PART THREE
10
ALTHOUGH HE TOOK his vows as a Carmelite friar at the tender age of seventeen, Fra Filippo Lippi was not suited to the religious life. In contrast to his calm, pious brethren at the convent of Santa Maria del Carmine, he had a wild and restless spirit, and chafed at the routine lessons prescribed for novices in the years before being received into the Order. An excitable teenager, “he never spent any time studying his letters, which he regarded with distaste … but instead … spent all his time scrawling pictures on his own books and those of others.” Even when he was given the opportunity to devote himself completely to painting, his imagination roamed far beyond the narrow confines of his cloister. Inspired by Masaccio’s frescoes and conscious of his burgeoning artistic talent, he seems to have begun thinking about leaving his parochial life far behind and exploring the world.
Before turning eighteen (that is, in about 1423), Filippo made up his mind. “In response to the praises which he heard from all sides … he boldly threw off his friar’s habit” and fled the convent. No records have survived to give any clue as to the roads he may have trodden, but—if Vasari is to be believed—he ventured east, through Umbria, and toward the tantalizing expanse of the Adriatic Sea.
Filippo’s wanderlust was, however, to take him much farther than he might have expected. One day, he and a few friends were out in a little boat off the coast of Ancona and were no doubt having a whale of a time. Yet they were ignorant of the pirates who habitually haunted those waters. Accosted by a Moorish galley, they were taken captive and clapped in chains. Carried across the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, they were sold as slaves in the dusty markets of the Hafsid kingdom.
Filippo’s life was “wretched.” Far from his homeland and bereft of any rights, he would have been forced to endure backbreaking manual labor in the scorching heat of North Africa, and even though he had become “very familiar” with his master, it is difficult to believe that he did not long for Florence and the life he had left behind.
Yet even as a slave, Filippo was unable to repress his artistic instincts. One day, he picked up a piece of coal from the hearth and began drawing on a whitewashed wall. Before long, he had sketched out a full-length portrait of his master, dressed in typical Moorish clothes.
Catching sight of what Filippo had drawn, the other slaves hurried to tell the very man he had depicted. Given the status of slaves in the Hafsid kingdom, Filippo could well have expected to be punished severely for defacing the walls of his master’s house. But it proved to be his salvation. As Vasari later recorded,
Since neither drawing nor painting were known in those parts, everyone was astounded by what he had accomplished and he was, as a result, freed from the chains in which he had been kept so long. It was a glorious thing for the art of painting that it caused someone with the lawful authority to condemn and punish to do the opposite, giving his slave affection and liberty in the place of torture and death.
Released from the burdensome drudgery of household labor, Filippo was now charged only with painting and, delighting his erstwhile master with each fresh work, soon earned a position of honor and respect among the Berber people.
Eighteen months after his capture, Filippo was finally allowed to leave the Barbary Coast. Hopping on board a ship, he bade farewell to Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, finally disembarking in Naples, and from there he gradually worked his way back up through Italy to his native Florence. But while he had left the searing sun of the “Dark Continent” behind and was never again to smell the fetid aroma of crowded souks or hear the muezzin’s haunting call to prayer, he had acquired an acute sensitivity for the exotic that would remain with him until his dying day. As he traveled north through the Italian peninsula, he would have been more alert to the “foreignness” of his own land than he had been as a mere boy.
Although Filippo may not have recognized it in his youth, fifteenth-century Italy possessed a profoundly “international” character that it would have been difficult for him to ignore after his captivity in North Africa. In Naples—still a meeting place for the religions, cultures, and trades of the Mediterranean—Arabic was spoken by Moors from Spain, Hebrew was studied by scholars hungry for knowledge, and churches were heavy with the mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy. In Florence, the “foreign” was, if anything, even more clearly evident. By the time Filippo returned to the city, it had become one of the most important crossroads of the world. Florence was a flourishing entrepôt: its markets bristled with pungent spices and luscious fabrics from the distant East; its merchants knew Constantinople, Moscow, and the Levant every bit as well as their native city; its palaces housed servants and slaves of every creed and color; and its streets and squares were abuzz with tales of strange and wonderful places far away. What was more, at the time Filippo reentered Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence was on the brink of playing host to the great Ecumenical Council that Gozzoli later celebrated in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem. Already, the streets would have been thronging with the bearded priests of Byzantium and the brightly colored silk caftans of the Eastern Empire’s highest officials, while the taverns would have been filled with the buzz of Greek chatter and talk of the rapidly advancing Ottoman Turks.
