Text, from Patricia Emison's

               LOW AND HIGH STYLE IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART

                              Introduction
 

 
                             Nam perabsurdum esset si Helenae aut
                             Iphigeniae manus seniles et rusticanae
                             viderentur...====<Alberti, De
                             Pictura, II, 37:  ``For it would be absurd if Helen
                             or Iphigenia were seen with an aged and rough
                             hand.''>====

 
             
In Giorgione's Castelfranco Enthroned Madonna and Child with
Sts.~Liberalis and Francis (Cathedral) [fig.~1],====<See also such a
painting as Titian's Gypsy Madonna (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches
Museum), not an altarpiece but displaying a similar contrast.>==== the
enthroned Madonna extends her court beyond the marble, velvet, and
brocaded surfaces which proclaim her status to the rural landscape,
complete with ramshackle barns and dusty, distracted, and even dispirited
foot soldiers.  Low and high exist as complements, the low validated by
its closeness to nature, the high by its analogy to the kingdom of
heaven.  In a secular painting such as the Louvre Concert champ\^etre
[fig.~2], a similar theme is established by the proximity of richly robed
dandy and shepherd boy in drab brown.  Both paintings present not only a
compositional but also a semantic breakthrough in their juxtaposition of
silk and satin with dust and sweat.  A respect for rustic poverty has
been prominently encapsulated within the icons of wealth and
magnificence; moreover, the very theory of style---the validity of both
low and high---has been visualized.

Legitimating the low did not erase its distinctiveness from the high; the
difference between the two reflected very real anxieties.  Few things
offended Renaissance sensibility more acutely than the idea of a peasant
boasting a coat of arms.====<E.g., Domenichi, [1548] 1923, no.~447:
``Messer Anton Francesco Doni, il quale \`e di quel grido e fama ch'ormai
si sa per tutto, come acutissimo d'ingegno e d'intelletto sottile e
svegliato, fu richiesto una volta a dover far di suo concetto un'arma a un
contadino, che, per esser molto ricco, dal contado s'era ritirato a star
nella citt\`a, e vi aveva compro casa, e procurava col mezzo della roba
nobilitarsi.  Il Doni, che volea reprimere l'arroganza e la presunzion di
colui, ordin\`o che in uno scudo si facesse dipigner un bel campo di
grano, nel mezzo del quale fusse una vite, ch'avesse abbraciato un pero.
Quivi, divisandogli che ella era molto vaga per lo ornamento di quel grano
incerato e spigato, per la verdura di quella vite piena di pampini e per
quella bella pianta di pero, lo fece restar contento e partirsi
consolato... Il Doni, recatosi in una serverit\`a di volto costante e
piena di granvit\`a, disse:  ---Il soggetti di queste arme sono, il Gran,
la Vite, e 'l Pero, che uniti insieme vogliono dire:  Gran vitupero,---e
poi soggiunse:  ---ch'un par tuo, villan traditore, si voglia nobilitar col
mezzo della roba.''>==== Like an ugly heroine, upstart peasants offended
decorum, that basic principle of art and nature alike.  Generally the
visual arts paid heed to such sensitivities on the part of their public.
Being the products of magnificence, they existed to endorse the same.

The exceptions to this routine denigration (or, in the case of art, simple
omission) are those instances in which the poor were granted a part in the
ideology, and also the imagery, of power.  The most traditional instances
of elevating the meek and humble occur in altarpieces, such as Piero della
Francesca's Madonna and Child with Saints (Milan, Brera) [fig.~3],
with its ragged ascetic saints, John the Baptist, Bernardino, Jerome,
Francis, and Peter Martyr standing with St.~Andrew amidst polished and
ornate marble slabs.  In this case the theme had not only Christian but
also special personal significance, since the patron, Federigo da
Montefeltro, had risen to a position of considerable power, wealth, and
respect despite illegitimate birth and the dubious social credentials of a
practicing condottiere.  He no doubt believed deeply in the conventions
which reconciled the co-existence of wealth and poverty, high and low
status, each bearing its own potential for dignity and virtue.====<For
a thumbnail sketch of Federigo's accomplishments, see Denis Mack Smith,
1961 and Cole, 1995, pp.~66-91.>==== Apart from such theologically encouraged
or even mandated inclusion of the poor and simple, Renaissance art
developed such types as pastoral protagonists, crude rustics, and anonymous
but distinctly unheroic figures.  Each served the theme of art's delicate
position between an unexpurgated nature and corrupting artifice.

Not by accident is a woman, not always the Virgin Mary, prominent in many
works which allude to the low.  Women were in themselves both high and low,
idealized and scorned almost in the same breath, hailed as Muses and
denounced as whores, or alternatively vilified as prudes.  Nature
personified was a woman---but so was artifice the domain of women, their
paints and potions deplored.

Literary and philosophical traditions had long paid tribute to female
objects of contemplation and desire.  In harmony with the courtly love
tradition of medieval troubadours, continued in Italy by Cavalcanti and
Dante, the Platonic interests of fifteenth-century Florentines interpreted
carnal love as an analogue of spiritual love, a woman's grazia as
emblematic of God's grace.====<Although Panofsky never claimed this,
it is as though woman came to function as a ``disguised symbol'' for the
divine (bearing, like many other ``disguised symbols'' an option of quite
reversed connotation); see also Emison, 1995, ``Paysage Moralis\'e,''
pp.~125-37, and idem, ``Grazia,'' 1991, pp.~427-60.>==== This way of
conceptualizing women emphasized their analogy with the formidable example
of the Virgin Mary.  The novel alternative of the late fifteenth century
was to compare woman with nymph or Venus, a more carnal and natural object,
considerably less imposing.

The visual imagery of women tended to be more complicated than that of men
because they fit so poorly into the dominant heroic mode.  Michelangelo's
David (Accademia, Florence) is more straightforwardly heroic than any
image of a woman, however heroic, however erect.  Donatello in his 
Judith (Palazzo della Signoria, Florence), the statue displaced by
Michelangelo's David in 1504, had gone so far as to include comic
scenes of vintage on the pedestal reliefs.  To be sure, these allude to
Holofernes' fatal drunkenness, but they also insinuate---whether
intentionally or not---that woman's image is never absolutely ``high.'' If
a woman appears ``con arte,'' this threatens some deception practiced upon
the male viewer, all the more so in the case of a real woman than in the
artistic representation of a woman; should woman's image be ``senz'arte,''
it cannot be high.  Gender affects rank, whether social or stylistic.

