Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914

Where Federigo differed from most other captains of his day was in his schooling. He had begun his education at the Mantuan academy of the great humanist teacher Vittorino Rambaldoni da Feltre (d.1446). And his favourite reading in later life remained the usual humanist texts, with a particular professional preference for the histories of Livy and for the De Bello Gallico of Julius Caesar. ‘In arms, his first profession’, recollected Vespasiano, who had sold him many books, ‘he was the most active leader of his time, combining strength with the most consummate prudence, and triumphing less by his sword than by his wit.’38 And in truth, the bookseller reasoned, ‘it is difficult for a leader [today] to excel in arms unless he be, like the Duke, a man of letters, seeing that the past is a mirror of the present’. More followed:

As to architecture it may be said that no one of his age, high or low, knew it so thoroughly. We may see in the buildings he [Federigo] constructed, the grand style and the due measurement and proportion, especially in his palace, which has no superior among the buildings of the time, none so well considered, or so full of fine things … As to sculpture he had great knowledge … employing the first masters of the time. To hear him talk of sculpture you would deem it was his own art. He was [also] much interested in painting, and because he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste he sent to Flanders and brought thence a master [Joos van Gent] who did at Urbino many very stately pictures, especially in Federigo’s study, where were represented philosophers, poets, and doctors of the Church, rendered with wondrous art. He painted from life a portrait of the Duke which only wanted breath.39

That portrait was long thought to have been the formal double-portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro and Guidobaldo, his infant son, now more usually attributed to Pedro Berruguete, the Castilian. And the long-term presence at Federigo’s court of two such major foreign artists, while saying something also about their own crisis times at home, is tribute enough already to the range and intelligence of the duke’s patronage. But the portrait has other intentions. Its first and most obvious emphasis is on the duke’s worldly success and magnificence. Duke Federigo displays his chivalric honours: the Garter of England and the Ermine of Naples. The great book he is holding is bound in the distinctive scarlet livery of what he had always intended from the first to be ‘the finest library since ancient times … bought without regard of cost’. A richly dressed Guidobaldo, at his father’s knee, holds the sceptre of government and promises the continuity in the Montefeltro dynasty which is the second major message of the painting. That continuity had not been easily achieved. Federigo himself had been born illegitimate. He had succeeded his murdered half-brother at Urbino chiefly because the much younger Oddantonio had no son. Then two of Federigo’s own natural sons – the talented Buonconte and probably Bernardino also – had died of the plague; while the pale and delicate Guidobaldo of the Urbino double-portrait was the cradle-sick last child of what was otherwise a quiverful of daughters.

Berruguete’s painting is not overtly religious. It lacks even the usual close attendance of a saint. Yet we are told that ‘as to works of alms and piety he [Federigo] was most observant. He distributed in his house every day a good quantity of bread and wine without fail, and he gave freely to learned men and gentlefolk, to holy places, and to poor folk ashamed of their case.’40 Federigo’s charity, we may assume, had some design. There is another and larger painting at Urbino, more certainly by Joos van Gent, in which the duke is shown with members of his circle as witnesses of Our Lord at the Last Supper. The Communion of the Apostles (1473–4) is the central panel of a big and costly altarpiece, partly paid for by the duke but commissioned for their chantry by one of the wealthier confraternities of Urbino. Its purpose, unequivocally, was commemoration. Not many years before, Niccolò della Tuccia, similarly portrayed with the Madonna of Mercy (1458) at Viterbo, had sought to justify his presence in that company. He was there, Niccolò explained, ‘not out of pride or vainglory, but only in case any of my successors wishes to see me, he can remember me better thus, and my soul may be commended to him’.41 In Renaissance Italy, as throughout the Gothic North, neither the banker nor the soldier, the priest nor the scholar could ever entirely set aside their apprehensions. Art has never known a greater stimulus than fears of Purgatory.

