Ammanati and Vasari were in Florence the leading architects of the age. It was Ammanati who laid out for Cosimo the famous Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, and spanned the Arno with the beautiful Santa Trinità Bridge (1567–70)—destroyed in the Second World War. He was also a painter and sculptor of quality; he won sculptural competitions from Cellini and Giovanni da Bologna, and carved the Juno that adorns the Bargello court. In his old age he apologized for having made many pagan figures. The Pagan Renaissance had now (1560) run its course, and Christianity was regaining its hold on the Italian mind.
Cosimo made Baccio Bandinelli his favorite sculptor, to the horror of Cellini. One of Cosimo’s recreations was in hearing Cellini berate Bandinelli. Baccio was popular with himself; he proclaimed his intention to surpass Michelangelo, and was so critical of other artists that one of the gentlest, Andrea Sansovino, tried to kill him. Nearly everybody hated him, but his many commissions in Florence and Rome suggest that his talent was better than his character. When Leo X wished to duplicate the complex Laocoon group of the Belvedere as a gift to Francis I, Cardinal Bibbiena asked Bandinelli to undertake the assignment; Baccio promised to make a copy superior to the original. To the general dismay he almost succeeded. Clement VII was so pleased with the result that he sent authentic antiques to Francis and kept Baccio’s copy for the Medici Palace in Florence, whence it passed to the Uffizi Gallery. For Clement and Alessandro de’ Medici Bandinelli carved a gigantic group, Hercules and Cacus, which was set up on the porch of the Palazzo Vecchio beside Michelangelo’s David. Cellini did not like it. “If your Hercules had his hair cropped,” he told Bandinelli in Cosimo’s presence, “he would not have skull enough to hold his brains…. His heavy shoulders remind one of the two baskets of a donkey’s packsaddle. His chest and muscles are copied not from nature but from a bag of bad melons.”31 Clement, however, thought the Hercules a masterpiece, and rewarded the sculptor with a substantial property in addition to the promised fee. Baccio repaid the compliment by giving the name Clement to a bastard born to him soon after the Pope’s death. His last work was a tomb prepared by him for himself and his father; as soon as it was finished he occupied it (1560). Probably he would have greater renown today had he not been invidiously immortalized by two artists who could write as well as design—Vasari and Cellini.
Giovanni da Bologna was a more genial competitor. Born at Douai, he made his way in youth to Rome (1561), resolved to be a sculptor. After a year of study there he brought a clay sample of his work to the aged Michelangelo. The old sculptor took it in his hands, pressed it here and there with his worn fingers and heavy thumbs, and in a few moments molded it to greater significance. Giovanni never forgot that visit; throughout the remainder of his eighty-four years he labored with unrelaxing ambition to equal the Titan. He started back to Flanders, but a Florentine nobleman advised him to study the art collected in Florence, and for three years maintained him in his palace. There were so many Italian artists in or near the city that it took the Fleming five years to win acceptance for his work. Then Francesco, son of Duke Cosimo, bought his Venus. He entered a competition to design a fountain for the Piazza della Signoria; Cosimo judged him too young for so responsible an assignment, but his model was rated best by many artists, and probably it won him an invitation to build a much larger fountain in Bologna. After that Giovanni was brought back to Florence as official sculptor for the Medici, and never lacked commissions. When he went to Rome again Vasari introduced him to the Pope as “the prince of the sculptors of Florence.”32 In 1583 he modeled a group, now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and named in afterthought The Rape of the Sabines: a hero virile and muscular holds in his grasp a ravishing woman whose soft form is realistically compressed against his supporting hand, and whose back is the loveliest in the bronze sculpture of the Renaissance.
The sculptors surpassed the painters in Cosimo’s galaxy and regard. Ridolfo Ghirlandaio strove but failed to maintain his father’s excellence; we may sample him from his portrait of Lucrezia Summaria in Washington. Francesco Ubertini, nicknamed il Bachiacca, liked to paint historical scenes in great detail on a small scale. Iacopo Carrucci, called Pontormo from his birthplace, had every advantage and a good start; he received instruction from Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto; and at nineteen (1513) he stirred the art world with a painting, now lost, that aroused the admiration of Michelangelo and was pronounced by Vasari “the finest fresco ever seen till then.”33 But soon afterward, to the disgust of the Italians, Pontormo fell in love with the engravings of Durer, abandoned the smooth lines and harmonies of the Italian style, preferred crude and heavy Germanic forms, and pictured men and women in poses of physical or mental disturbance. In frescoes at the Certosa outside Florence Pontormo painted in this Teutonic style scenes from the passion of Christ. Vasari resented this imitation: “Was not Pontormo aware that Germans and Flemings come to learn the Italian style, which he made such effort to shake off as if it were bad?”34 Even so, Vasari confessed the power of these frescoes. Pontormo further complicated his art by developing phobias. He never allowed death to be mentioned in his presence; he avoided feasts and crowds, lest he be crushed to death; though himself kind and gentle, he distrusted nearly everyone except his beloved pupil Bronzino. More and more he courted solitude, until he formed the habit of sleeping in an upper-story room reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up after him. On his final assignment—to fresco the main chapel of San Lorenzo—he worked for eleven years in isolation, boarding up the chapel and allowing none but himself to enter. He died (1556) before finishing the task; and when the frescoes were unveiled it was seen that the figures were badly disproportioned, the faces excited or melancholy. Let us remember him by a work of his saner maturity, the lovely portrait of Ugolino Martelli now in Washington—soft feathered hat, pensive eyes, luminous raiment, immaculate hands.
Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, renamed Bronzino, distinguished himself by a remarkable series of portraits, chiefly of the Medici. The Medici Palace contains a gallery of them, from Cosimo Pater Patriae to Duke Cosimo; and if we may judge from the pouchy face of his Leo X, they were often truthful. The best of them is of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Uffizi) —a veritable Napoleon before Bonaparte—handsome, proud, and breathing fire.
Probably Duke Cosimo’s favorite artist was the man to whom this and every book on the Italian Renaissance owes half its life—Giorgio Vasari. The family into which he was born at Arezzo already included several artists; he was distantly related to Luca Signorelli, and he has told us how the old painter, seeing Giorgio’s boyhood drawings, encouraged him in studying design. In one of those innumerable acts of magnanimous and clairvoyant patronage that should be considered in judging the morals of the Renaissance, Cardinal Passerini, who had been appointed guardian of Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici, took Giorgio to Florence; and there the lad of twelve shared the studies of the young heirs to wealth and power. He became a pupil of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, and to the end of his life he revered Buonarroti—broken nose and all—as a god.
When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1527, Giorgio returned to Arezzo. At eighteen, his father having died of plague, he found himself the chief support of his three sisters and two young brothers. Again kindness rescued him. His former fellow pupil, Ippolito de’ Medici, invited him to Rome, where for three years Vasari sedulously studied ancient and Renaissance art; and in 1530 Alessandro, master of Florence after another restoration, called him to live and paint in the Palazzo Medici. There he made portraits of the family, including Lorenzo the Magnificent in a somber study, and the vivacious young Caterina—posing and opposing at whim, as if already conscious that she would be queen of France. When Alessandro was assassinated Vasari wandered for some time patronless. His paintings are rudely dealt with by modern critics, but they must have earned him some repute, for at Mantua he was housed by Giulio Romano, and at Venice Aretino was his burly chaperone. Wherever he went he carefully studied the local a
rt, talked with artists or their descendants, collected drawings and made notes. Back in Rome, he painted for Bindo Altoviti a Deposition from the Cross, which, he tells us, “had the good fortune not to displease the greatest sculptor, painter, and architect that ever lived in our time.”
It was this Michelangelo who introduced him to the second Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; and it was this cultivated prelate who, in 1546, suggested to Vasari that he should compose for the guidance of posterity the lives of the artists who had so distinguished the Italy of the preceding two hundred years. While busily serving as painter and architect in Rome, Rimini, Ravenna, Arezzo, and Florence, Giorgio devoted part of his time to the unremunerative labor of the Lives, “moved by love for these our artists.” In 1550 he published the first edition of these Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, ed architetti Italiani, with an eloquent dedication to Duke Cosimo.
From 1555 to 1572 he was Cosimo’s chief artist. He remodeled the interior of the Palazzo Vecchio and decorated many of its walls with paintings more immense than magnificent; he raised the vast administration building known from its governmental offices as the Uffizi, and now one of the great art galleries of the world. He led in completing the Laurentian Library, and he constructed the enclosed corridor that enabled Cosimo to pass under cover from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi across the Ponte Vecchio to the new ducal residence in the Pitti Palace. In 1567 he spent several months in travel and research, and a year later he brought out a new and much enlarged edition of the Lives. He died in Florence in 1574, and was buried with his ancestors in Arezzo.
He was not a great artist but he was a good man, an industrious investigator, and (barring a few bites at Bandinelli) a generous as well as intelligent critic. In simple, racy, almost colloquial Tuscan, and occasionally with the vividness of the novelle, he gave us one of the most interesting books of all time, from which a thousand other volumes have been cribbed. It is rich in inaccuracies, anachronisms, and contradictions, but richer still in fascinating information and judicious interpretation. It did for the artists of Renaissance Italy what Plutarch had done for the martial or civic heroes of Greece and Rome. It will remain for centuries to come one of the classics of the world’s literature.
V. BENVENUTO CELLINI: 1500–71
There was in this age at the court of Cosimo a man who united in his character all the violence and sensitivity, all the mad pursuit of beauty in life and art, all the exhilarating pride of health, skill, or power, that distinguished the Renaissance; who, moreover, possessed the spontaneous capacity to pour forth his thoughts and feelings, vicissitudes and accomplishments, in one of the most engaging and unforgettable of all autobiographies. Benvenuto was not—no one man could be—completely typical of the Renaissance genius; he lacked the piety of Angelico, the craft of Machiavelli, the modesty of Castiglione, the blithe suavity of Raphael; and surely not all Italian artists of the time took the law into their own hands as Benvenuto did. Yet, as we read his turbulent narrative, we feel that his book, more than any other, more even than Vasari’s Lives, takes us behind the scenes, and into the heart, of the Renaissance.
