellectual education was 28 29 30

Randall R. Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, New York 2000, pp. 36, 84. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA 1977, p. 635. Aristotle, Politics, p. 639.

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important, and he also supplied the subjects to be taught.31 Public and classless education was one of the big achievements in antiquity that was revived in the Renaissance, especially in Renaissance Florence. It comprised public lectures, open to nonmembers, organized by the city, university, academies, or private efforts. Likewise the education of poor boys was organized. Humanism took up the idea of public education on a large scale.

Elementary Schools Vasari tells us that young Botticelli’s father was concerned to have him learn everything customarily necessary to know before starting an apprenticeship in a workshop, and therefore he sent him to school. And Vasari lets us know that this was a common habit in Florence. It thus appears that the boy was intended to learn as much as possible, and reading, writing, and abacus hardly seemed enough, before the father placed him finally with a goldsmith.32 While Botticelli was certainly an intelligent boy and a highly gifted painter, Vasari probably did not exaggerate in saying that often future artists went to school before their apprenticeship. Schooling took place on different levels, but some basic introduction to literature and mythology happened from very early on. And a number of artists did not stop with a basic education, but continued learning at school or in private. Although he believed that artists did not spend much time at school, Peter Burke’s survey on the start of apprenticeships is a telling summary for the fifteenth century: Andrea del Sarto was seven when he began his apprenticeship. Titian was nine, Mantegna and Sodoma ten. Paolo Uccello was already one of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s shop-boys when he was eleven. Michelangelo was thirteen when he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, and Palladio the same age when he began work as a stone-carver.. . . From the contemporary point of view, Botticelli and Leonardo left things a little late, for Botticelli was still at school when he was thirteen, while Leonardo was not apprenticed to Verrocchio until he was fourteen or fifteen.33

But Burke was wrong to presume that Botticelli, Leonardo, and Verrocchio were exceptional cases. The question is, rather, What type of school did a future artist attend? In the Middle Ages, being literate was an exception. During the Middle Ages, literacy naturally meant Latin reading and writing skills, as the vernacular did not exist as an official written language. Up to the thirteenth century, it was not even a common prerequisite among important professions like 31 32 33

Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, pp. 1–2, 9, 84. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 491. Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, p. 52.

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lawyers, judges, and priests. Only the few who went to a monastery school would have learned more than spelling. This changed significantly with the rise of communal and private schools starting at the end of the thirteenth century, but coming to blossom only slowly from the end of the fourteenth century onward. In the Renaissance, public education was a political and social aim, and a growing demand by parents.34 The literacy rate in Florence and Venice was exceptionally high during the Renaissance, with Rome coming next, followed by lesser numbers in other Italian cities.35 Confirming Vasari, elementary schooling was extremely frequent in Florence in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and figures speak for a male schooling rate between 67 and 83 percent. Black states that the male literacy rate for the year 1427 was almost 70 percent, which, in his account, would always have been Latin literacy, since he almost completely neglects vernacular education up to the beginning of the sixteenth century.36 The Florentine cadastre of 1427 is highly revealing on topics like literacy and social classes. All citizens had to respond to the cadastre and provide a summary of their property, family members, students at school, etc. The results are that, among the households that had to ask for help due to a complete lack of writing and reading knowledge, there figured eight stonemasons, but only one painter; and in the category of semiliterates who needed some help to fill out the cadastre, there were requests again by four stonemasons and two painters. Statements by scribes who had filled out the cadastre requests on another’s behalf resulted in sixteen stonemasons and eight painters. Those engaging a notary or professional scribe were thirty-three stonemasons and four painters.37 However credible these accounts and statements of family heads and scribes are, they show that the literacy rate must have been at least twice as high among painters than among builders, and that the majority of artists must have been able to fulfill such a complicated request, and this certainly goes for the painters. It is quite possible that the better literacy rate among the painters was due to their dependence on the guild of physicians and apothecaries, to which belonged the printers and also the literati (see above). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it seems to have been common in the artisan class to study reading and writing on the

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Paul F. Grendler, The organization of primary and secondary education in the Italian Renaissance, Catholic Historical Review, 71:2, 1985, pp. 185–205. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore 1989, p. 71. Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, ca. 1250–1500, Leiden 2007, pp. 1, 35. Following Grendler, in the 1480 one third of the Florentine youth aged ten to thirteen attended school officially, which would signify a lower number (Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 403; Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Western Europe, Renaissance Quarterly, 43:4, 1990, pp. 775–787, see p. 779). Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 19–20, 23–24, 26–27, 31–32.

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elementary school level and to visit the abacus school.38 Although some of this education could have been gained at home or in the workshop, nevertheless, it seems likely that many pupils would have gone to school, especially in Florence, where schooling was more common than in other cities. Numerous documents in Verde’s book confirm the fact that boys stayed at school for several years. The goldsmith Bernardo di Ghuccio di Giovanni, having a bottega (workshop) in via Calimala, had a boy who still attended school at the age of thirteen.39 Sometimes even an apprenticeship could be interrupted in order to make a boy go back to school. This is the case for Lapaccio di Giova’ Michele, a former apprentice of the goldsmith Nicholo di Piero, who went back to school at the age of fourteen, and would thereafter return to the goldsmith.40 Following Grendler, the Florentine cadastre of 1480 shows a considerable schooling rate between the ages of five and fifteen. Reading classes were frequented between the ages of five and fourteen, abbaco between the ages of ten and fifteen, Latin grammar between the ages of twelve and sixteen.41 Elementary schooling was highly popular in Florence, and consisted of learning reading, but not necessarily also writing, although probably the majority learned both. Secondary education included the abacus (mathematics taught in the vernacular) and Latin grammar. In general, the pupil first learned how to read – Latin traditionally, as the vernacular entered classrooms only slowly – then how to write and how to use the abacus, which seemed to have happened around the same age. Although there were different schooling systems, duties and topics often overlapped; therefore, writing could be taught by the elementary teacher, or the abacus or grammar teacher, or even at the university. For a long time, learning grammar meant learning Latin grammar, as vernacular grammar was introduced only during the sixteenth century.42 Grendler supposes that the painters, belonging to the group of craftsmen, went mainly to the vernacular school, which took place before or during their apprenticeship. They would therefore have been familiar with vernacular

38 39

40 41 42

Lebole, Breve storia dei mestieri artigiani. La tradizione fiorentina, pp. 34–35. Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503. Ricerche e documenti, Pistoia 1977, vol. 3.2, p. 1041. The stonecutter Francesco d’Antonio di Bastiano di Doffo from Settignano had two boys aged nine and eleven, who both went to school to learn reading. From the Ghiberti family two boys were attending school aged twelve and fourteen, which supposedly must have included abacus and Latin at this age (see for the documents Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, pp. 1103, 1180–1181). Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, vol. 3.2, p. 1091. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 75. Piero Lucchi, La Santacroce, il Salterio e il Babuino. Libri per imparare a leggere nel primo secolo della stampa, Quaderni storici, 13:38:2, 1978, pp. 593–630, see p. 597; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 56–59.

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literature, but not with Latin.43 This needs to be questioned, as there is a lot of evidence that many artists who actually went to school gained some familiarity with Latin nevertheless (see Chapter 3). There were plenty of elementary schools across Florence, and the pupil usually went to the school closest to his home, whereas grammar and abacus schools were more deliberately chosen.44 A special case in Florence was the Compagnia della Purificazione (recorded between 1434 and 1458), a confraternity for boys aged twelve to eighteen from every social stratum: from the nobility to the artisan class, where even sons of painters were present. Several hundred boys went to this school, of whom probably all learned at an elementary school level, but a considerable number also learned the abacus and Latin grammar.45 Attendance at elementary school did not reveal anything about social status, as many parents with precarious jobs, or even no jobs and plenty of debt, would send their children to the first school level and would somehow be able to deal with the fees, or were released from them. Usually, sixteenth-century vernacular education started with the Babuino containing alphabets and information on spelling.46 The second step in the classroom consisted in reading one’s first literary texts, which, however, should not be compared with twenty-first-century standards of reading recommendations for an eight- to twelve-year-old. Pupils started immediately with demanding religious and classical literature. Following Grendler, the vernacular curriculum used both medieval and Renaissance texts together, and did not care about the abandonment of medieval texts that the Latin curriculum had followed. Common texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Fior di virtù, Epistole e Evangeli, Le vite dei santi padri, Troiano in volgare, and I quarto libri di misser Giovanni Gerson (Imitation of Christ), books that would also be found in private households.47 Also, a vernacular version of the Legenda aurea (Il leggendario dei santi) seems to have been popular. Dating to the early fourteenth century, the anonymous Fior di virtu on virtues and vices continued throughout the sixteenth century to be one of the most commonly read books in classrooms and at home. Grendler compared its importance to the Disticha Catonis in Latin schools. Domenico Cavalca’s Vite dei Santi Padri and Lo specchio 43

44 45

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Grendler, Schooling in Western Europe, pp. 775–787, see p. 786; Paul F. Grendler, Form and function in Italian popular books, Renaissance Quarterly 46:3, 1993, pp. 451–485, see pp. 453–454. See Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 337. Lorenzo Polizzotto, Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youth in Florence, Oxford 2004, pp. 29, 40–42; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 457–458. Piero Lucchi, La Santacroce, il Salterio e il Babuino. Libri per imparare a leggere nel primo secolo della stampa, Quaderni storici, 13:38:2, 1978, pp. 593–630, see pp. 612–616. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 275, 405; Grendler, Form and function in Italian popular books, pp. 454–461.

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della Croce were very popular in the fifteenth century, but declined in the following, when Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso gradually gained more importance.48 Romances, especially chivalric ones, made a new, blissfully entertaining and sometimes even heroic entry into sixteenth-century vernacular elementary teaching, especially in Venice. In addition to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Luigi Pulci’s Morgante also were read throughout the century. With these three romances, the heroic deeds of Orlando, the knight of Charlemagne, were therefore a major topic in Italian vernacular classrooms.49 Both the vernacular and the Latin curricula had the aim, beyond reading and writing, to foster moral and civic values in the child. These were imparted to the pupil through standard classical and Christian texts, and also mediating texts. In the end, whether a pupil studied Vergil in the Latin curriculum or the Fior di virtu in the vernacular curriculum, both texts would transmit this mixture of classical and Christian doctrine with the idea of shaping the young student’s character and knowledge.50 The fundamental importance for painters of vernacular (Fior di virtu, Vite dei santi padri, and other) early school texts will be described in Chapter 3. These first reading texts from elementary and secondary education had a distinct impact on artists. They established the basic repertoire that they would initially fall back on when choosing a topic. And they established the first source a young artist could refer to, a written source of information and stories, that enhanced the visual repertoire they had seen or were going to see in the workshop.

Latin Grammar Schools Some artists, including Michelangelo and Leonardo, passed on to a Latin grammar school.51 Evidence reveals that a basic Latin literacy rate must have been frequent among Renaissance artists. Learning Latin was not just a higherclass or a financial question, as the society would often provide the necessary means, at least in major cities; this was probably less so the case in the countryside. Since well into the sixteenth century learning reading and writing would mean learning Latin, many sons of merchant or artisan families would go to Latin class, as is proven, for example, by a list of owners of Latin grammars from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Here figure sons of 48

49

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 276–299; Nicola Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, Gaeta 1997, pp. 134–135. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 289–290. These vernacular romances are of less importance in this study since the pictorial renderings are mainly of illustrative purposes. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 409. Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, p. 61; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 141, 401, n. 332.

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barrel makers, wool merchants, printers, spice merchants, and many more. All of these sons possessed a secondary grammar book, which indicates that they learned Latin at an advanced level, enabling them to read both ancient and contemporary literature. Black mentions a notable interest in these secondarylevel grammar books between 1470 and 1500, and especially of grammar books that served for humanists’ texts.52 In Italy, one could learn Latin in a variety of places: grammar teaching was provided by monastic schools, communal schools, the university, and private schools, or with a tutor in a private household. Many city comune would contract with a Latin teacher who was paid by the comune, although sometimes they also contracted with teachers who needed to be paid by the pupils themselves. The teacher appointed by the comune required an official agreement to be able to accept payment from pupils.53 In Tuscany, grammatical education was normally paid for by the comune, and the teacher would teach for free every son whose parents paid taxes. In Florence, however, the grammar teacher received fees from both the comune and the parents. Elementary and abacus teachers were always paid directly by the parents.54 Rome by contrast had several maestro dei rioni who were paid by the university; there numbered twenty-two in the 1470s. Therefore, basic Latin education would often be offered for free. This teaching policy followed the public politics of the popes.55 Bologna also worked in this manner, where the university sent their grammar teachers into four areas of the city for public learning.56 Also, in Florence’s university there was an overlap between the university and the schools, whereby teachers would also teach Latin in communal schools. In the fifteenth century, the university provided one to four masters contemporaneously who taught boys Latin (maestri di squola, magistri grammaticae, magistri scolarum, etc.).57 In Florence, however, the university played much less of a role than in other cities. At the end of the Middle Ages, grammar teaching was often, although not consistently, offered by the guilds. In the fourteenth century, the Florentine guilds were the most important place to learn Latin reading and writing, together with some abacus training. The statutes of 1316 talk about “Ars magistrorum gramatice, et abaci, et docentium legere et scribere pueros,” and also in 1321 courses were taught 52

53 54

55 56

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Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 142–144. See also Piero Lucchi, La Santacroce, il Salterio e il Babuino, pp. 598–599. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 737–778. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 328, 401–402. See on communal Latin teachers also Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 12–22. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 78. Umberto Dallari, I rotuli dei lettori legisti e artisti dello studio Bolognese dal 1384 al 1799, Bologna 1888. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 23–25; on the Latin teaching of the youth see pp. 13–33.

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on “Ars magistrorum gramatice et abaci.”58 Although these courses differed over the years, they show clearly how the guilds took an active part in teaching Latin and the abacus to future merchants and artisans. This might have been one of the reasons why the literacy rate was exceptionally high in Florence. Those pupils who went to one of the numerous private Latin schools went to a scuola or bottega, which indicates that the schools used the same term as every artisan shop in Florence.59 Therefore, one needs to be very careful concerning mentions about education happening in workshops, which might in fact not have been at the artist’s workshop. Orsanmichele (the headquarter of the guilds) and the Studio Fiorentino (the university) were the two most important places to learn Latin grammar in Florence during the fifteenth century. In fact, whoever had a private school as a Latin grammar teacher was also engaged in one of these two places.60 Although there is no proof, these two places would seem at first glance to have served those inclined toward higher studies at the Studio Fiorentino, on the one hand, and toward the Florentine guilds, on the other, which were all associated with Orsanmichele. The Latin school at Orsanmichele was on the first floor above a warehouse (belonging to the Calimala guild, the cloth merchants) on the square of Orsanmichele; it was organized most of the time by a master called Bigallo. This school was active for most of the years between 1407 and 1476, but, in between, it also served as an abacus school (1448–1451). Apart from Latin grammar, the school sometimes also employed teachers for elementary reading. It is certainly no coincidence that the Calimala guild was for some years also engaged in overseeing the Studio Fiorentino (1420–1528) as well as the private higher education school at San Marco (from 1428 onward; see sections “Private Schools” and “Poor Students”).61 This guild had a decisive part in education in Florence. Latin education in Florence, therefore, was very diverse, ranging from private to communal and merchant teaching, while embracing most of the classes in the society. Venice had a particular kind of combination school system. Latin and abacus training went hand in hand for most of the pupils, since parents saw both of these topics as necessary for their education.62 Although most primary and 58 59

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Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 205. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 75 note “a”; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 221. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 416. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 328, 338–339, 381, see on the history and various teachers engaged with the school also pp. 401–416; Jonathan Davies, Florence and Its University during the Early Renaissance, Leiden 1998, pp. 10, 80. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 50, 306, 403; Paul F. Grendler, The organization of primary and secondary education in the Italian Renaissance, Catholic Historical Review, 71:2, 1985, pp. 185–205; Gherardo Ortalli, Scuole e maestri tra medioevo e Rinascimento. Il caso veneziano, Bologna 1996, p. 80.

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secondary education in Venice took place through private teaching, Venice established three important public schools in the city. First is the Scuola di Rialto, which was initially a private initiative that opened in the middle of the fourteenth century. It then turned into a public communal school in 1441, and soon became known for the study of philosophy (especially Aristotelian philosophy and Averroism), but also for algebra and arithmetic. Second and soon after, the Scuola di San Marco was opened in 1443 by the Serenissima, who needed its youth to be trained for public service (cancelleria). Nevertheless, the school was soon opened up also to others and took on more topics in the humanities, including poetry, history, and oratory, and with a more Platonic orientation. Then, in 1460 a second public school opened at San Marco, teaching poetry, rhetoric, and history to a mixed audience of upper- and lower-class boys.63 Ross published a contemporary description of these three schools from Marino Sanudo in 1493: at the Rialto school, a publicly paid teacher lectured on philosophy and theology in the morning and afternoon. There was an explicit desire by the Venetian Senate to open these lectures to the public for everyone who wanted to attend. The two schools at San Marco also worked similarly, where important teachers lectured to the public openly and without fees to anyone.64 The grammar teacher would introduce the two well-known grammar handbooks, Donatus and Guarino’s Regulae, whereas the humanist had the task of teaching Cicero in the morning and Vergil, Terence, and Horace in the afternoon.65 All over Italy, the first stages of Latin teaching in the fifteenth century looked roughly like the following. After some initial books on spelling (tabula, carta, quaderno, Babuino – also called abbecedario, probably from the abacus school), the pupil moved right into reading the psalter (salterio, usually containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Miserere, Salve Regina) and the Disticha Catonis, a collection of moral sentences from ancient sources. Among the elementary reading texts were two works on Christian morality: the Eva Columba (Dittochaeum) attributed to Prudentius, and the Physiologus. The pupils

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James Bruce Ross, Venetian schools and teachers fourteenth to early sixteenth century: A survey and a study of Giovanni Battista Egnazio, Renaissance Quarterly, 29:4, 1976, pp. 521–566, see pp. 522, 527–531; Gherardo Ortalli, Scuole e maestri tra medioevo e Rinascimento. Il caso veneziano, Bologna 1996, pp. 30–33. Document in: Ross, Venetian schools and teachers, p. 557. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 67. “Two external academic influences, one local and the other international, probably help to explain the relatively large number of students learning logic and Aristotelian philosophy in pre-university schools in sixteenth-century Venice. First, the local Scuola di Rialto (often called the school of philosophy) taught logic and the works of Aristotle. Begun in 1408, the school served as a counterweight to the humanistic Scuola di San Marco.. . . Hence, logic and Aristotelian philosophy continued to exert some influence in Venetian schools, possibly more than in schools in other Italian cities” (Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 269).

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then moved on to Donatus’s Ianua (or donadello), the final stage of elementary Latin education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the end, they needed to memorize texts to become familiar with morphology and structures, for which the Ianua was also often the basis, since it provided grammar and reading elements to be memorized (per lo senno).66 When a student wanted to continue with the secondary grammar curriculum after learning the basics of Latin grammar, reading, and memorization, he would most likely have been taught with the classical ancient schoolbooks, Donatus’s Ars maior or Priscian’s Institutio de nomine pronomine et verbo, which were meant for perfecting one’s grammar and style.67 The most popular advanced Latin grammars in the fifteenth century were written by the two well-known humanists, Guarino Veronese and Niccolò Perotti, whose Rudimenta grammatices was written in 1468 and printed in the 1470s. Despite the fact that these grammars were widely read in humanists’ schools and served future intellectual circles, nevertheless they also included translations and explanations in the vernacular. And Perotti furthermore gave many useful citations from Horace, Sallust, Pliny, and the Bible.68 From Leonardo’s library, we know that he possessed both the two-language edition (Latin/vernacular) of Donatus, and the Donatus minor, an elementary standard Latin grammar for advanced beginners;69 later in life he also used Perotti’s advanced humanist grammar, the Rudimenta.70 In 1503, Leonardo possessed a substantial library of 116 books, among which were Latin and vernacular titles. Texts at an advanced Latin level were Euclid, Ptolemy, and Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. Other classical texts like those of Livy, Ovid, and Pliny he owned in vernacular translations.71 These examples show that, although Leonardo was able to read Latin at a scientific level, when a vernacular translation was available, he evidently chose this version for convenience. In 66

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 111–113, 142–161, 174–188; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 123–136; Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge 2001, pp. 36–40, 44–45, 48, 58–61; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 44–45; Lucchi, La Santacroce, il Salterio e il Babuino pp. 600–610. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, p. 23. Niccolò Perotti, Rudimenta grammatices, Rome 1473. See Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 166–174; Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, pp. 124–125, 131–133, 136; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 467. Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, p. 24; Carlo Vecce, La biblioteca perduta. I libri di Leonardo, Rome 2017, pp. 71, 81; Carlo Vecce, Leonardo e i suoi libri, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri. La biblioteca del genio universale, ed. Carlo Vecce, Florence 2019, pp. 13–23, see pp. 18–20. Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 68, 83, 141; Vecce, Leonardo e I suoi libri, pp. 13–23; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, pp. 25, 28. See on Leonardo’s library Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 21; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 62–70; Vecce, Leonardo e i suoi libri, pp. 13–23.

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Mantegna’s library, Latin texts dominated. Judging from the inventory at his son’s death in 1510, apart from Vergil’s Aeneid in the vernacular, Mantegna probably owned many classical texts from the humanist curriculum, like Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Epistles, Cicero’s De officiis, Mercurius Trismegistus, Flavio Biondo, Statius, Sallust, Terentius, Columella, Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Prosper, Ovid, and another book by Vergil.72 More advanced Latin study embraced reading the auctores who belonged to late medieval humanistic education, and could be taught on various levels for grammar, prose, and poetry, and thus served for secondary Latin grammar education as well as at the university level. Moreover, these texts conveyed moral values.73 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a few typical authors used at the intermediate Latin school level were Aesop (Fables), Boethius (Consolation), Homer (Iliad), and the Physiologus. They belonged to the socalled auctores minores.74 Among the auctores maiores were Vergil, Seneca, Cicero, Livy, and Sallust, with the last three also recommended by Leon Battista Alberti as appropriate reading material for pupils. One of the texts that became extremely important was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which students had to comment on while exploring moralizing patterns. Vergil’s complete works could also be used at this level, as could Lucan, Horace, Cicero’s De officiis, De amicitia, Orations, and Epistles; or Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae.75 In the secondary Latin grammar course during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the pupils would pass on to Ovid, Lucan, Horace, and Vergil for poetry, and to Sallust and Cicero (the moral treatises and epistles) for prose. Additionally, some would read Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Seneca’s Tragedies, Valerius Maximus, Terence, Juvenal, and Persius.76 Almost all of these authors played a role in Renaissance iconography, as will be shown in Chapter 3. The most important were Ovid, Vergil, Aesop, Apuleius, Lucan, Lucrez, Seneca, and Plutarch. From the basic and intermediate reading level, several of the commonly used reading texts for Latin class proved to be very important for the artist’s education, which makes an overview of elementary and intermediate Latin teaching necessary. Among these were, for example, subsequent elementary 72

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Rodolfo Signorini, New findings about Andrea Mantegna: His son Ludovico’s post-mortem inventory (1510), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 59, 1996, pp. 103–118, see pp. 113–114. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 113–114; Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance, Baltimore 2002, p. 202; see also Silvia Marcucci, La scuola tra XIII e XV secolo: figure esemplari di maestri, Pisa 2002, pp. 69–98. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 145–148. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 154–159, 166–167. See also Grendler, Schooling in Western Europe, pp. 781–782. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 48–49; Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, pp. 144–145.

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reading texts on Christian morality, such as the Physiologus and the compilation called “auctores octo.” Both belonged to the easiest and most common medieval Latin reading texts in use throughout Europe. The “auctores octo” was a compilation of texts with moral and some ancient mythological content (Disticha Catonis, Theodolus, Facetus, Chartule alias de contemptu mundi, Thobias, Parabolae Alani, Fabule Esopi, and Floretus). The Italian humanists condemned this compilation and its simplified educational approach, which made it much less important during the Renaissance, even though it survived longer in Northern Europe, where it is also true that more schoolbooks still exist today.77 However, some texts survived separately and gained importance on their own. Two elementary Latin reading texts in this compilation were important for painters, the first being the Ecloga Theodoli (Theodulus) from the Middle Ages, which dealt with mythology and the Old Testament in a moralized context, where, for example, Liar and Truth were the poetic opponents. The second was the Liber Aesopi (Aesopus) written by Gualterus Anglicus, a narration of animal fables that circulated in many different versions on its own. The most frequently studied texts that were of major interest to the artists came from the more advanced Latin curriculum, for example, Aesopus and Vergil (Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics), but also Ovid (Metamorphoses, Epistole Heroides, Fasti, Ars amatoria), Statius (Thebaid), Lucan (Pharsalia), and Boethius (De consolatione philosophiae).78 Some of these texts were already translated into the vernacular by the fifteenth century; the rest were translated up to the middle of the sixteenth century. On the importance of these Latin texts for painters, see Chapter 3. The list provided by Black of surviving manuscripts documenting which authors were frequently read in school in the fifteenth century shows evidence for how these authors were read. Apart from philological annotations, there was significant evidence for historical and mythological reading of these texts, as well as of the parts concerning natural philosophy and geography, all of which were consequently annotated. Many parts were translated into the vernacular in the margins. The surviving schoolbook manuscripts show that these texts were actually read for a basic philological understanding, most importantly of history, mythology, and allegory, in addition to providing definitions and making cross references to Pliny’s Natural History. Books read this way were, for example, Ovid (Metamorphoses), Vergil (Aeneid, Georgics, Eclogues), Horace (Odes), Aesop (Fables), the Physiologus, and Cicero

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August Buck, Der italienische Humanismus, in: Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, ed. Notker Hammerstein, Munich 1996, vol. 1, pp. 1–53, see p. 11; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 140–141; Giuseppe Zago, Vittorino da Feltre e la rinascita dell’educatore, Lecce 2008, pp. 30–31. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 111–116, 235.

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(De amicitia, De senectute, Paradoxa stoicorum, Somnium Scipionis, and De officiis).79 These texts and their interpretations, therefore, added substantially to a basic understanding of history and mythology. Historical and mythological reading of texts would thereafter be continued on an advanced level at the university in the commentary tradition (see Chapter 3). All of these texts were part of pre-university education and belonged mainly to the secondary grammar schools, where pupils would have been between approximately twelve and fourteen years old. Artists who started their apprenticeship later could have reached this advanced reading level. There are numerous documents as well as visual evidence for artists who had learned Latin at least on an elementary level. As we saw above in the vita of Botticelli, Vasari confirmed that young boys in Florence often benefited from an education in reading. This is regardless of whether or not they came from established households. Likewise, Antonio Manetti confirms in his vita on Brunelleschi that he, like other men of good standing in Florence, learned reading, writing, the abacus, and “lettere.”80 Vasari writes that Brunelleschi was the son of a person educated in letters who worked as a notary, and who was himself the son of a physician. His notary father taught him writing and sent him off to grammar and abacus school because he wanted him likewise to become a notary, even though Brunelleschi preferred to work with his hands.81 Brunelleschi must therefore have learned Latin reasonably well, and even more than a grammar school would provide. Giuliano da Maiano was also sent to grammar school by his father, who had wished to make him a notary because he seemed to be a very intelligent boy.82 Giuliano owned some theological and historical books in Latin (Titus Livius, Sant’Antoninus, Vita Patrum).83 The mother of Piero della Francesca, widowed early, could still send her boy to abacus school to make him learn mathematics before the age of fifteen.84 This speaks for at least eight years of education, which leaves plenty of time for studying grammar and reading. Piero would later become an author himself, and he consulted a variety of written authorities for his own work. As Vasari tells us, the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio was also well studied in

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Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, pp. 231, 245, 248–249, 262–265. Antonio Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi preceduta da la novella del grasso, ed. Domenico de Robertis, Milan 1976, p. 52; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, pp. 19–20; Bernd Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler – Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten der Renaissance über Kunst, Berlin 2013, p. 52. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, pp. 293–294. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 355. Creigthon Gilbert, L’Arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, Florence 1988, pp. 75–76; Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano: A Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance, Turnhout 2006, p. 462. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 361.

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literature.85 In Ghirlandaio’s time, this would principally have been in Latin. Giorgio Vasari had a primary Latin education in the public schools of Arezzo and knew Vergil’s Aeneid at the age of twelve. After he moved to Florence, he was educated by the humanist Piero Valerio.86 The painter Pordenone had also learned Latin.87 Giovanni Battista Caporali boasted that he had received a substantially advanced Latin education in Perugia before learning the profession of a painter. In the preface to his Vitruvius commentary, he said that he was able to read Latin source literature all by himself. He then provided a translation from Latin and a commentary on Vitruvius, where he cited from Plato and Thomas Aquinas (see Chapter 4). That the architect Giovanni Battista da Sangallo owned the Latin editio princeps of Vitruvius, which he commented on in the margins and in which he made drawings (Florence, Ms. Corsini 50. F.1), speaks to his ability to read Latin at an advanced level. Following Vasari, although he was of noble origins, Michelangelo’s father was not wealthy enough to send all of his boys to school, and chose Michelangelo because of his vibrant mind.88 In 1478, Michelangelo’s elder brother Lionardo was sent as a five-year-old to Don Mauro, a priest at Santa Maria in Settignano, to learn reading. This location was close to the family’s country retreat.89 Michelangelo probably had the same Latin teacher as Leonardo da Vinci, a man named Francesco di Giovanni da Urbino, who was the composer of a well-known Latin manual called Regole, a book to be found in many private households, but also in the library of San Marco.90 Francesco di Giovanni da Urbino was a Latin teacher active in Florence between 1483 and 1503. He served in many private households, and between 1497 to 1503, also as a communal schoolteacher.91 Following Black, Michelangelo received his Latin education around 1483 in Francesco di Giovanni’s grammar school together with the children of Lorenzo di Matteo Morelli.92 Michelangelo could have undergone a complete grammar education, but asked to leave grammar school earlier in order to start an artistic

85 86

87 88 89 90

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Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 482. Liisa Kanerva, Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius’ Educational Ideas, Vaajakoski 2006, pp. 23, 61. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 794. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, pp. 948–949. See Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 337. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 141–143, 401, Appendix 5; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 52; Berthold Louis Ullman and Philip Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco, Padova 1972, p. 240, n. 980 (for San Marco). Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 141, 144, 543. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 401; see also Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo, Life, Letters, and Poetry, Oxford 1987, p. 9 (who argued that Michelangelo was send by his father to Francesco’s school).

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career.93 The goldsmith, illuminator and humanist Piero Cennini (1444–1484), himself son of a goldsmith and printer, went to grammar school with Pietro Fanni; then he switched to the more advanced grammar and reading school of Bernardo Nuti, where he studied classical literature. At Nuti’s school he met the humanist and university teacher Bartolomeo della Fonte, with whom he remained for long in contact (see below).94 Contacts between artists and humanists or professors were not particularly rare. In very exceptional cases, the painting pupil could receive a Latin education with his practical apprenticeship. Around the year 1440, the painter Francesco Squarcione was running a workshop and school in Padua with 137 pupils. Here he taught drawing and manual work, but also the Latin language and antiquarian studies. Among his most famous pupils were Andrea Mantegna, Cosimo Tura, and Carlo Crivelli.95 Mantegna certainly learned enough Latin to read classical texts by himself (see Chapter 3).96 After some rudimentary Latin training in their youth, some artists returned as adults to seriously study Latin. This is the case with Leonardo, who bought the more linguistically demanding Latin grammars only as an adult, as well as with Francesco di Giorgio. Following Mussini, while in Siena Francesco di Giorgio had first attended a Latin grammar school and then the abacus school, probably under Pietro dell’Abaco (Pietro Checchi), who was active in those years.97 Thereafter, as an adult – as Francesco di Giorgio himself admitted in an interesting confession in the foreword (proemio) to his treatise – he had been pushed by his patron, in this case Federico duke of Urbino, to learn Greek and Latin while at Urbino in order to learn more about ancient architecture as provided in the sources. This method clearly reveals the architect’s approach to ancient literary knowledge. Although Francesco claimed to have struggled 93

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On Alberti’s, Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s education see Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, pp. 51–62; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, pp. 17–19; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 52. Francesco di Teodoro said Leonardo did not know Latin at all and therefore needed translations (Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Quale Vitruvio?: Il “De architectura” all’inizio del XVI secolo alla luce della traduzione per Raffaello di Fabio Calvo, Atti e studi/Accademia Raffaello, 1/2, n.s. 2012, 2/2013 (2014), pp. 9–18, see p. 9). Also Ames-Lewis believed Leonardo, albeit being the son of a notary, did not attend grammar school, but somehow in his life tried to learn it nevertheless (AmesLewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, pp. 19, 21). See Marco Palma, Piero Cennini, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Rome 1979, vol. 23, pp. 572–575. Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna, Oxford 1986, pp. 15–29. Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 20. Massimo Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio. Le traduzioni del “De Architectura” nei codici Zichy, Spencer 129 e Magliabechiano II.I.141, Florence 2003, vol. 1, p. 18. Biffi and Long suppose that Francesco di Giorgio was an autodidact in Latin (Marco Biffi, Introduction, in: La traduzione del De Architectura di Vitruvio: dal ms. II.I.141 della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Pisa, 2002, p. LXIV; Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Corvallis 2011, p. 80).

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EDUCATION IN THE RENAISSANCE

with these languages, he nevertheless thought it necessary to read about ancient Greek architecture in the literature because he did not have the opportunity to visit the country himself. Since he admired the Greeks and Romans as great and important architects and sculptors, it was important to consult those authorities directly. Subsequently, Francesco’s efforts to read these texts seemed much less exhausting to him, since he could now explore authorities and writings like those of Vitruvius.98

Abacus Schools Knowledge of geometry, basic mathematics, and accounting was certainly necessary for an artist to possess, all of which were offered by the abacus schools. These were organized by the cities and guilds, or less often by monastery schools and universities. Abacus schools existed from the middle of the thirteenth century, and were thus contemporary with the rise of the universities as an alternative professional education. Often closely associated with the guilds, use of the abacus was considered an art form, as a document from 1441 testifies, which talks about “detta arte d’albacho.”99 Artists like Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, Piero della Francesca, Bramante, Botticelli, and Leonardo went to such a school for mathematical and geometrical training.100 In the case of Bramante, Vasari writes, his father sent him to learn reading, writing, and the abacus, whereafter he had to enter a workshop and earn his own money, since the father was not wealthy enough to have him continue in these studies.101 Piero della Francesca himself wrote an abacus book useful for classroom training or private study.102 Abacus books taught algebra (mathematics), simple building and construction rules, but also winemaking and much else that was useful for craftsmen, artists, merchants, bankers, and many others. Private schools were set up where a teacher taught for money, but sometimes boys learned at home with either their father or a private teacher. The pedagogic structure of many abacus books made this kind

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Renato Fusco, Il codice dell’architettura, antologia di trattatisti, Naples 1968, p. 273; Piero Pierotti, Prima di Machiavelli. Filarete e Francesco di Giorgio consiglieri del principe, Ospedaletto 1995, pp. 22, 116, nos. 41 and 42. Elisabetta Ulivi, Gli abacisti Fiorentini delle famiglie ‘del maestro di Luca’, Calandri e Micceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI), Florence 2013, p. 109. Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, p. 52; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 308; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, pp. 19–20; Judith Veronica Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art, New Haven, CT 2004, p. 15. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 595. See on the abacus book, for example, Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance, New Haven, CT 1997, pp. 97–101; Field, Piero della Francesca, pp. 15–24.

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of autodidactic training possible. Alberti was one of the very few humanists (apart from Vittorino da Feltre) to recommend studying abacus for the general education of the youth, not limiting it to the artisan class, as others had done.103 They acknowledge what was commonly done, as learning the abacus was widespread throughout Italy. Boys normally attended the abacus school for two years between the ages of eight and fifteen (most frequently between ten and twelve). The abacus school was frequented by the artisan youth who had studied some rudimentary vernacular or Latin first, or went directly to the abacus school, which sometimes also offered vernacular and Latin reading classes.104 In many Italian cities, like Venice (but less in Florence), primary schools would offer a mixed curriculum with some arithmetic and Latin grammar teaching.105 On the other hand, we know about universities like Bologna that already offered this kind of early curriculum with arithmetic and Latin grammar for young boys.106 In Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there were specialized abacus schools that taught only the abacus. Usually pupils aged eleven to fifteen would go there after the elementary reading school, stay for about two years, and then go on to the Latin grammar school.107 There were fifteen abacus schools in the fifteenth century. Many of them frequently changed their locations, since rooms were usually rented on a five-year basis, but others were more stable. For example, the three most important abacus schools between the end of the fourteenth century and at least the 1480s–1490s were the scuola di Santa Trinità, the scuola di Santi Apostoli, and the scuola del Lungarno, which was run by the Micceri and Calandri families and some others. They usually rented a room on a ground floor and set up some benches.108 These ground-floor locations called bottega were the same spaces that a Latin teacher or an artist would rent (see section “Latin Grammar Schools”). The painter Lo Scheggia, for example, rented a room from 1443 to 1448 from a certain Francesco Nobili somewhere close to the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa. But after

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Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, Columbia 1969, p. 86; see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 310–311. On the practice of Florentine boys attending abacus school see Piero Lucchi, La Santacroce, il Salterio e il Babuino, pp. 610–616; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 22–23, 74–78, 308–309; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 106–111; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 43–44, 52–54, 226–241. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 72–73, 269, 298–299, p. 308–309; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 106–111. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 23–27, 115. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 308–309. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 362–385; Ulivi, Gli abacisti Fiorentini delle famiglie ‘del maestro di Luca’, Calandri e Micceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI), pp. 82–83, 97.

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the five years were up, Nobili rented these rooms to Pietro from the Calandri family, who set up his own abacus school.109 Simple abacus training included accounting and bookkeeping, but not much geometry, which, however, was important for artists, but not for merchants or secretaries. More advanced mathematics, as taught at the universities, would, however, have some geometry. From antiquity, Boethius and Euclid were the important starting points that were passed down through the centuries. The most important commentaries were Giovanni Campano da Novara’s from 1260 and Luca Pacioli’s. Medieval and Renaissance university mathematics was based on Boethius’s De arithmetica and Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.110 Whoever dealt with geometry usually referred back to book 13 of Euclid’s Elements and his five basic figures.111 These were Latin texts, and the commentaries on these texts were usually in Latin too. But abacus books were usually written in the vernacular for easy access. Although the majority of them date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they began to arise in the thirteenth century, albeit all in Latin, which confirms the basic Latin training that artisan boys received at the end of the Middle Ages. Abacus training and arithmetic were usually practiced on different levels, but some teachers also gave classes on both elementary and advanced levels, both in an abacus school and at the university. Although there is an important distinction between these two institutions, both the content and the teaching personnel could pass back and forth between the so-called vernacular and Latin worlds, and they often taught at both the local abacus school and the university.112 Dating to 1225, one of the most important early schoolbooks on geometry was Leonardo Fibonacci’s Practica geometriae,113 which was translated into Italian for easier understanding in 1442 by Cristofano di Gherardo di Dino, a school teacher of mathematics in Florence. Around these years, Paolo dell’Abaco taught geometry and mathematics at the abacus school of Santa Trinità; Antonio de’ Mazzinghi da Peretola then substituted for him, and later it was Giovanni di Bartolo. Following the documents, for example, Antonio was very learned and had been trained in astrology, music, and perspective, that is,

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Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 362–363; Ulivi, Gli abacisti Fiorentini delle famiglie ‘del maestro di Luca’, Calandri e Micceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI), pp. 82–83, 97. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 306–307. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 306–307; Field, Piero della Francesca, pp. 24–32. Ulivi, Gli abacisti Fiorentini delle famiglie ‘del maestro di Luca’, Calandri e Micceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI), p. 49. Leonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1170–ca. 1240), originally from Pisa, traveled widely through Arabia and North Africa, where he learned the Arabian numeral system and way of counting (Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 307–308).

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in topics that usually belonged to the quadrivium and thus to the university.114 Therefore, his pupils might have gotten an early insight into the quadrivium curriculum. There is, in fact, enough evidence to state that an abacus school might also have provided some simple quadrivium training. Antonio de’Mazzinghi not only included all of these quadrivium subjects in his teaching, but also some principles on the art of building (edifichare). Pupils could also follow the teacher for more classes at the studio, which means, the university.115 Sometimes abacus teachers and artists worked together on a professional basis, when they were called on to give advice and support. In fact, several abacists worked as collaborators with architects, where they were in charge of measuring and consultations, duties which today are probably comparable to statics and inspection. The abacist maestro Michele di Gianni, a former pupil of the famous teacher Paolo dell’Abaco, helped in the construction of the Ospedale di San Matteo in Piazza San Marco (today Accademia delle Belle Arti) in the years 1387–1390.116 Several abacists were involved in Brunelleschi’s constructions. Himself the son of a builder, Giovanni di Bartolo (Giovanni dell’Abaco) gave advice to the architects of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (1417, 1420, 1425), and also surveyed the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova and Santa Maria degli Angeli. He taught abacus not only at the school of Santa Trinità (until 1440), but, being an especially skilled abacist, also for several years at the university, the Florentine studio (between 1401 and 1432).117 Giovanni di Bartolo had among his pupils Giannozzo Manetti, as well as Paolo Toscanelli (1397–1482), the famous mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer.118 Toscanelli also became the teacher of Brunelleschi for mathematics and geometry, when he was already an adult and well known, as Vasari tells us.119 His book was also owned by Leonardo,120 although we do not know whether Leonardo was taught by him. Another collaborator of Brunelleschi

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On abacus schools in Florence see Gino Arrighi, Le scienze al tempo di Brunelleschi, in: Filippo Brunelleschi – La sua opera e il suo tempo, ed. G. Spadolini, Florence 1980, vol. 1, pp. 93–103, see pp. 94, 97–98; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 71–78, 306–319; Field, Piero della Francesca, pp. 13–17; Massimo Mussini, Luigi Grasselli, Piero della Francesca – Prospettiva pingendi, Sansepolcro 2008, pp. 169–197; Laurence E. Sigler, Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci: Leonardo Pisano’s Book of Calculation, New York 2002; Barnabas Hughes, Fibonacci’s De Practica Geometria, New York 2008. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 229. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 231–232. In the years 1401–1403, 1422–1423, 1424–1427, 1431–1432. See Gino Arrighi, Le scienze al tempo di Brunelleschi, in: Filippo Brunelleschi – La sua opera e il suo tempo, ed. G. Spadolini, Florence 1980, vol. 1, pp. 98–99. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 364. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 296. Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 64. Leonardo also owned the complex book on perspective written by Witelo, in Latin (pp. 67, 87).

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was the abacist maestro Mariano (1387–1458), who helped the architect between 1422 and 1426 in the building of the Ospedale degli Innocenti. He was asked to help in measurements and in writing a report on the construction.121 Also the Maiano brothers were helped by an abacist. Benedetto di Antonio da Firenze (or da Cristofano) (1429–1479) helped Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano, both architects and sculptors, in the renovation of the Palazzo Vecchio in the years 1472–1479. When Benedetto di Antonio was asked to survey and estimate, he probably did a kind of expert inspection of the works. He also himself wrote an abacus treatise, Trattato d’abacho (ca. 1465).122 This is probably the first abacus book Leonardo owned; it was specified in his first inventory (1478) as written by Benedetto del’Abaco.123 We do not know if Leonardo attended his classes, although following Cursi he presumably did, because he mentioned him in the Codex Atlanticus.124 Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino also required help from an abacist, and asked a member of the Calandri family, the well-known abacist Calandro di Piero Calandri (1419–1468), to serve in 1462 with measurements for the Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte in Florence. In 1454 and from 1457 to 1462, this maestro also helped in the convent of the Santissima. Annunziata and in the San Salvi monastery, as the account books testify.125 Calandro Calandri had botteghe in different places. In 1466 in one of his botteghe on Piazza dei Pilli, he taught the son of the painter Neri di Bicci, called Bicci.126 Calandro’s son Filippo Maria Calandri wrote one of the first printed abacus treatises, De arimetricha opusculum (1492), which he dedicated to Giuliano de’ Medici.127 This book was also owned by Leonardo,128 who therefore owned three of the most important books on the abacus. But we do not know which of the three masters’ courses he actually attended. One of the most important abacus sources for artists was written by an artist himself, the painter Piero della Francesca (ca. 1412–1492). Most likely Piero underwent a thorough abacus training in his youth, but then took on the profession of a painter.129 Despite his numerous treatises on algebra, 121 122

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Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 376. Elisabetta Ulivi, Benedetto da Firenze (1429–1479), un maestro d’abaco del XV secolo, Florence 2002, pp. 7, 36; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 368. Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, p. 15; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 63. Marco Cursi, Scrittura e scritture nel mondo di Leonardo, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri, ed. Carlo Vecce, pp. 25–31, see p. 25. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 366; Ulivi, Gli abacisti Fiorentini delle famiglie “del maestro di Luca,” Calandri e Micceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI), p. 36. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 377. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 376. D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, p. 15. On Piero’s education see Field, Piero della Francesca, pp. 73–78. On Piero’s Latin see Mussini, Luigi Grasselli, Piero della Francesca, p. 193.

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mathematics, and geometry, which were the basics necessary for most artists, we do not know if he himself taught in an abacus school, as his texts could also be used for autodidactic training. For a basic self-education in algebra, the artist (and anyone else) could use his vernacular Trattato dell’abaco (1460s–1480s). Building on this was his vernacular Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus (1460s–1480s) for a detailed education in geometry, which was based mostly on Euclid’s Elements. Furthermore, Piero wrote a vernacular treatise on painting, where he concentrated on perspective (De prospectiva pingendi, ca. 1482). Skills in abacus and geometry were therefore readily available for every artist by around 1480, regardless of whether or not he had the opportunity to attend an abacus school. Piero della Francesca’s most important pupil embarked on an even more important path. In his youth, the mathematician Luca Pacioli first underwent training in geometry and as a painter in the workshop of Piero della Francesca, where his mathematical skills were soon noticed.130 After studying mathematics in Florence and Venice, Pacioli first composed a manual on algebra (1475–1478). Later, while living in Milan, he composed the treatise De divina proportione (ca. 1496–1498), which was illuminated with geometric figures by Leonardo da Vinci. Published in Venice in 1509, it was dedicated to Lodovico Sforza.131 Pacioli and his treatises were the most influential components for learning geometry, arithmetic, and mathematics of his time. Since Pacioli had himself experienced the needs of the artists, he kept an eye on them and their educational requirements. To be sure, Leonardo was his most distinguished pupil, who would then show a detailed knowledge of Euclid’s Geometry in his own treatises, and even revealed awareness of the Golden Section.132 In 1495, Leonardo owned Pacioli’s freshly published Summa de arithmetica geometria proportioni et

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Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 365. Pacioli studied mathematics with Domenico Bragadin at the Rialto School in Venice. Bragadin and his writings were also familiar to Leonardo (Andrea Bernardoni, Leggere per costruire: la biblioteca di Leonardo per le arti Meccaniche, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri, ed. Carlo Vecce, pp. 59–70, see p. 68). On Leonardo’s geometrical figures as illustrations for Pacioli’s De Divinia proportione see Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci e il “Paragone” delle arti nella Divina proportione, in: Luca Pacioli a Milano, ed. Matteo Martelli, Sansepolcro 2014, pp. 89–100. Charles H. Carman, Images of Humanist Ideals in Italian Renaissance Art, Lewiston 2000, pp. 74–77. On Pacioli and Leonardo see also Argante Ciocci, Ritratto di Luca Pacioli, Florence 2017, pp. 58–78; Stefano Zuffi, Da Sansepolcro alla Summa: giovinezza e primi successi di Luca Pacioli, in: Luca Pacioli tra Piero della Francesca e Leonardo, ed. Stefano Zuffi, Venice 2017, pp. 25–34; Simone Ferrari, Il paragone delle arti. Luca Pacioli a Milano fra Leonardo, Bramante e Dürer, in: Luca Pacioli tra Piero della Francesca e Leonardo, ed. Stefano Zuffi, pp. 37–45; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, pp. 39–42.

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proportinalità (Venice 1494), from the man, whom Bambach called to be “Leonardo’s most significant tutor.”133 Learning at an abacus school was certainly much more multifaceted than it seems at first glance. Teaching comprised a spectrum from simple algebra to demanding mathematics, and was often taught by teachers who switched back and forth between schools and universities. As we have seen, many abacus schools would also teach vernacular and Latin reading. We can, therefore, make no precise judgment on an artist’s education simply from the fact that he went to an abacus school.

Private Schools Private schools existed on different levels. A teacher could offer lessons in reading, writing, and literature to young pupils at his home or in a bottega, or open up a large school with dozens of students. As we have seen above, many private schools opened by humanists had settled and opened up by the middle of the fifteenth century. They increasingly influenced the method and choice of texts that the communal and smaller private schools worked with.134 Florence had many private teachers and small schools for Latin reading and writing. As we saw above, Michelangelo and Leonardo frequented the Latin teacher Francesco di Giovanni da Urbino. The two most well-known Latin teachers in Florence were Bernardo Nuti and the Dominican Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. Among Nuti’s pupils counted the painter Bernardo Cennini and his son, Piero Cennini. As mentioned above, Piero Cennini (1444–1484) went first to grammar school with Pietro Fanni, then he switched to the more advanced school of Bernardo Nuti, where he studied classical literature. At Nuti’s school he met Bartolomeo della Fonte, with whom he remained in long contact.135 Vespucci mainly taught advanced theoretical grammar, and many surviving manuscripts testify to his method of syllabus, syntax, orthography, etc.136 He also taught poetry and history, including classical Latin authors like Cicero, Vergil, Terenzio, Sallust, and Juvenal, as well as the Greek Basil.137 Leonardo was a good friend of his and Vespucci helped obtain books for him, 133

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Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 69; Vecce, Leonardo e i suoi libri, pp. 13–23; Andrea Bernardoni, Leggere per costruire: la biblioteca di Leonardo per le arti Meccaniche, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri, ed. Carlo Vecce, pp. 59–70, see p. 68; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, pp. 33–34, 39. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA 1986, p. 62. Marco Palma, “Piero Cennini.” Ullman and Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence, p. 38; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 136–137. Karl Schlebusch, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci 1434–1514. Maestro canonico domenicano, Florence 2017, p. 44.

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which were seemingly otherwise difficult to get.138 Vespucci was known to be also very generous with his own substantial personal library. We do not know if Leonardo frequented his private school too, but given the close relationship between the two this is not unlikely. This seems even more probable for Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, 1445–1510). As Schlebusch has shown, the Vespucci and the Filipepi families were close neighbors for decades in the quartiere Ognisanti (Via della Porcellana, Via Paolino) and also in close contact. When the Vespucci needed a testimonial for juridical reasons, they would often ask their neighbors, whereas the Filipepi would ask the Vespucci for legal help. Giorgio Antonio Vespucci had his private Latin school likewise next door, where he taught at least between the 1450s and the 1480s.139 For Botticelli it must have turned out very comfortable to have this important schoolteacher right next door for his whole youth. Going to school up to the age of thirteen, it would have given the young and eager pupil, as Vasari mentions from his father’s words, at least the beginnings of a secondary Latin education. Vespucci furthermore became also one of his major patrons (for example, the Allegory of Venus and Mars, and frescoes in Ognisanti). Apart from those bottega-type of schools, there were also major boarding schools, which had a decisive impact on humanists and some selected artists as well. Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446) was the most famous and influential of all private humanist teachers in Italy. He had studied with both of the two famous private teachers who had existed so far: Gasparino Barzizza and Guarino Guarini. After Vittorino’s studies in Padua, he started teaching privately for single families in Venice, where he taught grammar and mathematics. Then, in 1415 he joined the school of Guarino Guarini in Venice and taught the arts and mathematics there. Soon after, he opened his first private school in Padua, as a boarding school, where pupils would live together with him. In 1423, he opened his famous Ca’ Giocosa in Mantua, which would become the most famous humanist school in Italy. There he taught important pupils like Federico da Montefeltro and Lorenzo Valla, but he also regularly accepted a number of poor pupils, who were personally recommended to him. For those, he would cover all the costs on his own.140 Vespasiano da Bisticci praised

138 139 140

Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 76, 92; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, p. 243. Schlebusch, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, pp. 39–41, 53–55. Enzo Petrini, Venticinque secoli di educazione e scuola in Italia, Florence 1971, pp. 74–83; William Harrison Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, Toronto 1996, pp. 16–24; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 160–163; Mariarosa Cortesi, Libri di lettura e libri di grammatica alla scuola di Vittorino da Feltre, in: Libri di scuola e pratiche didattiche: Dall’antichità al rinascimento, ed. Lucio Del Corso and Oronzo Pecere, Casino 2010, vol. 2, pp. 607–635.

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Vittorino for being highly learned in all the seven liberal arts,141 and indeed pupils at his school were taught in almost all trivium and quadrivium topics, and some extra subjects that were particular to Vittorino’s school. Arithmetic and geometry, the latter of which was taught together with algebra and drawing, had special significance. Otherwise, Vittorino concentrated on literature, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Additionally, pupils were also taught music, dancing, and singing.142 Vittorino was the only one among the famous humanist teachers who regularly taught mathematics in his school based on algebra and Euclid.143 Literature, especially from ancient authorities, was very important, primarily texts by Cicero, Vergil, Lucan, and Ovid. Some pupils would pass on to Terence, Plautus, Horace, Homer, Juvenal, Plutarch, and Seneca. Among the historians, pupils read Valerius Maximus, Livy, and Sallust.144 Among the topics taught almost uniquely at Vittorino’s school were Aristotle’s Poetics and Livy’s Historiae, as well as Pliny’s Natural History.145 For ethics and the moral training of a good citizen, Vittorino relied on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Lessons were most likely almost exclusively given in Latin, apart from some rudimentary primary education, as Woodward suggests.146 Sources establish that Vittorino paid a variety of teachers to teach everyone who wanted to attend for free: among them were grammar and dialectic teachers, teachers of arithmetic, musicians, dancers, teachers of Greek and Latin literature, as well as painters.147 One should suppose that the painters were actually teaching painting, or rather drawing, which was indeed offered regularly in Vittorino’s curriculum. It has been suggested that Alberti’s treatise On Painting had served as a textbook at Vittorino da Feltre’s school in

141

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145 146

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Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV scritte da Vespasiano da Bisticci, Florence 1859, p. 491. Petrini, Venticinque secoli di educazione e scuola in Italia, pp. 76–78; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 238, 310; Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 42–43; Giuseppe Zago, Vittorino da Feltre e la rinascita dell’educatore, Lecce 2008, pp. 70–73; Mariarosa Cortesi, Libri di lettura e libri di grammatica alla scuola di Vittorino da Feltre, in: Libri di scuola e pratiche didattiche: Dall’antichità al rinascimento, ed. Lucio Del Corso and Oronzo Pecere, Casino 2010, vol. 2, pp. 607–635. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 310–311; Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, p. 8. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 44–50; Zago, Vittorino da Feltre e la rinascita dell’educatore, pp. 70–73. Cortesi, Libri di lettura e libri di grammatica alla scuola di Vittorino da Feltre, p. 634. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 40–42, 48, 59; Zago, Vittorino da Feltre e la rinascita dell’educatore, pp. 70–73. Giordana Mariani Canova, La personalità di Vittorino da Feltre nel rapporto con le arti visive e il tema dell’educazione nel linguaggio figurativo del Quattrocento, in: Vittorino da Feltre e la sua scuola: umanesimo, pedagogia, arti, ed. Nella Giannetto, Florence 1981, pp. 199–212, see p. 206; Francesco Prendilacquae, De vita Victorini Feltrensis dialogus, in: Il pensiero pedagogico nell’Umanesimo, ed. Eugenio Garin, Florence 1958, p. 661.

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Mantua.148 We do not know with certainty which artists might have figured among Vittorino’s nonpaying students, but a couple of them have close affinities with this type of school for various reasons. Mantegna has always been judged as a very learned artist, but his knowledge certainly goes well beyond what Francesco Squarcione would have offered for Latin reading in his school/workshop. Indeed, Vittorino’s reading list is very close to Mantegna’s personal library! For example, the artist owned books by the ancient authors Cicero, Statius, Sallust, Terentius, Columella, Valerius Maximus, Ovid, and Vergil, and by the patristic author Prosper of Aquitaine.149 It is likewise possible that the architect Filarete (Antonio Averlino, ca. 1400–1469), son of an artist, attended Vittorino’s school as one of the poor students, because in his architectural treatise he developed ideas about a school very similar to the school in Manuta. Filarete, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s most talented pupil, was exceptionally learned and one of the few to actively bridge the gap between the visual arts and literary studies. He was active as an architect, sculptor, and author. Filarete described in his Trattato di architettura (1460–1464) a general educational system for boys (putti) aged between six and twenty-four, who would live together in a kind of boarding school called “Sapientia,” with an educational reach up to university level. The most important topics were doctrine and literature, but there were also teachers for the two laws, medicine, rhetoric, poetry, and the abacus. Filarete then added that his Sapientia would have a binary educational system, following an idea missing in the other authors. His aim would be to add more sciences than usual, among them also manual education, where boys would be trained in the practical arts, painting, drawing, and the different types of sculpture (in silver, marble, wood, clay, etc.), but also in singing and playing. These two orientations in schooling would have two different wings in the building: one cloister for the higher, liberal arts, another one for the mechanical arts.150 Thus, the mechanical arts were separate from but right next to the sciences (and the church). He also established a second place for study in his Sforzinda. In the socalled House of Vice and Virtue, the House of Vices was intended for earthly pleasures, whereas the House of Virtue had a layout similar to the school’s. It offered teaching in the liberal and practical arts.151 The topics Filarete proposed were similar to Vittorino’s school, focusing on doctrine and literature, but also

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149 150

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Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford 1971, p. 127; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 18. See the inventory in Signorini, New findings about Andrea Mantegna, pp. 113–114. Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, ed. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, Milan 1972, vol. 2, pp. 494–496, 502 (book 17). Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, vol. 2, pp. 529, 542–545 (book 17–18). See also Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, p. 80.

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on the two laws, medicine, rhetoric, poetry, and the abacus.152 Also the idea of a binary education is close to Vittorino’s idea, which leads to the impression that the artist must have known this school well. Through the comparison of physical and literary places, he derived his own version of a Sapientia. The name “Sapientia” goes back to public schools for poor boys (see section “Poor Students”), but such a school would not have provided Filarete with his obviously broad humanist background. It seems very likely that Filarete himself attended such a private humanist school and there received his remarkable humanist education. And probably at Vittorino’s school Filarete had the occasion of comparing Vittorino’s with Aristotle’s ideas of schooling, because his ideal city and its integrated binary educational system is also an idea present in Aristotle’s Politics, which had already proposed teaching the scientific and mechanical arts side by side, with drawing as an essential part to be learned by everyone. Filarete was well aware of the ongoing discussion, and declared ten years after Alberti in his own Trattato di Architettura (1460–1464) that the architect is an intellectual – probably following Plato’s intellectual craftsman and Thomas Aquinas’s wise architect (see Chapter 1). He also made the practical arts an integral part of his educational system – an idea going back to Aristotle’s statement that the liberal and mechanical arts are part of public education (cfr. Aristotle, Politics VIII; see Chapter 1). Filarete’s treatise stood at a moment of changing ideas. On the one hand, it was certainly influenced by Alberti’s and Lorenzo Valla’s idea expressed around 1440 (Elegantiae, De vero falsoque bono) that the three visual arts should be seen as close to the liberal arts (see Chapter 1). Valla evidently had no topographical picture in his head, but was thinking about social and educational ranking, which in Filarete becomes almost visible. On the other hand, it might have had an influence on Pope Sixtus IV, the promulgator of learning and founder of the new Vatican library, who was so much in favor of a university for painters.153 The establishment of the first Roman university for the visual arts in the 1470s might have happened right after Filarete’s introduction of the binary educational system, which included the practical arts as well. More private schools like Vittorino’s were soon to be opened. Guarino Guarini (1374–1460) was another famous Italian private school teacher, where probably some selected artists also passed by. In his early years Guarini was employed in Florence (1408), Venice, and Verona, and then settled in Ferrara, where he opened his renowned school in 1429. Later on, this school became

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Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, vol. 2, pp. 494–496, 502 (book 17). On Sixtus IV engagement for the university for painters and the two papal painters Antoniazzo Romano and Melozzo da Forlì see: Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma. 1478–1588, Rome 2012, pp. 18–19, 31–37.

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the arts faculty of the university in Ferrara. Like Vittorino, Guarini offered the most famous humanist education then available. His students started with reading and writing Latin, using the Ianua first for reading exercises; then they passed on to Guarino’s own Latin grammar, called Regulae. Following Grafton and Jardine, Guarino taught grammar in two steps: with a methodical approach concerning grammar and syntax, and with a historical approach, including history, geography, and mythology. Under history, therefore, fall all of the humanistic disciplines, such as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history.154 Grafton and Jardine explain Guarino’s historical method of grammar teaching by using the example of Vergil’s Georgics. Guarino stressed the etymology of Greek and Latin words, the meaning of figures from ancient mythology, and geographical regions. As Grafton and Jardine write: “It was not a deep knowledge of any one subject or subjects, but as comprehensive a catalogue as possible of disconnected ‘facts’ necessary for informed reading and writing in the classical tradition: etymological, geographical and mythological points have equal value for this purpose, and demand equal attention.”155 This process would be followed by many humanist commentators (see Chapter 3). On his own, the student then was asked to read Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights), Pliny (Natural History), and Augustine (City of God), and sometimes also Strabo (Geography). In rhetoric, they would mainly deal with Cicero, who offered secondhand access to Plato and Aristotle.156 Guarino was very interested in Pliny, and he himself produced two versions (1433, 1459) where he tried to correct the text by comparing different manuscripts. His interest in Pliny not only may have resulted in an engagement with natural philosophy, but the art history section too probably meant a lot to the teacher. It appears that Guarino also engaged as an artistic consultant for Leonello d’Este, as for example, with the studiolo.157 That Guarino’s school in Ferrara was frequented also by artists is witnessed by the presence of Cesare Cesariano (1475–1543), who stayed at the school at the age of about sixteen around 1490 (under Guarino’s successors) for almost a year. Cesariano arrived well prepared in Latin because his father had already

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Petrini, Venticinque secoli di educazione e scuola in Italia, pp. 66–73; Grafton and Jardin, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 1, 9–10; Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, pp. 147–152; Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the ethical commentary: Philosophy, commonplaces and the structure of Renaissance knowledge, in: Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700), ed. Karl Enenkel and Henk Nellen, Leuven 2013, pp. 201–219, see pp. 201–202. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 14–15. Grafton and Jardin, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 16–18. Stephen J. Campbell, Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City 1450–1495, New Haven, CT 1997, p. 52; Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, New Haven, CT 2013, pp. 129–130.

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started to teach him with Donatus’s grammar at the tender age of four, and he continued to look after his education until he was fifteen. After his father’s death and being left with almost no money, Cesariano moved first briefly to Milan and then to Ferrara, where he learned philosophy, mathematics, cosmography, and other sciences, as well as (advanced) Latin and Greek. Thereafter, he moved on and learned the work of an architect. In the 1520s, he was the first artist and architect capable of compiling a philological commentary on a level that one would expect from a university professor. Printed in 1521, his Vitruvius commentary appears to be the first printed commentary in the history of art and architecture. It contained more philosophical aspects than commentaries normally had, thus showing Cesariano to be on top of the discussion (see Chapter 4).

Poor Students The Renaissance offered a wide variety of public and private education that was accessible to poor boys and men. For poor boys, there were institutionalized models, while for poor men, the possibility existed to participate in oral apprenticeships through lectures and discussion. The education of poor students who could not afford to pay fees for schools and teachers was an ongoing topic during the Renaissance. The Renaissance inherited from antiquity the idea of making education public, adding to the humanist idea of the bonum comune. Since Aristotle had said “that education also must necessarily be one and the same for all,” (Politics Viii.1 (1337a)),158 poor students (pauperes) in Europe were a class of the population that attracted attention and concern. As mentioned above many times, a plenitude of public schools organized by the city allowed poor students to attend lessons for free, and the cities made arrangements with the teachers accordingly. In Bologna, for example, the communal Latin teachers were obliged to teach poor pupils gratis.159 It was also common that a guardian would provide the fees for a poor boy to attend elementary school or sometimes even the abacus or grammar school.160 Plenty of poor families with precarious or no jobs managed to send their sons to the elementary school. Even the orphans at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence had an elementary school teacher.161 A telling example of a single family is that of the widowed Monna Giovanna, the former wife of a grammar 158 159

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Aristotle, Politics, p. 635. If they did, they were allowed to teach also privately. See Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 27. Tomoko Takahashi, Il rinascimento dei trovatelli. Il brefotrofio, la città e le campagne nella Toscana del XV secolo, Rome 2003, pp. 128, 131, 132, 135; Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, p. 449, n. 449. Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 446–449, 454–456, 462–467.

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teacher, who was documented as “poverissima e forestiera” and had a bunch of children in need of education. Despite her poverty, she nevertheless had one son studying medicine, another studying law, one in grammar school, and more children to look after.162 She probably could not have afforded to pay for the education of her boys, but benefited from a kind of “public poor education program.” Many private initiatives added to the cities’ endeavors. The phenomenon mentioned earlier of pedagogical care for students of all classes was promoted early on and at the highest level. Concerned about the poor students of Siena and Florence in 1364 and 1428/29, the emperor Charles IV gave the Florentines their own domus sapientiae. Pope Martin V provided for them from tax revenue.163 Both Florence and Siena opened a Casa della Sapienza for poor students, a kind of boarding school that was financed by private initiatives. In Siena, the Casa della Sapienza, situated in the Ospedalle della Misericordia, was available from 1415 under papal support, and was able to partially end the shortfall of the city’s unstable university. It became so successful that, in the end, a fee was charged, and this certainly reduced student numbers. In view of its success, a comparable institution was under discussion in Florence from 1429 for around forty students, who benefited from free housing and probably supplementary teaching at the university. The Sapientia was intended expressly to complement the studio and to promote the continuity of studies.164 In 1428/29, the university administrators asked the city government for permission to do something for the poor with the help of a private donor. This donor was Niccolò da Uzzano, who formerly was briefly engaged in university administration. It is interesting that Uzzano meant to have the Sapienza administered by the Arte di Calimala, which had formerly been in charge of university administration for a few years (1420–1423),165 and had also hosted the abacus and Latin schools for the guilds (see above). Following Ferretti, between the mid-fourteenth and the end of the fifteenth century, there were about forty-seven institutions 162 163 164

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Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, pp. 387–388. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1936, p. 49. Peter Denley, Academic rivalry and interchange: The universities of Siena and Florence, in: Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. Peter Denley and Caroine Elam, London 1988, pp. 195–196, 201–202. Jonathan Davies, The studio fiorentino in the Renaissance, in: La sede della Sapienza a Firenze. L’università e l’Istituto Geografico Militare a San Marco, ed. Amedeo Belluzzi and Emanuela Ferretti, Florence 2009, pp. 19–29; Emanuela Ferretti, La Sapienza di Niccolò da Uzzano e le stalle di Lorenzo de’ Medici, in: La sede della Sapienza a Firenze. L’università e l’Istituto Geografico Militare a San Marco, ed. Amedeo Belluzzi and Emanuela Ferretti, pp. 31–68, see pp. 31–50; Veronica Vestri, Il testamento di Niccolò da Uzzano. Trascrizione e brevi note storico-archivistiche, in: La sede della Sapienza a Firenze. L’università e l’Istituto Geografico Militare a San Marco, ed. Amedeo Belluzzi and Emanuela Ferretti, pp. 263–180.

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like those in Siena and Florence all over Italy, beginning in Perugia in 1360, and concentrating later in Bologna, Padua, and Pavia. Most of them offered housing and instruction in the same place.166 These institutions can be seen as yet another indicator of the engagement with public education, including for the poor. In fifteenth-century Venice, the two schools at San Marco had important teachers lecturing to the public openly and without fees to anyone, at the wish of the Venetian senate.167 These Venetian schools were certainly exceptional for Italy. They allowed every poor pupil to study algebra together with Aristotelian philosophy, and to obtain a background in history, poetry, and theology. Apart from these three main schools, there was plenty of private teaching on the elementary and grammar school levels happening in the city; and like Florence, many sons of Venetian merchants and craftsmen would participate in this general education.168 In the first half of the sixteenth century, Venice continued to made significant efforts in public education when four humanities and six grammar schools were opened for pupils without fees.169 An almost entirely private initiative comprising elementary and higher education took place in Mantua at the abovementioned boarding school of one of the most influential humanist teachers, namely, Vittorino da Feltre, in his Casa Giocosa. Opened in 1423, the Casa Giocosa offered primary and secondary education for pupils usually aged six to fourteen, or older, which would prepare them for university studies and supply everything they needed. They learned everything from basic Latin to reading the classics, and some Greek, plus drawing, music, philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. From the approximately eighty pupils, half were paying boys from high class and noble families; the other half had poor origins but high recommendations, and would be accommodated without fees. Vittorino would himself cover the costs for their living, learning, and clothing. Vittorino had already followed this policy in his schools in Venice and Padua. Both rich and poor pupils alike were treated on an equal level.170 Vittorino took on as many poor students as he thought necessary. In the end, if he had spent more money on them than he

166 167 168

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Ferretti, La Sapienza di Niccolò da Uzzano e le stalle di Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 33–34. Document in: Ross, Venetian schools and teachers, p. 557. Gherardo Ortalli, Scuole e maestri tra medioevo e Rinascimento. Il caso veneziano, Bologna 1996, pp. 54, 82. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 66–67. Giuseppe Flores D’Arcais, Vittorino da Feltre: La pedagogia come autobiografia, Vittorino da Feltre e la sua scuola: umanesimo, pedagogia, arti, ed. Nella Giannetto, Florence 1981, pp. 35–53, see p. 44; Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, pp. 19, 30–31; Grendler, Schooling in Western Europe, p. 781. See on Vittorino’s educational methods regarding poor students also Livy, Historiae romanae decades, Rome 1469, foreword.

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could afford, he went to the Gonzaga family to ask for support, which was readily granted.171 Artists were certainly a group which benefited a great deal from general education for the poor. They also shared the ideal of classless education without fees. As mentioned above, it is most likely that Filarete was acquainted not only with Aristotle’s ideas on equal public education in his Politics but also with current and public endeavors for poor students. He incorporated these into his concept of an educational center called Sapientia, which benefited also from ideas about schools for the poor in Florence, Siena, and elsewhere, as well as from the model shaped by Vittorino da Feltre. As mentioned above, in Filarete’s architectural treatise (Trattato di architettura, 1460–1464), he talks about a general educational system for boys (putti) between six and twenty-four years old, who would live together in a kind of boarding school called Sapientia, with educational outreach up to university level. In this work, Filarete addresses the attendees of his Sapientia. It was intended for public education, and thus accommodated pupils without their needing to pay fees.172 In Filarete, the different orientations come together: Aristotle’s combination of liberal and mechanical education, and contemporary ideas manifested in the Casa della Sapienza and private schools like Vittorino’s in Mantua, which Filarete interpreted as an education in higher-curriculum literature, as well as painting and sculpture. It is difficult to establish to what extent future artists in the fifteenth century could actually have benefited from such educational programs. There is, however, sufficient evidence to believe that highly educated artists, like Filarete himself, had the opportunity to participate in them. The architect Cesare Cesariano mentioned that he himself had attended a comparable school in Ferrara that was led by the followers of Guarino Guarini (see above). Cesariano, who came from a notary family, lost his father when he was young, and thus was required to look early for his living. He later became one of the most educated architects of the sixteenth century, and compiled a philological commentary comparable to those of university professors. From the sixteenth century onward, there are some documented endeavors that supported the education of poor artists. Vasari had similar ideas, which he expressed in the statutes of the Accademia del disegno in Florence. Comparable to other schools mentioned above, there was a clause concerning poor students who were unable to afford the expenses of such an academic education. If these students were gifted, they should be freed from fees, and this would be valid

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Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV scritte da Vespasiano da Bisticci, Florence 1859, pp. 491–492 (Life of Vittorino); Petrini, Venticinque secoli di educazione e scuola in Italia, p. 80. Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di architettura, vol. 2, p. 545 (book 18).

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for either students from Florence or foreigners.173 Another private initiative took place in Rome. Wazbinski supposes that Cardinal Francesco del Monte offered housing and education for poor artists in his Palazzo Madama around 1600; Caravaggio also studied there. In his wine garden on the Via di Ripetta, the Cardinal collected antique statues that were studied by his students. It is probable that Del Monte deliberately wanted the young artists to benefit from an interdisciplinary atmosphere, including discussions among literati, musicians, archeologists, collectors, and scientists, as well as from a library.174 All these efforts show that education for the poor was a common effort shared throughout Italy. The actors were private citizens, schoolteachers, the university, the Pope, and even the artists themselves. And it happened in either private and public schooling systems, where social ranks had been deliberately mixed to allow for an equal educational path.

Oral Apprenticeship for the Artist: Private and Public Teaching The adult artist, who had the good fortune to live in a culturally vivid environment, sometimes had the possibility to widen his horizons by attending public or private lectures and gatherings. In Florence and Venice, this culture was especially lively, open, and fruitful. There are several hints in the artist’s education that point to an oral apprenticeship, especially in topics that did not belong to his workshop education. Oral apprenticeship as an intellectual educational method is confirmed by several artists like Francesco di Giorgio, Cesare Cesariano, and Giovanni Battista Caporali, and by literati like Angelo Poliziano and Daniele Barbaro. In the Prologue of his Della pittura (1436), Alberti realizes the difficulties that an artist encounters when approaching the sciences without a proper teacher175 – a suggestion he borrowed from Pliny and Lorenzo Valla. When Alberti first introduces the mathematical and geometrical foundations for his theory of painting, he asks his reader to read the content in regard to the purpose of the book. He probably meant that the whole field was not necessary, also because, he then explains, his approach toward the sciences would be that of an artist and not of an expert in these other subjects (Prologus, Della pittura).176 However, Alberti did not recommend to the artist where to receive this knowledge of the sciences, whether an abacus school was sufficient, or if Alberti demanded more from the artist. 173 174

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Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, p. 303 (chapter 35). Zygmunt Wazbinski, Il cardinale Francesco del Monte 1549–1626, Florence 1994, pp. 202–206, 215–216, 223. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda, Darmstadt 2002, pp. 62–65. Alberti, Della pittura, p. 67.

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The artist Francesco di Giorgio is most explicit about oral apprenticeship in his treatise (1482), where one may also assume a classification of types of learning. He said that the most important was drawing, but the architect also needed thorough knowledge in geometry, arithmetic, and history. Then, from oral apprenticeship he should have heard about philosophy, music, physics, civil law, and astrology, whatever of these topics should be of interest to an architect.177 The question arises as to where Francesco di Giorgio thought his artist could possibly receive all of these different subjects on a semi-erudite level. Drawing was part of workshop education. Geometry and arithmetic belonged to the abacus school, whereas some history was taught indirectly, as we have seen, in the elementary and secondary school system. More difficult to localize for the artist are the following topics from oral apprenticeship: astrology and music belonged to quadrivial education at the university, and philosophy and law to the higher university curriculum. What Francesco di Giorgio required here was not a complete study of these subjects, but an orally followed lecture or discussion. This could have happened in private gatherings of humanists, in publicly organized lectures, or at the university, where many people attended courses without taking a degree. Francesco di Giorgio’s recommendation for the artist to conduct a semi-autodidactic training through public organizations is confirmed by one of the most important Florentine humanists and teachers, Angelo Poliziano, who compared his own learning experience with those of painters. In Poliziano’s last university course on Aristotle’s’ Topica in the year 1493–1494, Poliziano opens a discourse on dialectics. While he distances himself from people who claimed that he, Poliziano, had not learned philosophy and could therefore not judge dialectics, he claimed for himself a vast knowledge through the reading of foundational authors. He justified this kind of autodidactic method by comparison with a painter. This artist had obviously not studied with famous teachers; thus, he would respond to the question of where he had learned: from the public. There he had seen symmetry, light, colors, and composition, and in that manner he could express himself elegantly and in detail.178 Learning by an autodidactic approach and by public discussions were therefore a method that many must have followed. We know about the architect Cesare Cesariano’s education in philosophy, mathematics, cosmography, and other sciences at the school in Ferrara through his own appraisal of oral apprenticeship, which has already been mentioned

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Trattato di architettura di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ed. Luigi Firpo and Pietro C. Mariani, Florence 1979, pp. 19–20 (chapter 39). See also: Piero Pierotti, Prima di Machiavelli. Filarete e Francesco di Giorgio consiglieri del principe, Ospedaletto 1995, pp. 22, 114, no. 29. Angelo Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, introduction, trans. Otto and Eva Schönberger, Würzburg 2011, pp. 125–127.