Far from being cut off from the excitement of the wider world, cities like Naples and Florence, as Filippo would have recognized, were emporia in which the whole world was at play and in which people and ideas from the farthest-flung places came together. And just as his awareness of cultural exchange became more acute, so his art gradually began to reflect the interaction of the different societies he had encountered.
Painted in ca. 1438, the Barbadori Altarpiece (Louvre, Paris) reveals the extent to which Filippo was beginning to think in broader, cross-cultural terms (Fig. 33). At first sight, it is a fairly typical example of early-fifteenth-century Italian devotional art. In the center, the Virgin Mary stands on a slightly raised platform holding the infant Christ, receiving the prayers of the kneeling saints Augustine and Frediano. On the left and the right appear a host of angels and cherubs. But a closer look reveals a multitude of other, quite distinctly un-Italian features. There is a clear hint that Filippo was aware of recent developments in northern European art, which he had perhaps encountered through discussions with the many Florentine merchants who traveled there regularly. In contrast to earlier Italian works, the figures are placed not against an impersonal gilt background but in a well-proportioned, accurately represented room, in the left-hand wall of which can be glimpsed a window looking out onto a rustic landscape, an innovation that was characteristic of the works of artists such as Jan van Eyck. More important, however, there is also a tantalizing sign not only of Filippo’s continued fascination with the exotic but also of the extent to which he had come to understand religious norms in dialogue with the other cultures. Far from dressing her in a simple piece of cloth, Filippo gave the Virgin Mary a blue mantle with a finely painted golden hem that he adorned with a series of intricate symbols resembling an oriental script. Although meaningless, this lettering—an example of what is known as pseudo-Kufic—was intended to represent Arabic script and to endow the Virgin Mary with what Filippo (who would have encountered genuine Arabic in the Hafsid kingdom) perceived to be an authentically “Eastern” appearance, irrespective of the “Western” dress of the other figures. In that one, simple detail, East and West seem to have been brought together with sensitivity, care, and revealing astuteness.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE “OTHER”:
THE RENAISSANCE GOES GLOBAL
Filippo Lippi’s supposed experiences in Barbary show that, quite apart from being an age of tremendous artistic innovation, the Renaissance was also a period in which the boundaries of the known world were coming crashing down.
From antiquity through the late Middle Ages, Italy’s heritage, trading links, and geographical position had brought it into frequent contact not only with other regions of the Mediterranean basin but also with much farther-flung reaches of the earth. From the writings of classical authors such as Pliny and Strabo had come knowledge of Alexander the Great’s campaigns through Persia to the banks of the Indus, and of the distant provinces of the Roman Empire, extending from the northern shores of the British Isles to the scorching deserts of Nubia, and from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the shores of the Caspian Sea. From the commerce, confusion, and warfare of the Middle Ages had come a deeper familiarity with the fading splendor of the Byzantine Empire—the remains of which are still visible in the South and the former Exarchate of Ravenna—and an acquaintance with Muslims in al-Andalus, Sicily, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and with the strange, frozen wastes of Kievan Rus’. And from the sudden shock of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the medieval Italian mind had recovered the materials to extend the geographical limits of the imagination yet further. Facilitated by the Pax Mongolica, the Spice Road across central Asia to China had been opened up once more, and inquisitive explorers—including the Franciscan William of Rubruck and the Venetian Marco Polo—had brought back firsthand accounts of the outer edges of the earth.
Yet while medieval Italy was “wired in” to the wider world, as it were, the erratic, intermittent, and often violent nature of many of the most important routes for the transmission of knowledge not only guaranteed that links with other cultures were patchy at best, but also ensured that perceptions of the non-Italian world during the later Middle Ages remained dominated by the fantastical, the magical, and the downright unbelievable. Despite including a great many accurate and well-observed details, Marco Polo’s account of his travels was, for example, riddled with fabulous inventions that owed more to the author’s overexcited imagination than to any actual experience. Tales are told of unicorns, men with “tails full a palm in length … as thick as a dog’s,” a valley filled entirely with diamonds, and islanders who have dogs’ faces, while even so recognizable an edifice as the Great Wall of China is shrouded in wild, mythological speculation. Such fanciful absurdities were far from being untypical. The world of the imagination was filled with extraordinary and implausible characters. The legend of Prester John—supposed to be a supremely virtuous and wealthy king who was descended from one of the three Magi—played a disarmingly prominent role in shaping ideas of the Orient and sub-Saharan Africa, and—thanks to his reputed Christianity—even had a part in international policy making. Similarly, the many versions of the Alexander romance featured the Macedonian king having an affair with the queen of the Amazons in the Near East and being borne aloft in a cage carried by eagles. So, too, Idrisi, a twelfth-century geographer at the court of Roger II of Sicily, argued that gold was so plentiful in Japan than even dogs wore collars made of the metal, while the (probably fictitious) Sir John Mandeville drew on earlier writings for his descriptions of lands filled with phoenixes, weeping crocodiles, and men with heads in their chests.
