Botticelli's Secret, page 5
Though Dante’s spirit began to struggle for a home among Italy’s scholars and intellectuals, its poets and artists continued to welcome him with open arms. In the Florentine author Franco Sacchetti’s Il trecentonovelle, a collection of “three hundred short stories” that appeared in 1399, soon after Boccaccio’s lectures, one tale finds Dante winding his way through the streets of Florence on his way to attend to a legal matter, when he happens upon a blacksmith who “sang from Dante’s poem as one sings a song, and he so jumbled his verses, clipping here and adding there, so that he seemed to Dante to be doing him a very great injury.”68 The image of a lowly workman chanting Dante’s epic poem from memory in the streets confirmed Petrarch’s prophecy: Dante had indeed become the cultural go-to for the tavern drunkard and his social equivalents. Meanwhile, the literary persona of Dante himself had fully emerged with characteristics that we recognize to this day. In Sacchetti’s story, Dante was reputed to be a cool, cutting customer, so he said nothing to the smith. Rather, he calmly walked over to his forge, grabbed his tools, and threw his hammer into the street. The bewildered blacksmith asked, “What the devil are you doing? Are you mad?” Dante answered, “If you don’t want me to spoil your things, don’t spoil mine.”69
The story distills the ferocious ingegno, quick wit, associated with Dante, while revealing how his poem permeated the public spaces of Florence. Sacchetti narrates a similar story that finds Dante, once again, walking through Florence and encountering a donkey-man, basically a garbageman collecting loads of waste. The donkey-man was “singing out of the book of Dante,” and “when he had sung a piece he struck his animal, and cried, ‘Arri!’ ”70 Dante was none too pleased when he heard the garbageman say “Heel!” (Arri!) to his beast, as though this grating sound was part of The Divine Comedy, so he walked over and gave him a sharp blow, saying, “I did not put that ‘arri’ in my book.”71 The donkey-man did not recognize Dante and drove on, then turned and stuck out his tongue mockingly, saying to Dante, “Take that!” Dante registered the insult and, once again thinking quickly, sneered to the man, “I would not give one verse of mine for a hundred of yours.”72
Sacchetti’s most telling story involves the poet Maestro Antonio da Ferraro. A gambler and sinner, he embodied the Italian trait of furbizia, cunning or street smarts. After a day of gambling losses, Antonio found himself in a church in Ravenna and noticed that there was a cluster of candles before a crucifix just a few paces away from Dante’s tomb. From either reverence or mischief—probably a combination of both—Antonio did something heretical, transferring all the candles from the crucifix to Dante’s tomb. Brought to account for this sin by the people of Ravenna, he explained his seemingly impious action thus:
Look at the writings of one [the Bible] and the other [Dante]. You will conclude that those of Dante are a wonder of nature and the human intellect, and that [in contrast] the gospels are stupid. And indeed, if those gospels contain anything high and wonderful, it’s not surprising, since He who sees everything and has everything [God] should express Himself in that manner. But what’s more remarkable is that Dante, a mere man . . . has nevertheless seen all and written all. . . . So from now on I’m going to devote myself to him [instead of God].73
The words may drip with ironic mockery, but the sentiment Antonio expresses is real: for him and many other Italians, from the lowborn and uneducated to the noble and learned, Dante had come to be seen as a “wonder of nature and of the human intellect,” his Divine Comedy a preferable alternative to the word of God. Though a “mere man,” Dante somehow had “seen all and written all.” For Antonio and Florence’s donkey-men, to meditate on The Divine Comedy was to reflect on the divine itself.74
TWO /
Bottega to Brand
Botticelli, Inferno 18.
bpk Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY
Il suo famigliarissimo Dante . . .
The Dante he knew most intimately . . .
