Florence’s vibrant artistic culture was shaped by its luxury economy. Artistic production reflected the social, economic, and contractual contexts of interactions between producers and consumers, who came from different classes, as well as the religious and aesthetic dimensions of consumer demand. Artists were mostly artisans formed by the guild traditions in which highly specialized skills were learned, perfected, practiced, and transmitted through training and apprenticeships. Like other cities with strong guild and artisan traditions, Florence had long been noted for the quality of its dyed cloth, furs, clothes, jewelry, furniture, woodworking, sculpting, and myriad products whose value lay in both high-quality materials and the talents of artisan-artists who crafted prized and admired objects from those materials. Skilled sculptors, painters, and master builders that we call artists and architects worked in shops they owned or rented, hired assistants, trained apprentices, signed contracts that stipulated, usually in meticulous detail, what they were to do, how much they were to be paid, what materials to use and who paid for them, and by when the work was to be completed. Surviving contracts show that artists were, and needed to be, good businessmen and negotiators who knew how to keep careful accounts, calculate costs, and make ends meet. Most of their paintings and sculptures were produced on commission; works produced without specific commissions and offered to the market were generally popular and less expensive products, such as terracotta reliefs, birth trays, and small devotional paintings. But big, expensive, and artistically innovative works were always the result of commissions, whether from institutions or individual patrons who paid for works produced in conformity with their wishes. This had long been the legal and economic framework of artistic production, and it did not substantially change after 1400.417
New factors nonetheless emerged from Florence’s luxury economy and changing class relations to affect the production of art in the fifteenth century. The same socio-economic context that turned the silk industry into a showcase for the talents of skilled weavers and goldbeaters and the clothing industry into the same for tailors,418 and made them both arenas of conspicuous consumption, also shaped the demand for art and thus the status of artists.419 Growing
Demand for luxury goods that enhanced the prestige of consumers was a crucial factor behind perhaps the biggest difference between fourteenth - and fifteenth-century art patronage: a gradual shift from a balance between public (or institutional) and private (or individual) patrons to a preponderance of private patronage. After about 1400 the transformation of class relations heightened individual patrons’ desire to display their (and their families’) status, honor, and “social identity.”420 With the elite having assimilated the civic and economic ethos of the popolo and, after 1434, lost political power to the Medici, and with families from the popolo continuing to make new fortunes in trade and banking, many in the elite felt the need for new cultural spaces in which to exhibit their superior social status. Conspicuous consumption of artworks, luxury clothing, great private palaces, but also of literary culture and humanism, met this need. Families of new wealth emulated the elite and also invested in culture to advertise their social rise and aspirations, making cultural patronage an arena of competition and mimetic rivalry both among elite families and between the classes. Although this patronage was private in the sense that wealthy individuals hired and paid artists and builders, the fact that so much of it was placed conspicuously on display to promote the patrons’ “greatness” made it at the same time very public.
Contrasts between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries should not however be overdrawn. Fourteenth-century private individuals and families also paid for a good deal of art, chiefly in churches, where citizens vied to establish their families’ rights in chapels and sacristies in which they buried their dead and preserved family memory with artworks that included vestments, chalices, altarpieces, frescoes, tomb sculptures, and sculpted coats of arms. But fourteenth-century chapel patronage was conditioned less by the patrons’ aesthetic and religious preferences than by the devotional and theological traditions of churches and religious orders. Here too, of course, “private” chapels were quite public in that they were meant to be seen by neighbors and visitors and thus to publicize family piety and wealth. Everyone knew that this or that splendidly decorated chapel belonged to a notable family, but, except for the occasional coat of arms (often not allowed) or tomb, there was little or nothing that identified the family, much less the individual, who endowed a fourteenth-century chapel or paid for its wall paintings. But by the fifteenth century, family patronage in ecclesiastical settings increasingly reflected the devotional and/or aesthetic choices of individuals who paid for this art, hired the artists of their choice, and, while putting the honor of their lineages on display, now also increasingly left their own distinctive imprint on what they commissioned.