Initially the new figural vocabulary of the Renaissance, as exemplified by
Masaccio in the Tribute Money (Brancacci Chapel, Sta.  Maria del
Carmine, Florence), avoided the problem by presenting a very male
population.  Gradually the decision to portray female protagonists, ones
antique as well as Christian, contributed to a redefining of the vocabulary
away from strictly heroic norms.  The complementarity of high and low
already inherent in Christian thought was accentuated by the pictorial
prominence of women other than the Virgin, beginning particularly with
Botticelli, Bellini, Giorgione, and Raphael.  Ideals for women changed,
with more overt emphasis on their legitimate or at least de facto approved
sensuality.====<I make no claim here about their real lives and actual
social or political weight.  On that issue, see, for instance, King and
Rabil, 1992 and Turner, 1993.>==== This provided one of the important
motivations for using mythological imagery, since goddesses combined
sensuality with good birth.  In pastoral, similarly, class considerations
and social strategies did not intrude upon the happy conjunction of
uninhibited women and natural impulse.  The Renaissance imagination had
understandably little use for the realities of fairly hidebound
upper-class women.

A drift from concepts of Woman in Renaissance literary and philosophical
thought toward the aesthetics of the visual arts was fundamental to the
evolution of those arts during the period spanning from Mantegna to
Michelangelo.  Woman simultaneously epitomized the supraterrestrial reaches
of divine grace and lowliest humility.  This complexity created a type
useful to the artist who was at once awarded the epithet divine and, in
various ways, required not to forget his residual baseness by comparison
with his patrons.  A happy palliative was to reconceptualize baseness as
itself a form of worthiness, even of exceptionally special status.

Because nature herself enforced not only modes and moods but levels of
occasion and character, art required more than one level of style.  Decorum
was as natural as proportionality, being, as it were, a proportionality of
form to content.  And decorum demanded not only that Helen of Troy appear
young and beautiful, but that epic sweep be complemented by the narrow
focus and self-proclaiming modesty of the low style.


                              D'oro e di gemme, e spaventata in vista,
                              adorna, la Richezza va pensando;
                              ogni vento, ogni pioggia la contrista,
                              e gli auguri e ' prodigi va notando.
                              Le lieta Povert\`a, fuggendo, acquista
                              ogni tesor, n\'e pensa come o quando;
                              secur ne' boschi, in panni rozzi e bigi,
                              fuor d'obrighi, di cure e di letigi.
====<Buonarrotti, Rime, from 67:
``Adorned with gold and gems but hideous of
face/Riches comes thinking/every wind, every rain
troubles her/and she goes noting the omens and
prodigies./Happy Poverty, fleeting, acquires/every
treasure, without thinking how or when,/secure in
the woods, in rough, grey clothes,/untouched by
intrigues, cares, and litigations.''>====
 
             
To call a person or a style ``rustic'' reeked of insult in the fourteenth
century.  By the sixteenth century, the connotations had
improved.====<Beginning with Bramante's introduction of the Tuscan
order and flourishing especially with Serlio's designs for bizarre and
weed-ridden gates, the inelegant had a prominent place in architecture;
Onians, 1988, p.~240.  See also Ackerman, 1983, pp.~15-34.  ``Il modo di
fabricare rusticamente e forte'' was associated with ``contadine e simili
gente rozzi,'' Lomazzo, 1974, vol.~II, p.~352, and was, furthermore,
admired, both for its novelty and for its association with things rural.>====
In the earlier period, the term implied a lack of education and
refinement, as in the case of Boccaccio's doltish Cimon. ====<For
rusticity used as a term of abuse, see, inter alia, Boccaccio, quoted by
Panofsky, 1960, p.~13.  Dispraise of the country life as self-indulgent
escapism is a rarity during the Renaissance, with notable exceptions.  See
Salutati's letter to Francesco Bruni, which accuses him of eating and
hunting himself into bestiality, comparable to the Persians (Salutati,
1891, p.~263-76 [summer of 1377]).  Moralizing scenes of the idle rich at
pleasure usually are set in a garden bower:  e.g., the Triumph of
Death fresco at Camposanto, Pisa, or the Apotheosis of St.~Thomas in
the Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.>==== Cimon falls in love and
thereby loses his rusticity, as a writer would abandon scholastic Latin for
Cicero's,====<Apuleius, at the beginning of the Golden Ass,
apologizes for his self-taught, rough Latin (``si quid exotici ac forensis
sermonis rudis locutor offendero'').  This equation of the exotic with the
rude, implicitly justifying the latter, sometimes recurred in Renaissance
times.>==== or a painter la maniera greca for Giotto's
style.====<Landino, in his commentary on Dante, describes the obsolete
style now eliminated by one elegant and ornamented as rozzo and  
povera.>==== The new civic world being built by merchants and bankers opposed
rusticity as an unwanted innocence in an age intent upon legitimate
worldliness.====<Comparably, Alberti, in his dialogue on the art of
love (1491), has his first-person interlocutor, an old woman, explain that
young men are undesirable because they are ``imperiti & rozzi,'' like an
unripe apple.  It is no great compliment when Poggio Bracciolini referred
to the Roman nobility of yore as ``honesta licet rusticana''; De
nobilitate [c.~1440], 1964, I, p.~70.  See, on related issues,
Antal, 1986.>==== The new Renaissance art promoted the ideas held dear by those
in positions of economic and political power.  Florentine society, in
particular, was bent upon dignifying itself in a world unaccustomed to the
idea of bankers' and merchants' dignity.  As a pocket of new wealth, it
needed the glitter of the ideal, including an ideal of nobility founded on
virtue rather than blood, more pressingly than its neighbors.  The rapid
expansion of art patronage in Florence served the aspirations and
pretensions of the established non-noble to think of themselves ideally.
In Italy for a long time this implied grandly.

