Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [53]
What is significant is the way in which the spirit of competition, always strong in Florence, seeking to beat off rivals in Genoa, Venice and elsewhere, spread from commerce to art in the thirteenth century and after. Painters, sculptors and architects were encouraged to compete among themselves for contracts, and still more for glory. As the cult of the individual artist spread, emerging from medieval anonymity to the blaze of personal fame, so the competition sharpened. It was a race within generations and between them.
Dante himself first made the point that Giotto’s fame had obscured Cimabue’s. Two centuries later Leonardo echoed his remark by affirming, “He is a wretched pupil who does not surpass his master.” E. H. Gombrich, in a famous essay, “The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences,” resurrected a forgotten text of 1473, in which the Florentine humanist Alamanno Rinuccini wrote a dedication to the great artistic patron Federigo da Montefeltro. In it he argued with great force that progress in the arts had been such in recent times that men no longer had to abase themselves before the ancients. He instanced the original work of Cimabue, Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi as being progressively of so high a standard as to make them worthy to stand alongside the artists of the ancient world. Since then, he added, Masaccio had done even better. And what about Domenico Veneziano? And Filippo the Monk (Fra Filippo Lippi)? And John of the Dominican Order (Fra Angelico)? He adds to his litany Ghiberti and Luca Della Robbia and, above all, Donatello. Over the whole range of achievements, he insisted, including oratory and the writing of Latin, artists and scholars had been building on the achievements of predecessors to reach standards of performance that had never been equaled in ancient times.
Rinuccini’s dedication seems to have been written after he read Alberti’s Della pittura. Therein, Alberti stated flatly that his earlier belief that humanity was in decline and could no longer produce giants like the ancient masters had been completely dispelled when he returned to Florence and saw the work of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti and Della Robbia. Artists strove to excel not only one another, let alone their predecessors, but even themselves. And they set up absolute standards taken from the real world they saw around them. Gombrich argues that Ghiberti, perhaps the most conscientious of all the great Renaissance artists, had taken to heart a saying of Lysippus, the finest sculptor of antiquity, which is recorded by Pliny: An artist should imitate not the work of other artists, but nature itself. His second set of bronze doors at the Baptistry was a conscious effort to excel the first by a closer study of nature. It is likely that men such as Ghiberti and Brunelleschi saw themselves not just as artists but also as scientists (as we would call them), adding by progressive experiments to the sum total of human knowledge. Many of the great paintings of this time were demonstrations of what could be done and how to do it. Patrons knew this, and encouraged it. Each time they commissioned a master, they were striving to help him push forward the frontier of knowledge and skill a little further—or in some cases a lot further. It was the true spirit of the Renaissance.
This, then, is the background against which artists in those days worked. The motion was always forward. There was no turning back. Nor was there stability. But we must not