CHAPTER FOUR Expectations Raised and Dashed

‘Money is like muck’, wrote Francis Bacon (1561–1626), ‘not good except it be spread.’ And in his own lifetime there was much more of it about. In complete contrast to the severe and prolonged bullion famines of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Central European silver production had enormously increased. The formerly rich but long abandoned silver sources at Goslar, Freiberg and Kutná Hora had been made accessible again by more up-to-date technologies. And the new silver mines at Schneeberg (Saxony) and Schwaz (the Tirol) had come into full production by the 1470s, to be closely followed in the next generation by those at Annaberg (Saxony) and Joachimsthal (Bohemia).1 In 1542, in the first known formulation of the quantity theory of money (according to which price levels are determined by the money supply), Sigismund of Poland’s counsellors reported: ‘This year the unmeasurable increase of the coinage has raised the value of the gulden very much and will raise it still further, if nothing is done … When now the gulden (which is a measure and standard of everything bought and sold) rises and becomes dearer, it follows that everything brought from abroad and grown at home must become dearer too.’2 ‘As for the reason [for these price rises]’, wrote Peter Kmtia, Palatine of Cracow, that same year, ‘nobody is so foolish as not to see that the multitude of coins is to blame, which is in no relation to either the gulden or the things to be bought, as it used to be in former times.’3

In his own terms, Kmtia’s analysis was perfectly correct: there was too much silver in circulation, forcing up the face value of the Polish gold gulden and causing prices to rise out of control. However, the population of the West was recovering swiftly also, and a superabundance of bullion – additionally swollen from the 1520s by Spanish-American gold and silver – was not the only explanation of the ‘price revolution’ which saw European prices, after their long stagnation, rise between three and four times in just one century. George Hakewill (d.1649), the English scholar and divine, saw this clearly. Writing in the 1620s, Hakewill recognized that it had not been ‘the plenty of coin’ alone which had caused the upward drift of prices but ‘the multitude of men’ – for ‘either of which asunder, but much more both together, must need be a means of raising the prices of all things’.4 ‘That the number of our people is multiplied’, wrote William Lambarde in the 1590s, ‘is both demonstrable to the eye and evident in reason’. And whereas Lambarde’s list of likely causes included the broods of married clergy – ‘which was not wont to be’ – he could also point more plausibly to the fact that ‘we have not, God be thanked, been touched [in England] with any extreme mortality, either by sword or sickness, that might abate the overgrown number of us.’5

Just as everybody by the 1590s had a view on overcrowding, so the contemporary price inflation produced a literature of its own, explanations ranging from usury (the old enemy) to enclosure (the new), from harvest failures and civil commotion to state monopolies and excessive government spending. Fashion also took its share of the blame. Poland’s youths, Bishop Tarlo had complained during the currency scare of 1542, ‘cannot go comfortably and smoothly without foreign merchandise as nourishment and clothing’.6 And seven years later, it was Sir Thomas Smith’s lament that ‘there is no man [in England] can be contented now with any gloves than is made in France or in Spain; nor kersey, but it must be made of Flanders dye; nor cloth, but French or frizado; nor owche, brooch, nor aglet, but of Venice making or Milan; nor dagger, sword, nor girdle, or knife, but of Spanish making or some outward country; no, not as much as a spur, but that is fetched [bought] at the Milaners [milliners].’7

Complaints of this kind are often heard, and are not usually given much credence. However, Sir Thomas – ‘physician, mathematician, astronomer, architect, historian, and orator’ – was no ordinary Colonel Blimp. And as one of the promoters of Edwardian England’s recovery from the chaos of Henry VIII’s Great Debasement, he was exceptionally well placed to appraise for himself the consequences of over-rapid growth. As to how it all began, historians today have yet to agree on fundamentals – ‘the price revolution was a phenomenon of [population-led] bullion velocity rather than of bullion imports’ (Harry Miskimin); ‘the price rises in England were not caused by the influx of precious metals but by … the upsurge of credit and the rise of banking and of the inland bill of exchange’ (Eric Kerridge); ‘the price revolution evidently began in Spain … [and was] a monetary phenomenon after all’ (Douglas Fisher).8 However, the fact remains that, after the long price stability of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, prices continued to rise through every decade of the next; that economies were growing and that their growth was real; and that it was not just prices which rose but profits also.

