Humanism — or, more strictly, the studia humanitatis — was never an exclusively Italian phenomenon, but the first attempts to link the revival of classical literature and learning with the revival of classical art and architecture took place in Florence at the beginning of the century, under the auspices of three artists whose careers typified the new categories of the ‘fine’ arts: Brunelleschi the architect (1377—1446), Donatello the sculptor (c. 1386—1466) and Masaccio the painter (1401—c. 1428). Florentine republicanism may have hastened the integration, for the heady sense of liberty that pervaded the city in 1402 after the death of its most dangerous enemy, Giangaleazzo Visconti, was articulated by its historian, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370—1444) precisely in terms of Florence’s unique classical past: ‘of all peoples the Florentines appreciate liberty most and are the greatest enemies of tyrants . .. your founder is the Roman people, conqueror and lord of all the world’ (History of Florence, c. 1430). Brunelleschi’s, Ghiberti’s and Donatello’s first steps in the creation of a new style all’ anticha took place in the traditional setting of Florence’s greatest monuments of civic corporate patronage — the cathedral, Orsanmichele, and the baptistery — and were driven by the familiar Florentine device of competitions between artists, set up and adjudicated by city guilds. Just as Florentine humanists recognised that the Latin of the ancients had been given literary dignity by the Tuscan vulgate of Dante and Petrarch, so Florentine artists — doubtless impressed by the myth that the culture of Rome had been providentially transposed to Florence during the Middle Ages — cast their revival of antique forms in a medieval, Tuscan mould. The monumental and emotionally powerful figures of Masaccio’s Brancacci chapel at S. Maria del Carmine (c. 1427) (plate 5), which give to Renaissance painting a new weight and eloquence, owe a general debt to the statuesque solidity of Giotto, and to the passionate idiom of Giovanni Pisano’s Trecento sculpture — itself based on classical models. The first true recreation of classical contraposto in Donatello’s St Mark in Orsanmichele (1410) would have been inconceivable without the precocious revival of antique figure styles by Tuscan Trecento sculptors. Brunelleschi’s first-hand knowledge of Roman ruins and his ingenious use of Roman constructional techniques in his monumental dome of Florence cathedral (1420—36) doubtless contributed to his heroic reputation as the one man who brought about the revival of classical architecture, but the general tone of his Florentine buildings — from the Foundling Hospital of 1419 to the Pazzi chapel of c. 1440 — is more Tuscan than Roman. Despite the new purity of their volumes and the mathematical clarity of their proportions, they recall the delicate arcades and marble incrustations of Florentine Romanesque rather than the scale and weight of imperial Rome. Brunelleschi’s other, equally influential, achievement, the invention of a systematic and mathematical linear perspective, may also have grown out of his direct experience of Florentine architecture, since the geometrical grid which single-point perspective imposes on pictorial space (for which Alberti used the urban term ‘pavement’) finds its closest analogy in the techniques used by surveyors and architects (among them perhaps Brunelleschi himself) to measure real urban spaces. Significantly, Brunelleschi chose to demonstrate his new invention with two (now lost) perspectival views of the two most significant urbanistic developments of Trecento Florence, symbolic of the secular and ecclesiastical poles of its civic life: the baptistery in the cathedral square and the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria. Such links between mathematical space and the ordered but familiar ambience of the city were later made explicit in the townscapes of Carpaccio, where Venice itself becomes the panoramic setting for the rituals of its religious history and civic life. The unity between the ordered vistas of the street and the ideal spaces of art must have been even more literally obvious in the overlaps of image and civic spectacle provided by the outdoor theatricals staged by any Italian city’s guilds and confraternities. In painting, as in life, perspective provided at once a window on to a mathematically ordered world, and a lucid stage for dramatic action, for istoria. In his treatise on painting, De pictura (c. 1435), Leon Battista Alberti (1404—72) presented the first systematic formulation of Brunelleschi’s perspective, in the belief that the painter’s central duty was to uncover the principle of harmony (concinnitas) manifest in the mathematical laws of proportion (mesura) and perspective which govern creation. The painter, in other words, acted like a scientist (Alberti was described by Cristoforo Landino in the 1480s as a ‘natural scientist’), concerned not just with the imitation of the outward phenomena of nature (natura naturata) — of primary interest to Flemish painters — but with the understanding of the creative forces which lie within it (natura naturans). But if Alberti’s painter must align his art to the science of geometry and optics, he must also obey the precepts of classical rhetoric. Like the poet, he must depict a heroic narrative (istoria); he must apply the literary discipline of composition (composi-tio) to figures, limbs and planes, to ensure a pleasing variety (varietas) of action and colour; he must add light, shadow and atmospheric effects to produce a sense of projection (rilievo); and finally, he must suggest mental states through gesture and facial expression (vivacita and prontezpa).
Alberti’s De pictura, like his other two treatises on sculpture and architecture, De statua and De architectura, seems to be addressed more to the informed humanist patron of the arts than to practising artists; but they articulated the interests and practices of the leading Florentine artists of the early Quattrocento, and fixed them, as exempla, for later generations. Masaccio’s Tribute Money in the Brancacci chapel (plate 5), or Donatello’s bronze reliefs for the baptistery at Siena (c. 1425) (plate 7) set a dramatic istoria, composed around the complementary virtues of varieta and compositio (and Landino praised Donatello as ‘mirabile in compositione et in varieta’), within a masterly delineation of classical architecture arranged in perfect perspective. And just as Masaccio was praised by Landino for his rilievo — which makes him ‘the great imitator of nature’ — so Donatello was praised at his funeral for ‘putting nature into marble’ — a reference which could include all the genres of sculpture which he revitalised, from the tomb, the free standing nude figure (David, Bargello, Florence) and the equestrian statue (plate 11), to his extraordinarily virtuoso low relief carvings (rilievo stiacciato) (e.g. The Ascension, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, c. 1428) that convey effects of atmosphere and soft light usually associated with painting. But ‘nature’ here was no doubt also a reminder of the peculiar vivacita, the psychological and nervous power, which infuses all his work, from the early St George in Orsanmichele (c. 1416) to his late reliefs on the pulpit of S. Lorenzo in Florence (1460—6) (plate 21).
Whatever the particular influence of Alberti’s treatises, their identification of the fine arts with rhetoric and mathematics, and thus with the liberal arts, introduced a new distinction in western art between art and craft, and thus, at least theoretically, elevated the artist from a rude mechanicus to a man of letters. Of course, only the most eminent artists could maintain these pretensions, but the first biography of an artist, Manetti’s Life of Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti’s Commentaries, which contained the first collection of the lives of antique and modern masters, with the earliest known artist’s autobiography, suggest that the leading Italian artists did so with some literary style. Their exceptional status marked them off from their leading contemporaries north of the Alps. When the young Durer of Nuremberg arrived in Venice in 1494 he was struck by the divide: ‘here I am a gentleman, at home I am a parasite’.