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above. In Cesariano’s case, frequenting one of the most illustrious private schools for almost a year provided him with some solid and broad fundamentals of intellectual training, which was accomplished later by meeting with other outstanding instructors in Milan. This resulted in a highly learned commentary on Vitruvius (1521). The architect and painter Giovanni Battista Caporali is another important source for oral apprenticeship, especially when, in his commentary on Vitruvius (1536), he turns to all of the scientific knowledge Vitruvius required of an architect, which Caporali was now applying to his own times. Caporali makes distinct differences between all of the nine sciences mentioned in Vitruvius: geometry, perspective, arithmetic, history, philosophy, music, medicine, civil law, and astrology. All of these sciences were important and would form the perfect architect, especially if he learned in abundance and at a young age, gradually evolving thence from topic to topic. Otherwise, it would be difficult to reach the desired temple of knowledge. As Aristotle had said in his Ethics, there are five places in our souls that are important for our understanding: the arts, the sciences, intellect, wisdom (sapienza), and practical wisdom (prudenza) (ff. 4v–7r, 10v–13).179 But as Aristotle had said, universal knowledge was better than being an expert in everything and knowing all the details. Everyone should know just as much as was sufficient (f. 13v). Caporali therefore recommends that the architect follow as many oral lessons among all the sciences as possible, but most important were the lessons on philosophy, which he should follow eagerly. Philosophy would be the most virtuous and most praised of all the sciences. The architect, therefore, should follow disputations and the most excellent presentations on this topic (f. 5r). Arithmetic could be learned from Euclid and was taught in abacus schools. Concerning history, it seems that Caporali was thinking about acquiring this through reading (“che habbia intese molte historie”). His mention of medicine is rather short. In fact, Caporali does not express himself clearly, only that the architect should have learned it; likewise, in civil law he needed just some general knowledge, whereas astrology seemed to be slightly more important and should be studied. Likewise, the type of knowledge about music is uncertain, but it included knowing instruments and harmony. Literature was again an important topic, most likely to be gained through reading. This could be studied either through the text itself or through a commentary on the text, accompanied with brief annotations on important issues which would ease memory, as many grammar teachers had done (f. 6r). Geometry was explained in Euclid, and the best source to study this would be the books of Luca Pacioli (ff. 3v–7r). The point of oral apprenticeship, on which Caporali touched, is confirmed by the humanist 179

Vitruvius, Architettura con il suo commento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato, Perugia 1536.

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Daniele Barbaro. His points on the education of the architect seem to be pretty close to actual practice. Geometry, arithmetic, and mathematics were the basics to which oral lessons, literature, and commentaries should be added.180 Oral lectures happened in a variety of locations and under different circumstances. Documents that discuss lecturing and teaching often divide these lessons between private and public. Public teaching and lecturing could happen in churches by individuals, or as a lecture series or single events in academies. But the academies also sometimes organized public lectures in churches, when they expected a large audience, which could be up to a couple of thousand people at one time. Private teaching and lecturing could take place at the university, in academies, in monasteries, or in private homes. In the case of private teaching, there was usually a circumscribed and limited fixed number of audience members, which did not, however, exclude the possibility that occasionally or even regularly a nonstudent or non-academy member would attend. The history of teaching and lecturing in the Renaissance is very complex, and becomes increasingly more diverse from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, especially in Florence, where education was in popular demand. As mentioned above, it might well be that education, seen as a responsibility for a well-functioning society, was a direct consequence of Aristotle’s Politics, which demanded a general education with the liberal and mechanical arts together (see Chapter 1). Founded in 1348, the Florentine university (Studio Fiorentino) was administered by a variety of people from different social ranks. In addition to the Florentine nobility (including all of the recent Medici generations), in the years 1385–1473 many ufficiali dello studio came from the artisan class too. For example, there were some woodcutters (1387–1388, 1398–1390), a wine maker (1390–1391), several shoemakers (1402–1403, 1432–1433), a cooper (1443–1444) and a floor maker (1451–1452),181 apart from the Calimala guild, which was active in university administration in the first half of the fifteenth century (see above). Therefore, the artisan class played a distinct part in developing the university and in choosing the teachers. Attending university courses was not necessarily aimed at gaining a degree. Indeed, it was typical just to attend some classes.182 Usually, university students ranged in age from their mid-teens to their late twenties. This resulted from

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Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura di M Vitruvio tradutti et commentate da monsignor Barbaro, Venice 1556, p. 10. Jonathan Davies, Florence and Its University during the Early Renaissance, Leiden 1998, pp. 145–155. Notker Hammerstein, Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, Munich 1996, vol. 1, pp. 218–219; Martin Kintzinger, A profession but not a career? Schoolmasters and the artes in late medieval Europe, in: Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, ed. William J. Courtenay and Jürgen Miethke, Brill 2000, pp. 167–181, see p. 168.

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long years of studying the arts, civil and canon law, and medicine. The time schedule at the Florentine university allowed for different options during the day. Important primary topics were taught in the morning and in the evening; secondary topics in the early and late afternoon, as well as on weekends. While the principal topics were lectured on by professors, the secondary topics went to those of lower academic rank, and sometimes even students lectured.183 Black talks about four different teacher categories: ordinary, extraordinary, holiday teachers, and students. Ordinary professors would lecture for one or two hours, having ten to a hundred students, presenting important topics during the day, and less important topics on holidays. Extraordinary professors would teach the same topics but at different times.184 This means that a substantial amount of lecturing occurred in the evenings or on weekends. There was also no fixed educational level for attending university classes. The foundational university courses did not necessarily require prior schooling. The courses generally consisted of first learning reading, writing and grammar, including the study of Latin, the same subjects that could also be learned in basic Latin schools.185 Not much more was required for most professional qualifications. More was demanded, however, from university teachers or those aspiring to high church or civic office. Regular students at the university were first trained in the trivium, which means in grammar and rhetoric/ dialectic (Latin), and then in the quadrivium, which are the mathematical disciplines (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). After this liberal arts curriculum, one would ultimately look for a specialized education in law, medicine, or theology. Only later during the second half of the fifteenth century were history, poetry, and ethics added, topics that were of interest to those who favored a humanist education.186 University teaching usually consisted in lectures (lectura) and disputations (disputatio). Lectures were given by the professor, who explained the key features of a text and its meaning. He commented on a topic, which sometimes resulted in a written and printed commentary on a specific author. The disputations were exercises on this topic, discussing the pros and cons of an interpretation, while the student was learning scientific argumentation.187 This 183 184

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Davies, Florence and Its University during the Early Renaissance, pp. 21–22, 32–33. Robert Black, Education, in: Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Perile, Cambridge 2015, pp. 260–276, see pp. 274–275. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, pp. 16, 29. On the curriculum see for example Anchille Pellizzari, I trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola iberica, Naples 1915, vol. 2, pp. 183–298; Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, pp. 52–56; Field, Piero Della Francesca, pp. 31–32; Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance. Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning, New York 2018, pp. 10–16. On the history of Italian universities and their teaching method see for example Paul Oskar Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, Munich 1976, vol. 2, pp. 207–222, see p. 209.

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so-called scholastic method of teaching was also applied in monastic education. The most important Florentine monasteries with schools and access to a kind of public library were Santa Maria Novella, a Dominican convent, and Santo Spirito, an Augustinian friary. These institutions of higher learning were also open to lay students. The teaching friars and monks were simultaneously employed outside the monastery, in private households and also in the city’s communal schools, and even at the university.188 Sometimes the teaching in monasteries and churches was provided by laymen coming from the artisan class. As Grendler notes, the same middle- and lower-class people taught the boys coming from the same social ranks in monastic schools. This would happen in addition to their work in the shops, and naturally on feast days, when everyone could attend. These artisans and other laymen would often teach Christian doctrine, which was normally a topic for priests.189 But clerics would not just teach Christian doctrine alone, because Howard suggests that friars and monks were actually teaching with an eye and mind for visual narratives to the sermons, a circumstance which might have helped artists to render these topics.190 It might not be purely coincidental that important clerical artists came out of major teaching congregations, like the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians. Almost all were painters, and mostly Dominicans or Carmelites. To the Dominicans belonged painters like Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolomeo, whereas Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Diamante, and Fra Lorenzo Monaco were Carmelites. These painters were mostly engaged in miniature painting and in producing precious manuscripts, where a Latin education was helpful, but most of them would also produce large panel paintings. As their topics usually circulated around a limited variety of biblical themes, their education is difficult to grasp from their largescale oeuvre. If it is true that Leonardo used the monastery of Santa Maria Novella for his second stay in Florence around 1500, and was even allowed to use the Sala del Papa as his studio,191 he might have possibly taken this occasion for additional education. The monastery provided education not only for young boys but also for adults, on request. Even Angelo Poliziano went there to receive a refresher on Aristotle from the Dominican friar Francesco di Tommaso before

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 6–13, see especially pp. 8, 11. See also Grendler, The organization of primary and secondary education in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 185–205. See on the quadrivium education in Italian monasteries Anchille Pellizzari, I trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola iberica, Naples 1915, vol. 2, pp. 196–200. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 358–359. Peter Howard, Painters and the visual art of preaching: The exemplum of the fifteenthcentury frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 13:1, 2010, pp. 33–77, see p. 47. Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 74, 77; Vecce, Leonardo e i suoi libri, pp. 13–23.

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teaching his books himself at the Florentine university.192 Leonardo’s stay there could have furthered his interest in authors like Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Albert of Saxony, and Walter Burley, texts that were usually outside the courses that artists would attend but that belonged to the advanced levels of higher education. Leonardo possessed a rich collection of texts by Aristotle that appear in his 1503 inventory, such as Problemata, Propositiones, Meterologica, De philosophia naturalis, Physica, and De caelo et mundo.193 Vecce supposes that Leonardo also used this stay to frequent the important and well-furnished libraries of San Marco and Santo Spirito, as notes in his inventory led him to presume.194 Leonardo’s personal library of roughly 200 books (at the time of his death)195 would indeed speak for a broad academic training. Girolamo D’Adda describes Leonardo’s library as follows: he had books including the Bible, theology, philosophy, morals, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, natural sciences, mineralogy, geology, chemistry or alchemy, agriculture, history, rhetoric, geography, grammar, poetry and poesy, satire, architecture, and additionally fables and romances, legends, epistles, chronicles, and Dante and Petrarch.196 The number of university topics is remarkable, and would speak clearly for the universal training of an artist, as Vitruvius, Ghiberti, Filarete, and others had proclaimed. Following Armando Verde, Leonardo was inscribed in the Studio Fiorentino in 1491/92 and 1492/93 (and possibly in the following year) for arts and medicine (“studens artibus et medicinae”).197 That Leonardo followed university lectures on medicine, in particular, anatomy, has already been assumed for his stays in Florence (Santa Maria Nuova 1506–1508) and Milan (1508–1511). During the dissections held by the Paduan professor Marcantonio della Torre, Leonardo drew the inner parts.198 It seems that artists sometimes attended university lectures as adults, some probably on an occasional basis; others were even inscribed as regular students. For the Florentine goldsmith Nicolo Silvestri, a notary document describes him as “studens artibus,”199 while the Florentine goldsmith Petrus Franciscus Bartholomaei studied law in Pisa in 1493–1494.200 The painter Carlo di Giovanni da

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Jonathan Hunt, Politian and Scholastic Logic: An Unknown Dialogue by a Dominican Friar, Florence 1995, pp. 3–46. Inventory in Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 84–85, 90, 93. Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 75. See Vecce, Leonardo e i suoi libri, pp. 13–23, see p. 23. D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, p. 11. Verde interprets the entry for Leonardo Strochani de Piticardi de Mantua as the person of Leonardo da Vinci. Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, vol. 3.1, p. 589. D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, pp. 44–45; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 102, 107. On his study of anatomy see also Domenico Laurenza, I libri della natura: l’uomo, la Terra, il cosmo, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri, ed. Carlo Vecce, pp. 51–57. Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, vol. 3.2, p. 729. Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, vol. 3.2, p. 820.

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Milano, active in Genoa from 1481 to 1514, attended university, where he was inscribed as “pictor et artium doctor.”201 A member of the Della Robbia family, Lucas Simonis Della Robbia, is also mentioned in the cadastre as “studens humanis litteris.”202 Florence had a long-standing history of public lectures outside the university, where important literary texts or texts from higher education were explained to the public, evidently choosing well both the argument and the way of presenting a difficult topic to an intellectually diverse group made of literati, university students, and faculty, but also merchants and artists as well. Such lectures are recorded from the late Middle Ages, with Dante exegesis as a major topic. For example, Giovanni Boccaccio was one of the official speakers authorized by the comune, who from 1373 gave about sixty public lectures, starting with explanations of Dante’s Comedy. This happened in the church Santo Stefano to an open and thus mixed public. In 1428, maestro Antonio d’Arezzo also taught publicly in Santo Stefano, but since the space of this huge church was not even sufficient, he transferred to the cathedral.203 Francesco Filelfo also gave a public lecture series in 1431–1434 in the cathedral, arranged by the university, which included topics on Dante.204 Many of these fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century public lectures were jointly organized by the university and the city. These public lecture series diminished, however, once Cristoforo Landino received the first chair for poetry at the Studio in Florence and started to teach Dante texts at the university, but also in public. It was nevertheless possible for a smaller audience to attend those university courses as well.205 Between 1460 and 1470, Landino gave a series of lectures on highly interesting topics for painters on ancient poetry at the university, where he lectured several times on Horace (Odes, Ars poetica), Vergil (Aeneid, Eclogues), Persius (Satires), Juvenal (Satires), and Petrarch (Canzoniere) (see Appendix). Landino’s Roman counterpart, the university teacher Paolo Marsi (1440–1484), was most famous for his lectures on Ovid’s Fasti, which he published in 1482. He praised his public university lectures that took place around 1480 for their open character. They were not situated in an academy or a monastery, but were given publicly at the university, where a wide range of listeners attended: unlearned and learned alike, both youngsters and adults. In 201

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Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, p. 51; Roeck, Gelehrte Künstler, p. 53. Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503, vol. 3.1, p. 607. Salvino Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina, Florence 1717, xiv–xix; Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, p. 87. Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 87–88; Davies, Florence and Its University during the Early Renaissance, pp. 83–84, 111; Jonathan Davies, The studio fiorentino in the Renaissance, p. 22. Arthur Field, Christoforo Landino’s lecture on Dante, Renaissance Quarterly, 39:1, 1986, pp. 16–48; Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, p. 88.

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this circumstance, he excused himself for having to explain everything in great detail to make everyone understand.206 The amount of public teaching on topics relevant for artists should not be underestimated. Apart from the many lectures on Dante, Petrarch, and Aristotle, there were public lectures on Titus Livius’s Decades, provided by the famous humanist Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua every summer in the 1430s and 1440s; on Cicero’s Tusculans delivered by Filelfo in Rome (1470s); on Ovid’s Fasti delivered by the university professor Antonio Costanzo in Fano (between 1463 and 1490); again on Ovid’s Fasti delivered by the university professor Paolo Marsi in Rome (1475–1476); on Apuleius’s Golden Ass delivered by Giovanni Battista Pio in Bologna and Mantua (ca. 1494–1496); and many more (see Appendix). The first lecture deliberately on the visual arts could be the one held by the architect and professor Fra Giovanni Giocondo on Vitruvius’s De architectura, which he delivered in Paris (ca. 1495). Pliny’s Natural History was an immensely important source for artists, although it was seldom taught. It is therefore all the more interesting to realize that the few public teachers were two well-known university professors. Filippo Beroaldo from Bologna seems to have given public lectures on the Natural History in Parma in 1472, according to his biographer Bartolomeo Bianchini;207 and Angelo Poliziano lectured on it publicly in Florence in 1490.208 Pliny was sometimes part of a humanist education (as mentioned in “Latin Grammar Schools” and “Private Schools” sections above and in Chapter 4), but could also take part in more general schooling, as in the school of San Marco in Venice, where in 1511 lectures on Pliny were given together with Cicero and Vergil in the morning, afternoon, and evening.209 Likewise, in Florence Pliny was included together with Cicero and others in the public education provided by the Florentine literary academy in the 1540s (see following section). The sciences made a slow entry into public lectures. Luca Pacioli was not the first to make them a topic of public lectures, but ever since his engagement, the sciences became an increasingly popular topic offered to the masses. Pacioli held university appointments in Perugia, Padua, Venice, Florence, Milan, Rome, and other cities. In many places, he offered public lectures as well, always keeping in mind that people in need of his instruction did not

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Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, p. 64. This has been questioned by modern scholarship; see Andrea Severi, Il giovanile cimento di Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio sulla Naturalis historia di Plinio: la lettera a Niccolò Ravacaldo, Schede humanistiche, 24–25, 2010–2011, pp. 81–112, see p. 88. Charles G. Nauert, Humanists, scientists, and Pliny: Changing approaches to a classical author, in: Humanism and Renaissance Civilization, ed. Charles G. Nauert, Farnham 2012, p. 76. On Poliziano’s appreciation for Pliny see for example Peter Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, New York 2016, p. 4. Ross, Venetian schools and teachers.

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necessarily frequent the universities. For example, Pacioli offered public lectures in Padua in 1493 on arithmetic and geometry, and in his famous lecture on proportion in 1508 in the Venetian church San Bartolomeo.210 Pacioli was inspired to bring mathematics to everyone, and especially to artists. In his public lecture, he pointed to the importance of proportion for many different professions, like painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, the liberal arts, and law. His audience was packed with around 500 attendees, among them famous personalities like Bernardo Rucellai and Aldo Manuzio, but also artists like Fra Giocondo and Pietro Lombardo.211 In 1534–1535, the famous mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia offered public lectures on mathematics in the Venetian church Santi Giovanni e Paolo. These lectures were known to be attended by a wide-ranging audience, from learned people to artisans, including nobles, soldiers, engineers, painters, architects, merchants, and school teachers, as they all required a knowledge of mathematics.212 From 1548, Francesco dell’Ottonaio delivered vernacular lectures on Euclid, both in Florence and in Pisa. He came from humble origins himself, and was allowed to frequent Duke Cosimo’s Sapienza that had been built for poor students.213 Evidently, the education for the poor was good enough to make him a teacher himself. Oral apprenticeship certainly changed between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. At first it would be due to the personal effort of an individual interested in a certain topic. But also the Florentine university helped with public lectures that mainly concentrated on Dante. From the 1540s onward, topics offered publicly were much more diverse and wide-ranging. Whatever topic was discussed among the learned would soon be offered also in the vernacular for those less learned. Others would follow this example, and Euclid’s mathematics was brought to the many. The well-known philosopher Francesco Verino I (1474–1541), a student of Ficino’s pupil Jacopo da Diaceto, is a telling example of how public and private lectures happened at the university in the middle of the sixteenth century. Verino usually taught Aristotle, Plato, and Neoplatonism at the university of Florence, lessons which would switch between Latin and Italian, and were attended by some participants without having to pay the obligatory fee. Occasionally attending Verino’s philosophy lessons at the university, the shoemaker Giovanni

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Pellizzari, I Trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola Iberica, p. 254; Martin Lowry, The proving ground: Venetian academies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in: The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe, ed. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, Florence 1985, pp. 41–52, see p. 45. Lowry, The proving ground, p. 45, relying on the source: Euclidis Megarensis opera, Venice 1509, ff. 30v–31v (source: Pacioli mentions the meeting in the church San Bartolomeo). Pellizzari, I trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola iberica, vol. 2, pp. 256–257. Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, p. 99.

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Battista Gelli (1498–1563) praised him highly for his understanding of those who lacked Latin. Whenever a student could not follow his Latin explanations, he would switch into the vernacular in order to help the less learned attendees understand the topic.214 Then Verino became the first lecturer the Accademia Fiorentina would invite to lecture publicly on Dante in the church Santa Maria Novella (in 1541). Soon after, Andrea Dazzi lectured on Dante in the same church, and afterward in the same year, it now became the shoemaker Gelli’s task to lecture on Dante. He would continue doing so until his death in 1563, thus receiving a second regular income.215 This gives a good idea of the mixed expertise that was publicly represented, from the highly esteemed university professor to the partially autodidact artisan with a keen interest and a remarkable literary knowledge. They were all considered learned people who wanted to help shape public knowledge. The 1540s were a landmark time heralded by a change in public education in many parts of Italy that was driven by the effort to make knowledge available to the semi-educated masses. Around the same time, the majority of important literary works were readily available in the vernacular (see Chapter 3). This overview of public teaching brings to light precisely where the engagement for the diffusion of knowledge took off from: it came either from individual university professors and their public engagement or through efforts by the academies and their mission for public education, which will be addressed subsequently.

Literary Academies Providing Intellectual Education for the Artist Literary academies provided substantial assistance in the dissemination of knowledge through either public lectures or translation efforts. Many academies engaged in this help, some short-lived and some with a more solid basis and programs. Before an artistic academy opened in Florence, there had been several other efforts in other types of academies that paved the way for the artist’s organization. The earliest established literary academy formed itself twenty years before the artistic academy, but it also had some important forerunners. Several of these literary academies had the declared aim to foster knowledge on a broad level, which would also embrace less educated people. Every uneducated person could gain knowledge without linguistic, social, or financial boundaries, and this policy also embraced the handcrafts.216 214

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Giovan Battista Gelli, Opere di Giovan-Batista Gelli, ed. Agenore Gelli, Florence 1855, p. 194 (Capricci del Bottaio). See also Armand L. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence 1976, pp. 82–83. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 112–114, 293–294. Selected bibliography on academies: Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d’Italia, 5 vols, Bologna 1926–1930; Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present; Frances Yates, The Italian

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An early literary academy settled in Bernardo Rucellai’s garden Orti Oricellari. This was active starting from about 1502 and lasted at least until 1522. The meetings had a wide range of topics, including literature, linguistics, history, and politics, as their goal was not only to transmit important literature but also to advance knowledge in general. Therefore, it even offered mathematics, which was to be studied with the teacher Norchiati in the evening hours to make attendance for everyone possible. Some of the academy’s members overlapped with Ficino’s so-called Accademia Platonica. But in the Orti, the discussions were explicitly held in Italian and had an open character. From the beginning, they primarily met on holidays so that everyone could attend. That topics at times could be either very narrow or very broad was due to the desire to reach the unlearned as well, and their eagerness to acquire knowledge.217 As we will see, people of all ages and levels attended, even very young ones and those from the artisan world. Another contemporary shortlived academy ultimately had some input in Florentine literary circles. The Accademia Sacra Medicea (or Sacro Ginnasio), active between 1515 and 1519 and supported by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son, Pope Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), was directed toward vernacular literature as well as music. This academy concentrated on religious or moralizing texts, however, and their favorite author was Dante. Some members overlapped with the Orti while others were separate, among them Michelangelo Buonarroti. He was a member together with illustrious persons like Francesco Cattani da Diacceto (1466–1522), a Neoplatonic philosopher who had been a disciple of Ficino and taught at the Florentine studio.218 The first proper and institutionalized Florentine literary academy grew out of the short-lived Accademia degli Umidi (1540–1541), which already had as its main aim the composition of vernacular poetry, but also to promote the vernacular language and to broaden knowledge through the vernacular, for

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academies, in: Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution, London 1983 (1949), pp. 6–29; Eric Cochrane, The Renaissance academies in their Italian and European setting, in: The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe, ed. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, pp. 21–40; Lowry, The proving ground; Ian F. McNeely, The Renaissance academies between Science and the Humanities, Configurations, 17, 2009, pp. 227–258; Alison Brown, Defining the place of academies in Florentine culture and politics, in: Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, ed. Jane E. Everson, Oxford 2015, pp. 22–37; Simone Testa, Italian Academies and Their Networks, 1525–1700: From Local to Global, New York 2015, pp. 18–38. Armand De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular: The Orti Oricellari and the Sacra Accademia, Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 30, 1968, pp. 19–52, on the transmission of knowledge see especially pp. 31–32, 35. De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, pp. 27–28; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 95–100.

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which reason classical texts needed to be translated. Then, a year later in 1542, the Accademia Fiorentina opened with the principle aim to raise laurels for the two major vernacular Florentine poets Dante and Petrarch, and to offer translations of literary and scientific texts in the Tuscan idiom. It was in fact a declared aim of the academy, which was sustained by Cosimo I, to develop the vernacular as a scientific and literary language. The Accademia Fiorentina, like its sister academies elsewhere, was intentionally set up as an alternative educational institution separate from schools and universities. This worked particularly well in Florence, where the university at that time did not have a significant standing because, after the relocation to Pisa in 1473, only a few branches were left.219 The phenomenon of academies as an educational counterpart to the official and standardized university was a global one, and around the same time several literary academies opened throughout Italy (Accademia degli Inntronati in Siena, 1525; Accademia degli Infiammati, Padua, 1540; Accademia della Fama, Venice, 1557) and even one academy on the natural sciences, which studied the secrets of nature (Accademia Secreta, opened 1540s).220 Although most of these academies were literary in their display, this did not mean that they neglected the sciences. The Accademia degli Infiammati in Padua, for example, as well as some others, also offered lessons in mathematics.221 And, founded in 1555 in Vicenza by Gian Giorgio Trissino, the Accademia Olimpica incorporated both the liberal and the mechanical arts and addressed all social classes. As Daniele Barbaro narrates, its main purpose was to implement virtue and to impart knowledge of all the arts. Likewise, their members came from all the arts, for example, soldiers, literati, musicians, and painters.222 A prominent member of this academy was Andrea Palladio, who had Daniele Barbaro as his patron, the author of the academy’s history. Installed by Cosimo I in 1541, the Accademia Fiorentina had weekly public Sunday lectures in the Sala del Papa in Santa Maria Novella, which were very 219

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On the foundation of the Accademia degli Umidi and the later Florentine Academy see Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina; De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular; Richard S. Samuels, Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia delgi Infiammati, and the origins of the Italian academic movement, Renaissance Quarterly, 29:4, 1976, pp. 599–600, 630; Cesare Vasoli, Considerazioni sull’ “Accademia Fiorentina,” in: La nascità della Toscana. Dal convegno di studi per il IV centenario della morte di Cosimo I de’ Medici, ed. Massimo Tarassi, Florence 1980, pp. 33–63; Ian F. McNeely, The Renaissance academies between science and the humanities, Configurations, 17, 2009, pp. 227–258. Frances Yates, The Italian academies, in: Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution, ed. Frances Yates, London 1983, pp. 6–29; McNeely, The Renaissance academies between Science and the Humanities; Lowry, The proving ground; Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa, Turin 1995, p. 25. Pellizzari, I trattati attorno le arti figurative in Italia e nella penisola iberica, vol. 2, p. 267. Daniele Barbaro, Della Eloquenza, Dialogo, Venice 1557, ff. aiii-v–aiv-r.

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well attended (at least in the years between 1541 and 1550), with massive crowds of up to 2,000 people. The attendees came from all kinds of social, economic, and political classes: noblemen, churchmen, literati, historians, merchants, legal persons, military men, and university professors.223 Usually these lectures were given by academicians, but in cases where volunteers were lacking, professors from the universities in Florence and Pisa were sometimes asked as well. As mentioned, the Florentine philosophy professor Francesco Verino was very understanding toward those lesser learned. It is certainly no coincidence that the Florentine Academy asked him to hold the first public lectures in Santa Maria Novella in 1541. These were three inaugural lectures on Dante, which were enriched with Aristotelian ideas and Platonic love theory.224 Often the public Sunday lectures were given on Dante, whereas the private Thursday lectures were related to Petrarch.225 But sometimes also contemporary authors were discussed, among them Michelangelo and his poems. Some of the lecturers were Pietro Bembo, Guido Cavalcanti, Benedetto Varchi, Giambattista Strozzi, and Luigi Alamanni.226 Most lectures were given on Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio, with a higher percentage on Petrarch’s texts. The intention was not only to popularize the oeuvre of the three Florentines, the pioneers of vernacular erudition, but also to promote broader knowledge through these texts, which often served more or less as a starting point.227 In general topics of the public lectures dealt with philosophical, theological, historical, and scientific texts, often on the basis of ancient authors like Pliny, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, Boethius, and Lactantius. The topics included every aspect of life: [the] color of the eyes, anatomy and physiology, love, dreams, grammar, the soul, law and justice, free will, fortune, fate, the elements (earth, water, air, fire), friendship, envy and jealousy, Providence, beauty, honor, the spots on the moon, monsters, medicine (for and against), peace and concord, how the earth was inhabited, human and divine happiness, infinity, eternity, the sentiments and senses, ideas, divine and human intelligence, fame, eloquence, sculpture and painting, the Bible, nature, comets, predestination, nobility, size of the heavens, size of the earth, size of the planets, arms vs. law, arms vs. letters, the sea, rain, the

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Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 80–81. De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, p. 37; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 6; Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 80–81. Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, p. 88; Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina,. De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, p. 44; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, p. 120. De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, pp. 37–38; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, p. 114.

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tides, perfection of the universe, time, laughter, metaphors, cause and effect, affections (attributes), the qualities of Hell, money.228

Here we find a plenitude of topics essential to artists, like the attributes of affects, the Bible, nature, beauty, and much more. Likewise interesting is the fact that sculpture and painting were taught too, evidently for a broader interested public, and therefore from a wider perspective. We do not know if these concentrated on iconography or style, or if an artist was asked to teach these topics. One should presume that these lectures had a significant impact on painting, especially for those painters needing to compose an allegory and also for the plentitude of paintings connected to the topics of Dante and Petrarch. Lina Bolzoni has already shown the congruence between topics from the Venetian Accademia della Fama and contemporary iconography in painting cycles.229 Benedetto Varchi (1503–1565) was one of the most active members of the Accademia Fiorentina. He had the task of delivering two lectures per week – for academy members and for the public – and both were given in the vernacular. When he lectured publicly on Dante (which happened in Santa Maria Novella), these lessons were obviously hugely popular, and could be attended by up to 2,000 people. These public lectures were requested by Cosimo himself,230 who wished to promote the sciences in every language: in Greek and Latin, and also in the vernacular, as Varchi underlines.231 And Varchi did not miss the occasions of expanding the original text beyond its meaning in order to broaden the listeners’ perception. In fact, when Varchi lectured on Petrarch in the vernacular, his most attended lessons, he added the Neoplatonic interpretation of love to Petrarch’s love theory, and likewise he explained Dante through Aristotle’s De anima, Ovid with Mount Parnassus and Apollo, and Lucian with the Metamorphoses.232 In fact, Petrarch’s sonnets (La gola e’l sonno et l’otiose piume) were also Varchi’s first topic, when he started lecturing publicly at the Academy in 1543. He lectured frequently on Petrarch, Dante (for example, on Paradiso in 1545 and on Purgatorio in 1564), and Bembo, but also on ancient literature. Varchi also lectured on topics like Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 1540) in the vernacular, although when some literati thought it inappropriate to render philosophical

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De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, pp. 43–44; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 120–121. Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa, Turin 1995, pp. 17–18. Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 42–58; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, pp. 29, 39. Benedetto Varchi, Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen Darmstadt 2013, pp. 74–75 (letter to Bartolomeo Bettini). Annalisa Andreoni, La via della dottrina. Le lezioni accademiche di Benedetto Varchi, Pisa 2012, pp. 49, 54–55, 168–169.

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topics in the vulgar language, he changed to Latin. Evidently, the popularization of knowledge had reached a level where those erudite few feared for their last bastion. But Varchi fought a battle to render public philosophical questions in the vernacular, and to raise the vernacular up to a scientific language.233 Also Giovanni Battista Gelli (the shoemaker mentioned above), another member of the Florentine Academy, was actively engaged in public teaching. Gelli’s teaching method had a particular didactic structure as he tried to consult and present all available commentaries on Dante. Very important of course was Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Comedy, although Gelli held some critical views on this as well, such as Landino’s ignorance of the Convivio and other sources. This is a telling example of an autodidact study of an artisan and the importance of the Convivio for this purpose, as we will see later on. Furthermore, Gelli was one of the very few to publish his lectures in print right after the academic year, making them even more accessible for people inside and outside Florence.234 Although the core members of the Accademia Fiorentina were literati, there were a few people with less well-developed literary skills, such as merchants and artists. Already from the beginning, some artists were allowed to participate, among whom were Tribolo, Bronzino, Michelangelo, Cellini, and Bandinelli from 1545, and Francesco da Sangallo from 1546. But then, between 1546 and 1547, the artists were forced to drop out due to a change of rules and admittance policy – that is, all of them except Michelangelo. The banishment lasted for only about two years, however, and in 1549/50 some artists were admitted again, although only on written proof of their literary capacities; Bronzino was the first to pass this strict rule.235 Artists were to be seen as equal, but only when they reached the required level. Tribolo, for example, one of the early members of the academy, had been asked twice to give one of the

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Samuels, Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati, and the origins of the Italian academic movement, pp. 623, 627; Andreoni, La via della dottrina. Le lezioni accademiche di Benedetto Varchi, pp. 11, 15, 43–46, 279–280. See also Samuels, Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati, and the origins of the Italian academic movement; Salvatore Lo Re, Politica e cultura nella Firenze cosimaniana. Studi su Benedetto Varchi, Manziana 2008, pp. 191–256; Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen, Benedetto Varchi – Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 23–25. Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 74–78; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 295–297. Detlef Heikamp, Rapporti fra accademici ed artisti nella Firenze del ‘500 da memorie e rime dell’epoca, Arezzo 1957, pp. 5–7; De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 110–111; Mendelsohn, Paragoni, pp. 25–27; Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina; Francois Quivigier, The presence of artists in literary academies, in: Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. David S. Chambers and Francois Quiviger, London 1995, pp. 105–112, see p. 108; Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State, pp. 27–29.

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private Thursday lectures, and both times had to be excused. He was then among the artists who had to drop out in 1546, and was never permitted in again.236 Cellini never mentioned his membership in his detailed Vita, but acknowledged openly that he had studied neither Latin nor Greek, whereas his father and brother did. Although he never mentioned to have studied Latin later in his life, he must have had a solid vernacular education (of a kind which will be explained in the following chapter) which enabled him to write praised sonnets and show a broad knowledge in mythology.237 By contrast, Michelangelo, the only artist permitted to remain in the 1547 change of rules, became himself the subject of public teaching by one of the ardent and most frequent lecturers in the academy. In fact, Benedetto Varchi chose Michelangelo’s sonnets for a public lecture in the very same year when the other artists were forced to leave. Varchi’s first lecture on the sonnet Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto was followed in the second lecture by a comparison between the merits of painting and sculpture, taking Michelangelo as the example of excellence.238 The exchange between artists and literati was certainly a more direct one in the sixteenth century. There was much mutual interest, and it happened often that literati would comment on artists’ works, for example, in churches, palaces, and public squares. Sometimes there were even printed appraisals of artists’ practical works, for example, for Andrea Sansovino, Benvenuto Cellini, and Giambologna.239 Around 1550 and therefore shortly before the opening of artistic academies in Florence and Rome, there were a couple of literati, members of the Florentine Academy, who enthusiastically wanted to help lay the foundations for the theoretical standing of the visual arts. The discussions they opened were not primarily or exclusively addressed to the artists themselves, but should also help their fellow literati in the understanding and acceptance of the visual arts. Among them figured Giovanni Battista Gelli (1498–1563), Benedetto Varchi, and Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574). These discussions helped to elevate the visual arts among the intellectual sciences, and furthered the soon-to-be-realized opening of the academy for the visual arts.

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Bryce, The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina, p. 91. As Quivigier points out, although there were a lot of academies, which employed artists, only a few in Florence, Bologna, Brescia and Siena accepted them as members, although never on the basis of their artistic work. See Quivigier, The presence of artists in literary academies, pp. 105, 108. The sonnets he transmits in his Vita are only from his later years during his time in prison, but their quality shows an ongoing interest. See on his learning: Benvenuto Cellini, Vita, ed. Ettore Camesasca, Milan 1985, pp. 90, 96, 99, 244. Raymond Carlson, “Eccellentissimo poeta et amatore divinissimo”: Benedetto Varchi and Michelangelo’s poetry at the Accademia Fiorentina, Italian Studies, 69:2, 2014, pp. 169–188, see pp. 170, 172. Heikamp, Rapporti fra accademici ed artisti nella Firenze del ‘500 da memorie e rime dell’epoca, p. 3.

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For all three, Michelangelo was the leading artist, who in fact was going to have a major role in the ensuing artistic academy. The most surprising and likewise exemplary member of this academy and promoter of the visual arts was Gelli, son of a wine merchant and himself active his whole life as a shoemaker, who in his youth attended the garden meetings in the Orti Oricellari, then the Accademia degli Umidi, and finally received all duties and honors in the Accademia Fiorentina. Although his father neglected to provide him with a school education, he received an education in Latin, literature, and philosophy sometime later in life through autodidactic study and training from others. Gelli obtained profound and notable knowledge and wrote important philosophical works, as well as biographies of artists.240 The fact that Gelli got the chance to participate in the Orti’s meeting already as a young, uneducated boy points not only to the open character of these meetings but also to the intellectual level that could be pursued by everyone.241 The discussions Gelli attended included members of the Florentine and Italian high society as well as the most well-known Platonists, none of whom seemed to mind that an artisan boy was interested in eloquent discussions. Latin and vernacular both were held in high regard, and Bernardo Rucellai, the originator of these meetings, and, later on, Gelli as a lively attendee praised themselves for knowing Latin well enough, but choosing the vernacular for the spoken language.242 Later Gelli studied for some time probably as an adult at the Florentine university under the famous philosophy professor Francesco Verino. This study of logic and philosophy might have taken place either in his youth before 1515 or in his mature years from 1526 onward. However, a speaker in Gelli’s funeral oration had mentioned that Gelli’s father was against the boy’s desired school education. That Gelli learned as an autodidact by attending discussions in younger years and got a more formal training in later years is also underlined by the fact that another funeral speaker claimed that Gelli had learned Latin at the age of nineteen “quickly and without effort,” then deepening his knowledge at the age of twenty-five.243 Gelli is one of the examples of someone who had learned Latin as an adult without much difficulty, and this proves Gelli’s own claim, that it was just the right method 240

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Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina, pp. 74–78; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 33–34. Gelli, Opere di Giovan-Batista Gelli, ed. Agenore Gelli, pp. iii–iv, 292–293; De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 70–71. How these meetings worked for the young merchant’s son Gelli is described by an eyewitness, Cosimo Bartoli: Gelli, Opere di Giovan-Batista Gelli, p. 293 (Ragionamento intorno alla lingua). On Gelli see De Gaetano, The Florentine Academy and the advancement of learning through the vernacular, pp. 22–25. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, p. 27. On Gelli’s education, see pp. 12–13, 26–27, although De Gaetano sees an education in the maturity years as rather problematic; ibid., pp. 70–71. See also: Gelli, Opere di Giovan-Batista Gelli, p. xxxvi.

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that was needed to make everyone learn and understand Latin (see above in this section and the “Oral Apprenticeship” section). This late and intensive approach toward Latin was not uncommon even among humanists. Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) studied hardly any Latin in his youth besides reading, writing, and abacus, after which he went to work. Only at the age of twenty-five did he return to Latin and quickly learned it, including classical Latin literature.244 Gelli, however, did not praise himself for learning the Latin language, as for him it was purely a means to get to the necessary sources, to learn about method and sciences. And this he evidently did only in his spare time in addition to his own domestic enterprises. Also in his mature years, Gelli’s division between the artisanal and the academic work was obviously no obstacle for him, nor was he disregarded by the intellectual elite, including Cosimo I and Anton Francesco Doni. And another shoemaker, Michele Capri, who likewise benefited from higher education, declared that Gelli was erudite in moral and natural philosophy.245 In public opinion, Gelli remained an artisan, as anyone else who dealt with manual labor, artists included. Although Gelli was proud of his intellectual capacities, he stuck with his job and preferred to remain both intellectually and economically independent, instead of taking well-paid public offices, which were offered to him even by Cosimo I.246 But being an artisan did not keep him from holding public lectures on Dante and Petrarch between 1541 and 1551 in both the Accademia degli Umidi and the Accademia Fiorentina. Some of these were printed, as was common practice with public lectures.247 Benedetto Varchi initiated the public academy lectures on topics directly related to art history (see Chapter 3). His first, dedicated to Michelangelo’s sonnet (Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto) in 1547, praised Michelangelo as a poet. This might have helped Michelangelo’s continued acceptance as an academy member when his fellow artists were kicked out. In following Michelangelo, Varchi picked up on a key problem of the artistic creative process: the development of a concept and its practical setup. With his second lecture following two weeks later, he engaged with another mainstream discussion among the artists, which was likewise to become a principal discourse for a theory for the visual arts: the comparison of the merits of painting and sculpture, and the importance of drawing. For the publication of his lectures two years later, he invited the artists themselves to express their opinions. 244 245

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 77. Gelli, Opere di Giovan-Batista Gelli, p. xxxvii. See also Vittoria Perrone Compagni, Cose di filosofia si possono dire in volgare. Il programma culturale di Giovambattista Gelli, in: Il volgare come lingua di cultura dal Trecento al Cinquecento, ed. Arturo Calzona, Florence 2003, pp. 301–337, see p. 301. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 33–34. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy, pp. 291–323.

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The many literary discussions on the visual arts in academies certainly had their effect. Literati becoming art critics developed into a real fashion among the literary academies all over Italy. They all felt that their training in ancient literature and rhetoric along with their regular meetings and discussions gave them more eloquence in discussing artistic styles and talents. This was, however, not a discussion that took place apart from the artists themselves, as Varchi and Doni had helped Vasari in his composition on artists’ lives. This overview about institutional and private education should have made clear that participating in education and knowledge was not a privilege only for the upper classes, but was a participatory undertaking furthered by the society, academies, and individuals, mixing social ranks and trying to offer at least part of the educational palette to everyone in mixed classes and settings. At least in cities like Florence and Venice, and probably less so in southern cities or in the countryside, participating in knowledge was the endeavor of the individual, artists included. Whoever was willing to learn and had an avid curiosity was likely able to learn Latin and read the appropriate literature. And some individuals as mediators may have helped to pave the way.

THREE

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T

he long-lasting affinity between painting and literature has been documented in many ways (see Chapter 1). Following either the discussion about whether literature or the visual arts had an academic standing or the related but separately led discussion after Horace’s ut pictura poiesis about whether painting should be done like poetry, authors acknowledged that painting and literature had a lot in common. Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, and members of the Florentine literary academy, like Benedetto Varchi and Giambattista Gelli, saw painters and poets on the same intellectual level and underlined their symbiosis.1 And a multitude of authors, most of all Alberti, recommended that the painters orient themselves in relation to literature.2

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Benedetto Varchi, In che siano simili e in che differenti i poeti e i pittori. Terza disputa della lezione della maggioranza delle arti (redac: 1547), in: Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen, Benedetto Varchi – Paragone. Rangstreit der Künste, Darmstadt 2013, pp. 190–203, see pp. 190–191; Cristoforo Landino, In quinti Horatii Flacci artem poeticam ad Pisones interpretationes, ed. Gabriele Bugada, Florence 2012, pp. 99–100, 126–127; Angelo Poliziano, Vorworte und Vorlesungen, trans. Otto and Eva Schönberger, Würzburg 2011, p. 89; Armand L. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence 1976, p. 314. There is a vast literature on the topos, which cannot be summarized here. For a general introduction to the topos, see, for example, Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art, University Park, PA 1994, pp. 3–5. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda, Darmstadt 2002, pp. 151–153 (III.53–54). On Alberti’s idea of a rivalling competition between painting and literature, see Lina Bolzoni, Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, Rome 2008, pp. 5–6.

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Without a doubt, the majority of paintings had an iconography deriving from biblical or classical sources that were sometimes transformed in modern interpretations. That these sources were not beyond the reach of Renaissance painters was demonstrated in Chapter 2. The predominant question remains: How did a painter gain access to a source? Italian Renaissance society shared a knowledge patrimony, in which people would participate in different degrees. The most important authors like Ovid and Vergil, Pliny and Vitruvius could be accessed in different ways. Highly learned people would read the original Latin oeuvre and were able to decipher the meaning. The less learned would read the text in translation, in an often simplified and smoothed version for better understanding that was also sometimes commented on. Some would also read shortened compendia. Furthermore, learned readers would access Latin commentaries initially deriving from the university curriculum, but then spread out more widely to better understand the meaning. The access differed according to the person’s education and capabilities, but sometimes a reader also went for expedience. As Guthmüller pointed out for the case of Ovid, in many cases the reader would access not the original Latin text, but a simplified version of it, and this could be true for any reader as much as for a painter.3 That humanists were not only concerned with texts in Latin and Greek, which they greatly cherished, but often also with vernacular texts is documented at least since Kristeller.4 In the end, the original text circulated in many different ways, and the result was that many topoi from texts written by Ovid and Vergil, Pliny and Vitruvius entered the domain of common knowledge. But the ways they became common knowledge could be very diverse, and knowledge itself did not necessarily indicate the level of learning. When we therefore look at a painting, we might find content from a specific author, but rendered in a way that we are not familiar with judging from the original source. This is due not only to the liberal interpretation of the artist, as it is often claimed, but often to the version, translation, or commentary he consulted. It was common to shorten or expand translations, and to give some indirect or diverging explanations. In commentaries on ancient sources, in addition to explaining the text, the content was often interpreted from a contemporary perspective that would make the original source more attractive. This means that a text by an ancient author could appear in a Christianized and Neoplatonic vestment. This kind of literary preparation could significantly help an artist who was expected to render a

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Bodo Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale (le Metamorfosi di Ovidio), in: Immagini degli dei. Mitologia e collezionismo tra ’500 e ’600, ed. Claudia Cieri Via, Milan 1996, pp. 22–28, see p. 22. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts, Princeton, NJ 1980, p. 14.

THE MEDIATING TEXTS

text in a humanist version. In this case, it would not be the artist alone and his individual capacity for sophisticated interpretation that allowed him to do so, but he would also be helped by mediating texts. The aim of this chapter is to show which original and mediating texts were available, and which were likely to have shaped the artists’ ideas. Art historians tend to underestimate the range of literature available to the lesser formally educated readership, who nevertheless had a desire and necessity to access similar sources as their patrons did. The rediscovery of ancient texts was one of the main concerns of humanists in the Renaissance, but they also revised many ancient texts which had never been lost during the Middle Ages, and assessed their philological reliability. Likewise, Renaissance artists were also concerned with ancient literature, which their patrons required of them. But the artists as well as many of the patrons would not necessarily draw directly on the classical text itself, since there were so many channels by which ancient literature had come down to them. Today we tend to consult the most authoritative edition of an ancient or medieval text, possibly even with a commentary. This approach was not dissimilar in the Renaissance, with the main difference being that the authoritative text we look at today was often different from the Renaissance version. Our idea of providing an authoritative edition derives indeed from the circumstance that different versions often circulated at the same time. A modern author and editor would compare versions and try to find the oldest and presumably most authentic version. A Renaissance author and reader, and likewise artist, normally had different versions at hand. Furthermore, many texts were available in different editions: in compilations, in Latin, in translation into the vernacular, with a commentary or without, and sometimes in different versions. Therefore, we need to investigate the original Renaissance version that an artist could have consulted, instead of primarily looking at authoritative modern versions, in order to properly judge the topic of a painting. In addition, that can give us important insights into what kind of literature an artist was able to consult. Guthmüller already pointed out why it can never be sufficient for modern scholarship to turn to the modern authorized and established version of a text. During the Renaissance, it was natural to alternate texts in translation, which did not need to be literal translations. Starting only in the middle of the sixteenth century did translations more closely follow a presumably original version, and thus pay attention to these details. It is necessary, therefore, to explore contemporary literary sources when judging art and iconography.5 That this is a discrepancy in the concept of humanism has also been pointed out by Guthmüller. The humanists found 5

Bodo Guthmüller, Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei. Bemerkungen zur Sala dei Giganti Giulio Romanos, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 21:1, 1977, pp. 35–68, see pp. 35–36.

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their sources in the original classical texts without medieval and Renaissance transformations and allegorizations. By contrast, artists needed precisely these transformations and interpretations that were much better fitted to an allegorical pictorial program.6 Researchers have occasionally mentioned that artists did not necessarily access the classical version of a text, but looked out for mediating versions. However, there has never been a substantial study to establish this thesis, which so far has only been questioned with individual examples. Looking at iconography and iconology, we will notice that even Panofsky, the father of iconology, presented the Christianization of ancient motifs less as a copy from antiquity, but as an assimilation of forms, as a symbiosis and juxtaposition of pagan and Christian context.7 However, he does not tell us how the idea was able to take shape in the artist’s mind, which initiated this juxtaposition that ultimately leads to iconography and iconology. This part was facilitated by mediating texts that interpreted the ancient past in a Christianized version. Literary sources can be rendered by a painter as an illustration faithful to the text, or through an interpretation resulting in an allegory. This could derive either from an extraordinarily skilled artistic mind or, more easily and plausibly, through sources already prepared in a “modern” sense. Often the allegory was based on a Christianized version of the original text as supplemented by humanist knowledge.8 In this case, literary allegorization and commentaries were extremely helpful. Both ancient literature and sacred scripture were interpreted throughout the centuries. For biblical exegesis and patristic theology, the quatuor sensus scripturae (historical, dogmatic, moral, and eschatological) were used,9 which were not so different from the normal approaches to the interpretation of ancient literature. What Hugh of Saint Victor explained about the interpretation of sacred scripture, namely, the interpretation in a historical, allegorical, and moral way (thus using three ways),10 was not so different from Giovanni del Virgilio’s and Bonsanti’s interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see below). In order to provide a text as comprehensive as possible, the commentator had used a fourfold approach: through history

6 7

8 9

10

Guthmüller, Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei, p. 57. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York 1939, pp. 69–70. For a contrary view, see Bertrand Prévost, Botticelli: Le manège allégorique, Paris 2011, p. 11. Ernst von Dobschütz, Vom vierfachen Schriftsinn. Die Geschichte einer Theorie, in: Harnack-Ehrung. Beiträge zur Kirchengeschichte ihrem Lehrer Adolf von Harnack zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag (7. Mai 1921), Leipzig 1921, pp. 1–13; Friedrich Ohly, Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter, Darmstadt 1966, pp. 1–23, see pp. 10–11, 18; Meinolf Schumacher, Einführung in die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, Darmstadt 2010, pp. 35–39. Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon V.2. See for quotation: Jerome Taylor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor, New York 1991, p. 120.

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR VERSUS LATIN

(istoria), ancient virtue could be rendered with examples; through legends (legenda), Christian virtue could be exemplified by stories of virtuous people; through fables (favola), the unreal could be narrated in a poetic and allegorical manner; and through novels (novella), stories could be told in a new way.11 This is also precisely the way that interpretations were made in the Renaissance (see section “Commentaries”). In the end, painters tried similar expressions with visual means, especially when depicting fables, allegories, and mythologies. With their own means they could try visual poetry and visual commentaries. The literati were certainly seen as authorities for interpretation and description. The artists acknowledged that the poet had a deeper understanding of sources, which could turn out to be useful. Grendler describes it thus: “The poet penetrated divine mysteries. Medieval scholars used allegory, the basis of most of their poetical interpretation, to unlock poetry’s wisdom.”12 Sometimes poetic interpretations could also be understood as unraveling a hidden myth, an idea which would later stimulate many Renaissance painters too. Boccaccio, for example, suggests that poetic obscurity could stimulate the search for truth, as, for example, the poets and philosophers were doing. If things were transmitted too easily, they looked rather too simple (Genealogia deorum, 14.12).13 This was also what painters were aiming at in choosing allegorical content. Painting and poetry used similar means, a circumstance which build the basis for their age-old competition. But it was more often the artist who found inspiration in literature than vice versa. The question is, What kind of literature did he consult? THE QU ESTIO N OF LANGUAGE: VER NACULAR VERSU S LATIN

There were two factors which made literature more widely and easily accessible: the invention of printing and vernacularizations. Intellectual vernacular literature rapidly increased from the fourteenth century onward. The genres that appeared in the vernacular were basically the same as those treated in Latin: treatises, dialogues, letters, orations, and translations from Greek and Latin. This kind of vernacular literature was directed toward an educated and intellectually stimulated readership, which, however, lacked a humanist education or university studies. These could be artists, artisans, merchants, or women, all of whom are mentioned in many dedicatory prefaces. Later on 11

12

13

Giovanni Bonsignori da Città di Castello, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare, ed. Erminia Ardissino, Bologna 2001, pp. 3–6 (proemio). Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600, Baltimore 1989, p. 235. See also Rainer Stillers, Humanistische Deutung. Studien zu Kommentar und Literaturtheorie in der italienischen Renaissance, Düsseldorf 1988, p. 32.

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in the sixteenth century, several individuals as well as the academies would fight a battle to have the vernacular accepted as an original scientific language. Vernacularizations happened in Italy later than in other countries, such as France, where the vernacular language gained importance and acceptance much earlier. Vulgarizations were already common in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when dialects also gained more and more importance.14 That the vernacular developed in Italy rather late has been seen as a consequence of the closeness of medieval Latin to the Italian vernacular. Kristeller even supposes that medieval Latin texts pronounced in the vernacular idiom would have been understood by most people.15 The origins of vernacular learning started with Dante. He was the first to address theological and philosophical questions and doctrines in the vernacular, preparing and explaining them for the less learned reader, while the sources he used and explained were exclusively in Latin and from the higher curriculum.16 His Convivio (1304–1307) is a vernacular encyclopedia of learning transmitted for the unlearned, which he introduces with the ancient philosopher’s words: every person desires to possess knowledge. Consequently, he based his compendium in large measure on Aristotle and his concept of learning, and how the ancient sage addressed the arts and sciences (Convivio 1.9). Dante makes education and knowledge part of people’s life without limitations and barriers. He shows himself to be aware of the disadvantages of birth into a limited social environment, where people had no possibility to study. But, Dante explains, the sciences are part of everybody’s soul and its ultimate perfection, which can bring us happiness (Convivio 1.1). Book 1 of the Convivio is dedicated to the advantages of the vernacular over the Latin language for access to knowledge (Convivio 1.5–11). Dante said he was moved by three points: an inconvenient situation, the search for liberality, and a love for the proper idiom. And he refers to his book on the vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia) for a detailed discussion. Dante tries to prove the differences of idioms, while underlining their characteristics by calling Latin a fixed language, whereas the vernacular was in constant movement, and therefore capable of being influenced. While the vernacular reader in lack of capability would not use Latin texts, the same would be true in the opposite case, when Latin readers often ignored vernacular writings. With its fixed rules, Latin had the

14

15

16

See on French and Italian early translations in the twelfth to fourteenth century: Paolo Cherchi, Vernacular literatures, in: Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Perile, Cambridge 2015, pp. 371–388. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy, Journal of the Rocky Mountain and Renaissance Association, 6, 1985, pp. 105–126, see pp. 106–107. Kristeller, Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy, p. 108; Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning, New York 2018, pp. 17–25.

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR VERSUS LATIN

advantage of being obedient to its grammar. It was also used in several countries and thereby facilitated communication (Convivio 1.5–7). But, in the Latin language, no one had yet tried to bring learning to the non-literati, despite the demand. It would therefore be necessary to make knowledge available to the multitude, and exactly what they needed. Dante also explained that this way of giving generously was an act of virtue (Convivio 1.7–8). The vernacular would be able to transmit useful things, which the Latin was not able to render (Convivio 1.9). And then he addressed the manual arts by saying that whoever wanted to create something good needed to know about its structure and material, and this was true for both language and the manual arts (Convivio 1.11).17 Three literary luminaries had all left important works in the vernacular: Dante (Convivio, Divine Comedy), Petrarch (Trionfi, Canzoniere), and Boccaccio (Decameron). Parts of their Latin oeuvre were soon to be translated into the vernacular during the period of the language dispute in the early fifteenth century.18 After the three crowns had introduced the vernacular as a respectable literary language, there were many famous fifteenth-century literati who themselves wrote texts in either Latin or the vernacular, or provided translations of some of their own Latin works. Flavio Biondo, Leon Battista Alberti, Matteo Palmieri, Cristoforo Landino, and Angelo Poliziano in Florence held the vernacular in high esteem.19 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, discussions among the humanists brought the topic to the fore, for example, between Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo. For Bruni, only classical Latin with its grammar should be accepted, whereas Biondo saw the vernacular with all its idioms as another form and derivation from Latin with its own standing. Alberti responded to this by compiling a vernacular grammar, his Grammatichetta (1430s), and by organizing a vernacular poetic competition, Certame Coronario (1441). From Alberti and as further developed by Landino, there became an accepted neo-vernacular language. What was important in this discussion, as Kircher points out, was that language was located within a debate between art and nature. Latin as the artificial language and the vernacular as a natural language had their own reputations. And as the first and most important poet to value the vernacular, Dante received the highest praise, especially in the 1480s through Landino’s commentary on the Comedy.20 After Alberti, Leonardo also seems to have been concerned about placing the vernacular on an equal footing with Latin and the sciences, and about 17 18

19 20

Dante, Convivio, ed. Giorgio Inlese, Milan 1993, pp. 41–42, 55–67, 73. Petrarch, De remediis uteriusque fortunae (trans. in 1427); Dante, Monarchia (trans. Ficino in 1468; Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum (published in translation in Venice 1547). Kristeller, Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy, esp. pp. 110–113. Timothy Kircher, Landino, Alberti, and the invention of the neo-vernacular, Albertiana, 19:1, 2016, pp. 29–48, see esp. pp. 29–31.

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providing it with a grammar and a lexicon, although the plan must have stopped in the preliminary phase.21 The vernacular promoted by Dante and Landino elevated the Florentine idiom to the highest levels. Here we are not dealing with vernacular literature produced for courtly entertainment or for partially educated people. Instead, this vernacular literature is directed toward humanist circles, which were usually committed to Latin literature. It also served people with a partial humanist education but a limited knowledge of Latin, who nevertheless were interested to engage with literature on a humanist level, and thus to benefit from their interpretations and depictions.22 To this group also belonged many patrons and artists who frequented humanist circles, including artists like Francesco Francia in Bologna, Leonardo in Milan, and Sandro Botticelli in Florence. Botticelli, for example, was one of the privileged artists who belonged to the Medici circle, from which also sprang a good part of his clientele. He certainly belonged among those privileged painters who had a school education and access to the social environment that provided them with relevant literature and appropriate interpretations. Through their own textual studies, other artists would have had only a limited choice of available literature. Aware of this situation, Landino recommended the learned vernacular for the artist in his preface to the Dante commentary.23 This particular commentary with its interpretations would become most useful for Botticelli’s allegorical interpretations (see below). In the second half of the fifteenth century, the vernacular increasingly gained attention and distribution, not least due to the printing press, which made literature accessible and affordable. Richardson mentions that 20 percent of the print production from the fifteenth century was in the vernacular.24 Following Grendler, only about half of the literate men could read a Latin text, 21

22

23

24

See Leonardo Olschki, Bildung und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Renaissance in Italien, Vaduz 1965, p. 173. For another interpretation of the vernacular, see Dempsey. Dempsey, who has studied vernacular influences on late medieval and early Renaissance Italian painting including Botticelli, looks for vernacular settings in environments dominated by femininity, beauty, and naturalness. With his lyric interpretation of the vernacular, he omits the other aspect of the vernacular (Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificient, Princeton, NJ 1992; Charles Dempsey, The importance of vernacular style in Renaissance art: The invention of Simone Martini’s Maestà in the Palazzo Communale [sic] in Siena, Studies in the History of Art, 74, 2009, pp. 189–205, 192; Charles Dempsey, The Early Renaissance Vernacular Culture, Cambridge MA 2012, pp. 1–7, 69–114. Cristoforo Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, 4 vols., ed. Paolo Procaccioli, Rome 2001, vol. 1, p. 255 (proemio 9). Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge 1999, pp. 136–137. See also Paolo Trovato, Per un censimento dei manoscritti di tipografia in volgare (1470–1600), in: Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo, ed. M. Santagata and A. Quondam, Modena 1989, pp. 43–81.

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR VERSUS LATIN

but all could certainly read vernacular texts. There were a number of vernacular texts that were printed already during the incunable period. While it was still difficult for private manuscript copies to be obtained by artisans, the printed version or copies in monastic libraries were easier to get access to. Since the fourteenth century, but more extensively during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, translations from Latin and Greek were commissioned.25 While in the fifteenth century these commissions were made mainly by the courts, in the sixteenth century they mainly arose in the context of the academies, where the scientific vernacular was promulgated. Fifteenth-century families who added considerably to the number of vernacular translations were, for example, the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, the Aragonese in Naples, the Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua, and the Bentivoglio in Bologna. The translators were often either university professors or court humanists.26 They normally did not intend to provide an exact translation, but smoothed and simplified the text for easier understanding, considering a reading public with lower educational background.27 There were three major periods with intense activity devoted to translating the ancient classics. The first, in the fourteenth century, made just a few texts available in the vernacular; the second, between 1470 and 1485, made many texts available in the vernacular for the first time in history. The third period, between 1525 and 1550, delivered many higher-quality translations of previously vernacularized works, as well as some new ones, but now under the influence of the rising literary academies, which often had as their main purpose to make important classical texts available to the people and in a correct philological version. The demand for public learning was an ongoing desire from Dante’s time onward, and many translators insisted on the utility of their work for public learning.

25

26

27

See on early translations Concetti Marchesi, Traduzioni e compendi volgare, Florence 1978; Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature, Cambridge 2011; Translating the Middle Ages, ed. Karen L. Fresco and Charles D. Wright, Farnham 2012. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Latin and vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy, p. 114; James Hankins, Translation practice in the Renaissance: The case of Leonardo Bruni, in: Methologie de la traduction: De l’antiquité a la Renaisance. Théorie et praxis, ed. C. M. Ternes and M. Mund-Dopchie, Luxemburg 1994, pp. 154–175; Andrea Rizzi, Vernacular Translators in Quattrocento Italy: Scribal Culture, Authority, and Agency, Turnhout 2017. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 282; Bodo Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale (le Metamorfosi di Ovidio), in: Immagini degli dei. Mitologia e collezionismo tra ’500 e ’600, ed. Claudia Cieri Via, Milan 1996, pp. 22–28, see p. 23; Alison Cornish, Traces of the translator in late Medieval Italian vernacularizations, in: Translating the Middle Ages, ed. Karen L. Fresco, Farnham 2012, pp. 97–108; Andrea Rizzi and Eva Del Soldato, Latin and vernacular in Quattrocento Florence and Beyond: An introduction, I Tatti Studies, 16:1, 2013, pp. 231–242; Rizzi, Vernacular Translators in Quattrocento Italy, pp. 14–29, 35–47; Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 1–9, 17–25.

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Looking at the early efforts, Brunetto Latini (1220–1294) is a very early thirteenth-century vernacularizer who not only translated Cicero’s De inventione, but also enriched it with a commentary. Likewise, the Bolognese Dominican friar Galeoto did so also with his Fiore di retorica, which is a partial translation of Cicero’s Rhetoric and his De inventione. When printed in Venice in 1472–1473, the foreword stated that this edition would be most useful and necessary for vulgar and unlearned people (“opera utilissima & necessaria a gli omeni vulgari e indocti”). In fact, Cicero’s Rhetoric was one of the most frequently printed works in the early years of printing, with editions in Venice (1472–1473), Milan (1475), Padua or Venice (ca. 1475), and Venice (ca. 1478). The two main fourteenth-century translations were Ovid’s Metamorphoses, provided by the Bolognese professor Giovanni Bonsignori around 1370 (published in Venice, 1497) and Lucan’s Pharsalia, provided by Luca di Monticello in the second half of the fourteenth century (printed in Milan, 1492). In 1432, Vergil’s Aeneid by Tommaso Cambiatori (published in Venice, 1532) followed. Thus, the most important classical school books by Ovid and Vergil from the basic Latin curriculum were already available in the vernacular shortly after 1400. They both also became highly popular stories, with which many of the patrons and artists were familiar, and artists often referred to them in their paintings on classical topics. Among the two, Ovid was certainly more accessible than Vergil, as he also received an early print run. Ovid was almost entirely accessible in translation in the early years of printing. De arte amandi was published in translation in Venice ca. 1472, and again in Naples in 1481 and Milan in 1494; the Heroides were published in translation in Naples ca. 1475, and again in Brescia 1491. In 1497, the famous translation of the Metamorphoses by Giovanni Bonsignori and edited by Giovanni Bonsanti followed. Vergil’s Bucolics were printed in translation in Florence in 1482 and again in 1494, the Georgics in Florence in 1485, and the Aeneid in Bologna in 1491. By the 1490s, Ovid’s and Vergil’s works were therefore easily available in both translation and in print. Furthermore, there were printed translations of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Milan, 1492; Venice, 1495), Aesop’s Fabule (Verona, 1479; Milan, 1497), Livy’s Deche (Venice, 1493), and Plutarch’s Lives of the Philosophers (Aquila, 1482), as well as for the mathematical and natural sciences: Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica (Venice, 1494) and Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographica (Florence, ca. 1480). The most important schoolbooks from the Latin curriculum were thus available in print and translation by 1500 (see the Appendix). Of special importance for artists were Ovid, Vergil, and Aesop, but also Lucan and Plutarch, and additionally the translation of Pliny’s Natural History, printed in Venice in 1476. By the sixteenth century, the vernacular was increasingly embraced in academic publishing, and as an eloquent language of discussion. Especially from the 1530s and 1540s onward and with the help of the literati Bembo,

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR VERSUS LATIN

Varchi, Speroni, and Gelli (who helped to shape the idiom and also initiated or themselves provided important translations), the standing of the vernacular changed considerably and reintroduced the question of the appropriate form. The question as to which version of the vernacular would be appropriate for eloquent discussions or academic publishing – already initiated by Dante – was probably even stronger in the cinquecento. An early example and a lively account of practice is in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). Castiglione, who himself dealt with the question of the paragone of the visual arts, was also concerned with the transmission of knowledge and the question of language. For example, Castiglione points to regional differences in using a vernacular idiom when he claims that the Tuscans would translate everything from Latin into a weird Tuscan, whereas the Lombards took Latin idioms into their vernacular. Castiglione himself, however, associated with the grammarians and preferred a vernacular without Latinizations.28 This had certainly not always been the case, since, in fifteenth-century vernacular translations, Latin idioms were quite commonly to be found in Italian translations, for example, in Landino. It shows, however, that Latin vocabulary was, to some extent, part of the vernacular, and that the vernacular reader was expected to understand it. And this is exactly what Castiglione is pointing to, namely, that Latin vocabulary was also familiar to the unlearned.29 Around the same time, Bernardino Donato from Verona published his vernacular Latin grammar (Grammatica latina in volgare; Verona, 1529) explicitly to make Latin more easily accessible to everyone. The author also stated that it would make little sense to publish a Latin grammar in Latin, when most teachers were already teaching Latin in the vernacular.30 From about 1525 onward there is a second wave of interest in rendering classical philosophical and poetical texts in the vernacular, this time promoted through influential patrons and the first academies, of which some had the precise intention to make classical literature accessible to the people. In the 1530s and 1540s, a large number of translations of the most important classical texts followed. The new vogue of sixteenth-century translations immediately included the needs of the visual arts. The 1520s and 1530s saw several translations of Vitruvius, together with Pliny, the standard reference for every educated artist (1521, 1524, 1535, and 1536). At the same time, more texts from the Latin curriculum were translated or received a new translation: Apuleius’s Asino aureo (Venice, 1526, 1528, 1537), Lucian’s Dialogues (Venice, 1527, 1535), Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Venice 1527, 1531; Florence, 1551), and Plutarch’s Lives (Venice, 1529). Ovid and Vergil received new translations

28

29 30

Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Walter Barberis, Torino 1998, pp. 10–11, see also pp. 64–77. Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, p. 10. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 186.

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(Aeneid, Venice, 1532, 1543; Georgics, Venice, 1543). The most astonishing lacuna in this period is a missing vernacular translation of Philostratus’s (the Lemnian) Imagines. The Imagines is a detailed description offered to a young boy of a picture gallery in Naples containing sixty-five paintings described in two books, then accomplished by his grandson Philostratus the Younger in book 3. Philostratus as a teacher not only describes the pictures and thus gives an ecphrasis, but also explains the meaning and the sources, together with the painters’ alterations to the texts. Although Philostratus had a small print run in the early sixteenth century (Florence, 1517, with a late antique translation into Latin by Callistratus; Milan, 1521, with an early modern translation into Latin by Stephanus Nigrus), the text became popular only in the seventeenth century, despite the fact that it would have been a much more comprehensive and detailed source for antique mythology than Pliny, and also an early source for art critique. Of great importance during the 1540s were the published translations of major mathematical, geometrical, and astrological works, like Euclid’s Elements (Venice, 1543, Rome, 1545, Florence, 1573, Urbino, 1575) and Sacrobosco’s Trattato della sphere (Venice, 1543). Before 1550, therefore, the most important texts an artist might need to consult were all published in translation. Around that date and through Cosimo Bartoli’s effort, Alberti’s Latin artistic treatise De statua also appeared in print in the vernacular (together with a new translation of Della pittura), and he also translated Euclid’s Elements (published in Venice, 1564). The sixteenth century also saw a new vogue of translating philosophical works. As a promoter of art and humanism, Cosimo I in some ways took up his ancestor’s path. Among his initiatives was to revive quattrocento Platonism as furthered by Ficino with the translation of his works into the vernacular. This became one of the projects of the Florentine Academy.31 But he likewise promoted the vernacular translation of Aristotle. Around 1500, Bernardo Segni, also a member of the Florentine Academy (and Varchi’s opposite at the Academy),32 produced translations and immediate publications of Aristotle’s Poetics, Ethics, and Politics.33 Cosimo also had the vernacular version of Ficino’s translation of the Pimander published in 1548,34 and Cosimo Bartoli translated Boethius’s Consolation (published in Florence 1551). In these big translation efforts that were often furthered by members of the academies,

31

32

33

34

Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 6. Annalisa Andreoni, La via della dottrina. Le lezioni accademiche di Benedetto Varchi, Pisa 2012, p. 38. Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 10; Andreoni, La via della dottrina, p. 38. On efforts for the vernacular coming from Federico Badoer and the Venetian academy, see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa, Turin 1995, pp. 3–9. Mendelsohn, Paragoni, p. 21.

COMMENTARIES

several people figured as mediators. As mentioned earlier, a few of the sixteenth-century literati had a special interest in helping the artists. Important cinquecento translators with this motivation were Cosimo Bartoli, Giovanni Battista Gelli, Benedetto Varchi, Sperone Speroni, and Pietro Bembo. COMMENTARIES

Commentaries were an elevated literary genre originally connected to university lectures, but then also promoted separately through the print medium, where they finally served for private studies as well. Through this channel they eventually reached the artists, probably through their patrons’ interest. Daniele Barbaro, for example, picked up on Vitruvius’s recommendation for the architect to read commentaries. Both insist on the importance of literature for the architect. Reading the most appropriate text, possibly even with a commentary, would help memory and understanding. Barbaro adds that a commentary could also be spoken (cf. Oral Apprenticeship), but to better undertand and memorize a text it would be useful to be able to read it, the commenatries included. Also, Barbaro insists that it is not sufficient to simply know grammar as a reading principle to understand texts, but that it would additionally require the right explanation as provided through commentaries.35 As will be shown later, a couple of artists had a close familiarity with commentaries. While artists like Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano referred to certain parts in specific commentaries in order to develop ideas and interpretative possibilities, some artists were critical of them. Leonardo banished the idea of a literary commentary, as many of the commentators did not understand the author’s ideas,36 and also Benvenuto Cellini had likewise a very critical opinion about commentaries and commentators and their ability to interpret,37 which shows at least in both cases a certain familiarity with the genre. Other artists were known to have possessed commentaries in their private libraries, like Mantegna, who owned at least one commentary (Iuvenale cum comento).38 A small number of artists, initially mostly architects, including Cesare Cesariano, Giovanni Battista Caporali, and Giovanni Battista Bertano, embarked on a commentary tradition and composed philological commentaries on their own. The earliest hint for an artist having knowledge 35

36 37 38

Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura di M Vitruvio tradutti et commentate da monsignor Barbaro eletto patriarca d’Aquileia, Venice 1556, p. 10. Leonardo, Trattato della pittura, ed. Ettore Camesasca, Vicenza 2000, p. 17 (cap. 18). Benvenuto Cellini, Vita, ed. Ettore Camesasca, Milan 1985, p. 468. Library inventory in Rodolfo Signorini, New findings about Andrea Mantegna: His son Ludovico’s post-mortem inventory (1510), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 59, 1996, pp. 103–118, see pp. 113–114.

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of the commentary tradition comes from Simone Martini, who for the frontispiece to Petrarch’s Vergil (Codex Ambrosianus, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ca. 1336)39 paints in an allegory the inspired ancient poet writing, while Servius, his classical commentator, stands right beside him, pointing at him. The rest of the human cast is explained by the inscription in the middle of the painting: “Servius, speaking here above, uncovers the secrets of Maro [i.e., Vergil], that they may be revealed to leaders, shepherds and farmers.”40 Campbell and Cole rightly pointed out that “this identifies the poems’ threefold audience, though a knowledgeable viewer would recognize that the three figures also designated the estates represented in Virgil’s three great poems – soldiers in the epic Aeneid, shepherds in the pastoral Eclogues, and farmers in the didactic Georgics.”41 Simone Martini’s painting makes the evidence of commentators – and mediators – also for the classes of artisans very clear. The painter also showed himself to be up to date with current developments at the university. Following Kristeller, the commentary gains importance at Italian universities from the fourteenth century onward, after the introduction of classical authors and poetry into the curriculum.42 Although grammatical and philological commenting had been a tradition in Greco-Roman antiquity, this method was modified during the Middle Ages. Many different kinds of commentaries had existed since antiquity, and they were enhanced with new forms in the Middle Ages.43 The commentary became a part of the university curriculum, and was therefore originally a part of the oral tradition. The text started with an introduction, often called accessus in the Middle Ages, and then explained the original version phrase by phrase while the student took notes.44 Some early student lecture notes survive, but only later, during the second part of the fifteenth century, did the professors consider promoting their commentaries to a broader public through the print medium. Already in the 1470s and 1480s, the first commentaries were printed and found a wide readership. Commentaries on ancient poetry and systematic treatises on the theory of

39

40

41 42 43

44

Both Vergil and Petrarch belonged to the earliest printed commentaries in the early 1470s, right from the start delivered in several editions. English translation after Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art, London 2012, p. 13. Campbell and Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art, p. 13. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, Munich 1974, vol. 1, p. 100. For a general discussion on commentaries, see Deborah Parker, Commentary and ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, Durham, NC 1993; Kraus C. Shuttleworth, Introduction: Reading commentaries, commentaries as readings, in: The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, ed. Roy K. Gibson and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus, Leiden 2002, pp. 1–27; Alejandro Coroleu, Printing and Reading Italian Latin Humanism in Renaissance Europe (ca. 1470–ca. 1540), Newcastle upon Tyne 2014, pp. 24–57. Kristeller, Humanismus und Renaissance, vol. 2, pp. 226–227.

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literature arose between 1480 and 1590. It is important to notice how a classical commentary was built up and composed of different parts, and was not necessarily connected with the text itself. The process is much the same in the oral and written commentary. Humanist commentaries follow the desire to exegetically unfold the meaning of a text, and specifically to throw light on its hidden meaning. Furthermore, the commentator often takes his comment as an opportunity to display his erudition even in fields other than those mentioned in the text. He might add more examples, or include extensive excursions into other topics when he finds the place appropriate.45 For example, this is true for Landino’s commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid, where he gave the text a Neoplatonic interpretation, while Sebastianus Regulus’s comment on the same book interpreted it in accordance with an Aristotelian concept.46 Another example is Poliziano’s commentary on Statius (1480–1481), where he gave explications apart from the usual topics of historiography, mythology, and geography, including on the visual arts and architecture, ethnology, cosmology, zoology, and mineralogy.47 Stillers sees Poliziano’s approach as manifold, including various fields of knowledge: “Poliziano explains, while he cites or mentions a historiographical or biographical (e.g. Plutarch), a cosmological (e.g. Hesiod), an art historical (e.g. Vitruvius) or a mythological source (e.g. Homer, Vergil or Ovid).”48 As we had seen in Chapter 2, the very first steps of a historical and mythological reading already had happened in the school, and are now taken to a more complex level. Grendler summarizes how the commentary tradition worked at the Latin school and in the university: “The teacher . . . explained unfamiliar persons, places, and customs, thereby deepening the student’s historical, geographical, and mythological knowledge of the ancient world. And he presented an allegorical-cum-moral interpretation of the text.”49 While the commentator cites a variety of mostly ancient or early Christian sources, he refers directly to them, and does not yet include secondary literature to evaluate the comment and the meaning. This will be introduced only in the middle of the sixteenth century. Here critical judgment and a solid general knowledge were still demanded from the

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See on the genesis of the commentary: Stillers, Humanistische Deutung, pp. 12–13, 22, 37, 52. Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the ethical commentary: Philosophy, commonplaces and the structure of Renaissance knowledge, in: Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700), ed. Karl Enenkel and Henk Nellen, Leuven 2013, pp. 201–219, see p. 203. Stillers, Humanistische Deutung, pp. 76–77. Stillers, Humanistische Deutung, p. 77 (my translation). Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 244, see also pp. 135, 203, 244–255. See also Konrad Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz. Filippo Beroaldo und sein Kommentar zum goldenen Esel des Apuleius, Munich 1971, pp. 40–42.