Interest in pastoral and other art of the low or rustic manner was both
chronologically and geographically dispersed, though rarely dominant.
Between the time of Cosimo il Vecchio and the rise of the more overtly
absolutist Medici under his grandson Lorenzo il Magnifico, the
countryside came to be associated with aristocratic retreat and remoteness
from bourgeois affairs.====<See Jordan, c.~1986, pp.~145,
163-68.  She dates the enthusiasm for pastoral from Lorenzo's
``Altercazione'' of 1474.  See also Gerhardt, 1950.>==== Cosimo's stance of
primus inter pares gave way to an elite community of shepherds of the
mind.====<The grand heroism of Michelangelo's David,
commissioned by the newly empowered Signoria, should probably be set
against the pastoral fad sponsored by Lorenzo de' Medici.>==== Especially
after the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478 Lorenzo de' Medici frequented his villas
and wrote poetry about nymphs.====<On Medici promotion of the ideals
of the contemplative life, see Rubinstein, 1982, p.~168.>==== Bernardo
Pulci's collection of vernacular pastoral poems, published in Florence in
1481, was dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico.  Luca Signorelli's
painting of the Court of Pan (Berlin, destroyed), with its secular
god surrounded by courtiers of humble stripe, was made in Lorenzo's
Florence or its near afterglow.====<An attempt to read this painting
as an allegorical portrait of the members of Ficino's problematic Academy
has been made by Freedman, 1989, pp.~80-101.  Suggested dates have varied
between 1484 and 1497.>==== It hints at the long-term developments to come of
the rustic aesthetic, promising as it does to raise not only the dead poet,
but now also his patron, to a divine status above rulebound republican
order.  When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, their villas
were burned by the mob, suggesting that the pretensions associated with
them had been particularly hated.====<The Medici had used peasants,
``wild and fierce,'' to control the city on important occasions; see D.
Kent, 1978, pp.~337-38.>====
 
Later Lorenzo's son Leo X evoked the idea of the return of a pastoral
Golden Age.  In 1513 at the Florentine Carnival celebration marking his
accession, six pairs of nude shepherds with Saturn heralded the return of
the Age of Gold.  Glorification of things natural continued to figure among
the tools of absolutism, reaching a climax of sorts under Francesco I
(1541-87).  He developed the marvels of his villa at Pratolino to impress
his guests with his magical, and therefore implicitly absolute,
power.====<See Mourlot, 1977, pp.~322-31.>==== The idea of a radically new
identification with nature or with an Arcadian age had many possible
connotations and extrapolations.

Rome, a bastion of feudal families, was notable for the relative absence of
pastoral subjects.  Furthermore, the taste for pastoral developed
particularly in those cities whose relationships with Rome were most
strained:  Naples, Florence, and Venice.  Although not all pastoral need be
taken as deliberate satire of ``il gran Pastore,'' that is, the
pope,====<Cammelli, 1908, p.~406.  Sannazaro did see the popes as
degenerate shepherds; see Kennedy, 1983, pp.~66-68, on his Epigrams.>====
nevertheless pastoral's purity of motive and simplicity of means would
have necessarily created a degree of dissonance in the ambience of the
pope.  It is fitting that Michelangelo's Bacchus (Florence, Bargello)
was executed for a Roman patron, since it is low in style without being
directly pastoral and without implying the least criticism of luxurious and
besotted habits.  This work offers an important example of a non-heroic
statue executed with evident ambition in an expensive medium, marble.

In Venice, where it was easier than in Rome to make a virtue of moderation,
pastoral art flourished.  Proud though the Venetian aristocracy was, it
could not compare with the lavishness characteristic of aged popes.  The
Venetian Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542) supposed that nobles were more
likely to be impoverished than not, precisely because their motivations
were noble, i.e., intellectual ones:
 
    i Cittadini nobile, e nobilmente allevati si fanno poveri, \`o per
   fortuna inimica come spesso accade, \`o perche inclinati \`a gli studi
   liberali spezzono tutta questa cura d'accrescere la
   robba.====<Cf.~Possevino, 1553, p.~226, ``si ci\`o fosse [if wealth
   implied nobility], si trovarebbono molti villani, che sarebbono piu nobili,
   che non son molti gentil'huomini.'' On the earlier history of the problem
   of an impoverished nobility, especially in Florence, see Trexler, 1974,
   pp.~63-109.>====
    
   (the noble citizens, and the nobly raised, make themselves poor, whether
   by unfavorable fortune as often happens, or because, inclined to liberal
   studies they divorce themselves entirely from this care for acquiring
   wealth.)
    
 Thus, in real life as in Arcadia, true nobility was cast as in opposition
to greed, even to the point of honoring certain kinds of poverty.

If one of the fundamental resolves which marks the Renaissance is that of
reviving a notion of ``good'' style all'antica, another is that of
taking pleasure in fiction, from the debate over whether Petrarch's Laura
had been real, to the paintings of reclining Venetian women as Venus, to
men taking the guise of rustic lover.  These fictions were the province of
the low style.  And fictions were presumed ephemeral.  In the letter of
dedication for his Stanze, performed at Urbino during Carnival of
1507, Pietro Bembo expressed some diffidence about preserving his informal
poetry beyond that occasion:
 
    Per ci\`o che assai vi dee esser chiaro che in quella guisa et in tale
   stagione pu\`o
   per aventura star bene e dilettar cosa, che in ogni altra sar\`a
   disdetta e sommamente spiacer\`a.====<Bembo, 1961, p.~541.>====
    
   (Consequently it must be very clear to you that in that circumstance and
   in such a season it is possible by chance to be satisfied and to enjoy a
   thing that in every other case will be denounced and will displease very
   much.)
    
 He and Ottaviano Fregoso had dressed as ambassadors of Venus and recited
verses about the power of love.====<Ottaviano (1470-1524) was a nephew
of Guidobaldo.>==== Well might he worry that this performance, when preserved
as text, might seem the proverbial fish out of water:
 
   Oltra che ognuno che le sentir\`a o legger\`a, se esse
   pure si lasceran leggere, non saper\`a che elle siano state dettate in
   brevissimo spazio tra danze e conviti, ne' romori e discorrimenti, che
   portan seco quei giorni, come sanno quelli che le videro et udirono
   dettare.====<Ibid.>====
    
   (Besides which everyone who will hear or read these things, assuming that
   they bother to read it, will not know that they were recited in the
   shortest interval amidst dances and feasting, in the midst of noise and
   talk, that those days bring with them, as they know who saw and heard them
   spoken.)
    