Much emphasis has been placed on the inflationary effect of large-scale imports of Spanish-American bullion. And it is undoubtedly true that inflation in Spain from the 1520s forced up price levels in other nations also. But the turn-around of the West’s economy had begun much earlier. And it was in the late 1460s and 1470s, when silver returned and the mints re-opened, that rents and other revenues became collectable again and that the purses of the rich were replenished. It was not American gold that enabled Ludovico il Moro (d.1505), the Sforza ruler of Milan, to attract Donato Bramante from Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci from Florence, but a strong revival of Lombard industry and commerce. In Florence, it was the recovery of banking profits from the 1470s that allowed Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent) and his fellow bankers to commission work of the highest quality from Andrea del Verrocchio and Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio. And what supported Andrea Mantegna at Mantua, Francesco del Cossa at Ferrara, and Piero della Francesca at Urbino, was always less the old-style profits of war of their respective Gonzaga marquesses and Este and Montefeltro dukes, than a very visible escalation of landed wealth. Baldassare Castiglione’s hugely influential dialogue, Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), while first drafted at Urbino in 1508, took many more years to complete. And his cherished recollections of life in Duke Guidobaldo’s palace – ‘the very Mansion place of mirth and joy’ – no doubt improved in the telling. But Castiglione (like Sir Thomas Smith) was an expert witness: a professional courtier all his life. And his final judgement, in consequence, carries weight. ‘There was then to bee heard’, Castiglione remembered of those long evenings of lively talk, ‘pleasant communications and merie conceites, and in everie mans countenance a man might perceive painted a loving jocundnesse … And I beleeve it was never so tasted in other place, what manner a thing the sweete conversation is that is occasioned of an amiable and loving company, as it was once there.’9

In April 1528, when his book was at last published, Castiglione was in Spain at the Court of Charles V, where he was Clement VII’s papal nuncio. Less than a year later, he was dead. However, there had been manuscript versions of Il Cortegiano in circulation for at least ten years before his death, and Castiglione’s book was an immediate success. Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) and Francis I (King of France) each received a presentation copy from the author, as did Pope Clement VII (Castiglione’s employer) and Isabella d’Este (his patron). Other recipients of complimentary copies included Eleonora Gonzaga (Duchess of Urbino), Federico Gonzaga (Marquis of Mantua), Aloysia Gonzaga Castiglione (the writer’s mother), and Ippolita Fioramonda (Marchioness of Scaldasole). Thomas Cromwell (the English statesman) is known to have possessed a copy as early as 1530; in the following year, Rosso Fiorentino (the Mannerist painter) had another; in 1545, a third was on its way to Peru.10 Translated first into Spanish (1534), then French (1537), then English (1561) and finally German (1565), nothing better demonstrates the aspiration, widely-shared across the West, for a life-style characterized by good talk and sensitive to the arts on the perceived model of Guidobaldo’s Urbino. It was Victor Hugo who once said: ‘Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. Of that divine tear and of that human smile the sweetness of present civilization is composed.’11 He spoke in 1878 at a commemoration of the centenary of Voltaire’s death. But almost four centuries earlier, in Castiglione’s time, that synergy was already present at Urbino.

Jesus wept for Lazarus. In 1528, he had greater cause for weeping in his Church. Castiglione, the pope’s envoy, took Clement VII’s initial blame for the Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527. But there were many, even then, who saw the looting of Rome’s treasures by Charles V’s unpaid troops as a visitation of God’s wrath on Clement himself and on the venality and chronic nepotism of his Court. A decade before, the growing secularization of the papacy in the pursuit of dynastic ends had been a major cause of Martin Luther’s disaffection when, on 31 October 1517, he nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, thereby launching the German Reformation. His target in that year had been the Medici pope, Leo X (1513–21), second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. But already in 1509 it was the della Rovere warrior-pope Julius II (1503–13), nephew of Sixtus IV (1471–84), whom Erasmus had pilloried (but prudently failed to name) as ‘the deadliest enemy of the Church’, along with those earlier ‘impious pontiffs’ – Innocent VIII (1484–92), Alexander VI (1492–1503), and Sixtus himself – ‘who allow Christ to be forgotten through their silence, fetter him with their mercenary laws, misrepresent him with their forced interpretations of his teaching, and slay him with their noxious way of life!’11 ‘They that will be rich [Paul advised Timothy] fall into temptation and a snare … For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.’ (1 Timothy 6:9–10)