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commentator; however, method and references to other authors and opinions increasingly become more important.50 Although born as an instrument for the university, commentaries will eventually enter the world of the visual arts and be used to more easily access a classical text as prepared for a “modern” interpretation. This is the case for Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano, for example (see below), painters who started from the literary tradition, but went beyond it to illustrate a text by looking for allegorical readings. The interpretative possibilities proposed in the commentaries aided and guided their reading of a topic. When Ghiberti was composing his commentary (Commentarii) shortly before 1450, the genre of commentaries had not yet risen to public prominence. Thus far, commentaries were used exclusively in the university environment. Commentaries were usually not part of literature on the visual arts, although Ghiberti claimed that the Egyptians started writing commentaries on art (Commentarii 1.31), followed by the Romans at the time of Constantine (Commentarii 2.1).51 Normally, however, literature on the visual arts is known in the form of treatises, but, from Ghiberti’s time and before, there had been very few writings on the visual arts anyway. What Ghiberti could have referred to here were, for example, philological commentaries like the late antique and Early Christian commentaries on philosophy and literature, or medieval commentaries on Aristotle. One of the best-known commentaries from the late Middle Ages – that was most likely known to Ghiberti – was Giovanni del Virgilio’s/Giovanni Bonsignori’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the end of the fourteenth century (see below). Otherwise, there were only a few written commentaries closer to his own time. Ghiberti himself speaks about the commentary character of his work right after having explained the various disciplines the artist should be trained in, which comprised most of the university topics. He then adds that the ancient philosophers instituted the category of commentaries, who, at an advanced age and having risen to the summit of doctrinal knowledge, left wise and thoughtful notes to those who came afterward (Commentarii 1.3).52 This is exactly what Ghiberti himself provides: a thought-provoking discussion on Aristotle’s primary texts, a discussion on medieval, mostly eastern commentators on his topics on natural philosophy (Avicenna, Averroes, Alhazen), and many citations and discussions on Pliny’s topics, including the invention of painting and the famous ancient works of art and their topics. It seems clear that Ghiberti intended his Commentarii on the visual arts to be equivalent to university commentaries in literature and philosophy. Possibly even more than university commentaries he 50 51 52

Stillers, Humanistische Deutung, pp. 89, 125, 137. Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli, Florence 1998, pp. 31–32. Ghiberti, I commentarii, p. 6.

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is not only commenting on one source, but includes every topic he deems important for the visual arts. Thus the title Commentarii, which means many commentaries. Only in the sixteenth century will a few architects embark on the same competition with university commentaries, and successfully create commentaries of their own. Exemplary are Cesare Cesariano, Giovanni Battista Caporali, and Giovanni Battista Bertano, who left important commentaries on Vitruvius (see Chapter 4). KEY EARLY R ENAI SSANCE MEDIATING TEXTS

Some late medieval and Renaissance vernacular texts became widely known and important, especially because they transmitted knowledge on ancient mythology or on theological and philosophical questions. This is the case for Dante’s Convivio and his Divine Comedy and for Ficino’s Dell’Amore. To these should be added Boccaccio’s Genealogy, although it was written in Latin. Nevertheless, it figured to be one of the most important sources on ancient mythology also for the artists. But from the 1480s onward, Dante’s, Boccaccio’s, and Ficino’s texts would be outshined by Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which subsumed all relevant knowledge in one text. Dante’s Convivio and Landino’s commentary on the Divine Comedy will be highlighted under the category of the earliest and the most influential mediating texts in the vernacular.

Dante Alighieri’s Convivio Dante’s Convivio (1304–1307) was highly influential as the earliest and foremost compilation of knowledge written in the vernacular for the unlearned. As Dante mentioned in his preface, he wanted to bring knowledge to those who did not possess Latin.53 Dante himself certainly knew Latin very well, although he did not receive a full classical education. Following Imbach and Flüeler, Dante only occasionally attended the universities in Bologna and Paris, and was otherwise educated in monastery schools like Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella in Florence.54 By contrast, Black insisted that there was no evidence that Dante had attended the university in Bologna, and he underlined that Dante probably did not have much formal education within the stillunderdeveloped educational system in Florence at the end of the thirteenth 53

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On Dante’s search for knowledge and its transmission, see Paolo Falzone, Desiderio della scienza e desiderio di dio nel Convivio di Dante, Bologna 2010; Andrew Frisardi, The Quest for Knowledge in Dante’s Convivio, London 2015; Il Convivio di Dante, ed. Johannes Bartuschat and Andrea Aldo Robiglio, Ravenna 2015. See on Dante’s education, for example: Ruedi Imbach and Christoph Flüeler, Dante Alighieri – Monarchia, Stuttgart 1989, pp. 15–16.

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century. This included a very basic education in Latin grammar during his school years that led to a limited knowledge of texts he had become acquainted with during his youth. Black insists that Dante was principally an autodidact, apart from some formal philosophical teaching that he received in monastery schools in Florence, where philosophy was taught on the basis of Thomas Aquinas. Florence was not yet a university town as some other Tuscan cities were, and therefore Latin education did not play a significant role at that time. Following Black, Dante became familiar with classical school texts like Cicero (De amicitia) and Boethius (Consolation) only as an adult, probably starting in 1290 at the age of twenty-five.55 One may presume that Dante, as a semi-autodidact with difficult initial access to learned Latin literature, therefore had a clear idea of what the unlearned classes needed to know and knew about their lack of access. This is why he wrote the first vernacular compendium for the unlearned. Although the dissemination of the text in manuscript was high, it is astonishing that Dante’s important compendium for the unlearned received only one incunable version in Italy, printed by Francesco Bonaccorsi in Florence in 1490 in a small and user-friendly octavo format.56 Topics were divided into paragraphs, and were sometimes introduced by a sentence in bold referring to the content. This situation changed rapidly in the sixteenth century, however, when public learning received a new wave of attention. The Venice edition of 1521 underlined Dante’s text as a work on Platonic love (for wisdom).57 The foreword put Dante’s Convivio into a precise context: on the one hand, it refers to Plato and the oracle of Apollo, in order to stimulate the individual’s wish for self-knowledge (both were hardly mentioned in the original); on the other, it underlines the importance of this work for poetry, moral and natural philosophy, and astronomy. Dante hardly mentions the visual arts themselves, but what he transmitted in terms of general knowledge, textual analysis, allegories, and biblical and mythological characters would prove to be extremely helpful for artists. What Dante offered were useful topics and programs, but he did not give instructions for visualization, although many of his topics would later become commonplaces in art. But that Dante intended his allegories and stories to be in the visibile parlare tradition is made clear in his De vulgari eloquentia. Dante recognizes a language of images, of speaking in pictures (de pictis loquentibus) or figurative speaking ( figurate dicit),

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Robert Black, Education, in: Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Cambridge 2015, pp. 260–276, see pp. 267–276. Dante Alighieri, Conuiuio di dante alighieri fiorentino, Florence 1490. This might have been inspired by Ficino’s translation of Dante’s Monarchia, where he already had been claimed as a Platonic philosopher. Dante Alighieri, Lo amoroso convivio di Dante, Venice 1521.

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which may be seen as an allegorical language, and he refers to the example of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (7).58 Dante’s Convivio is divided into four books: Book 1 treats the theory of knowledge, which had philosophy as its guiding principle. Knowledge should be transmitted in the vernacular to reach more people. Therefore, Dante opens a discussion on the relative value of the vernacular and Latin, which outlines the vernacular as a servant of mankind. He also discusses the value of commentaries as transmitters of knowledge. Book 2 discusses Orpheus helping the unlearned, the meaning of allegory, and the liberal arts. Dante offers ten arts, including the sciences, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and theology. Book 3 deals with Aristotle as a reference for wisdom, and the connection between love and philosophy/sapienza. Book 4 again explains the link between love and philosophy, and the outline of the mechanical arts. Throughout the book there are some recurring topics that were essential to late medieval and Renaissance education. In it, Dante makes several references to the other standard literature that a learned person would have consulted, which he thought was useful to transmit to the unlearned. His main reference is Aristotle, the main authority in questions of philosophy. To give Aristotle even more authority than what was transmitted through his philosophical and scientific writings, Dante made him a religious person, someone who had faith and obedience (dignissimo di fede e d’obedienza) (Convivio 4.6).59 The preferred works that Dante cites in his Convivio are written by Aristotle (Ethics, Metaphysics, Animals, De Celo et Mundo, and others), Plato (Timeus, the only text by Plato available in the Middle Ages), Boethius (De Consolatione), Augustine (Confessions), Vergil (Aeneid), Ovid (Metamorphoses), Cicero (De amicitia), and, in addition, Avicenna, Algazel, Socrates, Dionisyius Areopagita, Titus Livius, Horace, Juvenal, Seneca, and many more. This means that, in his compilation, Dante basically drew on the authorities and other classical authors in the entire curriculum that a learned person would have studied at school and in higher education. Dante’s approach to transmitting knowledge has a didactic philological intent. With the help of a love poem, he explained in several chapters those parts that link the poem to knowledge and the sciences. His method is twofold, employing an allegorical and a literary explanation, the classical approach mentioned above, which turned out to be very helpful for painters who wanted to depict allegories. Dante said that it would be necessary to show

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Dante gives Ovid’s example of the speaking birds in Metamorphoses 5, which was de facto no human speaking but a figurative speaking in imitation of something else (De vulgari eloquentia 1.7) (Dante Alighieri, Über die Beredsamkeit der Volkssprache, trans. Francis Cheneval, Hamburg 2007, p. 7). Dante, Convivio, p. 239.

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that the real message was often hidden behind an allegory (Convivio 1.1–2). The intent of an allegory would be to enable a search for the hidden truth (nascosta veritade) (Convivio 2.1). The allegory is indeed one of the leading topics Dante wants to transmit. Therefore, he gives a variety of examples, of which many were useful for artists. Since allegories often resulted from literary analyses, he explained the principles of textual exegesis, namely, how to read and interpret a literary text. A literary analysis should look at the facts stated in literature, and search for the spiritual meaning behind it. Here a thorough knowledge of literature would help, which allowed for an anagogical solution. He would approach the following poem by first offering the literal meaning, followed by the allegory, since the literal meaning provided the material for the allegory. Textual analysis was therefore parallel in every approach, be it in language, science, or architecture. It always needed a foundation to be built upon (Convivio 2.1). Dante explained the method that many late medieval commentators used in unraveling literary and scientific meaning to their readership. Two decades later, the Bolognese university professor Giovanni del Virgilio would provide his interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1322–1323), which was based on a similar approach. Dante’s reader therefore learned about the basics of textual and literary analysis, and furthermore also about the meanings of and uses for an allegory. A reader like the painter Filippino Lippi was interested in both approaches and possessed both the vernacular Ovid edition, probably the commented-on Bonsignori version, and Dante’s Convivio.60 Dante relied on the fourfold approach to literary exegesis explained above. He said that allegory should be one of four senses useful for deciphering literary texts (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical), and he provides Orpheus as an example of an allegorical reading. While referring to Ovid he explains that Orpheus was presented as someone able to move the unlearned, those who had no sense for sciences and arts. The charms expressed through his cithara could move animals, stones, and trees, and likewise he could use his voice to move simple human beings who knew no sciences or arts. As a wise man, Orpheus could be used as an allegory both by theologians and by literati, and Dante would use him in the allegorical sense following the poets (Convivio 2.1). This allegorical reading of Orpheus was extremely helpful for artists. Although the version of the enchanting Orpheus was incorporated likewise in the Liber Theodoli and in Vergil’s Bucolics (see below), it was Dante’s Convivio which was the most easily accessible and best-explained source for an artist. Isolated as a single representation extracted from his original context, Orpheus 60

See inventory in Doris Carl, Das Inventar der Werkstatt von Filippino Lippi aus dem Jahre 1504, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 31:2–3, 1987, pp. 373–391, see pp. 388–389.

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4 Luca della Robbia, Orpheus, 1437–1439. Florence: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Photo: Courtesy of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze

presented here in his capacity to move people, animals, and stones entered the visual arts in many examples in both painting and sculpture. One of the most telling examples is the enchanting Orpheus reliefs made by Luca della Robbia in the Florentine campanile, where Orpheus was meant to mediate between the liberal and the mechanical arts, the learned and the unlearned (see below) (Fig. 4). Manifold examples of Orpheus as a single allegory include Bertoldo di Giovanni’s Orpheus sculpture (ca. 1480), the drawings on Orpheus Charming the Animals by an unknown Ferrarese, from the fifteenth century, and by

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Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano from the early sixteenth, as well as the bronze plaquette by the Orpheus master from the early sixteenth century. As another explanation of an allegory, Dante uses Hercules fighting with the giant Anteus, who through reason succeeded in defeating him. Dante refers this story to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to Lucan. While lying on the ground, Anteus took on the force and strength of the earth. Once Hercules realized what was happening, he made Anteus move away from his natural source of power and was able to win (Convivio 3.3). Also the fight between Hercules and Antaeus would become one of the most popular representations in art, in painting, sculpture, and ceramics, of which numerous examples may be found: School of Andrea Mantegna (engraving, ca. 1497; Fig. 5), dish from Deruta (majolica, ca. 1490–1500, New York, Metropolitan Museum), Antonio del Pollaiuolo (painting, ca. 1478, Florence, Uffizi; sculpture, ca. 1478, Florence, Bargello; sculpture, ca. 1490; Fig. 6), and Giambologna (bronze sculpture, 1578–1580, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Both of these allegories, Orpheus and Hercules, became extremely popular in art, and the fact that both figures appeared as isolated topics removed from their context and story show that they were primarily depicted as allegories, following Dante’s proposal. The artist was aware that he was realizing a topic from Ovid, but his immediate source of access would have been Dante and the wish to immortalize an allegory. Also, Solomon is used to exemplify allegories. And again Solomon is isolated from the background story in order to focus on his personification of Sapientia (Convivio 4.5). Dante might have influenced the plenitude of individual Solomon figures symbolizing wisdom both inside and outside churches (Judgment of Solomon, Venice, Doge palace; Giorgione, Judgment of Salomon, 1496, Florence, Uffizi; Raphael, Judgment of Solomon, 1509–1511, Rome, Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura).61 Dante also explained the virtues and vices with an allegorical meaning. Following Aristotle’s Ethics, Dante informs the reader that there were eleven virtues: strength, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, honor-loving, gentleness, reliability, truthfulness, eutrapelia (from the Greek for “wittiness”), and justice. Each of them had two concomitant vices of exaggeration or reduction. All of these would provide the bases for an active or contemplative life, of which the biblical figures Mary and Martha were the examples: Martha for the active part, and Mary as the contemplative (Convivio 4.17). The allegory of the active

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Other important topics deriving from Dante are seven gifts given by the Holy Spirit: sapienza, intellect, advice, strength, science, devoutness, and fear of God (Convivio 4.21), and the four ages of man, adolescence until the fifteenth year, youth until the forty-fifth year, senior until the seventieth year, and senile until the eightieth year (Convivio 4.23–24), and the hours of the day (Convivio 4.23) (Dante, Convivio, pp. 299–300, 309–315).

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5 School of Andrea Mantegna, Hercules and Antaeus, ca. 1497. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (Rogers Fund 1918)

and the contemplative life entered art in manifold versions. The example of Christ’s visit to the home of Mary and Martha told in the Gospel of St. Luke is an omnipresent example in art. While Mary listened to Christ’s teachings, Martha was preoccupied with housekeeping. In late medieval painting this topic had a fixed place, as, for example, in Fra Angelico’s Agony in the Garden with

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6 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules, ca. 1490. Berlin: Bode Museum. Photo: bpk Bildagentur, Bode Museum, Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY

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Mary and Martha (ca. 1437, Florence, San Marco), Giovanni da Milano’s frescoes in the Rinuccini Chapel (1365, Florence, Santa Croce), and Alessandro Allori’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (1580 Florence, Banca Toscana). Although Dante dedicates his Convivio to the unlearned, he speaks directly about manual working people only a few times. Here he draws on Aristotle, who had created the most authoritative description of the liberal and the mechanical arts. Putting this into a Christian context, Dante advised that the artificers, of whatever orientation but united in the process of producing a work, should be as obedient and faithful as Aristotle (Convivio 4.6). Dante praises the human nature of the artifex, who was capable of producing beautiful things out of a material. But the human intellect and his fantasy were limited in creating from material, as the highest union and perfection was in God (Convivio 3.4). Dante continues that there are different arts: the rational arts, to which belonged speech, and the mechanical arts, which produce with material. To whichever orientation the art belonged, however, namely, to the liberal or mechanical arts, they all had to follow principles and an advisor (Convivio 4.9). Without offering a list of categories, Dante subsumes under the mechanical arts all the manual work of daily life, that is, the human operations concerned with producing something with material by either a master or an artifex (Convivio 4.6 and 9). In the context of astrology, Dante explains the structure of the liberal arts (Convivio 2.3–5). The first seven heavens were home to the sciences: the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astrology). The eighth heaven, where the stars have their home, corresponds to the natural sciences (natural philosophy, metaphysics), and the ninth heaven to the moral sciences and the divine science, which is theology. Compared with the mythological owners mentioned above, Venus could be compared to rhetoric, the sun to arithmetic, Mars to music, Jupiter to geometry and perspective, and Saturn to astrology (Convivio 2.13–14). The natural sciences, the moral sciences, and metaphysics actually counted as philosophy, and especially the kind of philosophy for which Dante invented his allegory of the gentle woman (Convivio 3.11). Philosophy as the mother of all the arts and sciences was seen as the guiding principle for Dante throughout his encyclopedia of knowledge. She is on top of all the science and literature, and is taught (at Dante’s time) in monastery schools and in disputations (Convivio 2.12 and 15, 3.9–14). Dante’s compendium proved to be an extremely useful and accessible source for iconography, and therefore entered the visual arts in many ways. Dante’s system of the arts and sciences is one of the most complex structures he presented. He owed his system of the arts and sciences to a long tradition (see Chapter 1), and very learned artists were familiar with the topic even earlier in the Middle Ages, which is proved by a few examples. For the few versions during the Middle Ages, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a

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text of wide diffusion in Latin schools of the Middle Ages, was responsible. Here the liberal arts were represented by philosophy, a combination often used in the visual arts.62 The topic undoubtedly became more familiar after 1300; once Dante had finished the Convivio, it might have influenced Andrea Pisano’s Florentine campanile reliefs. One of the few preceding visualizations of the liberal arts was created by Nicola Pisano in 1268 for the pulpit in the Sienese cathedral. It followed the classical order of the trivium and quadrivium, supplemented with philosophy. Following Seidel, the program went back to Martianus Capella (De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii) and Alanus de Insulis (Anticlaudianus), where Pisano might have been helped by the grammar professor Teobaldo di Orlando.63 Surely, Giotto must have been familiar with Dante’s Convivio when he designed a figurative sculptural program for the Florentine campanile around 1334–1340/41. Giotto provided the general program for the campanile, the decorative reliefs of which were first started by Pisano and his workshop. The five missing reliefs on the north side were finished by Luca della Robbia between 1437 and 1439.64 For the sculptural decoration of the campanile, a cycle of the artes liberales and artes mechanicae was planned, together with other topics that occurred in Dante’s Convivio. The hexagonal reliefs included some biblical figures, the virtues and sacraments, the planets, inventions, and the seven mechanical and the seven liberal arts. The mechanical arts and the inventors seem to have been mixed deliberately, and might suggest an equal valuation among the artes, as Kreytenberg suggests.65 The program starts with biblical figures (Adam and Eve), followed by Jonitus as the inventor of astrology, architecture, medicine, horse riding, and wool weaving;

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For early representations of the artes liberales, see Paolo D’Ancona, Le rappresentazioni allegoriche delle arti liberali nel Medio Evo e nel Rinascimento, L’Arte, 5:5, 1902, pp. 137–155, 211–228, 269–289, 370–385; Fabio Stock, La raffigurazione delle arti liberali, in: Il linguaggio figurativo della fontana maggiore di Perugia, ed. Carlo Santini, Perugia 1996, pp. 291–312; Ursula Schaefer, Artes im Mittelalter, Berlin 1999; Michael Stolz, Artes-liberalesZyklen: Formationen des Wissens im Mittelalters, Tübingen 2004; Michael Stolz, Wege des Wissens: Zur Konventionalität mittelalterlicher Artes-Bildlichkeit, in: Konventionalität und Konversation, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz et al., Tübingen 2005, vol. 2, pp. 273–301; Laura Cleaver, The liberal arts in sculpture and metalwork in twelfth-century France and ideals of education, Immediations, 1:4, 2007, pp. 56–75; Max Seidel, Padre e figlio. Nicola e Giovanni Pisano, Venice 2012, pp. 175–211; Gregorio Piaia, Il nesso “philosophia – sapientes – artes liberales” fra Medioevo e Rinascimento: Un approccio iconologico, Atti/Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere ed Arti, 170:2, 2011–2012, pp. 195–212. Seidel, Padre e figlio. Nicola e Giovanni Pisano, pp. 175–211. Luca della Robbia finished the series with grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, and Orpheus. See on the reliefs: D’Ancona, Le rappresentazioni allegoriche delle arti liberali nel Medio Evo e nel Rinascimento, pp. 227–228, 269–272; Allan Marquand, Luca della Robbia, Princeton, NJ 1914, pp. 34–40; Gert Kreytenberg, Andrea Pisano und die toskanische Skulptur des 14. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1984, pp. 56–78. Kreytenberg, Andrea Pisano und die toskanische Skulptur des 14. Jahrhunderts, pp. 56–57.

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7 Andrea Pisano, Daedalus, 1340s. Florence: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Photo: Courtesy of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze

Phoroneus stands for law and order; Daedalus as the first artist (Fig. 7), followed by navigation; Hercules (Fig. 8); agriculture and chariot racing; and closing with architecture (Fig. 9), sculpture, and painting. The mechanical arts were represented by architecture, painting, sculpture, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, agriculture, commerce, and law, while the liberal arts followed the typical order with the trivium and quadrivium. Furthermore, there were heavenly bodies (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna), sacraments, prophets, two sibyls (Tiburtina and Erythrea), King David and King Salomon, and the theological virtues (caritas, spes, and fortitudo). The original distribution

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8 Andrea Pisano, Hercules, 1340s. Florence: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Photo: Courtesy of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze

of the panels is still a point of discussion. Nowadays they are held in the museum of the Opera del Duomo of Florence. Looking at Dante, we find much congruence. In Dante the spheres are mixed: he combines the skies of the Gods with the astrological skies and the Christian sky (Convivio 2.5). He also combines the skies with the sciences, and talks about the combination of the trivium and quadrivium with the natural sciences and moral sciences. Dante then gives precise directions for how to combine the heavenly bodies with the arts, like Luna with grammar, Mercury with dialectic, Venus with rhetoric, the sun with arithmetic, Mars with music,

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9 Andrea Pisano, Architecture, 1340s. Florence: Museo del’Opera del Duomo. Photo: Courtesy of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze

Jupiter with geometry, and Saturn with astrology (Convivio 2.13). These combinations given by Dante might help in composing the original setup of the hexagons. The presence of Orpheus and Hercules is another significant hint toward the Convivio as a literary source. Since Vasari, the Orpheus panel had been interpreted as representing music.66 Others have seen rhetoric or poetry in this panel.67 Following the Convivio, Orpheus should be seen here as

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Marquand, Luca della Robbia, pp. 36–37. D’Ancona, Le rappresentazioni allegoriche delle arti liberali nel Medio Evo e nel Rinascimento, p. 225; Giancarlo Gentilini, I Della Robbia. La scultura invetriata nel Rinascimento, Florence 1992, p. 91.

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the mediator between the liberal and the mechanical arts, the person who brings knowledge to the unlearned. It is this attribute which is important for the campanile’s iconography. Hercules symbolizes the victory of reason and intelligence. Dante’s Convivio does not provide a visual source for a detailed iconography, but it offers one comprehensive source for the overall concept, and, most importantly, this source was written in the vernacular. Thus far, the reliefs have not been seen in the same context as Dante’s Convivio, with Gentilini proposing Leonardo Bruni for Luca della Robbia’s part.68 Kreytenberg instead suggested a Dominican from Santa Maria Novella who was learned in scholasticism for the whole program.69 However, it is the enlarged system of the two arts combined with astrology, Orpheus, and Hercules that makes the Convivio a plausible source for Giotto’s invention. The same inspiration for an overall concept, this time painted contemporaneously with its written source, might have worked for Giotto for his fresco cycle in the Palazzo della Regione in Padua (1306–1309), in the combination of planets, astrological signs, and works of the months. However, this cycle has been damaged and repainted so much that the original is difficult to judge.70 Another program that might have been inspired by Dante’s Convivio is the fresco cyle in the Palazzo Trinci in Foligno (Sala dei planeti), which was realized by Perugian painters under the guidance of Gentile da Fabriano around 1410.71 The significant point here is that it combined the artes liberales with the planets, including the seven ages of man and the hours of the day, all topics present in Dante, a point that Anne Dunlop has already mentioned as a possible general frame for the fresco.72 In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, depictions of the liberal arts will become very frequent in painting and sculpture, although most of the examples concentrate on this topic exclusively without enlarging the program. One of the very few examples to antedate Dante’s Convivio is the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia (1277–1278), executed by the sculptors Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano (trivium and quadrivium plus philosophy), while the vast majority were

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Gentilini, I Della Robbia, p. 91. Kreytenberg, Andrea Pisano und die toskanische Skulptur des 14. Jahrhunderts, pp. 60, 77–78. See on the fresco cycle Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance, Berlin 2000, pp. 70–85 (Blume proposes iconographical similarities to miniature painting). Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance, Berlin 2000, pp. 118–125 (Blume sees an influence on the frescoes by the humanist Francesco da Fiano, who frequented this court and should have provided the inscriptions in the frescoes); Giordana Benazzi, I dipinti di Gentile da Fabriano nel Palazzo Trinci di Foligno, in: I lunedi della Galleria: Grandi restauri in Umbria, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi, Perugia 2001, pp. 137–164; Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy, University Park, PA 2009, pp. 73–87. Dunlop, Painted Palaces, pp. 85–86.

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executed afterward, like Agostino di Duccio’s reliefs (1449–1457) in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (trivium and quadrivium plus philosophy) and Antonio del Pollaiolo’s funeral monument for Pope Sixtus IV in Rome, St. Peter (1493) (trivium and quadrivium with perspective, theology, and philosophy). Examples from paintings are Andrea da Firenze with the Triumph of St. Thomas and Allegory of the Sciences (1366–1367, Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Cappella degli Spagnoli), Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi with The Seven Liberal Arts (1460, National Museum of Catalunia), Francesco Pesellino (workshop) with The Seven Liberal Arts (ca. 1450, Birmingham Museum of Art), and Pinturicchio’s liberal arts cyle in the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican (1492–1494, trivium and quadrivium). As with many literary examples for artists, they emerged from a large pool of connected literary traditions with often overlapping topics that could be expressed in many ways, topics like the liberal and mechanical arts, the wise Solomon, the enchanting Orpheus transmitting knowledge, Hercules using reason, the virtues and vices, the four ages of mankind, the seven gifts of the holy spirit, and philosophy as a guiding principle and as an allegory. Philosophical directions and concepts like the vita activa and vita contemplativa occurred in other texts as well. But Dante certainly provided an easier access to their meaning with an allegory understandable to everyone. It seems likely, therefore, that the majority of artistic representations of these topics, which did not occur in larger narrative programs, but concentrated on one of these single topics, had their origin in Dante’s Convivio. Dante’s Convivio had a major influence also on sixteenth-century art, and we have seen that this century had several print runs. The goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who admitted several times in his Vita to not possess a Latin education, was certainly well read in the vernacular curriculum. As an admirer of Dante’s Comedy, he surely also must have read his Convivio, which may have been the source for the majority of his mythological artworks.73 This is particularily evident in a model for a fountain he prepared for the French king. And being very proud of his “bella fantasia,” he said, he not only wanted to present this as a model, but would likewise like to describe with his own words what his invention was about. This description is very close to the allegories in the Convivio – and also to Giotto’s realization of this program in the campanile reliefs. Cellini describes two major allegories, Mars and Music, which Dante had given as a couple of the planets and the arts. They are accompanied by four virtues, philosophy as the head of all arts and sciences, including the manual arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture, to which he added disegno.74 Even in the first half of the sixteenth century the Convivio 73 74

See, for example, Benvenuto Cellini, Vita, ed. Ettore Camesasca, Milan 1985, pp. 485–486. Cellini, Vita, pp. 458–459.

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seem to have inspired an artist’s allegorical education, although its popular time was certainly in the fourteenth and fifteenth century.

Cristoforo Landino’s Commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy Cristoforo Landino’s (1424–1498) commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy was highly influential on Renaissance art and culture (Florence, 1481).75 While Dante’s original version invited artists mainly to illustrate the text faithfully, Landino’s commentary opened it up to a variety of allegorical or mythological representations. Similar to other commentators, he not only explained the text itself, but also included his own broad knowledge of ancient mythology that was now accessible in the vernacular. Where Dante’s Divine Comedy is spiked with short quotations from Ovid and Vergil, Landino picks up on Dante’s brief mentions and explains many stories in detail. And Landino enhanced the stories in a way one would not necessarily have read in the classical editions of Ovid and Vergil themselves. Given the many narrative traditions of mythologies, Landino sometimes delivers a different version, and from these differences it is possible to tell if a painter followed the stories from his commentary. The painter Bartolomeo di Giovanni (1475–1501), a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio, depicted a few cassone panels with scenes originating in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but given in the version portrayed by Landino. Bartolomeo’s two panels from 1487 were entitled Story of the Argonauts or Story of Jason (Departure of the Argonauts, Argonauts in Cholcis, London, Ashburnham/Kapstadt/Mari-Cha Collection at the Frick, New York). While Jason’s story in general is present in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his Heriodes (and ultimately derives from Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautika), Bartolomeo turned to Landino’s version of Jason and closely followed his narrative (Inferno XVIII).76 The first panel shows the departure, Jason’s landing with his boat in Colchis, already in possession of the Golden Fleece on which he is riding, and then kneeling in front of King Eta. He is accompanied by his fellow traveling companions: Hercules, Telamon, Castor, and Pollux. The second panel shows again the island Cholchis with Jason’s boats in the harbor. Close to the harbor is the temple of Mars, where the skin of the sheep gets sacrificed to Mars. Next to it is the scene where Jason had to fight the dragon/snake, while above Medea intones her magical spells. Then on the right, Jason plows the land with two boars and seeds the tooth of the snake, from which would immediately grow men fighting bitterly, as shown in the scene in front. 75

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Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, 4 vols. (citations after this edition). Landino was certainly not the first to comment on Dante; most notably, Boccaccio and Filelfo preceded him, but Landino’s commentary was unchallenged for many decades and was the most important commentary during the Renaissance. Schubring proposes different sources, like the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius, Valerius Flaccus, and Ovid, Metamorphoses 7 (Paul Schubring, Cassoni, pp. 311–312, nos. 389 and 390).

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Jason then marries Medea, the daughter of the king, a scene shown on the left of the temple with the banquet scene in front. All episodes are found in Landino with almost the same narrative sequence, whereas Ovid’s Epistle mainly deals with Medea’s unrequited love and her magical spells, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses lacks many scenes as well, like the sacrifice and the temple of Mars, and Jason’s traveling companions. Also, the scene that Bartolomeo di Giovanni narrates in two cassone panels seems to be taken from Ovid’s story of Peleus and Thetis (Metamorphoses 11), from which, however, the painter takes only part of the general setting (ca. 1490–1500, Figs. 10 and 11).77 He shows a landscape with a shore that is shaped by a promotory with two sides reaching into the sea. The waters are not very deep, and the cave on the shore is almost artifical. But many of the details in Ovid’s version are not present in the painting, like Thetis as the goddess of the seas riding on a dolphin, her transformation into different figures for protection, and Peleus insisting on coming together with her – all topics which constituted the main narrative stream in Ovid. The painting, however, portrays details not present in Ovid, like the centaurs and the marriage scene. There is more congruence in details with Landino’s version of Peleus and Thetis (Inferno V.52–69). Landino eliminates Peleus’s entreaties to Thetis and instead concentrates on their son Achilles: his being nurtured by the centaurs with uncooked food; his learning music, astromony, and medicine from them; and Thetis bringing Achilles to the island of Scyros and its king Lycomedes, where Achilles could hide away as a woman among the king’s daughters until Thetis had new arms made for him by Vulcan. This is precisely the story that the painting depicts: the happy marriage of the parents surrounded by Achilles playing music with the centaurs. Another part shows Thetis and Vulcan bringing Achilles over the sea to King Lycomedes and his daughters, where Achilles is one of them, and Vulcan waits for his duty. The island is filled with centaurs playing music and preparing uncooked food (fruits). These scenes were much more appropriate for the destination of a wedding gift in the cassone than the original version by Ovid was.78 One of the many side stories in Landino’s commentary was his description of Lucian of Samosata’s story of the famous ancient painter Apelles and his narration on Calumny. This story circulated in two different versions in Florence, and research has unanimously favored Alberti’s version in his treatise 77

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Schubring refers to Metamorphoses XI and gives the missing scenes on Ovid as the painter’s free invention (Schubring, Cassoni, no. 379). Centaurs are an important topic in Landino’s commentary and Margit Lisner points to Landino’s Dante commentary as a possible source for Michelangelo’s relief of the centauers (Margrit Lisner, Form und Sinngehalt bei Michelangelos Kentaurenschlacht, mit Notizen zu Bertoldo di Giovanni, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24:3, 1980, pp. 299–344, see pp. 300–304, 310–311).

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10 Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Peleus and Thetis (The Arrival and Procession), ca. 1490–1500. Paris: Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

on painting as the source for the many pictorical renderings. It was, however, Landino’s version of the story of Calumny that had a big impact on Italian Renaissance painting (Inferno XXIII.142–148). One of the first representations was Botticelli’s famous painting of Calumny (see Fig. 1), which was painted shortly after Landino’s editio princeps appeared (ca. 1482).79 A textual

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Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–after 180 CE) was a Greek satirist. His text on Slander circulated in different versions in Italy. For a detailed analysis, see my article: From Dante to Landino: Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles and its sources, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 59:3, 2017, pp. 325–339.

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comparison between the ancient version and Alberti’s and Landino’s versions clarifies two points: despite the fact that all three recount the same story, Lucian and Landino are closer in descriptive detail and in the background story. To consider some of these details: in Lucian and Landino, the person sitting on the right is characterized as having donkey’s ears, like Midas. In Alberti, this person simply possesses large ears. In Lucian and Landino, the man resembling Midas extends his arm toward Calumny, who approaches him; in Alberti no such episode occurs. In Lucian and Landino, Calumny holds a torch in her left hand and seizes a youth in her right. In Alberti – following Guarino – the torch is in her right hand while she holds the youngster in her left. This boy in Alberti’s version raises his hand, whereas in Lucian and

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Landino he gestures as if preaching, and calls on God to witness his innocence. The man in front of Calumny in Alberti is called a guide, whereas in Lucian and Landino he is Envy. Penitence is described by Alberti and Guarino as wearing funeral garments, whereas Lucian describes her mourning in black. In Landino, she wears a black dress and weeps uncontrollably. Last comes Veritas, whom for Alberti is a young girl, “vergognosa e pudica,” alluding to the Veritas pudica. Lucian does not describe this woman at all, and Landino describes her as coming to help the wrongfully accused man. Only Landino mentions a wordless communication between the last two figures, which address one another. To summarize: in Alberti’s version, some important details are missing that are, however, present in most of the other translations; these are Midas’s

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10 (cont.)

donkey ears, the judge extending his hand toward Calumny, the young boy calling for God’s help, and the weeping Penitence who turns back toward Calumny. Alberti, however, points to this last person as a Virtus pudica, a topos in Renaissance literature and art, which will be rendered by many painters as a naked Venus pudica, and will also be picked up by Botticelli. In any case, what makes Landino’s version singular is its stress on the two transcendental themes of divine help and religion, which are here exemplified by the victim and by Truth, who are both calling for help and insight from above. The differences between Alberti’s and Landino’s details are exactly reflected in Botticelli’s painting, which clearly follows all of the details of Landino’s version.

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11 Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Peleus and Thetis (The Wedding), ca. 1490–1500. Paris: Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Botticelli’s Calumny can be directly related in all figures and scenes (including the background reliefs) to Landino’s version of Calumny, with a very few additions coming from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Shortly after 1500, when representations of Calumny suddenly became very popular, a series of drawings and etchings were produced that derived from either Alberti’s or Landino’s

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11 (cont.)

version. The drawing by Mantegna (1504–1506, London, British Museum) and Girolamo Mocetto’s engraving (1500–1506, Chicago, Art Institute; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Cleveland Museum of Art) are virtually identical with Landino’s version (although research so far had claimed Alberti as the source), and only change the hand movements of Calumny. Outside Italy, Alberti seems to have benefited from more popularity, of which Pieter Brueghel’s

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drawing (1565) and Rembrandt’s drawing (1652–1654) are two examples. Landino’s text was doubtless the guiding source on the Apelles topic for Botticelli and Mantegna, and many painters thereafter.80

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Angela Dressen, From Dante to Landino: Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles and its sources, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 59:3, 2017, pp. 325–339.

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11 (cont.)

Landino’s commentary could also be used for complex fresco cycles. In the Cappella Nuova of Orvieto’s cathedral, the older part of the fresco cycle by Fra Angelico referred to Dante’s original version of the Divine Comedy, while Luca Signorelli finished the cycle while referring to the commentary. Between 1499 and 1502, it was Signorelli’s task to continue the chapel decoration on the ceiling already started by Fra Angelico in the 1440s. The documents show

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clearly that a committee was involved in making selections and recommendations for the artistic program. While Signorelli had to strictly follow a program given to him for completing the part of Fra Angelico, he seemed to have had more liberty with the walls. For this new contract, he could submit a program which would then undergo evaluation by the committee; in the negative case, it would be substituted by a program from the committee. But Signorelli was skilled enough to propose a program which passed the evaluation.81 While Signorelli’s upper wall paintings were inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and general Judgment Day iconography (showing the scenes of Preachers of the Antichrist, Final Judgment, Resurrection, Damned, Beatified, Hell),82 for the lower walls – divided into different sections, each filled with author portraits, little narratives, and grotesques – many different sources have been proposed, usually referring to each of the portrayed authors themselves.83 But instead of relying on a quantity of sources, the attempt will be made here to derive the scenes almost entirely from Landino’s commentary on the Divine Comedy.84 This follows the general idea that the commentator incorporated many fuller stories on the people and works mentioned briefly in the original, and that he added a lot of mythology not necessarily present in the original work. In theory, there could have been a variety of sources for these little scenes, but the fact that Landino mentions almost all of them in one single source, and in the source most plausible for the chapel’s iconography, this 81

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Edwin Hall and Horst Uhr, Patrons and painter in quest of an iconographic program: The case of the Signorelli frescoes in Orvieto, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55:1, 1992, pp. 35–56; Jonathan B. Riess, Luca Signorelli. La Cappella San Brizio a Orvieto, Torino 1995; Laurence B. Kanter, Luca Signorelli – The Complete Paintings, London 2001; Sara Nair James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto. Liturgy, Poetry and a Vision of the End-Time, Aldershot 2003; Creighton E. Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, University Park, PA 2003; Marianna Villa, Signorelli e il purgatorio “visualizzato” a Orvieto, Dante e l’arte, 3, 2016, pp. 121–142. Possible sources for the iconography: Edwin Hall and Horst Uhr, Patrons and painter in quest of an iconographic program: The case of the Signorelli frescoes in Orvieto, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55:1, 1992, pp. 35–56, see p. 46 (Nuremberg Chronicle as a visual and textual source for some scenes in the upper wall paintings, suggested to Signorelli by the committee); James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, pp. 70–72, 82–85 (Nuremberg Chronicle thesis for the upper frescoes, and huomini famosi cycles and manuscript illumination for the lower parts); Villa, Signorelli e il purgatorio “visualizzato” a Orvieto, pp. 121–142, see p. 125 (upper part influenced by Domenico Savonarola, lower part visual counterpart in studioli). James, instead, while not neglecting the original authors as a source, sees a second important influence coming from the Ovid moralisé tradition (James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, pp. 106–113). While this interpretation seems plausible it has to be recognized that the Ovid moralisé tradition is picked up in Landino’s interpretation. Gilbert in a similar vein pointed to Pierre Bersuire (Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, p. 110). Some authors have made general comparisons to the humanistic idea behind Landino’s commentary on Dante, without making any specific suggestion (Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, pp. 111–112; Villa, Signorelli e il purgatorio “visualizzato” a Orvieto, pp. 121–142, see pp. 126, 133).

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12 Luca Signorelli, Ovid and Vergil, 1499–1502. Orvieto: Cathedral, Cappella Nuova. Photo: © Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

becomes the crucial argument to explain the artist’s choice. Having used the Divine Comedy for the upper parts of the wall, it seems plausible to continue along the same line. If Signorelli used the Landino commentary in its printed form, he had anyhow both versions in one volume. And the printed commentary was, at any rate, the most widely used, distributed, and accessible version of Dante’s Comedy, because the original text was printed along with it. The characters and mythologies that Signorelli selected from the commentary are often rendered visually in a simplified iconography, pointing only to some of the essential characters and gestures (Fig. 12).85 The sequence of author portraits surrounded by four medallions with scenes from their texts starts on the left side of the entry with Sallust, who is generally identified with his two works: the Conspiracy of Catiline and the War of Jugurtha.86 Landino mentions Sallust in his second proemio, talking about his historical books on wars, while he stresses their second meaning, namely, the morality of leaders and of the Roman populace. Signorelli does not offer a 85

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The author portraits are interpreted as follows: Dante, Statius, Vergil, Lucan, Ovid, Cicero (Riess, Luca Signorelli, p. 11); Kanter proposes for the West wall Vergil and next either Ovid or Claudian (Kanter, Luca Signorelli – The Complete Paintings, p. 58). The portrait has been identified as Sallust by James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 89. Other interpretations see him as Cicero (Riess, Luca Signorelli, p. 11), or Salutati (Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, pp. 94–98).

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precise narrative of the two wars, and they can hardly be distinguished by the little medaillons. Since Landino mentioned two books on war, Signorelli consequently presented two battle scenes. Dante comes next with scenes generally identified with the first four canti of the purgatory. The author is a self-explaining figure in this authoritative sequence, and his identity is generally accepted. Statius on his right is surrounded by the following canti (Purgatorio V–VIII).87 In Landino, Statius holds an important spiritual place between Dante and Vergil. He describes Statius as an allegory of the human intellect. While Dante would stand for sensuality and Vergil for the human intellect, they were both, however, unable to perceive on their own. Statius as the allegory for the human intellect had the capacity to go beyond, and could also perceive what was not accessible to reason (Purgatoio XXI.1–15). Therefore, Landino assigns Statius an almost higher status and insight than the other two, and subsequently Signorelli places him in the sequence with Dante and Vergil. Continuing on the wall next to Statius, three extra panels are filled with scenes from the purgatory. Since the altar wall had been significantly modified during the baroque era, it is almost impossible to establish an exact program. Most likely, some panels went missing, and possibly the connected author portraits too.88 What has been proposed for what remains are scenes from either Dante’s Comedy, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Vergil’s Aeneid, while the two latter would build a bridge to the other side. The presented characters and topics like Charity, Hercules, and Nessus can all be found in Landino. On the next wall, the following portrait with four scenes is dedicated to Ovid and his Metamorphoses (Fig. 13).89 Ovid is an author often cited by Landino, who used him as an ancient authoritative reference. Landino explicitly dedicates the purgatory to Ovid and Vergil. Together with Vergil and Claudianus, Ovid had talked about hell (Proemio XIV, Inferno III.1–12). Furthermore, Ovid could be seen as a benefactor for Dante, a poetic guide (Proemio XII). The medallions illustrate the four episodes: Pluto in front of 87

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This portrait had been identified as Statius by James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 87; Riess, Luca Signorelli, pp. 32–33; Villa, Signorelli e il purgatorio “visualizzato” a Orvieto, p. 138. For example, James proposes as the lost author portrait Boccaccio with surrounding scenes from the Genealogy (James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, pp. 87–88). The identification of Ovid is sustainded by James (James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 88). Kanter sees in this portrait either Ovid or Claudian (Kanter, Luca Signorelli – The Complete Paintings, p. 58). Others have identified this person with Claudianus and his work De raptu Proserpinae (Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, p. 93). Claudiano holds an important place for Landino as the last eloquent writer in Latin coming from the Florentine region (Proemio IV). Together with Vergil, Ovid, and Statius, Claudianus would be an important writer from the Latin tradition expressing himself on hell (Proemio XIV, Inferno III.1–12). However, in the Renaissance, stories on Pluto and Proserpina would be accessed more easily through Ovid, or through other secondary sources like Landino.

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13 Luca Signorelli, Ovid, 1499–1502. Orvieto: Cathedral, Cappella Nuova. © Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

Etna with Enceladus carrying his wagon; Proserpina at Etna with Venus, Pallas, and Diana; the Rape of Proserpina; and Ceres looking for her daughter. Pluto is an important figure in Landino’s interpretation of the Inferno. He symbolizes for Landino earthly belongings and riches, including gold and silver, which were all values that man was looking for and accumulating with diabolical intentions. And Landino points to Vergil, who had located Pluto’s city in hell, where a virtuous man could not go. Pluto would be the devil of this place, punishing men who had sinned with their riches because it would not be sufficient just to know what was right and not doing it, and thereby showing that the intellect and the sensuality did not go together (Inferno VII.1–6). Landino also gives the story of Proserpina, although not in detail. With the story of her rape by Pluto he refers here to Ovid, while he is, however, making his own connection between Proserpina and Methelda, as Landino’s invention, and flowers (Inferno X.73–84, Purgatorio XXVIII.43–60). He explains that Proserpina had been raped while collecting flowers in a garden, an act which

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had always been interpreted as virtuous. Proserpina walking with Diana should be interpreted with Landino as an alter ego: Proserpina had to split her life during the course of a year: living in hell with Pluto she was called Proserpina, while on earth she was called Diana (Inferno X.73–84). Ultimately, Ceres mourns Proserpina and her rape by Pluto and blames Jupiter (Inferno X.73–84). Ovid and Vergil are sitting side by side on the wall looking at each other, with Dante sitting on the opposite site.90 Landino called Vergil the wisest of men, who symbolized the intellect full of wisdom, but was likewise enriched by divine grace, which would elevate him above everyone else (Inferno VII.1–3). The scene in the medallion with Aeneas in the Underworld,91 a grisaille painting, comes originally from Vergil’s Aeneid IV, but is rendered here following Landino’s commentary (Inferno II.10–36). Vergil’s original would not offer much in terms of how the underworld should be presented. Landino compares Aeneas to Dante, with both going into the underworld without having committed fraud or violence (Inferno XII.73–90; see also Inferno IX.16–30). Landino instead describes hell as a place where the souls of sinners were punished eternally. Signorelli depicts devils with horns and wings who torture naked men and women – as nakedness since the Middle Ages stood for the soul. Only in Landino do we find the right context that allows Aeneas to have a place in the chapel of divine judgment. Landino points to many parallels in Dante’s and Vergil’s accounts of hell, including Aeneas’s trip to the underworld and the Cumaean Sibyl guiding him. Vergil as a guide for Dante and the Sibyl as a guide for Aeneas are paralleled many times throughout the commentary (for example, Inferno IX.16–30). Aeneas was accompanied by a Sibyl to the underworld because Aeneas desired to arrive at the “sommo bene,” the highest good, a divine stage that is closest to God. Aeneas would symbolize virtue, while the Sibyl was a symbol for the superior reason of a virtuous man, with the golden trunk in her hand being a sign of human wisdom (Inferno III.82–99). Following Landino, the sign of Aeneas’s willing trip into this unknown world was his uncovered sword that showed how strong and invincible his mind was against anything unforeseen (Inferno III.13–21). The medallion depicts precisely this scene of Aeneas taking his trip, guided by the Sibyl with her trunk, and showing his sword to the spectator, who would thereby have been made aware of his mind. Therefore, Aeneas’s descent into hell and 90

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The identification of Vergil is sustained by James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 88; Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, p. 92; Jonathan Kline, Orpheus, Aeneas, and Hercules in the Cappella Nova of Orvieto Cathedral, in: Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe. Continuity and Expansion, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Shelley Perolve, Turnhout 2018, pp. 117–131. This scene has predominantly been interpreted as Aeneas in the underworld with the Cumaean Sibyl: James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 122; Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, p. 93; Kline, Orpheus, Aeneas, and Hercules in the Cappella Nova of Orvieto Cathedral, pp. 117–131.

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his reascent, accompanied by the Sibyl, to the contemplative life, the beatified souls, and God is an appropriate interpretation for a chapel on the Last Judgment, which Vergil himself could not have offered. The medallion with “Hercules overthrows Cerberus” is located on the right.92 Where Dante mentions Cerberus only briefly, Landino tells the reader about Hercules’s fight with Cerberus and the allegory behind it. Cerberus was seen as the infernal spirit guided by diabolical temptations, whereas Hercules symbolized heroic virtues, which were able to overcome the diabolical adversary. These were the diabolical temptations that Vergil had narrated (Inferno IX.91–105). The medallion below shows Orpheus in front of a variety of people.93 Landino explains that the sound of Orpheus’s cithara could move animals and mountains, and makes the rivers stop flowing. He continues by explaining that Orpheus had the capacity to move people, especially the lesser educated, to realize virtue, and to calm the furious. This is what seems to be represented in the painted scene, an animated mass of wild and furious people, whom Orpheus tries to calm. Landino does not give a direct link to Vergil for this episode, but it was one of the most common sources for painters when they referred visually to Vergil (Inferno IV.130–144). As we will see below, Vergil’s two most painted topics were Orpheus and Aeneas, and painters were fairly knowledgeable about their stories. The same is true for the medallion on the left of Vergil’s portrait. It shows Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from the underworld – the only topic not present in Landino, but certainly known to the painter as one of the most important topics in Vergil, for which he had numerous visual references. The sequence finishes on the right side with Lucan (Fig. 14).94 Landino mentions Lucan as an author with high moral virtues expressed in his works, morals with which only Horace and Ovid could be compared. Citing his works, he mentions the Pharsalia as a narrative on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and he returns to the Pharsalia numerous times throughout his commentary (Inferno IV.76–96). In his introduction to Lucan’s story and to war in general, Landino stresses its usefulness only when the aim was to rescue one’s people with only the reason to defend oneself, as otherwise caritas was the only aim one should live for (Inferno XII.100–114). Lucan therefore had a similar meaning for Landino as Statius had, who was praised for applying virtue

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This has also been identified as Hercules and Theseus in Hades, while the other two scenes show Orpheus in Hades (James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 88; Gilbert, How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, p. 93). Following Kline, this scene about Orpheus and Eurydice follows Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Kline, Orpheus, Aeneas, and Hercules in the Cappella Nova of Orvieto Cathedral, pp. 117–131). The identification of Lucan is sustained by Riess, Luca Signorelli, p. 11. Others have seen him as Tibullus with his Elegies (James, Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto, p. 88).

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14 Luca Signorelli, Lucan, 1499–1502. Orvieto: Cathedral, Cappella Nuova. Photo: © Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

in war. Consequently, Signorelli placed both in opposition right after the chapel’s entrance. Like Statius’s also, Lucan’s surrounding medallions show general battle scenes without being very specific. The two historians at the entrance to the chapel and the intention of giving war a moral sense make the following scenes of hell, heaven, and judgment all the more potent. Evidently, Signorelli’s concept aimed at considering war-making and history under the consideration of the final judgment.

KEY EARLY RENAISSANCE MEDIATING TEXTS

Landino’s commentary on Dante is an easily accessible source of ancient mythology for a painter like Signorelli, who otherwise was mainly involved with religious topics. Landino’s Christian interpretations of mythologies made them a proper source for a sacral environment. The painter could thus add ancient wisdom and humanist interpretation to a prominent commission without having to look very far. Signorelli simply used one of the most frequented sources for artists. One should nevertheless suppose that Signorelli had some familiarity with ancient authors, especially with Ovid and Vergil and their most famous stories. He must have been aware of their importance and the popularity that they gained with Renaissance patrons. But instead of accessing six different sources with no connection to Christian morals, he found Landino’s commentary to be a source much easier to use. Signorelli’s fresco cycle is a telling example for Landino’s commentary advancing at the end of the fifteenth century to become the most influential source for mythologies for artists. Landino’s commentary would be challenged only sixty years later, in the 1540s, at a time when public lectures on Dante provided by academy members for citizens, including artisans, in need of more insight had become regular events. This is also mentioned in the commentary that followed chronologically by Alessandro Vellutello, who talks in his preface about private and public lectures on the subject for young people and adults in Florence, for example, in the church of Santa Trinità. Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary and editio princeps from 1544 would likewise receive many reprints in the following years.95 The influence Landino’s commentary had on painters can hardly be overestimated. Here within one text the artist could find everything he needed, where otherwise he might have used Dante’s Convivio, Boccaccio’s Genealogy, or Ficino’s Dell’Amore in previous years, and also ancient sources like Ovid, Vergil, Lucan, Statius, and many more. Landino’s text was the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge that was used by painters like Botticelli, Mantegna, and Signorelli; sculptors like Benedetto da Maiano;96 and a multitude of majolica painters.97 And it is well possible that Landino intended its use

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Alessandro Vellutello, La divina commedia, Venice 1544, accompanied by a new woodcut series. Most likely Benedetto da Maiano possessed the Landino edition, because Landino is mentioned in his inventory of books; see Lorenzo Cendali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, Sancasciano 1926, pp. 178–186; Creighton Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, Florence 1988, pp. 71–78. Majolica painters, and especially those involved in maiolica istoriato, are a category of artists, who benefited the most from easily accessible compendia like Dante’s Convivio and Landino’s commentary. See for example dishes like Maestro Giorgio Andreoli’s plate with the fight between Hercules and Nessus (1525, New York, Metropolitan Museum), Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo’s Story of Aeneas (1432), and his plate depicting a scene of Vulcan Venus and Mars (both New York, Metropolitan Museum).

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for the artist, as he mentioned Florentine painters and sculptors and the genesis of painting explicitly in his foreword to the commentary. RELIGIOU S LITERATURE FOR POPULAR USE

Given the quantity of religious paintings in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, one might presume that the most important text for religious matters would have always been the Bible. The Bible, however, was a book meant to be read not by a broader public but only by clerics and people of higher ranks. For those involved in theological studies and preaching, commentaries on the Bible by early church fathers and medieval authors were almost more important. They would then preach to the general populace, which heard about the Bible through the deliberately simplified exegesis of the commentators. Additionally, there were some Bible-related works written for the people. They were easier to access because they transmitted part of the Bible’s content in easier language for the unlearned. Accessing the Bible itself was much more difficult than one might think. The Bible circulated in the Middle Ages only in a Latin version. Even in the thirteenth century, it was forbidden for private men to possess a translation of the Bible, and this was true also beyond Italy, although a few medieval translations existed in households of illustrious persons.98 Thus, the Bible was not accessible for people who had not studied Latin. The normal folk would learn about its content orally from lectures and sermons in the church. In Italy, we may presume easy access to a Bible translation only from the 1470s onward, unsurprisingly at a time when the popularization of knowledge through the printing press was starting to be high. Three printed editions appeared in 1471 in Rome and in Venice. The Roman edition by the Benedictine monk Nicolò Malermi gained the patronage of the Venetian Pope Paul II and became very popular. The other two appeared in Venice, and a variety of editions followed within the century. It is highly questionable whether an Italian version existed before the 1470s, although it has been claimed that Jacobus de Voragine had already offered a translation.99 Once available at least 98

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See on the history of Bible translations: J. Schmid, Bibelübersetzungen, in: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Freiburg 1957–1965, vol. 2, pp. 402–412. See on important vernacular manuscript bibles in Italy: La Bibbia in italiano tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. La Bible Italienne au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, ed. Lino Leonardi, Florence 1998; Sabrina Corbellini, Vernacular bible manuscripts in late medieval Italy: Cultural appropriation and textual transformation, in: Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible, ed. Eyal Poleg and Laura Light, Leiden 2013, pp. 261–281, see pp. 271–276; Sabina Magrini, Vernacular bibles, biblical quotations and the Paris Bible in Italy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century: A first report, in: Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible, ed. Eyal Poleg and Laura Light, pp. 237–259. Walter Arthur Copinger, The Bible and Its Transmission, Leipzig 1972, pp. 312–314.

RELIGIOUS LITERATURE FOR POPULAR USE

in parts, the vernacular version was used for education.100 Considering these complicated circumstances, it is understandable why a text like Dante’s Divine Comedy had a much wider readership, and thus a more direct impact. Both artists and patrons had firsthand access to this text. But this situation changed from the 1470s onward and artists were keen to get access to a vernacular Bible and inform themselves about the stories of the testament. In the two scrittoi of Benedetto and Giuliano da Maiano, sculptors who were lucky enough to each have his own reading room, a vernacular Bible appeared in the inventory from 1497.101 Also, Leonardo possessed a vernacular Bible (Bibia volgare historiata) in several editions, beginning in 1471.102 Once the Bible was allowed to become a popular book, many people helped to render access. Isaia da Este, an Augustinian canon, translated a part of the Bible, the Cantica Canticorum of Solomon. This text was printed in Venice in 1504. Both in the incipit and in the explicit, Isaia talked about his intention to make this important part of the Bible accessible to the public. And he adds that, although many people had talked about and commented on this text, so far it was only for the community of the literati, but never for the common people.103 Isaia’s initiative seems to have arisen from his own intention to make an important Bible text known to the public. Comparable to the translation of classical authors, his illiterate readership was nevertheless expected to have some Latin vocabulary. Usually the paragraphs start with a Latin phrase followed by the vernacular transcription, which made the Latin part easily understandable. Some vernacular Bible compendia seem to have proved very useful for vernacular readers and for artists as well. There was a literary tradition that compared the figures of the Old and New Testaments in their lives and meanings. This would usually happen in couples, with two figures from the Old Testament compared with another couple from the Old Testament, or with a couple from the New Testament. A number of print editions from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provide proof for the popularity of the topics, for example, the publication by frate Marco dal Monte S. Maria (1425–1496), Libro delli comandamenti di Dio, del Testamento vecchio et nuouo et sacri canoni (Florence, 1494). Another Bible compendium from the publisher Giovanni

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The sons of Filippo di Matteo di Simone Strozzi were taught in 1476 with the vernacular version of the first epistle and letters. See document in Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, ca. 1250–1500, Leiden 2007, p. 676. Cendali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, pp. 178–186; Creighton Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, pp. 71–78; Doris Carl, Benedetto da Maiano: A Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance, Turnhout 2006, p. 462. Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, p. 16. Isaia da Este, Expositione sopra la cantica di Salomone Divota, grave & scientifica, Venice 1504, ff. Ai–v., Liii–v.

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Andrea Vavassore (1518–1572) (Venice, ca. 1530) presented Old Testament figures mentioned in the New Testament, adding what the prophets told about them.104 Each page was filled with a woodcut accompanied by a short text about the figure, quoting the Bible passage and pointing to the references in the Old and New Testaments. For example, the figure of the annunciation was presented in a woodcut with the typical arrangement of the figures of Mary, the announcing angel with a lily, and the Holy Ghost (ff. A ii–v). Also, the story of Samson as a prefiguration of Christ is explained in figure and words: on the story of Samson, the book presents a picture with a tamed lion, explaining that Samson was a symbol for Christ. Following that is a picture of a man carrying away the doors of a city, while the inscription explains the comparison to Christ rising from the tomb (ff. F iiii r–v). Thereafter comes the story of Jonah as a prefiguration of Christ, likewise explained in iconography and sources: where the woodcut shows a half-figure of a man rising out of a sea monster’s mouth set in a scene with the sea and a landscape, the text explains that Jonah’s three days in the sea monster’s stomach were comparable to Christ’s three days in the grave (ff. F v–r). Mary’s annunciation, and Samson and Jonas as prefigurations of Christ were commonplaces in late medieval and early modern art, on altarpieces, in painting and sculpture, in woodcut illustrations, and in many other places. Their stories belonged to the general knowledge that a vernacular reader would be familiar with. Many short explanations of the prophets’ words in the Old Testament and their equivalent in the Old or New Testament would help the vernacular reader to understand complicated meanings in the Bible. Both the vernacular reader and the artist likewise received a canon of respective iconography, which would help the artist to compose his story and the reader to decipher what he saw. The 120 woodcuts have been attributed to the brother of the printer, Florio, and must therefore date to around the time of printing.105 The text, however, might well be older and taken up by the printer for his purpose. Compendia like this must have inspired paintings with Old and New Testament comparisons like the two scenes with Adam and Eve with little Cain and Abel by Fra Bartolomeo (1512) and Bachiacca (ca. 1516–1518), both in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Bachiacca’s Eve (and Adam, cut out) with Cain and Abel (1520s) in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Fig. 15).

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Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, Opera nova contemplativa per ogni fidel christiano laquale tratta de le figure del testamento vecchio; le quale figure sonno verificate nel testamento nuovo con le sue expositione, Venice ca. 1530. On the printer and his brother, see Leo Bagrow, Giovanni Andrea Vavassore: A Venetian Cartographer of the 16th Century, a Descriptive List of His Maps, Jenkintown 1939; Gert Jan van der Sman, Print publishing in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century, Print Quarterly, 17:3, 2000, pp. 235–247; Natalie Lussey, Staying afloat: The Vavassore workshop and the role of the minor publisher in sixteenth century Venice, Kunsttexte.de, 3, 2017.

RELIGIOUS LITERATURE FOR POPULAR USE

15 Bachiacca, Eve (and Adam) with Cain and Abel, 1520s. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (Gwynne Andrews Fund, 1938)

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There was a variety of religious texts that sprang off from the Bible, where a medieval author explained the circumstances of the Bible to a broader public. The Bibbia pauperum tried to convey condensed biblical content with an interpretation and a large number of drawings or woodcuts. This text dated to the late thirteenth century and was widely read.106 The Speculum humanae salvationis also had a similar use. The Speculum dates to the early fourteenth century and was meant to be used by preaching monks and clerics. The Speculum is a compendium with commentaries on the Bible and some biblical texts. The focus was the New Testament and how the Old Testament referred to the New, and the prefiguration of Christ. All copies are richly illustrated, following a model established in 1324. And illustrations were in this case more than just illustrative, as the prologue explained, so that learned people could access the Bible and its commentaries, but the less learned could consult the images for their learning.107 Eventually, the Speculum was translated into the vernacular. This happened in 1448 in France, and in Italy considerably later. In other European cities, the Speculum received several early printed editions, but in Italy this text continued for some time to circulate as a Latin manuscript. Notwithstanding the variety of religious texts available in the vernacular, the most important sources for artists were early Bible translations and gospels, usually read at home, and the two texts from the vernacular curriculum, the Vite dei Santi Padri and Domenico Cavalca’s translation of Specchio della Croce.108 LITERATURE FROM THE VERNACULAR CURRICULUM

Some texts from the vernacular curriculum proved to be of considerable importance for artists, since they supplied the young pupils with background knowledge on religious, ancient, and mythological knowledge. The texts that came from elementary education – that were also used in private education – were widely known over generations, and belonged to public knowledge.

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Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum humanae salvationis, 1324–1500, Berkeley 1984, pp. 24–25. There are numerous publications on single Speculum manuscripts, of which I mention only a few: Margit Kern, Heilspiegel: Handschrift 2505 der Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, Darmstadt 2006; Chiara Frugoni, La povertà taciuta, in: Immagini di San Francesco in uno Speculum humanae salvationis del Trecento, ed. Chiara Frugoni and Francesca Manzari, Padua 2006, pp. 55–112; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Marian devotion derived from the “Speculum humanae salvationis,” in: Piecing Together the Picture, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Cambridge 2011, pp. 73–94. Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror, p. 24. Sabrina Corbellini, Vernacular bible manuscripts in late medieval Italy, p. 270.

LITERATURE FROM THE VERNACULAR CURRICULUM

Vite dei Santi Padri The Lives of the Holy Fathers (Le vite dei Santi Padri) was a school text belonging to the vernacular curriculum. It originated with S. Athanasius, who lived in the fourth century, and had been altered and translated many times. In the version of the more complex Vitae Patrum, it was one of the fundamental references for hagiography. The most influential translation of the Vitae Patrum into the vernacular was made by the Pisan Dominican professor Domenico Cavalca about 1320–1342.109 This translation appeared in many manuscripts and in nineteen incunable editions. The text became important for artists, who benefited from the combination of the descriptions of the saints’ lives and their actions presented in a strongly moralizing context. It became an important reference for saints, especially those with ecclesiastical and monastic backgrounds, and it was easily accessible in the vernacular. Many painted cycles on saints’ lives owe their origin to the Vite dei Santi Padri.110 This kind of reference book was well known through the vernacular schools, but it was also present in most monastic libraries and in many private households. While the Latin version served clerics and educated secular people, the vernacular version was read by less educated monks, people without a Latin education, and women.111 The majority of artists fall in the second category, although the sculptor and architect Giuliano da Maiano seemed to have possessed the Latin version De Vita Patrum, judging from the inventory of 1497.112 The Venice edition of 1501 (Ottino da Pavia) of the Vita di sancti padri vulgate historiada, for example, explicitly describes its intended readership (on the first page of the prologue) and the setup of the book. It was intended for people with little education, who had the need or interest to learn more. In the foreword, Cavalca describes that this version would serve not only the literati, but explicitly also secular readers, who could now read this text without the knowledge of grammar (which meant those who studied in the Latin school). And bearing this readership in mind, he admitted that he had taken the liberty of making the text more accessible by cutting out passages and disregarding rhetoric and unnecessary subtleties of language.113 As a useful addition to the lives of the holy fathers, the Venice edition of 1501 also had the Prato spirituale by the Byzantine monk Giovanni Mosco following the text. Both texts deal mainly with monks who had become saints. There are a very few female saints and 109

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On Domenico Cavalca, see Domenico Cavalcalupo, Vite di Santi Padri con Annotazioni di Fraticelli, Florence 1858. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 282–285. Carlo Delcorno, La tradizione delle “Vite dei santi padri,” Venice 2000, pp. 517–532. Cendali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, pp. 178–186; Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, pp. 71–78; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, p. 462. Domenico Cavalca, Vite dei santi padri vulgate historiada, Venice 1501, f. 1v; Domenico Cavalca, Vite dei santi padri, ed. Carlo Delcorno, Florence 2009, pp. 467–469.

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secular persons. The lives of the saints are expressed in an easy and lively narration. This edition often contains a large full-page or half-page woodcut for the saints, although the majority are represented by only a small woodcut in the initial. The large woodcuts were of high quality, and place the saint into a complex scene. For example, in the life of Saint Antonius abbas there is a woodcut showing Antonius outside his house seeing a giant with little figures around his head. The text explains that this giant was obsessed with the many souls which should not go into heaven (f. 17r). The reader would learn thereby, for example, that little flying men could represent the soul. In the case of abbot Hilarius, he is shown with a centaur, which symbolized the demon that had entered into a horse, here represented by a centaur, which confronted the abbot (f. 25r). The saints’ lives are followed by some chapters on penitence and poverty, and demons and temptations, which were followed in the fourth part by virtuous acts and miracles, and in the fifth chapter by angels, demons, Lucifer, and salvation. The last part is the Prato spirituale, a hagiographical text with some additional anecdotes written by Giovanni Mosco, whose text was translated into Latin during the fifteenth century by Ambrogio Traversari (1421), a Florentine Camaldolese monk, and into the vernacular by Feo Belcari (1443), a Florentine poet.114 This text contains a little episode of interest to the artist, entitled “Why the devil pushed a painter, because he had painted the Madonna too beautiful” (f. 181r). The story goes that the devil complained to the painter that he would paint the Madonna extremely beautiful and himself extremely ugly. When the devil then tried to push the painter, who struggled and fell down, the painted Madonna stretched out her hand and saved him. The accompanying woodcut shows exactly the moment when the painter stands high up on the scaffolding in front of a wall with the Madonna image on it. This painted Madonna stretches out her hand, while the devil in the back tears his shoulders. Apart from this story and other anecdotes, the Vitae Patrum was certainly more important than the Prato spirituale. The whole volume closes with a table listing the saints mentioned and references to the chapters for both works, the Vita dei Sancti Padri and the Prato spiritual, a very helpful guide for quick access. Many representations of saints’ lives in churches and monasteries owe their story to the Vite dei Santi Padri. One important and contemporary influence is to be found in the program Buffalmacco made for the Camposanto in Pisa (ca. 1342). Following Frugoni, the part of the fresco cycle situated after the “Triumph,” “Judgement,” and “Hell,” now showing a part of Statius’s Thebaid in the version of the Vite dei Santi Padri, points to virtue to overcoming vices and leads to paradise, as demonstrated by the eremites. Also, the lives of saints

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The dates are reported in the explicit of the translation.

LITERATURE FROM THE VERNACULAR CURRICULUM

such as Saint Paul, Saint Anthony, and Saint Ilarione and their detailed stories are likewise taken from this book.115 The reception of Cavalca’s vernacular version took place only a decade after its completion (1331) and show that Buffalmacco was aware of the translation efforts of his time. Ronzani underlines the possibility that Buffalmacco and Cavalca might not have known each other.116 This was, in fact, unnecessary, since Cavalca’s text was part of the school curriculum and found its own distribution network through the normal educational channels. The Vite dei Santi Padri has been claimed as a source also for complex allegories, like Giovanni Bellini’s Allegoria Sacra (1490–1500, Florence, Uffizi). Hirdt sees an influence of two religious texts, the pericopes of the Old and the New Testament, and Cavalca’s translation of the life of Saint John, which would explain the gathering of the praying characters, including their silent distribution in the space, going back to the narration of the encounter between the holy family with Saint John in the desert. This interpretation, circling around a particular kind of Christmas iconography, would underline the reading of the painting as a “natività,” which Isabella d’Este received to decorate her study in Mantua.117 Religious allegories were much rarer than those resulting from ancient and mythological sources. Bellini’s Allegoria Sacra was a rare and enigmatic example for such a demanding task, for which Isabella showed vivid interest.

Fior di virtu The Fior di virtu was an immensly popular book in vernacular reading courses up to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was written by an anonymous author between 1300 and 1323, circulated widely in manuscript, and found its first printed edition already in 1471, followed by another fifty-seven editions in Italy alone in the fifteenth century. In Rome there was a new print run at least every other year from 1478 onward. The book was meant to be one of the first reading texts for young pupils and was therefore offered in an easy idiom, often accompanied by small illustrations. With the Fior di virtu, young pupils would study topics like love (divine and earthly) and friendship, and the virtues and vices, all topics likewise important for artists. The forty chapters contained

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Clara Frugoni, Altri luoghi, cercando il Paradiso (il ciclo di Buffalmacco nel Camposanto di Pisa e la committenza domenicana, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ser. III, 18:4, 1988, pp. 1557–1643, see pp. 1579–1592, 1618, 1633 (book “Trenta Stoltizie,” chap. XIX for the fresco with the topic on the Tebaide). See also Mauro Ronzani, Un’idea trecentesca di cimitero. La costruzione e l’uso del Camposanto nella Pisa del secolo XIV, Pisa 2005, pp. 134–137. Ronzani, Un’idea trecentesca di cimitero, pp. 134–137; see also Domenico Cavalca, Vite dei santi padri, ed. Carlo Delcorno, p. xi. Willi Hirdt, Giovanni Bellinis “Allegoria Sacra,” Tübingen 2001, pp. 122–127.

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moral advice derived from the Bible, ancient philosophy and literature (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Ovid, Vergil, Macrobius, etc.), early Christian writers (Augustine, Jerome, Priscian, Boethius), and medieval theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais). The result was a practical orientation for those who could not (yet) read the important authorities themselves, and thus provided key citations and references to the authors. Thus furnished, and additionally helped by many illustrations, the pupil received a well-prepared moral education.118 Even the very beginning of the text was a source of inspiration for medieval painting. As the introduction to the Fior di virtu explained, virtue should be represented allegorically as an enclosed garden enlivened by the Holy Spirit, which entered through the doors symbolizing the Holy Scriptures, where a variety of flowers and birds represented different virtues. In analogy to the Fior di virtu, in fact, many representations of Mary in paintings set her in an allegorical garden, a flowering hortus conclusus, where a unicorn stood for Temperance (Fig. 16). The animal allegories were familiar also in other moralizing literary traditions, but the popularity of the Fior di virtu helped enormously to cement an allegorical tradition. Popular images included, apart from the unicorn, the lion as a symbol for strength, the peacock for vanity, the rabbit for fear, the ant for providence, the swallow for inconstancy, the falcon for superbia, etc. Many of these allegorical figures are set into the background of religious paintings, for example, in the Veneto (e.g., Vittore Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini).119 The Fior di virtu seems to have been popular among artists. Benedetto and Giuliano da Maiano possessed a Fior di virtu in their scrittoi, as the inventory from 1497 testifies.120 Also, in Leonardo’s inventory from ca. 1499 there figured a Fior di virtu.121 Kanerva even believes that Filarete took the system of virtues and vices in his Trattato from the Fior di virtu.122

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 276–280; Paul F. Grendler, Form and function in Italian popular books, Renaissance Quarterly, 46:3, 1993, pp. 451–485, see pp. 454–461. For example: on Vittore Carpaccio’s Madonna with Child (Washington, National Gallery, Kress Collection) there is a rabbit as a sign for fear close to the Christ child, a deer as a sign for the adult Christ close to Mary, as well as a bird as a sign for virtues in front of Mary. On Giovanni Bellini’s Risen Christ (Forth Worth, Kimbell Art Museum) the rabbits in the background behind the risen Christ are cheerfully playing on the green and have overcome their fear. Cendali, Giuliano e Benedetto da Maiano, pp. 178–186; Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, pp. 71–78; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, p. 462. D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, p. 36; Carlo Vecce, La biblioteca perduta. I libri di Leonardo, Rome 2017, pp. 71, 117; Carmen C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, New Haven, CT 2019, vol. 1, p. 120. Liisa Kanerva, Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius’ Educational Ideas, Vaajakoski 2006, p. 62.

LITERATURE FROM THE VERNACULAR CURRICULUM

16 Artist from Pesaro, Bowl with the Virgin and the Unicorn and Arms of Matthias Corvinus and Beatrice of Aragon, ca. 1486–1488. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (Fletcher Fund, 1946)

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some of the manuscript versions were richly illustrated. For example, the copy Houghton MS Typ 150123 from around 1450 offers little pen drawings enriched with watercolors at the beginning of most chapters: Amor shows a woman lying in her bed, Envy a nest of young birds, to which an adult bird is flying to feed them. Happiness shows a cock singing happily at every hour. Sadness again shows a bird’s nest, but this time still with eggs in it, and a bird sitting in front (corno). Peace has a hunter surrounded by a wolf and a dog, as beaver (castorno) would signify a wild animal persecuted by hunters. Rage shows a bear in front of honey, but disturbed by the bees. Temperance shows a young woman sitting on the green with a unicorn in her lap. In general, it should be said that these watercolor illustrations are of high quality; they are situated within landscape sketches and use shadows and different tonalities. Whoever was responsible for these little illustrations had also learned the principles of drawing, perspective, shading, and illumination. The illustrations of the Houghton MS 150 manuscript of the Fior di virtu show colored drawings, which are very similar to other elementary school manuscript texts from about the same date. There must have been a standard form all over Europe, as, for example, a manuscript with 123

This manuscript has a shortened introduction in opposition to the incunable version.

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Aesop’s Fables from the middle of the fifteenth century, a book with a Latin text and commentary, and a German translation all show very similar drawings colored with watercolors.124 Both of these texts do not seem to have been executed by the pupils themselves as part of a writing exercise, as this would be the case for many schoolbooks. They have a regular, almost professional script, and leave places for illustrations between the lines. From early on, the incunable editions were also enriched with illuminations and woodcuts. The Florentine edition from 1491 is a good example of how each chapter and topic could be illustrated. It therefore had a great impact on an iconographic tradition of these allegories. Although the Fior di virtu had been intended principally for very young students, this does not mean that the topics were simplistic. To a certain degree, the text inserted philosophical questions. For example, when speaking about love in general, the author refers to Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato to explain the origin of love, and compares this opinion with Thomas Aquinas and Saint Paul. He also does not miss referring to Augustine, saying that divine love is superior to all other forms, and that this divine love was built out of two virtues, belief and hope. Then he offers an example of love: the virtue of love would be symbolized by a bird called calendrino, as testified by Albertus Magnus and Pliny. This bird indicates what is going to happen: if someone was going to die, the bird would look away; if the person was to be rescued, the bird would look at him directly (ff. a2 r–v).125 When talking about friendship, the author does not miss referring to Cicero’s book on friendship (ff. a3 r–v). Talking about justice, the text refers to Macrobius and Thomas Aquinas, and to the three things necessary for justice: the authority to practice it, the right knowledge necessary for judgment, and good reason. Other authors referenced are Hermes, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Boethius, Egidius, and Plato. The example here concerns the state of bees and their organization, and how they behave in confronting their king (ff. biiii v to bv r). Moral and virtuous meanings could also be transmitted with different examples for the same topic. Therefore, cruelty was rendered with a symbolic meaning through a basilisk killing a snake, and through Ovid’s story of Jason and Medea. This twofold example made the reader aware of topics and their parallel readings in Christian symbolism and ancient mythology, ultimately leading to the same expression. In this sense, the Fior di virtu introduced the humanist idea that ancient mythology was seemingly built on Christian moral concepts and was able to reveal the same values.126 124

125 126

The Houghton Fior di virtu nevertheless has better quality than the German Fables (Munich, BSB, clm 4409). Some of these illustrations are printed in Kattrin Schlecht, Fabula in situ: Äsopische Fabelstoffe in Text, Bild und Gespräch, Berlin 2014, figs. 14–19. Fior di virtu, Bressa 1489, ff. a2 r–v. The edition from Venice in 1504 included updated educational matters of mythological, historical, or contemporary importance, like Bernardin from Siena given as a contemporary

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

The Fior di virtu was therefore a textbook at an easy reading level for a first introduction to virtue, the vices, and allegorical readings. All the explanations in this text can be taken as commonplace knowledge for everyone with basic reading skills. The theological virtues (Amor, Temperantia, Providence, Superbia, Fortezza, Castita, Misericordia) and vices (Inconstantia, Gola) reached artists through early reading classes, and were then used by the artists in a multitude of religious commissions. Of course, these could end up looking differently, and they were finalized in relation to the specific commission. But the patron could expect the artist to have a basic knowledge of religious iconography. The text also transmitted the basic concepts of symbols and allegories and provided some examples, and it offered an introduction to basic moral knowledge from the Bible and from ancient and medieval literature. ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE FR OM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CUR RICULU M

The easy Latin reading level comprised several texts that were useful for everyday iconography. There was a lot of animal symbolism since the Middle Ages, where animals often got connected with a specific meaning. These meanings were conferred through specific religious texts from elementary education, which made them widely known in society. This interpretive canon was accessible to both patrons and artists, and guaranteed that they would use the same means of interpretation. These keys were established, for example, through texts like Aesop’s Fables and the Physiologus, all of which belonged to basic and intermediate Latin grammar education. Among the common elementary Latin reading text, only Aesop’s Fables received an early translation into the vernacular and an early distribution through the printing press.127 Like the Fior di virtu and the Physiologus, the symbolic repertoire of Aesop’s Fables entered the iconological canon of the medieval and Renaissance artist in its entirety. As presented in the Fior di virtu, Aesop’s Fables, and the Physiologus, the animal symbolism there established the basis for the artistic iconological repertoire. Animals were used on everyday items like furniture decoration or majolica, but they also had a decisive impact on animal allegories in panel paintings, where animal symbolism underlined the iconographical meaning of the general topic.