 
Why, then, make this lightweight, though not necessarily lighthearted,
art?  For one thing, pastoral offered the comfort of melancholy to those
born to an otherwise stiff lip.  It promised a more comfortable concept of
nobility, wistful but untroubled about obligation or status.  Those
literary shepherds, like courtiers, lived in the ambient of powers only
vaguely present.  They have no pretense to complete comprehension or
control over their lives.  Yet Arcadia was eminently secure.  There it was
structurally disallowed that bourgeois and noble would reverse status as
suddenly as reflected light can switch to shadow.  Arcadia existed in part
to assert that very impossibility.  Where there were no coats of arms, they
could not be acquired by anyone unworthy.  For all their emphasis upon
changeable light and weather, pastoral images provide a reassuringly
stable, and a delightfully undemanding, world.====<Hale (1971,
pp.~3-26) describes the myth of the Golden Age as a ``mental prophylactic
against brooding overmuch on the violence in their own [i.e., Renaissance]
society.'' He speculates interestingly on theories of war as an early
source of realistic attitudes.  Cf.~Gentili (1980, esp.~pp.~23-40) on the
importance of distinguishing between Giorgione's imagery and the more
escapist Giorgionesque variety.>====
 

                             Esto non adeo detestabile sit, ut hi arbitrari
                             uidentur, habitare siluas, cum in eis nil fictum,
                             nil fucatum, nil menti noxium uideatur; simplicia
                             quidem omnia sunt natura
                             opera.====<Boccaccio, 1978, p.~49.  (``It
                             seems then that it is no such abomination as these
                             critics appear to think, to dwell in the woods where
                             there is nothing artificial nor counterfeit, nor
                             noxious to the mind, for all nature's works are
                             simple,'' Boccaccio, 1956, p.~56.)>====
 
             
 The historiography of the Renaissance has normally emphasized the
confidence of the period.  And not without cause:  the shift from a worried
and guilt-ridden Giovanni Villani (d.~1348) who attributes natural
disasters and disease to a vengeful God, to a Giovanni Rucellai
(1403-1481), who relishes the idea of himself as riding the waves of
fortune, empowered by sagacity and verve, is both striking and valid.
Voltaire told us that Medicean Florence, along with ancient Greece, ancient
Rome, and his own France under Louis XIV, was one of the great periods of
human history.  Such unquestioned esteem has often been granted, not only
to the period,====<E.g., Hartt, 1964.>==== but to the period's self-image.
From Jacob Burckhardt, whose Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien:
Ein Versuch was first published in 1860, to Michael Baxandall, whose  
Giotto and the Orators:  Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the
Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450, was published in 1971,
emphasis has been placed on the sheer self-assurance which typifies the
time we call the Renaissance.  This trait has served to distance the period
from medieval angst and to demonstrate its affinity to the modern era.

What do we know, by contrast, of self-critical tendencies and their outlets
during the Renaissance?  The braggart Italian Renaissance is no longer
immune from derogatory analysis; for instance,  Joan Kelly's seminal
1972 essay ``Did Women Have a Renaissance?''  denies that women in
the Renaissance began to taste anything like modernity, even granting that
men did.  Vasari's bias in favor of Florence's, and in particular
Michelangelo's, accomplishments is
routinely discounted in the art historical literature.====<See further
on Vasari, inter alia, Barolsky, 1990.>====
 
Yet the Renaissance had its own critics.  Petrarch's irascible and
disgruntled voice, with its acerbic despite, has come down clearly through
the centuries, as have Luther's and Erasmus'.  Arguably, these voices fall
outside the core of the Renaissance, on either end.  But these are the most
famous of such critical voices, not solitary examples.  From the sixteenth
century there sounds a chorus of discontent, not confined to laments over
the Sack of Rome in 1527.  Even before that traumatic event, bitter voices
of confusion, sometimes of revulsion, struggled to be heard.

Renaissance self-doubt and self-abnegation, more prevalent in the sixteenth
century, were often at least partially ironic.  But it is also true that
the status of claiming to be without status had risen.====<In
Michelangelo's case, in particular, this
is a very complicated, at times paradoxical, process.  See Ch.~3, this volume.>====
Ultimately we hope to show that so familiar a Renaissance stylistic trait
as non-finito is allied with the low style, and
that so important a Renaissance figure as Michelangelo was, in part, a
low-style artist.

In the study of Italian art the pictorialization of the vile and the rustic
are topics normally deferred until Caravaggio's time.  At that point the
representation of poverty acts as the equal and opposite of Baroque
lavishness, a dichotomy as vivid as that of Baroque chiaroscuro.  A dirty,
dusty, ignoble Nature was first intimated, however, and sometimes
portrayed, in earlier works---Renaissance ones---that are not counted among
our accustomed masterpieces and that have not necessarily epitomized their
time for us.

During the later fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries there evolved
pictures without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful
than celebratory.  In part, art adjusted to the social and economic
pressures of the times we call Renaissance through tactics that fail to
conform to standard characterizations of the period.  The heroic and epic
mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and
proudly.  Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that
heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less
affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from
the Vitruvian ideal.  In pastoral poetry and pictures, the artist gave up
the idea that ornament necessarily enhanced art, and tried to move in the
direction of what we might call a more primitive art.  ``Art hiding art''
became a familiar phrase.====<Landino, in the aforementioned
commentary on Dante (n.~12), explains how, in the low style, art seems
simple to the unlearned, whereas to their betters its true difficulty is
manifest, ``perche in quello gareggia larte con la natura.'' See also
Saccone, 1983 and Shearman, 1967.>==== Women likewise were asked to be both
natural and cultivated, i.e., to have grazia.====<See Emison,
``Grazia,'' 1991, 427-60.>====
 
The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High
Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice,
of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of Italy, of attitudes
toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of
sight.====<Cf.~Mellinkoff, 1993.>==== The issue of whether one aspired to
rusticity or disdained it involved not only competing ideals of virility,
not only the impact of those ideals on ideas of femininity, but also
consequences of the same for notions of style.  By ``style'' I mean here
not personal style, an imprint from the unconscious self in the modern
sense,====<It is true that the writers during the High Renaissance and
Mannerism did develop a notion of legitimate personal maniera, indeed
that this helps to distinguish these periods from the Early Renaissance.
But style here is taken as a kind of meta-maniera.>==== but style as 
chosen modalities of representation, geared to a certain kind of subject
and kind of audience, in the Renaissance sense.

The shift evident in the arts is not simply one of  Zeitgeist, nor of
the fall from classic Italian Renaissance to Mannerist style, which art
history of the last several decades has been at such pains to expose as
fallacy, but more concretely of whether the visual arts were used to
acknowledge the distaste a people may have for their own time or, as in the
earlier period, only their satisfaction with it.  The borders of
disillusionment are not so neat as the limits of decades, nor is it a
thesis here that social ills caused or even that specific ills made
possible this art of disaffection.  I mean to portray the visual arts not
as reflexive to economic and political reality but as increasingly varied.

