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By Root 2823 0

two albums that have survived of drawings by Jacopo Bellini, father of Giovanni and Gentile, show how brilliant and inventive Venetian draftsmen could be. But the Venetians never made a fetish of drawing as the Florentines did, and one reason they adopted oil with such passion was that they could change their minds while at work. X rays of Giorgione’s masterpiece The Tempest, which may be from as early as 1505, show the pentimenti that were to become familiar in European art, involving important changes of detail. His collaborator Titian made even more extensive changes and corrections all his life. The Venetians also relished painting in oil because it extended the range of colors open to them, increased their richness and brilliance, and allowed for dramatic contrasting effects of darkness and light. Hence, just as the Florentines were preeminent for their draftsmanship, so the Venetians achieved an unrivaled reputation for color and drama.

There were other, equally fundamental consequences. If the Dutch and Flemish initially painted in oils on wood, they soon also learned to use stretched canvases, variously treated to receive paint. The introduction of canvas was almost as important as the use of oil, for it gave artists much more freedom in determining the size, shape and texture of their working surface, adding lightness and economy too. The panel painting, which went back a long time, was succeeded or complemented by the easel painting, which was new and revolutionary. Once an artist could make a living from painting smallish canvases or panels on his easel, he could go in for portraits, then as now one of the most remunerative forms of art. He could either carry his easel about with him or work from his studio—where he could more readily get models, including nude ones, male and female, to sit for him—and above all he could escape from the time-consuming tyranny of the wall painting. That involved much less church work. Artists continued to create altarpieces in their studios, but this kind of product was now merely one of several. The result was a commercial impetus to the ending of the religious monopoly of art, a process that was taking place anyway but that painting in oils immeasurably accelerated in the sixteenth century. A further result, since the artists escaped from the tyranny of palace walls too, was to break the aristocratic and princely stranglehold on art patronage, and allow the rising bourgeoisie a look-in. This happened much sooner and faster in the Low Countries than elsewhere, but it eventually began to happen in Italy too. To tell the truth, Italian painting was never quite the same after it did.

In addition to these forces of technical change in the world of painting, there was a further fact, more properly belonging to the world of ideas, that was of immense importance in giving the Renaissance its peculiar dynamism. This was the notion of progress. It is of the nature of humankind to wish to improve things and better our condition, and all societies have possessed this wish to some extent. But some societies make it a cardinal principle of existence, while others put different considerations first. The ancient Egyptians did not seem to be interested in progress. They were much more anxious to ensure that things were done in the right and canonical way. By contrast, the Greeks sought self-improvement and set targets to be attained, and they spread this notion through their eikoumene. They certainly infected the Romans under the Republic. But under the empire, the authorities became more concerned with order and stability than with advantageous changes. That had a deadening effect on their economy, as we have seen. It also in time affected the arts, which began to regress rather than improve, so that the artistic decadence that we associate with the Dark Ages and the forces of intruding barbarism actually set in well before the empire disintegrated as a defensive system. Up until the eleventh century, at least, the power of progressive ideas, and the desire to improve systematically on the