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example of virtue, King Alexander the Great as an example of virtue, and some short mentions of mythological characters from Ovid. In general, elementary reading texts were meant to be copied by hand by the pupil, who learned writing and reading this way. It seems that in Italy these texts entered the printing press later than north of the Alps.

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Auctores: Aesopus and Theodolus Aesop’s Fables (Liber Aesopi) counted as one of the most important elementary reading texts from the Middle Ages through the early modern period. This text was known from the twelfth century in the version of Gualterus Anglicus under the title Liber Aesopi. It then circulated in many variations and translations, and also with commentaries during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.128 Contrary to other early school texts, the fables received early translations into the vernacular during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Tuscany and the Veneto (Esopo volgare), and therefore also entered the vernacular schools as a text that provided both easy reading practice and moral education.129 Immediately following the earliest beginner’s Latin, Aesop’s Fables was one of the most used literary texts. It actually constituted one of the earliest reading books both in school and at home. The original Greek text had been translated into Latin several times, by Leonardo Bruni, Ognibene Bonisoli, and many others, since it was used also as one of the earliest exercises in Greek into Latin translations by the advanced pupils of the classical languages. This happened, for example, in humanist schools like Guarino Guarini’s and Vittorino da Feltre’s, as well as in personal composition exercises performed by humanists, like Leon Battista Alberti (1437, Apologi centum, Intercenales), Marsilio Ficino (1481, in the Apologus de apologo), and Bartolomeo Scala (1481, Centum apologi). The text served for exercises in linguistic style as well as for ethical teaching.130 The foreword of Aesop’s Fables recommends this text at a beginner’s reading level for the person interested in literary studies.131 The full version of the Fables numbered 244 little stories, but many versions and publications were reduced to a smaller number. The Fables are an allegorical narration of animals whose lives, characters, friendships, and enemies are paralleled in human nature. In the Fables, the animals usually appear in pairs (wolf and eagle, wolf and lion, two frogs, etc.), from which story a short moral allegory may be deduced (fabula docet). Aesop’s Fables had a wide distribution in the moralized version (Esopus moralisatus, Esopus fabulato, or Esopo hystoriate), in

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Carlo Filosa, La favola e la letteratura esopiana in Italia: Dal medio evo ai nostri giorni, Milan 1952, pp. 52–136; Giovanni Mardersteig, Italienische illustrierte Ausgaben der Fabeln des Äsop, insbesondere der Veroneser Druck von 1479, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 52, 1977, pp. 234–243; Schlecht, Fabula in situ. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 112. Filosa, La favola e la letteratura esopiana in Italia, pp. 74–114; Cristina Cocco, Ermolao Barbaro il vecchio. Aesopi Fabulae, Genoa 1994, pp. 13–28; David Marsh, Alberti, Scala, and Ficino: Aesop in Quattrocento Florence, Albertiana, 3, 2000, pp. 105–118; Cristina Cocco, Aesopi Fabulae. Hermolao Barbaro senior interprete, Florence 2007, pp. 7–17. Fabulae aesopi de graeco in latinum per panagathum Vincentinum traducte, Brescia 1492, f. 1r.

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

the version of Jacobus de Breda,132 or in the version of Accio Zucco.133 The additions of both fabulato and historiato meant an allegorical, moralized reading of the original text. The first printed version of the Latin moralized version of Aesop (Esopus moralisatus) appeared in 1473 in Rome, and a second moralizing version appeared in 1479 in Verona (Rinicius version). In the same year and the same place, the first vernacular version of Aesop (Verona, 1479) appeared.134 Its translator, Accio Zucco, acclaimed himself as being a highly educated and learned person, and praised himself openly for his enterprise in the foreword. His translated edition became very popular and had many editions. In its proemium, Zucco’s foreword had a different and interesting translation and allegorization by Accio Zucco himself. It explains the first lines as follows: a painted room with histories gives more joy than a room rendered differently. Memory would work as a garden filled with all different kinds of flowers and fruits, and they should be picked one by one. He then explains in the moralizing comment that these flowers were all virtues, which when picked would then help the boy live a rich and virtuous life. Every “sonnet” is given in the following way: after the original Latin version there follows a sonetto materiale and a sonnetto morale. The first gives a summary translation into the vernacular, the second an allegorical interpretation. Zucco was evidently proposing that his version of the Fables helped in the painting of room decorations, for which his allegorical readings might build the basics. Some examples of fables illustrate the moralizing content of the Aesopus hystoriatus tradition. The first fable concerns a cock and a precious stone as an image for a stupid man and science. When the cock was looking for grain in an uncommon place, he found a precious stone. But he thought that, if the creator of this stone had been a prestigious artist, it would have to be found in another place, and so he ignored it, preferring things seemingly richer, which furthermore granted him enough food. And so he lived on in poverty, ignoring what he could have had. This allegory was to be compared with a mad person ignoring the sciences. Zucco explained this fable by comparing the cock to a stupid man with mortal vices. Asked what he was doing, the stupid man said that he preferred to look for vices rather than for anything else, thus living in contrast 132 133 134

Esopus moralisatus cum bono commento iterum textus de novo emendates, Deventer 1496, f. 41r. Fabule de Esopo hystoriate, Venice 1528. The printed editions of Aesop’s Fables were usually illustrated with woodcuts. This is the case for the vernacular Aesop edition from Verona in 1479 (and already the Latin Verona edition from 1472), which were attributed by Giovanni Mardersteig to Liberale da Verona (1445– ), who was known to have also illustrated other books. See Aesop, Aesopi Fabulas, trans. Accio Zucchi, Verona 1479. Giovanni Mardersteig, The Fables of Aesop Printed from the Veronese Edition of MCCCCLXXIX in Latin Verses and the Italian Version by Accio Zucco, with the Woodcuts Newly Engraved and Coloured after a Copy in the British Museum, ed. Giovanni Mardersteig, Verona 1973, pp. 264–273; Mardersteig, Italienische Illustrierte Ausgaben der Fabeln des Äsop (see here also for a history of illustrated Aesop editions).

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to God’s desire, and ignoring what could have been given to him, the precious stone, which signified the science. Once again, the sciences were proposed through this fable as something important and essential even for an ordinary man. Some artists engaged very closely with the Fables, like Leonardo da Vinci. He possessed three incunable versions of the Fables, among which was the Fabulae de Esopo historiate.135 This led him to compose vernacular versions of fifity-two fables in Milan between 1487 and 1494 (mostly contained in the Codex Atlantico, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana), which showed his great interest in nature and animal symbolism. Already fifty years before, Alberti had engaged with the Fables in his Centum apologi, composed in Bologna in 1437, where the humanist showed his involvement with the medieval fable tradition with one hundred short fables. A comparison of the two versions shows that Leonardo had likely consulted Alberti’s Latin fables, which he renarrates in a compact and more fluent version, as Carlo Filosa has shown. Filosa sees Alberti as the fine literato, who picks up reality and transforms the fables into an artistic game, whereas Leonardo would appear as the philosopher and scientist, the close observer of human and natural laws.136 Aesop’s Fables counted among the most popular books throughout society. Unsurprisingly, it also found entry many times into art, ultimately becoming one of the reference books for artists. Linda Pellecchia has already presented the example of the Gondi palace in Florence, where the architect Giuliano da Sangallo inserted stone reliefs with scenes from the fables into the ceremonial staircase of the courtyard. Every step had at its short end a small figurative relief, where the animals were inspired by either Aesop’s Fables or the Arabic beast tale Kalila wa-Dimna (the fable of the serpent, crab, and heron). Giuliano Gondi had his palace built in the 1490s; the reliefs in the staircase also date to this time. Pellicchia analyzes every panel, including “Jupiter Ammon and a Griffin,” “The Eagle and the Beetle,” “The Boar and the Mouse,” “The Weasel and the Rooster,” “The Nightingale and the Sparrowhawk,” and others.137 Pellicchia supposes that this staircase was meant as a metaphor for the moral education of the Gondi youth, as she explains: “The morals, ‘don’t step on others on your way up’; ‘manage your own affairs’; ‘be prudent’; and

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D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, p. 40; Pierto C. Marani, Per la ricostruzione della biblioteca di Leonardo. Una breve introduzione, in: La biblioteca di Leonardo. Appunti e letture di un artista nella Milano del Rinascimento, ed. Pietro C. Marani and Marco Versiero, Milan 2015, pp. 1–3; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, p. 20. For Alberti and Leonardo, see Caro Filosa, La favola e la letteratura esopiana in Italia, pp. 119–120; David Marsh, Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernardo Baldi, Tempe, AZ 2004, pp. 2–3, 9. Linda Pellecchia, From Aesop’s fables to the “Kalila wa-dimna”: Giuliano da Sangallo’s staircase in the Gondi palace in Florence, I Tatti Studies, 14–15, 2011–2012, pp. 137–207.

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

‘be cunning in situations of imbalanced power’ appear as excellent precepts to live by and to pass on to one’s offspring.”138 The example of an early educational text had therefore found its appropriate manifestation. But the fables could likewise be chosen for large fresco cycles. In Trento, Dosso Dossi was responsible for a fresco cycle relying on Aesop’s Fables in the Palazzo Magno next to the Castello del Buonconsiglio. His frescoes for Bernardo Cles’s dining room (Stua de la Famea) date to 1531–1532. Giancarlo Fiorenza has described these frescoes, which were divided into ten lunettes, large lyrical landscape paintings with ruins and insertions from Aesop’s Fables, among which are “The Ox and the Frog,” “The Horse and the Lion,” “The Fox and the Stork,” “The Fox and the Crow,” and “The Hawk and the Doves.” Fiorenza pointed out that Cles usually left the literary choice to the artist, but made sure he found artists who could cope with this task.139 Dossi figures as another example of the fact that artists took this elementary but allegorical reading text very seriously indeed. By combining these allegories with landscape paintings, he added a visual interpretation to the interests already shown by Alberti and Leonardo. The fables proved to be a perfect everyday moral entertainment. Aesop’s Fables were often part of a medieval compilation called Auctores octo, which as a whole were considered old-fashioned in the Italian Renaissance and were not part of humanist school teaching, although parts of it did circulate, most notably Aesop’s Fables, less frequently also the Liber Theodoli.140 The Liber Theodoli (or Egloga theoduli), a ninth-century Latin verse dialogue by Theodolus, became a standard schoolbook in the basic Latin curriculum through the rest of the Middle Ages and up to the sixteenth century. The Eclogue orients itself stylistically and in its setting with Vergil’s Eclogues, especially in its form as a verse dialogue in a pastoral setting. It fuses the Old Testament together with classical mythology and often pairs their figures, and is especially interesting in its commented version (Theodolus cum commento), where the most important and widely distributed version was written by the Frenchman Odo Picardus around 1406–1407 (Eudes de Fouilloy; death after 1431).141 Odo’s version included detailed explanations about ancient fables

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Pellecchia, From Aesop’s fables to the “Kalila wa-dimna,” p. 170. Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, University Park, PA 2008, pp. 127–134. The Auctores octo include the texts Disticha Catonis, Liber Theodoli, Aesop’s Fables, Facetus, On Contempt for the World, Tobias, The Proverbs of Alan, Florentus, and Carmen Juvenile (all these texts are gathered in the modern edition: Ronald E. Pepin, An English translation of Auctores octo, a Medieval Reader, Lewiston, NY 1999). The Auctores octo were printed many times mostly north of the Alps (for example, Lugduni, 1494); in Italy, however, it circulated as a medieval reading text mainly in manuscript form, in part because copying the text was part of the school exercise. Hennink Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, Tübingen 1980, p. 359. For example: Theodolus cum comento, magistri Odonis natione picardi (France), 1487.

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coming mainly from Ovid and Vergil, and citations from Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, stories from the Old and New Testament and from mythology. These short stories and explanations about biblical and mythological characters are introduced as fables (fabularum poeticarum et historiarum sacre scripture) and place the ancient characters within a moralized, Christianized, allegorical meaning.142 The original version in verse did not inform pupils about their respective sources and the context of these stories. This shortcoming is eliminated in the commentaries on the Eclogue of Theodolus (Theodolus cum commento). Where Theodolus’s text only briefly mentions names and relations, the commented version gives a fuller account of religious and ancient characters, and places them into context. For Ganymede, the original version talks only about the young boy called Ganymede, who was raped by Zeus. In the commentary, the original source is mentioned with its author, title, and chapter and a short abstract of their stories. For example, the pupil was led to different sources when a character appeared in more than one place, which in this case were Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The commentary talks about Ganymede’s fable, the boy fleeing from his home in Troy, and being captured by Zeus in the vestments of an eagle (Fig. 17). The rapture and rising up into the sky of the eagle as Zeus stands for a plenitude of wisdom, sublime clarity, and contemplation, whereas Ganymede signifies the gospels of John and human nature.143 Ganymede’s physical elevation is therefore a spiritual one, the rising to contemplation and wisdom in the Christian sense. And this knowledge was transmitted through late medieval elementary Latin school texts and manifested in art numerous times. The story of Daedalus is rendered briefly in the main text: the father was building wings with wax and feathers, but Icarus, the son, not following his father’s advice, flew too close to the sun; his wax melted and he fell into the sea. In the commentary to Daedalus, the sources from Ovid and Vergil are mentioned separately and the story itself is given in detail. From Vergil’s Aeneid (book 6), the commentator simply took the story of Daedalus and Icarus falling into the sea because the wax in his wings melted. Then the commentator talks about more detail in Ovid (Metamorphoses book 8 and Ars Amatoria), including about Daedalus as a sublime artist with great inventive capacities. Daedalus is presented as the

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Pepin, An English translation of Auctores octo, pp. 25–27. The commented version shares significant knowledge with Dante’s Convivio, written in the vernacular a century earlier, and embarks on the Christian Platonism. Odo Picardus was close to the French king and wrote this commentary for Duke Ludwig from Orleans, the king’s brother (see on Odo: Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, p. 359). It seems possible to presume Dante’s text might have been transmitted to Odo through Petrarch. Odo’s comment received much higher attention in France, England, and Germany than it did in Italy. Liber Theodoli, Auctores octo opusculorum cum commentariis diligentissime emendati, videlicet, Lyon 1494, ff. e i v.

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

17 Artist from Castel Durante, Tazza with Ganymede and the Eagle, ca. 1535–1540. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (Gift of V. Everit Macy, in memory of his wife, Edith Carpenter Macy, 1927)

exemplar of the most versatile builder of the world (summus fabricatorum mundi). Daedalus worked for Minos, king of Crete, whose wife Pasiphae fell in love with a bull, resulting in the birth of Minotaurus, a monster who was half-bull and half-man. Daedalus was also the creator of the labyrinth, where the Minotaur lived, but the king imprisoned him and his son in it, hence their escape with the help of wings. The moral of this account is that one should not fall in love with the devil, here symbolized by the bull. Pasiphae, Daedalus, and Icarus were all sinners failing in different ways. The labyrinth and the sea both symbolize the world with its manifold difficulties. Daedalus is presented as a God-like creator of the world, who had tamed the devil in a labyrinth, whereas his son symbolized Christ, rising up to the heavens, a flight presented as a contemplative act. The two conclusions to be learned from this story, appropriately pointed to schoolboys, were to obediently follow the wise suggestions of parents, and the importance of virtue. Virtue will take us to

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heaven, whereas superbia would make us fall into the sea, which stood for hell.144 Therefore, the story of Daedalus was used to claim that he was the utmost artistic inventor, and to give a practical example of virtue. The artist reading the Theodolus text would thus learn about Daedalus as the sublime artist, and the stories of Pasiphae and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, and their respective sources. In the pictorial renderings, these stories were mostly separate. For example, the Master of the Campana cassoni pictured the story of Pasiphae and the bull around 1510 on two cassone (“Pasiphae Watching the Taurus on the Lawn,” “Pasiphae Watching the Minotaur in the Labyrinth,” ca. 1510, Musee du Petit Palais, Avignon). The Fall of Icarus was depicted, for example, by Sebastiano del Piombo around 1511 in a lunette of the Sala di Galatea in the Farnesina in Rome. These few examples taken from the Theodolus text clearly indicate the level of Christian Platonism already available to school-age students in simple texts, written in simple Latin, that are connected to the broad range of ancient mythology as transformed into Christian morals. Many artists would need exactly this kind of interpretation to satisfy their patrons with a piece of art bearing a little more sophisticated meaning. The next level would require the reading of Ovid and Vergil themselves, but the overview should have shown that it was not always necessary to reach this level, since the introductory reading level already provided a good deal of Christian and mythological knowledge.

Physiologus The Physiologus is a first reading text that was often consulted in schools on the same primary Latin reading level as Aesop’s Fables. It circulated widely in manuscript form. Although it was printed during the fifteenth century several times north of the Alps,145 it remained available as a Latin manuscript in Italy for a long time, and was hardly ever translated during the Italian Renaissance (contrary to its use in other countries). This is true for many schoolbooks used in Italian primary schools, where compiling one’s own copy was part of the learning process. Whoever consulted the Physiologus required a Latin reading knowledge just beyond the elementary level. The text is a compilation of

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Theodoli, Auctores octo opusculorum cum commentariis diligentissime emendati, videlicet, ff. e iii r–v. For example: Phisiologus Theobaldi episcopi de naturis duodecim animalium, Deventer between June 1490 and January 1492; Physiologus de naturis duodecim animalium, Cologne 1495; Phisiologus Theobaldi Episcopi de naturis duodecim a[n]imalium, Delft 1495. Among the several versions circulating in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, one of the most common was probably written by a certain Theobaldus, probably a Christian living in the eleventh century somewhere in Northern Italy, although it has to be said that there are different interpretations of this authorship. For an analysis, see P. T. Eden, Theobaldi “Physiologus,” Leiden 1972.

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

animal imagery and symbolism from different passages in the Old and New Testment, Hellenic texts, and Judeo-Christian allegories, originally composed in Greek or Egyptian and transmitted throughout the Middle Ages in various versions. The narrations included in the Physiologus are enriched with detailed Christian allegorical accounts of actions and characters, adding short stories about virtuous and voluptuous life in Christian moral teaching. The Physiologus was one of the most well-established sources for medieval iconography, and defined Christian symbolism in art throughout Europe. The twelve animals presented in the shortened Physiologus are lion, eagle, serpent, ant, fox, deer, spider, sea monster, siren, elephant, turtle, and panther. Other editions present greater numbers of animals and symbols, of up to fifty-one examples. Many of these animals and symbols were also present in texts by Aristotle, Pliny, Aesop, Ovid, Plutarch, and others, which comprised the sources of the Physiologus.146 The animals and symbols had either a moral meaning or were associated with the life of Christ. Connected to Christ’s resurrection were several animals, like the lion, the pelican, the phoenix, and the panther. The lion served as a symbol for both the trinity and for the resurrection of Christ. His offspring were born dead, and rescued only after three days through the breath of the father lion, who brings them life. The pelican kills his children, but after three days he regrets his actions, and they are reborn through the blood of the mother bird. The phoenix was able to kill himself and be reborn by his own ability. Likewise, the panther was also a sign for Christ and his resurrection after three days. Some animals are symbols for renewal and the purification of sins: both sirens and centaurs are half-human and half-animal. They would be paralleled with Christians in a community, who could be faithful only within the community, but would not succeed outside, where they told stories of slander and destiny. A symbol of Christ, the unicorn may be tamed only by a virgin; otherwise, it is too strong to be caught. It has the capacity to purify the water in a sea that was spoiled by a snake’s venom, after which all the other animals may drink from the now purified water.147 Many animals bear allegorical meaning for different parts in Christ’s life, which is summarized by Baxter: thereafter, the lion stands for Christ’s divinity, the caladrius bird for Christ’s rejection by the Jews, the phoenix for Christ as fulfilment of the Law,

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Friederich Lauchert, Geschichte des Physiologus, Strasburg 1889; Theobaldi “Physiologus,” ed. P. T. Eden, Leiden 1972; Nikolaus Henkel, Studien zum Physiologus im Mittelalter, Tübingen 1976, pp. 36–41; Der Physiologus: Tiere und ihre Symbolik, trans. Otto Seel, Zürich 1987; Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages, Stroud 1998, pp. 29–82; Lorena Mirandola, Chimere divine: Storia del Fisiologo tra mondo latino e slavo, Bologna 2001; Michael J. Curley, Physiologus, Chicago 2009. The shortened symbolic versions are taken from Physiologus. Frühchristliche Tiersymbolik, trans. Ursula Treu, Berlin 1981. This translation is a synthesis of different versions of the Physiologus.

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18 Vittore Carpaccio, Christ Showing the Instruments of Passion, 1496. Udine: Museo Civico. Photo: Courtesy Art Resource

the unicorn for Christ’s renunciation of the devil, the panther for Christ’s redeeming mission, and the deer for Christ and the saints.148 This kind of animal symbolism was very popular in painting, especially in the Veneto. Vittore Carpaccio may have used this iconography for the symbolic figures in his religious paintings. For example, in Christ Showing the Instruments of Passion (1496, Fig. 18), the background shows a crying deer being bitten by a panther. As an allegory of passion, the biting panther pointing to resurrection shows Christ’s embodiment in the deer and that this does not happen without pain. Carpaccio used the same allegory of the deer and the panther, adding an 148

Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages, p. 34.

LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNER’S LATIN GRAMMAR CURRICULUM

19 Vittore Carpaccio, The Meditation on the Passion, ca. 1490. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1911)

angry lion as a symbol of strength, in the background of The Meditation over Christ’s Passion (ca. 1490, Fig. 19). The background scene of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow shows instead a pelican as a sign of resurrection, while the Christ child on the Madonna’s lap is sleeping as if dead. Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden (1458–1460, London, National Gallery) combines the animal symbolism of both the Physiologus and the Fior di virtu in showing a pelican and rabbits in the background. While the pelicans in the Physiologus were a sign for the resurrection of Christ facing his fear of the agony, the rabbits in the Fior di virtu were also a symbol of fear and underlined the traumatic nature of the situation. Many of the Physiologus’s allegories and symbols overlapped with those of the Fior di virtu, like the interpretations of the ant and the lion. For example, Bambach proposes Leonardo’s drawing of a young woman with a unicorn (ca. 1475–1480) being inspired by the Physiologus,149 although the Fior di virtu 149

Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 1, p. 123.

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would likewise offer itself as a plausible source, which he possessed. To be sure, both texts drew on common allegorical traditions with shared moral values. The brief condensed symbolism in the Physiologus was often used in applied art, glass windows, medals with emblems, or heraldic emblems. Its symbolic meanings were widely known and understood, since they derived from one of the main sources of childhood education, a text source that almost everyone became acquainted with when attending the earliest stages of Latin school. Its basic Christian allegorical readings may be compared to the Fior di virtu, and both texts likewise found their iconographic counterparts in everyday art, like majolica, emblems, and the basic Christian iconology in paintings. One example of the influence of the Fior di virtu, the Physiologus, and the Theodolus overlap is to be found in the fresco painting and the majolica floor of the Convent of San Paolo in Parma (1471–1482). The repertoire of symbolic animals, Christian allegories, and mythological topics mirrors the iconography conferred through these basic school texts. Here we find, for example, the tamed unicorn sitting on the lap of a virgin, the panther, the donkey, the sea monster, the women with pearl necklaces, the virtues and vices, and the basic Ovidian mythological themes like the Judgment of Paris, and Pyramus and Thisbe.150 The easy reading level of the Latin school therefore contained useful texts for an introduction to Christian Platonism, Christian symbolism, and Christian allegorical readings, which formed the basis of most fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century iconography, accomplished through Christian morals and hagiography via the vernacular school texts. Together, both groups of easy reading levels form the everyday iconological basis for a majority of works in the visual arts. CLASSICAL LITER ATU RE FROM THE INTERMEDIAR Y AND ADVANCED CUR RICULUM

As we saw in Chapter 2, the most important classical authors used in Latin school after the beginner’s level were Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and sometimes Lucan. They also happen to be among the authors that artists studied most, together with Pliny and Vitruvius for artistic techniques, mythology, and other painting topics. Ovid and Vergil were used in the Latin school curriculum for learning grammar and rhetoric, and belonged to the most annotated texts in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. But they were also part of private and court culture.151 That these two authors also figured among most

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See on this floor: Angela Dressen, Pavimenti decorati del Quattrocento in Italia, Venice 2008, pp. 357–358. For an overview, see, for example, Jane Chance, The Medieval “Apology for Poetry”: Fabulous Narrative and Stories of the Gods, in: The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the

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of those translated by the end of the fifteenth century shows the demand from the vernacular populace for the same access to mythology. After the advanced beginners reading level, there is a vast variety of authors from antiquity writing on poetry or history who belonged to a curriculum only occasionally, depending on the school type and the teacher. Authors like the magical Apuleius, and historians like Lucan, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Diogenes Laertius, and even Pliny were sometimes taught in advanced humanist schools, while Vitruvius and Lucretius were certainly difficult to find in a curriculum, and belonged more to private studies. The most typical authors of an advanced Latin curriculum were Ovid, Vergil, Lucan, Sallust, Cicero, Terence, and Juvenal,152 of whom we will consider the first three as the most important, together with Apuleius and Lucretius, for their influence on the visual arts. The reception of classical texts in art was parallel to the rise of humanism, and started in the early fifteenth century. It certainly grew considerably with the first vogue of rendering classical texts in the vernacular, starting in the 1470s to 1490s. The reception was furthered by several important facts: first, the discovery of antiquity through excavations and the necessity to learn more about history; second, the rise of ancient literature and history in the curriculum; and third, the establishment of the printing press. These all encouraged a sufficiently broad readership for affordable texts in vernacular translations that were printed in cheap editions on paper, mostly without illustrations, and in the practical format of the octavo (therefore intended as a personal copy, not as a library copy). When looking for literary sources in iconography, researchers do not often take into account that the most important texts by Ovid, Vergil, Plutarch, and Cicero were already available in translation during the Renaissance. Cicero – while less important for artists – received translations into the vernacular already in the thirteenth century, first of all for his Rhetoric. Lucan’s Pharsalia dates in translation to the second half of the fourteenth century, almost contemporary to Ovid’s Metamorphoses from 1370. Vergil’s Aeneid became available in translation only half a century later in 1432, but still in the manuscript era. Then, to the incunable period belong Ovid’s De arte amandi (1472) and his Metamorphoses (1497), all three texts by Vergil – his Aeneid (1476), Bucolica (1482), and Georgics (1485) – and Lucan’s Pharsalia (1492). Before 1500, all important books by these authors were readily available in translation and in print. The wide distribution was certainly connected to the fact that they figured as school authors, and were therefore acknowledged for

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Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, ed. Jane Chance, Gainesville, FL 1990, pp. 3–46. Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge 2001, pp. 144–145.

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their importance, regardless of whether people had the possibility of accessing the texts or not. Furthermore, these translations and editions often are particularly dedicated to a didactic approach that explains vocabulary, meaning, and background. This is not at all typical for the Latin editions of these authors. Instead, these vernacular editions were meant for personal autodidactic study at home. While Ovid and Vergil were the most common school authors, Ovid’s texts – most of all his Metamorphoses, but also the Ars amatoria and the Fasti – were especially picked up by artists.153 Ovid and Vergil counted also among the most annotated authors during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. These texts from elementary education served to teach Latin grammar and rhetoric, while at the university they were used for commenting and glossing. But they were also present in court culture and education.154 Although Ovid’s Metamorphoses antedates Christian moralizations, some later Christian authors like Boethius and Dante nevertheless tried to add Christian contexts to the story. They enriched the animalesque metamorphoses with Christian symbolism, and Ovid appeared as a moralizing author.155 The possibility of adding Christian moralizing meaning to ancient texts made them especially attractive to both patrons and artists. Antiquity could be visualized as in harmony with current religious beliefs and desires. At the same time, the classical biblical canon could conveniently be enhanced and transformed by ancient topics too. Therefore, moralized allegories and mythologies fulfilled the desire for a reception of antiquity by adding late medieval and humanist moral context. Highly learned artists were knowledgeable about these school authors, and exceptionally learned artists like Leonardo also possessed titles from the advanced curriculum that were usually pursued at humanist schools. In Leonardo’s book inventory, Latin school authorities like Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Caesar, Plutarch, and Titus Livius figured, but there were also advanced texts used in humanist schools, like Lucretius, Pliny, Plautus, Horace, Nonius Marcellus, Priscian, Quintilian, Servius, Varro, Festus Pompeius, and many

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Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 113–114; Jane Chance, The medieval “apology for poetry”: Fabulous narrative and stories of the gods, in: The Mythographic Art, ed. Jane Chance, pp. 3–46, see pp. 5, 8–12; Jeanne A. Nightingale, From mirror to metamorphosis: Echoes of Ovid’s Narcissus in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, in: The Mythographic Art, ed. Jane Chance, pp. 47–82, see pp. 50–51. For an overview, see Chance, The medieval “apology for poetry,” pp. 3–46. On the dissemination of Ovid in the middle ages, see, for example, Jamie C. Fumo, Commentary and collaboration in the medieval allegorial tradition, in: A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands, Chichester 2014, pp. 114–128. Bodo Guthmüller, Mito, poesia, arte. Saggi sulla tradizione ovidiana nel rinascimento, Rome 1997, pp. 19–27.

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more.156 Filippino Lippi owned books by the classical school authors Ovid and Titus Livius, and also Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.157 Mantegna even owned a commentary on Juvenal.158

Ovid Not surprisingly, Ovid appears to be the classical author cited most often in art. This was certainly due to the circumstance that he was made easily accessible at the end of the Middle Ages, both in translation and in the moralization of the content. Ovid retells many stories widely known in antiquity through such authors as Homer and Catullus, authors an artist was unlikely to have read in an original version. The artist’s source might therefore have been Ovid, but Ovid’s stories were themselves handed down over the centuries through a multitude of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors and in compilations. For example, looking at cassone paintings, a field where ancient mythology was very important, Schubring proposed that Ovid was received primarily through mediating texts of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. He proposed Boccaccio’s Genealogy, his De viris illustribus, and De claris mulieribus as the most important texts for cassone paintings.159 However, as we will see, there are many more mediating texts that were of significant importance. This does not exclude the possibility that painters also turned to a printed Latin edition of Ovid. Indeed, as we will see, some painters used the early printed Latin edition of Ovid, although a vernacular edition of the Metamorphoses would already have been available. The first printed edition on Ovid appeared in Venice in 1474 (Ovid, Pvblii Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseos, Venice 1474). This Latin edition seems to have been what the painter Piero di Cosimo had consulted for his version of Perseus and Andromeda on a cassone (ca. 1510–1513, Fig. 20). In the fourth book, the story of Perseus freeing Andromeda from the sea monster offers the narrative plot and many details

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Inventory in Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 129; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, pp. 19–21. Carl, Das Inventar der Werkstatt von Filippino Lippi aus dem Jahre 1504, pp. 388–389. Rodolfo Signorini, New Findings about Andrea Mantegna: His son Ludovico’s postmortem inventory (1510), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 59, 1996, pp. 103–118, see pp. 113–114. Paul Schubring, Cassoni, pp. 19–20. For a useful list of mythological figures and their representation in art, see pp. 184–192. Schubring only in rare occasions justifies why some figures occur in certain periods and not in others, and also which could have been the literary source. The three Florentine luminaries offered different mediatory steps, not just for Ovid alone. For a spalliera by Botticelli (History of Virginia) going back to Titus Livius in the interpretation of Boccaccio’s Famous Women, see Elsa Filosa, History of Virginia: Livy, Boccaccio, and Botticelli, in: Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes, ed. Nataniel Silver, London 2019, pp. 79–93.

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20 Piero di Cosimo, Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1510–1513. Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

necessary for the painting,160 while the whole story was not available in the abbreviated vernacular Bonsignori/Bonsanti version, and the commentary 160

Also other authors suggested that Piero di Cosimo might have taken his source from Ovid directly: Schubring, Cassoni, p. 316; Carla Greenhaus Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1968, p. 123; Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia, London 1993, pp. 60–62; Uwe Bischoff, Die “Cassonebilder” des Piero di Cosimo: Fragen der Ikonographie, Frankfurt 1995, p. 110; Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange, New Haven, CT 2006, p. 110; Hirschauer and Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 50, 202.

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20 (cont.)

edition by Raffaele Regio would have added nothing significant to this picture. Even before a printed edition came on the market, Ovid proved to be of great interest to painters, especially for cassone paintings. Following Schubring and Carla Greenhaus Lord, the first cassone after Ovid could have been the one by Dello Delli mentioned by Vasari in his Lives.161 Ovid’s

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Schubring, Cassoni, pp. 16–17; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, p. 117; Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence 1878–1885, vol. 1, p. 148.

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Metamorphoses became a popular topic for cassone paintings. Vittore Carpaccio painted one of the very few representations of the Story of Alcyone (ca. 1502–1507, Philadelphia Museum of Art). From her marriage with Ceyx, his leaving to consult the oracle, his death on the sea, her mourning and suicide, and their transformation into birds, only the last sequence of the story was picked up by Carpaccio. He shows her standing at the shore seeing Ceyx’s dead body arriving in the waters, and at the moment she wants to throw herself into the sea, she turns into a bird. This moment could have been taken either from the Latin or the vernacular version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 11). During the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as other ancient metamorphoses, as Guthmüller and others have pointed out, were perceived not as literal transformations but as poetic inventions with a secondary meaning behind them. His corporeal transformations could be paralleled to the Christian transformations of the soul, since both were metaphors for a change in one’s spiritual existence. Many ancient and medieval authors picked up on the idea of metaphorical narration in order to express their ideas of transmutation, like Boethius and Dante.162 One of the most famous translators of Ovid, Giovanni Bonsignori, therefore called his interpretation “allegories,” and they had an intention similar to Dante’s allegorizations. The allegories looked for moral and Christian reasoning behind the ancient story, when, for example, Orpheus and Eurydice are proposed as the virtuous man and the profound spirit. Therefore, Orpheus and Eurydice could be seen as an image for Christ and the human soul.163 This allegorical approach can also be found in other late medieval commentaries, as we have seen. There were several moralizing Ovid editions during the late Middle Ages. Among the well-known editions are the Latin commentary on the Metamorphoses by Giovanni del Virgilio (ca. 1323), the contemporary Italian translation of the Metamorphoses by Arrigo Semintendi (beginning of the fourteenth century), the anonymous text Ovid moralisé (fourteenth century), and Christine de Pisan’s vernacular Epitre d’Othéa (early fifteenth century), which all circulated in many manuscript versions, some of them richly illuminated.164 The version that most influenced society and artists between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries was the translation and allegorization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1375–1377) by Giovanni Bonsignori from Città di Castello, who himself had benefited from the university lectures and moralizing interpretations around 1322–1323 given by Giovanni del Virgilio, a wellknown professor in Bologna, who was famous for his lectures on Ovid and

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Bodo Guthmüller, Mito e metamorfosi nella letteratura italiana, Rome 2009, pp. 42–44. Eleanor Irwin, The Songs of Orpheus and the New Song of Christ, in: Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth, ed. John Warden, Toronto 1982, pp. 51–62, see esp. p. 55. Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, pp. 28–60, 96–97, 120–121.

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

Vergil.165 Bonsignori’s translation and Giovanni del Virgilio’s interpretation were the starting point for many more editions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They all differed significantly from the original versions in Ovid because Bonsignori and Giovanni del Virgilio introduced their own views and allegorical interpretations, even in the translation. In order to make the contents more comprehensible, Bonsignori divided the text into fifteen chapters, each followed by an allegory.166 Bonsignori himself explained his choice in the foreword: his intention is to explain the individual fables and Ovid’s intention through allegories, while enriching the meaning with the help of Aristotle’s Ethics. Bonsignori wanted to provide a comprehensive text for students of the vernacular curriculum, while students of the Latin curriculum, usually familiar with scientific texts, could still find the author and the poetry in its present version useful and enjoyable. In order to provide a text as comprehensive as possible, he had used the classical fourfold approach to interpretation (see above): through history (istoria), ancient virtue could be rendered with examples; through legends (legenda), Christian virtue could be exemplified with the stories of virtuous people; through fables (favola), the unreal could be narrated in a poetically allegorical manner; and through novels (novella), stories could be told in a new way (proemio). The printed Bonsanti/ Bonsignori edition would become extremely popular among artists, as we will see below. It was reflected in numerous paintings, and appeared also in artist’s personal libraries, as the inventories of Filippino Lippi, Benedetto da Maiano, and Leonardo da Vinci testify.167 The Bonsignori vernacularization not only was a liberal translation, but it also changed the content in a Christian allegorical direction. More than just a translation, this was a retelling of the story, shortening parts when appropriate or explaining when necessary. Therefore, interpretive content did not only appear in the subchapters called “allegoria.” Sometimes these alterations made for significant changes to the story. For example, when Ovid starts the 165

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Giovanni Bonsignori, Ovidio methamorphoseos vulgare, Venice 1497; Giovanni Bonsignori da Città di Castello, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare, ed. Erminia Ardissino, Bologna 2001. Giovanni Bonsignori da Città di Castello, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare; Fausto Ghisalberti, Giovanni del Virgilio espositore delle “Metamorfosi,” Florence 1933, pp. 4, 19, 34; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, pp. 96–97; Bodo Guthmüller, Lateinische und volkssprachliche Kommentare zu Ovids “Metamorphosen,” in: Der Kommentar in der Renaissance, ed. August Buck and Otto Herding, Boppard 1975, pp. 119–139; Bodo Guthmüller, Mito, poesia, arte. Saggi sulla tradizione ovidiana nel rinascimento, Rome 1997, pp. 65–84; Kathryn L. McKninley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: “Metamorphoses” Commentaries 1100–1618, Leiden 2001, pp. 96–105; Valeria Cotza, Le allegorie ovidiane di Giovanni del Virgilio tra studia lombardi e corti rinascimentali, in: Il ritorno dei classici nell’umanesimo, ed. Gabriella Albanese, Florence 2015, pp. 195–209. Inventories in: Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 155 (the listed Ovidio vulgare in Filippino Lippi’s inventory was for sure the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition); Carl, Das Inventar der Werkstatt von Filippino Lippi aus dem Jahre 1504, p. 389.

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narrative with the creation of the world as initiated by one of the gods, especially Jupiter as the highest, the vernacular version retold a shortened version of the Genesis account, and referred to the one and only God (1.1–13). Another example is in the story of Phoebus and Daphne: after Daphne was turned into a laurel tree, Phoebus praised the tree for ornamenting those dedicated to the science of poetry. She would thereafter crown the poets with her laurels, while in Ovid the laurels crowned the emperors (1.37). Another significant difference between the original and the Bonsignori version is the story of Narcissus (3.17–23). The translator starts by saying that Narcissus was transformed into a flower, a point the original had left out. The allegory then adds that flowers were likewise fragile and did not last. In the translation, the oracle of Tiresia says that Narcissus would live until he sees his face, whereas the ancient version presents a mystification; that is, he would live until he recognized himself. Such allegorizations were common since Dante’s Convivio, Boccaccio’s Genealogy, and the commentary on Theodolus. Bonsignori’s translation was revised by Bonsanti and published in 1497 in Venice, as a richly illustrated incunable with woodcuts (Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare), from which many editions would follow. Editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses tended to be richly illustrated in both manuscript and print. Images were not always copied from one edition to another, but they did reflect the current edition and the variations in the narration present there, as, for example, in the Bonsignori version. This is not the standard practice for early printed book illustrations.168 With its printing, the text compilation became even more popular than it had been before, and many artworks around and after 1500 testify to the wide distribution of the Metamorphoses among the artists. Furthermore, this is true for all fields of art: in frescos, panel paintings, and majolica and wherever a pagan topic seemed suitable for a private location, like the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, the Palazzo Petrucci in Siena, the Villa Pelucca in Sesto San Giovanni, and the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, to name just a few.169 A study by Carla Greenhaus Lord discussed the 168

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See Fátima Díez-Platas, Et per omnia saecula imagine vivam: The completition of a figurative corpus for Ovid’s Metamorphoses in fifteenth and sixteenth century book illustrations, in: The Afterlife of Ovid, ed. Peter Mack and John North, London 2015, pp. 115–135, see pp. 122–125. On illustrations in various editions, see Giulia Orofino, Ovidio nel medioevo: l’iconografia delle Metamorphosi, in: Aetates Ovidianae. Lettori di Ovidio dall’Antichità al Rinascimento, ed. I. Gallo and L. Nicastri, Salerno 1995, pp. 189–208; Carla Lord, A survey of imagery in medieval manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and related commentaries, in: Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. J. G. Clark, F. T. Coulson, and K. L. McKinley, Cambridge 2011, pp. 257–283; Max Dittmar Henkel, Illustrierte Ausgaben von Ovids Metamorphosen im XV, XVI und XVII Jahrhundert, Leipzig 1926–1927, pp. 53–144. Cristina Quattrini and Bernardino Luini, Gerolamo Rabia e l’“Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare” di Giovanni Bonsignori. Un’interpretazione degli affreschi mitologici della Villa Pelucca, Bollettino d’Arte, 130, 2004, pp. 25–44, see p. 29; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, pp. 102–164; Paul Barolsky, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the history of

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Bonsignori edition in either his interpretation or in the woodcuts as the bases for numerous paintings, especially in the Veneto. Giorgione was the leading example, who, in his numerous cassone paintings and other furniture, sometimes painted after the text, sometimes after the woodcuts. Other painters are Andrea Schiavone (Deucalion and Pyrrha, the Birth of Adonis, Apollo and Daphne, Hercules and Deianira, Pan and Marsyas), Tintoretto (Pyramus and Thisbe, Jupiter and Semele, the Fall of Phaeton), Titian (Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Europa, etc.), Veronese (Europa), Dosso Dossi (Pesaro, Villa Imperiale), and many more.170 And, fittingly, Benedetto Varchi dedicates his partial translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1539 to the sculptor Tribolo and the painter Bronzino, two artists who later on would become members of the literary academy. Lord is correct, therefore, when she contests Schubring, who had given Boccaccio (Genealogy, De Claris mulieribus) and Hyginus (Fabulae) preference as a source for artists over Bonsignori.171 The popularity of Ovid in the Veneto, even though probably promulgated by means of the vernacular version, leads to the question of how much artists became involved with Ovid during their primary education. The vernacular Bonsignori/Bonsanti edition became very popular among the artists, about whom only a few examples shall be mentioned in this context by listing some cassone/spalliera paintings and some frescoes. Piero di Cosimo, who in other occasions had turned to the Latin version of Ovid, sometimes likewise used the vernacular. This is the case in the cassone showing Procris and Cephalus (also called Satyr Mourning over a Nymph, ca. 1495, Fig. 21). The story from Ovid’s Metamorphosis 7 is given in Piero di Cosimo’s panel following the details in the Bonsignori/Bonsanti version, with one addition from Niccolò da Correggio’s (1450–1508) Aurora (Favola di Cefalo) from 1486, which is Cephalus’s transformation into a fawn, while both Ovid himself and the Bonsignori/ Bonsanti version just mention a transformation without specifying it.172 Other details are closer to the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition, with a special importance

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Baroque art, in: A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands, Chichester 2014, pp. 202–216; Valentina Lotoro, La fortuna iconografica delle “Metamorfosi” di Ovidio. Gli amori, Ariccia 2016. Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, p. 117. Schubring, Cassoni, p. 17; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, pp. 117–118. For Ovid: Schubring, Cassoni, p. 315 (Ovid, Metam VII). For Niccolò da Correggio: Irving Lavin, Cephalus and Procris: Transformations of an Ovidian myth, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 17, 1954, pp. 260–287, see p. 278; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, p. 123; Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia, London 1993, pp. 49–54; Uwe Bischoff, Die “Cassonebilder” des Piero di Cosimo: Fragen der Ikonographie, Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 49–54; Anna Forlani Tempesti and Elena Capretti, Piero di Cosimo: Catalogo completo, Florence 1996, pp. 115–116; Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 85–87 (sees as sources the Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria, Niccolò da Correggio); Hirschauer and Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 50–51.

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21 Piero di Cosimo, Procris and Cephalus (also called Satyr Mourning over a Nymph), ca. 1495. London: National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

given to the dog, which in Correggio is mentioned only in passing. The panel shows the last part of the story, when Cephalus finds that his wife Procis had accidentally been killed by means of his own miraculous bow. Procis herself had passed on to him the two gifts she had previously received from Diana, namely, the bow and a dog, both miraculous objects that always find their aim. In the Bonsignori/Bonsanti edition, the dog receives an extra chapter and an allegorical reading (5.53) at the end of the story. The miraculous bow could turn the dog into a marble figure and thereby rescue a person whom the dog wanted to kill. The allegory by Bonsignori explains that the marble dogs were actually white dogs, which were unable to reach their aims because they appeared as unmovable. Nevertheless, Cephalus’s dog was described as being the opposite and especially ferocious. As the Bonsignori/ Bonsanti edition explains, the dogs’ allegorical reading would stand for the vices and virtues, and should therefore be read as punishments for those who would not follow him. The interpretation of the dogs offers a special solution to the reading of the painting, which could hardly be explained in another version of Ovid. In the painting, Cephalus’s dog is presented twice: next to the dying Procis, and next to the two versions of the dog, the aggressive and

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

21 (cont.)

the immovable as turned into a white statue. The background of the painting thus explains how Cephalus, through his vices and superbia, failed to lead a happy life with his wife. This means that Piero di Cosimo used the best morally directed part of the Procis and Cephalus story, in which he follows Bonsignori/Bonsanti, who only for this one morally oriented part added an allegorical interpretation to the characters. Piero di Cosimo’s so-called Forest Fire (1497–1501, Fig. 22) has sometimes been associated with either Vitruvius’s De architectura (book 2), or more often with Lucretius’s De rerum natura (book 5), because both texts deal with a fire. Both proposals started with Panofsky, and his Lucretius interpretation was followed by many researchers, although everyone agreed that there could be only a loose link to the text.173 In fact, the Forest Fire is another example of Piero di Cosimo’s link with the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition, where many otherwise

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Panofsky refers to famous sources for a forest fire, but did not see a literal transcription into paint: Lucrez, De rerum natura (V) and Vitruvius, De architectura, but also in Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca historica), Pliny (Natural History), and Boccaccio (Geneology XII). Many researchers have followed his proposal regarding Lucrez. See Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 53; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 180; Tempesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo: Catalogo completo, pp. 109–110; Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 127–135.

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22 Piero di Cosimo, Frest Fire, 1497–1501. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Photo: Courtesy Art Resource

inexplicable features are present. The painting presents a multitude of animals fleeing from several fires in the forest: birds flying away, a dominant cow toward the front, while in the background a couple of people are concerned with farming. Among the animals there are curious creatures with animal bodies and human faces. Looking at book 1 of the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition, the topic is the creation of the earth and the elements, and the first ages of mankind with their first battles. After the giants had populated the earth, wanting to reach the heavens and to feel like gods, they had been punished and eliminated. The commentary adds that these giants, feeling excessively superior and close to the gods, were to be seen as monkeys. And here the commentator explains that the monkey had to be interpreted as an animal bearing a human face because their appearance would be human, but their existence bestial. Jupiter became angry about this second kind of creature that he had not intended to create, and which had to be eliminated. Therefore, he sent the fire with the help of Vulcan, but the commentary mentions also a second punishment via water, which would gather all the birds in the sky. Because of the water’s arrival, all of the animals became restless, including lions, tigers, deer, and birds (1.18–25). Not all of the places were destroyed by fire or water, however, and those parts inhabited by science and the wisdom of poets, like on Mount Parnassus, were left alone. The men

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22 (cont.)

living here were counted among the first, and were created out of stone (1.29). Then the commentary moves on to the mythical figure Io and her transformation into a cow, which symbolized the transformation of wisdom. Wisdom and eloquence would form the intellect, which, however, did not always react with reason. This would be comparable to Io’s transformation into a cow, who, when sinning, became bestial (1.40–43). Piero di Cosimo’s so-called Forest Fire is therefore a shortened version of the first book of the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition. It is a story about superiority and wisdom as transmitted by the commentary. In order to tell this story, Piero di Cosimo picks up many of its elements: the beasts with human faces symbolizing the giants and their superiority, the fire which should eliminate them, the birds flying anxiously in the air because of the approaching waters, the multitude of animals, the first men living on the earth, the bestial men looking like animals, and wisdom transfigured into a cow, which both depict the inner struggle between wisdom and bestial behavior. The painting should therefore be entitled: “The Quarrel between Superiority and Wisdom,” and may have been a part of Piero di Cosimo’s series on the early history of man.174 174

Already Panofsky, while relying on Lucretius, proposed this painting for his category of paintings on the early history of man (Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art,

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23 Piero di Cosimo, Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, ca. 1500–1515. London: National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Piero di Cosimo used the vernacular Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition also for his cassone painting, the Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs (1500–1515, Fig. 23). While at first glance Ovid’s Metamorphoses chapter 12 might have been

p. 180). Contrary is Geronimus, who sees the Forest Fire not as a part of the series, but as pure landscape painting, which would prove that Piero did not always part from literature, although he acknowledges that the human deformation might come from Lucretius (Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 127–137).

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23 (cont.)

the source,175 the vernacular edition, however, where this episode was addressed as one of the most historical of the entire book, has different details, which in most cases are similar to the narrative details in the painting, most obviously Hercules’s occurrence in several parts of the story that were not present in the Latin Ovid. For example, Hercules is presented as a fighter in the painting in the left foreground, where, as explained in Bonsanti/Bonsignori, he takes his

175

In favor of the original Ovid version are Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 54–60; Tempesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo: Catalogo completo, p. 111; Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, p. 95; Hirschauer and Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, p. 50.

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23 (cont.)

adversary by the neck and kills him. Where Ovid talks about the marriage supper taking place in a palace on tables, Bonsignori/Bonsanti mention a simple supper, and tables being overturned on the earth, with cups and bowls flying around. Other additions to the story from this source ensue once the fight begins: each centaur takes his crying woman away, and centaurs fight with wood to beat their adversary. These details are likewise rendered in the painting, and thus testify to a literary source in the vernacular Bonsanti/Bonsignori version. The importance of the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition for the Veneto has already been mentioned. In the case of Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (1514, National Gallery of Art, Washington), it has been convincingly

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23 (cont.)

argued since Fehl’s article that the painter took his source from the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition, as it contains a selection of persons and scenes not present in Ovid’s original. As an X-ray made by John Walker has shown, the original scene was quite different before it had been changed by Titian, Dossi, or someone else. Based on the appearance of the original characters, Fehl has called this painting Priapus and Lotis, who were accompanied by Bacchus, Mercury, nymphs, satyrs, Neptune, and others. The Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition had added a much more detailed story of Lotis that originally came from Ovid’s Fasti. In this version, Lotis was partying with other nymphs in the company of Bacchus. When Priapus arrived and

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24 Giulio Romano, Sala dei Giganti, 1532–1535. Mantua: Palazzo del Te. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

fell in love with Lotis, he uncovered the sleeping woman, but at the same moment as Priapus arrived with his donkey. This is described within a lively scene with women dressed in festive garments and engaging in lascivious behavior.176 There can be no doubt that Giovanni Bellini had used the Bonsignori/Bonsanti version for his original version of the painting.177

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Phillip Fehl, The worship of Bacchus and Venus in Bellini’s and Titian’s Bacchanals for Alfonson d’Este, Studies in the History of Art, 6, 1974, pp. 37–95, see pp. 43–51, 58–60, 88; Charles Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors in the Italian Renaissance, in: Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, Princeton, NJ 1981, pp. 293–343, see p. 313; Andrea Beyer, Il pubblico di Dosso: La corte estense a Ferrara, in: Dosso Dossi. Pittore di corte a Ferrara nel Rinascimento, ed. Peter Humphrey and Mauro Lucco, Ferrara 1998, pp. 27–51, see pp. 36–37; Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, New Haven, CT 1989, p. 243; Bodo Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale (le Metamorfosi di Ovidio), in: Immagini degli dei. Mitologia e collezionismo tra ’500 e ’600, ed. Claudia Ceri Via, Milan 1996, pp. 22–28, see p. 24. It should be mentioned only briefly that other interpretations start from the painting as it is visible to us today, including the attributes, which the original lacked. Ames-Lewis proposed Ovid’s Fasti as the source or its transformation by Mario Equicola from 1511 (Francis AmesLewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, New Haven, CT 2000, pp. 173, 200–201). Nalezyty, for example, interprets the characters as a short summary through the six chapters of the Fasti, where each god represents a month within a “concept of ritual celebration as it follows the calendar; each god or goddess signifies a festival for a particular month” (p. 754), while some passages are taken from Marcrobius’s Saturnalia as well (Susan Nalezyty, Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods and Banquests of the Ancient Ritual Calendar, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 40:3, 2009, pp. 745–768.

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In the sixteenth century, several fresco cycles followed the Bonsignori/ Bonsanti edition. Giulio Romano used Ovid’s Metamorphoses several times in fresco paintings. One of his most famous cycles was realized in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, the Sala dei Giganti (1532–1535, Fig. 24). Here the painter referred to Ovid’s mention of giants in books 1 and 5. Giants are an important topic in the Metamorphoses, where they appear after the creation of the world and of man, and before the reunion of the gods. Giants are mentioned because of their greed after gaining power in heaven. Therefore, they would bring together stones and mountains to construct an upward path to heaven. Jupiter, however, destroyed Mount Olympus with lightning and beat the giants with the island of Sicily, under which they were trapped, in particular, the giant Typhoeus. From the giants’ blood filtering into the earth, a new mankind arose, and one as brutal as their ancestors (book 1.5). Thereafter, Ovid continues with the story of the rape of Proserpina (book 5). Giulio Romano organized Ovid’s story of greed on the brutal beginnings of mankind as a continuous cycle around the walls, while on the top ceiling, he depicted the reunion of the gods. Guthmüller had already pointed out that the original version of Ovid did not provide enough details for the fresco cycles as composed by Giulio Romano, especially the missing link between the story of the giants in books 1 and 5, Pluto accompanied by the furies, and other details. Therefore, Guthmüller’s suggestion was the translation of Niccolò degli Agostini (printed in Venice, 1522). This translation was based on the Bonsanti/Bonsignori version. Agostini offered some details not present in the original version, like the combination of giants and monkeys, which grew out of those giants killed by Jupiter, and also the furies may derive from it.178 But Guthmüller also noted that Agostini took the versions of the monkeys from Bonsignori and his alternative translation from Ovid.179 In Christian iconography, the monkey could stand for avaritia and luxuria, especially in connection to transformations, as Guthmüller noted. In connection with the frescoes, they would point to superbia and the subsequent fall. Likewise, the other added characters had a moral meaning, when people struck by superbia would fall into the underworld, in Pluto’s realm.180 Guthmüller’s moral-religious interpretation seems more suitable than earlier interpretations pointing to political circumstances.181 In the Bonsignori/Bonsanti edition, the Christian moral interpretation becomes most developed when asserting that there is only one way to heaven and to God, while the giants driven by superbia felt themselves superior to God, and 178

179 180 181

Bodo Guthmüller, Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei. Bemerkungen zur Sala dei Giganti Giulio Romanos, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 21:1, 1977, pp. 35–68, see pp. 42–45; Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale, p. 24. Guthmüller, Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei, p. 48. Guthmüller, Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei, pp. 48, 53–54. Kurt W. Forster and Richard J. Tuttle, The Palazzo del Te, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 30:4, 1971, pp. 267–293, see p. 280.

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actually felt like gods themselves. The giants would be animals, human beings turned into beasts, much like monkeys, not knowing anything about God or any other beings (book 1.15–18, ff. aiii–v to aiiii–r). The interpretation of the monkeys is the most telling difference between Ovid’s original and its later interpretations. Obviously, Giulio Romano did not follow Ovid directly, nor the Latin commentary by Raffaele Regio, but followed the vernacular interpretations offered by Bonsanti/Bonsignori and Niccolò degli Agostini. The Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition served for other fresco cycles as well, especially in the first half of the sixteenth century. The frescoes in the Villa Pelucca (Sesto San Giovanni) made around 1520 by Bernardino Luini had a biblical, courtly, and mythological background, in which, for the last part, the Bonsanti edition has been made responsible because it combined certain scenes from the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, which in the originals were not combined.182 Also, Pontormo’s fresco Vertumnus and Pomona and surrounding personalities in the lunette (1519–1521) in Poggio a Caiano have been traced back to the Bonsanti/ Bonsignori edition by Falciani and Natali because of the combinations of attributes of the figures, which are different in this edition.183 Likewise, Tintoretto’s panel painting Priamus and Tisbe (ca. 1541) had the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition as its source.184 Up to Ludovico Dolce’s new translation in the 1550s, the Bonsanti/ Bonsignori edition appears to have been one of the most important standard references for painters.185 This changed in Titian’s time, and it has already been shown that he used the Dolci translation for his mythologies for Philip II.186 Five years before the Bonsanti/Bonsignori edition was published, another important edition with accompanying commentary was printed (Venice 1492), this time by the well-known Venetian university teacher and philologist Raffaele Regio (ca. 1440–1520).187 Although this edition became enormously 182

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184 185

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Cristina Quattrini and Bernardino Luini, Gerolamo Rabia e l’“Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare” di Giovanni Bonsignori. Un’interpretazione degli affreschi mitologici della Villa Pelucca, Bollettino d’Arte, 6th ser., 89: 130, 2004, pp. 25–44, see p. 29. Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, Pontormo, Cinisello Balsamo 2014, pp. 122–132. Others have traced the Pontormo fresco Vertumno and Pomona back to Vergil’s Georgics, and composed with the help of Paolo Giovio: Julian Kliemann, Il pensiero di Paolo Giovio nelle pitture eseguite sulle sue “invenzioni,” in: Paolo Giovio, Il rinascimento e la memoria, ed. Società Storica comense, Como 1985, pp. 197–223, see also Marcello Fagiolo, Virgili nell’arte e cultura europea, Rome 1981, p. 91. Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale, pp. 24–25. See for further paintings by Giulio Romano, Cavalier d’Arpino, and Tiepolo, referring to the vernacular editions: Guthmüller, Il mito e la tradizione testuale, pp. 22–28. Peter Humfrey, Titian, London 2007, p. 176; Carlo Ginzburg, Titian, Ovid, and sixteenthcentury codes for erotic illustration, in: Titian’s Venus of Urbino, ed. Rona Goffen, Cambridge 1997, pp. 23–36; Thomas Dalla Costa, Venere e Adone di Tiziano. Arte, cultura e società tra Venezia e l’Europa, Venice 2019, p. 35. Guthmüller, Lateinische und volkssprachliche Kommentare zu Ovids “Metamorphosen,” pp. 119–139; Kathryn L. McKinley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: “Metamorphoses” Commentaries 1100–1618, Leiden 2001, pp. 127–160.

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famous and was reprinted numerous times, it did not have a significant impact on art (although other Latin commentaries sometimes had; see below). Text and commentary were in Latin and therefore less accessible for the mid-level reading public, which found easier access elsewhere. Therefore, the Bonsignori/Bonsanti and Regio editions had different readerships, vernacular and Latin. Nevertheless, Regio’s text had an even more widespread distribution than the Bonsignori/Bonsanti vernacular version. His text was enormously successful, and was reprinted thirteen times in the incunable period, and up to sixty times through the middle of the sixteenth century.188 Regio did to Ovid’s text what Renaissance commentators normally do: he took the ancient poetry as a rich source of knowledge to which he added his own broad learning, and he expanded or diverted arguments whenever he felt the necessity. Therefore, the reader could learn about history, astronomy, geography, music, philosophy, morality, and oratory.189 Ovid’s other famous opus, The Fasti, is much less present in the visual art, probably because it was much harder to access. All of the major ancient works received translations already by the end of the fifteenth century, whereas the Fasti did not. It was available in Italian only as late as 1551, which means, after the important translation periods of the 1470s–1480s and the 1530s–1540s. Until this date, artists could access the text only in Latin, and only a very few of them did so. This lack of an early translation is the more surprising when one considers the wide interest that the Fasti received in the Renaissance, and the variety of topics touched on in the poem. The Fasti was a poem on the Roman calendar year and included religious, historical, and social customs; natural history; geography; mythology; and astrology. Ovid finished only half of the calendar year, stopping at the month of June. Some authors believed that Ovid’s Fasti came along as a poetical commentary. There were several medieval commentaries and lessons on the Fasti, especially in Italy and France, most notably in Orléans. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Fasti was read mostly due to an incipient antiquarian interest.190 The first printed edition (Latin) came out within an early Opera omnia in Bologna in 1480. Thereafter, the poem benefited from important commentaries, which did not all make their way into print. The two most important and widely distributed were the commentary by the Roman university teacher and academician Paolo Marsi (1440–1484), printed in 1482 and 1489, then, from 1497 onward, in combination with the likewise important commentary 188

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Guthmüller, Lateinische und volkssprachliche Kommentare zu Ovids “Metamorphosen,” p. 131; McKinley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine, p. 130. Guthmüller, Lateinische und volkssprachliche Kommentare zu Ovids “Metamorphosen,” pp. 128–130. Angela Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti, Columbus, OH 2015, pp. 5–13, 52–53, 101–150.

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25 Piero di Cosimo, The Misfortune of Silenus, ca. 1500. Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Photo: Courtesy © President and Fellows of Harvard College

by the university teacher Antonio Costanzo (1436–1490). Costanzo’s commentary (finished in 1480) remained only in a manuscript version for some time, and was accessible only through the Montefeltrian library in Urbino, until 1489, the year of its first printing.191 Both commentaries required an advanced knowledge of Latin, and were therefore difficult to access. However, there was a second oral way to follow up on important topics in the Fasti, namely, the lessons provided in Florence, Rome, and Fano at the universities or in a public environment. Costanzo gave lectures in Fano between 1463 and 1490;192 Poliziano lectured on the Fasti at the Florentine studio in 1480–1482,193 and Marsi gave public lectures in Rome on Ovid at the university and at the academy between 1475 and 1482. In the preface to the printed edition, Marsi praised himself as having lectured in front of both the learned and unlearned, the young and old.194 Artists therefore could try to follow these lessons, or search to access snippets from the Fasti through other secondary texts referring to it. In any case, addressing the Fasti required a significantly larger effort compared with any other text by Ovid.

191 192 193

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See on the manuscripts and printing history Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, pp. 29–62, 87–94. Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, pp. 41–42. Ida Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien: Catalogue descriptif; avec dix-neuf documents inédits en appendice, Genève 1965, pp. 206f; Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, p. 42. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA 1986, p. 64; Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, pp. 34, 69–70.

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Piero di Cosimo followed the Fasti in his two paintings from around 1500 for the Vespucci family: The Discovery of Honey (Worcester, Art Museum) and The Misfortunes of Silenus (ca. 1500, Fig. 25). Both paintings narrate in two episodes the Feast of Bacchus and Bacchus’s Discovery of Honey. Since Panofsky, researchers have referred to a passage in the Fasti covering the feast of Bacchus on March 17 (3.737–760).195 Piero di Cosimo had to access a Latin text. A manuscript version of the Fasti or the Opera omnia (Bologna, 1480) would have supplied him with almost all of the necessary features, apart from some minor details. Congruently with the text, the painting’s first panel describes Bacchus coming from a sandy shore to higher land, accompanied by people and their instruments. This attracted the bees, which Bacchus collected and set into a hole in a tree trunk, where he discovered the honey. The accompanying satyrs and Silenus tasted the honey and were overwhelmed by the taste. The second panel shows old and bare-headed Silenus sitting on a donkey, from which he wanted to reach the newly discovered treasures of the tree. He fell off the donkey, however, and the wasps and bees stung his face so badly that it became swollen. While the satyrs were amused by his looks, Bacchus applied earth to his face in order to diminish the pain. This last scene is on the left of the painting. On the whole, the story could be found in a Latin version of the original or in the 1480 Bologna edition, although it seems more likely that Piero di Cosimo consulted either the edition with Antonio Costanzo’s commentary from 1489 or the joint commentaries from 1497,196 because of a particular feature in the first painting on the discovery of honey. On the right, we see two people who were not in Ovid, but in his commentary Antonio Costanzo added Apollo and Daphne to the feast of Bacchus. Of course, the commentated version would have had the original text side by side with the commentary, and Piero di Cosimo could therefore have accessed both with one edition. Also Mantegna in his monochrome painting on the Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome (1505–1506, London, National Gallery) picked up on Ovid’s Fasti. Already Fritsen has shown how Mantegna followed the Marsi commentary because of their shared antiquarian interests. Although at first glance Mantegna’s painting seems to combine elements from both Titus Livy’s story on ancient Rome and Ovid’s Fasti for the story of Cybele, in the end it is Marsi’s version, who

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Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 61–65; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, p. 181; Thomas F. Mathews, Piero di Cosimo’s discovery of honey, The Art Bulletin, 45:4, 1963, pp. 357–360; Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, p. 123; Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 46–48, 81–86; Tempesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo: Catalogo completo, pp. 124–126; Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist, p. 173; Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 101–106; Hirschauer and Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 52, 144; John F. Miller, Ovid’s Janus and the start of the year in Renaissance Fast sacri, in: The Afterlife of Ovid, ed. Peter Mack and John North, London 2015, pp. 81–93, see p. 81. Ovidius de Fastis cum duobis commentariis, [Paolo Marsi, Antonio Constanzo], Venice 1497.

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himself relied on Livy to enrich his commentary. Fritsen points especially to the character of Scipio and his story, since he receives more attention in Ovid than in Livy, and even more so in Marsi, who explicitly talks about his outstretched hands, thus inspiring Mantegna to make him the predominant figure: as the halfkneeling figure with his hands stretched out in front of the altar.197 The Fasti were translated into the vernacular only in 1551 by Vincenzo Cartari. As he underlined in his foreword, he aimed at a free translation, using many more words than the original to explain what could be difficult to grasp for an uneducated person. Just two years later, there appeared a new translation of the Metamorphoses provided by Ludovico Dolce (Venice, 1553), which tried to displace the old Bonsignori translation. Although Dolce provided a translation without commentary, he too used Cartari’s approach and offered a free translation including explanations (although he did not mention this in the foreword). Interestingly, the Vitruvius commentator and architect, Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, was asked to provide the illustrations. Rusconi was one of the very learned architects who had studied at the University of Padua, and translated Alberti’s De architectura for his fellow architects (see Chapter 4). Both translations belong to the third important translation period of the Renaissance, and came at a point when representations of Ovid in art had moved away from the narrative aspect to the pointed depiction of one moment, or to a syncretistic account of key points. No longer merely illustrating, artists took a different approach to their work and to the underlying texts. They required background information to the stories because they no longer attempted to use the parts as they had been written. Two other Ovidian texts received early translation, as well as early and ongoing print editions. De arte amandi was first published in Italian in Venice in 1472, with many reprints to follow, and the Epistole Heroides were translated into Italian and published in 1475, receiving a printed commentary in 1496. Ovid’s Heroides were intended as a schoolbook at an easy Latin reading level for both boys and girls, so it therefore circulated widely in both manuscript and print. Its importance as a schoolbook is confirmed by the vernacular translator of the first Italian edition printed in 1475, who said that the letter collection should give moral advice by illustrating exemplary and reprehensible couples and their love affairs. More important than the story of the two lovers, which was presented only obliquely in the narration, the letters concentrate on their sufferings for love, their distance from their beloved, or anger and fear at being left alone.198 Sometimes the translator gives a short introduction to explain 197

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Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, pp. 190–194. For a different interpretation, see Lightbown. Following Lightbown, Mantegna took the inscription on the painting from Juvenal, the scenes from Valerius Maximus Memorabilia, and the background of the scene from Livy (Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna, Oxford 1986, pp. 215–216). Ovid, Epistole d’Ovidio, Naples 1475 (Italian); Theodor Heinze, Ovid – Epistulae Heroidum – Briefe von Heroinen, trans. Theodor Heinze, Darmstadt 2016, pp. 7–20 (Latin).

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Ovid’s intention with a given letter. The characters are based on mythological figures that were normally present elsewhere in ancient poetry, but in places difficult to access for an artist. But since their stories were so well known, they entered other works as well, mostly the Metamorphoses. However, a few topics could most likely have entered art only through these epistles. The vernacular version of the epistles was owned by several artists, for example, by Verrocchio and Leonardo.199 Francesco di Giorgio is among the first to depict one of the love stories in a panel painting. Being one of the few learned artists, he presumably knew this text from his Latin education, and he addressed the topic of Oenone and Paris around 1460, when he was roughly twenty years old (Fig. 26). The story is rendered as a multilayered narrative in one painting on a cassone.200 The ancient story tells us that Paris as a shepherd meets the nymph Oenone and marries her. After having a child, he feels the need to leave for Troy. Oenone predicts the Trojan War, embarrassed to have been left alone. Francesco di Giorgio picks up only on the first plot of the story: Paris meeting Oenone, the marriage, and him leaving for Troy. Ovid instead offered a longer discourse, involving other deities, on the vicissitudes of being alone and having to wait for one’s true love. This story was not present in the Metamorphoses and could have reached Francesco di Giorgio through the school text of the Heroides. Francesco di Giorgio or his workshop probably selected another cassone topic from the Epistles, the story of Dido and Aeneas (1470s, Portland Museum).201 Dido was the first queen of Carthage, who was originally married to Acerbas, her uncle. Apart from Ovid’s Epistles, the story of Dido and Aeneas is not a frequent one, but here it is one of the longest narrations. The Epistles concentrate on Aeneas being Dido’s lover, and her pleas for him not to leave her. The Epistles tell very little about what preceded or followed that story. The painting likewise picks up the crucial moment when Aeneas, with his father Anchises and his son, had left Troy and reaches Carthage with his company, where he is welcomed by Dido, sitting enthroned with her maidens in a temple-like loggia in the rebuilt city, while Aeneas is approaching her. It is likely that Paolo Uccello (1397–1475) also relied on the Epistles. His cassone with the Battle of Greeks and Amazons before the Walls of Troy (together with

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D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, pp. 33–34; Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, pp. 71, 198–199; Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, vol. 2, p. 16. Earlier publications identified this painting as the Judgment of Paris and the Rape of Helen, but did not attempt to name an author or a source for the two episodes (formerly Boston, collection of Mrs. Edmund March Wheelwright); see Allen Stuart Weller, Francesco di Giorgio 1439–1501, Chicago 1943, pp. 115–118; Burton B. Fredericksen, The Cassone Paintings of Francesco di Giorgio, Malibu, CA 1969, pp. 33–35. Fredericksen, The Cassone Paintings of Francesco di Giorgio, pp. 36–38. Fredericksen does not attempt to find the source for the topic. He sees the painting more by the workshop than by Francesco di Giorgio himself.

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2 6 Francesco di Giorgio, The Story of Oenone and Paris, 1460s. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Photo: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

Allegories of Faith and Justice and Reclining Nude, ca. 1460, Fig. 27)202 recalls a passage of Vergil’s Aeneid, but given its limited details beyond the battle happening outside Troy, it does not offer many narrative details and could therefore also derive from Ovid’s Epistles, explicitly the letter between Dido and Aeneas, and Laodamia’s letter to her husband. Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Deianeira (ca. 1470, Fig. 28) on a cassone is likewise inspired by Ovid’s Heroides. The centaur Nessus tries to rape Deianeira, Hercules’s wife, while crossing the river Evenus. Clay Dean made a far-fetched proposal giving Philostratus’s Imagines as the source (rather than Ovid’s Metamorphoses) because it describes Deianeira’s outstretched hand, which was not present in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.203 However, Ovid’s Heroides give the story in much more detail. He describes a river meandering

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Seymour does not give a literary source for this painting, which he describes as “Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes” (Charles Seymour, Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery: A Catalogue by Charles Seymour, Jr., New Haven, CT 1970, p. 141; likewise without literary proposal: Lisa R. Brody, A “Cassone” painted in the workshop of Paolo Uccello and possibly carved in the workshop of Domenico del Tasso, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2010, pp. 114–17, figs. 1–7). Callmann calls to attention to Boccaccio, although she admits that there is no direct link (Ellen Callmann, Subjects from Boccaccio in Italian painting, 1375–1525, Studi sul Boccaccio, 23, 1995, p. 37). Clay Dean, A Selection of Early Italian Paintings from the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT 2001, p. 34. Seymour does not attempt to give a source (Seymour, Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery, pp. 170–173).

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2 6 (cont.)

through a valley filled by much rain when Nessus raped Deianeira in the river, and then hanging his coat filled with poison over her. The river under them was red from blood. Pollaiuolo shows precisely this scene of Nessus raping Deianeira and covering her with a veil, while the river beneath them is filled with blood, coloring it deeply. If the date given for this panel corresponds indeed to 1470, as given in the museum catalog, then Pollaiuolo must have consulted the Latin edition, which he probably knew from school. From 1475 onward, he might have used the vernacular translation. Ovid’s Heroides received an early printed edition (Naples, 1475),204 and in the same year as the printing, the topic was also taken up in painting. An anonymous painter in Siena used the first story of the Return of Odysseus (Ullisses) to Penelope on a cassone (ca. 1475, London, V&A museum, attributed by the V&A to a painter close to Liberale da Verona, and referred to Homer’s Odyssey). He showed the story as it was narrated in the Heroides, with Penelope sitting at home and weaving the never-ending shroud, Ulisses and Diomedes, Ulisses on his way with his horses, Troy in back, and the multitude of boats. Pinturicchio likewise painted a story of Ovid’s Heroides on a cassone, 204

Ovid, Epistole d’Ovidio. This edition of the Heroides contains the stories of Penelope and Ulisse, Demofonte and Felix, Achille and Criseyda, Fedra and Ypolito, Paris and Oenone, Jason and Medea, Dido and Eneas, Hermione and Horeste, Hercules and Deianira, Adriana and Teseo, Canace and Amachareo, Laudomia, Ipermestra and Lino, Paris and Helena, Leandro and Hero, and Aconzio and Cipide.

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27 Paolo Uccello, Battle of Greeks and Amazons before the Walls of Troy, ca. 1460. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, public domain

28 Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Deianira, ca. 1475–1498. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, public domain

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29 Pinturicchio, Odyssey of Penelope and Odysseus, 1509. London: National Gallery. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

taking a letter in which Ovid was retelling Homer’s story from the Odyssey on Penelope and Odysseus (Ullisse) (1509, Fig. 29), a story which was not included in the Metamorphoses. Since it is unlikely that Pinturicchio accessed Homer’s text, he might have either encountered this text in Latin school205 or accessed the Italian translation available from 1475. Ovid tells about Penelope’s endless waiting until Odysseus was supposed to turn back from the battle in Troy. In Ovid, this sequence is turned into a letter, where she pleads for her husband to return home. For Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena, Pinturicchio frescoed his story of Penelope and Odysseus at exactly the moment of his turning home, while she sits and weaves the never-ending textile she had promised to finish before she would marry again. All these examples show the importance of Ovid’s Epistles especially for secular home decorations like cassone and spalliera.

205

It is unlikely he had access to Homer directly, because even a Latin translation was difficult to grasp. The translation into Latin by Raffaello Volterano was published in Rome 1510. Carli and Fornari Schianchi do not attempt to find a source for the scene. See Enzo Carli, Il Pintoricchio, Milan 1960, pp. 81–82 (date 1509, city of Genoa in the background); Lucia Fornari Schianchi, Pintoricchio a Siena. L’ultimo decennio (1502–1513), in: Pintoricchio, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, Milan 2008, pp. 131–139.

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In its Italian version, Ovid’s De arte amandi (printed in 1472) was of limited use for artists. Roughly comparable to Boccaccio’s Decameron, it was mainly intended as an easy and entertaining reading experience for women. Some of the loving couples and their stories presented were taken from other stories by Ovid, mostly from the Metamorphoses, and became famous in this text as well. Venus and Cupid, Bacchus and Ariadne, Paris and Helena, Medea and Jason, and Hercules on his own might have influenced the iconography of household decorations, probably furniture, for the most part, although many of the stories were present in the Heroides as well.