The crucial issue is not one of reconstructing intentionality, but of
building a history of kinds of intentionality, both artistic and
interpretative.  That is, the problem is not, when did artists work with
secular ends in mind,====<Cf.~Panofsky, 1953, ch.~V.>==== or when did
visual fidelity become their overriding objective,====<Cf.~Alpers,
1983.>==== but instead, when did they give up the idea of art as an expression
of authority?====<See further, Emison, 1995, ``Prolegomenon.''>====
Further, when did works of art cease to provide ideal protagonists
functioning as exempla, but also, when did artists give up on the notion of
an ideal, constrained, and predictable viewer of a work of art?

In a culture as literary as that of the educated man during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, the fundamental images were not necessarily fixed
for him in prominent works of art.  The imagery of language was rich and
competitive with that of the visual arts and more (or at least differently)
expansive.  Low-style works sometimes derive from low-style literature but
without serving any deferential function in respect to a specific text.
Not being committed to the cult of beauty and dignity, low-style imagery
might be more popular than works of the high style, but it is also true
that even works of rozzo stile were often made for a cultivated
public and managed to reconcile the ideas of rusticity and plainness with a
notion of elegance.  Had they not done so, they would have been no more
than sub-standard art in the eyes of those who mattered, i.e., the
commissioners of more pretentious works.====<On the difficulties in
understanding even woodcut broadsheets as popular, folk, or low art, see
Moxey, 1989, pp.~2-3.  Those works he presents as carrying on much the same
business---indoctrination, in a word---as the religious artistic tradition
out of which they grew.>==== As it was, such art allowed even the usual
patronage class to envisage a pathetic humanity, in which lovers contract
disease, or at least fail to find divine love, and women grow old.

The constraints of patronage, of public display, of the professional
craving for an incompletely established prestige, at times hampered
innovation in painting and sculpture.  Writers might choose the vernacular
when they wanted to be free of overweening precedent.  Vernacular
literature was more easily secular, more readily complaining.  If there was
a correlate in the visual arts for writers' use of the vernacular, it was
the print, which operated without the dictates of precedent and of public
decorum.  The world opened up by prints was essential to the low style in
the visual arts:  not because the print was despised but because the low
style was esteemed.  Arguably the theory of levels of style made it
possible for prints to flourish apart from their reproductive role.  Prints
in particular were not bound to the norms of didactic istorie and
epic grandeur.

The expanding use of print media catalyzed the general widening in the
scope and purposes of art, making it possible for the low style to
flourish.  Prints never overwhelmed the viewer physically.  Although prints
were more widely owned than paintings and sculptures had been, they were
not so suitable to public display and the restraints that implied.  With
the exception of small icons of saints, they were generally intended for
the literate, to a degree that had not been the norm in art ownership since
Roman times.  They introduced a class of collectors who did not immediately
possess the prestige of wealthy patrons but who nevertheless desired the
dignity accorded to an empowered, interpreting viewer.  As a medium, prints
were more likely to present the allusive, the curious, and the casual than
the ideal and the perfect.  The development of print media had at least as
profound an effect on the range and significance of European art as any
turn toward the culture of antiquity.====<See Landau and Parshall,
1994; Eisenstein, 1979.>====
 
             
If full account is taken of prints within our history of art, its subtext
about the inglorious aspects of wealth becomes more complicated.  Although
they are customarily termed ``original'' in the technical sense of
identifying designer with engraver, fifteenth-century engravings are better
called original for their independent standards of what makes an image.  A
less prestigious, though still respected, medium fostered an art less
singlemindedly dedicated to the making of prestige.  Unless we allow for
the application of some notion of a low genre, be it ad hoc or theoretical,
in which levity is legitimate and neither persons nor ideas necessarily
subscribe to ideal types, we must discount much of the work done in
engraving as feeble and unsuccessful or chalk it up, without further
explanation, to ``northern influence.''====<See also Emison, 
``Little Masters,'' 1988, on
the reciprocal question of understanding how the Little Masters of
Nuremberg responded to the overweening example of Italian high style.>====
 After centuries of looking up at pictures, at some still-debated point it
became possible to look down---quite literally so in the case of
prints.====<For a particularized study of how the print medium
encouraged a more colloquial approach to image making, see Parshall, 1978,
``Lucas,'' pp.~185-238.>====
 
             
The distinctive norms of the engraving medium were not applied with a
consistency that would allow us to categorize prints as a medium
necessarily of the low genre, as a verse form might be.  The fit is not so
restrictive.  But even masters of pictorial dignity, who designed
engravings of considerable complexity, such as Mantegna, developed more
fully in that medium than elsewhere a population of lowly persons and the
grotesque.====<Emison, 1994.>==== To the extent that engraving became an
art form used by prominent artists, it did so initially not so much because
it was used to disseminate their grandest compositions in accessible format
but because it was used to develop ideas not appropriate for murals and
altarpieces.  Print imagery might be too sensuous, too lighthearted, or
merely too simple, judged by the standards of commissioned, public, or
semi-public art.  In engravings by more obscure artists the same
independence of norm applies.  Love and women are treated
comically.====<Combat between Women and Devils, H.  A.II.6;  
A Satire on Cuckolds, H.  A.II.23; a scene of a rapacious woman, H.
A.IV.12.>==== Peasants are shown at work---and this as the sole pictorial
subject (E.III.26, 27).  Many compositions feature but a single figure, and
many are shown with less setting than in a large-scale painting of
comparable subject.====<It may be that such prints provide clues for
changing patterns of viewing even the complex, high-style works.>====
 
Eventually, the more ambitious art took on characteristics related to
those that had once marked the less ambitious examples:  independence from
linear perspective's guarantee of proportionality and perfection; markedly
idiosyncratic style rather than deference to antique norms of naturalism;
the inclusion of nonideal types.  In this way our designations of the
history of art within the framework of a history of style may mask more
fundamental aesthetic changes:  characteristics of ``Mannerism'' are
sometimes markers of distance from the norms of high style without being
any less ``Renaissance'' therefore.

Once our history of fifteenth- and sixteeenth-century art integrates prints
adequately, it will be a history of a more stable, more communal
imagination, less given to the leaps and eccentricities of genius.  Indeed,
such a shift in perspective allows us to recognize that Renaissance talk of
``ingegno divino'' was not a foreshadowing of Romantic deference toward the
prerogatives of untrammeled creativity, but that instead it could refer to
the low-style poet---divine because the female object of his poetry
was---his divinity as contingent and even dubious as hers.====<See 
Ch.~3, this volume.>==== The divine artist followed along this rather bosky and
ostensibly humble path marked out by the love poet.