The dawning of the Renaissance, by contrast, is often held up by historians as having signaled a radical break with earlier centuries. Although contact with other lands, peoples, and cultures had not been lacking in the past, the fourteenth century saw the beginning of an unparalleled expansion of the horizons of knowledge that pushed back the boundaries of understanding further than ever before.
It was not just that the rediscovery of classical literature exposed Italians to the “foreignness” of Greek literature and the greater learning of the ancient world. “Other” peoples—especially Jews from Spain, Portugal, and, later, Germany—were flooding into the peninsula, opening as they did so the doors to greater socioeconomic vibrancy and to medical, linguistic, and philosophical learning of immense value. But most important, travel was the real mainspring of the broadening of the Renaissance mind, and it was in this respect that Lippi’s journey to the Barbary Coast seems to exemplify the spirit of the age. The East, in particular, became a realm of almost unique promise. As early as 1338, the Florentine traveler Giovanni de’ Marignolli became the first person since Marco Polo to visit and return from China and—at the behest of Pope Benedict XII—opened up diplomatic channels and brought back much commercially useful information. Trade with the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, the Mamluk sultanate in Cairo, the Hafsid kingdom ofNorth Africa, the Timurid Empire in central Asia, and the rising Ottoman Empire grew exponentially, catalyzing a passion for greater and more reliable knowledge of the peoples, languages, and customs that were encountered with mounting regularity. Sub-Saharan Africa, too, seemed suddenly to burst into life as travelers crossed the desert and the seas in pursuit of new lands and new riches. But it was in the West that the greatest strides were taken. After the settlement of the Canary Islands by Lancelotto Malocello (from whom Lanzarote takes its name) in 1312, all eyes looked toward the setting sun as thoughts turned to discovering another sea route to China, and it was left to the Genoese Christopher Columbus and his successors to reveal the true, breathtaking novelty of the Atlantic territories. In place of the mythmaking ignorance of the past, there emerged an increasingly rich and detailed picture of a world that was bigger, and more exhilarating, than anyone had ever imagined.
Historians have placed considerable emphasis on the colossal extent to which knowledge of “foreign” lands grew from the fourteenth century onward in giving shape to their notions of the Renaissance as a whole. In a sense, it has been only reasonable to see the pursuit of naturalism in art as having a counterpart in a growing consciousness of the realities of the wider world, and since the beginnings of modern critical scholarship the very idea of the “Renaissance” has been intimately connected with the idea of “discovery.” As far back as the eighteenth century, for example, Girolamo Tiraboschi identified the broadening of intellectual and commercial horizons through exploration as one of the period’s greatest, and most defining, characteristics. In the next century, the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt followed Tiraboschi’s lead and made what he termed the “discovery of the world and of man” central to his conception of the Renaissance. Today, when the advance of cross-cultural studies has eroded the excited spirit of Romanticism and Enlightenment, scholars continue to assert that the Renaissance was, indeed, the beginning of the “age of discovery,” and despite expressing certain reservations, Peter Burke, for example, has not hesitated to draw a connection between the two.
The importance of the identification of “Renaissance” with “discovery” lies not so much in the coincidence of the two phenomena as in the vital impact that the exploration of other lands and cultures is thought to have had on the character of the period, and in the degree to which attitudes toward the wider world changed as a result of intercultural exchange. For Tiraboschi, the “discovery of America” was every bit as important as the “discovery of books” and the “discovery of antiquity” in giving rise to the self-consciousness that he believed was integral to the very essence of the Renaissance. So, too, Burckhardt made the broadening of intellectual horizons the centerpiece of his conception of Renaissance individualism, and although the work of scholars such as Edward Said has done much to bring to light the mutual nature of culture exchange, more modern historians have shown a general willingness to sustain the identification of the two. It has even been suggested that it would have been impossible for the men and women of the Renaissance to have been aware of their own distinctive identity without a clear and sophisticated knowledge of the “other.”