—VASARI ON MICHELANGELO’S FAVORITE AUTHOR
Around the time that an imagined Dante was haranguing a blacksmith and garbageman in Franco Sacchetti’s stories, Florence’s leading artists and architects prepared to compete for what would be the greatest prize in a generation. Long before the swollen Duomo would rise up to define the Florentine skyline, the Baptistery was the spiritual heart of the city. Dedicated to Florence’s patron saint, John the Baptist, it was where all Florentine citizens—including Dante—received the sacrament of baptism. In 1401, the city’s powerful cloth merchant guild, the Arte di Calimala, announced a competition to complete the Baptistery’s two remaining doors, the first having been designed by the noted architect Andrea del Pisano. The massive doors were to be made of bronze and would be the first prominent work in Florence cast in that costly metal. The prestige of the building, combined with the deep pockets of the Calimala and the splendor of the Baptistery’s existing art, were enough to make Florence’s artists salivate.1
The Calimala announced that the competition was open to “skilled masters from all the lands of Italy,” and eventually that wide field was whittled down to three finalists, who were invited to submit models depicting the biblical scene of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac: Filippo Brunelleschi, his friend Donatello, and an obscure young goldsmith from the tiny Tuscan town of Pelago, Lorenzo Ghiberti.2 Then, according to Vasari, in a heroic act of team spirit Brunelleschi and Donatello “decided that only Lorenzo’s [model] was satisfactory, and they agreed that he was better qualified for the work than they. . . . So they approached the [judges] and argued persuasively that the commission should be given to Lorenzo . . .”3
Vasari’s notional split decision was hardly how Ghiberti himself saw it:
To me was conceded the palm of victory by all the experts and by all those who had competed with me. To me the honor was conceded universally and with no exception. To all it seemed that I had at that time surpassed the others without exception, as was recognized by a great council and an investigation of learned men.4
Brunelleschi’s biographer Antonio Manetti offered yet another perspective. After essentially accusing Ghiberti of colluding with jurors while preparing his model, Manetti wrote that the hung jury couldn’t decide between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, and so offered them the commmission jointly. But the irascible Brunelleschi would have none of it:
When Filippo and Lorenzo were summoned and informed of the decision, Lorenzo remained silent while Filippo was unwilling to consent unless he was given entire charge of the work. On that point he was unyielding. The officials made the decision thinking that certainly they would in the end agree. Filippo, like one who unknowingly has been destined for some greater tasks by God, refused to budge.5
Manetti’s image of a larger-than-life and prodigiously self-confident Brunelleschi reveals that Vasari wasn’t the only Renaissance historian prone to mythmaking. Whatever the actual case, the commission did in fact go to Ghiberti alone, and Brunelleschi proceeded to leave Florence and spend the next fifteen years in Rome with his sidekick Donatello, studying ancient forms and nursing his grudge as only a high-spirited Florentine could.
So what really happened? All three accounts contain partial truths. As Vasari and Manetti wrote, the jury very likely was divided between the equally magnificent panels submitted by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, and it is plausible that such an important project could have been jointly assigned to the two young and inexperienced goldsmiths (Brunelleschi was twenty-four and Ghiberti twenty-three).6 It’s also difficult to argue with Ghiberti’s boastful claims about the quality of his model and its effect on the jurors, as he eventually completed a work of such astounding beauty that Michelangelo would dub it the “Gates of Paradise.” Yet each of the three accounts also contains distortions, if not outright lies: the competitors were hardly as virtuous as Vasari made them out to be, Ghiberti was probably not the categorically triumphant winner his self-promotional account proclaims, and Manetti’s fulsome elegy of the high-minded Brunelleschi comes across as partisan. Taken together, the divergent narratives all point to one thing: the intensely communal and interactive nature of artistic life in Florence. As brutally competitive as the contest for the Baptistery doors was, it reflected the artistic ferment taking place in the city, which had become home to an astonishing number of brilliant craftsmen and creators all vying to make their names and earn their fortunes through the increasingly ambitious commissions and public works that defined a city as self-consciously aware of its grandeur as Florence.