Civic and public art flourished in the fourteenth century and into the first third of the fifteenth and then declined, in part because the biggest projects were by then completed. It continued thereafter in less monumental manifestations, such as the artistic commissions of confraternities. Like “private” patronage, the concept of “public” patronage requires care. Supervision of civic and ecclesiastical building projects was typically entrusted to citizen works committees, called “opere,” vested with responsibility for spending funds assigned to them, keeping accounts, and selecting, hiring, and paying builders, sculptors, woodworkers, painters, and others artisans. They decided on specific building plans and sculptural programs and were thus involved in aesthetic and engineering decisions as well as administrative matters. Opere typically consisted of four, six, or eight “operai” appointed, or elected by scrutiny and sortition, for four - or six-month terms, and then replaced by new committees. With so many projects and short terms of office, scores of citizens served on opere at any given time, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, over the course of decades and generations. Although laymen without specialized training in the techniques of sculpture or the complex engineering of large-scale building, many developed recognized expertise and were regularly reappointed or elected to different opere.421 They also served as judges in competitions for commissions. Public projects were not supervised by faceless government bureaucracies. Citizens assumed myriad responsibilities in a system of collective participatory patronage in which they significantly contributed, alongside builders and sculptors, to the creation of works of art.
The construction, decoration, and renovation of the palace of the priors always remained under communal supervision. Because the original structure was complete by 1315, operai were subsequently appointed by the Signoria only as needed until around 1470 when the Medici regime made the “palace operai” a permanent office.422 For other projects the government assigned responsibility to the guilds or Parte Guelfa, which in turn elected the operai. At the cathedral, construction began under joint communal-ecclesiastical supervision, then briefly rotated among the five major commercial guilds, and in 1331 was definitively entrusted to the Wool guild. From as early as the twelfth century, the Calimala supervised the baptistery works and the church of San Miniato al Monte; it also acquired responsibility for two hospitals, and later the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. Por Santa Maria administered works projects at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova from the thirteenth century and subsequently had responsibility for the convent of San Marco and the construction of the Innocenti Hospital. In the 1330s it was also assigned the rebuilding of Orsanmichele, the communal granary that became a site of popular devotion to a miracle-working image of the Virgin. After Orsanmichele became an oratory, the image and the great tabernacle built by Orcagna to house it came under the care of the captains of the confraternity of Orsanmi-chele. The popular government of 1378-82 authorized the minor guilds to have images of their patron saints painted on the interior piers of the oratory. In the fifteenth century the bankers’ guild administered two hospitals, and the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai had responsibility for a hospital, a church, and a convent.423 Many confraternities controlled chapels or oratories in which they commissioned works of art.424 Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, so called because it was for a long time in the Rucellai family chapel at Santa Maria Novella, was actually commissioned by a laudesi confraternity, the Compagnia di Santa Maria. Corporate supervision and patronage pervaded every corner of Florence’s ecclesiastical and civic architecture and sculpture.
Particularly intriguing is the history of citizen participation in the well documented administration of the cathedral project by the Wool guild’s operai.425 For a generation after the guild’s assumption of responsibility, attention shifted from the cathedral to the bell tower under the supervision of Giotto, who was appointed “magister et gubernator” of the combined works in 1334. In the mid-1350s, with the bell tower nearly finished, the operai oversaw crucial debates regarding the cathedral. An original plan, which had guided the early construction, was challenged by the proponents of a different design calling for three huge bays in the nave instead of five smaller ones and requiring major readjustments in what had already gone up; the operai presented both proposals to a meeting of a hundred citizens and held thirty-eight other meetings with experts and advisers. A decade later yet another plan was put forward, and the operai requested advice from a large committee of goldsmiths, painters, and masons, led by the builder Neri di Fioravante. Their proposal (known as the plan of the “maestri e dipintori”) was for a dramatic enlargement of the church with the addition of a fourth nave bay, a huge increase in the size of the crossing and thus of the space eventually to be covered by a dome, and the addition of a drum to elevate the dome to what seemed to many an impossible height. A large meeting of eighty citizens (including Salvestro de’ Medici and Uguccione de’ Ricci), together with the operai, guild consuls, master builders, and various experts, discussed the audacious plan and recommended that another committee of eight be appointed to evaluate its feasibility and safety. These eight, all laymen, included a Salviati, a Peruzzi, a Rucellai, a Bardi, an Albizzi, and Uguccione de’ Ricci. Discussions continued throughout the next year concerning the drum