Often in this study we will turn to texts in an effort to understand the
ramifications of the low style.  This is not meant to imply that such texts
directly generated the imagery in which we are interested, but to exploit
the fact that literary texts are an important part of what we have
available to help us reconstruct the intellectual context of these
deliberately underdeveloped visual compositions.  They, too, are products
of imagination; moreover, they are often written by close associates of
artists.  Such minor texts provide at least points of reference,
coincidental but nevertheless useful; in some instances the existence of
the genre to which they belong may arguably form the sine qua non for
artists' innovations.  Nevertheless, these texts are not to be used merely
as straightforward guides to the images:  they have their own complicated
history.  Many of these low-style images exist in remarkable independence
from any textural source whatsoever; if we appeal to texts here, this is
not to claim that those texts would have been for the original viewers
either necessary or sufficient accessories.====<For complementary
instances of Renaissance works of art operating in relation to oral and
popular culture, or at a more elite level but still without reliance on
textual authority, see Emison, ``Bear,'' 1992; idem, 1990; idem, ``Adam,''
1988.>====
 

             
The project here is to learn how Renaissance art helped its viewers to
visualize the whole world, not the ideal and magnificent parts of it alone.
To what degree may Renaissance art be thought of as low or high rather than
as Michelangelesque
 or Raphaelesque, High Renaissance or Mannerist,
Florentine or Venetian?  Although respect for ancient imperial standards of
wealth was a prime characteristic of much of the Renaissance, and
reconciliations of wealth with ideas of virtue were frequently put forward
and often accepted,====<See Goldthwaite (1987, pp.~15-39) for a pithy
analysis of conspicuous consumption in Renaissance Italy, including the
distinctively urban character of Italian wealth; this was extended in
Goldthwaite, 1993.  See also Kent, 1987; Shepherd, 1995.>==== our present
subject involves ambivalence about wealth as it carried across into
receptivity for art not dedicated to an exclusive respect for magnificence
and grandeur.



             
Giving prints and other modest productions in Renaissance art their due
provides a vantage from which it may well appear that our model for
Renaissance artists' success has been overly restrictive, in short, too
Vasarian and too focussed on social success as its ultimate measure.  The
more inclusively we study the entire cultural production, and the reasons
for its breadth, the more we will apprehend the interaction of competing
aesthetic ideals as well as the persistence of unsolved aesthetic problems
and issues.  A second major aspect of this study involves the clash of the
ideals of nature and art.  This ties in directly with attitudes toward the
feminine ideal as, on the one hand, associated with the simplicity and
modesty of nature, and, on the other hand, the epitome of beauty and hence
nearly a personification of art as that which adds grace and ornamentation
to nature.

In studying the Renaissance, the less we rely exclusively on concepts of
magnificence, the heroic, and the unchallenged cult of classicizing
beauty---on art as an expression of power---the more chance we will have of
recuperating the undercurrents of the period and so its authentic
complexity.  The point here is not so much to complicate our
interpretations of particular works, but instead to expand our sensitivity
to the interactions of opposing patterns of interpretation.  Undoubtedly
Renaissance art was used to express and reinforce power, but it was also
developed to express profound reservations about the usual mechanisms of
respect in Renaissance society, generally by expanding the treatment of
themes of love beyond the confines of the ideal.  Once woman was
acknowledged as a fallible ideal, natural in multiple senses of the word,
the predictable role of dutiful, obedient servant opened up into the
complex world of the aggrieved and heartsick poet, the voice of the low
style.  Our subject is the eye whose sympathies lay there rather than with
his epic counterpart.


The following chapter describes how even a supposed advocate of elaborate,
moralizing istoria, namely Alberti, envisioned viable alternatives to
the high style, and how Leonardo seconded some of those predispositions on
the part of his predecessor.  Not only was magnificence occasionally
slighted on moral grounds, but the controversial career of Cosimo de'
Medici served to problematize the whole convention of wealth as a respected
correlate to high birth and rank.  In pictures, the indefinite characters
and attitudes of the background figures of Giovanni Bellini provided a
precedent for works of art, often prints or drawings, in which an unheroic
figure conveyed no clearly distilled istoria nor even the
mythological nugget typical of a poesia.  Chapter Two develops an
expansive definition of pastoral pictorial art.  The concept of
liberality played an important part in reducing the intellectual hegemony
of the rich man's magnificence and is seen to have helped catalyze the
development of the aesthetic of the low style.  From Giorgione's La
tempesta to the woodcut after Parmigianino, Nude Man Seen from
Behind, and even in Il morbetto engraved after Raphael, the
pictorial exercise of complaint transformed figural and compositional
norms.  Chapter Three deals with the question:  how might the designation
``divine,'' used of the love object, be transferred to the low-style poet
who is the ultimate source of the woman's divinity, or, alternatively, both
transferred to and appropriated by an artist like Michelangelo, steeped in
the mores of vernacular love poetry?  How might his sculptural practice
dubbed non-finito reflect the aesthetic of rozzo verse and the
incompleteness of expression of which the love poet typically complains?
Michelangelo's involvement with figural and compositional types not
encompassed in the heroic istoria is viewed not as his unique
aberration, but as part of a spotty but recurrent phenomenon which can be
traced in images of lowly women, pretentious women, and abased men.
Finally, the extent to which such aesthetic choices related to political,
social, and economic conditions---and even more to perceptions of those
conditions---is a consideration throughout.


                                 CHAPTER 1
 

                           Beyond Istoria
 

                             Ne' piccioli suggetti \`e gran fatica; 
                             Ma qualunque gli esprime ornati e chiari, 
                             Non picciol frutto del suo ingegno coglie.
====<Rucellai, 1524:  ``There is great effort
in tiny subjects/But whoever expresses them
elegantly and clearly/gathers not insignificant
fruit from his mind.''>====
 
             
 The dominant model in modern art history for explaining Renaissance
imagery has been Leon Battista Alberti's in De pictura (1435).  The
apex of a painter's achievement, he declares, is the istoria, a
copious narrative showing various dignified, beautiful figures engaged
expressively in a didactic, coherent narrative.  Linear perspective
construction insures that the viewer looks, as though through a window,
into a more orderly world; inventio and composizione provide
that what is seen there is more perfect and more comprehensible than
nature; disegno, and colorito
(in Alberti's language, ``circonscrizione'' and ``recezione di lumi'')
that it is nevertheless lifelike.  As in portraits, the vivid image exerts
authority over viewers and demands respect, whether by making them quiver
before their absent general or allowing them to witness Peter's walk upon
the Sea of Galilee.  That which Giotto and the ancients have done before,
Alberti now expects of Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca della
Robbia.====<Although he names several living artists in his treatise
on painting, he names no living painter.>====
 