Vergil Beyond doubt, Ovid and Vergil were the most commonly read ancient authors in the Italian Renaissance. Artists likewise fell back on Vergilian topics, but nevertheless with less frequency than on Ovidian ones. Translations of Vergil were not as early or as readily available as those of Ovid, but from the 1470s onward, he received an astonishing number of vernacular translations.206 Probably the earliest translation was made in 1476 on Vergil’s Aeneid by the Greek Athanagio.207 Why a Greek was asked to translate Vergil from Latin into the vernacular is not known, nor do we know the patron who requested it. Given the city’s place, Athanagio was most likely active in Vicenza or a neighboring city. In his foreword (prologo), Athanagio defined himself as a highly learned literato who had dedicated much effort to his translation. This edition was, however, a shortened version of the Aeneid, namely, what Athanagio thought it was sufficient to know. Athanagio also explained in his prologo that the book would give an account of the science of battles, of agriculture and bucolic life, of the different Roman populations (Troians, Greeks, Sabines), and of the praiseworthy works in Aeneas’s life.208 Highly aware of his intended readership, Athanagio states in the explicit that now the illiterates (non docti) would be able to read or listen to this important story of an ancient erudito. Athanagio applied a few didactic means to prepare the content for the reader. Before he started with the translation, he gave Latin summaries in front of some chapters (compendium), which the reader was obviously expected to understand. For the following translated parts, he gave explanatory summary titles to each chapter in order to better guide the reader through the content.209 This setup goes through the whole book. 206

207 208 209

For a list of translations, see Craig Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil, Florence 1994. Vergil, P. Maronis Virgilii Liber Eneidos feliciter incipit, Le fatezze de Enea, Vicenza 1476. Vergil, P. Maronis Virgilii Liber Eneidos feliciter incipit, Le fatezze de Enea, ff. a3r and v. Summary titles are, for example, “Qui navicando perdi enea una nave per aspera fortuna,” “Come li troiani rivarono nel porto di libia,” “Risponso che diede Iove a Venus di facti de Enea,” “Come Venus aparve ad Enea nella selva.”

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Vergil’s Bucolica (Ecloge) was first translated into the vernacular at the beginning of 1482 by Bernardo Pulci,210 a close friend of the Medici family, and he dedicated his translation to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who would certainly not have had any difficulties with the Latin original. Pulci explained that he wanted to dedicate the text to Lorenzo in order to gain more acceptance for this vernacular version from the learned. He would not expect the learned to read this version, as they were perfectly familiar with the Latin, but Lorenzo’s approval would help with acknowledgment by the learned as well as with the distribution of this work among less learned people. He evidently still expected a readership from both sides (ff. aiiii r–v). The text was printed in 1482 in Florence by Bartholomeo Miscomini.211 As in Athanagio’s edition, Pulci likewise followed a didactic approach in several ways. He explained in his foreword that this text usually requires a learned readership. Therefore, he would offer some modifications in his translation to render a difficult topic comprehensible for a vernacular public. Like many translators into the vernacular, Pulci therefore made some adjustments for a different audience. As he wrote in his foreword to Lorenzo, he claimed to have adapted the translation to make it more useful for and understandable to less-educated readers. For example, his didactic method included in the introduction an explanation of the origins of the word Bucolica, and a short summary of the chapters, which made them more accessible. Every eclogue is introduced by its own summary of the content and an introduction to the argument, after which follows the translation; both of these are in the vernacular. Pulci presented Vergil’s stories as allegories (f. a 4v). At the beginning of the famous fourth egloga, Pulci briefly mentioned an interpretation that was circulating: he informed the reader that the wise poet in this egloga introduced divine mysteries, which other commentators had transformed into fables. This, however, should be left to educated readers (ff. b5r–v). Vergil’s fourth egloga had indeed always been interpreted with a special meaning, which theologically equipped Renaissance readers interpreted by means of the theory of pre-Christian wisdom as an annunciation of Christ. Modern scholars, especially Riverso, have pointed out that many classical texts introduced into the fifteenth-century school curriculum were interpreted along the lines of a parallel to the prisca theologia discussion, and were seen as a prophetic version of pre-Christian wisdom.212 Here the Cumaean Sybil announced the birth of God’s child, and a “virgo” appeared as the Goddess of justice. Then the childhood and youth of this boy is narrated 210

211

212

Vergil, Bucolica, foreword and translation by Bernardo Pulci, Florence 1481 (1482) (citations from here). See on this edition Kallendorf, A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil, pp. 18–19. Nicola Riverso, Alfabetizzazione e Umanesimo nell’Italia dei secoli XIV e XV, Gaeta 1997, p. 120.

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in a world where fear no longer had any place. Obviously, Pulci thought that the prisca theologia tradition of pre-Christian wisdom was too much of an interpretive stretch for an unlearned person. By the 1480s, Vergil’s work (the Aeneid and the Bucolics) was mostly accessible in the vernacular, and its stories thus became public knowledge. There then arose a new and more intense wave of Vergil translations in the 1530s–1540s, which took place when the literary academies opened. The case is a little different with Vergil’s Georgica. Although the Latin version counted among the very earliest printed books (Rome, 1467) and enjoyed a wide distribution with more than ninety incunable versions, the history of its translation is more complicated. An early translation was available only in Bastiano Foresi’s book Libro chiamato ambitione (Florence, ca. 1485). Only during the busy 1540s did more accurate translations become available: the first was by Antonio Mario Nigresoli (Venice, 1543), and the second by Bernardino Daniello, who also provided a commentary (Venice, 1545). The Georgics’ main topics are a detailed account of rural life in the countryside, the human and natural efforts it requires, and its serenity in comparison with the corruptions to life in the city. Vergil shows himself to be well acquainted with cultivating trees and raising boar, horses, sheep, goats, and especially bees. The labor of bees serves as a good analogy for the ideals of human society and community. In between these accounts of natural life alternating between arcadian settings with music, the fertility of nature and animals, and the sensuous organization of nature, symbolic and mythological examples are included, which give the settings an additional meaning because they took place in the ages of Saturn and Jupiter. The readers learn, for example, about oak trees, which the Greeks used for oracles; olive trees as a symbol for peace; and spiders as enemies of Minerva. For their settings, Vergil mentions several places, like Mantua, Mount Parnassus, and Arcadia. There are also brief mentions of Pan, the nymphs and Clio, Bacchus taming the centaurs, and, most importantly, at the end of the book after the description of the bees is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Vergil was also addressed by a few important commentaries, which were very popular among Renaissance humanists and patrons. Vergil’s Aeneid had already been commented on in antiquity by Servius Maurus Honoratus and Tiberius Claudius Donatus, then during the Renaissance by Filippo Beroaldo (1482) and Cristoforo Landino (1488), two of the most famous commentators, as well as by Sebastianus Regulus in the sixteenth century. All of these commentaries were printed numerous times and in different combinations, starting around 1470 with Servius’s commentary.213 Vergil’s Bucolics had been 213

On Renaissance editions of Vergil’s Aeneid, see, for example, David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, Cambridge 2010, pp. 31–37.

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commented on in antiquity by Servius, and in the Renaissance by Landino, Beroaldo, and Antonio Mancinelli. Vergil’s Georgics received an ancient commentary by Servius, and shorter Renaissance commentaries by Beroaldo and Landino. The commentators had different intentions and wanted to render Vergil’s stories in a particular light. For example, Landino used the Aeneid to make a Neoplatonic interpretation, while Sebastianus Regulus used an Aristotelian approach. In approaching the text through philosophical authorities, they placed the original source within a system of new knowledge.214 The prolific commentator Filippo Beroaldo published his commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid in 1482 (Bologna) as the first modern printed commentary on Vergil, although in the end it turned out to be more a commentary on the ancient commentator Servius, about whom Beroaldo was highly critical. This edition also had shorter comments by Beroaldo on the Bucolics and the Georgics.215 A few years later in 1488, Landino published his commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid together with the Bucolics (Eclogues) and Georgics. It was reprinted many times thereafter, for example, in 1491.216 Both Beroaldo and Landino loaded their commentaries with references to Ovid and Pliny. As mentioned, Landino especially interpreted the Aeneid in a Neoplatonic light and as enriched with Christian moral meaning. Therefore, virtues and vices had a special interpretation in Landino’s version. In the end, the Aeneid became a text with special ethical values to be imparted to the reader.217 As was often the case, Landino’s printed commentaries were the result of university lectures, and he started early on to comment on Vergil at the Studio Fiorentino. Between 1462 and 1464, he offered lessons on the Aeneid, and between 1467 and 1469, on the Bucolics. The first general introduction to Vergil’s Aeneid, where Landino had already clothed the poet in Neoplatonic and moral vestment, was held on a Saturday, a day which assured that everyone was able to attend.218 Landino engaged again with Vergil in his other publications, including the commentary on the Divine Comedy and his Disputationes Camaldulenses. 214

215 216

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See on these different approaches: Kallendorf, Virgil and the ethical commentary, pp. 203, 214–215. See on Beroaldo’s critique on Servius: Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, pp. 32–33. Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, pp. 35–37. Landino himself commented on the Aeneid, but he only wrote a preface to the commented editions to the Bucolics and Georgics (for example, in P. Virgilij Maronis poetarum facile principis Buccolica et Georgica, Paris 1500). Kallendorf, Virgil and the ethical commentary, pp. 203–206; John Stevens, Landino, Vergil, and Plato, Renaissance Papers, 2009, pp. 1–20. See on Landino’s lessons: Roberto Cardini, Prolusione: Praefatio in Virgilio, in: La critica del Landino, ed. Roberto Cardini, Florence 1973; Arthur Field, A manuscript of Landino’s first lectures on Virgil, 1462–63, Renaissance Papers, 1978, pp. 17–20; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, p. 236; Jonathan Davies, Florence and Its University during the Early Renaissance, Leiden 1998, p. 113; Craig Kallendorf, Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the humanist critical tradition, Renaissance Quarterly, 36:4, 1983, pp. 519–546.

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30 Apollonio di Giovanni, Shipwreck of Aeneas, ca. 1450–1460. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, public domain

Vergil’s Aeneid in particular was a major source for allegorical interpretations and renderings in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It also was a text that in printed editions often received illustrations.219 Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Vergil’s Aeneid was present in cassone and spalliera painting, although less frequently. Apollonio di Giovanni’s (ca. 1416–1465) two cassone panels Shipwreck of Aeneas (ca. 1450–1460, Fig. 30) and Aeneas at Carthage (ca. 1450, Fig. 31) are both examples of paintings derived from the Latin Aeneid tradition. The attribution to Apollonio di Giovanni was aided by his illustrations of a Latin Aeneid manuscript (Vergil codex, scribe Niccolò d’Antonio de’ Ricci, Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 492).220 This also explains his familiarity

219

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Ulrich Wilke, Vergils Aeneis in vier Zyklen von Buch-Illustrationen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Neukirchen 2014. Research has always agreed on the Aeneid as the source for the panels: Schubring, Cassoni, pp. 430–437; Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford 1932, p. 347; Wolfgang Stechow, Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni, cassone painters, Bulletin of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1944, vol. 1, pp. 5–21, see pp. 15–17; Ernst H. Gombrich, Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine cassone workshop seen through the eyes of a humanist poet, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 18, 1955, pp. 16–34, see pp. 17–18; Ellen Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, Oxford 1974, pp. 7–10, 19–20, 41, 54–55; Rita Parma Baudille, Virgilio nell’arte e nella cultura europea, ed. Marcello Fagiolo, Rome 1981, pp. 224–225; Jennifer Klein Morrison, Apollonio di Giovanni’s “Aeneid” cassoni and the Virgil commentators, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 1992, pp. 34–35; Margaret Franklin,

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30 (cont.)

with the work. Although the story appears in Ovid’s Epistles, this text would not offer enough detail regarding the scenes in the paintings. Since a translation would not have been available in Apollonio’s time, he must have accessed a Latin manuscript of the Aeneid. Here he could read a more detailed narration of the shipwreck (Aeneid, book 1), Aeneas landing on the Libyan coast, hiding the boats behind forests and grottos, and meeting together with Achates, Venus appearing as a huntress. The second panel with the building of Carthage is a summary of several different parts in the Aeneid (though most comes from book 1): Dido in her temple, with the permission to rebuild Carthage; her receiving the Trojans after the battle, including Aeneas; and the killing of the animals for the banquet (pigs and lambs are present, the cows have been mixed up with deer).221 Apollonio di Giovanni was a well-known cassone painter, for whom the access to Latin original sources must have been

221

Vergil and the “femina furens”: Reading the “Aeneid” in Renaissance “cassone” paintings, Vergilis, 60, 2014, pp. 127–144. As Morrisson has shown, Apollonio di Giovanni relied for his cassone, currently in Boston and Paris (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Paris, Musée de Cluny), on Vergil’s last books of the Aeneid together with a contemporary extension to the Aeneid by Maffeo Vegio, who in 1428 added a thirteenth book (Libri XII Aeneidos Supplementum). Here Vegio told the story of the marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia (Morrison, Apollonio di Giovanni’s “Aeneid” cassoni and the Virgil commentators, pp. 38–43; see also Franklin, Vergil and the “femina furens,” pp. 127–144).

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31 Apollonio di Giovanni, Aeneas at Carthage, ca. 1450. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, public domain

fundamental in the middle of the fifteenth century, before translations appeared in manuscripts and prints. Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Vergil’s Aeneid also received plenty of majolica dishes222 and monumental fresco cycles, mostly between 1530 and 1560, which means during the third major period of translations.223 Many frescoes still exist at least partially, like Dosso Dossi’s Camerino d’alabastro in the Palazzo Ducale of Ferrara (ca. 1522), the Sala di Troia in the Mantuan Palazzo Ducale by the workshop of Giulio Romano,224 and Perin del Vaga’s Sala dell’Eneide in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome (after 1536, for Clement XII).225 One of the most productive Vergil illustrators was Nicolò dell’Abate, who frescoed the Castello 222

223

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225

On majolica disches for Isabella d’Este with Vergilian and Ovidian topics (1524) by the painter Nicola da Urbino and Vergilian-inspired dishes for the Pucci family (1532) and Vespasiano Gonzaga (1555), see Lisa Boutin Vitela, Virgilian imagery and the majolica of the Mantuan court, in: Virgil and Renaissance Culture, ed. L. B. T. Houghton and Marco Sgarbi, Tempe, AZ 2018, pp. 49–62. For the change from single episodes on Vergil’s Aeneid to monumental fresco cycles, see Gombrich, Apollonio di Giovanni, pp. 11–28. Sylvie Béguin, La decorazione della Rocca di Scandiano, in: Mostra di Nicolo dell’Abate. Catalogo critico, ed. Sylvie M. Béguin, Bologna 1969, pp. 53–58, see pp. 53–54; Bettie Forte, Vergil’s “Aeneid” in literature and art of the Italian Renaissance, Vergilius, 28, 1982, pp. 4–14, see p. 5. Rita Parma Baudille, catalog entry, in: Virgili nell’arte e cultura europea, ed. Marcello Fagiolo, Rome 1981, pp. 141–143 (probably influenced by Sebastian Brand’s illustrations).

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31 (cont.)

di Scandiano for Giulio Boiardo (1540s) and the Sala di Camilla in the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna for Alessandro Poggi (1550s, Aeneid XI).226 From the second half of the sixteenth century, some partial frescoes survived with uncertain attributions: the Sala dell’Eneide in the Palazzo Spada in Rome (ca. 1550), the Saletta dell’Eneide in the Palazzo del Giardino in Sabbionetta (1582–1584, for Vespasiano Gonzaga, probably by Bernardino Campi), and several rooms in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (end of the sixteenth century).227 Little is left of Dosso Dossi’s Camerino d’alabastro in the Palazzo Ducale of Ferrara. The court artist of Alfonso I d’Este contributed frescoes to a room where panels by Titian, Bellini, and others of his own were also located. Dosso provided a so-called Fregio di Enea, where research agrees that the frescoes are not exact illustrations of Vergil’s Aeneid, but rather a liberal choice of passages.228 Since Longhi, the topic has been connected with Vergil, then 226

227 228

Sylvie Béguin, La decorazione della Rocca di Scandiano, in: Mostra di Niccolo dell’Abate, ed. Sylvie M. Béguin, Bologna 1969, pp. 53–58; Baudille, catalog entry, pp. 136–140; Sonia Cavicchioli, La “visibile poesia” di Nicolò. Fonti letterarie e iconografia dei fregi dipinti a Bologna, in: Nicolò Dell’Abate: Storie dipinte nella pittura del Cinquecento tra Modena e Fontainebleau, ed. Sylvie Béguin and Francesca Piccinini, Milan 2005, pp. 101–115, see pp. 106–109. Baudille, catalog entry, pp. 144–159. Amalia Mezzetti, Le Storie di Enea del Dosso nel camerino d’alabastro di Alfonso I d’Este, Paragone, 16:189, 1965, pp. 71–84; Erika Langmuir, Arma Virumque . . . Nicolò dell’Abate’s

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discussed and enhanced by other researchers.229 Dossi certainly did not attempt to illustrate all the twelve books in his ten panels, but rather sought for a synopsis.230 Five frescoes of the original ten have been found in different galleries: Aeneas in the Elysian Fields (ca. 1520–1521, Ottawa, Aeneid VI,), the Sicilian Games (ca. 1520–1521, New York, Aeneid V), and the newly titled Trojans Building or Repairing Their Fleet (ca. 1520–1521, Washington, Aeneid I or III). Also accepted is a painting called Scenes from a Legend (Aeneas and Achates at the Libyan Coast, ca. 1520–1521, Birmingham, Aeneid I:310–314, 157).231 Christiansen adds to the aforementioned topics also The Plague at Pergamena (ca. 1520–1521, New York).232 While Shearman proposed Ariosto as the advisor on the program, Del Bravo suggested the Mantuan court humanist Mario Equicola, a thesis which is supported by Christianson. The duty of the advisor, however, is not specified for particular paintings in the palace. Equicola’s letter talks about six fables in one room, for which he had suggested the stories in 1511.233 Whether Dosso followed the advice of a specific person or a source yet unknown remains to be investigated. Giulio Romano (1499–1546) painted a Sala di Troia for Federigo Gonzaga’s Appartamento di Troia in the ducal palace in Mantua (1536–1538, Fig. 32).234 Federigo was the son of Isabella d’Este, and therefore most likely benefited

229

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232 233

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Aeneid gabinetto for Scandiano, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 39, 1976, pp. 151–170, see pp. 158–159; Baudille, catalog entry, pp. 120–121; Beyer, Il pubblico di Dosso, pp. 27–51. Roberto Longhi, Saggi e ricerche, Florence 1967, vol. 1, pp. 157–161 (oriented after Orlando Furioso, representing Aeneas and Acate); Bernard Berenson, Central Italian and North Italian Schools, London 1968, p. 114; Felton Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi, Court Painters at Ferrara, Princeton, NJ 1968, pp. 91, 114, 123–124, 214–215; Carlo Del Bravo, L’Equicola e il Dosso, Artibus et Historiae, 30, 1994, pp. 71–82, see p. 81; Peter Humphrey, cat. no. 19, in: Dosso Dossi. Pittore di corte a Ferrara nel Rinascimento, ed. Peter Humphrey and Mauro Lucco, Ferrara 1998, pp. 130–132. Keith Christiansen, Dosso Dossi’s Aeneas frieze for Alfonso d’Este’s “camerino,” Apollo, 151:455, 2000, pp. 36–45, see p. 43. Felton Gibbons, Dipinti inediti o poco noti di Dosso e Battista Dossi: con qualche nuova ipotesi, Arte antica e moderna, 1965, pp. 311–323, see pp. 313–315; Berenson, Central Italian and North Italian Schools, pp. 110, 113; Carlo Del Bravo, L’Equicola e il Dosso, pp. 73–75; Humphrey, cat. no. 24, pp. 147–153; Keith Christiansen, Dosso Dossi’s Aeneas frieze for Alfonso d’Este’s “camerino,” Apollo, 151:455, 2000, pp. 36–45; Giancarlo Fiorenza, Studies in Dosso Dossi’s Pictorical Language: Painting and Humanist Culture in Ferrara under Duke Alfonso I d’Este, University Park, PA 2000, pp. 73–75. Christiansen, Dosso Dossi’s Aeneas frieze for Alfonso d’Este’s “camerino,” pp. 36–45. John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, NJ 1992, pp. 256–257; Del Bravo, L’Equicola e il Dosso, pp. 73–75, 81; Christiansen, Dosso Dossi’s Aeneas frieze for Alfonso d’Este’s “camerino,” p. 36. Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano, New Haven, CT 1958, pp. 161–192; Langmuir, Arma Virumque; Bette L. Talvacchia, Narration through gesture in Giulio Romano’s “Sala di Troia,” Renaissance and Reformation, 10:1, 1986, pp. 49–65; Bette L. Talvacchia, Homer, Greek heroes and Hellenism in Giulio Romano’s Hall of Troy, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 51, 1988, pp. 235–242.

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32 Giulio Romano and workshop, Sala di Troia, 1538–1539. Mantua: Palazzo del Te. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

from a literary education. Isabella d’Este was known to have had a definite influence on the artist’s work, but less so did Federigo. On the one hand, Talvacchia sees a close relationship between the patron and his artist, which made outside help unnecessary; on the other hand, she proposes Benedetto Lampridio as the humanist advisor for the textual sources.235 Although the iconographic basis of the scene is Vergil’s Aeneid, there is no intention to illustrate the story. Talvacchia noted that many of the details and characters do not fit (like Apollo in the Laocoön scene, Paris’s escapades, the death of Ajax Oileus, the sleeping woman, etc.), while she concludes that only the Laocoön and the Trojan Horse could clearly be derived from the Aeneid.236 While Langmuir also proposed Homer’s Iliad in addition to Vergil’s Aeneid, Talvacchia adds to Vergil (for the story of Achilles, on the ceiling) and Homer with his ancient commentator Eustathius (for the two scenes of Achilles and the battle scene, the shield of Thetis) also Hyginus’s Fabularum 235

236

Bette Lou Talvacchia, Giulio Romano’s Sala di Troia: A synthesis of epic narrative and emblematic imagery, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1981, pp. 47, 56, 78–81, 168–169. Talvacchia, Giulio Romano’s Sala di Troia, pp. 55–56.

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liber, an compilation of ancient myths that was printed in Basel in 1535 (for the stories of Paris and Hecuba, Laocoön’s punishment, Apollo’s wagon in the Laocoön scene, Minerva, and the architect Epeius).237 Nicolò dell’Abate was responsible for the gabinetto frescoes in the Castello di Scandiano (1540s) that were executed for Giulio Boiardo, a relative of Matteo Maria Boiardo.238 The painter divided the twelve chapters of the Aeneid into twelve corresponding scenes: Aeneas with his boats on the Libyan shore; Aeneas tells about the fall of Troy; Aeneas arrives at Delos; Juno and Venus; Aeneas departs from Africa; Aeneas arrives in Cumae; Aeneas passes by Circe and arrives at the Tiber; Aeneas at the Tiber; Juno orders the attack on Troy; Jupiter does not manage to make peace between Juno and Venus, and Troy is attacked; Aeneas in front of Troy, and Aeneas fights Turnus (the frescoes referring to books 3, 4, and 9 are all destroyed). The choice of Vergil has been seen as an homage to Matteo Maria Boiardo and his Orlando innamorato. As Langmuir has shown, dell’Abate was inspired by Sebastian Brant’s illustrations in the Vergil edition from Strasburg (1502), and he was helped by the humanist advisor Sebastiano Corrado, who lectured on Vergil and published a partial commentary.239 But a humanist advisor would not have been required to simply illustrate Vergil’s stories, a task Nicolò dell’Abate was already familiar with on several occasions. By the 1540s, several translations of the Aeneid were available: the Venice 1476 version, which was shortened; the Bologna 1491 version; the Venice 1539 version; and a translation of the first six chapters published in Rome in 1540. Either the Bologna 1491 or the Venice 1539 editions could have been the possible sources that dell’Abate could have digested on his own. It is important to notice that not every typical Vergilian topic in art was transmitted through Vergil directly. Some were transmitted via Boccaccio’s Genealogy, or others, like Dido and Aeneas, Chryseis and Anchilles, Paris and

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Langmuir, Arma Virumque, p. 160; Talvacchia, Giulio Romano’s Sala di Troia, pp. 56–81; Bette Talvacchia, La sala di Troia, in: Giulio Romano, [no editor], Milan 1989, pp. 406–411. Walter Bombe, Gli affreschi dell’Eneide in Niccolò dell’Abate nel palazzo di Scandiano, Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della Educazione Nazionale, 12, 1931, pp. 529–533; Sylvie Béguin, Mostra di Niccolo dell’Abate, Bologna 1969, pp. 54–57; Langmuir, Arma Virumque; Odoardo Rombaldi, Roberto Gandini, and Giovanni Prampolini, La Rocca di Scandiano e gli affreschi di Nicolò dell’Abate, Reggio Emilia 1982; Diego Cuoghi, L’Eneide a Scandiano, una ipotesi iconografica, in: I luoghi di Nicolò dell’Abate: Pitture murali e interventi di restauro: atti del convegno, Scandiano 10 giugno 2005, ed. Angelo Mazza, Novara 2007, pp. 107–126; Angelo Mazza, Nicolò dell’Abate, Scandiano, il “Paradiso” ritrovato, in: Nicolò dell’Abate alla corte dei Boiardo. Il Paradiso ritrovato, ed. Angelo Mazza and Massimo Mussini, Cinisello Balsamo 2009, pp. 65–83; Diego Cuoghi, Una nuova “ricostruzione” del Camerino dell’Eneide, in: Nicolò dell’Abate alla corte dei Boiardo. Il Paradiso ritrovato, ed. Angelo Mazza and Massimo Mussini, pp. 121–129; Mauro Bini, Virgilio, l’Eneide e Nicolò dell’Abate, Civiltà mantovana, ser. 48, 3:136, 2013, pp. 102–119. Langmuir, Arma Virumque, pp. 152, 160–161.

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

Helena, and the Trojan War, often derived from common school texts like Ovid’s Epistles. As we have seen above, Francesco di Giorgio and his workshop probably selected the story of Dido and Aeneas (1470s) for a cassone topic from Ovid’s Epistles, a text certainly easier to access. The same could also be true for the cassone of the Vergil master presenting Aeneas’s Arrival at Dido (ca. 1450–1460).240 Also Luca Signorelli’s Aeneas in the Underworld in the Cappella Nuova in Orvieto, a topic which could have come from Aeneid IV, is given following Landino’s Dante commentary (see above), while another panel in the same chapel follows Vergil more closely. This shows the importance of Vergil’s stories for Renaissance painters, while on the whole direct access to his texts was not as frequent as the access to Ovid’s.

Lucan Lucan’s Pharsalia (De bello civili) was also a commonly used schoolbook. In print, it was already available in a Latin edition from 1469 (Rome), and received thereafter a new print edition in every decade. The contents of the Pharsalia deal with the civil war between Julius Caesar and the Roman senate, in particular with Magnus and Pompey, who wanted to free their country from tyranny. Like the other Latin schoolbooks, this text received an early vernacular translation, which was available in print by 1492 (Lucano in vulgare, Milan, 1492). Leonardo is known to have possessed this edition, which figures in his inventory of 1503.241 As in the case of Ovid and Vergil, the translation published here was a work from the fourteenth century, provided by Cardinal Luca Manzoli (1331–1411) from SS. Ognisanti in Florence, where he had studied theology, after which he lived between Florence and Rome.242 It is therefore likely that his translation of the Pharsalia circulated in manuscript in both Florence and Rome already from the second half of the fourteenth century. Luca Manzoli’s translation in rhyme was preceded by a foreword in Latin that summarized the contents of the different books. Here once again the vernacular reader was expected to have some basic Latin. Why the Florentine and Roman cardinal engaged so closely with a topic about the Roman civil war is not known. His translation would remain relevant for a long time, and, in fact, it was the only authoritative vernacularization of the Pharsalia during the Renaissance. As in other early vernacularizations, the text cannot be read as 240

241 242

Research on the painting did not present the Epistles as the possible source. See Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, p. 347 (Master of the Jarves Cassoni); Gombrich, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 25 (Apollonio di Giovanni); Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, pp. 68–69; Forte, Vergil’s “Aeneid” in literature and art of the Italian Renaissance, p. 5; Morrison, Apollonio di Giovanni’s “Aeneid” Cassoni and the Virgil Commentators, pp. 35–37. Vecce, La biblioteca perduta, p. 82. Konrad Eubel, Hierarchia Catholica Medii Aevi, Padova 1952, vol. 1, pp. 31, 43 e 249.

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a faithful translation of the original, but was, rather, a retelling of the story, with shifting chapters and explanatory intervals whenever needed, including corrections to Lucan and references to the Bible. Alterations occur throughout, like Manzoli’s point that the brave and heroic leader Pompey, who was fighting against the troops of Caesar, should be seen almost as a saint, regardless of his missing baptism. As we had seen in the context of Pinturicchio’s fresco decoration in Orvieto, following Landino’s account of Lucan inserted in his commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Christian and moral interpretations of history were not rare at all. A number of important commentaries on Lucan’s Pharsalia were available that had been provided by three university professors of rhetoric: Giovanni Sulpizio, Ognibene Bonisoli, and Filippo Beroaldo, and by the printer and grammar teacher Jodocus Badius. They were usually printed some years after their composition in editions with two or three of these commentaries in order to offer a comparative overview of opinions. The edition of Venice, 1493, contained the commentaries of Giovanni Sulpizio and Ognibene Bonisoli;243 the edition of Venice, 1498, the same two commentaries, but revised by Giovanni Taberius;244 and the edition of Paris, 1514, provided the commentaries by Giovanni Sulpizio, Filippo Beroaldo, and Jodocus Badius. In the case of Lucan’s Pharsalia, the commentaries do not seem to have played an important role in the visual arts, as long as they were not placed deliberately out of context (see Landino). History was rendered as such and did not require interpretations or allegorizations. Why Lucan was important to Renaissance people is explained by Giovanni Sulpizio in the 1519 commentary: it was an exemplary text for “historia,” and Lucan could be seen as the eloquent and versatile historian par excellence.245 The Pharsalia was therefore very suitable for representation when a historical topic was needed. Olson has already referred to the Pharsalia concerning Antonio del Pollaiolo’s bronze group Hercules and Antaeus, which is one of the earliest mythological representations in sculpture246 (see above under Dante’s Convivio for its allegorical character). The Pharsalia would become another favorite subject on cassone and spalliera paintings, but only, as it seems, from around 1460 onward. While the Venetian painter around 1465 who painted a cassone with Pompey’s Head Brought to Julius Caesar (Baltimore, Walter Art Gallery) likely used the Latin version to depict a scene from book 10, the Florentine painter Apollonio di Giovanni could have read either. 243

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Lucan, Accipe candidissime lector Ioannis Sulpitii Verulani in singulos Pharssaliae Lucani libros argumenta, Venice 1493. Lucan, Lucanus: cum duobus commentis, Venice 1498. With the Commentaries of Joannes Sulpitius and Ognibene Bonisoli, revised by Johannes Taberius. Lucan, Lucanus cum tribus commentis, Lyon 1519, ff. AA vii–v. Roberta J. M. Olson, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, London 1992, pp. 120–122.

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

Apollonio di Giovanni (ca. 1416–1465) and Marco del Buono di Marco (ca. 1402–1489) painted the Battle of Pharsalus and the Beheading of Pompey (ca. 1456–1465, Fig. 33),247 integrating two scenes from different chapters together into one painting. While the Latin version of the textual source narrates the battle in Pharsalia book 7 and Pompey’s death in book 8, the vernacular version anticipates the death in book 7. The painted scene offers a generic account of the ferocious battle at Pharsalia and the beheading of Pompey, after which his head was collected. These details are given in both the Latin and vernacular versions. Since Apollonio used the Latin version for his cassone after Vergil, the same seems possible here. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s (1449–1494) Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon is a little-known and little-studied cassone or spalliera painting (ca. 1470, Fig. 34).248 Ghirlandaio used neither the vernacular version nor a commentary, but must have consulted the Latin version, possibly in the editio princeps of Rome, 1469. In the unfaithfully translated vernacular version, several details are missing, while others are stressed, but were not present in the scene.249 The Latin version instead tells about the river Rubicon as a landmark between the Gallic and the Italian lands, which flowed widely through the bottom of a valley. The soldiers rested on both sides of the river, while Caesar, after having crossed the landmark, shouts: they would leave peace behind, and by crossing the river they unavoidably entered battle and followed Fortune. Thereafter, the troops attacked the first city, Ariminum, while trumpets and horns announced the beginning of the civil war (book 1.213–238). Ghirlandaio followed the story very closely, showing the arrival of the troops from the left, the resting on both sides of the river in a valley, Caesar proclaiming war after the crossing, and the attack on the city in the right background. The trumpets and horns are presented as Sibylline figures on both sides of the river and within it, to fix the landmark of the war’s beginning. The date of the panel should be around 1470, that is, soon after the publication of Lucan’s editio princeps. It therefore belongs to Ghirlandaio’s early works, which is confirmed with certainty on stylistic grounds. Learned young men at this age would have been familiar with Lucan’s story. Although Lucan was not the only author to transmit knowledge on ancient history – patrons and artists also consulted Plutarch and Livy – he was the one most present in schools, and therefore more widely known. 247 248

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Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, p. 74 (here given as Plutarch, Life of Caesar). This painting is not listed in the V&A catalogues, but the museum’s home page refers to Plutarch’s Lives as a source, under the story of Alexander the Great. For example, it does not give a description of the riverbed of the Rubicon, but stresses at length a giant woman with white hair, which is much more important in the vernacualar than in the Latin version, and not present in the picture. Missing also are the trumpets in the field and the attack on the city.

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33 Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono di Marco, Battle of Pharsalus and the Beheading of Pompey, ca. 1456–1465. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts www.mfa.org, public domain

Apuleius Apuleius (second century) was a staple of traditional Latin elementary schoolbook authors, of Latin schoolbook authors at an advanced level, and of scholars at the university. His most famous work, the Golden Ass (Metamorphoses), found a wide distribution on all these levels because it circulated in different versions and fulfilled different reading needs. On an easy Latin reading level, people enjoyed the entertaining fables in the Golden Ass, around a figure called Lucius encountering magic. On a private advanced humanist level, people likewise read Apuleius’s translation of Hermes’s Asclepius, and students read both texts in Latin university classes. The Golden Ass circulated both as a single story and in compilations in many elementary schoolbooks (for example, in Auctores octo and Theodolus), and was therefore widely known, but less so its centerpiece, the story of Amor and Psyche, which was usually not contained in the elementary school texts, but only in versions from humanists’ schools and universities.250

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Once Jacob Burckhardt failed to make this distinction and claimed the story was well known and memorized by everyone, many art historians consequently picked up on this presupposition and hardly questioned the genesis of the text (Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, Basel 1959, vol. 2, p. 290).

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

33 (cont.)

The fabulous Golden Ass circulated in many different versions, with four major differences in the narrative. The main story that all versions share deals with a man called Lucius, who, out of the curious wish to experiment with magic, gets turned accidentally into an ass. In this vestment, he has many cruel, burlesque, and erotic encounters, until, in the end by magic again, he turns back into a human being. The story is meant to be mostly entertaining, but also conveyed some moral value, a point which was usually considered important for a beginner’s school text. The basic version ended here, but the second version was considerably longer (ten chapters), and had an insert in chapters 4–6 that placed Lucius’s story in a more exclusive refined environment. This story is enriched with many side stories on ancient deities, like Venus, Mercury, Apollo, and Proserpina, as well as Zephyr and the Graces. Most importantly, it included the famous story of Amor and Psyche, the manifestations of love and soul, their love story between heavenly and earthly partners, and their marriage on Mount Olympus. This part likewise became a well-known story on its own. The third version had an eleventh chapter on the cult of Isis. Other versions included secondary narratives, like an opening chapter on Lucius’s friendship and drunkenness with a character named Socrates. Since the genesis of the Golden Ass is complicated and ultimately offered different versions for interpretation, it is necessary to investigate further into different interpretive strands and editions.

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34 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon, ca. 1470. London: V&A Museum. Photo: Courtesy © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, public domain

Apuleius’s story has always been seen as an educational text by those who provided new editions, like Giovanni Andrea de’ Bussi and his editio princeps, or those who provided commentaries, like Filippo Beroaldo. It conveyed moral value, on the one hand, or to commentators the possibility of revealing human existence and ethics and displaying a wide range of erudite explanations due to its unusual and post-classical Latinity.251 Apuleius has always been interpreted as a Platonic author who could be integrated with a ChristianPlatonic reading. Psyche as the soul’s marriage to God allowed her to ascend to

251

See on the educational purpose Konrad Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz. Filippo Beroaldo und sein Kommentar zum goldenen Esel des Apuleius, Munich 1971, pp. 64–67.

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

34 (cont.)

heaven, which was seen as a Christian elevation to heaven.252 As a Platonist, Apuleius picks up several points discussed since Plato initially wrote. The difference for Apuleius is that he used mythology for his comparisons, a circumstance which made the topics clearer, and also gave artists a chance to depict allegories. Throughout the Middle Ages, Apuleius was not widely read, but was rather known as an author cited by Augustine (City of God). He presented Apuleius as a magician, philosopher, and Platonist, and as a follower of a wrong beliefs. People who said that his magic was comparable to Christ followed wrong beliefs, Augustine said.253 Since the late Middle Ages, an

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Sonia Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche. L’iconografia della favola di Apuleio, Venice 2002, p. 19; Robert H. F. Carver, The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Oxford 2007, pp. 11–60. Franziska Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels: Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses” im frühen 16. Jahrhundert: Der Kommentar Filippo Beroaldos d. Ä., die Übersetzungen von Johann Sieder,

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abbreviated version of Apuleius circulated by Fulgentius, including the story of Amor and Psyche, where Fulgentius focused on human sins concerning sexual desire, and on Psyche as the soul reflecting human free will.254 Only with Boccaccio, Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini did Apuleius receive a new fortune in Florence, which spread out from there. Most important was Boccaccio, when he used the story of Amor and Psyche and others in the Genealogie deorum gentilium (5.22), and partially also in his Decameron (following Igor Candido as reinterpreted in novella 10.10).255 In the Genealogy, Boccaccio refers to Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, but picks up only the story of Amor and Psyche, adjusting this to his purposes and intentions. He follows Martianus Capella on Psyche’s noble birth, being the daughter of Apollo, although he still refers to the king and his three daughters. Boccaccio makes Psyche another Venus, an earthly Venus neglecting the riches of the heavenly one, which caused a rivalry between the heavenly Venus, the mother of Cupid, and the earthly Venus as Psyche. Then he narrates the well-known story of Zephyr taking Psyche to Cupid’s palace, where she finds love; the witty sisters; Psyche’s discovery and expulsion; her finding comfort with Pan and assistance with Ceres and Juno; Venus giving her four tasks, which Psyche fulfills; and her falling asleep and being rescued by Cupid, who wants to marry her. Then the marriage is preceded by an assembly of the gods, without a feast on the Mount Olympus, after which Psyche gave birth to a daughter, Pleasure. Boccaccio then starts with his allegorical interpretation, pointing to Psyche as the rational spirit since she is the daughter of Apollo, and her sisters being the vegetative and the perceptive spirits. Psyche’s marriage was meant for “a divine offspring, that is, for an honest love, or God himself,” as Boccaccio said. In this, she is helped by Zephyr, who is the “vital spirit, which is sacred, and joined in marriage.” When Psyche loses her rational spirit and commits what can be paralleled to sins in terms of doing what is denied, she is unable to see God, and loses contemplation. Only through repentance and action can she come back to “benefit from divine pleasure and contemplation.”256 Boccaccio’s

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Guillaume Michel, Diego López de Cortegana und Agnolo Firenzuola, der Schelmenroman Lazarillo de Tormes, Heidelberg 2005, pp. 48–51; Carver, The Protean Ass, pp. 24–30. Luisa Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 42, 1979, pp. 104–121, see pp. 104–105; Florian WeilandPollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance. Medienspezifisches Erzählen im Bild, Petersberg 2004, pp. 15–15; Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass”: A Study in Transmission and Reception, Princeton, NJ 2008, pp. 53–59. Igor Candido, Boccaccio umanista: Studi su Boccaccio e Apuleio, Ravenna 2014, p. 11; Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, pp. 105–106; WeilandPollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 16–18; Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 51–53. Citations from Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, Cambridge, MA 2011, vol. 1, pp. 684–699.

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interpretation of the original story eventually became very important, but it would not be the only important interpretation in the Renaissance. Apuleius’s importance and popularity are underlined by the fact that his Opera omnia was among the very first classical texts to be printed during the incunable period. Giovanni Andrea de’ Bussi edited this volume and published it in Rome 1469 with Sweynheym and Pannarzt. Bussi compiled an authoritative version by comparing several manuscript versions, as he faithfully recalled in his preface. For an allegorical reading of the Psyche story, Bussi refers to Fulgentius, since he himself only published the text. In Bussi’s version of the text, Psyche’s parents were presented as kings, not as gods, and they asked Apollo’s oracle about the destiny of her daughter. Psyche herself was described as a second Venus. The story included Ceres and Juno, Jupiter and his lion chariot, Venus and the pigeon chariot, the assembly of the gods arranged by Mercury, and the wedding meal cooked by Vulcan with the singing Apollo and dancing Venus. Also the Graces and Muses were mentioned very briefly. This edition was complete with eleven chapters, including the last on the cult of Isis. Bussi established a kind of canon for Apuleius editions for the next decades. Former manuscript versions lost their importance. The fables were translated into the vernacular sometime during the late 1470s by the highly educated count Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434/41–1494). Boiardo’s version included the mythological insert on Amor and Psyche. However, the text had a limited circulation in manuscript form, and its distribution is difficult to establish beyond the two related courts of Ferrara and Mantua. The patron of this commission was Alfonso I d’Este in Ferrara, who was known to have literary desires that he could not fulfill without knowing Latin and Greek. After comparing Boiardo’s translation with circulating manuscript and print copies, Fumagalli established as the original source for the translation the editio princeps from 1469. Following Fumagalli, this translation was made in haste, simplified the content, and was not concerned with linguistic accuracy. It also lacked the last, eleventh book on the cult of Isis.257 The translation seems to have been ready by 1479, when it appeared in a note of the library, and then in 1481, Francesco Gonzaga asked for a copy to be sent to Mantua. Fumagalli supposes that the circulation of the manuscript edition of the vernacularization was small, before it was printed in Venice in 1518.258 If so, the vernacularization must have been accessible in Ferrara and 257

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Edoardo Fumagalli, Matteo Maria Boiardo volgarizzatore dell’“Asino d’oro”: Contributo allo studio della fortuna di Apuleio nell’umanesimo, Padova 1988, pp. 2–28, 39, 92–97; Mariantonietta Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento. Dai volgarizzamenti alle raffigurazioni pittoriche, Ravenna 2001, pp. 18–21, 35–53. Fumagalli, Matteo Maria Boiardo volgarizzatore dell’“Asino d’oro,” pp. 10–12, 94, 161. See also Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 175, 185–186.

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Mantua from 1479 or 1481 onward. Boiardo’s version had several inserts throughout the story, novellas that enriched the main story. The first and most distinctive novella was the story of Lucius’s friendship with Socrates, their drunkenness, and Socrates’s colorful death (also present in the editio princeps). With this first novella, Boiardo introduced the reader to the nature of fables, declaring that any invention was possible. The last novella presented a festive encounter of the deities (Paris, Juno, Minerva, Venus, Castor, and Pollux) in a theater setting with goats and a wooden hill. Given Boiardo’s demanding readership, he certainly included the story of Psyche and Cupid, while giving it a slight variation. Instead of talking about Psyche, the beautiful girl, and Venus, the mother of Cupid, he included the two versions of Venus. These had already been present in Boccaccio and the editio princeps, but Boiardo seemed to be aware also of Ficino’s Neoplatonic theory of the two Venuses, the earthly and the heavenly. Psyche turned into a terrestrial Venus, as the counterpoint of the celestial Venus.259 After this divine theater encounter in the tenth book, Boiardo placed Lucius’s conversion from donkey back to man in the eleventh book. Boiardo’s translation found an echo in his cousin Niccolò da Correggio’s (1450–1508) Fabula Psiches et Cupidines, dedicated in 1491 to Isabella Gonzaga and printed in 1507. While retelling Apuleius’s story, Correggio made many adaptations for his own purposes. The story is arranged around the vicissitudes of Fortune, making Cupid the main character with a fate to bear, as underlined by the poet Pan to confirm Cupid’s story and fate.260 His context is an arcadian one, where a shepherd meets a nymph, and the story of Amor and Psyche is narrated in the shepherd’s dream (including two Venuses). The next translation by Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524), Aseno d’oro, was provided in the 1470s–1480s around the time of Boiardo’s vernacularization.261 His version, a liberal translation from Apuleius, includes only Lucius’s adventures, without the divine side stories and the eleventh chapter on the cult of Isis. Next follows the important and certainly more influential translation by the Florentine poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1494–1543) around 1524–1525, which was printed in Venice only in 1550. Firenzuola generously benefited from Boiardo’s earlier translation, especially in books 8–10. Nevertheless, Firenzuola’s printed edition was able to replace Boiardo’s in both importance

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What is missing in Boiardo’s version, but present in others, is Apollo’s oracle at the beginning of the story, the Graces, and the council of the Gods. Rainer Stillers, Erträumte Kunstwelt. Niccolò da Correggios Fabula Psiches et Cupidinis (1491), in: Der Mythos von Amor und Psyche in der europaeischen Renaissance, ed. Joszef Jankovics and S. Katalin Nemeth, Budapest 2002, pp. 131–150; Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, p. 18; Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 185–188. A copy of this version from the last quarter of the fifteenth century is published in Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento, pp. 161–187 (ms. Vaticano Chigiano L.VI.215, cc. 3r–25r).

LITERATURE FROM THE INTERMEDIARY AND ADVANCED CURRICULUM

and distribution. As Künzlen has shown, Firenzuola otherwise departed from Beroaldo’s commented edition for this translation.262 As was common with Renaissance translations, Firenzuola offered a looser and slightly interpreted version, taking every liberty he felt appropriate. Thus, he tied the story more closely to sixteenth-century Bologna and its inhabitants, and even inserted himself as protagonist into the story. He must have felt that a contemporary story would be more attractive to a less-learned reading public. He also took the liberty, like Boiardo, to eliminate the last book (book 11) and the references to the Isis cult. But he incorporated the version of the two Venuses, which derived from Boccaccio and was developed by Beroaldo, as we will see, although Küenzlen tries to refer it to Ficino’s theory of the celestial and earthly Venus that represent heavenly and vulgar love, respectively.263 Firenzuola talks extensively about the goddess Venus, the mother of Cupid, and about Psyche as the earthly Venus, who in Apuleius was described only as a beautiful girl. As we have seen above, moralizing commentaries on Apuleius in the humanist’s sense start with Fulgentius and Giovanni Boccaccio. But the most famous and extensive commentary was provided by the well-known teacher and commentator in Bologna, Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505). His published edition in 1500 not only had a high print run (1,200 copies were stipulated in his contract), but was also reprinted several times, making the text and his interpretive version well known throughout Italy.264 This commentary derived not from a single lecture cycle, as was sometimes the case, but from many private lecture cycles. It was the result of an ongoing effort that started for Beroaldo at least by 1488, and resulted in an authoritative version of the text that attempted to eliminate errors and provide background information on Apuleius’s time and society.265 The commentary evolves from the first printed edition of 1469 as the primary source. Each book starts with a “hypothesis” on its argument, where Beroaldo immediately makes it clear that the art of magic is the dominant topic. In his detailed commentary he adds, as usual, many little-related points in order to enhance the reader’s overall understanding. A number of mythological figures are explained, although they had not appeared in the original text. While many researchers have stressed Beroaldo’s willful nonallegorical reading of the text (ff. 76r–v),266 Stillers 262 263 264

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Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 314–321. Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 372–373. For comparisons made later in this study I used the second edition: Apuleius, Commentarij a Philippo Beroaldo conditi in Asinum aureum, Venice 1501. Konrad Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz. Filippo Beroaldo und sein Kommentar zum goldenen Esel des Apuleius, Munich 1971, p. 38; Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 74, 85. Both Marek and Günther, for example, pointed to Beroaldo for his distance from a Neoplatonic interpretation in order to strengthen the “sensus historicus” of the story, the historical plot, and its interpretation. Beroaldo would therefore be citing Fulgentius and

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emphasizes that this is valid only for the Psyche story, not for the entire commentary, where he limits himself to a word-by-word reading and explanation.267 In the end, Beroaldo did only what a Renaissance commentator saw as his task: to comment on the facts in a text and explain their meaning, but he did not limit himself to an allegorical, which in this sense meant a moralizing, reading. Beroaldo presents Apuleius as a Platonist and almost as an ancient priest, which is the starting point of his moralizing interpretation. The search for ancient wisdom and illumination is present in the Apuleius story through the Isis religion (book 11). Beroaldo connects these with ancient wisdom from Egypt, which was often associated in Neoplatonic studies with preChristian wisdom. This is exactly what Beroaldo suggests in his interpretation, namely, to see the Isis religion as a predecessor of the Christian religion. Beroaldo shows Lucius being confronted with his own decisions in life, which can also remove him from difficult operations. It depends on him and his knowledge about how to conduct his own life, and this is precisely where Beroaldo’s interpretation has a highly moral application.268 The concept also points to the soul being separate from the body, as present in both Neoplatonic and Christian beliefs. Like Boccaccio, Beroaldo interprets Psyche as soul.269 Beroaldo describes Psyche as being a Venus herself, who comes down to earth where the mortal humans were able to look at her, while she wanted to be worshiped for her human body. Therefore, Psyche would be the earthly Venus. This allegorical transformation between human and animal existence is experienced by all men and their desires, for which Lucius in his donkey version is a telling example in the search for a virtuous and happy life that would ultimately lead to God.270 This Christian and Neoplatonic interpretation was hardly ever transferred

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Boccaccio, but not follow them in their interpretation (Michaela Marek, Raffaels Loggia di Psiche in der Farnesina, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 1983, pp. 257–290, see pp. 163, 277; Hubertus Günther, Amor und Psyche. Raffaels Freskenzyklus in der Gartenloggia der Villa des Agostino Chigi und die Fabel von Amor in der Malerei der italienischen Renaissance, Artibus et Historiae, 2001, pp. 149–166, see pp. 163–164). Stillers, Erträumte Kunstwelt, pp. 132–133; Konrad Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz. Filippo Beroaldo und sein Kommentar zum goldenen Esel des Apuleius, Munich 1971, p. 152. Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz, pp. 65, 152–160; Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 97, 112–121; Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 208–211, 219. Apuleius, Commentarij a Philippo Beroaldo conditi in Asinum aureum, Venice 1501, f. 82v. See also: Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 233, 237 (Beroaldo comm. f. 103v.). Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz, pp. 66–67; Küenzlen, Verwandlungen eines Esels, pp. 99–102; Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 218–219.

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into art, with the possible exception of Perin del Vaga’s frescoes in Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome (1543–1548), where the papal apartment needed a Christian topic on the wall, and Psyche served as an example of the ascension of the Christian soul to God.271 Otherwise, the Apuleius story was used with its most pagan intention. Beroaldo’s commentary also offers several parallels to the visual arts. For example, in order to render his explanations illustrative and vivid, Beroaldo sometimes compares an argument with a painting. When the painting was standing comprehensive and clear before the eye, this would be the same as a poet vividly describing a story with lengthy terms. Both would be adding decorum to a story.272 His description of the three graces falls into this same category, where Beroaldo delivers almost an ekphrasis to paintings like Botticelli’s Primavera, while Beroaldo ultimately relied on the ancient source. Beroaldo writes that everyone knows that the Graces were three – Euphrosyne, Laetitia, and Thalia – and depicted with arms folded, in youthful appearance and with loose and transparent garments. Of the three sisters, one delivered good deeds, which the next received, and the third returned to the first. They could be rendered in such a way that one was turning her back to the spectator, whereas the other two were directed toward the spectator. They had folded hands because the beneficence was not terminable, and good deeds were returned back, and this order could not be broken, for otherwise their beauty would be spoiled (f. 107r).273 Beroaldo further adds that the Graces were companions of Venus, and Apelles had said that painters usually forgot about one Venus, whom the Greek called Charitas (ff. 30v, 107r, 205r). Beroaldo presents other passages on ancient sculpture, which topics were of great concern in the Renaissance. Therefore, he picks up on Apuleius’s few passages on art and develops them further. In book 2, Apuleius describes Lucius entering the house of his friends, where he sees and describes a sculpture of Diana and Acteon. Diana is standing with her dogs in a grotto, while Acteon’s curiosity is shown shortly before he turns into a stag. Beroaldo adds that this marble image had been executed with graphic and scientific skills (f. 27v).274

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On the Christian interpretation of the fresco cycle, see Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 89–90; Maria Grazia Bernardini, Il fregio di Perin del Vaga a Castel Sant’Angelo e la favola di Psiche nell’arte del Rinascimento, in: La favola di Amore e Psiche. Il mito nell’arte dall’antichità a Canova, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini, Rome 2012, pp. 83–95. Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz, pp. 63–64, 112–114 (as an example Krautter gives for example a phrase in 9.11 and 10.23); Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 224–225. Apuleius, Commentarij a Philippo Beroaldo conditi in Asinum aureum, Venice 1501. Furthermore, Beroaldo seems to be the only person to give a detailed description of a luxurious palace, but he did not attempt to describe a fictive palace for Cupid; instead, he referred to an existing palace, the palace of the Bentivoglio family in Bologna. The narration starts with Vitruvius’s idea of columns, the symmetry of the building, the vestibule, stairs, a

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Once again, the commentary by Beroaldo seems to be potentially useful for artists, since Beroaldo showed himself to be quite knowledgeable about art. Apuleius’s Metamorphoses was always visualized in painting by separating the narratives of Lucius and his donkey, the version circulating in elementary schools, from the divine story of Amor and Psyche in the advanced curriculum. Lucius’s story appeared mainly as book illustrations, whereas Psyche’s story would be rendered in the fifteenth century as cassone paintings, and from the end of the century onward as fresco cycles. Illustrations of the Isis cult were extremely rare, as were the case with other side stories, like Lucius’s friendship with Socrates. Once the Psyche story was introduced in cassone paintings from the 1440s onward, it became very popular in the context of wedding gifts. The earliest examples known today are the two cassoni of 1444 painted for the wedding of Lucrezia Tornabuoni with Piero il Gottoso (Berlin, Bode Museum). Here as well as for the following examples, a mixture of Apuleius’s and Boccaccio’s texts have been confirmed as the sources. For example, Psyche’s father was rendered as Apollo, following Boccaccio’s description.275 Vertova described the challenges the painter faced. She calls the painter “little more than a competent artisan. His task was to create a comprehensible visual equivalent of a story that lacked any iconographic tradition available to him.”276 Somehow, the painter must have accessed both Apuleius’s and Boccaccio’s texts, both in Latin, and presumably this task must have been possible for him. This is one of many examples where an educated painter in the 1440s seemed to have accessed Latin texts whenever there was a need. These early cassone painters could not yet turn back to a variety of textual sources and interpretations, like their fellow-painters at the end of the century. In most cases they had to access a Latin text, while in the present case Boccaccio’s version was certainly easier to grasp than Apuleius’s. It presents an easier, confined story in a circumscribed chapter. The Master of the Argonauts painted a cassone for the wedding of Lorenzo de’ Medici with Clarice Orsini, which leads most researchers to date the cassone panels around 1468–1469.277 For Schubring, the painter draws upon Boccaccio’s Genealogy; for Vertova and Weiland-Pollerberg, from Apuleius, with some inserts from Boccaccio; for Cavicchioli, he copies the iconography of his other two panels on Amor and

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pool, a garden, a sundial, and finally a detailed account of the pavement and the history of pavement design (ff. 80v–81r). Wilhelm von Bode, Zwei Cassone-Tafeln aus dem Besitz des Piero de’ Medici in der Sammlung Eduard Simon zu Berlin, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut zu Florenz, 2:5–6, 1917, pp. 149–151; Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, pp. 107–113; Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento, pp. 108–109. Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, p. 112. See for a history of the dating: Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 27–45.

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Psyche, which were taken from Apuleius with additions from Martianus Capella (e.g., Psyche being the daughter of the sun). Again, Apuleius and Boccaccio should be seen as the two likely sources, offering scenes not present in the other’s narration (and as adjusted for the current wedding couple).278 It seems possible that the Master of the Argonauts sets off directly from Apuleius, but it seems unlikely that Martianus Capella was the painter’s source, although Capella might have raised the argument first, which was later taken up by others. As in many other cases when searching for literary sources, the painter started not from the primary source of a story or an argument but from the most plausible and accessible source. In this case as in others, Apollo as the father of Psyche, and Psyche as another Venus were both transmitted by Boccaccio. Jacopo del Sellaio (1442–1493) rendered the Psyche story visibile several times (ca. 1490, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum; Amsterdam, Ernst Proehl Collection; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).279 Schubring gives Boccaccio’s Genealogy as the only source for the cassone, whereas Vertova and Acocella suppose Sellaio simply copied the topic from other cassone paintings, with little knowledge of the text itself, as the dispositions of the scenes were unconvincing.280 Weiland-Pollerberg rightly objects to this thesis since Sellaio incorporated scenes not present before.281 For Cavicchioli, Spike, and Cecchi, Boccaccio was the clear source because Sellaio depicts Psyche’s father as Apollo. Also, on the earlier cassone, Venus and Apollo as parents are witnesses to the wedding scene, which is not directly taken from Boccaccio, but given through the importance of the characters.282 The Sellaio panel now in Riggisberg (ca. 1490, Fig. 35) adds the three Graces to the scene, which has sometimes been mentioned, but explained only as an appropriate addition in the company of Venus, where Weiland-Pollerberg referred to Botticelli’s Primavera. The same explanation was given for the flying couple next to

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Schubring, Cassoni, p. 320; Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, pp. 107–109; Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, pp. 47–49; Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, p. 31. Cavicchioli also sees the extensive representation of Psyche consulting with her sisters as an influence coming through Boccaccio and his interpretation of the vegetative and the sensitive soul, which required an extended narration in the painting. Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, p. 49. Schubring, Cassoni, pp. 303–304, nos. 355 and 356; Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, pp. 113–116; Günther, Amor und Psyche, pp. 152–156; Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 112–118. Schubring, Cassoni, p. 303; Vertova, Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance painting before Raphael, p. 114; Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento, p. 109. Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, p. 115. Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, pp. 50–52. John T. Spike and Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfires of Vanities, Florence 2017, pp. 110–113. Spike and Cecchi see the Bode panel related to Boston. They postpone the Bode panel to around 1475 (pp. 112–113).

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35 Jacopo del Sellaio, Story of Psyche, ca. 1490. Riggisberg: Abbeg-Stiftung. Photo: © AbeggStiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 1987 (photo: Christoph von Viràg)

Venus.283 As the Riggisberg panel is probably the last of Sellaio’s series, it needs to be considered how new Apuleius interpretations, like those of Beroaldo, already available orally in Bologna, could have been accessible to painters in Florence. As we have seen above, Beroaldo assigned the Graces importance within the story. Giovanni Battista Pio’s public lectures on Apuleius in Bologna between 1494 and 1496 were slightly too late, and the artist was already dead.284 In any case, we see a change of presentation and interpretation during the 1490s that had an impact on painters, and especially their followers in the sixteenth century. The examples given so far start either from Latin manuscript versions of Apuleius (considering the difficulties of their different versions), the first printed edition, Boccaccio’s interpretation, or a combination of several texts. Toward the end of the century, large fresco cycles on the topic became popular, probably connected to the fact that new versions and interpretations also became available. As Boiardo’s translation circulated at the courts of Ferrara and Mantova, it presumably influenced the first monumental fresco cycle by Ercole de’ Roberti in the Palazzo Estense di Belriguardo (1493–1494), 283 284

Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 115–117. Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz, p. 130.

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35 (cont.)

today destroyed.285 Also Correggio’s poem has been seen as the basis of the Belriguardo frescoes, as, for example, by Günther and Gaiser.286 One of the most famous representations of Psyche is in Raphael’s fresco cycle in Agostino Chigi’s roman Villa Farnesina.287 After completing the room dedicated to Galatea, Raphael continued to fresco the Loggia di Psyche between 1517 and 1518. He probably only delivered the drawings and was then aided in the execution by Francesco Penni, Giulio Romano, Raffaelino del Colle, and Giovanni da Udine. The cycle spreads out over two big ceiling panels and ten pendentives, and, as often happens, is incomplete, not depicting every scene in the story. It shows two big scenes on the ceiling (the Assembly of the Gods, the Feast of the Gods), and ten smaller panels in the pendentives (Venus

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Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento, pp. 110–111; Hubertus Günther, Amor und Psyche, pp. 150, 156–157; Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, pp. 55–64. Günther, Amor und Psyche pp. 150, 156–157; Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” pp. 188, 192–193. Some authors are concerned about the reconstruction of a possibly different design of the cycle, including different scenes in the original idea by Raphael, then alternated during execution: Michaela Marek, Raffaels Loggia di Psiche in der Farnesina, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 1983, pp. 257–290. See also Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 46–60, 118.

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and Amor, Amor and the three Graces, Venus with Ceres and Juno, Venus with the pigeon chariot, Venus and Jupiter, Mercury, Psyche, Psyche and Venus, Amor and Jupiter, and Mercury and Psyche). In this case, Raphael separated out into single scenes what had to take place simultaneously on one panel in a cassone painting. He also presented a different scenographic setting and choice of narrative scenes. As earlier representations were usually produced for wedding contexts and had therefore concentrated on wedding scenes and Psyche’s family, Raphael limited his cycle at the Farnesina to those scenes that would fit in with a heavenly setting, that is, those appropriate to be painted on a ceiling with the background color of a blue sky. Raphael’s selection of topics concentrated therefore on the second half of the fable, and stressed topics related to the gods and leading to the wedding and future fertility. Since John Shearman, Niccolò da Correggio’s poem Fabula Psiches et Cupidinis has been seen as the primary source.288 Comparing the versions it becomes clear that Boccaccio’s version can be excluded, as he is missing Venus’s pigeon wagon and the Graces, but all of the topics could have been found in the Latin Apuleius versions (editio princeps), and most of them in Boiardo’s vernacularization and Niccolò da Correggio’s poem (apart from the assembly of the gods). Research has usually focused on the vernacular sources for his frescoes. Correggio’s poem contains many important elements for the fresco cycle, although it does not explain all of them. A detail that might have come from Correggio is Psyche being clad in golden vestment, a point stressed explicitly in Correggio. Also, Venus emerging from the sea on a chariot made by Vulcan with a sun symbol and carried by four pigeons follows Correggio’s description closely, although the iconography is not out of line with Apuleius’s Latin edition princeps. Some details also fit for the divine wedding with Amor and Psyche, Apollo, the Muses, the Graces, a dancing Venus, Vulcan, a Satyr, and Ganymede distributing vines and ambrosia. Other panels may be taken from Correggio, although they are less precise, like the three Graces (although Amor is missing), Ceres with Juno and Venus, Venus and Psyche, Mercury and Psyche, Psyche and Jupiter; Cerberus is also present.289 The most obvious elements that appear but are missing in Correggio are the Council of the Gods 288

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John Shearman, Die Loggia der Psyche in der Farnesina und die Probleme der letzten Phase von Raffaels graphischem Stil, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 1964, pp. 59–100, see pp. 71–74 (adding some elements from Boiardo); Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, pp. 75–84; Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 48–49. Marek points to Boccaccio as the principal source for the painting: Marek, Raffaels Loggia di Psiche in der Farnesina, pp. 275–276, 290. For Apuleius as the main source, with some passages taken from Niccolò da Correggio, Pliny, Cicero, or Statius: Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, p. 82; Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 48–49. Niccolò da Correggio, Opere, ed. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Bari 1969 (Fabula Psiches et Cupidinis, pp. 49–96).

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36 Raphael, Council of the Gods, 1517–1518. Rome: Villa Farnesina, Loggia di Psyche. Photo: Courtesy Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome, Nachlass Barbara Malter

(Fig. 36), as well as several characters in the Wedding (Fig. 37). In the end, Correggio does not offer much more than could already be found in Boiardo’s translation, and both offer less than the Latin edition princeps or even Beroaldo’s commentary. By contrast, all of the scenes in Raphael’s cycle occur in Beroaldo’s commentary, and he often adds detailed descriptions to the characters. We will now examine some panels of the cycle in order to establish the parallel between Beroaldo’s commentary and Raphael’s visual interpretation of Apuleius. For example, Beroaldo turns several times to the description of Cupid and the three Graces, who were depicted in Raphael below the banquet. The Graces received special attention only in Beroaldo. He describes the Graces as companions of Venus, in youthful appearance, with arms interwoven with each other, as they passed and returned good deeds one to another. They should be rendered in a way that one was turning her back to

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37 Raphael, Wedding Banquet of Armor and Psyche, 1517–1518. Rome: Villa Farnesina, Loggia di Psyche. Photo: Courtesy Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome, Nachlass Barbara Malter

the spectator, whereas the other two were facing toward the spectator.290 This is exactly what we see in the frescoes. Also, Beroaldo’s description of Cupid’s youthfulness – rather a youngster than a boy or a man – showing his inclination toward desires, where desire is stronger than reason or virtues (f. 106r), is similar to the frescoes. In Raphael’s fresco, Cupid is shown exactly at this intermediate stage between childhood and manhood, a grownup, but not an adult yet. As is often the case with Beroaldo’s descriptions and interpretations, although they follow the allegorical and interpretative mainstream, here they are set in their precise context, which was useful for the frescoes. Likewise, the wedding feast incorporates some details that must have come from the commentary. Beroaldo said that Ovid had described the Horae as goddesses of youth, who were the guards of the heavenly spheres (and had the duty to 290

Apuleius, Commentarij a Philippo Beroaldo conditi in Asinum aureum, Venice 1501, f. 107r, and see the mention of the Graces above.

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tighten the sun’s horses to the wagon). They were part of the final supper celebration at the wedding together with Vulcan and the Graces (ff. 107r, 205v), which explains why Raphael had incorporated the Horae and the Graces into the wedding party, where they were otherwise not mentioned. Ganymede, whom Beroaldo mentioned was raped due to his beautiful physique, is mentioned as preparing drinking cups in heaven (f. 107r), and stands in the fresco on the far right, distributing wine with the help of little cupids. Also, Beroaldo’s description of the wedding feast as a luxury meal with bordello-like scenes (f. 106v) renders the lascivious atmosphere in heaven in the fresco. Raphael turned the scene with Venus, Ceres, and Juno into obvious harmony rather than a dispute, as the original text would suggest, where Ceres and Juno tried to help Psyche against the will of Venus. This is congruent with Beroaldo, who presents Venus as a relative of Ceres, with the two living in close friendship. Juno is mentioned as the representative of nuptial conjunctures and exemplifies the wedding. In Beroaldo’s etymological explanation, Ceres symbolized grain, which was rendered by Raphael in the picture with her crown of grain on top of her head (ff. 94v–96r). Also, Raphael included pigeons on many occasions and often in the company of Venus. Following Beroaldo, the pigeons lived under the shelter of Venus as a symbol of fertility (f. 96v). Also Mercury’s dominance in the fresco cycle may be deduced from Beroaldo, where Mercury is mentioned many times, as an important link between the single episodes. Beroaldo explains that, as Mercury derives from the Greek Hermes and has skills in interpreting speeches, he is the running messenger of the gods, who mediates between people (f. 97r). It thus becomes clear that Beroaldo incorporates in his description of characters and scenes many important iconological points, which were helpful for rendering the scenes. In his text, this information is much more precise and detailed than in any earlier text. Of course, Beroaldo sometimes also incorporates commonplace iconography of certain characters, but he usefully combines them with the Apuleius story and helps to render a visual setting in an iconographically convincing way. So far, both Marek and Günther had pointed to Beroaldo in relation to Raphael’s cycle only for his distance from a Neoplatonic interpretation, in order to strengthen the “sensus historicus” of the story (ff. 77 r–v), the historical plot, and its interpretation, which would fit with Raphael’s narration. But neither compare individual interpretations with Beroaldo.291 It seems very plausible that Raphael accessed the Beroaldo edition, where he would find both the original Apuleius text in the editio

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Marek, Raffaels Loggia di Psiche in der Farnesina, pp. 263, 277; Günther, Amor und Psyche, pp. 163–164; see also Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, p. 59.

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38 Giulio Romano, Story of Psyche, north wall, 1526–1528. Mantua: Palazzo del Te. Photo: Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome, author Tatjana Bartsch

princeps version and Beroaldo’s interpretation. At this point, he would not need to access Boccaccio or Correggio any longer.292 While Raphael was the originator of the Roman fresco cycle, and Giulio Romano one of his workshop executors, the former pupil got his own chance to explore this topic only ten years later. He realized an Amor and Psyche cycle in 1526–1528 in the Palazzo del Te in Mantova (Stanza di Psiche) that covered its walls and ceilings. Like his teacher Raphael, Giulio Romano was responsible for the drawings of the twenty-two scenes, while the execution was mainly done by Benedetto Pagni da Pescia, Rinaldo Mantovano, Gianfrancesco Penni, and others. By contrast with Raphael, Giulio Romano realized some scenes that were not present in Apuleius, for example, in the triumph of Amor with musicians and singers. There are a variety of panels on the north, east and west walls that have been proposed as coming from different stories: on the north wall (Fig. 38): Venus and Mars bathing, Bacchus and Ariadne, Venus with Mars and Adonis; on the east wall: Jupiter and Olympias, Polyphemus with Acis and Galatea, Pasiphae and the torus; and in the west ceiling octogones: Venus leads Psyche to Amor, Psyche as a new

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For Raphael as a reader, see, for example, Lina Bolzoni, Raffaello, frammenti di un ritratto letterario, in: Raffaello – La poesia del volto, ed. Marzia Faietti, Moscow 2016, pp. 56–71.

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Venus, Psyche and parents request advice from Apollo’s oracle, Zephyr takes Psyche into the presence of Neptune. For these differently inspired scenes, a comparison has been made with the free iconographic renderings in the Hypnerotomachia. This text has been proposed by Gombrich, Cavicchioli, and others for its inventive character.293 Also, Acocella sees an influence of the Hypnerotomachia, for example, in the scenes of the bath of Venus and Mars, and of Mars following Adonis.294 Lord cites the Venice 1497 edition of Ovid and Basinio Basini’s Meleagris as responsible for the frescoes.295 Weiland-Pollerberg follows up with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Plutarch as additional sources: while the topic of Olympia betraying Philipp with Ammon comes from Plutarch, Polyphemus and Pasiphae are from Ovid’sMetamorphoses.296 However, while the Hypnerotomachia is a text too distant from the original narration by Apuleius, Beroaldo’s commentary once again offers detailed descriptions for several missing scenes and incorporates them into the main story. Also a few additions from the commented Ovid 1497 edition seem likely. On the east wall, the Pasiphae story, which was missing in Apuleius, can certainly be referred to Beroaldo. Beroaldo introduces the story, which is similar to the story of Diana and Acteon mentioned by Apuleius before, as an example of animal love, and a counterpart to Apuleius’s loving donkey, which leads Beroaldo to call Pasiphae a donkey as well (Parsiphae asinaria). He gives a short summary of the story as follows: Pasiphae was the daughter of the sun who was married to Minos. To consummate her mad love with a bull, she slipped into the wooden costume of a cow and came together with him, with the result being the birth of the Minotaur. This deranged love story had a historical background, and appeared in the stories of ancient poets. In this case, the famous story of Pasiphae originated in Vergil.297 On the north wall, the bathing Mars and Venus is not easily traceable in Beroaldo, while the other two panels are. Beroaldo narrates the story of Venus, Mars, and Adonis in the classical version of Venus and Adonis both being symbols for beauty and feeling attracted by one another, while envious Mars hurts Adonis and then catches him away from his beloved Venus (ff. 42v–43r). The panel often titled as Bacchus and Ariadne should be read instead as Bacchus and Venus. Beroaldo turns to the bacchanalia several times (e.g., f. 14), but points also to the story of Bacchus and Venus (f. 32v), where Bacchus symbolized an elevated libido. Whoever has tasted his wine would always be attracted by Venus. In the west 293

294 295 296 297

Ernst H. Gombrich, Kunst und Illusion: Zur Psychologie der bildlichen Darstellung, Stuttgart 1978, p. 156; Cavicchioli, Le metamorfosi di Psiche, pp. 92–94, Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, p. 64. Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel Rinascimento, pp. 125–136. Lord, Some Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art, pp. 146–147. Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 64, 73–74. Apuleius, Commentarij a Philippo Beroaldo conditi in Asinum aureum, ff. 195r, 197r.

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ceiling, several scenes can be taken from Beroaldo. The topic of Psyche being represented as the new Venus is mentioned several times in Beroaldo (e.g., ff. 77r, 80r). Also, the request for Psyche’s destiny from Apollo’s oracle is mentioned by Beroaldo (f. 78v), but it is also in the Latin version, which he takes as his starting point and incorporated into the volume alongside the commentary. Without going into detailed comparisons between every fresco painting and Beroaldo here, it may be said that Beroaldo’s version offered many – although not all – of the missing links for the development of the entire cycle. It seems plausible that Giulio Romano consulted Beroaldo’s commentary, as also his teacher Raphael had done for the Farnesina frescoes, with which Giulio Romano was involved ten years earlier. The missing scenes may indeed be taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text Giulio Romano was familiar with, and which he used for the adjacent room (Sala dei Giganti). Among the scenes taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses would therefore figure Venus and Mars betraying Vulcan.298 More precisely, this scene might come from the 1497 Bonsignori/Bonsanti edition (4.28), which stresses the betrayal of Vulcan much more than the original version does, in that it does not even mention Vulcan personally, although he is certainly indirectly intended. Many fresco cycles on Apuleius’s topics followed these two famous examples in Rome and Mantua. Not surprisingly, another pupil of Raphael, Perino del Vaga, produced two cycles: in the Palazzo Andrea Doria in Genova (1529) and in Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome for Pope Paul III Farnese (1545–1546). Francesco Salviati painted a now lost cycle for Giovanni Grimani in Venice (1539), and Taddeo Zuccari for the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Bracciano (ca. 1560). Parallel to the different versions of his text, Apuleius was an author, who could fulfill different intellectual tasks, from cassone and wedding iconography up to allegorical complexities in demanding fresco cycles.

Lucretius The importance of Lucretius for artists has long been recognized. However, accessing Lucretius was no easy task for an artist. His De rerum natura was an important text, but it had no place in a normal school curriculum (it was even prohibited). After the Middle Ages it reappeared only in 1417 (discovered by Poggio Bracciolini), whereafter it soon found interest among private readers, even though the church tried to banish it. Although the text seemed to be popular, it is difficult to establish the number of readers it actually received.299

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Weiland-Pollerberg had seen an influence of the Hypnerotomachia here. Weiland-Pollerberg, Amor und Psyche in der Renaissance, pp. 64, 73–74. Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence, Cambridge, MA 2010, especially pp. 14–15; Alison Brown, Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context

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Only a very few artists seem to have been capable of accessing the text.300 During the Renaissance, the text enjoyed several Latin editions (first in Brescia, 1473), but it never appeared in print in the vernacular, and had only two important printed commentaries. The summary commentary on specific aspects by Raffaele Franchi was printed in 1504, and a classical commentary by Giovanni Baptista Pio (ca. 1475–ca. 1543) was printed in Bologna in 1511. Also, Filippo Beroaldo seemed to have composed a commentary, as Giovanni Baptista Pio claims in his own foreword about his colleague, namely, that a copy of this commentary was to be found in the library in Mantua, and that he himself had also gotten the chance to see it. Lucretius was considered a philosophical poet (poetae philosophici antiquissimi), which was expressed in the first printed Latin edition from 1486 in the implicit and explicit. This probably served to place natural history in the realm of Christian genesis and divine creation, as put into verse. Nature was considered divine, immortal, and created by God. Each of the six books starts with a summary of chapters included as a reading aid. The author of the first printed commentary on Lucretius, Raffaele Franchi, wrote only a kind of summary comment on one of Lucretius’s main arguments: the immortality of the soul (Raphaelis franci florentini In Lucretium paraphrasis cum appendice de animi immortalitate, Bologna 1504). The main commentator on Lucretius, Giovanni Baptista Pio, taught at the universities of Mantua, Milan, and Bologna, and had been in close contact to Isabella d’Este.301 His most important other commentaries include Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Ars amatoria. Giovanni Baptista Pio’s commentary on Lucretius from 1511302 (reprinted in 1514) was a classical commentary, where the original text and the comments were laid out in separate boxes. As many commentators did, Pio filled his text with references to other important authorities, like Albertus Magnus (De animalibus), Thomas Aquinas (Contra gentiles), Ovid (Metamorphoses), Lactantius (De opificio, Divinae institutiones), Boethius, Pliny (Natural History), and many more. As in many commentaries, useful keywords in the margin guide the reader through the content.