and the projected cupola, and the construction site was kept open on Sundays to allow any and all citizens to inspect two large models of the rival plans. Although the operai and guild consuls had already decided for the plan of the “maestri e dipintori,” they went to great lengths to mold public opinion in support of an idea that was risky and in a sense incomplete, because no one had any idea how to build a dome large enough to cover the immense space created by the plan, or whether the walls and piers could even bear its weight. On October 26-27, 1367, more than four hundred citizens filed in to have a look: elite, popolo, minor guildsmen, and artisans. Whether there really was near unanimity (only one person, Jacopo Alberti, is recorded as expressing doubts about the new plan), or whether the notary ignored a few more dissenting voices, the operai succeeded in winning widespread approval for an enlarged cathedral. Only after still more meetings of experts and prominent citizens did they definitively commit the opera, and communal funds, to the astonishingly bold plan.426
Early fifteenth-century public patronage displays both continuity and change in the relationship between artist-artisans and corporate patrons. As in the deliberations over the cathedral design in the 1360s, so also (if Lorenzo Ghiberti’s later account in the autobiographical section of his Commentarii is accurate) in the famous competition announced in 1401 by the Calimala for the baptistery’s second set of bronze doors, in which contenders were required to cast panels depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, the decision-making process involved large numbers of citizens: Ghiberti claims he was declared the winner by a jury of thirty-four, whose judgment was confirmed by the baptistery operai, Calimala consuls, and then the entire guild.427 But Antonio Manetti’s
Plate 6 Orsanmichele, rebuilt from 1330s (Brogi/Art Resource, NY)
(still later) Life of Brunelleschi asserts that the decision was actually for a joint commission, which, although unlikely, is not altogether implausible in view of what happened when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi faced off again over how to build the cupola. In 1418 the Cathedral Opera announced an open competition for design-models, with a 200-florin prize for the winner, and created a separate committee of overseers for the project. Brunelleschi astonished everyone by proposing that a dome could be built without centering or supporting scaffolding, a plan favored by some but derided by others as the height of folly (see Plate 2). Again meetings and extensive consultations followed, and the public was invited to view the Brunelleschi model. In the end, the consuls, operai, and cupola officials approved his bold plan, but they nonetheless appointed Brunelleschi and Ghiberti as co-supervisors of the project in a gesture of compromise perhaps intended to co-opt potential opposition.428
The third great locus of civic patronage of these years was Orsanmichele (see Plate 6), where responsibility was shared among the confraternity, the
Guilds, and the Parte Guelfa. In 1339 Por Santa Maria petitioned the Signoria to require each of the twelve major guilds to commission paintings or statues of their patron saints in the external piers of the granary whose reconstruction the guild was then overseeing. At the time only the Wool guild complied with a statue of St. Stephen by Andrea Pisano, and subsequently a few other guilds did so as well. But for a long time little happened until, in 1399, the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai commissioned a statue of the Virgin and Child; two years later the guild of Jurists and Notaries initiated discussions for the replacement (completed in 1406) of its old statue of St. Luke. Perhaps encouraged by these signs of reviving interest, in the same year the Signoria required all the other guilds with assigned niches in the external piers to commission statues of their saints and have them in place within ten years or risk having the niche reassigned. Over the next twenty years a dozen monumental sculptures were erected at Orsanmichele, including three each by Nanni di Banco, Ghiberti, and Donatello. Nanni di Banco, who had been producing large sculptures for the cathedral, sculpted St. Philip for the guild of shoemakers, the Four Crowned Saints for the stonemasons and carpenters; and St. Eligius for the blacksmiths, all in marble.429 The Calimala turned of course to Ghiberti and commissioned a bronze St. John the Baptist, and the Cambio and Lana also engaged him to cast bronze statues of, respectively, St. Matthew and (a new) St. Stephen. And Donatello, who had also worked on the sculptural program for the cathedral facade, did the St. George for the guild of armorers and the St. Mark for the guild of linen manufacturers and used-cloth dealers, both in marble. The Parte Guelfa had the most prominent niche at Orsanmichele, at the center of the east side of the building overlooking the ceremonial route of via Calzaiuoli that connected the cathedral complex to the north and the palace and piazza of the priors to the south. For that prestigious location they commissioned Donatello to do a bronze statue of St. Louis of Toulouse, brother of Robert of Naples and a Franciscan Spiritual revered in the Guelf tradition. Orsanmichele’s sculptures were the result of a remarkable collaboration of guilds, government, confraternity, and Parte Guelfa, and every work emerged from discussion and debate among the members of these civic bodies.430 A register of deliberations kept by the Arte del Cambio detailing every decision involved in the commission of the St. Matthew from Ghiberti, and listing the names of guild members who served as operai and on the various sub-committees related to
The project, is eloquent testimony to the participatory dimension of corporate Patronage.