The reason for this is not hard to appreciate, and it is indeed difficult to avoid the sense that here, at last, is one aspect of the Renaissance that lives up to familiar preconceptions of the period. Despite the grim realities of Renaissance society, it has been thought that the discovery of new lands served to produce a fresh sense of openness and tolerance that found expression in both literature and the visual arts. Coming into contact with new peoples and cultures, Renaissance Italians, it has been argued, began to question their preconceived notions of humanity more intensively. When they were confronted with the civilization of the Ottoman Empire, the strange customs of Javanese islanders, and the unfamiliar habits of North American Indians, chauvinism was supplanted by a growing awareness that when superficial differences were stripped away, there was, in fact, an unchangeable human nature that was common to all men. Not only did this contribute to the development of the Renaissance conception of man as an independent, creative individual (most clearly evident in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man), but it also went a long way toward weakening the fantastical prejudices of previous centuries. Men were men, no matter where they came from, and all had the same potential to reach the dizzy heights of human achievement envisaged by the Florentine Neoplatonists. Some, like Pico della Mirandola, were even moved to speculate about whether Christianity did not, in fact, share more with the pagan religions of diverse cultures than had previously been thought.
At first glance, the Barbadori Altarpiece and Vasari’s account of Filippo Lippi’s adventures in Barbary appear to fit nicely with this interpretation. By including a pseudo-Kufic inscription in his painting, Lippi seems to demonstrate his awareness of Muslim and Levantine culture, and to acknowledge a certain shared heritage linking Christian and Near Eastern traditions. That the Virgin Mary wears a distinctly Arabic-looking mantle points both to a certain willingness to root early Christian history in its proper geographical context, and to a recognition that both Christianity and Islam had common roots. Similarly, Vasari’s decision to integrate the story of Lippi’s captivity in the Hafsid kingdom of North Africa into his biography of the artist appears to testify to a sense that the aesthetic judgment of other peoples could evidence the talent of an Italian painter and a belief that the “foreign” was not altogether alien to the life of an artist.
Parallels are not hard to find, and the numerous literary examples are, perhaps, especially striking. As early as the mid-fourteenth century, hints that the horizons of the imagination were broadening to include a more positive view of other peoples and places became visible in Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the first book, for example, a Jew named Abraham serves to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Church in Rome, while a co-religionist called Melchizedek outsmarts Saladin in the very next tale. Later in the collection, an even wider range of locations are chosen as settings for Boccaccio’s tales, and the starring characters—among the most impressive and dramatic in the entire work—are both “foreign” and familiar. Thus, the reader is introduced to the sultan of Babylon’s diplomatic links with the king of the Algarve, to Genoese trade in Alexandria, to the shipping interests of the king of Tunis, and to the dramas of everyday life in Cathay. So, too, the deliciously lusty tale of Alibech and Rustico (see chapter 5) takes place in Gafsa, in modern Tunisia, while the elopement of three beautiful sisters culminates in high drama in Crete. Such tendencies only became more pronounced in later centuries. Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (ca. 1476–83), for example, begins with the arrival of Angelica, the daughter of the king of Cathay, at Charlemagne’s court and has as one of its main themes the struggle between her father and the Tartars, and between the Franks and the Moors. Similarly, in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the Christians’ Muslim enemies in the Holy Land are accorded a degree of chivalry that is hard to ignore.
Examples from the visual arts are, however, certainly not lacking. It was not merely that paintings such as Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem included both striking depictions of the Byzantine court and a liveried servant of obvious African descent. Familiar myths were, for example, also adapted and augmented to take account of growing knowledge of other lands. Depictions of the Cappadocian saint George—whose story not only was shared by different Christian traditions but also served as a cipher for East-West relations by virtue of the dragon having supposedly been slain in Libya—became a particularly prominent vehicle for the display of Near Eastern dress and cross-cultural exchange. In this vein, Vittore Carpaccio’s scenes from the life of Saint George, painted for the Chapel of Saint John in Venice in ca. 1504–7, included a host of turbaned Muslims set in an urban landscape that is a curiously revealing blend of the Italianate and the “oriental.” Similarly, in Pinturicchio’s Disputation of Saint Catherine (ca. 1492–94), painted for the Sala dei Santi in the Vatican’s Borgia Apartments (Fig. 34), the emperor is shown surrounded by figures reflecting the full gamut of late-fifteenth-century Mediterranean cultures, such as Greeks, North African Muslims, and Turks, an image that seems positively to radiate a sense that a world was being discovered without barriers of any kind.