It was Clement VII who reaped the whirlwind that the nepotistic Sixtus and his successors had rashly sown. Yet what must have struck most visitors to Rome, both before and after its Sack, was the ceaseless activity of its building sites. Sound money had returned during Sixtus’s long pontificate. What followed was urban renewal. It was to Sixtus IV that Rome owed the Via Sistina and the Ponte Sisto; to Alexander VI, the Via Alexandrina; to Julius II, the Via Giulia; to Leo X, the Via Leonina; and to Clement VII, the Via Clementia. In the 1530s and 1540s, following the Sack, it was Clement’s successor, Paul III (1534–49), who more than restored the ruined city with new buildings. But while this renewal undoubtedly gained momentum from the economic reforms which Sixtus IV put in place, it was never entirely the work of the popes. Sixtus’s reforms are now most often remembered for the institutionalization of the sale of papal offices which helped create an army of Roman sinecurists and placed a heavy charge on future revenues. Yet he had greater success in the short term. Along with much else, Sixtus freed his cardinals and officials, by protecting their heirs, to use the receipts from their church benefices for private building. Thus it was that Alessandro Farnese (Paul III), while still a cardinal, began building his enormous family palace, the Palazzo Farnese, on the Via Giulia. Then after election to the papacy in 1534, Paul nearly doubled the building’s size, spending almost a quarter of a million ducats on it before his death. Yet this was only one of the many new palaces and villas of Renaissance Rome, built by laymen as well as priests, both in the city itself and its Campagna.12

Paul III borrowed heavily to finance his many works. And it was largely with borrowed money that successive builder-popes – Pius IV (1559–65), Gregory XIII (1572–85), Sixtus V (1585–90), and Paul V (1605–21) – carried out their programmes of embellishment and renewal. They would have done so with more confidence because their credit was good, because their revenues were rising steadily, and – perhaps most of all – because the bulk of their new money, in contrast to earlier times, came directly from taxation of the Papal State.13 Even so, it would take over a century – and more than a million and a half gold ducats – to complete their flagship project, the new St Peter’s, which became one of the heaviest crosses they had to bear. Begun during the pontificate of Julius II – ‘a patron of genius and a lover of all good art’ (Vasari) – under the direction of Donato Bramante, this huge enterprise drained the papal finances and absorbed the energies of other famous partnerships: Antonio da Sangallo (d.1546) with Paul III; Michelangelo Buonarroti (d.1564) with Julius III; Giacomo della Porta (d.1602) with Gregory XIII and Sixtus V; and – following consecration – Gianlorenzo Bernini (d.1680) with Urban VIII (the bronze baldacchino) and Alexander VII (the Piazza).

On 18 April 1506, when the foundation stone was laid, both Julius and his architect were over sixty. Understandably, they were men in a hurry. It was Julius’s intention that receipts from the sale of papal indulgences should finance the work, there being long-established precedents for such action. However, another anticipated source of funding was rising revenues from the Papal State, the full recovery of which became the principal objective of Julius II’s high-profile military campaigns. ‘Here even decrepit old men’, grumbled Erasmus in 1509, ‘can be seen showing the vigour of youths in their prime, undaunted by the cost, unwearied by hardship, not a whit deterred though they turn law, religion, peace, and all humanity completely upside down.’14 But Erasmus wrote in private to Thomas More, his English friend. And neither Julius (on the field of battle) nor Erasmus (in his study) knew the damage he was doing to the Church. ‘I laid a hen’s egg’, reflected Erasmus after the event. ‘Luther hatched a bird of quite a different species.’ The incubator was Luther’s horror of indulgences.