The drama of the Baptistery doors set the stage for an even more hotly contested competition, for an even greater prize, in 1418: the commission to design the Duomo, or dome, of Florence’s main cathedral, which would sit atop Santa Maria del Fiore on the city’s sacred axis. No monument would better symbolize Florence’s cocktail of civic pride and self-promotion than the Duomo, which aimed to be the world’s largest self-supporting dome. Once again, the entrants included Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, now middle-aged and at the height of their powers. According to Vasari, as desperately as the secretive and suspicious Brunelleschi wanted the commission, he was just as keen not to reveal his design for fear that it would be stolen by a competitor. So when the committee pressed him to explain his proposal for erecting the gigantic dome, the likes of which had not appeared since the Roman Pantheon a millennium earlier, Brunelleschi replied that whoever could balance an egg on a table would be capable of producing the winning form. He allegedly proceeded to crack the end of an egg and stand the shell perfectly upright and balanced on the table. The committee members were so impressed by the artist’s wit and ingenuity, Vasari wrote, that “they resolved that Filippo should be given the task of carrying out the work.”7
In truth, no deftly cracked egg decided the fate of the most consequential architectural competition of the Renaissance, a drawn-out affair that slogged on for years, with Brunelleschi only acquiring complete control of the project after yet another bitter tussle with his archrival Ghiberti.8 But the legend of the cracked egg reveals, once again, the deeply social, interdependent nature of Florence’s creative class, as well as another quality long associated with the Florentines, a people known as spiritosi, spirited to the point of being prickly, fond of verbal sparring, and able to think on their feet. Vasari wished to display Brunelleschi’s ingenium, or raw genius, with his story of the cracked egg. Similarly, Vasari wrote, when Giotto was asked for proof of his talent by a patron, he responded by drawing a perfect circle in all its spare and unadorned simplicity.9
That so many of these great names knew, competed against, and told stories about one another astonishes us now. But their intense connections were no coincidence or fluke. Over the decades, their creative talent had been nurtured by the city’s botteghe, or workshops, a system of artisanal training and apprenticeship. While other Italian cities, especially Venice, also developed their own workshop system, Florence had the most elaborate and programmatic model for mapping out the course of study and practical expectations for aspiring craftsmen.
By the late fifteenth century, Florence had more woodcarvers than butchers, suggesting that creating beautiful objects was considered as essential as eating meat. The city had more than fifty workshops for marble and stone, forty-plus master goldsmiths and silversmiths, and some thirty master painters (a group that would include Botticelli).10 As renowned as some of these craftsmen would become, they did not think of themselves as “artists” in the modern sense of the word—that is, highly educated, theoretically minded creators with special powers. It was only after Vasari and his Lives that the “artist” was thought of as someone imbued with remarkable, often divinely inspired, genius. Vasari would transform humble artisans and craftsmen into exalted beings.11
Men like Brunelleschi learned about the structures of buildings and the elements of art through on-the-job training. They either toiled as apprentices in a master’s workshop or, in the manner of Brunelleschi and Donatello during their Roman sojourn, went out in the field and observed firsthand the way that objects were conceived and created.12 The place where these artisans brought their discoveries to life was the bottega, which was at once their university and their second home, if not their first. In the collegial and convivial atmosphere of the bottega, craftsmen not only worked side by side but also drank together, played jokes on one another, and slept with one another’s women (and men) with the same passion and resourcefulness that they put into their work. The traditions of the bottega went deep into the Florentine past. In his Craftsman’s Handbook from 1390, the painter Cennino Cennini described his mammoth twelve-year-long apprenticeship, a period of enforced labor closer to indentured servitude than artistic training.