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of Renaissance Florence, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 9, 2001, pp. 11–62; James Hankins, Reinterpreting Renaissance humanism: Marcello Adriani and the recovery of Lucretius, in: Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco, Leiden 2006, pp. 262–291; Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, 73:3, 2012, pp. 395–416; Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Cambridge 2014; Marco Beretta, La rivoluzione culturale di Lucrezio: filosofia e scienza nell’antica Roma, Rome 2015. Brown, Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context of Renaissance Florence, p. 56. Paolo Barsanti, II pubblico insegnamento in Lucca dal secolo XIV alla fine del secolo XVIII, Lucca 1905, p. 134. Giovanni Baptista Pio, In Carum Lucretium poetam Commentarij a Joanne Baptista Pio editi, Bologna 1511.

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39 Giorgione, Tempesta, ca. 1510. Venice: Galleria dell’Accademia. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY

It is to precisely the opening lines of Giovanni Baptista Pio’s commentary that Giorgione’s (1478–1510) so-called Tempesta (ca. 1510, Fig. 39)303 refers, and the key scenes of this interpretation may be found on the first two pages of the commentary. At the very beginning of the commentary to the first book, Giovanni Baptista explains the meaning of Lucretius’s Venus: she was the “aeneadum genitrix,” the procreative Venus, from which the Roman people were the offspring (f. 3r). She therefore symbolized natural fertility, and would transmit a sense of sweetness as Venus Genitrix. Pio then moves on to refer to 303

As there is no historic evidence for the date of the painting, it has usually been given as between 1505 and 1508. For reasons of literary congruence, it must be postdated to Giorgione’s final year.

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Vergil’s Aeneid and the other form of Venus. When Aeneas fled destroyed Troy, Venus was shown as the bellicose Venus, whereas Aeneas became the father of the Romans by giving birth to Julio Alba, the ancestor of Romulus and Remus (f. 3r). In Lucretius’s original text, there was of course no connection of the Venus Genitrix with Aeneas, and of them both being parents of the coming Roman people. The commentator thus puts together a combination of Roman genealogy that had not existed before. Then Giovanni Baptista continues to explain the origin of Rome under Epicurean “religion” as generated through the Venus Genitrix, and he said he was aware of the fact that, in Lucretius and Vergil, Venus had two different meanings. But Venus would be the mother of nature and the earth, and brings forth the Julian gens (the Roman people) (f. 3v). The commentator then takes some time to explain the natural side of Venus, which he sees confirmed in Ovid, Plato’s Symposium, and Apuleius’s Asinus aureus (f. 4v). The double nature of Venus deriving from Plato’s Symposium and from Venus and Aeneas as the ancestors of coming Rome is the main topic in Giovanni Baptista’s first pages of the comment. The scene that we find in the painting is established by Aeneas as the ancestor of the Roman populace, and by Venus Genitrix, the procreative Venus, who likewise generates the Roman people. Here she is feeding Julio Alba, Aeneas’s son and the direct ancestor of the Roman people, who leads directly to Romulus and Remus. This family which will generate the new Rome is set into an Epicurean landscape, whereas the background shows Troy being destroyed. Foreground and background iconography are tight together, as Settis has noted for the ruins in the foreground and the lightning in the background.304 The thunderstorm adds to the historic moment. When Giovanni Baptista Pio talks about thunder and lightning and its ancient history in literature, he mentions Venus (and Juno) as part of the legendary twelve-headed council of Jupiter’s thunder (f. CXCii–v). Following Pio, a thunderstorm would be helpful for natural and corporal creation, as creation always needed a specific input in order to happen; it would not just happen accidentally (f. 19v). A more fitting title for Giorgione’s painting would therefore be “Tempesta: The Cradle of the Roman People under Epicurean Spirits.” Regarding the picture, there have been a plentitude of different approaches in interpretation so far. Most researchers have been struggling between a possible source in either Vergil or Lucretius, without considering the commentary tradition.305 304 305

Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpretating the Hidden Subject, Chicago 1990, p. 104. Just to summarize a few proposed solutions, which are not always dealing with one precise source: Wind and Gilbert saw an allegorical reading, referring to the theological virtues (Edgar Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta, Oxford 1969, pp. 1–15; Creighton Gilbert, On subject and non-subject in Italian Renaissance pictures, Art Bulletin, 34:3, 1952, pp. 202–216). Settis identified the figures with Adam and Eve and Cain in a moral landscape, with the background city as the paradisus voluptatis (Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, pp. 113–119).

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Giorgione therefore took the opening pages of Pio’s commentary on the first book of Lucretius as the basis for this painting. The commentator Giovanni Baptista Pio mixed topics, which were otherwise not naturally connected. For Giorgione it proved to be a fertile ground on which he could plant his own setting for the origins of Rome. Giorgione died the year before the commentary was printed (although we lack the precise date). He must have either had access to the manuscript version or followed Giovanni Baptista Pio’s lessons orally. One needs to ask who the patron of such a Roman topic might have been. When the panel was first mentioned about twenty years after its composition, it was located in the house of the Venetian doge Vendramin.306 But it has also been placed in relation to Cardinal Domenico Grimani, another of Giorgione’s important patrons.307 One of these important contacts must have brought Giorgione into contact with Mantua, Bergamo, or Bologna, and thus with Pio, where Giorgione accessed the manuscript version of his commentary a year before it came into print.308 From time to time, Piero di Cosimo’s Venus and Mars (1511 [formerly 1500–1505], Fig. 40) has been brought into connection with Lucretius or Ovid, albeit admitting that there was no direct source. The commentary tradition had been neglected. The general consensus in research offers a

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Stephen Campbell mentioned the original Lucretius as the main source (Stephen J. Campbell, Giorgione’s “Tempest,” “Studiolo” Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius, Renaissance Quarterly, 56:2, 2003, pp. 299–332). For Schier it is the first and fourth Eclogue of Virgil (Rudolf Schier, Giorgione’s tempesta: A Virgilian pastoral, Renaissance Studies, 22:4, 2008, pp. 476–506). Falciani sees a connection to Virgil’s Aeneid, but interpreted through the verses of Bernardino da Firenze in honor of the Vendramin family (Carlo Falciani, La Tempesta di Giorgione e un poemetto encomiastico dedicato ai Vendramin, Studiolo, 7, 2009, pp. 101–123). Stefaniak sees a variety of possible sources coming from Plato (Symposium 203, Timaeus 49–50), Plutarch’s De Iside and Osride, and Virgil’s Georgics (4) (Regina Stefaniak, Of founding fathers and the necessity of the place: Giorgione’s Tempesta, Artibus et Historiae, 29:58, 2008, pp. 121–155). Also Pliny has been mentioned as a source with his passage on Apelles (Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice 1470–1790, London 1972, p. 229; Hope, Artists, patrons, and advisors in the Italian Renaissance, p. 311). Augusto Gentili, Per la demitizzazione di Giorgione: Documenti, ipotesi, provocazioni, in: Giorgione e la cultura veneta tra ’400 and ’500: Mito, allegoria, analisi iconologica, ed. Augusto Gentili and Claudia Ceri Via, Rome 1981, pp. 12–14. Rudolf Schier, Giorgione’s tempesta: A Virgilian pastoral, p. 481. Domenico Grimani owned a manuscript version of Lucretius, where, however, no commentary is mentioned for this particular manuscript. Grimani bought the former library of Pico della Mirandola (death 1494, inventory of 1498), where plenty of primary texts and commentaries were present (F. Calori Cesis, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola detto la fenice degli ingegni cenni biografici, Memorie storiche della città e dell’antico ducato della Mirandola, 11, 1897; see: Della biblioteca di Giovanni Pico, pp. 32–76, see p. 54). On the impressive Grimani library of 15,000 volumes, including also other important collections, divided between Venice and Rome, then passed on in 1522 to San Antonio di Castello in Venice, see Theobald Freudenberger, Die Bibliothek des Kardinals Domenico Grimani, Historisches Jahrbuch, 56, pp. 15–45.

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40 Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Mars and Cupid, 1511 (formerly ca. 1505). Berlin: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen. Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Gemäldegalerie/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY

reading of the painting as an allegory of love’s triumph over war.309 On closer inspection, however, it turns out that Lucretius himself is not the source of the painting, but Giovanni Baptista Pio’s commentary on Lucretius (commentary to book 1),310 where all the details in the painting may be found that the painter brought together into a coherent visual composition. Many explanations in Pio’s commentary are commonplace, but the author brings them together within the span of a few pages: pigeons are the companions of Venus, and they are voluptuous, which they express by intense kissing (ff. 3r, 8v). Venus is the mother of nature, and she furthers all voluptuous life (ff. 3r, 6v). She is called Voluptas, both by the Gods and by men (f. 4r), and she is the reason for the growth of all living things (f. 7r). Gods are moved by good desires and affects (f. 4v). Venus does not wear weapons. She is not belligerent (f. 5r) but loves peace (f. 8r). With the inclination of her head, she indicates whether weapons should be used or not, and she orders Mars to use them or let them stay (f. 8r). Mars has desperately fallen in love with Venus, regardless of whether Venus is in good relation with him or not; nevertheless, he must fulfill her pleasures and desires (f. 8r). Eyes desire to see amorous things, and take the lead in matters of love (f. 8v). Cupid is pleasurable and transmits desire

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Lotoro, La fortuna iconografica delle “Metamorfosi” di Ovidio, pp. 55–56, 168 (proposes Ovid’s Metamorphoses); Schubring, Cassoni, p. 316 (Poliziano, Giostra I); Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 63 (Lukrez, De rerum natura, I, 28–40); Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 44–48 (story from Homer and Ovid, but the picture is not coming from a specific text); Uwe Bischoff, Die “Cassonebilder” des Piero di Cosimo: Fragen der Ikonographie, Frankfurt 1995, pp. 25–26 (follows Panofsky with the Lukrez suggestion, adds Ficino’s Dell’Amore, but does not see a final source); Tempesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo: Catalogo complete, pp. 101–102 (Morgante di Luigi Pulci 1478 XVI, 45–64, Poliziano Stanze I, 122, 126, Ficino Simposio). Giovanni Baptista Pio, In Carum Lucretium poetam Commentarij, Bologna 1511.

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(f. 7r). He is followed by rabbits wherever he goes, animals that symbolize pleasant thoughts of desire (f. 7r). As applied to the painting showing voluptuously extended images of Venus and Mars, we see both depicted in lascivious poses while resting peacefully and in harmony, thereby expressing positive feelings and desires. In the front between them are two pigeons kissing intensely, thus alluding, by their example, to what should follow. Venus holds Cupid in her arms accompanied by a rabbit, thereby underlining the voluptuousness of the couple. Cupid’s eyes full of desire toward his mother allude to the next step she will take toward the completely relaxed and peaceful Mars. Mars’s usual armor has been removed, which has been picked up by several little Cupids, who are dismantling the armor, probably because Venus is shown here as not being belligerent. She moves her head up and orchestrates the scene with her eyes, while Mars falls asleep and the little cupids dismantle his armor. The picture has been rightly interpreted as love’s triumph over war, but the source is Giovanni Baptista Pio’s commentary to Lucretius and not the ancient source itself. Piero di Cosimo must have had access to (at least) the first chapter, where he took the individual characters and composed them into a telling allegory. This is another example of a painter who promptly followed up on the up-to-date interpretation of a topic, by using a commentary right after it appeared in print. And Piero di Cosimo showed himself once again being informed by different strands of literature, as his sources vary from picture to picture. LEVELS OF LEARNING

Artists as readers had been dealing with a broad array of categories of literature. But the vast majority of textual sources can be deduced to schooling and curriculum literature and vernacular literature dealing with curriculum literature. By confronting the most popular literature from the elementary and following curriculum, it is possible to thence derive the majority of iconological symbolism, allegories, and mythologies. The early reading texts like Fior di virtu, Aesop’s Fables, and the Physiologus counted particularly as common knowledge, and every painter would have been expected to be familiar with their contents. As a part of both the early Latin and vernacular curriculum, Ovid’s Epistles were known by many painters, before some of them became familiar with other Ovidian texts. Examining nonreligious paintings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a substantial number of their topics originated from these early school texts. If we add easy to access, but extracurricular literature in the vernacular, like Dante’s Convivio, Landino’s commentary on Dante, and Bonsignori/Bonsanti’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we find that well over half of the topics occurring in nonreligious painting topics derive from these sources. It is evident that a painter would have arrived at the texts by Dante, Landino, and Ovid only

BOTTICELLI’S PRIMAVERA AND CONTEMPORARY COMMENTARIES

after having studied the early curriculum texts. We may therefore conclude that at least an elementary education was a common occurrence for a future artist, and that this included some Latin until after 1470, when vernacular translations became available for the most important texts. Elementary and intermediate school texts seem to have been common ground for both artists and patrons. Every topic taken from there was feasible for and comprehensible to both sides. Although Vergil, Lucan, and Apuleius were part of the earlier and intermediate Latin curriculum, they were not as widely accessed as Dante. Exceptions are fifteenth-century cassone/spalliera painters and fresco painters from the first half of the sixteenth century. They both had a private clientele with demand for history, mythology, and transformations. Not surprisingly, these texts were popular during the early translation period, which made them readily available, although it seems that especially cassone painters must have had a familiarity with Latin “standard” editions. But the fact that several artists engaged with advanced literature, including commentaries, shows that advanced levels of education embracing university topics were also possible for dedicated artisans, either through oral apprenticeship or through the resulting printed commentaries. Access to these demanding texts must have been sought after especially by highly talented painters, in order to satisfy patrons’ needs. This sophisticated literature, possibly helped by Christianized, moral humanist interpretations, proved to be extremely helpful for rendering topics as mythologies or allegories. Regardless of whether an additional person provided some help, like pointing to topics and texts, it required an appropriate level of understanding by the artist to render passages into a convincing concept. WEAVING MEDIATING TEXTS INTO ALLEGORIES: BOTTICELLI’S PRIMAVERA AND CONTEMPORAR Y COMMENTARIES

After briefly discussing several examples of the use of Renaissance commentaries in painting, this section provides an example of how Renaissance painters approached the literature of higher education through Botticelli’s famous mythological painting called Primavera (1482, Fig. 41).311 Renaissance commentaries were in fact used only by very learned painters because of their complex content, which needed familiarity with higher education and humanist ideas. Many attempts have been made to decode the figural composition of the Primavera, relying mostly on ancient literary sources like Ovid, Lucretius, Horace, Seneca, Cicero, and others.312 To illustrate the 311

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For a detailed analysis of this painting, textual sources, and bibliography see Angela Dressen, Botticelli’s Primavera and contemporary commentaries, in: Iconology, Neoplatonism, and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. Berthold Hub and Sergius Kodera, Routledge 2021, pp. 137–159. Ficino and Neoplatonic sources: Ernst Gombrich, Botticelli’s Mythologies: A study in NeoPlatonic symbolism of this circle, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 8, 1945, pp. 7–60; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London 1958; Joanne Snow-Smith,

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41 Botticelli, Primavera, ca. 1482. Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

ancient sources was not necessarily too complicated an enterprise. Composing a new humanistic invention by weaving several literary sources together was instead a major task, which needed invention and literary learning. This is why it will be proposed here that the painter’s literary choices were facilitated by contemporary philological commentaries on these ancient sources, thus providing him with useful explanations and guidance for understanding these works that allowed him to weave ancient

The “Primavera” of Sandro Botticelli: A Neoplatonic Interpretation, New York 1993; Karl Schlebusch, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci 1434–1514. Maestro canonico domenicano, Florence 2017; Marieke van den Doel, Ficino en het voorstellingsvermogen, “phantasia” en “imaginatio” in kunst en theorie van de Renaissance, Amsterdam 2008, pp. 154–176 (together with Apulieus and Plotinus); Liana Cheney, Quattrocento Neoplatonism and Medici Humanism in Botticelli’s Mythological Paintings, Lanham, MD 1985 (and Plato); Eugene Lane-Spollen, Under the Guise of Spring: The Message Hidden in Botticelli’s Primavera, London 2014 (and Ovid). Martianus Capella: Claudia Villa, “Per una lettura della Primavera, Mercurio retrogrado e la rhetorica nella bottega di Botticelli,” Strumenti critici, 13, 1998, pp. 1–28. Landino and Ficino: Max Marmor, “From Purgatory to the Primavera: Some observations on Botticelli and Dante,” Artibus et historiae, 24, 2003, pp. 199–212; Christophe Poncet, “The Judgement of Lorenzo,” Bruniana & Campanelliana, 14:2, 2008, pp. 535–553; John Dee, Eclipsed: An overshadowed goddess and the discarded image of Botticelli’s Primavera, Renaissance Studies, 27:1, 2013, pp. 4–33. Lucretius: Horst Bredekamp, Götterdämmerung des Neuplatonismus, Kritische Berichte, 14, 1986, pp. 39–48. Late medieval naturalistic tendencies: Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Botticelli. Allegorie mitologiche, Milan 2001; Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificient.

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and humanist ideas into a sophisticated allegorical web. Such secondary sources permitted artists to reflect on ancient topics, newly considered in a Neoplatonic light. These commentaries were also sometimes written in the vernacular, thereby making them more accessible to both painters and their patrons.

Landino, Ficino, and Marsi as Mediators for Dante, Plato, Ovid, and Horace Stepping away from the literary sources proposed so far, this section examines the role of two vernacular and two Latin Renaissance commentaries on classical literary sources and their influence on the Primavera. While some of the original sources have long been discussed with reference to the Primavera’s iconography, their interpretation within humanistic commentaries has until recently been disregarded. Therefore I propose Cristoforo Landino’s Latin commentary on Horace and Paolo Marsi’s Latin commentary on Ovid (both published in 1482), and their relevance for the painting,313 and also two vernacular commentaries that will prove to be even more important. These are Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium, titled Libro dell’amore (written in Florence in 1469), and Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy (published 1481). Both commentaries attempt to introduce currently fashionable topics of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. Plato’s two texts concern heavenly and earthly love, the birth of Eros, and the meaning of beauty. Ficino’s Libro dell’amore is probably the first of his vernacular texts, finished about 1469 or shortly after. Patrons as well as artists could now easily read about Ficino’s new Platonic theory of love, which found increasing distribution at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Plato’s and Ficino’s texts strongly influenced Landino’s Dante commentary, which was illustrated by Botticelli. Whereas in his drawings Botticelli closely followed the text, in the Primavera the painter seems to have tried out his own interpretation of Landino’s commentary. Reading through the commentaries does not challenge the most common interpretation of the nine allegorical figures in an idyllic setting with fruit trees and a flowering green lawn, on which we see, from left to right: Mercury, the three Graces, Venus with Cupid above, Flora, Chloris, and Zephyr.314 In the center, Venus inclines toward the three Graces, a group resembling a well313

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Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Opera, ed. and commentary by Christophorus Landinus, Florence 1482; Paolo Marsi, Paulus Marsus piscinas poeta. cl. generoso iuueni Georgio Cornelio. m. Cornelii equitis. f. salutem, Venice 1485. The oldest and most commonly accepted interpretation of the characters was provided many years ago by Aby Warburg, and it still remains valid. Aby Moritz Warburg, Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling,” in: Gesammelte Schriften: Studienausgabe, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Berlin 1998, pp. 26–44.

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known ancient type. Above Venus, blind Cupid deliberately aims his bow at the middle Grace. At the far left, Mercury looks heavenward and agitates the clouds with his caduceus. The new reading through commentaries emphasizes two important features that helped Renaissance artists to choose and compose their works. On the one hand, they benefited from the genre of the literary commentary, which transformed ancient, medieval, or contemporary primary texts into a more easily accessible mode, while they also relied on vernacular translations or texts, since many artists did not know the classical languages. Both features helped the artist to confront topics otherwise beyond his expertise. As we have seen above, Landino’s vernacular commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy has the invaluable advantage not only of interpreting the work of the greatest Florentine poet but also of linking his topics to the greatest ancient and contemporary authors.315 In the context of this publication, this will be exemplified only concerning the three Graces. Referring to Hesiod’s Theogony, Landino describes the Graces as Zeus’s three daughters (Inferno 1.2.43–57). In this way, Landino gives these characters a meaning beyond their original context, drawing them into a precise Neoplatonic concept. Furthermore, Landino compares the Graces also with the concept of divine grace, which was not included by the ancient authors. Divine grace had been introduced into Neoplatonism by early Christian authors such as Augustine, and it established itself as a concept that could help Christianize ancient topics as well as provide the highest level of Christian virtue (comparable to the level of sommo bene). Grace is assigned only by God to illuminate the virtuous, who through the spirit of love can approach closer to God (Augustinus, De civitate Dei X, 29).316 In Landino, the first Grace is the most important because she is illuminated by divine grace. The second is the only one to bring happiness, and the third stands for the flowering nature of our virtues. The following two would be looking at the first, because they were both depending on her (Inferno 1.2.43–57). In the painting, the first Grace stands closest to Mercury, who points heavenward. The second happy Grace links her sisters, while the third, flowering Grace, is set next to Venus and Flora. Appropriately, the second and third are looking toward the first, as described by Landino. Landino’s independence from the primary text, the Divine Comedy, is most visible when he inserts Plato’s theory of love into his commentary. Plato’s text was obviously unknown to Dante, as these Platonic texts were discovered afterward. For Landino, the story of Dante and Beatrice, and of God’s

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Dante Alighieri, Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra La comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta fiorentino, Florence 1481; Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, 4 vols. (citations after this edition). Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, London 2003, pp. 414–415.

BOTTICELLI’S PRIMAVERA AND CONTEMPORARY COMMENTARIES

inspiration, provided instead a valid reason to introduce Platonic love theory. It also offered Landino the possibility of trying out his own interpretation of Plato’s text on love, following the commentary by Ficino. Landino’s interpretation of the three Graces and three Venuses had a strong impact on Botticelli’s painting. These features appear in neither Plato nor Ficino. The winged Eros comes from Plato and Landino, but wings are absent in Ficino’s Libro dell’amore. On the other hand, in Plato and Ficino one can read about pregnant bodies, barefoot love, and Zeus’s flowering garden as the birthplace of Eros. Both commentaries thus provided significant details for Botticelli’s painting. As it shows, the subject behind Botticelli’s Primavera relied mostly on the dynamic between Eros and Ratio, based on the interpretation of Plato’s erotic theory and on contemporary Renaissance commentaries. The other two important Latin commentaries are Landino’s commentary on Horace’s Opera omnia, and Paulus Marsis’s commentary on Ovid’s Fasti. Both texts were printed in 1482, the same year as Pierfrancesco’s wedding (the circumstance of the commission), and one year after Landino’s Dante commentary. Both of these texts were likewise influenced by Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s philosophy of love. The original text of Horace’s Odes introduces the general topic of spring, and of Venus as the mother of Cupid. In short, while Horace positively characterizes the personifications related to spring, such as the arrival of Zephyr, the dancing Graces, and the seaborn Venus, who is related to the month of April (Horace, Odes, I, iv, and IV, xi–xii), there is, however, a negative interpretation of the influence of Venus and Cupid (Horace, Odes, II, viii ).317 In Horace’s narration, little would evoke the idea of beauty, youth, and the sweet introduction of love in an idyllic garden, which the Primavera proposes. Once again following Plato and Ficino, Landino’s commentary distinguishes between the different kinds of Platonic love, and introduces the topic of the three Cupids, born from Mercury and Diana and Mercury and Venus, and of the Anteros from Mars and Venus. He presents Venus positively as the mother of love, and renders the story in a flowering garden. Next, when introducing the theme of spring in Horace, where the author describes the arrival of spring, Zephyr blowing toward the beach, and the dancing of Venus and the Graces, Landino instead refers to the three Graces Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who were not present in Horace, but were already introduced by Landino himself in his Dante commentary, where he refers to their origin in Hesiod (Horace, Odes, I, iv; Inferno 1.2.43–57).318 Landino’s aim is obvious: although Horace had rendered an ambivalent idea of Venus’s intention, 317 318

Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd, Cambridge 2004, pp. 33, 111–113, 249–253. Horace, Odes and Epodes, p. 33; Horatii Flacci poetae opera, comm. Landino, f. 14r. Cf. Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, vol. 1, p. 349.

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Landino here again applied the Neoplatonic theory of love, thus transforming the story into a positive narration on love. A similar shift can also be shown in Marsi’s commentary on Ovid’s Fasti. In his detailed narration of Chloris and Zephyr, for example, he describes Chloris as a nymph with flowering roses coming out of her mouth; the smell of the flowers would be Chloris, then called Flora, a nymph in a pleasant garden. She would be of admirable beauty, loved by Zephyr, and given by him the primacy over flowers, so that these might be disseminated all over the earth. Marsi turns the Hore into Graces and sisters, with the familiar names Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. These would render the garden full of flowers, which would then be given to brides.319 It is therefore not merely a coincidence that Botticelli’s three figures, who shift between the appearances of ancient Hore in transparent garments and the three sisters as personification of the Graces, are situated in a garden full of flowers, thus indicating fertility. Given the circumstances of the painting as a marriage gift, this interpretation was certainly appropriate. Of the four commentaries relevant for the Primavera, it is clear that the two vernacular commentaries had a far deeper impact on Botticelli’s iconography than did the Latin ones. Above all, Landino’s discussion of Dante provides the main source for the painting (as it did for his Calumny of Apelles), followed by Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium. Among the Latin commentaries, Paolo Marsi is of greater importance than Landino, who mainly repeats his other commentary. Ficino’s commentary of 1469 on Plato’s Symposium forms the foundation for all these texts, which were all available in print by 1481 or 1482, the year of the wedding. If we presume Botticelli’s knowledge of these commentaries, there was indeed no need for him to turn to the original authors, who would have added nothing significant for the setting. Botticelli selected the relevant Renaissance commentaries dealing with a love-and-marriage topic that were all interconnected and well known in humanist circles. Extracting the essence of these commentaries, he composed a single narrative, in which the figures appear interlinked. The Medici circle would immediately have perceived the pointed paraphrases in Botticelli’s painting, for the relevant texts largely originated there. Moreover, Plato’s Symposium was the text with which Lorenzo inaugurated a series of annual meetings on the birthday of the ancient philosopher, as Ficino himself relates in the proemio to his commentary on the Symposium. These convivia, which included Cristoforo Landino, had precisely the purpose of commenting on classical texts. It is quite possible that Botticelli himself had attended those literary discussions as well, which would have eased his access to the discussed commentaries, especially those of Ficino and Landino. But he certainly knew 319

Antonio Costanzo and Paolo Marsi, Ouidii Nasonis Fastorum libri, Paris 1510, Ovid, ff. 155v, 156r (Paolo Marsi).

RENAISSANCE COMMENTARIES AND VERNACULAR INTERPRETATIONS

Landino’s commentary in any case, since he had to provide the illustrations for it, and also used it as his main literary source for his other major mythology, the Calumny. THE RELEVANCE OF RENAISSANCE COMMENTARIES AND VERNACULAR INTERPRETATIONS FOR THE RENAISSANCE ARTIST

Comparing these contemporary commentaries makes clear how certain topics relevant to the Primavera were of greater importance to commentators than they were in the original texts. The commentators not only explained what happened in the ancient narrative, thereby making the texts much more accessible; they even introduced and intermingled topics from other ancient sources that had been totally absent in the original ancient version. Many stories in Plato, Ovid, Horace, and Seneca were of little direct use for an artist because they needed explanation, which could be provided by a commentator. It has often been proposed that Botticelli would have needed a humanist advisor for the composition of his mythological paintings. The majority of scholars have proposed Poliziano, and some have suggested Ficino. This advisor would then necessarily have helped Botticelli to choose appropriate ancient texts, to interpret them under contemporary humanist and Christian views, and to configure the literary snippets into a new story. For an artist, it would certainly have been difficult to transform an ancient text into a Neoplatonic interpretation on his own. Therefore, commentaries such as Landino’s helped both patrons and artists immensely in finding the right up-to-date approach. Nevertheless, had Botticelli needed advisory help beyond that found in the commentaries, then Landino would certainly be the most plausible candidate for his advisor, given the fact that he was also the major source. The only other plausible contact is Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, his longtime neighbor, who probably acted also as his teacher (see Chapter 2). It is more difficult to prove Botticelli’s access to Marsi’s text, which was printed at the end of 1482, and thus perhaps slightly too late to influence the composition of the painting. However, Marsi was lecturing on this commentary in the academic year 1481–1482 at the Sapienza in Rome (and earlier in 1475–1476), when Botticelli was painting some scenes for the Old and New Testament cycle in the Sistine Chapel. Marsi also lectured on Horace and Vergil, but no printed commentaries seem to have survived. If we were to presume that Botticelli had attended classes at the university, this would have provided firsthand information for the artist. Marsi declared that his discussions took place “in publico gymnasio” and were attended by “pueris quam grandioribus.” As we have seen in Chapter 2, in Florence there were various possibilities for students and interested individuals to get some instruction on literary topics. Apart from

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university lectures and private circles, there was a category of public lectures for a general audience. Besides Landino’s Latin commentary, the young Botticelli might also have benefited from Landino’s university lectures, in multiple cycles on Dante, and in 1459–1460 and 1460–1461 on Horace’s Odes. A lecture on the Fasti by Poliziano, which the artist might have heard in precisely the relevant year 1481–1482, could also have been important. Regardless, since Poliziano’s lecture notes only partially survive, we do not know how close Poliziano’s interpretation was to Marsi’s. It is now becoming clear that Botticelli certainly did not rely on ancient literature to develop topics of ancient origin, and that he might have been pointed to appropriate commentaries for his inventions. Like humanists and philologists, Botticelli attempted his own interpretation of ancient sources, helped by the commentaries of his contemporaries, and possible discussions about these with Landino or Vespucci. These topics and motifs were woven together from different literary sources. Therefore, the ambiguity of paintings following literature seems intentional, as single figures and scenes may reflect several literary sources. Thus, Botticelli’s paintings could well be examples of Alberti’s expression of favole, as Dempsey proposes.320 In Della pittura, Alberti explains how textual sources can be woven together to depict a poetic idea like poesia. A painting with an ambivalent content, a favola in Alberti’s terminology (or a favola as Landino terms the story of Love and the Graces), should be represented as a poesia. Alberti’s concept of favola with a seemingly ambivalent content was coming out of a long literary tradition of interpretation. As we have seen above, Hugh of Saint Victor and Bonsignori suggested histories, allegories, and fables as poetical narratives to enrich the meaning and include moral components, and to show how different and interpretative models can all join together to tell stories in a new way. Both Dante and Boccaccio had pointed to poetic obscurity in allegories that would embrace a hidden truth, as a most welcome and stimulating task for the observer. Allegories in the visual art clearly had the same aim. And in the end, the nature of the favola is not the illustration of a single source, but rather depends on the concept of poesie, that is, the possibility of plural sources illuminating new concepts, which may be paralleled with the work of a commentator. This is exactly what legitimizes the use of several literary sources in a painting, and especially in Botticelli’s mythological scenes. The painter clearly competes here with the commentator, but also benefits from him. Allegories like the Primavera therefore gain, and perhaps exceed, the interpretative power of a philological commentary, offering a visual commentary to the ancient sources and their interpretations, while they ask the spectator to unravel a hidden truth incorporated in the poesie.

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Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, pp. 27–28.

FOUR

VITRUVIUS AND PLINY AS SOURCEBOOKS, EDUCATIONAL LANDMARKS, AND INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE

P

liny (Natural History) and Vitruvius (De architectura) were the only important sources on ancient art and architecture available in the Renaissance, and both texts had an enormous impact on artists and patrons.1 For a Renaissance artist in need of information on ancient art and architecture, including materials, techniques, and topics, it was highly desirable to get access to these sources. The two sources offered different insights: while Vitruvius dealt predominantly with architecture, Pliny offered a view into all three visual arts in antiquity in his encyclopedic work. With Pliny we have not only a first introduction to art but also a first historical overview, including the evolution of art and artists. Furthermore, both texts were the first important and highly influential sources on the education of artists. Although Pliny himself benefited from Vitruvius’s art theory, as well as from the visual evidence around him, he also relied on other important sources on art and architecture like Varro and others. Despite Pliny’s text receiving a print run and vernacular translation earlier than

1

As already mentioned, Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines would have provided a much more comprehensive and detailed source for ancient mythology than Pliny, containing many ekphrasis on ancient paintings in Naples, delivered in a description with a didactic approach. Although this text became a little more accessible with Latin editions from 1517 onward, and had a highly selected readership including Cesare Cesariano, it surprisingly received full attention only in the seventeenth century. It is astonishing that none of the important quattrocento translators and commentators like Landino and Beroaldo nor the literati of the Florentine Academy dedicated themselves to this text.

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Vitruvius’s, Pliny’s text did not inspire substantial commentaries as Vitruvius’s did. Rather, it was read as a sourcebook. In spite of its importance, the work of Pliny will not be treated here with the respect it deserves, as readers are referred to two recent and comprehensive studies.2 Nevertheless, a short summary will be valuable to complete the picture of important literature available for the artist. While Vitruvius’s text functioned likewise as an important sourcebook, it also took part in the intellectual challenge of making literary commentaries. For the first time, artists participated on an almost equal level in translating and commenting, thus indicating how much the visual arts were both taking part in the liberal arts and also competing with them. After summarizing the translation history on Vitruvius, the focus will then turn to evaluating the new commentary tradition on Vitruvius’s text, which has so far received very limited attention. PLINY AS THE ANCIENT SOUR CEBOOK

For learned Renaissance men, Pliny was mostly significant as the only important ancient Latin writer on natural history.3 Moreover, as McHam points out, he “offered humanists a moralized materialistic worldview, which was a significant alternative to the medieval Christianized Platonic theological emphasis on form and ideal.”4 Among the humanists, Pliny was a valuable source for those interested in antiquarian studies, and a number of authors writing historical overviews or descriptions of ancient Rome drew on information in Pliny. As Fane-Saunders has shown, this is true for Flavio Biondo’s Roma instaurata, Poggio Bracciolini’s De varietate, and Giovanni Tortelli’s In Commentaria grammatica, but also for the antiquarian interests of Pomponio Leto, Bernardo Rucellai, and many others. During the fifteenth and especially in the sixteenth century, the approach to Pliny developed from an appreciative reception of his descriptions of ancient monuments to the verification of recent discoveries as well as to critical assessments. Here several sixteenth-century architects like Serlio, Ligorio, and Palladio participated, who were already trained through critical approaches to Vitruvius.5 This is an important step in

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Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, New Haven, CT 2013; Peter Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, New York 2016. In addition to the three Greek writers Aristotle, Theophrastos, and Dioscorides. On ancient natural history in the Renaissance, see George Sarton, The Appreciation of Ancient and Medieval Science during the Renaissance (1450–1600), Philadelphia 1955, pp. 52–132; Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and Renaissance Civilization, Farnham 2012, pp. 72–85. McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, p. 313. Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, pp. 28–89.

PLINY AS THE ANCIENT SOURCEBOOK

the intellectual development of the artists who were increasingly gaining in critical competencies. Pliny and Vitruvius were never completely lost during the Middle Ages, although their texts survived incomplete and corrupt. Pliny had an earlier printing and translation history than Vitruvius, probably because he served an even larger variety of audiences, being in fact an author who entered the supplementary reading list in humanist education (see, for example, Chapter 2 and the school of Guarino). Pliny’s Natural History enjoyed numerous important editions between 1470 and 1530 (including fifteen Latin incunables and three Italian incunables), often provided by the best philologists at the time. They aimed, however, only for the best linguistically polished and – with regard to content – complete version, and never attempted to comment on the entire work, but only on smaller parts. No artist participated in this challenge, in contrast to all the efforts made on Vitruvius’s text. Pliny’s Natural History has been described as the first encyclopedia, and the favorite one throughout medieval times.6 In thirty-seven books he presented all knowledge of the natural, medical, and artistic labors in ancient times. Of special importance are books 33–36, where he narrates on a plenitude of ancient art works visible to him. The following division of chapters and subchapters is based on Landino’s vernacular edition (1476). Pliny’s Natural History existed in numerous manuscript books – albeit mostly in incomplete versions. Since Petrarch, humanists were concerned to possess or provide the correct edition, mostly for two reasons: Petrarch had already noted that circulating texts were both incomplete and linguistically corrupt.7 Only a few years after the invention of the printing press, the text was immediately printed twice (Venice 1469; Rome 1470) – a period which also marked a closer engagement with Roman antiquity. Pliny’s Natural History was reprinted or edited in almost every year between 1470 and 1550, and became one of the most popular and complete encyclopedias of the time. To provide access to this long and complex text, early printed editions often started with a detailed index for keywords showing chapter references. The first two Pliny editions still had low print runs, and offered a corrupt version unacceptable to learned people. Therefore, the famous Bolognese university teacher and commentator, Filippo Beroaldo the Elder, engaged with the text, and was responsible for the first highly influential and often reprinted Pliny edition. Beroaldo’s main aim was to provide a linguistically polished and complete version with regard to content. Published first in Parma in 1476, his highly praised Latin edition came out in the same year as Landino’s 6

7

Sarton, The Appreciation of Ancient and Medieval Science during the Renaissance (1450–1600), p. 78; Joyce Irene Whalley, Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, London 1982, p. 7. Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture, pp. 28–29.

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likewise very popular vernacular edition. In his preface, Beroaldo declared that he had finally made a reliable version of the Latin text available for study. His linguistically polished text was introduced by a detailed index considering both the contents and the different categories of authors; it was often picked up by subsequent editors as well.8 Beroaldo’s important edition had a wide readership and was also used by some artists and architects. One example is the architect Cesare Cesariano, who provided the first vernacular translation and commentary on Vitruvius. He studied the 1480 edition printed in Parma.9 Pliny’s opus never entered the classical commentary tradition during the Renaissance. Filippo Beroaldo tried for decades to finish a substantial commentary on Pliny, but he lost the first version and never finished the second. Nevertheless, he provided some kind of commentary with two separate short texts in letter form, which he described as “commentaries” on Pliny, however short these texts were. One of the short comments is a preface and a letter at the end of the original 1476 edition; the other is a dedication letter to Johannes von Wartenberg (from Bohemia), a pupil of Beroaldo’s, in a different edition (Bologna, 1498).10 They can both be disregarded in the artistic context – as can other commentaries made on Pliny during the Renaissance – since they do not touch on artistic matters. Otherwise, there were only a few short and partial commentaries that mainly concentrated on medical and herbal aspects. The first to comment on these was Ludovico Guasti (Epitoma Plinii Secundi in historia naturalis, before 1422).11 Two partial commentaries were written during the incunable period, with short texts separate from the editions, by Niccolò Leoniceno and Pandolfo Collenuccio; however, both concentrate on medical issues.

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Pliny, Historia naturalis ex emendatione Phlippi Beroaldi, Parma 1476. Alessandro Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, in: Cesare Cesariano e il classicismo di primo Cinquecento, ed. Maria Luisa Gatti Perer and Alessandro Rovetta, Milan 1996, pp. 247–308, see p. 283; Peter Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory: The case of Cesare Cesarino’s 1521 edition of Vitruvius, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 61: 166–167, 2011, pp. 423–453, see p. 428. There was a closing letter to Nicolaus Ravacaldum as a kind of short commentary to some single books, leaving out the last books on art (six pages at the end of the 1476 edition; only the commentary to book 21 briefly mentions Porphyry as a painter). On Beroaldo’s commentaries on Pliny, see Konrad Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistische Exitenz. Filippo Beroaldo und sein Kommentar zum goldenen Esel des Apuleius, Munich 1971, pp. 2–28; Nauert, Humanism and Renaissance Civilization, pp. 72–85, see p. 78; Andrea Severi, Il giovanile cimento di Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio sulla Naturalis historia di Plinio: La lettera a Niccolò Ravacaldo, Schede humanistiche, 24–25, 2010–2011, pp. 81–112. Remigio Sabbadini, La scuola e gli studi di Guarino Guarini Veronese, Catania 1896, p. 115; Charles G. Nauert, Caius Plinius Secundus, in: Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries; Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Washington, DC 1980, vol. 4, pp. 323–325; McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 100–101.

PLINY AS THE ANCIENT SOURCEBOOK

The corrected philological editions of Beroaldo and Barbaro circulated widely among the literati. But there was likewise an obvious demand by the representatives of the manual arts to gain access to the text, particularly the three chapters on the visual arts. Ferdinand of Aragon seems to have been aware of this lacuna, so in 1474 he ordered a vernacular translation from Cristoforo Landino, the well-known Florentine literature professor, humanist, and commentator. This translation was commissioned only a few years after Pliny first appeared in print. Landino’s translation was printed two years later in Venice (1476, reprinted six times) in a huge print run and at the expense of Girolamo Strozzi and Giambattista Ridolfi.12 Landino starts with a proemio and a preface. In the proemio he shows himself to be a skilled teacher, starting with some important points of useful knowledge on ancient mythology. He introduced the figures of Osiris and Isis, Hercules and Bacchus, and Jupiter, Apollo, and Minerva as praiseworthy immortal gods one should know about.13 After the preface, a substantial index of twenty-eight pages follows, listing for each chapter relevant keywords for content, including the names of the principal persons mentioned, important authors cited, and the names of physicians. This index had already been established for the 1470 Latin edition in Rome. It was reprinted in Beroaldo and Landino with minimal changes, mostly in its layout. The index was meant to provide the principal aid for readers throughout the book. It made access easy, and the contents searchable book by book. Also the choice of keyword access shows Landino’s helpful guidance throughout the text, as it permitted keyword searches for the most important artistic topics. For book 33, he mentions the origin of statues; for book 34, he mentions the first statues in Rome, namely, equestrian and colossal statues; for book 35 he mentions the value of painting and its history, including important Roman painters, monochromatic painting, how to use colors, the first battle scene in painting, illusionistic painting, and material studies (f. 19r). For book 36, the index mentions columns, marble incrustations, the nature of stones, the use of stone in ancient Rome, different material qualities, and the use of marble in temples, floors, glass, and medicine (f. 19v). These keywords permitted the reader to easily find his right access point without employing much time or preparation. Landino’s translation was to have a major impact on the spread of Pliny, especially among the artists who now had direct access to this important ancient source. We know that artists like Benedetto da Maiano, Bandinelli, and Vasari possessed their own copies.14

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McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 149–153, 257–259; Antonino Antonazzo, Il volgarizzamento pliniano di Cristoforo Landino, Messina 2018. Pliny, Naturalis historiae, Venice 1474, proemio p. [2]. McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 149–150, 308.

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For decades, Landino’s translation remained the most reliable source for many artists and literati until Antonio Brucioli (1487–1566), one of the literati of the Orti Oricelliari, was urged around 1540 to replace Landino’s translation with a more philologically scrupulous version. Brucioli’s corrected version of Landino appeared in Venice in 1543.15 He claimed to have added a few missing chapters and a new description of Pliny’s life. But he also copied Landino’s index to the chapters, expanding it to give more detailed headings. Brucioli’s starting point was, nevertheless, Landino’s version, and he even republished Landino’s preface to Ferdinand of Aragon. In Brucioli’s own preface to the Emperor Domitian, a contemporary of Pliny, he was concerned, like other vernacular translators of his time, with, on the one hand, the acceptance of vernacular versions for people of high social rank and, on the other hand, the expected readership this version would have: farmers and artists, and those who would spend their leisure time on these studies. This can be taken as further confirmation that Pliny’s text was highly popular among artists. To underline this requirement, Brucioli rhetorically asked the emperor to make his judgment on the translation’s utility, and not leave it to the judgment of the literati, who would not see the necessity for the unlearned to have access to such an important text by transforming it into a vulgar language. Brucioli certainly made this strong claim for the vernacular because the new literary circles had as their main aim to foster the vernacular as a scientific language (see Chapter 3). Apart from Pliny, Brucioli himself was also engaged in making the Bible (1539) and the work by mathematician and astronomer Giovanni Sacrobosco (1543) accessible to the vernacular public. From the mid-1470s, artists finally had firsthand access to Pliny’s important descriptions, thanks to Landino’s efforts. Beforehand, they almost exclusively approached Pliny in bits and pieces through other minds and texts when reading art theorists like Alberti, Ghiberti, and others. But firsthand access signified a fundamental break in the artists’ knowledge and references. And although Pliny also mentioned the artists’ intellectual education (see Chapter 1), he did so only by the example of the painters, despite dealing in principle with all the visual arts. Parrhasius in Ephesus was the first to introduce symmetry in painting (35.10), while Pamphilio was the first painter learned in every discipline, and especially arithmetic and geometry, which he declared fundamental for every painter. He was the teacher of Apelles and Melanthius. Landino underlined in his translation that art and especially drawing had now reached the level of the liberal arts and was as praiseworthy as they were (35.10). Not surprisingly, therefore, some ancient painters seem to have been active as writers of treatises, in which category Pliny mentions Antigones,

15

Pliny, Historia naturale . . . corretta per Antonio Brucioli, Venice 1543.

PLINY AS THE ANCIENT SOURCEBOOK

Senocrates, Zeuxis, and Apelles (35.10). Significantly for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, drawing was singled out as highly important for every artist, which should be learned by every boy (35.10). Its elevation to a liberal art status certainly helped for the opening of the artists’ Accademia del disegno in the sixteenth century too. On the whole, the Natural History gives a telling account of the art to be found somewhere in ancient Greece, and which topics, ornaments, constructions, etc. were used. In terms of topics, allegories, and mythologies, the text showed meaningfully how topics were often based on the very popular authors Ovid and Vergil, authors everyone had heard of who had gone through primary education. But Pliny offered a decisive step beyond the two ancient primary literary sources, as he placed these topics in context. In Pliny we are dealing with ancient mythology in combination with art, described with their visual evidence and in their full range. Furthermore, Pliny raises a lot of artistic questions concerning methods, techniques, materials, categories of art, and their topics, which would eventually become major concerns in Renaissance art. Indeed, these questions will find increasing resonance among artists after the vernacularization and publication of the text in 1476. The most important topics taken from Pliny were monochromatic painting, four-color painting, independent landscape painting, battle scenes, nude figures, colossal statues, public sculpture, the artists’ signature of their work (“faciebat”), artistic competitions, artists writing treatises, and the necessity for boys to learn how to draw. All of these topics became popular from the 1470s onward with the spread of Landino’s popular edition of Pliny. A quick summary is necessary to understand the spectrum of relevant information about which Renaissance artists could now be knowledgeable. Pliny gives much insight into material and techniques and their context of use and meaning, as well as in iconography. Book 33 speaks about different forms of metals – mostly gold, silver, copper, and brass – used to ornament both walls and people. Pliny informs his readers about how these metals were used in artwork and mythology. The reader learned about Midas’s ring, which made him and everyone who wore it invisible (33.1), and the use of wedding rings (33.1). Likewise, coins could be made out of gold and used as a valuable currency (33.3, 33.10). Pliny talks about the history of gold and that the Emperor Nero in Dalmatia was one of the first to use it (33.4). The first golden statue was placed in the temple of Anetide, and in the temple of Delphi was placed the first massive statue of gold (33.4). The first silver statues were taken to Rome in the triumphal march of Pompeus Magnus, with a silver statue of King Farnacus and golden and silver wagons (33.12). In the silver cave, one could find alabaster, which was called foaming stone for its appearance (pietra di candida schiuma) (33.6). He further describes monochromatic painting as painting with one color (33.7), and that mirrors apparently seem

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to multiply things, and thereby produce likenesses (33.9). Book 34 describes the qualities of stones (34.1 and 2), as well as copper and bronze, and presents some famous examples (34.8). The first copper statue was made for Ceres (34.4), and the famous sculptor Phidias produced a bronze statue of Minerva (34.8). Book 34 talks about the origins of figurative statues, and presents some examples of the highly praised categories of nude statues (34.8) and colossal statues (34.7, 36.5), and even of colossal nude statues (34.8). The reader would also learn about some praiseworthy ancient artworks (including statues of Mercury, Minerva, Amazonians, the drunkenness of Bacchus, the rape of Proserpina) and about famous artists (including Zenodoro, Phidias, Praxiteles) (34.8). Book 35 is dedicated to painting and pictures. It starts by saying that in antiquity, painting received less attention for a long time because of the dominance of marble colors and of “paintings” on stones (35.1). Portraits were also an important category (35.2). Pliny reports the famous story about the origin of paintings where the shadow of a man had been circumscribed by a line, which marked the beginning of monochromatic painting (35.3 and 5). Then painting discovered color and light, and Pliny narrates how the pigments were created and used as “colori in frescho” (35.6 and 7). A four-color scheme was also presented (35.10). Pliny described artistic competitions (35.9) and rivalries, such as that between Apelles and Protegenes concerning drawing (35.10). In Pliny we also find the topic of optical illusions, painting challenging perception in relation to the real world, for which Zeuxis became famous (35.10). While he judges this art as being very skilled, it had a negative connotation, as it was meant to deceive people. As an example of another influential painting technique, he introduces encaustic painting, that is, painting with wax (35.11). Throughout the text he mentions examples of mythological topics. The reader learned about Pan, god of the shepherds; Penelope; and Hercules as a child beating the dragons (35.9). Hercules occurred many times in different vestments, also in combination with Deianira. Important topics were also Venus or Venus Genitrix, Marsias, Ulysses, Bacchus, Semiramis, Bacchus and Adrianna, Apollo, Minerva, Diana and Mars, Iris, and Medea. He also mentioned battle scenes, the origin of landscape painting on walls (35), and how to represent women and nude figures (e.g., in 35.10). As famous painters he listed Phydias, Paneo (the brother of Phydias), Bularcho, Zeuxis, Apelles, Aristides, and Protogenes. With this introduction to painting, readers would have learned about some techniques and some important topics – but without the details required to render them visually. Readers learned to take major ancient painters as their model, Apelles above all, and that symmetry, geometry, and arithmetic were fundamental to the painter’s education.

PLINY AS THE ANCIENT SOURCEBOOK

Book 36 discusses the nature of stones and marbles as well as terracotta. Regarding stones, Pliny mentions the variety of stones (marmor luculleo, ophite, onyx, alabaster, obsidian, stones for mirrors), and shows relationships between the qualities of stones and their use within architecture (36.5). He talks about the combination of columns and statues (36.5), as well as about obelisks, labyrinths, buildings and theaters, pavements (36.25), and glass (36.25 and 26). Pliny also dedicates some parts of the chapter to public monuments (36.2), and again to nude and colossal statues appropriate for public display (36.5). Regarding the decoration of architecture and spaces, he mentions mythological figures like Satyrs with Venus and Bacchus, and sphinxes in front of buildings (36.5). Some examples of famous statues are mentioned: colossal statues or nude Venus statues, Venus washing herself, Daedalus, and a quadriga with Apollo and Diana sculpted from a monolith (36.5). His most highly praised work of art was the statue of the Laokoön in the palace of Titus, a work he preferred to every other sculpted and painted work (36.37). The final book 37 closes with gems. Almost every point in Pliny’s long list of the visual arts was already or would be taken up by Renaissance artists. Often repeated was Pliny’s famous narration on the origin of painting, which was invented by the Egyptians by drawing a line around the shadow. Well known is Alberti’s mention of this invention in his work De pictura (II,26). Monochromatic painting was mentioned in several chapters and must have appeared to the reader as an important variant of color painting. But as with color painting, Pliny himself hardly ever mentioned precisely where these were located. Starting with Giotto, they became popular for lower wall decorations, an arrangement many Renaissance painters would take up (e.g., the seven virtues and vices in the basement decoration of the Arena chapel in Padua). Giotto’s was an early example which set the stage, but as a proper fashion, monochromatic painting started only in parallel with the Pliny editions of the late 1470s and 1480s (see, for example, Pinturicchio in Rome). The four-color palette instead had an effect mainly on the painting theory to be found in Alberti, Leonardo, and Pacioli.16 It was applied less in practice, as complex scenes needed a broader palette. Nevertheless, scenes could sometimes be reduced to four colors, as for example in Pinturicchio’s Madonnas. As Pliny mentioned, independent landscape painting was introduced by the Greek painter Studius (35). He decorated walls with villas, gardens, woods, hills, rivers, harbor cities, and people entertaining themselves. Sarah Blake McHam has shown the importance of the landscape descriptions in Pliny and Vitruvius for the Renaissance artist. Landscapes were described with

16

McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 234–236.

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natural or anthropological “furniture,” and also often as settings for mythological scenes.17 At the end of the 1470s, landscape painting attained a different value within a scene, and actors became a part of a naturalistic setting. Around 1472, Francesco Rosselli painted the so-called Tavola Strozzi, a harbor view of Naples. Shortly after, Landino was commissioned to produce the vernacular translation of Pliny by Ferdinand of Aragon in Naples (1474). Other painters concentrated on the landscape and tried to give equal value to the landscape’s setting and figures, where a number of allegorical and mythological paintings may be mentioned (Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione). In Pliny, public sculpture was set in relation to politics as their visible statement. This is exactly what happens, for example, in Renaissance Florence, where heroic figures from the Old Testament were chosen to symbolize the Florentine populace confronting changing tyrannical leaders. McHam sees this effect in Donatello’s free-standing sculptures, like the statues of David and Judith and Holofernes in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.18 In 1495, this sculpture was taken from the Palazzo Medici and placed in the Piazza della Signoria beside the main door of the Palazzo Vecchio, where it symbolized the expulsion of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici from Florence, the elimination of tyranny, and the introduction of the Florentine republic under Girolamo Savonarola. In 1504 the Judith statue was replaced by Michelangelo’s David, likewise standing for the heroic resistance of a populace in confrontation with tyrannical leaders.19 One may also wonder if the later additions to Michelangelo’s David are also due to Pliny’s discussion about partially covering statues with silver and gold.20 Public monuments suddenly became more and more important. Some examples are Donatello’s equestrian monument of the Gattamelata (1445–1453) in Padua, and Verrocchio’s equestrian statue for Colleoni in Venice (1481–1488/96). Pliny was certainly the most important ancient source on colossal sculpture and its production (books 34, 36), which was then copied by many Renaissance art theorists, such as Alberti and Ghiberti.21 Colossal statues became fashionable only toward the end of the fifteenth century, with some failed attempts beforehand, like Agostino di

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McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 171–174. See on Pliny’s landscape paintings: Roger Ling, Studius and the beginnings of Roman landscape painting, The Journal of Roman Studies, 67:1, 1977, pp. 1–16. Important is the comparison with Vitruvius’s description of landscape painting (De architectura VII, 5, 2). While in Vitruvius’s text, villas, gardens, and seaside cities are missing, in Pliny, the missing points are the description of shrines, cattle, and shepherds. McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, New Haven 2013, pp. 236–237. Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, New Haven, CT 2002, p. 130; Loren Patridge, Art of Renaissance Florence 1400–1600, Berkeley 2009, p. 117. On the gold added later to the David, see Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, p. 130. McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 237–242.

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Duccio’s commission in 1464, and Antonio Rossellino in 1477. Successful examples are Michelangelo’s marble David (1501–1504), and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus (1525–1534). It seems possible that the quattrocento artists involved in writing artistic treatises might have had access to Pliny in the Latin, as their accounts differ slightly from Alberti’s. This should also be true for Ghiberti (I commentarii) and Filarete (Trattato di architettura, II). As we have seen, it was not unusual for learned artists to consult an authoritative version and pay attention to the sources. For subsequent artists writing treatises, like Leonardo (Libro di pittura, I, “Come fu la prima pittura”) and Vasari (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, 1550 and 1568), Landino’s translation would have been readily available. And in fact Leonardo possessed Landino’s edition, which appears in his library inventory,22 while also Raphael had been supposedly a reader of Landino’s vulgarization.23 Pliny’s Natural History was undoubtedly the most vast and influential literary source on ancient artistic topics and techniques, and it became the reference and model for many topics and techniques introduced during the Renaissance, mostly thanks to Landino’s vernacular translation. It was important for learning about techniques, and likewise for learning about topics for paintings and sculpture. But important topics were communicated as titles and not with a specific iconography. Therefore, the artist needed to learn in other ways about the story and iconographic details. Most importantly, however, he learned in Pliny which topics were important and worth presenting. THE ARTIST AS READER, TRANSLATOR, AND COMMENTATOR ON VITRUVIUS

Vitruvius’s architectural treatise was one of the most crucial texts for the visual arts because it touches on almost every point critical to Renaissance literati and artists: it was the only architectural treatise that survived from antiquity; it was an important authority and source for both artists and literati – artists themselves started making vernacular translations from the fifteenth century onward; it was commented on by artists and literati; and it was the only treatise from the visual arts that had been commented on during the Renaissance.

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Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, pp. 15–16; Antonazzo, Il volgarizzamento pliniano di Cristoforo Landino, pp. 49–50; Marco Versiero, La semantica del tempo (tra letteratura, storia e filosofia), in: Leonardo e i suoi libri. La biblioteca del genio universale, ed. Carlo Vecce, Florence 2019, pp. 43–49; Carmen C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, New Haven, CT 2019, vol. 2, p. 20. Simona Rinaldi and Claudio Falcucci, Raffaello lettore di Plinio e la tecnica del chiaroscuro, in: Metafore di un pontificato. Giulio II (1503–1513), ed. F. Cantatore et al., Roma nel Rinascimento, 44, Rome 2010, pp. 387–402; Antonazzo, Il volgarizzamento pliniano di Cristoforo Landino, pp. 49–50.

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Furthermore, it was the first and most authoritative reference for an intellectual training of the artist. Although Vitruvius’s treatise had been known through the centuries, it gained its greatest importance during the Renaissance. It became widely known among the literati during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who took Vitruvius’s architectural treatise and Pliny’s Natural History as their main sources when commenting on art and architecture, and on techniques. Ciapponi has shown the diffusion of Vitruvius’s treatise during the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. At first, it was due to Petrarch and his circles with an interest in classical buildings that the text started to be read again in literary circles. It was then promulgated through Poggio Bracciolini’s Vitruvius manuscript, which he found in the monastery of San Gallo in 1416. Thereafter, it was picked up in the fifteenth century by architects trained in letters.24 Second, the artists themselves also realized that this was an important text to know. With Alberti’s architectural treatise and his many indirect citations, the importance of Vitruvius’s text became obvious to everyone, although the text as such remained accessible to only a few. Vitruvius’s treatise therefore was among the first artistic texts translated into the vernacular. And it was the first artistic treatise ever to receive a commentary. In fact, these commentaries tried to compete with the classical tradition of philological commentary. As Pamela Long noticed, Vitruvius’s treatise was the most important text where the interests of literati and artisans joined together.25 But Vitruvius’s treatise should not be seen only as an architectural encyclopedia. It likewise provided much knowledge of ancient mythology, history, and geography, and was therefore also admired by the literati, who indirectly received some architectural background. Before we turn to the underappreciated innovations of artists translating and commenting on Vitruvius, a brief summary of early translation and publishing enterprises is necessary. Several artists and literati endeavored to make this text more widely known and accessible in terms of physical and intellectual access. The first printed version appeared in Rome in 1486, which was edited by the humanist, antiquarian, and professor of grammar at the Roman university, Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli (active ca. 1470–1490).26 He dedicated his edition 24

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On the diffusion of Vitruvius’s treatise, see Lucia A. Ciapponi, Il “De Architectura” di Vitruvio nel primo umanesimo: (dal ms. Bodl. Auct. F. 5–7), Italia medioevale e umanistica, 3, 1960, pp. 59–99, see esp. pp. 60, 98–99; Ingrid D. Rowland, From Vitruvian scholarship to Vitruvian practice, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 50, 2005, pp. 15–40, see p. 21; Stefan Schuler, Vitruv im Mittelalter. Die Rezeption von “De architectura” von der Antike bis in die frühe Neuzeit, Cologne 1999; Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Corvallis, OR 2011, p. 64. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, p. 62. L. Victruvii Pollionis ad Cesarem Augustum De architectura liber primus, Rome 1486–1487. See on Sulpicio and his edition: Francesco Pellati, Giovanni Sulpicio da Veroli, primo editore di

ARTIST AS READER, TRANSLATOR, & COMMENTATOR

to the Roman cardinal Raffaele Riario, and praised him for his building commissions in the city. Sulpizio belonged to the Roman literary academic circles of Raffaele Riario and Pomponio Leta, and exercised himself with commentaries on ancient authors (for example, on Quintilian). It has rightly been noted that Vitruvius and Alberti became available in print at almost the same date, and therefore in a certain sense appeared to be “contemporary” texts.27 Alberti had been edited one year earlier by the humanist and professor of (ancient) poetry at the Florentine university, Angelo Poliziano, who dedicated his edition to Lorenzo de’ Medici. These two editions may certainly be taken as rival projects. Poliziano wrote in his foreword about the intellectual skills of the almost contemporary author, who had unveiled ancient architecture and demonstrated it in an exemplary way. Wishing to raise Alberti to the same level as Vitruvius, he continued, Alberti’s work belonged to the literary patrimony and should be made publicly available. These were almost the same words Sulpizio had written one year before about Vitruvius. He had mentioned in his foreword that he was making available a relic of humanity for the use of scholars and the public. But Sulpizio explicitly mentioned that he wanted the learned to read this text. In an open collaboration and in a common effort, Vitruvius should appear in a thoroughly polished version in all its parts, underlining the importance of editing an ancient literary text in an exemplary way (f. 1v). Sulpizio was concerned to offer a corrected version of the text, which was circulating in manuscript in a variety of different versions (f. 1v).28 This first printed Vitruvius edition from Sulpizio therefore had as its main purpose to provide a cleaned-up Latin version that was accessible to everyone, and especially the literati. It was published without illustrations and commentary. After two lesser-known Latin editions (1496, 1497), the next important printed Vitruvius edition was published in Venice in 1511. It distinguished itself through a newly polished Latin version, which was enriched by an index of chapters and a plenitude of illustrations. This edition was published by Fra

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Vitruvio, in: Atti del II congresso nazionale di studi romani, Rome 1931, vol. 3, pp. 382–386; Laura Marcucci, Giovanni Sulpicio e la prima edizione del De architettura di Vitruvio, Studi e documenti di architettura, 8, 1978, pp. 185–195; Pier Nicola Pagliara, Vitruvio da testo a canone, in: Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis, Torino 1986, vol. 3, pp. 7–88, see pp. 32–33; Rowland, From Vitruvian scholarship to Vitruvian practice, 19–20, 29–31; Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, pp. 81–83. On this, see Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture, Cambridge 1999, pp. 70–71. On other Latin translation of ancient texts available to architects, see p. 53. Vitruvius, L. Victruvii Pollionis ad Cesarem Augustum De architectura liber primus, between 1486 and 1487, f. 1v. On the correction of this version, see also Rowland, who noticed that Sulpizio stayed with the medieval version for its terminology and style, but he did not hesitate to change something he did not know enough about (Rowland, From Vitruvian scholarship to Vitruvian practice, p. 19).

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Giovanni Giocondo (ca. 1433–1515), who qualified in both categories: as a teacher of Latin and Greek and as an architect. This edition was enriched with a Latin preface and 136 xylographs.29 Being an architect himself, Fra Giocondo could easily render into pictures what Vitruvius was describing. As a grammarian and architect, he did not simply copy what he found in medieval manuscripts – a fault that Sulpizio was accused of, despite his proclaimed efforts – but Fra Giocondo even endeavored to find the appropriate terminology for architectural techniques.30 Published toward the end of Fra Giocondo’s life, this Vitruvius edition was to become the standard Latin version. For the friar it stood at the end of a long engagement with Vitruvius, whom he approached through a variety of channels. Just as important as this textual edition was his public engagement with Vitruvius. It appears that, around 1495 in Paris, Fra Giocondo was the first person to lecture both publicly and privately on architecture, taking Vitruvius as his basis. This would probably have been one of the first lectures on art and architecture that ever took place (see Appendix). Probably becoming curious through the treatises of Alberti and Filarete, architects realized that they were missing out on an important source. They were deterred from actually reading Vitruvius themselves, since the Latin Vitruvius editions were accessible to only a few. Some early attempts in the fifteenth century testify to the efforts taken to translate this text. It should also be said that Vitruvius’s Latin was not on the level of ancient Latin poetry, and was therefore more technical and less complicated than the style of other famous ancient authors. Lorenzo Ghiberti was the first person to offer a partial translation of Vitruvius in his Commentarii, based on some prefaces and chapters. Ghiberti’s translation deliberately had a practical orientation. It was a synchronizing summary translation that did not pay attention to philological correctness and questions of style. Furthermore, Ghiberti rendered only the parts he thought were most important, including the learning that an architect was required to possess, which Ghiberti reinterpreted for the sculptor.31

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Pagliara, Vitruvio da testo a canone, pp. 34–35; Lucia A. Ciapponi, Fra Giocondo da Verona and his edition of Vitruvius, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 47, 1984, pp. 72–90; Giorgio Bacci, Frontespizi, immagini e parole in alcune edizioni Vitruviane del Cinquecento: Legami semantici tra testo scritto e illustrazione, in: Saggi di letteratura architettonica da Vitruvio a Winckelmann, ed. Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Florence 2009, pp. 1–28, see pp. 6–7; Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, pp. 83–85. On the question of language and style, see Rowland, From Vitruvian scholarship to Vitruvian practice, pp. 19–20, 29. Later, his grandson Buonaccorso Ghiberti would pick up on these translations in his Zibaldone. On Lorenzo and Bonaccorso Ghiberti’s translations and the dependency of the latter, see Giustina Scaglia, A translation of Vitruvius and copies of late antique drawings in Buonaccorso Ghiberti’s Zibaldone, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 69, 1979, pp. 1–30.

ARTIST AS READER, TRANSLATOR, & COMMENTATOR

Thereafter, the multitalented architect, engineer, painter, and sculptor, Francesco di Giorgio from Siena, appears to be the first translator who provided an almost integral translation of Vitruvius’s treatise into the vernacular.32 As Francesco di Giorgio mentioned himself in the introduction, as an adult he received additional Latin and Greek training at the Montefeltro court in Urbino. This translating endeavor had a considerable influence on his own architectural treatise composed at the Urbino court, which is perceptible in the two versions of his treatise: the first dates to the time of his translating efforts, and the second took place soon after (ca. 1475–1492). In the end likewise for his Vitruvius translation, he needed to polish his efforts and provided two versions.33 Francesco di Giorgio’s translation was almost complete, omitting only a few parts: astonishingly, these included the oft-cited education of the architect in the liberal arts (and in the planets and astrology), since for him building methods appeared to be more important.34 Confronted with Ghiberti’s first efforts, Francesco di Giorgio had a much better knowledge of Latin and of technical details, which rendered his translation more useful and easier to read, although he certainly did not demonstrate humanistic Latin skills. He often had to adjust words and meanings, and sometimes paraphrased them rather than translating them. But his experience in the field and his knowledge of the respective vocabularies allowed him to deal directly with the technical matters presented in the book.35 Several researchers have questioned the level of Francesco di Giorgio’s ability with Latin. Mussini characterizes his humanistic education and Latin training as quite rudimentary, that is, sufficient to deal with easy medieval Latin texts. Therefore, he would often leave words in Latin, as he was not capable of translating them correctly.36 Although Maltese and Fiore suppose that he had considerable help from several humanists for his translation, for which one clear sign would be the better understanding of Vitruvius in his second version of the treatise in comparison with the first – a fact which becomes understandable with more Latin training in between – they appropriately suggest that the Latinization of the phrase

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Corrado Maltese (ed.), Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, 2 vols., Milan 1967; Giustina Scaglia, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano” di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Florence 1985. The translation is inserted between Francesco di Giorgio’s treatises in the manuscript Magliabechiano II.I.141 (cc. 5r–99r, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze). On this, see Francesco Paolo Fiore, La traduzione da Vitruvio di Francesco di Giorgio: nota ad una parziale trascrizione, Architettura, 1, 1985, pp. 7–30; Scaglia, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano” di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, pp. 16–25, 30–36, 45–55; Pagliara, Vitruvio da testo a canone, pp. 25–26; Massimo Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio: Le traduzioni del De architectura nei codici Zichy, Spencer 129 e Magliabechiano II.I.141, Florence 2003. Scaglia, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano” di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, p. 47. Scaglia, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano” di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, pp. 37–38. Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio, vol. 1, pp. viii–ix.

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structure was probably due to a desire to adhere to standard humanistic practice.37 Scaglia rightly rejects the hypothesis that the architect was helped by literati in his translation, since he probably had enough knowledge of Latin on his own. Scalgia, however, does not exclude some occasional help by Fra Giovanni Giocondo. Even the famous mathematician Luca Pacioli appears to have found Francesco di Giorgio’s translation good enough to copy it occasionally in his own writings.38 Francesco di Giorgio’s writing style was certainly not comparable to a humanist’s, and he also used the merchants’ script, both in forming the characters and in spelling the words.39 This seems likely to support Mussini’s thesis, where Francesco di Giorgio, while in Siena, had first attended a Latin grammar school and then the abacus school, probably under Pietro dell’Abaco (Pietro Checchi), who was active in those years.40 Apart from Vitruvius, with whom he opens the treatise, he seems also to have consulted other ancient authors like Vegetius (on military issues), Frontius (on water), Socrates, Aristotle (Physics/Metaphysics), Thomas Aquinas, Marco Greco (on fire), and Ptolemy (on mathematics and geography).41 But there are also indirect citations from Plato. It therefore seems that Francesco di Giorgio received a solid Latin and literary education as an adult at the court in Urbino, which might have helped him to proceed with the Vitruvius translation mostly without specific help. More and more artists and architects felt the need to engage with Vitruvius, especially those who were developing their styles on ancient models. The classical style reached a new level with the turn of the sixteenth century, and it was increasingly important to know more about authenticity for both practical and archaeological interests. This was true for Raphael, for example, who was one of the Pope’s favorite painters and architects. He had a second workshop next to his painting workshop, where he conducted architectural and archaeological studies (probably around 1516). Due to Raphael’s archaeological 37

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Maltese (ed.), Francesco di Giorgio Martini, pp. xxx–xxxii; Fiore, La traduzione da Vitruvio di Francesco di Giorgio, p. 9. See Scaglia, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano” di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, pp. 45–55. Fiore, La traduzione da Vitruvio di Francesco di Giorgio, p. 10; Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio, vol. 1, p. 18. Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio, vol. 1, p. 18. Biffi and Long suppose that Francesco di Giorgio was an autodidact in Latin (Marco Biffi, Introduction, in: La traduzione del De Architectura di Vitruvio: Dal ms. II.I.141 della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Pisa 2002, p. lxiv; Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, p. 80). For example: Trattato di architettura di Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ed. Luigi Firpo and Pietro C. Mariani, Florence 1979, p. 3 (chapter 1), p. 4 (chapter 6), p. 33 (chapter 57), p. 78 (chapter 198). See also Francesco Paolo Fiore, The Trattati on architecture by Francesco di Giorgio, in: Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks, New Haven, CT 1998, pp. 66–85, see p. 67; Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 91–92.

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interests, Vitruvius became important to him. And as one of the most important papal architects, he had tasks to deal with where a significant knowledge of classical buildings was indispensable.42 As Raphael’s knowledge of Latin was not sufficient for complex and long ancient literary texts, he commissioned his humanist friend Fabio Calvo (ca. 1440–1527) to provide him with a translation of Vitruvius. The publisher Angelo Colocci planned to print Calvo’s translation together with drawings by Raphael, but the death of the latter stopped this project, which thereafter survived only in a few manuscript copies, although it was planned as a printed book for Leo X, as Rowland suggests. Possible dates for the translation are between 1514 and 1520, and there is common agreement that Calvo took as his Latin source the edition provided by Fra Giocondo, who was working as a consultant with Raphael in the Fabbrica di S. Pietro on the rebuilding of the new Saint Peter.43 Accessibility to Vitruvius’s treatise was not only determined by the question of language. Once the hurdles of translating the Latin text into the vernacular were overcome, the text itself proposed many questions of meaning and interpretation. Early attempts to interpret Vitruvius had been made by Alberti, who used the ancient source widely in his architectural treatise (ca. 1450), without paying much attention to acknowledging his source. But Alberti used fragments from Vitruvius exclusively to pursue his own concepts. He did not provide a commentary on the original source. Another humanist, Giorgio Valla, seems to have worked in 1492 on a partial commentary on Vitruvius, especially explaining the mathematics, but this text is currently lost.44 The first integral commentary produced in the standard form of commenting on ancient, classical literature was delivered at the beginning of the

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Vincenzo Fontana, Raffaello e Vitruvio, in: Vitruvio e Raffaello. Il “De architectura” di Vitruvio nella traduzione inedita di Fabio Calvo Ravennate, ed. Vincenzo Fontana and Paolo Morachiello, Rome 1975, pp. 25–44, see pp. 32–33. The text survived as manuscript copies of the original at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in München (Cod. It. 37 + 37a). See Paolo Morachiello, Il manoscritto: note descrittive, in: Vitruvio e Raffaello, ed. Vincenzo Fontana and Paolo Morachiello, Rome 1975, pp. 9–14; Fontana, Raffaello e Vitruvio, pp. 25–44; Philip J. Jacks, The simulacrum of Fabio Calvo: A view of Roman architecture all’antica in 1527, Art Bulletin, 72, 1990, pp. 453–481; Gabriele Morolli, Raffaello e Vitruvio: Un’ ultima amnesia della “fortuna,” Quaderni di storia dell’architettura e restauro, 6–7, 1991–92 (1992), pp. 30–50; Ingrid Rowland, Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the genesis of the architectural orders, Art Bulletin, 76:1, 1994, pp. 81–104; Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Per l’edizione del Vitruvio di Fabio Calvo per Raffaello, in: Saggi di letteratura architettonica da Vitruvio a Winckelmann, ed. Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Florence 2009, pp. 191–206; Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Glosse, ubterpolazioni e correzioni nel Vitruvio tradotto da Fabio Calvo (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. It. 37): Tra lavoro d’équipe e autografi di Raffaello, Saggi di letteratura architettonica, 3, 2010, pp. 177–196; Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Quale Vitruvio?: Il “De architectura” all’inizio del XVI secolo alla luce della traduzione per Raffaello di Fabio Calvo, Atti e studi/Accademia Raffaello, 2. ser. 2012/2013 (2014), pp. 9–18. Pagliara, Vitruvio da testo a canone, p. 23.

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sixteenth century by an architect: Cesare Cesariano. This architect had at his disposal the necessary higher education to compete with the literati in their very own material in commenting on the classics, which then promptly aroused reactions. Cesariano’s personality and his intellectual efforts have so far been underestimated and require a new evaluation. His contributions to vernacular learning were outstanding in his time. Cesariano (1475–1543) was a Lombard painter and architect. He probably received most of his professional training as a painter and architect under Bramante, who was a painter and architect himself. This must have happened sometime around 1490, and his master’s influence was certainly noteworthy.45 In fact, his teacher figured in Cesariano’s commentary whenever he needed a good contemporary example. Later in 1493, Cesariano became a painting collaborator under Matteo De Fedeli in Milan.46 Sometime between 1490 and 1496 (following Agosti) or 1493 and 1499 (following Coccia), he stayed in Ferrara and worked for Ercole I on theater scenes.47 Around 1512 he moved to Milan and worked as an architect (S. Maria presso S. Celso, cathedral), while Bramante and Francesco di Giorgio were also in town.48 It seems that he composed most of his Vitruvius translation and commentary while he was in Milan. In 1521 Gottardo da Ponte edited and published Cesariano’s translation of Vitruvius.49 Cesariano was one of the few artists to have gained a substantial Latin education both in his youth and later on. Cesariano himself explains his family background and education at the beginning of book 6 of his Vitruvius commentary (ff. 91r–v). He described his father and other members of his family as being well studied in the humanities and law. His father, a lawyer, had been at court for Galeazzo Maria Sforza. As Cesariano explained, he received his first Latin education already at the age of four and a half from his father, who guided him first through the traditional and well-known grammar by Donatus, the final stage for advanced beginners in Latin (Ars grammatica, printed as Rudimenta grammatices, Milano 1480). Although 45

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Alessandro Rovetta, Cesariano, Bramante e gli studi vitruviani nell’età di Ludovico il Moro, in: Bramante milanese e l’architettura del Rinascimento lombardo, ed. Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Venice 2002, pp. 83–98; Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, p. 424; Maurizio Coccia, Cesare Cesariano: Ricomposizione di un problema critico, Ariccia 2015, pp. 27–28, 110–115. Alessandro Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, in: Cesare Cesarino e il classicismo di primo Cinquecento, ed. Maria Luisa Gatti Perer, Milan 1996, pp. 247–308, see p. 253. Barbara Agosti, Cesare Cesariano. Volgarizzamento dei libri IX (capitoli 7 e 8) e di X di Vitruvio, De Architectura, secondo il manoscritto 9/2790 Secciòn de Cortes della Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, 1996, pp. 1–13, see p. 4; Coccia, Cesare Cesariano, pp. 32, 41. Coccia, Cesare Cesariano, pp. 43–45. Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura libri dece traducti de latini in vulgare affigurati, Como 1521.