But in these same decades traditions of corporate patronage were being challenged by both artists and patrons. Neither Ghiberti nor Brunelleschi was in the mold of the relatively self-effacing supervisors of building projects of the fourteenth century. Legends grew up around the competition for the baptistery door project, as memory of the event was shaped by Ghiberti’s own recollections and by Manetti’s partisan biography of Brunelleschi. This alone tells us that artisan-artists were redefining their relationship to patrons and the public (or having it redefined for them). Their own self-fashioning and the “thirst” for artist-heroes - a demand, even among corporate patrons, for the “best” artists - raised Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello from artisan status and gave them greater autonomy. Ghiberti worked almost exclusively for corporate patrons: the Calimala (for the two sets of baptistery doors); the Lana, through their cathedral operai (among other things, for the St. Zenobius shrine in the east tribune of the cathedral); and both these guilds and the Cambio at Orsanmichele. While working on the second set of baptistery doors, he signed a contract in 1432 with the cathedral operai for the Zenobius shrine but did so little on it for the next five years that they terminated the agreement. Instead of turning to someone else, however, two years later they again asked Ghiberti to undertake the project, and this time he completed it. Brunelleschi’s reputation as a rebel against convention may have been exaggerated by Manetti, but it was not completely invented. Manetti says that he simply walked away from the joint commission awarded for the baptistery doors and that years later his outbursts in heated meetings about the cupola caused him to be carried out of the room more than once. In 1420 he was unhappy about the co-supervisory collaboration with Ghiberti for the cupola but was not about to turn his back on that project. Manetti recounts that he pretended to be ill, forced Ghiberti to carry out on his own a technical procedure that he allegedly mishandled, and gradually forced his rival to retreat from the role of equal supervisor. True or not (as with the elaborate trick Brunelleschi allegedly played on the woodworker Grasso to rob him of his identity, as recounted in the Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo, also written by Manetti), this was the kind of reputation Brunelleschi not only acquired but apparently encouraged about himself.
Competition for prized artists was beginning to undercut the traditions of collective supervision, consensus, and corporate control of both projects and artisan-artists. Even artists whose careers unfolded primarily within the framework of corporate and civic patronage began to be drawn in different directions by private patrons. The always busy Ghiberti found time to make 431 a bronze reliquary for the Medici. In the case of Brunelleschi, 1419-20 was a particularly significant moment in this transition. Within the space of two years, in addition to the cupola, he also accepted the commission from Por Santa Maria to design the Innocenti Hospital and commissions for three private chapels: one from Giovanni de’ Medici to redesign the sacristy at San Lorenzo (where Giovanni and his wife are buried), and two others from elite members of the Wool guild, Tommaso Barbadori, who served on the Opera del Duomo in 1418, and Schiatta Ridolfi, a consul of the guild in the same year. According to Manetti, Brunelleschi was trying to convince the operai and consuls that he could build a dome without centering, and knowing that Ridolfi wanted to rebuild a family chapel with a dome in the church of San Jacopo sopr’Arno he offered to demonstrate on a smaller scale that it was possible. The Barbadori chapel in Santa Felicita and the sacristy in San Lorenzo also have domes,432 and the three projects demonstrate that the fame Brunelleschi already enjoyed as the ingenious designer of the controversial project for the cupola was stimulating the private demand for art that was becoming a symbol of status for elite families.
World History