The time frame became more relaxed as the Renaissance progressed, but the reach of the bottega only increased. A typical noble home such as Florence’s Palazzo Davanzati—the four-story mansion of a wealthy wool-trading family in the city’s historic center, which has now been converted into a museum—was filled with a dazzling mixture of products from the city’s botteghe and beyond. Unlike the daunting towers that dominated the Florentine cityscape in Dante’s era, by the time the Davanzati decorated their home the emphasis was not on military protection but on a mix of functionality and aesthetic design. The pedigree and beauty of the furnishings reflected the family’s high standing and social clout. The age’s suppliers included the Tuscan towns of Montelupo and Deruta, centers for the manufacture of high-quality, hand-painted ceramics, items that were considered artigianali, artisanal, to reflect their practical use in the kitchen or dining room. The botteghe were responsible for other decorative works in a wealthy Florentine’s home, everything from the della Robbia family’s colorful, tin-glazed terracotta statuary to the endless religious-themed paintings created under the direction of masters ranging from Andrea del Verrocchio (Leonardo’s teacher) to Domenico Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s maestro). The line between “craft” and “fine art” was blurred, as highly skilled in-between trades like the goldworker, orefice, customized their products with great sophistication in response to consumer demand.13 The Renaissance workshop changed the history of art through its emphasis on versatility. We now think of Leonardo as primarily a painter, yet his apprenticeship under the sculptor Verrocchio taught him how to give volume and three-dimensional life to his canvases. Meanwhile, though Michelangelo considered himself primarily a sculptor, he apprenticed under the painter Ghirlandaio, who trained him to infuse psychological complexity and emotional texture into his marble forms, a skill that was indispensable in his Sistine Chapel frescoes.14
Nowhere was this collaborative spirit and its emphasis on experiential learning more evident than in a painting sometimes called “the Sistine Chapel of the early Renaissance.” The Brancacci Chapel of Florence’s Santa Maria del Carmine contains a cycle of frescoes, dedicated to the life of Saint Peter, that was begun in the 1420s by the painters Masolino and Masaccio. When Masolino left the project soon after it was commissioned to return to his duties as painter for the King of Hungary, the young Masaccio—who would die at the tragic, tender age of twenty-seven—completed the lion’s share of the frescoes, which became so popular that Vasari described them as a kind of Florentine art school that would draw Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Perugino, and Raphael, among others. “In sum,” wrote Vasari, “all those who wanted to study painting always went to learn something in this chapel and immerse themselves in the precepts and rules that Masaccio established for the human figure.”15 A half-century after Masaccio died, the marvelously talented Filippino Lippi put the finishing touches on the cycle. Filippino’s father, Fra’ Filippo Lippi, had stood on the scaffold with Masaccio as he worked, learning the techniques that he would later pass along to his pupil, Sandro Botticelli, the painter who would in turn train Lippi’s son Filippino.16 One work of art, almost one hundred years in the making, by three major artists: with the Brancacci Chapel, the collaborative spirit of the Renaissance reached its summit (Plate 2).
The bottega provided more than technical training. It was also a classroom for many artists who had little to no formal schooling. Emphasizing Brunelleschi’s untutored brilliance, Vasari wrote, “non aveva lettere,” he was unlettered—that is, he had no knowledge of Latin. Mastering this ancient language was the academic credential of the age, the equivalent of a college degree. Knowing your Cicero and Caesar was the surest way of being considered istruito, educated. Despite his lack in that regard, Vasari continued, Brunelleschi could “discourse so skilfully from practical experience” that he could out-argue even the learned on theoretical issues.17 This hands-on learning enabled Brunelleschi to create transcendent adaptations of challenging scenes from the Bible in his model for the Baptistery doors and, more broadly, make major discoveries in the laws of perspective and the principles of engineering.
Vasari went on to say that Brunelleschi “devoted much energy . . . to Dante’s work, which was greatly understood by him . . . and often he would place comments on Dante into his measurements and plans.”18 Brunelleschi was just one of many artists transfixed by Dante’s persona and poetry, inspiring Vasari to underscore the poet’s hold on Florence’s creative class. Similarly, one of Dante’s earliest commentators wrote of how, one day, while Dante was watching his friend Giotto paint, he asked the artist why his figures were all so beautiful while his children were so ugly.19 Giotto’s quick reply was that he painted his figures by day but made his children by night, in the dark, when he couldn’t see what he was doing. The tale is fictitious, but it conveys the painter’s trademark earthy wit and deftness with words, traits typical of the rowdy botteghe.20 Petrarch had warned that poetry did not belong in tabernis, in the taverns, but that was exactly where many of Florence’s artists spent their free time, often discussing Dante and reciting his poetry a memoria, by heart. Artists like Brunelleschi and Giotto were far removed from the rarefied humanist culture promoted by Florence’s bookish class, preferring Dante’s no-nonsense personality and visceral, emotional verse. In fact, the earliest biography of Leonardo, written in 1540 by the same unknown author who first mentioned Botticelli’s Dante project, the Anonymous Magliabechiano, even described what he called a “Dante competition” between Leonardo and Michelangelo, to see which of the two could best explain key passages in the Commedia.21 Neither proven nor refuted to this day, the anecdote suggests Dante’s omnipresence in the Florentine art world: his epic had become the stuff of everyday conversation.22 In the words of Michelangelo, arguably the most Dantesque artist of all and an obsessive commentator on the Commedia his entire life, “No greater man [than Dante] was ever born.”23