There were many, from the first, who felt as he did. Within two years of publication in 1518, Luther’s polemical sermon on indulgences and pardons (Von Ablass und Gnade) ran into no fewer than twenty German editions. And already by the mid-1520s, there were great numbers of evangelical tracts in circulation in Germany, for many of which Rome itself – so-called ‘Whore of Babylon’, ‘Seven-headed Dragon’, ‘Gathering of Antichrist’, ‘Synagogue of Satin’ – was the enemy.15 That wild frenzy of pamphleteering – the Flugschriften of Luther’s followers – was a specifically German phenomenon. Yet it could not have happened, even in print-alert Germany, if economic recession had still gripped the West. In the event, it was those circumstances exactly which favoured the Roman papacy – new technologies (including printing), the return of sound money, easy access to cheap credit, and the beginnings of world expansion – that almost immediately split the Church.

Those were the circumstances also that encouraged movement in the arts, introducing the Renaissance to the North: to France under Louis XII (1498–1515) and Francis I (1515–47); to Germany and the Low Countries under Maximilian I (1493–1519) and Charles V (1519–56); to England under Henry VII (1485–1509) and Henry VIII (1509–47). It was the Urbino-born painter Raphael, Julius II’s talented protégé, whose fame (Vasari tells us) ‘spread as far as France and Flanders, and [also] influenced the work of Albrecht Dürer, the marvellous German painter and master of fine copper engravings’. Leonardo da Vinci, invited to France by Francis I, died there in 1519. And while Francis was less successful in attracting Michelangelo to the North, having no better luck with the Venetian painter Titian, he remained nevertheless an assiduous collector of their art, being among those contemporary potentates – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey, were others – who severally made Michelangelo ‘very honourable offers, simply to avail themselves of his great talents’.16

From 1529, when he began rebuilding Fontainebleau, Francis I assembled the cream of his collections in that huge palace. ‘All that he could find of excellence,’ recorded the architect-engraver Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau (d.1585), ‘was for his Fontainebleau, of which he was so fond that whenever he went there he would say that he was going home.’17 And one of the king’s most cherished possessions was Leonardo’s remarkable portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, of which Vasari wrote:

If one wanted to see how faithfully art can imitate nature, one could readily perceive it from this head; for here Leonardo subtly reproduced every living detail. The eyes had their natural lustre and moistness … The eyebrows were completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another and following the pores of the skin … The mouth, joined to the flesh-tints of the face by the red of the lips, appeared to be living flesh rather than paint … There was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original … Altogether this picture was painted in a manner to make the most confident artist – no matter who – despair and lose heart.18

That final parenthesis has been repeated ever since to explain a paradigm shift in Western art from the truth-to-nature realism of Leonardo and his contemporaries to the exaggerated gestures, long-bodied human figures, vivid contrasting colours, and extremes of light and shade of the Roman Mannerist painters of the next generation. But giants though the great masters of the High Renaissance undoubtedly were, setting new standards of unattainable perfection, the almost immediate rejection by their pupils of regularity in the arts – in sculpture and in architecture, as much as in painting – had more to do with aspiration than despair.

Following the Sack of Rome, it was in the North that many Mannerists found a welcome. Thus it was that Rosso Fiorentino, the bravura painter, who had been working in Rome in 1527 when assaulted and robbed by German troops, accepted the French king’s invitation to come to Fontainebleau in 1530–1, where he was appointed ‘superintendent of all the buildings, pictures and other ornaments of that place’. And it was at Fontainebleau most memorably, in the frescos and stucco ornament of the Galerie François Ier, that Rosso achieved his finest work. Certainly, Vasari was in no doubt that Rosso gained much more than he lost from his Northern exile, for ‘although in Rome and in Florence his labours were not pleasing enough to those who could reward them, he did, however, find someone to give him recognition for them in France, and with such results that the glory he won could have quenched the thirst of every degree of ambition that could fill the breast of any craftsman whatsoever’.19

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