According to this model, Renaissance images derive their inventio,
their conceptual nugget, from literary or philosophical texts, to which
authority they remain symbiotically linked;====<See the classic study
by Lee, 1967, and the more recent Land, 1994; Baxandall, 1971, on the
``periodic point of view,'' and Alpers, 1960.>==== the principal figures in a
composition have a commanding and dignified presence; and such works
reinforce the prevailing political, social, and economic structures.
Simply put, one of the objectives of this art of the istoria
is obedience; Alberti recommends, in Book III, an art which ``terr\`a
gli occhi e l'animo di chi la miri'' (will abstract the eyes and the soul
of whoever looks at it).====<``oculos et animos spectantium tenebit
atque movebit.''>====
In so doing he is a good humanist, for verbal eloquence likewise was
recommended for its effectiveness in teaching a morality appropriate to
civic behavior.

By what means, then, should this new art impress?  Not, it seems, by
conjuring up the splendours of the kingdom of heaven, for, whereas Abbot
Suger was quite definite about the analogy he wished to create between
heavenly and earthly courts by sponsoring the new Gothic style, Alberti
recommended plain white church interiors.  In On Painting, he
discouraged reliance on gold leaf:  the painter's ingenium was to be
displayed rather than the patron's wealth.  Although Alberti was an
advocate of a grand and imposing visual art, he did not want the artist to
rely upon rich materials to achieve that grandeur.

As a writer Alberti praised poverty.  ``Lieta poverta inimica delle
sollecitudini contenta di picciole & facile cose quale con pocha faticha
& presto si truovano & octengonsi'' (Happy poverty, unfriendly to cares,
content with small and convenient things which one finds and obtains
quickly and with little effort).====<Alberti, c.~1525, unpag.
Written c.~1440 and formerly thought to have been published in Milan,
c.~1492, see Rhodes, 1982, pp.~141-55.  Twelve copies of that first
edition are known to survive.>==== Poverty, it is claimed, is the choice of the
man who is a friend both to nature and himself.====<Ibid., De
republica, unpag.>====
Lionardo, an interlocutor in Della famiglia, asserts that, ``pi\'u
troverrai virtuosi poveri che ricchi... Assai sar\`a ricco chi
viver\`a contento'' (you will find more virtuous poor than rich... he
who will live content will be very rich).====<Alberti, 1969, p.~97.>====
Alberti appears to have been personally sympathetic with these sorts of
homilies.

Alberti also poked fun at metaphorical wealth, borrowing from an aesthetic
of poverty to justify his own, relatively plain, literary style.  Probably
in the late 1430s, Alberti dedicated Book II of the Intercenales
(short prose pieces for dinnertime) to Leonardo Bruni, the Aretine-born
humanist who became Chancellor of Florence in 1427.  Book II contains
essays on the right and wrong use of money.  Since Bruni was famous partly
as the translator of a book on economics ascribed to Aristotle, the
dedication had its polite pretense.  But Bruni was also rumored to be
parsimonious and seems to have resented the dedication, in which Alberti
ironically praised Bruni's ``wealth of talent and
learning.''====<Alberti, 1987, pp.~8, 34-35.>==== Bruni is said to possess
this wealth of learning to less avail than the poorer Alberti:  ``we think
that greater praise accrues to us if our puerile and unpolished style moves
peasants in the streets to dancing and merriment, than if we grow old in
silence devising countless ornaments.''

Alberti anticipated no corresponding crux between rich and poor style in
the case of the visual artist, for he thought that the problem of visual
style resolved itself in an awe-inspiring imitation of nature, the match to
awe-inspiring magnificence.  Nevertheless, his dedication to Bruni is
pertinent here for showing an incipient mistrust of the prerogatives of
wealth.  (As an illegitimate son of an exile, dependent upon the patronage
of princes, popes, and merchants, Alberti was in a more delicate position
than Bruni, whose wealth and prestige grew with that of Florence.) The open
letter also testifies to his awareness of the restricted, perhaps overly
restricted, scope of a learned and rhetorical literature.  As a writer
avowedly ready to please the peasants, Alberti proudly portrays himself as
modestly immodest and artfully artless.  In De pictura Alberti,
following Apelles' precedent in listening to the shoemaker, allows for the
judgment of unlearned men:  ``L'opera del pittore cerca essere grata a
tutta la moltitudine.  Adunque non si spregi il giudicio e sentenza della
moltitudine, quando ancora sia licito satisfare a loro oppenione.'' (The
painter's work seeks to be pleasing to the populace.  Therefore don't spurn
the judgment and sentiment of the masses, whenever it is legitimate to
satisfy their opinion.)====<Book III, ``Pictoris enim opus multitudini
gratum futurum est.  Ergo multitudinis censuram et iudicium tum non
aspernetur, cum adhuc satisfacere opinionibus liceat.''>====

Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, the earliest and most fruitful
commentary on Alberti's ideas for painting, comments on the breadth of
kinds of beauties to be found in nature.  He understood not only the drive
for beauty in art but also the allure of ugliness.  Well-dressed gentleman
though he may have aspired to be, nevertheless Leonardo went so far as to
ask whether what pleases the simple peasant is not actually more natural
than what pleases the city slicker:  

   non vedi tu, che infra
   le humane bellezze il viso bellissimo ferma li viandanti, et non gli loro
   richi ornamenti?  et questo dico \`a te, che con oro od altri ricci
   freggi adorni le tue figure.  Non vedi tu isplendenti bellezze della
   giovent\`u diminuire di loro eccellenza per li eccessivi e troppo culti
   ornamenti?  non hai tu visto le montanare involte negl' inculti e poveri
   panni acquistare maggior bellezza che quelle che sono ornate?
   ====<Leonardo, 1882, I, p.~394; cf.~Leonardo, 1956, I, pp.~163-64, II,
   pp.~130v-131.>====
    
   (Do you not see that among human beauties the very beautiful face stops
   passersby, and not their rich adornments?  And I say this to you, who
   dresses up with gold and other pompous trimmings.  Do you not see that the
   splendid adornments of the youth reduce their excellence by being overly
   refined and precious?  Haven't you seen that the mountain folk wrapped in
   rough and poor clothes possess greater beauty than those who are adorned?)
   
