In reality, humanists saw no dichotomy between Antiquity and Nature. For Alberti, as much as for Leonardo Bruni or Machiavelli, Antiquity offered dynamic exempla not just for imitation, but for the understanding of physical and human nature — particularly its more complex and elusive aspects. Behind the fantastic monsters and quasi-vegetal ornaments that overload the backgrounds of many late Quattrocento paintings (e.g. Filippino Lippi’s Expulsion of the Dragon in the Strozzi chapel of S. Maria Novella in Florence, finished 1502) lies the grotesque, late Antique style of wall decoration unearthed in the 1480s by the excavations in the Domus Aurea, the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Villa. Behind the increasing interest shown by late fifteenth-century artists in emotional characterisation, evident principally in an intensification of movement, of hair, drapery and gesture, lies not only the highly charged emotionalism of Flemish painting, but the antique ‘pathos formula’ (as Warburg called it) of Dionysiac ecstasy and pain. Andrea del Castagno’s David (Washington, National Gallery, c. 1450) is a transfigured Niobe; the harsh pathos of Donatello’s last works, with their Maenad-like gestures of grief, and their Dionysiac putti, convert the classical rhetoric of orgiastic release into a language of profound Christian emotion (plate 21).
Such transformations raised problems of decorum, what Leonardo defined as ‘the suitability of action, clothing, and situation’. Ghirlandaio’s use of figures with fluttering drapery seems confined to girls of lower social status. Social superiority was evidently expressed in dignified and barely perceptible movement. Similarly, the charade mood of many Quattrocento depictions of classical themes, particularly in cassoni and deschi da parte, where classical history is enacted in contemporary costume, attracted a number of fifteenth-century critics, among them Filarete, who argued that ‘figures of Caesar or Hannibal ... should be done according to their quality and their nature’. To fashion a new antique style for classical subject matter was the principal achievement of Andrea Mantegna (1431—1506), whose upbringing among the flourishing humanists of Padua University gave a profoundly antiquarian flavour to every aspect of his art. His heroic evocations of the gravitas of Rome, particularly evident in his cycle of The Life of St James in the lost Eremitani in Padua (c. 1450) (plate 22), display a scholarly knowledge of Roman architecture, armour and epigraphy, and a special sensitivity to Roman sculpture, not only in the render ing of sculptural detail, but in a pervasive stoniness of texture (already noted by Vasari) which gives to all his objects, animate as well as inanimate, the appearance of the hardest Roman marble. Similarly, his painted simulations of ancient relief sculpture in stone or gilt bronze (London, National Gallery, c. 1490) imply a knowledge of antique cameos and precious stones which he may have seen in Isabella d’Este’s studiolo. The ambience of connoisseurship also colours his highly finished drawings and his engravings, both bought as collector’s items, the latter securing his position as one of the most influential artists in Europe.
Mantegna’s creation of a classicising style corresponded to a growing interest in large-scale depictions of pagan subjects, usually classical mythologies, in the last decades of the century. The first such cycle, Pollaiuolo’s lost Labours of Hercules (begun c. 1460) for the Palazzo Medici, identified the Medici family with the virtues of the Florentine Republic and its classical guardian, Hercules Florentinus. But many of the surviving paintings, notably Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera (plate 23) (Florence, Uffizi, both c. 1480), evoke an obscure cluster of erotic, philosophical and poetic associations. Both paintings were made for the young Pierfrancesco Medici, perhaps for his wedding in 1482; both were conceived as decorations for private apartments and — particularly the Primavera — as inexpensive substitutes for tapestries. Like Mantegna’s Parnassus (Paris, Louvre, c. 1500) they combined the charms of ‘soft-core all’ antica erotica’ with more serious and uplifting meanings. Any attempt to disentangle their layers of association will never be wholly successful, since ambiguity is essential to their purpose. There can be little doubt that the compiler of their ‘programmes’ — as distinct from Botticelli himself — had in mind Poliziano’s Giostra (1476—8), and various classical ekphrases of Aphrodite, and that he sought to translate this sexually erotic mythology into a moral allegory of Christian caritas through references to the chivalrous love poetry of Provence, of the German Minnesinger and of Dante’s dolce stil nuovo. Equally decisive may have been the influence of the circle of Florentine neoplatonists, led by Pierfrancesco’s spiritual mentor, Marsilio Ficino. Ficino’s famous letter to Pierfrancesco in 1478, on the power of Venus to convey the highest virtues of humanity, is couched in the form of a horoscope, and typifies a deep preoccupation in Quattrocento Italy with astrology as a medium of cosmic order and a direct channel of divine intervention in human affairs. Hence the resurrection of the ancient Gods in much secular Renaissance art — in the conventional (medieval) form of zodiacal calendars; in diagrams of the human body as microcosm; in extended cycles of mythological divinities (chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena); in astrological ceilings (Old Sacristy, S. Lorenzo, Florence); and finally in complete astrological systems (Cosimo Tura’s and Francesco Cossa’s frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara). To Ficino, Botticelli’s Venuses, like amulets, had the power to charm and uplift, to initiate her devotees in the virtues of culture and refinement. In his neo-platonic belief in the fusion of heaven and earth, Venus represented both amor divinus and amor humanus, two poles that defined the endless struggle between man’s lower and higher nature. Pierfrancesco may not have been aware of all the implications of these meanings, but his teachers were; and to open up secular painting of this kind to such elevated associations is consciously to equate it with the functions of religious art. Like sacred imagery, the power of this new mythological genre lay in its rich obscurities, in its veils of metaphor and symbol, which both reveal and conceal the highest truths. To retrace this maze of meaning was, for the humanist, a mark of the initiate, a matching exercise in difficolta. For us, however, the charm of these poignant evocations of a lost Antiquity may lie less in their intellectual sophistications than in the poetic invenzione which gave them life.