place amongst the masters of civilisation. Like the condottiere, the poet, the grand schemer, the diplomat, like all those who were privileged by nature and who owed nothing to their forefathers, who were themselves the masterpieces of their own spirit, the artist could now unfold the generous forces or the perverted instincts of his conscience without any constraint. Whether it was Michelangelo or Aretino, the artist was greeted as the uomo singolare, uomo unico, the unique craftsman of a dazzling destiny and, in order to use the term that was at the very heart of the Renaissance, the virtuoso. We know that the virtù that Machiavelli glorifies in his most riveting passages has nothing to do with virtue. The virtuoso can be a great Christian, a very pure citizen, an excellent soul – such was Michelangelo and doubtlessly Brunelleschi, as well. But, in most cases, these ideal creatures, such as Cesare Borgia, Benvenuto Cellini, Pier Luigi Farnese, or Aretino, mocked the vulgar morality and the outdated traditions that governed the lives of the naive sort of people.
9. The Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, c. 1480–1490.
Silverpoint and brown ink on parchment, 44.5 × 39 cm.
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City.
10. Angel, c. 1485–1490.
Pen over chalk, wash and white heightening, 25.3 × 16.1 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
At the same time one must keep in mind that society was amazingly indulgent, delighted by the audacity of the strong and thrilled by the malice of the treacherous. The Italian virtuoso was certainly a product of his age. The Italian Church, corrupted by earthly vanities, had too big a share of moral responsibility in this. The motherly tenderness it showed for its beloved artists encouraged them in their most liberal fantasies. So when Fra’ Filippo Lippi had the idea of abducting a young nun and making her his mistress, Pope Eugene IV offered him a marriage dispensation and forgot to release him from his vows. But Lippi rejected the dispensation “so that he could do as he pleased” and kept his head shaved and his status of monk until his death. A dispensation by Pius II did not change anything about this extraordinary lifestyle. In their obituary, the good Carmelite friars registered the death of Frater Filippus, and the clergy of Spoleto devotedly laid him to rest at his church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta. He was survived by his son Filippino (who himself became an artist) and six little daughters.
Later, when Pope Clement VII locked up Benvenuto Cellini in the Castel Sant’Angelo because the latter liked to plant an occasional knife in the backs of Roman citizens, the very noble soul Paul III replied to anyone who denounced the vices of his pious assassin: “Men who are unique in their art, like Cellini, cannot be subjected to the law, and him less than anyone.”
One must thus keep in mind this dominant character of the Italian genius, of the Florentine genius, soaked with individual energy by three centuries of revolution. From year to year, the Quattrocento further broadened the horizon of enlightenment that fascinated the eyes of its children. The temptation of glory roused in them a calling to the arts. The smallest, the most obscure people harboured dreams of immortality. So the poor young man Sandro, clad in a coarse frock in his father’s tanning workshop, haunted by paradisiacal images that he had seen in the village churches, his ear ringing with the chants from the street, was also silently preparing for his future. In this fertile Florence, the butcher’s son Filippo Lippi, the barber’s son Paolo Uccello, and Pollaiolo, the son of a poultry merchant, all did the same.
11. The Annunciation (left panel), 1490.
Tempera on canvas, 45 × 13 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
12. The Annunciation (right panel), 1490.
Tempera on canvas, 45 × 13 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
The first lines of Vasari’s biography of Botticelli deserve a closer look:
The child was raised with much care by Filipepi and instructed in all things that the little ones must learn before you put them in the shops. But, even though he learned easily and fast anything he set his mind to, he was nonetheless always restless (era nientedimeno inquieto sempre) and at school, he rebelled against reading, writing, and arithmetic. Thus the father, irritated by this strange brain (infastidito di questo cervello si stravaganle) and disheartened (per disperato), made him an apprentice with a goldsmith, a friend by the name of Botticello (“the little bottle”), who was at the time an excellent master of this art.
This young boy with the burning imagination was full of promise but was an appalling pupil. Therefore his disappointed father advised him to become a goldsmith. As a matter of fact, he was “scrawling little figures all over his books and those of his classmates”, just like Filippo Lippi. Like Andrea del Castagno, he drew figures and animals on the school walls with coal. Being a good Florentine, his father could not suppress the blossoming talent of the artist who was trapped within the walls of his home. Little Sandro was only too happy to leave the school desks behind and escape the schoolmaster’s whip. So he spent some time braiding light filigrees of gold or silver under the watchful eyes of Botticello, chiselling ladies’ jewellery and reliquaries, and the daisies and roses that would later blossom on his paintings.
13. The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, early 1490s.
Tempera and gold on wood, 34.3 × 25.4 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Vasari tells us that in this time, relations between goldsmiths and painters were intimate and frequent. The trade of goldsmith naturally led to painting. Masolino da Panicale and Paolo Uccello had once been apprentices in the workshop of Ghiberti. And did not many of Botticelli’s famous contemporaries, such as Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiolo wield the file before they touched a brush? Domenico Ghirlandaio was the son of Tommaso, the tinsel maker, whose fingers handled the gold tinsel that young girls used to wreath into their hair in the middle of the century. Andrea del Sarto was later trained in the same art. It was a very Florentine discipline, from which the painters of Florence retained their taste for delicate ornaments as well as for the finesse of their work. The practice of the detailed, scrupulous design, the striving for the most tender, purest, even strange forms, the chatter in the workshop, the proximity of the painters’ workshops, and their delight at the beauty of a sunset, the golden softness of dusk, the austere look of the Apennine mountains washed in dark blue, the faint chimes of distant bells, the farewell to the dying day, which conjured up the memory of the great exiled Florentine Dante – all these impressions were these young men’s labour and leisure at the same time. They helped steer them away from the trade of goldsmith that was honest but limited and rigid in its procedures, and led them onto the footsteps of Masaccio and Filippo Lippi.
The gate of the Baptistery, which Michelangelo referred to as the “Gate to Paradise”, taught the children of Florence lessons every day. In fact, Ghiberti worked on this jewel for more than twenty years, and it almost seems as if he simply wanted to exemplify the easy passage from the goldsmith’s art to decorative sculpture. But it was actually the aesthetic and the techniques of painting that revealed themselves in these bronze bas-reliefs. The very delicate carving of the hair, the pleats of the robes, stirred by a breeze of air, the details of the ornaments are those of a goldsmith, but the general movement of the figures, the confidence and tricks of the perspective, the succession and grading of the layers, sometimes down to a
