Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [26]
Already by this date, Italians with a scholarly and antiquarian taste were poking about among the ruins of ancient Rome and other cities, which were much more extensive in medieval times than they are now, studying inscriptions, collecting medals and coins with low-relief heads and handling bits of broken sculpture to be found in the debris. Artists were often among those foraging parties, looking not just for the forms of antiquity but the technology that produced them. From this time there was a revival of casting in bronze for artistic purposes. The technique had not been lost but it had been used, in the Dark and Middle Ages, mainly by bell foundries. When Andrea Pisano (c. 1295–1348), not related to Nicola and his son, created a series of bronze reliefs for the doors of the south portal of the Baptistry at Florence in 1330, he merely modeled them in wax. They then had to be cast by the Venetian bell founder Leonardo Avanzi and his team. Thereafter, however, the success of bronze low reliefs led artistic workshops to set up their own foundries.
Andrea Pisano began his professional life as a goldsmith, as did most of the early sculptors in bronze. By the end of the fourteenth century, an artist-craftsman in a busy workshop— especially in Florence, already emerging as the richest and most art-conscious of the Italian towns—expected to work on almost every kind of stone, from limestone and Carrara marble to semiprecious and precious stones, and to deal with heated metals, ranging from gold to copper and copper alloys such as bronze, which had a mixture of tin. Goldsmiths played a much more central role in Renaissance art than is generally realized. Their skills were absorbed by the sculptors and their designs by the painters. The rich in Florence and other commercial cities liked to flaunt their wealth. They probably spent more on jewelry than on art, and one of the functions of the painters was to record in exact and realistic detail the jewels worn by their sitters, male and female—the brilliant depiction of jewelry was a skill that any Renaissance portrait painter had to possess. Bronze doors, with superb panels depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments, were the outstanding way in which the art of the jeweler could be transferred to the adorning of a new cathedral in hard-edged and permanent form. The frames and surrounds in which the illustrative panels are placed are essentially jewel settings.
Hence the importance that the Florentines, and the artists who served them, attached to the bronze doors of their cathedral and Baptistry: these increasingly elaborate artifacts were the jewels of God’s house, set in it for eternity. Immense care and years of work were devoted to them. This had important consequences. Even in the thirteenth century, commercially minded towns commissioning artists to do elaborate work insisted on detailed and binding contracts. Nicola Pisano, in order to get the commission to make the pulpit in Siena Cathedral, had to sign a contract, which survives, dated 29 September 1265, setting down what he had promised to do in a meticulous manner, what materials he had to use and how much time he had to spend on the site. These contracts had the effect of identifying the artist in a way that had hitherto been very rare—it plucked him forth from the mass of anonymous craftsmen and made him famous, or conscious of fame. Sculptors and painters began to sign their work. Thus the reliefs on the Florence Baptistry doors are signed Andreas Ugolino Nini de Pisis Me Fecit. The emergence of the artist as an individual coincided with the emergence of the individual in his works—both processes reinforced each other.
It was another consequence of Italian urban commercialism that patrons, conscious that their increased expenditure on art was drawing more and more gifted young men into the business, began to spur them on by holding public competitions for major contracts. At the end of the fourteenth century,