He begins disarmingly:
All men, of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty. This duty occurs to my own mind, now that I am traveling beyond the term of fifty-eight years, and am in Florence, the city of my birth.
He is proud that he was “born humble” and made his family famous; at the same time he assures us that he was descended from a captain of Julius Caesar; “in a work like this,” he warns us, “there will always be found occasion for natural bragging.”35 He was called Benvenuto—welcome—because his parents expected a girl and were pleasantly surprised. His grand father (probably violating all of Cornaro’s precepts) lived a hundred years; Cellini, inheriting his vitality, crowded as many into seventy-one. His father was an engineer, a worker in ivory, and a devotee of the flute; his fond hope was that Benvenuto would become a professional flutist and play in the band at the Medici court; in later years he seems to have derived more pleasure from hearing that his son had become a flutist in Pope Clement’s private orchestra than from the goldsmithery by which the youth was earning florins and fame.
But Benvenuto was enamored of beautiful forms rather than of melodious sounds. He saw some of the work of Michelangelo, and caught the fever of art. He studied the cartoon for The Battle of Pisa, and was so impressed by it that even the Sistine Chapel ceiling seemed to him less marvelous. Against his father’s pleading he apprenticed himself to a goldsmith, but in filial compromise he continued to practise the hated flute. In Filippino Lippi’s house he found a book of drawings representing the art antiquities of Rome. He burned with desire to see those renowned exemplars with his own eyes, and often he talked with his friends about going to the capital. One day he and a young woodcarver, Giambattista Tasso, walking aimlessly and talking passionately, found themselves at the gate San Piero Gattolini; Benvenuto remarked that he felt himself already halfway from Florence to Rome; on a mutual dare they walked on, mile after mile, until they reached Siena, thirty-three miles away. There Gian’s feet rebelled. Cellini had money enough to hire a horse; the two youths rode the one animal, and, “singing and laughing, we traveled the whole way to Rome. I had just nineteen years then, and so had the century.”36
In Rome he found work as a goldsmith, studied the ancient remains, and earned enough to send his father consolatory sums. But the doting father pled so earnestly for his return that after two years Benvenuto went back to Florence. He had hardly domiciled himself there when he stabbed a youth in a quarrel. Thinking he had killed him, he fled again to Rome (1521). He pored over Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s in the Villa Chigi and the Vatican; he noted all interesting forms and lines in men and women, metals and foliage; soon he was the best goldsmith in Rome. Clement took to him first as a flutist, then discovered his excellence in design. Cellini made such handsome coins for him that the Pope appointed him “stamp master of the papal mint”—i.e., designer of currency for the Papal States. Each cardinal had a seal, sometimes “as large as the head of a twelve-year-old child,” which was used to impress the wax that sealed a letter; some such seals were worth a hundred crowns ($1250?). Cellini engraved seals and coins, cut and set gems, modeled medallions, enameled cameos, made a hundred varieties of objects in silver and gold. These “various departments of art,” he writes, “are very different from one another, so that a man who excels in one of them, if he undertakes another, hardly ever achieves the same success; whereas I strove with all my power to become equally versed in all of them; and in the proper place I shall demonstrate that I attained my object.”37
Benvenuto brags on almost every page, but with such consistency and ardor that at last we come to believe him. He speaks of his “fine physiognomy and bodily symmetry,” and we cannot deny it. “Nature bestowed on me a temperament so happy, and of such excellent parts, that I was freely able to accomplish whatever it pleased me to take in hand.” Among these pleasant objects was “a girl of great beauty and grace, whom I used as a model.… I used frequently to pass the night with her…. After indulgence in sexual pleasure my slumber is sometimes very deep.”38 From one such slumber he woke to find himself host to the “French disease.” In fifty days he was cured, and took another mistress.
We glimpse the lawlessness of Italian city life in the sixteenth century when we note with what easy conscience Cellini overrode the commandments of Church and state. Apparently the policing of Rome was lax and fragmentary; a man of strong instincts could be—sometimes had to be—a law unto himself. When provoked Benvenuto “felt a fever” which “would have been my death had I not resolved to give it vent”;39 when offended “I thought I ought to act as well as intone my misereres??
?40 He fell into a hundred quarrels, and, he assures us, was in the right in all but one. He stuck a dagger into the neck of one offender, and with such matador precision that the man fell dead.41 In another case “I stabbed him just beneath the ear. I gave him only two blows, for he fell stone dead at the second. I had not meant to kill him, but, as the saying goes, knocks are not dealt out by measure.”42
His theology was as independent as his morality. Since he was always right (but once), he felt that God must be on his side, giving more power to his arm; he prayed to God for aid in his murders, and gave Him due credit for his success. However, when God failed to answer his prayers to help him find his lost love Angelica, he turned to devils for supplementary aid. A Sicilian sorcerer took him to the deserted Colosseum at night, drew a magic circle in the ground, lit a fire, sprinkled perfumes on the flames, and with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin invocations summoned demons to appear. Benvenuto was sure that hundreds of phantoms rose before him, and that they predicted his early reunion with Angelica. He returned to his house, and spent the rest of the night seeing devils.43