Fifteenth-century art was dominated by the culture of courts: the Sforza in Milan, the d’Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Montefeltro in Urbino, the Medici in Florence and — most admired of all — the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy in the Netherlands. Their most prestigious monuments were their palaces. Michelozzo’s Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence (plate 12), begun for Cosimo de’ Medici in 1444, combining an elegantly classical interior loggia with a massive exterior monumentality, set the pattern for all Florentine palaces of the Quattrocento, and established the Italian town palazzo as the largest and socially most important type of town house in Europe. By comparison all town houses north of the Alps, even Jacques Coeur’s palace in Bourges (1443—51), seem meretricious and uncoordinated. Behind their intimidating and defendable fagades, the household acquired a secular decoration attuned to the decorum of public and private life. The main rooms, decorated with costly and fashionable Netherlandish tapestries, and with large fresco and panel paintings whose flat and decorative style clearly sought to imitate them, displayed a rapidly enlarging range of secular subjects: the rural diversions of courtly life (the hunt, the Labours of the Month), the adventures of classical heroes (the duke of Burgundy’s castle at Hesdin, with its painted history of the Golden Fleece, was enlivened by a ‘machinerie’ that imitated the lightning, thunder and rain called up by Medea) and — no doubt inspired by Petrarch’s Trionfi — themes of triumph and victory, with a strong patriotic message. Paolo Uccello’s three large panels of the Battle of San Romano, painted for the Medici palace in the 1450s — their busy surface patterns blending impressively with the Medici’s prized tapestry of the duke of Burgundy hunting, which was kept in the same room — celebrated the Florentines’ victory over the Sienese. Such displays of civic virtue relate the allegorical cycles of the fifteenth-century palace to the edifying personifications of justice and good government in contemporary town halls (e.g. Rogier van der Weyden’s lost figures of Justice in the Brussels town hall, 1439—49). The elaborate furnishings of these Florentine rooms — the beds, the deschi da parto (ceremonial birth plates) and particularly the cassoni (marriage chests) (plate 13) — displayed a variety of classical and devotional themes. The outer surfaces of the cassoni often showed moralising classical narratives, while the inner face of the back panel (spalliera) — for example the exhausted, post-coital Mars in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (London, National Gallery, c. 1485) — indulged in erotic references, part lewd joke, part lucky charm.
From the public spaces of the camera the humanist prince (or princess) could retreat to the privacy of the studiolo, a study, a picture gallery, and a treasury of objets d’art. In his palace at Urbino (1476) — a building whose mathematical clarity and restrained elegance so charmed Baldassare Castiglione that he used it as a setting for The Courtier — Duke Federigo da Montefeltro created a studiolo as evocatively personal as his laudatory biography in Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Lives (plate 14). Lined with trompe l’mil intarsia panelling (representing fictive cupboards with the duke’s books, armour and musical instruments), crowned originally with enthroned figures of the liberal arts, and containing a portrait of the seated duke armoured but reading, Federigo presents himself as both successful soldier and enlightened patron, in a setting that recalls the pleasures of connoisseurship, and evokes — in the scientific perspectives of the intarsia — the orderly discipline of the intellectual life.
Such studioli — replete with the bric-a-brac of coins, gems, and objets trouves that clutter the backgrounds of Quattrocento images of scholar saints in their studies (e.g. Botticelli’s The Vision of Saint Augustine, Ognissanti church, Florence, c. 1480) — usually contained prized bronze figurines, an antique genre revived in the middle of the century by Antico and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the epitome of a secular, and frankly hedonistic, taste. The muscular energy of Pollaiuolo’s Hercules bronzes (c. 1470s) (plate 15) or the witty contortions of Riccio’s nudes and animals transformed into bronze table lamps have little meaning beyond their technical brilliance. They exhibit a quality prized throughout fifteenth-century Europe: conspicuous skill, a mixture of facilita (fluency of technique) and difficolta (making the difficult look easy). This sharpened awareness of artistic individuality is expressed in the growing premium put on artistic skill over the artist’s raw materials (a fact which may explain the migration of trained goldsmiths, like Brunelleschi, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, to painting and architecture); it underlies the common practice of paying an artist for both materials and skill, and the insistence in contracts on the direct participation of the master rather than his journeyman; it may also explain the popularity of the new medium of engraving, which, in the hands of Pollaiuolo, Mantegna and especially Durer, could demonstrate artistic virtuosity (made more conspicuous by prominent signatures) to a mass audience. But its principal impact is registered in the single most striking change in the appearance of Quattrocento painting: the rejection of the ‘materialist’ gold backgrounds of medieval art in favour of aerial and linear perspectives. Alberti recommended that any remaining gold or precious objects within the picture should be painted ‘with plain colours’, thus bringing the craftsman ‘more admiration and praise’. Skill could triumph not only over materials but also over subject matter. In her negotiations in 1502 with Giovanni Bellini over the delivery and subject matter of a ‘Nativity’, Isabella d’Este was concerned less with the proprieties of subject matter than with the fact that the istoria came from Bellini himself.