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Cesariano did not explain what came after Donatus, his father must have been concerned about his education for around ten years and one may suppose that the boy became familiar with the classical Latin text books from grammar and advanced reading education. Cesariano continues: after the early death of his father, he decided at age of fifteen to leave home and go to the ducal court in Milan, now supported by the nobleman Andrea de Vicomercato, who was his father’s successor. But Cesariano did not stay very long, since his benefactor’s allowances were not generous enough. He therefore traveled around, visited several places, and exercised himself as a painter and an architect. His travels took him to Ferrara for a brief time (probably for less than a year), where he visited the (highly prestigious) local gymnasium and learned about philosophy, mathematics, cosmography, and other sciences, as well as Latin and Greek. At sixteen, he went on and sometime later entered the service of Duke Massimiliano Sforza as an architect. He then explained how he met his new benefactor, Luigi Pirovani, a man he admired and called his second father, who evidently recognized his talents and would go on to commission the Vitruvius translation. Cesariano thereafter contradicts what Pirovani himself stated in the foreword of the edition: Cesariano claimed to have translated and commented on all ten books of Vitruvius, and to have provided all the illustrations. And he claimed explicitly to have done all of this work with minimal help from others, as he himself possessed the necessary knowledge. He hoped that this statement would not be changed in the printing, which was followed by a xylograph on Audacia and Ignorance. This is Cesariano’s own account of his curriculum (ff. 91r–v).50 The years of composition seem to concentrate in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Following Coccia, Cesariano composed the translation and commentary over the arc of two decades, which means from around 1500 to 1520,51 but Rovetta sees the translation as based on the printed Latin edition provided by Fra Giocondo in 1511, which should therefore coincide with the starting date of Cesariano’s endeavors. The years between 1513 and 1515 were probably Cesariano’s most intensive period. Cesariano does not seem to have known – or, rather, did not consult – Francesco di Giorgio’s earlier efforts to translate Vitruvius in the 1470s, or Fabio Calvo’s contemporary translation from around 1514, which both remained manuscript versions.52 Cesariano’s benefactors were the nobleman Luigi Pirovano, whose hobby was mathematics, and Agostino Gallo. At Pirovano’s wish, Cesariano appears to have been 50

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On Cesariano’s youth and education, see Sergio Gatti, Nuovi documenti sull’ambiente familiare e la prima educazione di Cesare Cesariano, Arte Lombarda, 86–87, 1988, pp. 187–194. Coccia, Cesare Cesariano, pp. 129–130. Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, pp. 255–264.

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helped by the humanists Benedetto Giovio and Bono Mauro. Their part is difficult to establish, but there is consensus that they might have added the commentary to the last one and a half chapters, and the table in front.53 Due to trying circumstances, Cesariano was not able to oversee the last parts: the completion of the manuscript and the printing process. At the beginning of the book, in a Latin dedication to Pope Leo X written by the book’s commissioner Pirovani, the didactic approach undertaken is explained as well as the intended readership: this edition was meant as a complete translation, which also contained additional explanations for the less equipped reader plus a plenitude of pictures, which were unique to this volume and should prove to be helpful for the purposes of understanding and study. The explicit of the book underlines the intended audience: “summi docti studiosi del Architoctonica disciplina.” Pirovani praised the effort to present an illustrated edition, which would help with the study of Vitruvius’s work, while a new translation into the vernacular and a revised and cleaned-up text would help with its reading. In another oration to the Duke of Milan, Pirovano contradicts Cesariano’s claims, explaining that several learned men had provided the vernacular translation, and the historical and philological commentary (f. [8] v). He adds that Mauro Bergomense (Bono Mauro) had provided the translation and revision of the text, at least of the final chapters. The best painters had made drawings for the illustrations, and the no less talented xylographers had delivered the woodcuts (f. [8] r). Indeed, many woodcuts on geometrical and ornamental forms, ground plans, buildings, building details and ornaments, the setup of walls, columns, and palaces provide a direct visual explanation of the text. There are some additional woodcuts that explain the allegorical arrangement of heaven and earth. This edition is accompanied by some characteristic additions to classical philological commenting that were evidently provided by Bono Mauro. Preceding the body of the text, there is a ten-page table with relevant vocabulary in alphabetical order with references to the respective page numbers within the text. Bono Mauro introduces the vocabulary by saying that this will become extremely useful for those who want to study the text (f. [8] v). This keyword vocabulary should be seen as a valuable reading aid, enabling one to quickly find relevant passages in the text. What Mauro provided here is basically an alphabetical keyword list (like an index), but a few entries also received brief explanations. The vocabulary consists of technical, geographical, and astrological terms, the names of ancient personalities, and also of mythology. Some Greek vocabulary may also be found. On the whole, the vocabulary list is similar in choice of subjects to what would have 53

Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, pp. 247–249; Coccia, Cesare Cesariano, pp. 52–54.

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been provided and explained in a philological class reading ancient authors in a Latin school and at university. Then follows a list of chapter titles and subchapters, as a second guide to relevant passages in the book. The text itself embodies the layout of traditional classical commentaries from the early Renaissance. The original translated text appears in segmented areas, surrounded by the commentary, and accompanied by 119 woodcut illustrations. Cesariano’s translation includes a large number of untranslated citations in Latin from ancient authors, which means that the reader was expected nonetheless to have some Latin knowledge. Furthermore, in his translation, Cesariano leaves technical vocabulary as close to the Latin original as possible. As we have seen, Francesco di Giorgio made the same linguistical choices, which were common in the translation business. Some researchers have seen here the deliberate choice of an authoritative language rather than a lack of ability or a wish for modernization.54 This indeed seems plausible, and even more authoritative translators like Cristoforo Landino use the same approach of leaving relevant terms in Latin (see Chapter 3). Several authors have tried to track down the classical references that Cesariano used in his commentary for his philological explanations. Rovetta sees influences from Pliny’s Natural History, a variety of texts by Aristotle (Politics, Physics, Meteorology, De coelo, etc.), and Euclid’s Elements as his most important references. In addition, there are Servius’s commentary on Vergil, Suetonius as commented by Filippo Beroaldo, Varro (De lingua Latina), Festus (De verborum significatu), Nonius (De compendiosa doctrina), Isidore of Seville (Etimologie), Giovanni Balbi (Catholicon), Ambrogio Calepino (Dictionarium), Averroes, Themistius, and many more. Rovetta also studied Cesariano’s comparative use of sources, where the architect, for example, uses several versions of Vitruvius and Pliny to make sure he got the authentic meaning.55 As for Pliny, the only edition we can establish with certainty is the Parma 1480 edition of the well-known Bolognese university teacher, Filippo Beroaldo.56 For Fane-Saunders, apart from authors like Theophrastus and Aristotle, Pliny needs to be seen as a major source in Cesariano’s knowledge of antiquity, together with Vitruvius and the study of the ancient buildings themselves, which must have occurred in Rome during the years 1507–1508. Fane-Saunders also points to personal contacts Cesariano may have had with Leonardo, who was likewise

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On Cesariano’s technical vocabulary and its translation, see Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, p. 267. Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, pp. 268–271, 282–287. Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, p. 283; Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, p. 428.

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interested in Pliny (and Vitruvius),57 and Ermolao Barbaro, the author of a short treatise and one of the best-known Pliny editions, who stayed in Milan at the end of the 1480s.58 Rovetta and Fane-Saunders, for example, point to the fact that Cesariano’s knowledge of the word “colossus” did not derive from Pliny directly, but from Niccolò Perotti’s encyclopedic Cornucopia, which itself relied on Plinian vocabulary.59 He was likewise acquainted, as Cesariano himself said, with Demetrius, identified by Fane-Saunders as Demetrios Chalcondylas, a Greek humanist active in Milan, who informed him about ancient Greek architecture.60 If we were to suppose a primary authorship in this commentary for Cesariano himself with a little help from his humanist companions at the end, this would speak well for the level of the architect’s humanist education that went well beyond the Latin studies of his youth, where he probably attained a good reading level and some fundamentals in Latin literature. His stay at Guarino’s humanist school in Ferrara (see above and Chapter 2) must have enriched him with secondary Latin philological and scientific training, which prepared him to understand and comment on classical literature and philosophical ideas. Afterward, the discussions at the court of Milan might also have been helpful. Cesariano was himself able to consult a range of demanding literature, and he recommends for his fellow artists that, apart from Vitruvius and Pliny, they should also read Philostratus to learn more about antiquity.61 This is one of the most outstanding recommendations by Cesariano, which would have made any knowledge on ancient art and its mythology complete, and is almost unrivaled compared with advice by the literati. Cesariano shows himself as one of the very rare persons in the first half of the sixteenth century, and one of the first in the Renaissance overall, to engage with Philostratus’s most useful source on ancient art, called Imagines, soon after the translation into Latin and publication in 1517. He possessed not only an outstanding humanist education, but also the most complete education in terms of art theory and literature. It is, therefore, not surprising that Cesariano discussed himself extensively in his commentary concerning Vitruvius’s suggestions for the comprehensive education required of an architect. This also gave him an occasion to 57

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Leonardo possessed a Vitruvius edition since at least 1499–1500 (D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria, p. 43). Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory. Alessandro Rovetta, Vitruvius – De architectura, Libri II–IV: I materiali, i tempi, gli ordini, ed. A. Rovetta, Milan 2002, p. 221, note 225; Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, p. 428. Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, p. 440. Cesarino, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura libri dece traducti de latini in vulgare affigurati, f. XLVIIIv. See also Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, p. 429.

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demonstrate his own all-around training, which certainly becomes more plausible through his explanations. Cesariano himself seems in fact to personify Vitruvius’s and his own requirements for the artist’s educational model. In particular, Vitruvius’s suggestion to study literature and philosophy must have fallen on fertile ground in Cesariano’s mind, as his commentary will show, since the commentary itself is the best proof of his thorough classical learning. Furthermore, Cesariano was well aware of the discussion on the liberal versus the visual arts, which had been conducted so vibrantly in both antiquity and the Renaissance (see Chapter 1). Taking up the topical discussion, Cesariano starts by acknowledging that architecture is both an institution and a science, referring to Aristotle’s and Averroes’s system of the sciences, where architecture took part and had its intellectual home. Referring to the Metaphysics, Aristotle had said that all men desire to create things after nature. Human beings live with reason and art, but many people think that this art would be created independently from nature, and as a supplement to it. This explains why the knowledge of many disciplines is desirable for the visual arts, as well as the knowledge of materials and instruments. In general, however, art follows nature, as established in Aristotle’s Poetics. But like the literati, the architect should also consult books for inspiration (f. 2v). Therefore, the wisdom of the architect was based on two things: knowledge of the sciences and experience based on practice. Here Cesariano goes beyond Aristotle, who had concentrated on the wisdom in the practical arts derived from skills. By contrast, Cesariano followed Thomas Aquinas’s idea of the wise architect and his three forms of knowledge: experience, skills, and sciences (see Chapter 1). Cesariano added literature to the category of the sciences, and he followed Vitruvius in saying that among all of the sciences, literature was one of the most important to consult. Therefore, Cesariano urged the architect to be knowledgeable in literature (“litterato”), and he explained that, in the end, this path would open up the other sciences as well, and that no science was accessible to anyone who was not a literato and well read. The three most important studies for the architect would, therefore, be the knowledge of reading, writing, and drawing. This was indeed what the ancient Greeks had required as an education for every boy, and would be the first step toward the liberal arts (ff. 3r–v).62 Cesariano then followed Vitruvius’s list of individual sciences to be learned, and explained them one by one, following Vitruvius’s sequence. Starting with geometry and optics, Cesariano immediately connects them to the graphic sciences and their necessity for painters. The same goes for optics, which he connects with the colors, light, and shadows that a painter would use. In architecture, optics were necessary to render luminous certain 62

On Cesarino’s explanation of the literary architect, see also Rovetta, Note introduttive all’edizione moderna del primo libro del Vitruvio di Cesare Cesarino, pp. 302–303.

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parts of a building, which had to be calculated by the architect, as, for example, Donato Bramante had done in San Satyro in Milan. Geometry and optics were thus part of the mathematical sciences and part of the liberal sciences (ff. 3v, 4v). Next, the knowledge of history would be of great importance to architects. Those who had this knowledge would be able to foresee and anticipate events, which was certainly of great utility in times of both peace and of war. Later on, he refers to history also when talking about architectural decoration, where history could help the architect to find the proper forms for columns, capitals, and architectural ornaments. Here Vitruvius had inserted the example of the caryatids, and both Vitruvius and Cesariano said that architects should not use them merely as an architectural ornament, but should know their story and not use them ignorantly: Caryatids were women in ancient Greece who collaborated with the Persian invaders, and were therefore punished by being transformed into columns (ff. 3v–4r).63 The next topic is philosophy, which architects should follow in the lessons given by great philosophers (confirming the importance of oral lessons) (f. 3v). Coming to arithmetic, Cesariano mentions Luca Pacioli as a contemporary reference, who had explained Euclid in an exemplary way (f. 5r). Cesariano finishes the chapter on the education of the architect by pointing out once again how important all the sciences of the trivium and quadrivium are: certainly, poetry, oratory, and dialectics, but also the mathematical sciences were to be considered of the utmost importance, including arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology. These were all perfected by the sacral science, theology (ff. 11v–12r). Cesariano also commented on Vitruvius’s philosophical argument on the origin of education, which was built on a combination of knowledge: following Vitruvius and Cesariano, and in line with Aristotle’s Ethics, the soul is made of five possibilities (habitus), which are art, science, intellect, wisdom, and prudence (f. 9r). Then Cesariano follows up with Vitruvius’s suggestion to start this teaching as early as possible and writes that it would be useful to inscribe this knowledge and all of these sciences in the memory of young boys, in order to erect in them a temple of wisdom during their lifetime, since all of the sciences are connected. Next follows the example of an architectural temple of wisdom, where he took up Vitruvius’s example of the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, who had written about architecture. This is where Vitruvius would have gotten this idea. And while Minerva figured as the ancient representative of architecture, painting and sculpture, by contrast, were represented by Apelles and Polycletus, as both Vitruvius and Cesariano explained (ff. 9r–v, 11v–12r).

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On the story of the Caryatides, see also Rowland, From Vitruvian scholarship to Vitruvian practice, p. 28.

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Although Cesariano’s appears to be the first printed commentary on the history of art and architecture, he already had a substantial variety of Renaissance commentaries to take as models. By the early sixteenth century, there were already numerous commentaries on ancient authors provided mainly by university professors as a result of their lectures. Even in the fifteenth century, there were, for example, commentaries on Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Quintilian, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Valerius Maximus, and others, and thus on texts that fell under the categories of poetry and history (see Chapter 3). But Cesariano’s commentary opened up new directions for the visual arts, since it was undertaken by an artisan who now commented like a literary erudito on classical artistic literature. And as a literato would have done, he first of all concentrates on the material surrounding Vitruvius’s architectural explanations, discussing arguments belonging to philosophy, literature, and mythology. Cesariano’s version of Vitruvius may be regarded as one of the first and most important humanist publications in architecture (and art history). Every subsequent sixteenth-century commentator on Vitruvius, both literati and architects, would pick up on his explanations. Cesariano’s description of ancient architecture following Pliny’s example and mixing them with contemporary Lombard architecture has been seen by some researchers as a probable incapacity for or lack of knowledge regarding rendering ancient architecture convincingly, when he described ancient temples as looking like contemporary churches or chapels (see, for example, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus).64 What Cesariano attempted to do should not be seen as a lack of ancient knowledge or as an alignment of Renaissance Milan with ancient Rome. Rather, he followed the contemporary commentary tradition. In the written commentary tradition, as provided, for example, by university lecturers or humanists, ancient knowledge was perceived through the contemporary eye and mind, giving them a Christianized and moralized sense (see Chapter 3). But also the approach of the historians and literary artists increasingly combined ancient and modern traditions, showing that there are several possibilities of commenting and interpretation. Cesariano’s approach was both a written and a visual/practical interpretation, similar to the visual commentaries of the painters. A similar, yet preceding step of confrontation with ancient architecture in contemporary Renaissance Italy can be interpreted as emulation. Also, Filarete is one of the artistic writers who will offer similar solutions for his projects by presenting ancient models in modern vestment, which shall make them even more desirable. Artists and patrons in the Renaissance hardly ever thought to copy ancient art outright, but rather they tried to build upon it, searching for convincing contemporary

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Fane-Saunders, Pliny the Elder and cinquecento architectural theory, pp. 438, 443.

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solutions.65 Cesariano took all of this into account. He was not only the first artist to write a commentary on art, but he is also the first to experiment with how to comment on classical art in a modern sense. On the one hand, Cesariano competed with Vitruvius in being an eloquent architectural writer, highly learned and skillful about writing on art. But he also competed, on the other hand, with the contemporary philological commentary tradition because he was able to evaluate and discuss authoritative sources and to include the ongoing discussions comparing the liberal to the manual arts. It took only three years until a highly competitive edition was published by a literato. Francesco Lucio Durantino was a literato active in the duchy of Urbino under Francesco Maria I della Rovere and also in Venice, where he published several literary and political works. Published in 1524, his translation of Vitruvius seems to be his only work connected to the visual arts, although he must have known his reading public very well because he chose a deliberately didactic approach. He developed several points that Cesariano had initiated, although the latter author preferred to leave out the commentary. Lucio wanted to surpass his predecessors, and proudly trumpeted his improvements already in the title: he claimed to have used as a source the correct version of all the circulating Vitruvius texts and to have enriched the text with an alphabetic table, with illustrations located in their appropriate places.66 Even more than in Cesariano’s version, it is now evident in every one of Lucio’s efforts that he intended to bring Vitruvius to the common people, while explaining Vitruvius’s merits and the relevance of the content. His approach becomes clear already in the preface: here we have only one preface addressing the reader himself, and it was written in the vernacular.67 The content of the preface is not dissimilar to comparable introductions for the Latin editions, although it seems that he wanted to convert this erudite style for vernacular understanding. Lucio first framed the importance of the text, and presented Vitruvius among the most important scientists of antiquity, and on a comparable scale to famous ancient literary figures and philosophers. Vitruvius, the architect and artisan, was presented, therefore, as eloquent, an erudito with perfected literary skills, the first among ancient sages. After praising ancient authors who were excellent in every science, like Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and those excellent in the imitating sciences, like poets and orators, as Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Sallust, Tibullus, Cicero, and others, Lucio stated that Vitruvius would deservedly merit a place among these, for both his doctrine 65

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On the emulating approach of Renaissance artists, see Christof Thoenes and Hubertus Günther, Gli ordini architettonici: Rinascità o invenzione?, in: Roma e l’antico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento, ed. Marcello Fagiolo, Rome 1985, pp. 261–310. L. Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura traducto di Latino in Vulgare, Venice 1524. The preface is mentioned also in Bacci, Frontespizi, immagini e parole in alcune edizioni Vitruviane del Cinquecento, pp. 7–8.

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and his elegance. Therefore, the reader was informed that architecture was a science on a similar level with poetry and science, and that it was useful for everyone to learn, including both erudite and more common people (ff. AA ii–r). Lucio’s effort in this laudatory preface to elevate architecture into the range of the sciences was immense, since he wanted to please the architects as much as possible. The world between literati and artisans seemed to be turned around. His effort was comparable to praises that the literati made when they addressed their patrons. This edition, however, had no other addressee or imagined patron than the entire guild of architects. The most important differences from Cesariano’s edition concern two points: the missing commentary, which was substituted by an extremely elaborate vocabulary list. With thirty-seven pages listing important vocabulary from the text in alphabetical order (Tabula de li vocabuli expositi di M. L. Vitruvio di architectura secondo lordine alphabetico), it provided an explanation for every entry listed. Among them are even a few Greek words, which Lucio must have thought would be understood nonetheless, as well as Latin words with Greek derivations (like pentimero = five times). The vocabulary contains similar topics to those in Cesariano, and it is likewise influenced by topics in Latin philological training on a secondary school or university level: the words come from technical, historical, geographical, literary, mythological, scientific, astrological, and philosophical backgrounds. But in Lucio’s edition, every single entry is explained in its meaning and etymology. He himself regarded it as a time saver for those who studied the text, and they certainly had no need to look elsewhere for explanations (ff. AA ii–r). With a reference to the page number, the reader thereafter was prepared to read the translated text. This vocabulary list makes clear why Vitruvius’s text was important for everyone – literati, patrons, and architects – and why it became an established source for so many topics. Among the technical vocabulary, for example, Lucio explained “Architecto” as the constructor and author who would be the master of the building business, but also “Orbe” as city, “Domus,” as house, and décor, where he is referring to Aristotle’s idea of beauty and fittingness. From mythology, for example, he explained centaurs, an astrological sign, creatures that were half-men and half-horses, one of whom invented medicine. He also explained the meaning of the Chaldean oracles. Another topic were the immortal gods, some of which were explicitly mentioned as among the most important, like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom; Mercury, the eloquent inventor; and Mars, the ruler over wars. From philosophy, Lucio gave the names of the most important ancient philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, Zeno, Thales, and many more. He also explains the place and meaning of perception, which are the eyes of the soul. Lucio also provided a distinction between discipline (disciplina) and science. A discipline would be something one could learn from a master, whereas science was connected to

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reason and the search for truth. He explains that this is precisely the difference between the liberal and the mechanical arts (f. BB 1v.). Although Lucio did not provide a commentary within the text, he must have felt that the reader through his tabula was sufficiently equipped to understand the meaning without further effort. He also provided a detailed list of chapters with respective page references and useful illustrations in their appropriate places in the text. With his humanistic philological method, Lucio helped the architects exactly as Vitruvius had explained that one should in the first chapter on the education of the architect, where Vitruvius writes that architecture was regarded as a science, and that the architect needed the knowledge of many other sciences. Those architects lacking erudition, as Vitruvius explained, would not have their buildings regarded as authorities. But whoever had the literary and scientific background could express himself with the requisite authority, in both words and constructions. Therefore, the architect needed arithmetic, philosophy, history, astrology, optics, music, and medicine, all of which Lucio addressed in his table, giving each entry the necessary technical, historical, and etymological explanation. Lucio therefore helped to create an auctoritas, a set of authoritative references, which had been used in literature since the Middle Ages. As mentioned, the vocabulary is derived from technical, historical, geographical, literary, mythological, scientific, astrological, and philosophical backgrounds, following, therefore, the same philological explanations that a Latin grammar or university course would have offered (see Chapters 2 and 3). What Lucio provides, therefore, is a humanistic education for the unlearned, where every item needs to be explained in its appropriate context. How humanist philological commenting worked in the classroom has been explained by Black and Grafton and Jardine. The historical method of grammar teaching and commenting on Latin authors was primarily philological. From a variety of topics, the teacher explained important, often unconnected keywords that were important for understanding the classical tradition.68 Cesariano’s approach had been different. While he was certainly aware of university educational methods, he went beyond them on many occasions, eager to show his own remarkable philosophical erudition. Lucio corrected this fact, and took the explanations of the text back to the general philological commentary of the classroom tradition – if only in the extended vocabulary.

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Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA 1986, pp. 14–15; Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge 2001, pp. 9, 271, 326–329.

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The next vernacular Vitruvius edition from 1536 was the second commented edition to be published, and again an architect figured as its author.69 On the title page Giovanni Battista Caporali (1476–1569) placed architecture enthroned between its four fundamentals: mathematics, music (harmony/ proportion), literature, and painting (fig. 42). Caporali, son of the painter Bartolomeo di Segnolo from Perugia, was a painting pupil of Perugino and Signorelli, who later in life worked likewise as an architect. Both Cesariano and Caporali figure as important forerunners in terms of artistic commentaries, and it would take at least twenty more years for literates to embark on the same Vitruvian route. Like Cesariano, Caporali also revealed a remarkable education, both in his Latin skills and in his ability to present topics. But in Caporali’s case it is less clear where his education came from. In the Latin foreword addressing Pope Clement VII, he praised himself for having provided this laborious translation into the vernacular, amplified with a commentary and illustrations, which should render the text accessible to everyone. However, he did not mention to the Pope that this had already been done. Instead, his other foreword written in the vernacular to Count Iano Bigazini from Perugia, the place where Caporali grew up and also published this work, was based on praising the education he himself had benefited from in Perugia. At this point, he did not miss the opportunity to mention what he had criticized in his predecessors’ efforts to publish Vitruvius’s text. Here he mentioned explicitly the first commented edition by Cesare Cesariano, which he regarded as insufficient since it did not reflect Vitruvius’s ideas. In many places this edition lacked clarity and effort. Cesariano had obscured meanings and did not explain the reasoning and vocabulary well. This was the motivation as to why he, Caporali, wanted to undertake the effort to provide a new translation with commentary for the benefit of the unlearned (questi huomini senza littere) – meaning those who did not possess the capacity to study Latin sources themselves, by which he actually meant his fellow architects. Caporali’s critique of his predecessors in translating and commenting implied a lack of appropriate idioms and explanations, due to the fact that they did not know enough about the subject itself (f. +r–v). He probably meant Lucio Duratino in this instance, although he did not mention him personally. Caporali is therefore one of the first artists to criticize the literati, who in the early sixteenth century were increasingly involved in art translation and critique. By contrast, his critique of Cesariano needs to be viewed with reservation, as Cesariano’s translation and commentary were evidently the starting point for

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Vitruvius, Architettura con il suo commento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato, Perugia 1536. Caporali left out the useful table with vocabulary at the beginning. As an introduction to this edition, see Bacci, Frontespizi, immagini e parole in alcune edizioni vitruviane del Cinquecento, pp. 11–16.

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42 Giovanni Battista Caporali, Architettura con il suo commento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato, Perugia 1536. Photo: I Tatti, Biblioteca Berenson. Courtesy © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Caporali’s own work. He took up many important arguments from there and elaborated them, like citations and explanations from Aristotle and other ancient references. But Caporali inserted more Christian Neoplatonic dimensions into his interpretation than Cesariano had done. It is questionable whether Caporali would have been able to offer his impressive work without

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Cesariano’s commentary. Regardless, that Caporali could take off from his erudite architect predecessor indicates exceptional learning, paralleled by hardly any other contemporary artist. At times, Caporali’s commentary reads more like a commentary on Cesariano than on Vitruvius himself. The same can be said about the illustrations in both books. Caporali presents almost identical woodcuts with little alteration and in the same places of the book, leaving out only Cesariano’s specific contemporary Milanese examples, which had little meaning to him in his own iter as an architect from Umbria. The main point of contrast is that in Caporali, as with the text, every textual explanation is exclusively in the vernacular, whereas Cesariano pleased himself to render his vernacular commentary with as many Latin insertions in both the text and the images as possible. In his commentary, Caporali reveals his superb erudition that was comparable to other standard commentaries. This leads to the question of where this painter and architect, himself the son of a painter, received this evidently complete humanist education. One source may have been his contact with Pietro Aretino in Perugia since his youth, with whom he later had exchanges on literature and painting. Similar to Cesariano, Caporali likewise indicates a lot about his own education in commenting on Vitruvius’s educational requirements for architects, and he uses these to insert philosophical questions and discussions about the arts. Caporali sees Vitruvius’s idea of an architect’s learning as composed of two main elements: manual work and reflection (ratiocinatione, which is an alternative expression for Cesariano’s sciences and practice). Caporali confirms Vitruvius’s requirement that an architect should be educated in various sciences, but Vitruvius’s pagan model is then rendered in a more Christianized version than Cesariano had attempted. Therefore, Caporali distinguishes the rational sciences dealing with numbers (as Aristotle had described them in the De anima) from the intellectual sciences coming from God. These intellectual sciences coming from God would dominate the natural sciences (ff. 3r–v). This comes close to Plato’s aforementioned requirements for the intellectual craftsman, who deals with applied mathematics and works through divine inspiration (see Chapter 1). Caporali then explains what should define an architect, separating him off from the so-called false architects, who were little learned, and were actually only manual laborers, simple builders, workers, or stonemasons. Only the learned should be called architects, dignifying the Greek work “architect,” which meant author, prince, or rector. Caporali continues that the architect should be intelligent and inclined toward the sciences. On both points, Caporali followed Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between the architect and the simple craftsman, with architecture as an intellectual science (see Chapter 1). And Caporali went on to explain, as Aristotle had said, that the artifex (artifice) was wiser than the expert, and that the architect as a manual artifex would know his business well. The wise

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person would know about the necessity of everything, and he would be an expert also on difficult things (ff. 4r–v). Caporali then comes to an important point about literature, where Vitruvius gave much importance to the fact that the architect should be a man of letters because literature was one of the main subjects to be studied. No one could be perfect without literature! Therefore, the three most important subjects for an architect to learn would be reading, writing, and drawing (the graphic art). On this point, Caporali turns to the ofttold story from antiquity that the Greeks always educated their youth in the graphic arts. Both points are taken almost verbatim from Cesariano (f. 4v). Caporali then lists and discusses one by one the sciences mentioned in Vitruvius as being important for the architect: geometry, perspective, arithmetic, history, philosophy, music, medicine, civil law, and astrology. A closer look reveals four of these sciences – arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music – were based on mathematics and were all part of the advanced university study of the quadrivium. Caporali continues to say that all of these sciences were important and would together form the perfect architect, especially if these topics were learned in abundance and at a young age. Otherwise, it would be difficult to reach the desired temple of knowledge. Then he refers to Aristotle (while citing Cesariano), who had said in his Ethics that there are five possibilities (habitus) in our souls, which are important for our understanding: the arts, the sciences, intellect, wisdom (sapienza), and practical wisdom (prudenza). But as Aristotle had said, although one should have universal knowledge, no one would need to be an expert in everything because often he who has universal knowledge does not know about details. Therefore, everyone should know as much as was sufficient (f. 13v). Caporali inserts here the same story mentioned by Cesariano: whereas the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, had written about the science of architecture, the temple of wisdom could be created only by a wise architect (ff. 12v–13r). Caporali then discussed the necessary sciences in more detail. He mentioned, for example, that arithmetic would rely on Aristotle (Primo posteriore) and Euclid, and that arithmetic and geometry rely on one another. Perspective could also be called optics, which was a kind of visual virtue or power (visiva virtù), following its Greek origin, and had a lot in common with mathematics. Arithmetic was also taught in abacus classes and ultimately derived from the Arabic countries. It was important because the architect needed a lot of numbers and counting. History was important because, with this knowledge, the architect would adjust himself better to times of peace and war, and would take appropriate measures. Above all of the sciences, philosophy would count as most important, and the architect should try to follow philosophy’s lessons whenever possible (confirming likewise the importance of oral lessons). Caporali is rather short about medicine for architects, and mainly connects this with the history of medicine and astrology. Civil law was important for

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understanding the needs and laws of the city, and also to be able to deal with neighborhood issues between houses, or with natural phenomena and disasters. Geometry was fundamental for an architect, and Caporali explains the history of the compass, an important instrument for this exercise. Then he mentions that geometry would best be learned through Euclid as explained in the books of Luca Pacioli (ff. 4v–7r, 11r). To sum up, Caporali’s major explanatory orientation followed Cesariano closely in substance and detail, but he also included citations from Plato and especially from Thomas Aquinas to a greater extent, which meant that he himself must have been familiar with these texts. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle were a substantial part of the university curriculum, while Plato at that time had been inserted into the curriculum in only a few places and was mainly the subject of private study. Cesariano’s and Caporali’s approaches in their commentaries vary at a few points, for example, in their Aristotelian or Platonic convictions. Whereas Cesariano generally keeps an Aristotelian approach in high regard by giving great value to the sciences and to reading books, Caporali too praises the sciences, but also follows a Platonic interpretation, whereby art owes a lot to inspiration. He developed this important point in his introduction to the first book, in which he follows the most common theories of invention and creation, taking up the Platonic tradition in which God is the creator, from which everything material and every invention derives. Then he follows up on Aristotle’s idea that sees the intellect as divine, and intelligence as living in the soul (f. A III v). Caporali’s philosophical and classical learning is almost as impressive as Cesariano’s, and both architects’ erudition speaks for the distinguished education they must have gained outside their workshop training at schools, universities, or academies; following oral lessons; or with their personal friends. Both authors showed themselves on top of the discussion on the liberal and the mechanical arts and the value of the visual arts, especially architecture. After Cesariano’s and Caporali’s important commentaries, it was only with Guillaume Philandrier (1505–1565) that the literati embarked again on commenting on Vitruvius. His commentary, however, was in Latin.70 The next commentary on Vitruvius written by a literato was published in 1556, a couple of years after some fundamental developments in the visual arts took place that were promoted by both the literati and the artists themselves.71 In his new commentary, Daniele Barbaro (1513–1570) was certainly influenced by Benedetto Varchi’s lecture on the value of the three directions in visual arts

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Guillaume Philandrier, Gvlielmi Philandri . . . in decem libros M. Vitruuii Pollionis De architectura annotations, Rome 1544. Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura di M Vitruvio tradutti et commentate da monsignor Barbaro eletto patriarca d’Aquileia, Venice 1556.

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and the common intellectual ground in disegno, by Varchi’s public lessons on Michelangelo, and by Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the artists. The evolution that the visual arts had made among the literati was notable, and this is why Barbaro now felt that he should introduce his commentary by explaining what the visual arts are and how the artist’s process of inspiration worked, which, in the end, was the first step toward disegno, namely, the manifestation of the inspiration. The new vernacular translation and commentary by Barbaro would become the most influential edition throughout the centuries. A Venetian nobleman and ecclesiastic, Barbaro had studied mathematics, optics, and philosophy in Padua, and he also practiced painting and architecture as a hobby, where his academic preparation appeared to be extremely helpful.72 Contrary to the architect Cesare Cesariano, who had received help on his commentary from a couple of humanists, Barbaro instead mentioned that he had asked the architect Andrea Palladio for help, since he had better knowledge of technical terminology and practices. Palladio also prepared drawings for some of the woodcuts in the first six books.73 Barbaro’s edition needs to be seen as the counterpart of the two translations provided by the artists. In fact, artists were not Barbaro’s primary audience. In his dedication and in many passages that follow, Barbaro makes the point that he provided the translation and commentary more for literati and patrons than for the artists themselves. This is comparable to Sulpizio’s first printed Latin Vitruvius edition from 1486. Barbaro wanted his edition to be the authoritative version, since he as a literary scholar felt himself more capable than his artisan forerunners. He nevertheless elevates the visual arts, and especially architecture, by applying scientific and philosophical categories that were otherwise used for different circumstances. It is not surprising, therefore, that Barbaro saw architecture as an intellectual work conceived by the mind. The artist would perceive images in his mind, which he then had to bring into physical existence.74 The artist would first develop an idea with the intellect, then visualize it with the intellect, and finally render the yet invisible form visible. Barbaro’s aim was to show the literati and scientists (studiosi) what artistic invention means (artificiose invenzioni), how the visual arts could be categorized, where they came from, and 72

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In his Dialogo della pittura (1557), Lodovico Dolce points to Barbaro’s engagement in painting (on this also see Louis Cellauro, Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius: The architectural theory of a Renaissance humanist and patron, Papers of the British School at Rome, 72, 2004, pp. 293–329, see p. 295). On Palladio’s participation, see Branko Mitrovic´ , Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius’ De architectura, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29:3, 1998, pp. 667–688, see pp. 668, 686; Cellauro, Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius, pp. 298, 328. See Mendelsohn on Barbaro’s idea of architecture as an intellectual process. There are also some parallels to Michelangelo’s sonnet, which have already been noticed (Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 14).

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how they developed. In doing so, he made a strong argument for architecture playing a significant role among the liberal arts (pp. 5, 9). Barbaro dedicated the proemio to the topic of intellectual artistic creation, while following philosophical categories.75 He therefore distinguishes the requirements for an architect, with possibilities (habitus) in the first place, to which belonged, as other important categories, prudence as practical wisdom (prudenza) and experience, categories that sound familiar after having learned about Aristotle’s (Ethics) and Cesariano’s five categories: art, science, intellect, wisdom, and practical wisdom. In Barbaro, the habits as philosophical qualities are meant to determine trained, fixed capacities. The habits generally circumscribe every science, art, virtue, and vice. The intellect would tell the difference between these habits and make its choice. And the intellect would be driven by opinion, suspicion, and credibility. There were three habits to distinguish: science, intellect, and wisdom. The intellect would be the most important component to possess; science came in second. Mathematics would count among these habits, but the intellect would still be in the first place. Art was dependent on practical wisdom, and therefore on the human mind. Depending on practical wisdom, art would always depend on experience, which was built by recalling many similar occasions, and therefore influenced the senses and memory. Confronting art and experience, however, Barbaro states that art would be much more valuable and precious than experience alone, as it was also built on reason, which was not necessary for experience. Therefore, art was closer to wisdom (p. 6).76 Art would embrace the liberal arts, both the trivium, connected to speech, and the quadrivium, connected to the sciences. All these arts were inspired by God through divination (!), as God inspired the arts. This would lead to human inspiration – the topic which Barbaro originally meant to explain to his fellow literati. From human inspiration depended many of the so-called necessary arts, among which were navigation, military art, and medicine, but also architecture, painting, and sculpture, all arts which depend on the manual arts. But among these, some of the handcrafts were closer to the sciences, as they also depended on mathematical arts, like geometry (p. 7). As mentioned, this long introduction was meant to describe to the literati how artistic inspiration worked, and how much this developed from habitus, practical intelligence, and experience. Therefore, Barbaro’s introduction was principally a philosophical approach concerning the artes debate (see

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Mitrovic´ studied Barbaro’s philosophical influences as they appear in his commentary. Having studied in Padua, he was very familiar with Aristotelianism (Mitrovic´ , Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius’ De architectura). See on these points also Mitrovic´ , Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius’ De architectura, p. 685; Cellauro, Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius, p. 300.

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Chapter 1) and to the architect’s learning, which was contradicted by Vitruvius’s own requirements as found in his first book, even though Vitruvius held philosophy to be very important. Therefore, it is not particularly astonishing that Barbaro insisted less on commenting on Vitruvius’s educational requirements than other commentators had done before him. When Vitruvius in his introduction speaks about architecture being a science composed of many disciplines, Barbaro mainly adds the origin of the word “architect,” and makes a neat distinction that architects were not producing on the same level as artisans working with wood, iron, or stone, but that they worked on a higher level and should supervise the others (see Thomas Aquinas, as followed by Cesariano and others). Architecture is closer to wisdom, like a heroic virtue among minor arts (p. 7).77 Therefore, Barbaro elaborates points already included in the Vitruvius commentary by Cesariano and Caporali. When Vitruvius talks about the various disciplines as grounding sciences for architecture, Barbaro prefers to take up the topic of Thomas Aquinas to distinguish between the work (opus) and the arts (arti), the work and artistic expression (see Chapter 1). Barbaro insists that “opera,” intended as a work, had be understood as an artistic work, whereas the arts (arti) as artistic expression would follow reason (p. 8) – a different way of saying that handcrafts and intellectual work were something different. Consequently, after these excursions, when talking about intellectual requirements, Barbaro put philosophy in the first place, and literature in the second. When Vitruvius talks about the necessity of literary studies for the architect, Barbaro explained rightly (bearing in mind the developments of recent years) that the architect should learn this lesson well in order to defend himself properly against the literati, and to be able to answer questions from literati in an appropriate and distinguished way. Architects would need both the manual work and speech in order to address their topics and defend themselves properly. In the end, all three visual arts would be driven by the intellect, and for this Michelangelo would be the most perfect example (p. 10). Finally, Barbaro comments in shorter epilogues on the education of the artist, which would ideally be initiated in childhood, starting with geometry, arithmetic, and mathematics, which were topics a boy could have learned at a good algebra school. Indeed, Barbaro stresses here Vitruvius’s own education; the latter had claimed that he had received a proper education during childhood thanks to the intention of his parents. In the third place, Barbaro placed oral apprenticeship and the reading of the most relevant literature. In the

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See also Mitrovic´ on Barbaro’s point that architects should be inspired by God and follow both him and nature, and on the superiority of architecture in regard to other supporting artisan professions (Mitrovic´ , Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius’ De architectura, pp. 674–675, 685–687).

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fourth place, he located the necessary requirements that the visual arts gained through the manual effort that enabled the artist to work things out. Barbaro then comes back to the importance of literature for the architect and develops Vitruvius’s concern, which included the reading of the most appropriate text and, most of all, of appropriate commentaries. Thus, the memory would have a more efficient role. And Barbaro insists that it would not be sufficient to simply know grammar as a principle of reading used to understand texts, but that additionally it would need the right explanations as provided through commentaries (p. 10). Barbaro’s points on the education of the architect seem to be pretty close to actual practice: geometry, arithmetic, and mathematics were the bases to which oral lessons, literature, and commentaries should be added. Barbaro likewise follows up on Cesariano’s and Caporali’s discussion of the sciences. He claimed that all mathematical sciences have visual arts dependent on them (while in the end the mathematical arts would depend on philosophy), whereas the visual arts also depended on drawing as their common principle for architecture, sculpture, and painting (p. 10). Drawing had geometry as its guiding principle and was fundamental for the architect. In terms of history as a fundamental subject for architects, Barbaro did not have more to offer than repeating that here one could read about Caryatids (p. 11). Philosophy as a guiding principle receives more attention, as it would benefit every study and lead to wisdom. It would also enable the architect to evaluate his actions. Coming to natural philosophy, Barbaro refers to Pliny’s Natural History as the guiding authority which had explained everything visible in the world (p. 14). In terms of mathematics, Barbaro limits himself to referring to authoritative authors, without mentioning Euclid explicitly. Contrary to Vitruvius’s recommendations on education, Barbaro offers the advice for the architect to concentrate only on one science and to try to perfect this one, instead of gathering knowledge in too many disciplines (p. 16). As mentioned, Barbaro’s entire arrangement of argumentation was intended to speak to the literati and not to the artists. At any rate, the main point – the topos of inspiration leading to the question of disegno – was a topic that circulated at this point more among literati and less among artists. The question remains as to why Barbaro gave much less attention to a general, overall education for the architect. It is inconceivable that he did not find convincing examples in his time, since some artists, Palladio included, certainly received at least some intellectual education.78

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The following commentary made on Vitruvius by the architect Giovanni Antonio Rusconi (1520?–1587) had been manipulated in many ways by the publisher, who integrated parts by Fra Giocondo and Cesariano, thus making its inclusion into this survey superfluous. Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, Della architettura di Gio. Antonio Rusconi con centosessanta figure dissegnate dal medesimo, secondo i precetti di Vitruuio, Venice 1590.

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The availability of Vitruvius and the increasing literary preparation of the architects would manifest themselves more fully during the sixteenth century. A telling example is Giovanni Battista Bertano (1516–1576), a Mantuan architect and pupil of Giulio Romano. He wrote a treatise on setting up the Ionic column, starting from Vitruvius’s explanations and developing from there his own interpretation, including the use of an architectural model in the city of Mantua (Gli oscvri et dificili passi dell’opera ionica di Vitrvvio, Mantua, 1558).79 Like Cesariano and Caporali, Bertano was educated enough to consult a Latin version of Vitruvius. More than his predecessors, he wanted to use a clear method of scholarly quotation. When citing from Vitruvius, he separated the quotations and used a different font type. These quotations were in Latin, and he expected his reader to understand them. Thereafter followed his comments in Italian. Another new method in Bertano is that, during his argumentation, he referred to the relevant literary commentary tradition on Vitruvius regarding his point. And he includes the scientific literature on art when he refers to authors like Fra Giocondo, Albrecht Dürer, Leon Battista Alberti, Cesare Cesariano, Sebastiano Serlio, Gulielmo Filandro, and Daniele Barbaro (p. 19). This level of scientific discourse and method of quoting had hardly been practiced before by other authors, literati, or artists alike. The method Bertano used in incorporating current critical and scientific literature and opinions was at his time only about ten years old. One of the first to introduce this method was Francesco Robortello in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, published in 1548. Robortello insists on verifying his statements in primary sources and in other literature on the topic. Therefore, a clear citation helps the reader to follow his ideas and validate his quotations.80 Once again, an architect showed himself to be in the vanguard of educational methods, this time a philological discussion leading to a scientific method. With Cesariano, Caporali, and Bertano, artistic scientific literature had attained the same intellectual level and scientific method as the other sciences. Cesariano, Caporali, and Bertano are architects/literati writing on a level comparable to that of the learned. They are knowledgeable about ongoing discussions on the liberal versus the mechanical arts, on the architect as creator, on the sciences compared with the humanities, and on the proper citation method for scientific texts, all of which are set within the genre of a philological commentary as delivered in university lectures. Not surprisingly, Cesariano, Caporali, and Barbaro pointed to the importance of oral lessons for the education of the architect. The translations and commentaries provided

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Giovanni Battista Bertano, Gli oscvri et dificili passi dell’opera ionica, di Vitrvvio. Di latino in volgare et alla chiara inteligentia tradotti, Mantua 1558. On Robertello’s scientific method, see Rainer Stillers, Humanistische Deutung. Studien zu Kommentar und Literaturtheorie in der italienischen Renaissance, Düsseldorf 1988, p. 137.

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by the literati Lucio Durantino and Daniele Barbaro had second editions, while those of the artists did not. But it was the artists who raised important architectural and philosophical questions first, even before the literati had discovered them. It is certainly no coincidence that the majority of artists producing literature on art were architects, among whom figure Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci, Cesare Cesariano, Giovanni Battista Caporali, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano Serlio, Gian Domenico Scamozzi, Federico Zuccari, and others.

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CONCLUSION

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY

The intellectual education of the Renaissance artist turns out to have been a personal enterprise until well into the second half of the sixteenth century. Institutionalized intellectual learning on a broader scale was available for the artist only from the time onward that we nowadays call Late Renaissance and the era of mannerism. At this time, artists benefited from all relevant ancient literature being available in translation, from public lectures on relevant topics, and from an institutionalized education that comprised mathematics, geometry, perspective, anatomy, literature, and drawing. Consequently, the artist developed a new self-confidence in finally being able to participate in learning as a quasi-erudite person: he could follow his own choices with regard to literature, and he concentrated on his own style as his personal manner of expression rather than on the accessibility of literary sources, which had now become almost the same for everyone (below the real academic level). Art moved away from being philology and became rhetoric. The concentration on disegno and style, the competitions among the visual arts, and the fact that the artist determined himself through his personal mode of expression added to this phenomenon. Up to this shift, the artist singled himself out by the learning he had, which was due to his own personal initiative (or initially to his parents’). But education was easier to access than we often presume. The society provided for an 322

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open educational system, including for the poor, and offered learning on all basic levels. Reading in the vernacular, reading Latin, learning algebra, geometry, and arithmetic was not limited to any social status, but depended primarily on the individual’s initiative to pursue these skills. Even as an adult, participation on an elementary or advanced level was possible. Learning Latin at an advanced age or participating in public lectures on higher education topics depended likewise on the individual’s initiative, but was made possible by a society that took all these needs into account. And it seems to have not been uncommon to pursue Latin education as a refresher (or for the first time) at the threshold of the adult life at twenty-five years, which turns out to have been the case for autodidacts, literati, and artist alike, such as Dante, Giannozzo Manetti, Giovanni Battista Gelli, Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo. The importance of Latin changed significantly from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. The very knowledgeable and learned shoemaker Giovanni Battista Gelli claimed around the middle of the sixteenth century that Latin should simply be seen as a language, whereas what made a person learned was not the ability to know a language, but rather the knowledge of concepts and sciences.1 The reading monkey painted by Luca Signorelli and his workshop on the walls of the Libreria Albèri in Orvieto, itself bearing a complex program of ancient authors, sums it all up: “legere et non intellegere est negligere” – “reading without understanding is neglecting” (1501–1503, Fig. 43). The monkey is presented as a scholar with reading glasses and an academic hat, hopefully indicating some intellectual preparation he received. The open book shows the first rudiments of the trivium and quadrivium, which he is trying to understand. The monkey symbolizing the unlearned needed help in grasping complex topics. Mediators here play a significant role because they were the first to see what was needed and helped out in a broad way. Mediators came from an autodidactic or semi-autodidactic level, like Dante and Gelli, from an academic background, like Alberti and Landino, or from the literary academies, like Benedetto Varchi and Anton Francesco Doni. The mediators were also the foremost sustainers in acknowledging the visual arts a place among the liberal arts. This ongoing epoch-making discussion led by literati and artists found its climax during the time of the Renaissance. Around the time of the opening of the Accademia del disegno in Florence all arguments had been placed and the artists benefited in many ways from public acknowledgment. Apart from the influence of the mediators, there were other initiatives and interests that had an influence on art. The fifteenth century was a melting pot of institutions and organizations, from which many ideas were taken up and finalized in the sixteenth century. It is interesting to see Pope Sixtus IV, the 1

Quotation in Armand L. De Gaetano, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence 1976, p. 27.

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43 Luca Signorelli and his workshop, Libreria Albèri, 1501–1503. Orvieto: Museo del Duomo. Photo: Courtesy © Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

promulgator of learning and founder of the new Vatican library, be so much in favor of a university for painters.2 The establishment of the first Roman

2

On Sixtus IV engagement for the university for painters and the two papal painters Antoniazzo Romano and Melozzo da Forlì see Isabella Salvagni, Da Universitas ad Academia. La corporazione dei Pittori nella Chiesa di san Luca a Roma. 1478–1588, Rome 2012, pp. 18–19, 31–37.

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university for the visual arts in the 1470s might have happened right after Filarete’s introduction of the binary educational system in his architectural treatise (Trattato di architettura, 1460–1464), which also included the practical arts. Filarete was aware of the education of the poor, of topics taught in private humanist schools, and the forerunner of Aristotle’s binary education system. Furthermore, some humanists involved in writing treatises on education and teaching, like Lorenzo Valla, Michele Savonarola, and Bartolomeo Facio, either compared the apprentice of the visual arts to university schools or included the visual arts in their lectures. They wrote before the university for painters opened and might have had an influence on Sixtus’s endeavor too. When Piero della Francesca and Francesco di Giorgio were writing their treatises in the 1480s, these first universities of the arts had already been founded, and these two descriptions of a learned artist should be seen in this light. Filarete’s idea and his summary of ancient and contemporary educational practice seem to have inspired this interest in others. Poliziano’s Panepistemon might also be built on not only Aristotle’s but also Filarete’s binary educational system as well as on the already existing university of the arts. Likewise, Vasari followed Filarete’s binary educational system as well as the private humanist schools that already existed, like Vittorino da Feltre’s. Vasari’s description of “una sapienza et uno studio per giovani e allo insegnar loro et ai mezzani il modo dello esercitarsi col fare delle opera” (“a Sapienza and a study room for the young and adult to practise how to create a work”) was very close to the educational system described earlier, including the participation of the poor. In his Lives of famous artists (in the life of Alberti), Vasari, summarizing Alberti’s own writings, underlines the fact that literature and the sciences were significantly enriching the visual arts. With the help of the sciences, art would become richer and more perfect, while literature was the ideal company for art, and knowledge about history and fables would indicate the skillful master.3 The mutual influence of art and literature had been emphasized many times. Landino even tries to manifest its ancient roots by saying that the ancient philosopher Socrates was the son of a sculptor and had himself sculpted the three graces, and that his pupil Plato had studied painting and poetics.4 By knitting art and literature, and the knowledge of antiquity and of ancient artworks all together, the artist of the Renaissance was able to work on new levels.5 That the Renaissance artist competed with his ancient predecessors and that the work of art was in relationship with ancient manufactures or ideas has 3

4

5

Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, Florence 1550, pp. 375–376. Cristoforo Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, ed. Paolo Procaccioli, Rome 2001, vol. 1, p. 436 (Inferno IV, vv. 130–144). See Alexander Nagel and Christropher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010, pp. 16–17.

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been demonstrated in many ways.6 Comparisons with famous artists from antiquity became especially popular, leading to an artistic paragone where Giorgio Vasari, for example, took Apelles, Zeuxis, and Phidias as a paragone for the highest artistic skills.7 To Apelles he compared Masaccio, Fra Giovanni, Pesello, Francesco Peselli, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, and Leonardo; to Zeuxis, Paolo Uccello and Ghirlandaio; and to Phidias, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Leonardo. These examples served as landmark comparisons and tokens of the greatest admiration. The parallels defined not only highly skilled artists, but also a sharpened intellect and standard of learning. But the Renaissance artist never wanted to be just an emulator. He used antiquity as a landmark, which had to be achieved, perfected, and overcome. This process can be seen as a parallel to imitation and emulation processes in general through models of rhetoric, where both Quintilian (De oratore 10) and Alberti (De pictura 3) had spoken for imitation done with the mind, not just copying, but mindfully emulating and interpreting.8 The rivalry with antiquity, however, found different expressions within the three visual arts. While sculpture and architecture found more and more surviving examples from antiquity and therefore expressed themselves in even clearer visual forms during the sixteenth century, painting had a plentitude of literary references and descriptions, but lesser visual evidence. It could therefore express itself more liberally. But all the more it was important for the painter to be able to read. The allegorizing of art, weaving literary topics into sophisticated intellectual nets, became the climax of Renaissance paintings, a sensitivity antiquity had not seen likewise. As we saw in Chapter 2, the artists did not all start on an equal educational level. The division of the guilds in Florence favored the painters and goldsmiths over the architects and sculptors, where the major guilds required more learning than the minor guilds. This certainly had an effect on their social standing and reputation, which seemed to turn out best for the goldsmiths, who had a high reputation, also because of their better abacus school and their closeness to the world of letters. Also, as we have seen, goldsmiths were more likely to be found in grammar schools or at the university. Their education must have been perceived generally at the highest level. Lorenzo Ghiberti learned from his goldsmith father Bertoluccio Ghiberti. Masolino learned first

6

7 8

Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 16-17; Jürgen Müller, Antigisch art: Ein Beitrag zu Albrecht Dürers ironischer Antikenrezeption, in: Von der Freiheit der Bilder, ed. Thomas Schauerte, Jürgen Müller, and Bertram Kaschek, Petersberg 2013, pp. 23–57, see especially pp. 35–36. Vasari, Le vite de piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, p. 559. Quintilian, Ausbildung des Redners, ed. Helmut Rahn, Darmstadt 2011, pp. 485–497; Leon Battista Alberti, Das Standbild, die Malkunst, Grundlagen der Malerei, ed. Oskar Bätschmann, Darmstadt 2000, pp. 302–303 (3.58).

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from the goldsmith Lorenzo di Bartoluccio Ghiberti before he turned to painting. Botticelli’s father sent the boy first to learn reading, writing, and the abacus, and thereafter to learn to goldsmithing because he clearly recognized his intelligence. Likewise, Francesco Francia in Bologna, himself the son of an artist, sent his son to apprentice with a goldsmith because of his intelligence. The father of Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo did not earn enough money to enable his sons to pursue higher education (lettere), and therefore sent him alternatively to the goldsmith Andrea del Castagno. Other artists who received an education as goldsmiths were Piero Cennini, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Jacopo della Quercia, Pisanello, Masolino, Luca della Robbia, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Benvenuto Cellini. This confirms that almost the entire artistic elite of Florence somehow received a goldsmith’s education. A similar manifestation took place in the category of collaborations. While architects often turned to abacists for help, as mentioned in Chapter 2, goldsmiths belonged to the world of men of letters. An interesting case is the goldsmith and editor Bernardo Cennini (ca. 1415–1498), a friend and collaborator of Lorenzo Ghiberti on the second pair of bronze doors for the baptistry in the workshop on Via Porta Rossa.9 But Cennini was also the editor of the first printed book in Florence, a publication of Servius’s commentary on Vergil’s works (Servii Honorati commentarii in Virgilium: Bucolica, Georgias, Aeneis), which was printed in Florence in 1471 and signed proudly by Bernardo Cennini, as he called himself several times in his publication: in every judgment extraordinary.10 His son Pietro also helped in this endeavor, who likewise had a multifold career as a humanist poet, goldsmith, and manuscript illuminator. He was highly regarded among the Florentine humanists, who called him a “homo litteratissimus,” and he had among his literary students Bartolomeo Della Fonte, who also frequented lessons by the famous grammar teacher Bernardo Nuti and the university professor Cristoforo Landino. Both Cennini and Della Fonte worked for some time at the court in Naples.11 Della Fonte himself became a university professor in Florence and lectured on Lucan and Horaz. It was not by accident, therefore, that the first printers in Florence, Bernardo and Pietro Cennini, came from the goldsmith’s guild, and this enabled them to manually produce the letters they needed for printing. Since father and son were both highly literate, as documented by contemporary sources, it might have been their choice to embark as a first (and last) printing project on Servius’s commentary 9

10 11

Manzoni mentions a collaboration with Ghiberti around 1451 on the baptistery doors. See Giacomo Manzoni, Studi di bibliografia analitica. Tomo primo, che contiene tre studii, Bologna 1882, pp. 256–257, 272; Giuseppe Ottino, Di Bernardo Cennini e dell’arte della stampa in Firenze, Florence 1871, pp. 24–25. Ottino, Di Bernardo Cennini, pp. 21-36; Manzoni, Studi di bibliografia analitica, pp. 241-253. Manzoni, Studi di bibliografia analitica, pp. 259-267.

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on Vergil.12 This choice of literature should make us reflect: it was the genre of the commentary that they were interested in. A new commentary at this time would not have been readily available, but still the goldsmiths preferred to print the authoritative ancient commentary over a simpler text edition. Although the society was constantly striving to translate Latin literature into the vernacular and to bring knowledge to those less learned, nevertheless, a beginner’s level of Latin was pretty much required. Even translations had many Latin words, as with Landino’s translation of Pliny, or had Latin summaries to begin the translated chapters, like Atanagio’s translation of Vergil’s Aeneid. People accessed vernacular translations not only because they possessed no Latin at all, but also because the text was easier to understand in its full meaning. And this goes for patrons as much as for artists. As we will recall, both Bernardo Rucellai and the shoemaker Gelli praised themselves for knowing Latin well enough, but chose the vernacular for the spoken language. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Latin and vernacular texts likewise figured in artist’s libraries, as in the libraries of Benedetto da Maiano and Leonardo. In this same light should be seen Raphael’s commission to Calvi for a translated Vitruvius. This does not mean that Raphael lacked Latin completely, but that he needed the full meaning of the entire text in the most understandable way, without spending too much time and effort. Many artists learned Latin at least on a beginner’s level, but a number also went beyond, and it seems that Raphael was among those learned artists. Leonardo approaches the question of language from a theoretical perspective, and he sees the question of language as a disadvantage for literature. Since multiple languages were difficult to comprehend, painting was easier to understand because it does not use language. Consequently, Leonardo wrote his treatise in the vernacular. ALLEGORIES, MYTHOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES

The simple fact that an artist knew about mythological figures like Orpheus, Hercules, or Aeneas does not immediately reveal his level of learning. The story of Orpheus appears in texts like Dante’s Convivio, Landino’s commentary on the Comedy, the Theodolus, or in Ovid and Vergil themselves, where it originated. Likewise, Hercules’s story could have been read in exactly the same sources. The figure of Aeneas was present in Landino’s commentary on the Comedy, as well as in texts by Ovid, Vergil, and Lucretius. Prosperina and Ganymede were to be found in the Theodolus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Beroaldo’s Apuleius commentary. Apollo and the Mount 12

Servius’s commentary on Vergil belonged to the earliest printed commentaries in Italy and appeared contemporaneously in 1471 in Florence, Rome, and Venice.

ALLEGORIES, MYTHOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES

Parnassus were available through Vergil’s Aeneid and Georgics, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Landino’s Dante commentary, and Beroaldo’s Apuleius commentary. This list could be further augmented. All these texts were accessible on different educational levels. They also often conveyed different intentions regarding character and setting. This could be either a narrative or an allegory, and this could influence the choice of literature. It is thus highly important to find the exact source for an artwork. Apart from sophisticated allegories, the intention behind the choice of literature for an artwork was either didactic/moral, amorous/entertaining, or historical.13 These were exactly the topics covered in school education. Texts from elementary education played a fundamental role in the artist’s knowledge of basic iconology. First, introductions to Christian morals with the virtues and vices and hagiography came from elementary school texts like the Fior di virtu and Vite dei santi padri. Further moral values, animal symbolism, and characters from mythology came from the Physiologus, the Theodolus, and Aesop. Important for Christian values and mythology was also the first vernacular compendium of knowledge, the Convivio, written by Dante, who likewise used mythology to introduce the topic of allegories. The many single Orpheus and Hercules representations in smaller paintings or in sculpture might well have their origin in these texts, and not in classical sources. The importance of early school texts for animal symbolism in the backgrounds of Venetian painting has already been shown. Animals like birds, rabbits, panthers, lions, unicorns, and the phoenix received a Christian meaning connected to the virtues, vices, or Christ’s life, which seemed suitable for an additional meaning in many altarpieces. These texts also gave hints of a basic iconography, which was in any case canonized once these texts appeared with illustrations. But the symbolism became familiar long before illustrations accompanied the text. The popularity of Ovid in the Veneto, promulgated by either the vernacular or Latin versions, leads to the question of how many artists encountered Ovid during their primary education, including both his Metamorphoses and his Epistles. This is also true for the Fior di virtu and the Physiologus. As another early school text, images from Aesop’s Fables occurred in sculpture and painting, and it was popular at least from Giuliano da Sangallo to Dosso Dossi, and probably much longer, in harmony with its use as a school text. The brief narratives with moral meaning were particularly suitable for a private environment. While elementary texts like Fior di virtu, Physiologus, Theodolus, 13

Allegories are mostly but not always taken from literature. For another category of allegory free from specific literary references, see Nagel. Nagel presents examples from Leonardo, where an allegory comes closer to voluntary not finished state or to a parody. But an allegory could also demark figures out of their usual context (Alexander Nagel, Allegories of artmaking in Leonardo and Michelangelo, in: Die Oberfläche der Zeichen. Zur Hermeneutik visueller Strukturen in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ulrike Tarnow, Paderborn 2014, pp. 117–127).

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Vite dei Santi Padri, and the Convivio conveyed Christian morals and symbolism, and thus laid the foundations for an iconological understanding, other texts from the immediately following curriculum offered the basis for a visual narrative. Most popular were Ovid, Vergil, Aesop, Lucan, and Apuleius. The genre of cassoni paintings referred most often to early school texts to depict mythological or historical scenes. A vast variety of cassoni refer back to Ovid’s Epistle, a classical and popular early school text, which was available only in Latin before 1475. Painters like Francesco di Giorgio, Paolo Uccello, and Pinturicchio referred to Ovid’s Epistles in their cassoni, while Jacopo del Sellaio composed his cassone after Apuleius, or even after a commentary on Apuleius, and Apollonio di Giovanni painted his cassone after the Latin version of Vergil’s Aeneid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, was represented on cassoni and panel paintings by Piero di Cosimo and Vittore Carpaccio, while Apollonio di Giovanni and Domenico Ghirlandaio used Lucan’s Pharsalia, both probably in the Latin version. It seems very likely that all of these painters became familiar with these school texts during their own schooling (up to around the age of twelve), and found them to be an easily accessible source for mythologies and allegories. Especially Aesop’s Fables and Ovid’s Epistles would offer a less complex mythology than other texts by Ovid or Vergil would. With these easy-reading texts, patrons and artists started from the same level in iconology. Patrons, often merchants, had likewise been to similar elementary and abacus schools as the future artists: in Florence, the system of the guilds would have offered both the same basic access to education. That both could rely on the same standard of literature and iconology certainly helped in commissions. Beyond the curriculum, the two most important vernacular texts were certainly the commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Bonsanti/Bonsignori and Landino’s commentary on Dante. That both of these texts happen to be commentaries is all the more remarkable because their intention was to shift the meaning of the original text in different directions, which was obviously appreciated by the artists. They were useful for allegories and mythologies, and applied a second interpretive meaning to a topic. The original versions of these texts, by contrast, were usually illustrated faithfully, sticking closely to the narrative. If we add these two extracurricular but easy-to-access vernacular texts to the elementary and immediately following literature, we can cover well beyond half of the topics found in Renaissance nonreligious artworks. In these two texts the artists not only looked for the easily accessible vernacular version, but, as in Dante’s Convivio, they also looked for allegorical, mythological, or Christian readings of well-known stories, which would render the topic more up-to-date and align it with modern interpretations. To fuse the content and meaning from ancient literature and mythology with Christian morals and symbolism was not an idea that sprang fully formed from the artist’s

ALLEGORIES, MYTHOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES

mind. Instead, the artist had experienced this fusion of meaning several times in literature, on an easy-reading level in the Fior di virtu and the Theodolus, in Dante’s Convivio, and on an advanced reading level in philological commentaries. These categories of texts helped to shape ideas for allegories and mythologies. The Bonsanti/Bonsignori commentary was used by artists like Piero di Cosimo, Giovanni Bellini, Giulio Romano, Pontormo, Tintoretto, Bernardo Luni, and many others, thus indicating the long time span before the new Dolce translation and interpretation became available. Lodovico Dolce translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the vernacular (Venice, 1553) in a free narrative adaptation with explanations. Here he mentioned Titian in the foreword as the new Apelles. The Landino commentary was used by artists like Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Botticelli, Girolamo Mocetto, Luca Signorelli, and many others, in roughly the time period between 1482 and the 1540s, until a new edition by Alessandro Vellutello became available. Beyond these vernacular commentaries, a few artists were even able to cope with Latin commentaries springing from the higher levels of the curriculum. Piero di Cosimo, Botticelli, and Andrea Mantegna used Marsi’s and Constanzo’s commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, while the original text seldom appeared in art. Raphael and Giulio Romano used Beroaldo’s commentary on Apuleius, and Piero di Cosimo and Giorgione used Giovanni Battista Pio’s commentary on Lucretius. Botticelli used Landino’s commentary on Horace and Paolo Marsi’s commentary on Ovid. The visual rendering based on an ancient author and helped by an interpretation could even be perceived as a visual commentary competing with a literary commentary on the ancient source. Both Giorgione’s (Tempesta, 1510) and Piero di Cosimo’s (Mars and Venus, 1511) paintings can be seen as exemplary cases of how a knowledgeable painter would proceed in composing an allegorical painting with the help of commentaries. Both painters were able to understand enough Latin to access a Latin commentary on an ancient source. Here they picked a story within the range of a few folio pages (Giorgione concentrated on two pages and Piero di Cosimo on five pages), which offered enough insight into interpretative possibilities on well-known topics: Venus or Venus and Mars. Although Lucretius and his commentator were taken as a philosophical aid for allegorical possibilities, the source itself did not offer any help for visualization. Giorgione and Piero di Cosimo just needed interpretive help in offering a new version of well-known characters, while the composition was entirely their own. For his Amor and Psyche cycle in the Roman Villa Farnesina (1517–1518), Raphael relied on roughly two pages from Beroaldo’s Apuleius commentary. Giulio Romano relied for his Amor and Psyche cycle in Mantua (1526–1528) on three passages in Beroaldo’s commentary on Apuleius, adding some chapters from Bonsignori/Bonsanti’s Ovid commentary. Quite likely, they all learned about the respective commentary from their patron’s environment, and accessed the

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text through the patron’s private library. The case was similar when an artist picked passages out of a Latin edition. In most cases, they would take a text out of the first chapter of a Latin book, like Apollonio di Giovanni for his Shipwreck of Aeneas and his Aeneas at Carthage, and Domenico Ghirlandaio for his Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon. If the passage was not from the first chapter, it nevertheless often concentrated on one chapter of the book, like Piero di Cosimo for his Discovery of Honey (chapter 3), and Nicolò dell’Abate for his Sala di Camilla (book 11). Panofsky has called Piero di Cosimo a singular figure among the Florentine artists with high inventive capacities, an “antipode” to Botticelli for being a painter and not a designer.14 Following Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo had mostly learned patrons, which he seemed to satisfy best.15 While this is certainly true for Botticelli as well, these two painters can be singled out as the most outstanding in their use of literature. While Botticelli seems, in his allegories, to be fairly familiar with the genus of the commentary, which he accessed through Landino’s commentary on Dante, Landino’s commentary on Horace, and Marsi’s commentary on Ovid, Piero di Cosimo accessed an astonishingly wide range of literature. He accessed the Latin version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the vernacular Bonsanti/Bonsignori commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Latin version of Ovid’s Fasti, the Latin Costanzo commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, and the Latin Giovanni Battista Pio commentary on Lucretius. The range of literature is remarkable, as well as the quantity of Latin commentaries from higher education, even though the vernacular Bonsanti/Bonsignori commentary in the end turns out to be the source he used most for his paintings. Piero di Cosimo’s acquaintance with literary sources and commentaries on these sources was outstanding among Renaissance artists. Piero’s highly competent knowledge of ancient mythology has already been pointed out. It was gained through the knowledge of literature, especially Ovid, Vergil, Lucretius, and Boccaccio.16 Geronimus writes that knowledge of these classical authors on the part of the patron and spectator was a prerequisite for fully enjoying these paintings. Nevertheless, Geronimus claims that Piero di Cosimo (as well as Leonardo and Dürer) did not possess an adequate knowledge of Latin.17 However, Piero di Cosimo, like Botticelli, was a painter who was obviously expected to be able to deal with reasonably complicated topics. Even if he had an advisor pointing him to an interesting source, including a specific chapter, one should presume that he

14

15 16 17

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York 1939, p. 33. Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange, New Haven 2006, p. 26. See Geronimus on Piero’s use of primary authors: Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, p. 78. Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 78, 101.

ALLEGORIES, MYTHOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES

then dealt with the source himself. Otherwise, we would expect virtually every artist to receive a commission starting from a sophisticated commentary, if this was as easy as telling an artist what was contained in a source and how he should depict it. But artists who dealt with commentaries all belonged to the highly respected, most requested, and most skilled members of their category. The artist might have been directed toward a topic and a source, but understanding the source, even with some explanations – that is, grasping the full meaning of the complicated interpretation on top of the background story, and finding a visual counterpart for it – is a capacity of only the most intelligent and educated artists. This was different with the two vernacular commentaries by Bonsanti/Bonsignori and Landino because topics and explanations took into consideration the possible artistic readership and were more easily accessible. Piero di Cosimo’s close friendship with Giuliano da Sangallo18 might indicate the knowledge of a new kind of artistic commentary in the last year of his life. Dedicated to Vitruvius’s De architectura, the first classical commentary on the visual arts came out in 1521, and this time it was written skillfully and knowledgeably by an artist. Cesare Cesariano is the first artist to write a commentary (ca. 1511–1520) in the commonly established form of a philological discussion as used in the university environment. Already Ghiberti in his Commentarii was alluding to commentaries, and he discussed several topics and authors, but he neither departed from a single source text nor respected the setup of a philological commentary. Cesariano provided an Italian translation of Vitruvius’s text and enriched it with a long and detailed commentary in Italian. This book must have appeared as a milestone among the artists, and seems to have created envy even among the literati. The topics touched upon in this commentary, dealing with reason, knowledge, and the sciences connected to the visual arts, do not need to be repeated here. As we have seen, Cesariano insisted on following Vitruvius’s education of the architect, and on the point that a skilled architect had to be educated in letters. With his second education as a painter, Cesariano certainly knew that the painters already used commentaries as a source for their work. It might not be a coincidence that Cesariano himself had only two important predecessors for vernacular commentaries: the translation and commentary of Ovid by Bonsanti/Bonsignori, and Landino’s commentary on Dante, the commentaries used most often by artists, on two of the most important sources for painters. Cesariano added to these the most important architectural source. Despite the important and noteworthy predecessors of philological commentaries, Cesariano’s commentary is almost more philosophical, especially in the passages on the currently

18

See Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 144–145.

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ongoing discussions on the arts and the intellectual standing of the visual arts among the liberal arts. Here he outshines other humanist commentators on Vitruvius writing after him. This is unparalleled. The architect is laying new foundations not only for the artist as a literato, but also for the commentary genre itself. He thus anticipates all of the important sixteenth-century artists writing on art and its theory, most importantly, Vasari. And parallel to the painted allegorical commentaries of the painters, he applied himself to visible architectonical commenting, and in fusing old and new solutions in his accompanying illustrations. Commentaries were the most sophisticated and complex source an artist could turn to. On the one hand, using commentaries allowed the artist to find a suitable allegory in a modern, humanistic vestment. On the other hand, they allowed what Dante and Boccaccio had suggested, namely, to invest a topic with a hidden meaning. This meaning could be unraveled with the knowledge of a Christian and philological reading, and by knowing the appropriate sources and models of interpretation. The artist was aware of the need for modernizing an ancient context, for elevating it to the requested ancient/ modern, pagan/Christian level that would be demanded by the patron. This development happened all over Europe, not only in Italy.19 So far, commentaries have been mentioned only infrequently as artistic sources. When Salvatore Settis tries to unravel “The Hidden Subject,” he does not take the possibility of allegories coming via commentaries into account. Instead, he claims: “The controversy on the subject is an essential part of the artist’s invention.”20 By contrast, Nagel suggests that the meaning was hidden behind the complex circumstances of the artwork’s creation. We should look more closely at the original invention of the artist, his first concept, which was often changed during execution, as this could reveal the intention of the artist.21 The present study does not wish to exclude other possible approaches and various categories of allegories, even though we need to investigate the possibilities of a reading through different sources. Not diminishing the artist’s capacities of invention, we need to consider that, even behind mysterious subjects, there might still be a literary source deriving from a more complex context, like the genre of the commentary. These sources would provide an easier solution by indicating an authoritative source in the background to a topic. The artist

19

20

21

See on Dürer’s reflection on antique art and its distinction from, for example, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Andrea Mantegna, his predominant interest in modernization rather than antiquarianism: Müller, Antigisch art, see esp. pp. 35–36. Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpretating the Hidden Subject, Chicago 1990, pp. 125–130. The majority of researchers have followed Settis on this road. This would reveal, as in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, a more detailed description of a scene through attributes, which were later taken away (Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, Chicago 2011, pp. 59–70).

ALLEGORIES, MYTHOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES

would still interact with the literary genre by making sophisticated ideas visible, but he would ultimately rely on literature, and therefore not demand from the spectator that he discover a subject entirely of his own invention. It would, therefore, also make little sense to portray content mostly as conceived in the mind of a humanist advisor, as if he would have been developing a thought which had not been published. In these cases, the audience would have had little to no opportunity of discovering the precise subject. If the artist was directed to a source or was able to find it on his own, he was then basically dealing with ideas that were already in circulation among erudite people. In the end, the artist knew since Dante’s Convivio about the possibilities of allegories as transmitters of a hidden truth (nascosta veritade; see Chapter 3). Literature and art were aligned in many ways. The competition was felt not only by the artists but also by the literati. Pliny was most important as an encyclopedia and sourcebook for ancient techniques and topics, and the most frequented version was offered by Landino in his vernacular translation. But Pliny was always consulted in the original text version with no commentaries and no explanations (as Beroaldo’s attempt had failed). Vitruvius’s architectural treatise was one of the most crucial texts for the visual arts because it touches on almost every point critical to Renaissance artists and literati: it was the only architectural treatise that survived from antiquity; it was an important authority and source for both artists and literati; artists themselves started making vernacular translations from the fifteenth century onward; it was commented on by artists and by literati; and it was the only treatise from the visual arts that had been commented on during the Renaissance. The availability of these two important sources, both in vernacular and as cheaper print editions, marked a turning point for the artist who was no longer dependent on mediatory help in this regard.22 The time frame discussed in this book is congruent with the time span where artists struggled the most with their literary competence and their access to literature. During the Middle Ages, the range of topics was more constrained. Apart from a few pagan topics, artists primarily concentrated on religious themes, which in most cases relied on a canonized iconography. Only a few artists, like Andrea di Bonaiuto, in his Allegory of the Active and Triumphant Church and of the Dominican Order (ca. 1365) in the Cappella dei Spagnoli in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, or Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in his Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena 22

A better insight into Philostratus’s Imagines and his description of an antique picture gallery, with a description of ancient mythology, literary sources, and artistic capabilities in rendering these, would have provided another important step in the parallel interest of literature and painting, as well as in the painter’s capacities to deal with literary sources and his judgment, of how to render a narrative in the visible. However, in the first half of the sixteenth century, this text was known to a very few artists, for example, Cesariano.

335

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CONCLUSION

(1338–1339), were able to break through the limitations of these canons and depict complex new scenes, and this happened after Dante and Bonsignori had explained the idea of the allegory. At the end of the Renaissance, almost all of the relevant literature was available in the vernacular and in print. The development concerned several points. The artist became more self-confident in his ability to access and work with knowledge as more and more texts became available. But, likewise, he was less concerned with illustrating a specific source. There was a turning point from narrative to no narrative. While this point was initially connected with the idea of developing an allegory, and included the concept of a hidden meaning, this would be found not in an obvious school text but in a more sophisticated text, or even as an original idea. Later, the artist would more and more single out one specific moment. While in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (1509, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), the first idea of the hidden subject and the sophisticated source could be relevant, and thus show an intention to challenge the spectator, almost at the same time, Titian (with Giorgione?), with his Christ Carrying the Cross (1507, Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco) and his Venus of Urbino (1538, Florence, Uffizi), started to move away from a narrative and toward the depiction of a moment. On the one hand, invention becomes more important than the narrative. On the other hand, painting is moving in the direction of sculpture, thus making a paragone debate all the more evident. In the same vein, in both cases of Giorgione and Titian, art becomes more like rhetoric in describing a specific moment, and therefore competes with the literary genre on another level. With the arrival of mannerism, the topic of the specific moment will have settled in more deeply. In his expressive modes, the artist underwent a reduction that corresponded to personalization.23 The rhetorization of art happened on various levels: narrative/nonnarrative and personal style. At the same time, when all knowledge was available in customized form, with different intellectual access but in good part doable for an average artist, around the third period of translation, the artists desired acknowledgment in both style/maniera and intellectual capacities. They started looking for social, artistic, and intellectual visibility, moving away from the outdone system of the guilds and associations, following the model of the 23

Rhetorization of art appeared under different forms in different centuries. Looking into Northern art of the seventeenth century, Müller observes a rhetorization of art for Flemish painters, first trying to compare themselves with Italian artists, then imitating them, and subsequently searching for distance and own directions, following the model given in literary theory deriving from the rhetorician Quintilian (“translatio, imitatio und aemulatio”). After Quintilian imitatio should always lead to a thoughtful aemulatio. See Jürgen Müller, Corcordia Pragensis: Karel van Manders Kunsttheorie im Schilder-Boeck, ein Beitrag zur Rhetorisierung von Kunst und Leben am Beispiel der rudolfinischen Hofkünstler, Munich 1993, p. 40; Jürgen Müller, Der sokratische Künstler. Studien zu Rembrandts Nachtwache, Leiden 2015, pp. 128–135.

KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH?

literati, aspiring to the same intellectual level the mediators sprung off from, but using more and more their own visual expressions through the process of rhetorization. The phenomenon of art moving away from being philological, a competition that took place with literary texts and commentaries, to being rhetorical could likewise be seen as a reflection of general tendencies.24 Leinkauf writes that a movement toward rhetoricizing happened on all levels of the arts during the sixteenth century, including philosophy and music, but also painting, sculpture, and architecture, which would ultimately be a response to the growing influence of Hellenism. Starting with language, it steadily influenced the other arts.25 This provides the ultimate proof that the artist could participate in higher educational topics and reflect on contemporary discussions, which he might have picked up in literature and at public lectures.26 KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH?

This is the point where the initial hypothetical thesis of knowledge periodization versus style epochs becomes most relevant: Nicola Pisano’s Crucifixion in Pisa as well as other gothic sculpture may show emotions exactly because writers like Thomas Aquinas referred to the ancient theory of the soul and its affects. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Andrea del Bonaiuto depicted the first allegories because they were probably knowledgeable about Dante’s and Bonsignori’s ideas about allegories. The 1470s and 1480s saw so many depictions on ancient topics because the printing press widely disseminated both the Latin source and the first translations. Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo were able to depict complex allegories because they relied on commentaries coming from the higher curriculum. And once the most important texts were all available in printed translations, the artist developed disegno and personal style/maniera. This thesis does not exclude other influences, like excavations and the discovery of ancient monuments, which were important for

24

25 26

See for a rhetoricization during the sixteenth century happening in other fields like philosophy: Thomas Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), Hamburg 2017, pp. 89, 112, 164, 321. Leinkauf speaks about a separation of scientia and sapientia, starting with Lorenzo Valla, which would lead to a rhetoricization of philosophy and aesthetics. Leinkauf, Philosophie des Humanismus, p. 321. In the end, rhetoric as a topic has been available to the lesser learned in a translation already around since 1260. The Dominican friar Galeoto or Guidotto, teacher at the convent school and at the university of Bologna, provided for a vernacularization of Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium, where also some parts of Cicero’s De Inventione were incorporated. The maestro Galeoto was aware of his readership and saw the necessity for his translation for those vernacular and unlearned people and gave other vernacularizations an imprecise translation, but filled with helpful additions. This book was published in 1475.

337

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CONCLUSION

developing a style all’antica. But in the end, the artist could appreciate and understand what he was seeing only if he had relevant knowledge about the topic depicted. Archaeological excavations and the discovery of ancient statuaries and frescoes became important around the same time when everyone could finally read about Pliny’s description of ancient art and artists thanks to Landino’s translation; while reciprocal, the commission of the translation might have been necessitated by some ancient findings. Also, Pliny’s second entry through Alberti’s Della pittura and Landino’s Dante commentary were useful. Art has never perceived itself as an intrinsic factor, but has always participated in a general system of learning and knowing. This is why the general background on the history of education and the knowledge of an epoch is so important. While education played a major role in literary sources of the Renaissance, it is nevertheless astonishing to see the discrepancy between the demands formulated in artistic treatises and the minor role education played in artistic congregations, associations, and workshops. Although little concrete happened, the formularization of visual art under a kind of academic umbrella was, nevertheless, an important step for a future intellectual acknowledgment. The point that many university lecturers mentioned the visual arts, such as Nicoletto Vernia, Lorenzo Valla, Michele Savonarola, Angelo Poliziano, Luca Pacioli, and Francesco Verino (see Chapter 2), to mention just a few, is another indicator of the fact that artists attended university lectures as an oral apprenticeship in the liberal arts. Also, the fact that many artists were knowledgeable about the debates on the liberal versus the mechanical arts is further proof of their attendance. Furthermore, many other humanists and artists promoted the oral apprenticeship directly, like Francesco di Giorgio, Cesare Cesariano, and Giovanni Battista Caporali, and literati like Angelo Poliziano and Daniele Barbaro. Leonardo is certainly the least surprising artist to have had the required allaround education mentioned by Vitruvius, his followers, and commentators, which was obtained through personal study and oral apprenticeship. What his personal library contained would be the ideal manifestation of this required education, and even exceeds it. As noted before, Girolamo D’Adda summarizes Leonardo’s library as follows: he had books (including the Bible) on topics such as theology, philosophy, morals, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, the natural sciences, mineralogy, geology, chemistry or alchemy, agriculture, history, rhetoric, geography, grammar, poetry and poesy, satire, architecture, and, additionally, fables and romances, legends, epistolaries, chronicals, and Dante and Petrarch.27 As we have seen, almost all of these 27

See the inventory in: Girolamo D’Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua libreria. Note di un bibliofilo, Milan 1873, p. 11; Carlo Vecce, La biblioteca perduta. I libri di Leonardo, Rome 2017, pp. 198–199.

KNOWLEDGE PERIODIZATION VERSUS STYLE EPOCH?

topics were available through philological commenting and as public lectures (see the Appendix), to which Leonardo added private study through texts. His capacity to deal with Latin literature, as well as in the cases of Raphael, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and many others, has often been misinterpreted. One of the most telling examples is the category of cassone painters. They certainly did not require a humanist advisor in order to decorate one of the most common and requested marriage gifts. But painters like Apollonio di Giovanni, Jacopo del Sellaio, Francesco di Giorgio, and Domenico Ghirlandaio certainly turned to Latin textual editions to grasp well-known mythological stories. At the other end of the line, painters dealing with Latin commentaries, like Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Giorgione, Raphael, and Giulio Romano were chosen for their intellectual capacities and for their ability to deal with a complex text. We should be aware of the anachronism we often apply by suggesting that the painter is the inventor of a complex, sophisticated topic in a humanist vestment, but removing his ability to engage with the relevant literature. Furthermore, not denying the artist’s capacities of invention, we need to turn to the precise sources of this literature in order to correctly estimate his own inventive part in an artwork, and what he took from elsewhere. As this book has demonstrated, examining contemporary editions reveals a more complex picture of artistic iconography, the most proximate literary sources, and the artist’s ability to deal with knowledge. The fact that the majority of topics and versions that the artist used came from elementary education or the more advanced literature that immediately followed should make it clear to us that schooling and education must have been common for many Renaissance artists.

339

APPENDIX A

PRINTED EDITIONS AS EDITIO PRINCEPS AND SHORTLY AFTER, DIVIDED BY EDITIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND COMMENTARIES

T

hese tables have a mere illustrative purpose. The intention is not to give an exhaustive overview of Renaissance publications and translations, but instead to catch the curiosity of the reader and illustrate the early years of publications and translations. The tables follow the same generally accepted logic also applied in the text, whereafter names and titles familiar in the English idiom are given as such, and not in Latin. ANCIE NT TEXTS IN EARLY LATIN EDITIONS

Author

Text

Short Title

Published

Cicero Cicero Vergil Augustinus Lactantius

De oratore Epistolae ad Familiares Georgica De civitate dei Opera

Subiaco 1465 Rome 1467 Rome 1467 Rome 1468 Rome 1468

Apuleius Hermes

De oratore Epistles Georgica De civitate dei De divinis institutionibus, De Ira dei Opera (Asinus aurus, Asclepius, etc.)

Rome 1469

Strabo

Geographia

Apuleius, Opera; Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius; Albinus Platonicus Geographia libri XVI

Rome 1469 (continued)

341

342

APPENDIXES

(continued) Author

Text

Short Title

Published

Lucan Livy Pliny Pliny Cicero Cicero

Pharsalia Deche Natural history Natural history De oratore De officiis, De amicitia, De senectute, Somnium Scipionis Ab urbe condita

Pharsalia Historiae Romanae decades Historia naturalis Libros Naturalis historie novitium De oratore. De officiis, Paradoxa, De amicitia, De senectute, Somnium Scipionis. Accedunt Versus XII sapientum. T. Livii Patavini Historici ab urbe condita Vitae illustrium virorum Fabulae Epistolae De finibus bonorum et malorum

Rome 1469 Rome 1469 Venice 1469 Rome 1470 Venice 1470 Venice 1470

Rome 1470 Venice 1470–1471 Venice 1471 Venice 1471

Orationes Epistolae Orthographia

Venice 1471 Venice 1471 Rome 1471

Elegantiae

Elegantiae

Rome 1471

Tusculanae quaestiones Opera

Venice 1472 Venice 1472

In Somnium Scipionis, Saturnalia

Venice 1472

Aesopus Aesopus Lucretius Aesopus

Tusculanae quaestiones Bucolica, Georgica, Aeneid In Somnium Scipionis, Saturnalia Fables Fables De rerum natura Fables

Aesopus moralisatus Aesopus moralisatus; Vita Aesopi De rerum natura Fabulae (Valla)

Aesopus Aesopus Ovid Valerius Maximus

Fables Fables Metamorphoses Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri

Guarino Guarini Lucan

Regulae Grammaticales

Aesopus moralisatus Vita et fabulae (Rinucius) Metamorphoseos liber primvs. Valerij Maximi factorum ac dictorum memoralium liber ad Tiberium Cesarem Regulae Grammaticales

Mantua 1472 Rome 1473 Brescia 1473 Valencia 1473–1474 Milan 1474 Milan 1474 Venice 1474 Venice 1474

Horace Valerius Maximus Valerius Maximus

Opera Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri

Livy Plutarch Aesopus Cicero Cicero Cicero Cicero Tortellius Johannes Lorenzo Valla Cicero Vergil Macrobius

Vitae parallelae Fables Epistles De finibus bonorum et malorum Orationes Epistles Orthographia

Pharsalia

M. Annei Lucani Cordubensis Pharsaliae liber primus Opera Valerii Maximi factorum, ac ditorum memorabilium libri Factorum dictorumque memorabilium

Venice 1470

Rome ca. 1474 Venice 1477 Milan 1477 Venice 1478 Milan 1478

APPENDIXES

343

(continued) Author

Text

Short Title

Published

Plutarch Ovid

Lives Epistles, De arte amandi, Consolatio, Metamorphoses, Fasti, etc.

Venice 1478 Bologna 1480

Livy Vergil

Deche Bucolica

Vitae illustrium virorum Heroides. Amorum libri. De arte amandi et de remedio amoris. Consolatio ad Liviam. Fasti. De Tristibus. De Ponto. De Pulice. De Philomena. De Medicamine Faciei. De Nuce. Metamorphosis. Historiae Romanae decades Bucolica

Euclid

Elementa

Lucan Lucretius Apuleius

Pharsalia De rerum natura Metamorphoses

Lucretius Aesopus Plutarch Plutarch

De rerum natura Fables Lives Lives

Ovid Euclid

Opera Elementa

Livy Apuleius

Deche Golden Ass

Valerius Maximus Lucretius Philostratus

Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium liber De rerum natura Imagines

Preclarissimus liber elementorum/ Euclidis perspicacissimi; in artem geometrie incipit quam foelicissime Pharsalia De rerum natura Lucii Apuleii . . . Metamorphoseos liber ac nonnulla alia opuscula eiusdem, necnon epitoma Alcinoi in disciplinarum Platonis De rerum natura Fabulae (Valla) Plutarchi vitae Plutarchi Vitae: nuper quam diligentissime recognitae Opera Euclidis Megarensis philosophi acutissimi mathematicorumque omnium sine controuersia principis opera, a Campano interprete fidissimo translata (Campanus, Pacioli) Decades cum figuris noviter impresse Qvae praesenti enchiridio contineantur/L. Apuleii De asino aureo libelli XI . . . [Metamorphoses] Exempla quatuor et viginti nuper inventa ante caput de omnibus Lucretius Icones Philostrati, Philostrati iunioris Icones eiusdem Heroica, Descriptiones Callistrati, eiusdem Vitæ sophistarum

Treviso 1480 Florence 1481–1482 Venice 1482 Parma 1483 Verona 1486 Vicenza 1488

Venice Venice Venice Venice

1495 1495 1496 1502

Venice 1502–1503 Venice 1509

Venice 1511 Florence 1512 Venice 1514 Venice 1515 Florence 1517

344

APPENDIXES

ANCIENT TEXTS IN EARLY VE RNACULAR EDITIONS

Author

Text

Cicero Cicero

Inventione Rhetorica

Vergil Aristotle Vitruvius Ovid

De inventione Rhetorica ad Herennium (17 chapters) Aeneid La Eneide di Virgilio tradotta in terza rima Ethica Etica d’Aristotile tradotta De architectura De architectura (incomplete) De arte amandi De arte amandi

Cicero

Rhethorica, Inventione

Ovid

Epistolae Heroides Rethorica

Cicero

Short Title

Date

Translator

Published

Ca. 1260 Ca. 1260

Brunetto Latini Brunetto Latini

manuscript manuscript

Tommaso Cambiatori Ca. 1450? Bernardo di Ser Francesco Nuti Ca. Francesco di 1471–1478 Giorgio Martini

Venice 1532 manuscript

1432

Fiore di retorica Before (partial transl. of 1266 Rhetorica ad Herennium and De Inventione) Epistolae Heroides

Pliny

Comincia La Ca. 1260 Elegantissima doctrina delo excellentissimo Marco Tullio Cicerone chiamata rethorica nova traslatata di latino in vulgare Rhetorica Comincia la elegantisima doctrina delo excelentissimo Marco Tullio Cicerone chiamata rethorica Deche Tavola delle rubriche del primo libro della Prima deca di Tito Liuio Padouano historico. Natural History Naturalis historia 1474–1476

Vergil

Aeneid

Cicero

Livy

P. Maronis Virgilii Liber Eneidos feliciter incipit/Le fatezze de Enea

Frate Galeoto da Bologna (Guidotto da Bologna)

Frate Galeoto da Bologna (Guidotto da Bologna)

Frate Galeoto da Bologna (Guidotto da Bologna)

manuscript Venice 1472 Venice 1472–1473

Naples 1475 Milan 1475

Padua or Venice 1475–1478

Decade 1 translated Rome 1476 “da persona doctissima”; decades 3 and 4 translated by Giovanni Boccaccio Cristoforo Landino Venice 1476 Athanagio Vicenza 1476

APPENDIXES

345

(continued) Author

Text

Short Title

Livy

Deche

Cicero

Rhetorica

Tavola delle rubriche del primo libro della Prima deca di Tito Livo Padovano historico Rethorica ad Herennium

Aseopus

Fables

Date

Translator

Published

Decade 1 translator Rome unkown, Decades 1476 3 and 4 translated by Boccaccio Frate Galeoto da Bologna (Guidotto da Bologna) Accio Zucco

Ovidius

Aesopus moralisatus [in Latin and Italian] De arte amandi De arte amandi

Ovid

Epistles

Epistole Heroides

Luca Pulci

Vergil

Bucolica

Bucolica (only 5 of 10 eclogs)

Bernardo Pulci

Plutarch

Lives

Baptista Alexandro Iaconello di Rieti

Vergil

Georgics

Ovid

Epistles

Vite de Plutarcho traducte de latino in vulgare . . . Libro chiamato ambitione Epistolae Heroides

Vergil

Aeneid

Lucan

Pharsalia

Lucan

Pharsalia

Livy

Deche

Vergil

Bucoliche

Ovid

De arte amandi De arte amandi

Ovid

Metamorphoses Ovidio Methamorphoseos vulgare

Bastiano Foresi

Il Libro de lo famoso & excellente poeta Virgilio Mantoano, chiamato lo Eneida vulgare Lucano in vulgare 2nd half 14th cent. Lucano in vulgare 2nd half 14th cent. Historiae Romanae 14th decades/Leonardus cent./15th Brunus Aretinus: De centu. primo bello Punico Bucoliche elegantissimamente

Domenico da Monticelli Annonymous

Venice ca. 1478 Verona 1479 Naples 1481 Florence 1481 Florence 1481 (1482) Aquila 1482 Florence 1485? Brescia 1491 Bologna 1491

Luca Manzoli (Luca di Monticello) Luca Manzoli (Luca di Monticello) Boccaccio (partially, deche 3 and 4)

Milan 1492 Rome 1492 Venice 1493

Bernardo Pulci, Francesco de Arsochi, Girolamo Benivieni, Jacopo Fiorentino de’ Buoninsegni

Florence 1494

1375–1377 Giovanni del Bonsignore, Bologna

Milan 1494 Venice 1497 (continued)

346

APPENDIXES

(continued) Author

Text

Ovid

Metamorphoses Metamorphoses

Aesopus

Fables

Livy Valerius Maximus Livy Vitruvius Apuleius Vitruvius Vitruvius

Plutarch

Apuleius

Short Title

Date

Esopo con la uita sua historiale uulgare & latino Deche Deche di Tito Livio vulgare historiate De i detti et Valerio Maximo fatti memorabili volgare novamente correcto Deche Deche di Tito Livio vulgare hystoriate De architectura De architectura 1514 Golden Ass Apulegio volgare De architectura De architectura libri dece De architectura M. L. Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura traducto di Latino in vulgare dal vero exemplare con le figure a li soi loci con mirando ordine insignito Lives La prima [-seconda & ultima] parte delle vite di Plutarcho Golden Ass Apuleo volgare

Lucian of Samasota

Dialoghi

Boethius

De consolatione philosophicae

Aesopus

Fables

Dialogi di Luciano Philosopho, nelli quali sotto piaceuoli ragionamenti si tratta la vita morale, & come lhuomo si debbe gouernare nel suo vivere Boetiose verino di Consolatione. Philosophica volgare, nuovamente revisto et di molti errori porgato Fabule de Esopo hystoriate

Translator

Published

Giovanni Bonsignori Accio Zucco

Venice 1497 Milan 1497 Venice 1502 Venice 1509

Fabio Calvo Matteo Maria Boiardo Cesare Cesariano Francesco Lutio Durantino

Battista Alessandro Jaconello

Venice 1511 manuscript Venice 1518 Como 1521 s.l., 1524

Venice 1525

Conte Matteo Maria Venice Boiardo 1526 Venice 1527

Padre don Anselmo Venice Tanzo 1527

Venice 1528

APPENDIXES

347

(continued) Author

Text

Plutarch

Lives

Short Title

Date

Apuleius

Le prima [-seconda] parte delle Vite di Plutarcho Dialoghi I dilettevoli dialoghi di Luciano De Boetio Severino di consolatione Consolatione philosophiae Philosophica volgare Aeneid La Eneide di Virgilio early tradotta in terza rima fifteenth century De architectura M.L. Vitruuio Pollione Di architettura dal vero esemplare latino nella volgar lingua tradotto Dialoghi I dilettevoli dialogi, le vere historiate, le facete epistole di Luciano, di Greco in volgare tradotte De architectura Architettura, con il suo comento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato Golden Ass Apuleo volgare

Plutarch

Lives

Lucian of Samasota Boethius

Vergil

Vitruvius

Lucian of Samasota

Vitruvius

Aristotle

Valerius Maximus Vergil

Vite di Plutarcho di greco in latino: & di latino in volgare tradotte Ethica Col nome de Dio. Il Segreto de segreti, le Moralita, & la Phisionomia d’Aristotile, dove trattano e mirabili ammaestramenti ch’egli scrisse al magno Alessandro si per il reggimento De i detti et De i detti et fatti fatti memorabili memorabili Aeneid Il secondo di (book 2) Vergilio in lingua volgare

Translator

Published Venice 1529

Nicolo da Lonigo Don Anselmo Tanzo

Venice 1529 Venice 1531

Tommaso Cambiatori

Venice 1532

Francesco Lucio Durantino

Venice 1535

Nicolo da Lonigo

Venice 1535

Giovanni Battista Caporali

Perugia 1536

Conte Mattheo Maria Boiardo Batista Alessandro Giaconello

Venice 1537 Venice 1537

Giovanni Manente

Venice 1538

Giorgio Dati

Rome 1539 Hippolito de Medici Citta di Castello 1539 (continued)

348

APPENDIXES

(continued) Author

Text

Short Title

Vergil

Aeneid

Vergil

Aeneid

Livy

Deche

Vergil

Aeneid

La Eneide di V. tradotta in terza rima I sei primi libri del Eineide di Vergilio, tradotti a più illustre & honorate donne Le deche delle historie romane I sei primi libri dell’Eneide di Vergilio

Vergil

Georgica

Pliny

Sacrobosco

Euclid

Plutarch

Date

La georgica di Vergilio Natural history Historia naturale di C. Plinio Secondo di latino in volgare Sphera Trattato della sphera, nel quale si dimostrano, & isegnano i principi della Astrologia Elementa Euclide Megarense philosopho: solo introduttore delle scientie mathematice Lives Le vite di Plutarco

Mercurio Trismegistus (Ficino) Vergil

Georgica

Euclid

Elementa

Pimandro

Il Pimandro di 1462 Mercurio Trimegisto La Georgica di Virgilio Quindici libri degli Elementi di Euclide

Translator

Published

Giovanni Paolo Vasio

Venice 1539

Vincentino di Persa Rome 1540 Iacopo Nardi

Venice 1540 Book 1 translated by Venice Allesandro Sasedoni; 1541–1543 book 2 by Hippolito de’Medici; book 3 by Bernardino Borghesi; book 4 by Bartolomeo Carli de Piccolomini; book 5 by Aldobrando Cerretani; edited by Vincenzio di Pers. M. Antonio Mario Venice Nigresoli 1543 Cristoforo Landino, Venice revised by Antonio 1543 Brucioli Antonio Brucioli Venice 1543

Nicolo Tartalea

Venice 1543

L. Fauno

Venice 1543 Florence 1545

Tommaso Benci

Bernardino Daniello Venice 1545 Rome 1545

APPENDIXES

349

(continued) Author

Text

Short Title

Aristotle

Politica

Aristotle

Poetica Rhetorica Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Gli otto libri della Republica, che chiamono Politica di Aristotile. Nuouamente tradotti di Greco in uulgare Italiano. Rettorica et poetica d’Aristotile Filostrato Lemnio, Della vita di Apollonio Tianeo

Philostratus, the Athenian

Philostratus, the Athenian Aristotle

Life of Apollonius of Tyana Ethica

Apuleius

Golden Ass

Boethius

De consolatione philosophicae De beneficiis Poetica Rhetorica Fasti

Seneca Aristotle Ovid Lucian, of Samosata

Dialoghi

Boethius

De consolatione philosophiae

Date

Translator

Published

Antonio Brucioli

Venice 1547

Bernardo Segni

Florence 1549 Florence 1549

Messer Francesco Baldelli, con una confvtatione overo apologia di Evsebio Cesariese, contra Hierocle; ilquale si sforzaua per l’historia di Filostrato d’assomigliare Apollonio à Christo, tradotta per il medesimo. Lodovico Dolce Venice 1549

La Vita Del Gran Philosopho Apollonio Tianeo L’Ethica d’Aristotile Bernardo Segni tradotta in lingua volgare fiorentina et comentata per Bernardo Segni Asino d’oro 1524–1525 Agnolo Firenzuola De conforti philosophici

Lodovico Domenichi

De beneficiis 1551 Rettorica et poetica 1549 d’Aristotile I fasti di Ovidio

Benedetto Varchi Bernardo Segni

I dialoghi piacevoli, le vere contempla, le facete epistole di Luciano philospho Boezio. Della consolazione della filosofia

Nicolo da Lonigo

Vincenzo Cartari

Benedetto Varchi

Florence 1550

Venice 1550 Florence 1550 Venice 1551 Venice 1551 Venice 1551 Florence 1551 (continued)

350

APPENDIXES

(continued) Author

Text

Boethius

De Della consolatione consolatione de la filosofia philosophiae Metamorphoses Le trasformazioni

Ovid Horace

Sermons, Satire Epistles Poetics

Ovid

Metamorfoses

Vergil

Aeneid

Statius

Thebaid

Euclid

Prospettiva

Short Title

Date

Translator

Published

1551

Cosimo Bartoli

Florence 1551

Ludovico Dolce

Venice 1553 Venice 1559

I dilettevoli sermoni, altrimenti satire, e le morali epistole di Horatio . . . insieme con la poetica Metamorfosi L’Enea di M. Lodouico Dolce tratto dall’Eneida di Virgilio Thebaide La prospettiua di Euclide nella quale si tratta di quelle cose, che per raggi diritti si veggono

Lodovico Dolce

Giovan’Andrea dell’Anguillara Lodovico Dolce

Erasmus di Valvasone Egnatio Danti

1561 Venice 1568 Venice 1570 Florence 1573

COMMENTARIE S

Author

Text

Manuscript Language Date Commentator

Ovid

Metamorphoses

Italian

Ca. 1323

Giovanni del Virgilio

Dante

Divine Comedy

Italian

anonymos

Dante

Divine Comedy

Latin

2nd half 14th cent. 1416–1417

Pliny Dante

Natural History Divine Comedy/ Inferno Commentarii in Vergilii opera Commentarii in Vergilii opera Commentarii in Vergilii opera Trionfi

Latin Italian

Giovanni da Seravalle manuscript (Giovanni Bertoldi) Before 1422 Ludovico Guasti manuscript Ca. 1440 Guiniforte Barzizza manuscript

Latin

4th cent.

Servius

Latin

4th cent.

Servius

Latin

4th cent.

Servius

Vergil Vergil Vergil Petrarca

Italian

Francesco Filelfo (Jacopo di Poggio?)

Published Venice 1497 manuscript

Rome 1470–1471 Florence 1471 Venice 1471 Parma 1473

APPENDIXES

351

(continued)

Author

Text

Manuscript Language Date Commentator

Lucan

Pharsalia

Latin

Ognibene Bonisoli

Statius Petrarch

Sylvae Trionfi

Latin Italian

Petrarch

Canzioniere

Italian

Pliny

Natural History

Latin

Cicero

De oratore

Latin

Pliny

Natural History

Latin

Domitius Calderinus Bernardo Ilicino (Bernardo di Pietro Lapini da Montalcino) Francesco Filelfo Bologna 1475–1476 Filippo Beroaldo, Parma 1476 letter to Nicolaus Ravacaldum Ognibene Bonisoli Vicenza 1476 Filippo Beroaldo Treviso 1479 Angelo Poliziano Notes on lessons Angelo Poliziano Notes on lessons Ognibene Bonisoli Venice 1480 Ognibene Bonisoli Venice 1481 Pietro Marsi Venice 1481 Ognibene Bonisoli Padova 1481 Acron, Pomponius Treviso Prophyrio Ed. 1481 Raffaele Regio Paolo Marsi Venice 1482 Angelo Poliziano Notes on lessons Angelo Poliziano Notes on lessons Bernardo Pulci Florence 1481 (1482) Servius, Maffeo Vegio Venice (continuation of 1482 Aeneid) Filippo Beroaldo’s Bologna commentary on 1482 Servius’ commentary on Vergil

1470s

Ovid

Latin

1480/81

Statius

Latin

1480/81

Quintilian

Institutiones Oratoriae Latin

Cicero

De officiis

Latin

Cicero

De officiis

Latin

Cicero

De amicitia

Latin

Horace

Opera

Latin

Ovid

Fasti

Latin

1470s

1470s

Persius

Latin

1482/83

Terence

Latin

1484/85

Vergil

Bucolica

Italian

Vergil

Opera (Bucolica, vel Eclogae, Georgica, Aeneid) Aeneid

Latin

Vergil

Latin

Published Venice 1475 Rome 1475 Bologna 1475–1476

(continued)

352

APPENDIXES

(continued) Manuscript Language Date Commentator

Author

Text

Horace

Carmina, Epodae, Latin Carmen saeculare, De arte poetica, Sermones, Epistulae Facta et dicta Latin memorabilia

Valerius Maximus Horace

Published

Cristoforo Landino

Florence 1482

Ognibene Bonisoli, Introduction Raffaele Regio Cristoforo Landino

Venice 1482

Ovid Ovid

Opera (Carmina, Latin Epodae, Carmen saeculare, Ars Poetica, Sermones, Epistles) Fasti Latin Fasti Latin

Paolo Marsi Paolo Marsi

Lucan

Pharsalia

Latin

Ognibene Bonisoli

Properz

Elegia

Latin

Filippo Beroaldo

Valerius Maximus Vergil

Latin

Oliverius Arzignanensis Cristoforo Landino

Ovid Augustine

Facta et dicta memorabilia Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics Fasti De civitate dei

Vergil Quintilian

Bucolica Latin Institutiones Oratoriae Latin

Pliny the Younger/ Epistles Pliny the Elder/ Natural History Vergil

Natural History, Epistles

Latin

Raffaele Regio

Bucolica, Georgica, Aeneid

Latin

Pliny

Natural History (partial)

Latin

Pliny

Natural History (partial)

Latin

Bucolics and Georgics: Venice Servius, Landino/ 1491 Aeneid: Servius, Donatus, Landinus Niccolò Leoniceno Ferrara 1492 Dedication to Poliziano 1491 Pandolfo Collenuccio Ferrara 1493?

Latin Latin Latin

Antonio Costanzo 1st half 14th Thomas Waleys cent. Antonio Mancinelli Raffaele Regio

Venice 1483 Milan 1483 Venice 1485 Brescia 1486 Bologna 1487 Venice 1487 Florence 1488 Rome 1489 Venice 1489–1490 Rome 1490 Venice 1490 Venice 1490

APPENDIXES

353

(continued)

Author

Text

Manuscript Language Date Commentator

Ovid

Metamorphoses

Latin

Lucan

Pharsalia

Latin

Commentary by Raffaele Regio, Vita Ovidii by Antonius Volscus Ognibene Bonisoli

Ovid

Metamorphoses

Latin

Raffaele Regio

Lucan

Pharsalia

Latin

Quintilian

Institutiones Oratoriae Latin

Vergil

Bucolica Georgica

Latin

Horace

Opera

Latin

Ovid

Epistole Heroides

Latin

Ovid

Fasti

Latin

Cicero

Latin

Apuleius

Tusculanae disputationes Golden Ass

Johannes Sulpitius Ognibene Bonisoli Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Sulpizio, Pomponio Leto. Ed. by Ognibene Bonisoli Servius, Aelus Donatus, Antonio Mancinelli, Landino, Domitius Calde Mancinellus, Acron, Porphyrion, and Landinus Antonius Volscus and Ubertinus Clericus Antonio Costanzo, Paolo Marsi; Bartholomaeus Merula Ognibene Bonisoli

Latin

Filippo Beroaldo

Philostratus, the Athenian

Philostratus de vita Apollonii Tyanei scriptor

Latin

Cicero

Latin

Ovid

Commentarii questionum Tusculanarum Fasti

Filippo Beroaldo. Translated from the Greek by Alemanno Rinuccini Filippo Beroaldo

Latin

Lucretius

De rerum natura

Latin

Lucan

Pharsalia

Latin

1470s

Published Venice 1492 Venice 1492 Venice 1493 Venice 1493 Venice 1494

Venice 1495 Venice 1495/96 Venice 1496 Venice 1497 Venice 1499 Bologna 1500 Bologna 1501 Venice 1502

Paolo Marsi, Antonius Venice Constantinus Fanensis, 1502 Bartholomaeus Merula Raffaele Franchi Bologna 1504 Ognibene Bonisoli Venice (printed with comm. 1505 by Giovanni Sulpizio) (continued)

354

APPENDIXES

(continued) Manuscript Language Date Commentator

Author

Text

Valerius Maximus Pliny the Younger Suetonius

Facta et dicta memorabilia De viris illustribus

Latin

Pietro Ranconi

Vitae Caesarum

Latin

Latin

Lucretius

Euclidis megarensis philosophi acutissimi mathematicorum De rerum natura

Filippo Beroaldo, Marco Antonio Sabellico Luca Pacioli

Quintiliian

Institutiones Oratoriae Latin

Ovid Vitruvius Ovid

De arte amandi De architectura Metamorphoses

Latin Italian Italian

Boethius

Italian

Vitruvius

De consolatione philosophiae De architectura

Italian

Euclid

Elements

Italian

Dante

Divine Comedy

Italian

Aristotle

Poetica

Latin

Aristotle

Poetica

Latin

Vitruvius

De architectura

Latin

1556

Euclid

Regole

Italian

1559

Boccaccio

Genealogia

Italian

Euclid

Elements

Latin

Euclid

Elements

Italian

Euclid

Oliverio d’Arzignano

Latin

1521

1536

1548

Published Venice 1505 Siena 1506 Venice 1506 Venice 1509

Giovanni Baptista Pio Bologna 1511 Raphael Regius/Latin Venice 1512 Bartholomeo Merula Milan 1521 Cesare Cesariano Como 1521 Nicolò degli Agostini, Venice In ottava rima, but 1522 with explanations Padre don Anselmo Venice Tanzo 1527 Giovanni Battista Perugia Caporali 1536 Nicolo Tartalea Venice 1543 Alessandro Vellutello Venice 1544 Francesco Robortello Florence 1548 Vincenzo Maggi Venice (Bartolomeo 1550 Lombardi) Daniele Barbaro Venice 1556 Cosimo Bartoli Venice 1564 Baccio Baldini Florence 1565 (1566) Federico Pisa 1572 Commandino da Urbino Federico Urbino Commandino da 1575 Urbino

APPENDIX B

ORAL LESSONS IN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ENVIRONMENTS

355

356 Author

Topic

Year

Professor/Lecturer

Place

Dante

Divine Comedy

1373

Giovanni Boccaccio

Dante Dante

Divine Comedy

1391–1392 1391 (in civitate) 1392–1407 (in studio) 1402–1403

Luigi Marsili Filippo Villani

Florence, in civitate (for the studio) (appointed by Signoria and Colleges) Studio fiorentino Florence. First in civitate, then in studio (appointed by Signoria and Colleges) Studio fiorentino

Bible Dante

1412–1417

Leonardo Dati (Dominican) Giovanni Malpaghini

Dante

1415–

Giovanni Gherardi

Latin grammar

1415–1471

Several men

Arithmetic or geometry Rhetoric and poetry

1426 1429–1434

Maestro Alberto dell’abaco Francesco Filelfo

Ethica

1430–1431

Giannozzo Manetti

1431–1434

Francesco Filelfo

1430s–1440s

Victorino da Feltre

Aristotle Dante

Livy

Deche

Florence. In civitate (appointed by Signoria and Colleges) Studio fiorentino (appointed by Signoria and Colleges) Florence. In civitate (appointed by Signoria and Colleges) Padova. Under loggia del comune Studio fiorentino (Ufficiali dello studio) Florence. (for Florentine partricians) Florence. In civitate (Signoria)

Mantua

Public/ Private

Reference (cf. Bibliography)

Public

Kristeller, 1985, pp. 108–109; Davies, 1998, p. 14

Private Public, then private

Davies, 1998, pp. 93–94 Kristeller, 1985, p. 115; Davies, 1998, p. 15

Private

Davies, 1998, p. 93

Public

Davies, 1998, pp. 15–16

Private

Davies, 1998, p. 16

Public

Davies, 1998, p. 16

Public

Pellizzari, 1915, p. 254

Private

Davies, 1998, pp. 83–84, 111

Private

Maxson, 2014, p. 34

Public, on feast days (Cathedral S. Reparata) Public, every summer (also

Kristeller, 1985, p. 115; Parker, 1993, p. 53; Davies, 1998, pp. 83–84, 111 Foreword in editio princeps: Livy, Rome 1469

Divine Comedy

1456–ff.

Cristoforo Landino

Florence

poor students) Public

Rhetoric and poetic

? 1458

Cristoforo Landino Cristoforo Landino

Florence Studio fiorentino

Private

Kristeller, 1985, p. 115; Arthur Field, “A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino’s First Lecture on Virgil, 1462–1463, Codex 13168, Biblioteca Casanatense Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly, 31:1, 1978, pp. 17–20 (1460s) Kristeller, 1985, p. 115 Davies, 1998, p. 113

Cristoforo Landino

Studio fiorentino

Private

Davies, 1998, p. 113

Poetry, history

1459–60/ 1460–61 1460

Filelfo

Horace Persius and Juvenal

Odes Satire

1461 1461–1462

Cristoforo Landino Cristoforo Landino

Venice, school at San Marco II Studio fiorentino Studio fiorentino. Introduction on a Saturday

Vergil

Aeneid

1462–63/ 1463–64

Cristoforo Landino

Ovid

Fasti

Between 1463 and 1490

Antonio Costanzo

Dante

Petrarch Cicero/ Tusculanae Cicero

Studio fiorentino, introduction on a Saturday Fano

Ross 1976, pp. 521–566 Private Private

Private

Public and private

Davies, 1998, p. 113 Davies, 1998, p. 113; Field, “A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino’s First Lecture on Virgil, 1462–1463, Codex 13168, Biblioteca Casanatense Rome,” pp. 17–20 Prolusione: Praefatio in Virgilio; Grendler 1989, p. 236 Angela Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti, Columbus, OH 2015, pp. 41–42

357

(continued)

358

(continued)

Author

Topic

Year

Professor/Lecturer

Place

Public/ Private

Horace

Ars poetica

1464–1465

Cristoforo Landino

Studio fiorentino

Private

Philosophy Abaco

1466 1464–1470

Marsilio Ficino Luca Pacioli

Studio fiorentino Venice

Private

1465

Cristoforo Landino

Studio fiorentino

Private

Cicero

Precepts of poetics and rhetoric Familiares

1465–66

Cristoforo Landino

Studio fiorentino

Private

Petrarca

Canzioniere

1466 and 1467 1466–1502

Cristoforo Landino

Studio fiorentino

Private

Venice, daily lectures at the foot of the Campanile di San Marco Studio fiorentino

Public

Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, Ithaca, NY 1979, p. 182

Private

Studio fiorentino Rome

Private Public

Prefatio to publication. Davies, 1998, p. 113 Davies, 1998, p. 113 Grafton and Jardin, 1986, pp. 63–64

Literature, rhetoric, history

Vergil

Eclogue (Bucolics)

1467–69

Benedetto Brugnolo (teacher at Scuola di San Marco, pupil of Ognibene Bonisoli) Cristoforo Landino

Horace Cicero

Odes Tusculanes

1470 1470s

Cristoforo Landino Filelfo

Reference (cf. Bibliography) Appunti Bartolomeo della Fonte; Field, “A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino’s First Lecture on Virgil, 1462–1463, Codex 13168, Biblioteca Casanatense Rome,” pp. 17–20 Davies, 1998, pp. 107, 122 Gianfranco Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, Professore nelle Scuole d’abaco e nelle Università, in: Luca Pacioli a Milano, ed. Matteo Martelli, Sansepolcro 2014, pp. 176–177 Grafton and Jardin, 1986, p. 58 Grafton and Jardin, 1986, p. 58; Davies, 1998, p. 113 Davies, 1998, p. 113

Pliny

1472

Filippo Beroaldo

Parma

Public

Horace

1474–75

Paolo Marsi

Rome, Sapienza

Private

Ovid

1474–75

Paolo Marsi

Rome, Sapienza

Private

Fasti

1475–76

Paolo Marsi

Private, Public

Abaco

1475–80

Luca Pacioli

Rome, Sapienza, academia di Pomponeo Leto Perugia

Ca. 1478

Filippo Beroaldo

Paris

Private

Ovid

Natural History

Lucan

?

Quintillian

Institutio oratoria

1480/81

Angelo Poliziano

Studio fiorentino

Private

Statius

Silvae

1480/81

Angelo Poliziano

Studio fiorentino

Private

Bartolomeo Bianchini (biographer) – questioned by modern scholarship; Andrea Severi, Il giovanile cimento di Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio sulla Naturalis historia di Plinio: La lettera a Niccolò Ravacaldo, Schede humanistiche, 24–25, 2010–2011, p. 88 Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, p. 34 Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, p. 34 Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, pp. 34, 113

359

Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Himself: Philippi Beroaldi Bononiensis oratio de laudibus gymnasia Parrhisiorum et poetics acta in enarratione Lucani, Paris 1478 Ida Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien: Catalogue descriptif; avec dix-neuf documents inédits en appendice, Geneva 1965, pp. 206f.; Grafton and Jardin, 1986, p. 94 Grafton and Jardin, 1986, p. 94; Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien, pp. 206f. and notices on lessons (continued)

360

(continued)

Author

Topic

Year

Professor/Lecturer

Place

Public/ Private

Ovid

Fasti

1480/82

Angelo Poliziano

Studio fiorentino

Private

Ovid

Fasti

Before 1482

Paolo Marsi

Rome.

Private and public

Vergil

Bucolica

1482

Angelo Poliziano

Florence

Public?

1482/83

Angelo Poliziano

Georgica Pharsalia

1483 1483?

Angelo Poliziano Bartholomeo Della Fonte

Florence Studio fiorentino

Private

Mathematics

1483 and 1489 1484 and 1486

Luca Pacioli

1484

Angelo Poliziano

Rome, Archiginnasio Romano Naples, University (Studio accademico nel Convento S. Lorenzo) Florence

Persius

Vergil Lucan

Mathematics

Horace

Satire

Luca Pacioli

Private Private

Private

Reference (cf. Bibliography) Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien, pp. 206f.; Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, p. 42 Printed Venice 1482. Grafton and Jardin, 1986, p. 64; Fritsen, Antiquarian Voices, p. 69 Isidoro del Lungo, Florentia, Montepulciano 2002, p. 176 Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien, pp. 206f. and notices on lessons Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176 Simona Mercuri, Strategie letterarie e communicative nelle “orations” accademiche di Bartolomeo della Fonte, in: Umanesimo e università in Toscana (1300–1600), ed. Stefano U. Baldassarri, Fabrizio Riccardelli, and Enrico Spagenesi, Florence 2021, pp. 305–326, see p. 311 Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176

Homer Juvenal Juvenal

Ilias Satire Satire

1485 1485 1485

Angelo Poliziano Angelo Poliziano Bartholomeo della Fonte

Florence Florence Studio fiorentino

Private Private Private

Horace

Ars poetica, Odes

1485

Bartholomeo della Fonte

Studio fiorentino

Private

Homer Pliny Aristotle

Ilias, Odyssee Natural History Ethica Arithmetic and Geometry De rerum natura

1486–1490 1490 1491 1493

Angelo Poliziano Angelo Poliziano Angelo Poliziano Luca Pacioli

Florence Florence Florence Padua

Public Private Public

Maier, Les manuscrits d’Ange politien, p. 206f. Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176 Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176 Mercuri, Strategie letterarie e communicative nelle “orationes” accademiche di Bartolomeo della Fonte, p. 311 Mercuri, Strategie letterarie e communicative nelle “orationes” accademiche di Bartolomeo della Fonte, p. 311 Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176 Nauert, 2012, p. 76 Del Lungo, Florentia, p. 176 Pellizzari, 1915, p. 254

1494–1498

Marcello Adriani

Private

Brown, 2010, pp. 44–56

Giovanni Battista Pio

Public

Krautter, 1971, p. 130

De architectura

Ca. 1494–1496 After 1496 Ca. 1495

Florence/Prato university Bologna

Giovanni Battista Pio Fra Giocondo

Mantova Paris

Public Public and private

Mathematics

1496–1499

Luca Pacioli

Milan

Krautter, 1971, p. 130 P. N. Pagliara, “Vitruvio da Testo a Canone,” in: Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis, Turin 1986, vol. 3, p. 34 Carlo Maccagni, Euclid, Pacioli e Leonardo, in: Luca Pacioli a Milano, ed. Matteo Martelli, p. 105; Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177

Terence

Lucretius Apuleius Apuleius Vitruvius

1484/85

Angelo Poliziano

Private

361

(continued)

362

(continued)

Author

Year

Professor/Lecturer

Place

Mathematics

1500, 1506

Luca Pacioli

Private

Mathematics

1508

Luca Pacioli

Studio fiorentino and Pisa Venice, University

proportion

1508

Luca Pacioli

Venice, San Bartolomeo Venice, school at San Marco I, morning, afternoon, evening Venice, school at San Marco I Studio fiorentino Rome, Sapienza

Public

Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Lowry, 1985, pp. 45

Private

Ross, 1976, pp. 521–566

Private

Ross, 1976, pp. 521–566

Private Private Public

Brown, 2010, p. 56 Cavazzoni, Fra’ Luca Pacioli, pp. 176–177 Pellizzari, 1915, p. 255

Public

Pellizzari, 1915, pp. 255–256

Public

De Gaetano, 1968, p. 37; De Gaetano, 1976, p. 112

Public

De Gaetano, 1968, p. 37; De Gaetano, 1976, p. 112

Public and private

Stillers, 1988, pp. 107–108, 190 Resulting in publication 1550

Pliny, Cicero, Vergil

1511 Latin poetry

1512

Raffaele Regio

Mathematics

1512–1523 1515–1516

Marcello Adriani Luca Pacioli

Mathematics

1534

Anton Maria del Fiore

Mathematics

1534–35

Niccolò Tartaglia

Purgatory, canto XVII

1541

Francesco Verino, il primo

1541

Andrea Dazzi

1546–1547

Vincenzo Maggi (Bartolomeo Lombardi)

Plato

Dante

Dante

Aristotle

Public/ Private

Topic

Poetica

Venice, SS. Giovanni e Paolo Venice, SS. Giovanni e Paolo Accademia Fiorentina/Santa Maria Novella, Sala del Papa Accademia Fiorentina/Santa Maria Novella, Sala del Papa Padua, Accademia degli Infiammati, public/Università di Ferrara, private

Private

Reference (cf. Bibliography)

Michelangelo

Sonnets (non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto)

1547

Benedetto Varchi

Accademia Fiorentina

Public

1547

Bendetto Varchi

Accademia Fiorentina

Public

Dante

Comparing merits of painting and sculpture Divine Comedy

1547

Giovan Battista Gelli

Accademia Fiorentina

Public

Petrarch

Sonnets

1549

Giovan Battista Gelli

Accademia Fiorentina

Public

Grammar Petrarca

Grammar (topic: amore) and Aristotle, Poetics (preferred to Petrarca by Varchi)

1551–52 1554

Benedetto Varchi Benedetto Varchi

Accademia Fiorentina

Public

Raymond Carlson, “Eccellentissimo poeta et amatore divinissimo”: Benedetto Varchi and Michelangelo’s poetry at the Accademia Fiorentina, Italian Studies, 69:2, 2014, pp. 170, 172 Carlson, “Eccellentissimo poeta et amatore divinissimo,” pp. 170, 172 Published: Lezioni accademici fiorentini sopra Dante, Firenze, presso Doni 1547, Tolentino 1551 (complete) Published: Sopra un sonetto di M. Francesco Petrarca, Firenze, Tolentino 1549 De Gaetano, 1968, p. 45–46 Andreoni, 2007, pp. 7–8

363

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRI MARY SO URCES

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INDEX

abacus 85, 89, 94, 97, 115, 314, 318, 326, 330 Abel 184 Accademia del disegno 2, 5, 43–44, 63, 67, 74–75, 112, 289, 323 Accademia Fiorentina 21–22, 24, 41, 47, 63, 123, 125, 127–128, 130–131, 133, 144 Achilles 165 Actaeon 213, 257, 267 Adam 158, 184 Adonis 213, 266–267 Adrianna 290 Aeneas 178–179, 229–230, 234, 239, 244, 271, 328 Aesop 92–93, 142, 329 Fables 92–93, 142, 192–194, 196–197, 200–201, 274 Agostini, Niccolò degli 223–224 Agostino di Duccio 293 Alamanni, Luigi 126 Alanus de Insulis 16, 158 Albert of Saxony 119 Alberti, Leon Battista 10, 21, 35–36, 38, 48, 62, 65, 68, 73, 133, 139, 168, 171, 194, 196, 288, 291–292, 323, 325 De pictura 40, 42, 165, 291, 326 De re aedificatoria 39, 44, 47, 49, 51, 56–57, 91, 107, 228, 294–296, 299, 320 De statua 144 Della pittura 55, 57–58, 105, 113, 282, 338 education 19, 35, 51, 55–56, 60, 63–64, 77, 92, 98, 113 theory for the visual arts 21, 24, 27, 31, 42, 67 Albertus Magnus 119, 192, 269 Al-Farabi 34 Algazel 151 algebra 51–52, 64, 105 Alhazen 148 Allori, Alessandro 157 Ammanati, Bartolomeo 75 Amor 248–249, 252–253, 258, 262, 266 anatomy 52, 57, 75, 77, 79, 119, 126, 322, 338 Anchises 229 Andrea da Firenze 163 Andromeda 207, 213 Antelami, Benedetto 8

Anteus 154 Antigones 288 Antonio d’Arezzo 120 Apelles 27, 42, 52, 57, 64, 165, 172, 257, 288, 290, 306, 326, 331 Apollo 213, 227, 243, 249, 252–253, 259, 262, 267–268, 287, 290–291, 328 Apollonio di Giovanni 238–239, 246, 330, 332, 339 Apollonius 164 Apuleius 92, 143, 205, 248, 271, 275, 330 Golden Ass 121, 248 Aretino, Pietro 313 Argiropulo, Giovanni 12 Ariadne 234, 266–267 Ariosto, Ludovico 87 Aristides 290 Aristotle 11–12, 28, 32–34, 36, 39–40, 43, 46, 54, 58, 61–62, 82, 105, 108, 119, 148, 151, 157, 190, 192, 201, 298, 303, 308–309, 312, 314–315, 325 De anima 7, 27, 49, 127, 313 education 63, 68, 138 Ethics 32–33, 38, 50, 115, 154, 211, 306, 314, 317 lectures 121–122, 127 Metaphysics 33, 305 Poetics 105, 305, 320 Politics 1, 63–66, 82, 107, 109, 112, 116 arithmetic 26–27, 29, 39, 50, 52, 57, 59, 62, 64, 102, 105, 114–116, 306, 310, 314, 318–319, 323 Arte dei Fabricanti 72 Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai 71–72 Arte della seta 72 Arte di Calimala 71, 89, 110, 116 astrology 52, 56–57, 59–60, 62, 99, 114–115, 158, 162, 306, 310, 314 astronomy 26–27, 29, 31, 50, 119, 338 Athanagio 234–235, 328 Athenaios 58 auctores octo 93, 197, 248 Augustine 190, 192 City of God 7, 34, 108, 251, 278 Confessions 151 Aulus Gellius 108 Averroes 148, 303, 305 Avicenna 148, 151

379

380

INDEX

Babuino 86, 90 Bachiacca 184 Bacchus 221, 227, 234, 236, 266–267, 287, 290–291 Badius, Jodocus 246 Balbi, Giovanni 303 Bandinelli, Baccio 63, 65, 73–74, 128, 287, 293 Barbari, Jacopo de’ 26–27, 68 Barbaro, Daniele 10, 68, 113, 116, 125, 145, 315–321, 338 Barbaro, Ermolao 304 Bartoli, Cosimo 144 Bartolomeo di Giovanni 164–165, 331 Barzizza, Gasparino 104 Basil 103 Belcari, Feo 188 Bellini, Gentile 17 Bellini, Giovanni 17, 189–190, 203, 220, 222, 241, 292, 331 Bembo, Pietro 17, 126, 145 Benedetto da Maiano 101, 181, 183, 190, 211, 287, 328 Benedetto del’Abaco 101 Benedetto di Antonio 101 Berlinghieri, Francesco 142 Beroaldo, Filippo 285, 303 Apuleius 250, 255–257, 260, 263, 265, 267–268, 329, 331 Lucan 246 Lucretius 269 Pliny 121, 285, 287, 303, 335 Vergil 236–237 Bertano, Giovanni Battista 145, 149, 320 Bertoldo di Giovanni 73, 153 Bible 91, 119, 126–127, 182–183, 186, 190, 193, 288 Biondo, Flavio 92, 139, 284 Bisticci, Vespasiano da 104 Boccaccio, Giovanni 120, 137, 139, 207, 255–256, 258–260, 262, 266, 282, 332, 334 Decamerone 170, 234 Genealogy 149, 181, 207, 212–213, 244, 252, 255, 258–259 lectures 126 Boethius 92–93, 99, 126, 143–144, 150–151, 190, 192, 206, 210, 269 Boiardo, Giulio 241, 244 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 87, 244, 253–254, 260 Bolognese, Giovannantonio 77 Bonaccorsi, Francesco 150 Bonaiuto, Andrea di 335, 337 Bonisoli, Ognibene 194, 246 Bonsanti, Giovanni 136, 148, 208, 211–212, 217, 219, 222, 224, 268, 330–333 Bonsignori, Giovanni 142, 148, 208, 210–212, 217, 219, 223–224, 268, 274, 282, 330–333, 336–337 Borromeo, Federico 79

Botticelli, Sandro 6, 73, 104, 140, 145, 148, 181, 281, 326–327, 331–332, 337–338 Calumny 8, 166, 169 education 15, 19, 83, 94, 97 Primavera 257, 259, 275, 279 Bracciolini, Poggio 268, 284, 294 Bramante, Donato 59, 97, 300, 306 Brant, Sebastian 244 Bronzino, Agnolo 75, 128, 213 Brucioli, Antonio 288 Brunelleschi, Filippo 13, 94, 97, 100, 327 Bruni, Leonardo 17, 139, 162, 194 Buffalmacco 189 Burley, Walter 119 Bussi, Giovanni Andrea de’ 250, 253 Cacus 293 Caesar 179, 206 Cain 184 Calandri, Calandro 101 Calandri, Filippo Maria 101 Calandri, Pietro 99 Calepino, Ambrogio 11, 26–28, 303 Callisto 213 Calvo, Fabio 299, 301, 328 Cambiatori,Tommaso 142 Campano, Giovanni 99 Campi, Bernardino 241 Capella, Martianus 16, 29, 157–158, 198, 252, 259 Caporali, Giovanni Battista 51, 95, 113, 115, 145, 149, 311, 313–315, 318–321, 338 Capri, Michele 131 Caravaggio 113 Carpaccio, Vittore 190, 202, 210, 330 Cartari, Vincenzo 228 Caryatids 306, 319 Casa della Sapienza 107, 110, 112, 122 cassone 164–165, 200, 207, 209, 213, 218, 229–231, 233, 238–239, 245–247, 258–259, 262, 268, 330, 339 Castagno, Andrea del 327 Castiglione, Baldassare 24, 29, 44, 47, 63, 65, 68, 143 Castor 254 Cataldi, Pier Antonio 77 Catullus 207 Cavalca, Domenico 86, 186–187, 189 Cavalcanti, Guido 126 Ceasar 247 Cellini, Benvenuto 128–129, 145, 163, 327 Cennini, Bernardo 73, 103, 327 Cennini, Cennino 53–54, 56 Cennini, Piero 96, 327 Cennini, Pietro 327 centaurs 15, 165, 201, 262 Cephalus 213, 215 Cerberus 179 Ceres 177–178, 252, 262, 290

INDEX

Cesariano, Cesare 10–11, 51, 108, 112–114, 145, 149, 286, 300, 302–305, 307–308, 310–311, 313–314, 316, 318–321, 333, 338 Chloris 277, 280 Christine de Pisan 210 Cicero 54, 61, 90, 92–93, 103, 105–106, 108, 121, 126, 142, 150–151, 190, 192, 204–205, 275, 307–308 Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Battista 154 Cimabue 46 Claudianus 92, 176 Clement VII de’ Medici 311 Clement VIII Aldobrandini 44 Clio 236 Colle, Raffaelino del 261 Colocci, Angelo 299 Columella 92, 106 Corrado, Sebastiano 244 Correggio, Niccolò da 254, 261–262, 266 Cosimo I de’ Medici 75, 125, 127, 131, 144 cosmography 62, 109, 301 Costanzo, Antonio 121, 226–227, 332 Cristofano di Gherardo di Dino 99 Crivelli, Carlo 96 Cupid 234, 274, 277 Cybele 227 d’Este, Alfonso 241, 253 d’Este, Ercole 300 d’Este, Isabella 17, 189, 240, 242, 269 d’Este, Leonello 108 Daedalus 159, 198, 200, 291 Daniello, Bernardino 236 Dante 119, 139, 206–207, 210, 275, 282, 323, 334, 336–338 Convivio 11, 21–22, 138–139, 149, 181, 212, 274, 328–330, 335 Divine Comedy 120, 149, 173, 175, 183 lectures 13, 120–123, 125–127, 131, 282 Danti, Vincenzo 77 Daphne 212–213, 227 David 159, 292–293 Dazzi, Andrea 123 Deianeira 213, 230, 290 del Monte, Francesco 113 del Piombo, Sebastiano 200 del Vaga, Perino 240 dell’Abate, Nicolò 240, 244, 332 della Fonte, Bartolomeo 96, 103 della Robbia, Luca 97, 153, 158, 162, 327 della Rovere, Francesco Maria 47, 308 Delli, Dello 209 Deucalion 213 Diacceto, Francesco Cattani da 124 Diaceto, Jacopo da 122 Diana 177–178, 213, 257, 267, 290–291 Dido 229–230, 239, 244 Diogenes Laertius 205

381 Dionisyius Areopagita 151 disegno 24, 73–74, 163, 316, 319, 322, 337 Disticha Catonis 86, 90, 93 Dolce, Lodovico 66, 224, 228, 331 Donatello 38, 73, 292 Donato, Bernardino 143 Donatus 13, 90–91, 109, 300 Doni, Anton Francesco 24, 66, 79, 129, 131–132, 323 Dossi, Dosso 197, 213, 221, 240–241, 329 drawing 24–25, 43–44, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63–65, 74–79, 82, 105, 111, 114, 131, 288, 290, 305, 314, 319, 322 Duccio, Agostino di 163 Duns Scotus 34 Durantino, Lucio 308–311, 321 Dürer, Albrecht 19, 320, 332 Egidius 192 Epicurus 309 Equicola, Mario 242 Euclid 58, 91, 99, 102, 115, 314–315, 319 Elements 10, 77, 99, 102, 144, 303 lectures 77–78, 105, 122, 306 Europa 213 Eurydice 179, 210, 236 Eustathius 243 Eve 158, 184 Facio, Bartolomeo 37, 48, 67, 325 Fanni, Pietro 96, 103 Ferdinand of Aragon 287–288, 292 Festus (Sextus Pompeius) 206, 303 Fibonacci, Leonardo 99 Ficino 4, 39, 41, 68, 73, 124, 144, 194, 255, 279–281 Dell’amore 149, 181, 277, 279–280 Filandro, Gulielmo 320 Filarete 19, 38, 44, 48, 63, 65, 68, 76, 80, 106–107, 112, 119, 190, 293, 296, 307, 321, 325 Filelfo, Francesco 120–121 Fior di virtù 86–87, 189–191, 193, 203–204, 274, 329, 331 Firenzuola, Agnolo 254 Flora 277–278 Fonte, Bartolomeo della 327 Foresi, Bastiano 236 Fra Angelico 6, 118, 155, 173 Fra Bartolomeo 118, 184 Fra Diamante 118 Francesco da Barberino 54, 61 Francesco da Urbino 13 Francesco dell’Ottonaio 122 Francesco di Giorgio 10, 19, 51, 59, 61, 68, 96, 113–114, 229, 245, 297–298, 300–301, 303, 321, 323, 325, 330, 338–339 Francesco di Giovanni da Urbino 95, 103 Francesco di Tommaso 118

382

INDEX

Franchi, Raffaele 269 Francia, Francesco 140, 327 Frederic III of Saxony 26 Frontius 298 Fulgentius 252–253, 255 Galatea 266 Ganymede 198, 262, 265, 328 Gaurico, Pomponio 41–42, 44, 56, 61–62, 68 Gelli, Giovanni Battista 13, 22, 123, 128–130, 133, 323, 328 Gentile da Fabriano 38, 162 geometry 26–27, 29, 31, 39–40, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59–62, 64, 75, 77, 80, 97, 102, 105, 114–116, 305–306, 314, 318–319, 322–323 Ghiberti, Bertoluccio 326 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 17, 38, 44, 48, 51, 56, 73, 97, 119, 148, 288, 292, 296, 326, 333 Ghiberti, Lorenzo di Bartoluccio 327 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 94, 164, 247, 326–327, 330, 332, 339 Ghirlandaio, Michele 75 Giambologna 129, 154 Giocondo, Giovanni 41, 121, 296, 298–299, 301, 320 Giorgione 154, 213, 270–272, 292, 331, 336, 339 Giotto 16, 46, 158, 162, 291 Giovanni da Milano 157 Giovanni da Udine 261 Giovanni del Virgilio 136, 148, 152, 210 Giovanni di Bartolo 99–100 Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi 163 Giovanni Mosco 187 Giovio, Benedetto 302 Giovio, Paolo 38, 67 Giuliano da Maiano 13, 94, 101, 183, 187, 190 Gonzaga, Francesco 253 Gonzaga, Isabella 254 Gonzaga, Lodovico 65 Gonzaga, Vespasiano 240–241 Gozzoli, Benozzo 19 Graces 249, 253, 257, 259, 262–263, 265, 277–279 Gregory XIII Boncompagni 78–79 Grimani, Domenico 272 Grimani, Giovanni 268 Gualterus Anglicus 194 Guarini, Guarino 13, 37, 90–91, 104, 107, 167, 194, 285, 304 Guasti, Ludovico 286 Helena 234, 245 Hercules 154, 159, 161, 163–164, 176, 179, 213, 219, 234, 287, 290, 293, 328–329 Hermes 192 Hesiod 147, 278–279 history 50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 108, 114–115, 306, 310, 314, 338

Holofernes 292 Homer 13, 39, 61–62, 92, 105, 147, 207, 233, 243, 308 Horace 8, 31, 37, 42, 46, 48, 54, 61, 90–93, 105, 120, 133, 151, 179, 206, 275, 279, 281, 307–308, 327 Horae 264, 280 Hugh of Saint Victor 33–34, 36, 38, 40, 43, 49, 68, 136, 282 Hyginus 213, 243 Hypnerotomachia 267 Ianua 108 Icarus 199 Iris 290 Isaia da Este 183 Isidore of Seville 40, 303 Isis 249, 253, 255–256, 287 Jason 164, 192, 234 Jerome 190 Jonah 184 Jonitus 158 Judith 292 Juno 244, 252, 254, 262 Jupiter 157, 159, 212–213, 216, 223, 236, 244, 262, 266, 271, 287 Juvenal 92, 103, 105, 120, 151, 205, 207 Lactantius 126, 269 Lampridio, Benedetto 243 Landino, Cristoforo 10, 22, 38, 41, 67, 133, 139, 143, 281–282, 303, 323, 325 Dante 15, 22, 73, 128, 140, 149, 164–165, 173, 176, 178–179, 181, 246, 274, 277–278, 280, 328, 330–333, 338 Epistles 22 Horace 277, 279, 331–332 lectures 29, 120, 237, 282, 327 Pliny 22, 53, 285, 287–288, 292–293, 328, 335, 338 Vergil 147, 236–237 Laokoon 291 Latini, Brunetto 142 Laurana, Luciano 18 Legenda aurea 86 Leo X de’ Medici 124, 299, 302 Leonardo da Vinci 27, 36, 68, 73–74, 102–103, 139–140, 145, 196, 203, 229, 291, 303, 323, 326, 328, 332 education 12–13, 19, 38, 61, 74, 83, 87, 95–97, 103, 118–119, 338 library 22, 91, 100–101, 119, 183, 190, 206, 211, 245, 293, 328, 338 Trattato della pittura 47, 59–61, 68, 293, 321 Leoniceno, Niccolò 254, 286 Leto, Pomponio 284, 295 Ligorio, Pirro 284

INDEX

Lippi, Filippino 152, 207, 211 Lippi, Filippo 118 Lo Scheggia 98 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 335, 337 Lorenzo Monaco 6, 118 Luca di Monticello 142 Lucan 92–93, 105, 142, 154, 179, 181, 204–206, 245, 269, 275, 307, 327, 329–330 Lucian of Samosata 127, 143, 165, 168 Lucius 249, 254, 256 Lucretius 92, 205–206, 215, 268, 275, 328, 331–332 Luini, Bernardino 224, 331 Luna 159 Lysippus 57 Macrobius 190, 192 Magnus 245 Mancinelli, Antonio 237 Manetti, Antonio 94 Manetti, Giannozzo 100, 131, 323 Mantegna, Andrea 92, 96, 106, 145, 154, 171, 181, 203, 207, 227, 326, 331 Mantovano, Rinaldo 266 Manuzio, Aldo 122 Manzoli, Luca 245 Marco del Buono 247 Mars 157, 159, 163–164, 266–267, 273, 290, 309, 331 Marsi, Paolo 282 lectures 120–121, 225–226, 281 Ovid 227, 277, 279–281, 331–332 Marsyas 213, 290 Martha 154 Martin V Colonna 110 Martini, Simone 6, 146 Mary 154, 190 Masaccio 326 Masolino 326 Master of the Argonauts 258 mathematics 31, 39–40, 51, 56, 61–62, 64, 77, 80, 97, 102, 104–105, 109, 111, 116, 119, 122, 301, 311, 314, 318–319, 322, 338 Mauro, Bono 302 Mazzinghi, Antonio de’ 99 Medea 164, 192, 234, 290 Medici, Cosimo de’ 72 Medici, Giuliano de’ 101 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 73–74, 235, 258, 295 Medici, Pierfrancesco de’ 279 Medici, Piero de’ 258 Medici, Piero di Lorenzo de’ 292 medicine 28, 50, 52, 57, 59, 115, 119, 126, 158, 310, 314, 338 Melanthius 288 Mercury 134, 159, 221, 249, 253, 262, 277–279, 290, 309 Methelda 177 Metrodorus 52

383 Michelangelo 15, 43, 48, 74, 124, 128, 292–293, 318 academy 75–76, 124, 129–130 education 19, 74, 87, 95, 103 poems 24, 48, 126, 129, 131, 316 Michele di Gianni 100 Midas 167, 289 Minerva 236, 244, 254, 287, 290, 306, 309, 314 Minos 199, 267 Minotaur 199, 267 Miscomini, Bartholomeo 235 Mocetto, Girolamo 171, 331 Montefeltro, Federico 96, 104 Muses 253 music 26–27, 29, 31, 39, 50, 52, 55–56, 59, 62, 99, 105, 111, 114–115, 306, 310–311, 314, 337 Narcissus 212 Neptune 221, 267 Neri di Bicci 101 Nessus 176, 230 Niccolò da Correggio 213 Niccolò da Uzzano 17, 110 Nonius Marcellus 206, 303 Nuti, Bernardo 96, 103, 327 Odo Picardus 197 Odysseus 233 Oenone 229 oral apprenticeship 61, 113, 115, 306, 315, 318, 320, 323, 337–339 Orpheus 151–152, 154, 161, 163, 179, 210, 236, 328–329 Orsanmichele 72, 89 Osiris 287 Ovid 92–93, 105–106, 127, 134, 142–143, 164, 179, 181, 190, 192, 198, 201, 204–207, 234, 237, 272, 275, 277, 281, 289, 307–308, 328–330 Ars amatoria 142, 198, 205, 228, 234, 269 Fasti 120–121, 221, 224–227, 279–280, 331–332 Heroides 142, 164, 228–231, 233, 245, 274, 330 Metamorphoses 92–93, 136, 142, 148, 151–152, 154, 164–165, 176, 205–207, 209, 212–213, 218, 223–224, 228–230, 268–269, 274, 328, 330–333 Pacioli, Luca 10, 40, 44, 46, 61, 68, 99, 102, 115, 121, 142, 291, 298, 306, 315, 338 Pagni, Benedetto 266 Palladio, Andrea 125, 284, 316 Palmieri, Matteo 139 Pamphilius 52, 288 Pan 213, 236, 252, 254, 290 Paneo 290 Paolo dell’Abaco 99–100 paragone 24, 26–27, 29, 32, 43–44, 48–49, 63, 67, 80, 143, 326, 336 Paride da Ceresara 17

384

INDEX

Paris 204, 229, 234, 243–244, 254 Parnassus 127, 216, 236, 329 Parrhasius 288 Pasiphae 199–200, 266–267 Paul II Barbo 182 Paul III Farnese 43, 268 Peleus 165 Penelope 231, 233, 290 Penni, Gianfrancesco 266 Perotti, Niccolò 13, 91, 304 Perseus 207, 213 Persius 92, 120 perspective 52, 55, 57, 62, 77, 79, 115, 314, 322 Perugino, Pietro 17, 311, 326 Pesellino, Francesco 163, 326 Pesello 326 Petrarch 27, 44–45, 47–48, 54–55, 60, 68, 119, 139, 146, 207, 285, 294, 338 lectures 120–121, 125–127, 131 Phidias 33, 290, 326 Philandrier, Guillaume 315 Philip II of Spain 224 philosophy 27, 34, 36, 38, 40, 48, 50–52, 57, 59, 68, 78, 90, 93, 108–109, 111, 114, 122, 126, 130, 148, 150, 157, 163, 225, 301, 305–307, 310, 314, 318–319, 337–338 Philostratus (the Athenian)
144, 230, 283, 304, 335, 349 Phoroneus 159 Phydias 290 Physiologus 92–93, 193, 200, 203–204, 274, 329 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio 92 Piero della Francesca 19, 94, 97, 101–102, 325 Piero di Cosimo 145, 148, 207, 213, 215, 218, 227, 272, 274, 330–333, 337–338 Pierozzi, Antonino 6 Pietro dell’Abaco 96, 298 Pinturicchio, Bernardino 163, 231, 246, 291, 330 Pio, Giovanni Baptista 121, 260, 269–274, 331–332 Pirovani, Luigi 301–302 Pisanello 38, 327 Pisano, Andrea 158 Pisano, Giovanni 162 Pisano, Nicola 8, 16, 158, 162, 337 Plato 19, 32, 40, 49, 95, 105, 107–108, 150, 190, 192, 251, 278, 281, 298, 308–309, 315, 325 education 51, 61, 67 Gorgias 52, 82 Laws 82 lectures 122, 315 Republic 52, 82 Symposium 271, 277, 280 Timeus 151 Plautus 105, 206 Pliny 27–28, 35, 38, 43, 45, 91, 93, 108, 113, 134, 143, 148, 192, 201, 204, 206, 237, 335 education 52, 54–56, 61, 63–64, 66 lectures 121, 126

Natural History 10, 47, 58, 91, 105, 142, 269, 283, 303, 319 Plutarch 8, 31, 42, 46, 48, 61, 92, 105, 142–143, 147, 201, 205–206, 247, 267 Pluto 176–177, 223 Poliziano, Angelo 4, 15, 34, 41, 47, 61–62, 68, 113, 118, 133, 139, 281, 295, 325, 338 lectures 38–39, 114, 121, 226, 282 Statius 147 Pollaiuolo, Antonio del 154, 163, 230, 246, 326–327 Pollaiuolo, Piero del 327 Pollux 254 Polycletus 33, 306 Pompey 245 Pontormo 224, 331 Pordenone 95 Prato spirituale 187–188 Praxiteles 290 Priapus 221 Priscian 91, 190, 206 Procis 214 Propertius 308 Proserpina 177–178, 223, 249, 290, 328 Prosper 92, 106 Protogenes 290 Psyche 248–250, 252–254, 256, 258–259, 261–262, 266–267 Ptolemy 77, 91, 298 Pulci, Bernardo 235 Pulci, Luigi 87 Pyramus 204, 213 Quercia, Jacopo della 327 Quintilian 54, 206, 295, 307, 326 Raphael 48, 145, 148, 154, 261, 263, 265, 268, 293, 298, 328, 331, 338 Regio, Raffaele 42, 62, 209, 224 Regulus, Sebastianus 147, 236 rhetoric 26–27, 29, 55, 59, 108, 119, 132, 160, 322, 336–338 Riario, Raffaele 295 Richard of Saint Victor 34 Ridolfi, Giambattista 287 Roberti, Ercole de’ 260 Robortello, Francesco 320 Romano, Giulio 145, 148, 223–224, 240, 242, 261, 266, 268, 320, 331, 339 Rosselli, Francesco 292 Rossellino, Antonio 101, 293 Rossellino, Bernardo 101 Rucellai, Bernardo 122, 124, 130, 284, 328 Rusconi, Giovanni Antonio 228, 319 Sacrobosco, Giovanni 144, 288 Sallust 91–92, 103, 105–106, 126, 175, 205, 308 Salomon 159 Salviati, Francesco 268 Samson 184

INDEX

Sangallo, Francesco da 75, 128 Sangallo, Giovanni Battista da 95 Sangallo, Giuliano da 196, 329, 333 Sansovino, Andrea 129 Saturn 157, 159, 236 satyrs 221, 227, 262, 291 Savonarola, Girolamo 292 Savonarola, Michele 27, 40, 44, 46, 48, 54, 60–62, 68, 325, 338 Scala, Bartolomeo 194 Scamozzi, Gian Domenico 321 Schiavone, Andrea 213 Segni, Bernardo 144 Sellaio, Jacopo del 259, 330, 339 Semintendi, Arrigo 210 Semiramis 290 Seneca 92, 105, 151, 192, 275, 281 Senocrates 289 Serlio, Sebastiano 284, 320–321 Servius 146, 206, 236–237, 303, 327 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria 300 Sforza, Lodovico 102 Sforza, Massimiliano 301 sibyls 159, 178, 235 Signorelli, Luca 173, 175, 178, 180–181, 245, 311, 323, 331 Silenus 227 Sixtus IV della Rovere 107, 163, 323 Sixtus V Piergentile 79 Socrates 42, 151, 249, 254, 258, 298, 309, 325 Solomon 154, 163, 183 Specchio della Croce 87, 186 Speculum humanae salvationis 186 Speroni, Sperone 145 Squarcione, Francesco 96, 106 Statius 62, 92–93, 106, 176, 179, 181, 188, 307 Strabo 108 Strozzi, Giambattista 126 Strozzi, Girolamo 287 Studio Fiorentino 89, 116, 119–120, 122, 237 Studius 291 Suetonius 303 Sulpizio, Giovanni 246, 294–295, 316 Tacitus 126 Tartaglia, Niccolò 122 Teobaldo di Orlando 16, 158 Terentius 90, 92, 103, 105–106, 205 Thales 309 Themistius 303 Theodolus 93, 152, 197–198, 200, 204, 212, 248, 328–329, 331 Theophilus Presbyter 53–54 Theophrastus 303 Thetis 165 Thisbe 204, 213 Thomas Aquinas 7–8, 10, 19, 28, 33, 35, 38, 43, 49, 55–56, 60, 67–68, 95, 107, 150, 190, 192, 269, 298, 305, 313, 315, 318, 337

385 Tiberius 236 Tibullus 308 Tintoretto 213, 224, 331 Titian 213, 221, 224, 241, 331, 336 Titus Livius 91–92, 94, 105, 121, 142, 151, 205–206, 227, 247 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia 258 Tortelli, Giovanni 284 Toscanelli, Paolo 13, 58, 100 Traversari, Ambrogio 188 Tribolo 128, 213 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 125 Tura, Cosimo 96 Uccello, Paolo 229, 326, 330 Ulysses 231, 290 Vaga, Perino del 257, 268 Valerio, Piero 95 Valerius Maximus 92, 105–106, 307 Valla, Giorgio 299 Valla, Lorenzo 37, 40, 46–48, 55–56, 67, 104, 107, 113, 325, 338 van der Weyden, Rogier 38 van Eyck, Jan 38 Varchi, Benedetto 44, 46, 63, 126–127, 132–133, 143, 145, 213, 323 lectures 24, 48, 127, 129, 131, 315 theory for the visual arts 24, 48–49, 63, 66, 129 Varro 49, 206, 283, 303 Vasari, Giorgio 63, 161, 287, 321, 326, 334 academy 75–76, 112 education 12–13, 76, 79, 83, 94, 97, 104, 325 Vite 38, 45, 48, 67, 74, 132, 209, 293, 316 Vavassore, Giovanni Andrea 184 Vegetius 298 Vellutello, Alessandro 181, 331 Venus 157, 159, 177, 213, 234, 239, 244, 249, 252–254, 256–257, 259, 261–262, 266–267, 271, 273–274, 277–279, 290–291, 331 Vergerio, Pier Paolo 54 Vergil 87, 90, 92–93, 103, 105–106, 120–121, 134, 142–143, 146, 164, 176, 179, 181, 190, 204–206, 234, 267, 271, 275, 281, 289, 303, 307–308, 327–328, 330 Aeneid 62, 92, 95, 142, 151, 176, 178, 198, 205, 234, 236–238, 240, 243, 271, 328, 330 Bucolics 142, 152, 197, 205, 235–236 Georgics 108, 142, 205, 236–237 Verino, Francesco 122, 126, 130, 338 Vernia, Nicoletto 62, 338 Veronese 213 Verrocchio, Andrea del 83, 229, 292, 327 Vespucci, Giorgio Antonio 103–104, 281–282 Villani, Filippo 27, 37, 46–47, 54–55, 60, 67–68 Villani, Giovanni 20 Vincent of Beauvais 33–34, 36, 49, 55, 190 Vitae Patrum 187–188 Vite dei santi padri 86–87, 186–189, 329–330

386

INDEX

Vitruvius 12, 19, 29, 35, 41, 44, 51, 95, 97, 115, 119, 134, 143, 147, 149, 204, 338 De architectura 10, 33, 58, 121, 215, 283, 293, 333, 335 education 50, 54–57, 67, 145 Vittorino da Feltre 63–65, 74, 80, 98, 104–105, 107, 111–112, 121, 194, 325 Vulcan 165, 216, 253, 262, 265, 268

Zeno 309 Zenodoro 290 Zephyr 249, 252, 267, 277, 279–280 Zeus 198, 278–279 Zeuxis 289–290, 326 Zuccari, Federico 77–79, 81, 321 Zuccari, Taddeo 268 Zucco, Accio 195