FOREVER FOREIGN?
Yet as with so much else in the Renaissance, appearances are bewilderingly deceptive. Attractive though it may be to equate discovery with knowledge, and knowledge with tolerance, it’s important to remember that such connections are more a testimony to modern sensibilities and Romantic tendencies than they are to Renaissance attitudes. Dramatic and extensive though the discoveries of the period may have been, there really was no objective reason why greater exposure to “foreign” cultures should either erode long-held and deeply felt prejudices or im- pinge on the moral standards of the day. The emergence of a genuine sense of intellectual curiosity about the world could quite easily coexist with ignorance, hatred, and exploitation. Far from looking on new lands with wide-eyed naïveté, travelers often saw exactly what they wanted to see and interpreted the scraps of what they saw through the lens of inherited ideas. What was more, the relationship between Renaissance travelers and foreign cultures was often framed by political conflict, economic self-interest, or cultural parasitism. Although information was accurately recovered and appreciated for its own sake on occasion, misunderstandings abounded, myths were adapted to take account of changing circumstances, and fresh forms of bigotry were crafted to take the place of the old with equal frequency. And as a result, lurking beneath the surface of those artworks that seem so innocent and open-minded is a host of altogether more surprising and unpleasant views.
Regardless of how they initially appear, Lippi’s Barbadori Altarpiece and Vasari’s biography conceal signs not only that understanding was still tempered with ignorance, but also that relativism and tolerance were wafer-thin veneers for crude bigotry and unseemly prejudice. Whatever the nature of Lippi’s acquaintance with Islamic culture, the Barbadori Altarpiece does not seem to point to any genuine sympathy. Intriguing though the pseudo-Kufic script on the Virgin’s hem may be, it remains a rather crude and amateurish imitation of Arabic orthography and does not attempt to be anything more than a superficial stereotype capable of fooling the ignorant. An even more pronounced tendency to approach Islamic culture from the perspective of disdainful condescension is visible in the account of Lippi’s life. Vasari’s biography—which has proved impossible to verify from other evidence—is as much a display of ill-informed cultural caricatures as it is of intercultural relativism. While he might have accorded some weight to the aesthetic judgment of the Barbary slave master, Vasari’s dramatization of that judgment relies on the persistence of notions of Islamic “barbarism.” Even though the Muslim societies of North Africa consistently produced an exceptionally rich and varied range of artworks—from pottery and carpets to architecture, calligraphy, and manuscript illustrations—Vasari quite deliberately affirms that drawing and painting were totally unknown in the Hafsid kingdom, and goes so far as to make this manifestly absurd claim the linchpin of his biographical sketch. Not only is this caricature every bit as reliant on antiquated stereotypes as Lippi’s own use of pseudo-Kufic script, but it also prioritizes the excitement of the narrative over accuracy to an almost ludicrous degree.
For both Lippi and Vasari, the imagination was still fenced in by the barriers of old. And yet their works are, in fact, perhaps among the “better” examples of artistic engagement with other cultures. Insofar as the arts were concerned, the fruits of discovery were mostly rotten. At the same time as Italian artists and writers came into closer contact with the wider world and experienced a greater sense of curiosity about the practices and habits of different peoples and religions, willful ignorance, hopeless prejudice, and rampant bigotry grew with mounting fervor and found expression in ever more insidious forms of art and literature.
The Florence in which Filippo Lippi lived and worked for the majority of his adult life was a microcosm of the environment in which Renaissance attitudes toward the “other” took shape. As one of the epicenters of international commerce and a crucial cultural center, the city was the locus for comings and goings from the farthest reaches of the known world, and was in the throes of the momentous changes that would transform the period’s intellectual outlook beyond all recognition. But at the same time, these factors ensured that it was also the nexus for the development of the more unpleasant dimensions of cross-cultural exchange.
The better to illustrate this, each of the following chapters will take one example of an encounter with “foreign” peoples (Jews, Muslims, black Africans, and Atlantic cultures) in Florence at about the time Lippi was completing the Barbadori Altarpiece as a starting point for setting the Renaissance relationship with the wider world in the broader context of culture, society, and ideas. And as the broadening horizons of Lippi’s Florence are uncovered, it becomes clear that hidden beneath the civilized and sophisticated surface of contemporary art and literature lurked a very ugly Renaissance indeed.