 In his caricatures Leonardo exposes the lesser examples of humankind to
mockery; here he makes the more radical move of suggesting that humble
people deserve admiration relative to fine ones.  The peasant,
traditionally seen as ridiculous or hateful, ====<Lomazzo, 1974, II,
``Trattato dell'arte,'' p.~315, describes under the heading ``Composizione
delle allegrezze e risi,'' a painting by Michelino da Besozzo.  It
portrayed two female and two male villani
in ridiculous dress, grinning and laughing while making lewd gestures to
one another.  Leonardo, says Lomazzo, likewise ``si dilett\`o di
disegnare vecchi e villani e villane diformi che ridessero.'' Miedema,
1977, takes these two passages as representative of the situation in
Italian art.  See further Meijer, 1971, pp.~259-66.  See also the
engravings of Leonardo's caricatures:  H.~2-4.>====
has been idealized in much the same way as the Arcadian shepherd.
Leonardo, who, like Alberti, was both illegitimate and an exile of sorts
from Florence, had much in common with him as aesthetician, not least in
this matter of using the peasant as one available yardstick of the
natural.====<Leonardo's St.~Jerome
(Vatican, Pinacoteca), left unfinished, may well belong in a different
genre than his narrative ensemblages.  In this ruvido work a single
figure wrestles with his grief, analogous to the low-style poet's crude
outpouring of anguish.>====
Alberti and Leonardo thus provided the beginnings of a theory of an art
deliberately limited in its means, adjunct to their primary emphasis on the
power of elaborate art.====<Not to forget the ancient precedent, cited
by Alberti, of Polygnotos, Timanthes, and Aglaophon, who used very limited
palettes.>====
 
                             When you depart this life, you will leave these
                             things behind.  Naked, impoverished, deserted, you
                             will descend into Hell to plead your case, without
                             the aid of a lawyer, and you will tremble before a
                             judge who cannot be corrupted by gold.
====<Bracciolini, ``On Avarice,''  
The Earthly Republic, Italian Humanists on
Government and Society, 1978, p.~278, a translation
of:  ``Cum migratis \`e vita, destituent vos
abibitis que nudi, inopes, deserti, descendentes ad
inferos dicturi propriam causam sine advocato, apud
tremendem illum iudicem, qui nescit auro
corrumpi...'' On poverty as a state of mind
proper to every Christian, see Mollat, 1986,
p.~128.>====
 
             
 The fifteenth century was characterized by a new enthusiasm for the
judicious use of wealth.  Wealth was lauded in no small part for making
possible the patronage of art with resulting benefits to church and state.
Much of the art produced at this time provided a vision of opulence, was
itself opulent, and was seen in an opulent setting.  At the same time, and
in orthodox accord with Livy as well as with Franciscan teaching, avarice
(taken to be roughly synonymous with the misuse of wealth) was routinely
vilified.====<Until 1540, in manuals for confessors, lust held second
place to avarice; see Ginzburg, 1989, p.~92.>==== Humanists worked to justify
wealth used for patronage, whether religious, civic, or intellectual.  A
painting, sculpture, or building represented money that might have been
spent directly on charity; artist and patron needed to convince themselves
and others that such diversion nevertheless served virtuous causes.

             
The standard apology for wealth in fifteenth-century Italy, and especially
in Florence, where the prominence of banking and commerce made the issue
most pressing, is presented by Matteo Palmieri (1406-75) in his Libro
della vita civile. ====<The book was not published until 1529; it was
written fairly early in Palmieri's life.>====
Money in itself is neither good nor bad, only the uses to which it is put.
Like art, it must obey the laws of decorum.  Magnificence is the reserve of
the ``richi, & potenti'' (rich and powerful) to the explicit exclusion of
the ``poveri & mezani'' (poor and middling). ====<Palmieri 1529, 75v.>====
Magnificence should be exercised in public projects, not in private ones,
and its object is to excite wonder.  Nobility---and here Palmieri shows his
republican stripes---is not requisite.  The lesser activities of 
liberality
and beneficence are the duty of all, albeit within a fairly strict sense of
hierarchy:  

   Innanzi siamo obligati alla patria poi al padre,
   & alla madre, dopo sono i figliuoli & la propria famiglia, appresso i
   coniuncti gli amici, i vicini, & cosi di grado in grado misurando tutta la
   Citta, le provincie, le lingue, & finalmente tutta la generatione humana
   \`e duno naturale amore insieme collegata, cosi si debbono i favori del
   vivere distribuire, & secondo detti gradi concedere. ====<This is a
   view of obligation by no means specific to Florence.  Cf.~Pullam, 1971,
   pp.~82-83, 186, in which the charities of the Scuole Grandi are described
   as providing insurance for the rich who might by bad fortune find
   themselves impoverished.>====
    
   (First we are obliged to our homeland, then to our father and mother,
   then to children and our own family, afterwards to our in-laws, friends,
   neighbors, and so forth gradually including the whole city, all the
   provinces, all languages, and finally all of humankind pulled together into
   one natural love.  Thus the goods of life ought to be given out, and
   granted in accordance with the aforestated ranks.) 
   
 
             
Although no admirer of the golden age before Saturn brought civilization
to the paesani, Palmieri is an advocate of the rural life.  To reap
the benefits of a villa is natural, honest, without violence or
injury. ====<Palmieri 1529, 84v-85v.>====

   La villa \`e tutta buona, fertile, copiosa, dilectevole,
   honesta, naturale, & degna d'ogni huomo da bene, & libero.
   
   (The villa is entirely good, fertile, copious, delightful, honest, natural,
   and worthy of every free and honorable man.) 
    
 This good disposition toward things rustic does not extend to the
laborers.  With regard to peasants, Palmieri's viewpoint is unequivocably
that of the landowner.  He remarks with annoyance that one must now employ
lavoratori liberi, paid with the harvest, or mercenarii
paid per diem, in place of slaves. ====<There is at least some
recognition of the rights of laborers and that they should be paid
according to their deserts; Ibid., 86v.>====
 
In the city, the plebe is even more of a problem.  Palmieri
designates most people as either the rich who benefit the city, making it
copiosa, or the infima plebe who live hand to mouth.  Both of
these smaller groups have an influence beyond their numbers, and the latter
a distinctly regrettable one:  
 
   Virgilio dice che il vulgo
   sempre si volge al peggio.  Da questo nasce la inferma stabilita, il poco
   durare, & la infinita moltitudine de gli ordini quali spesso nella Citta
   si truovano tanto diversi, che piu tosto confusione che ordine possono
   meritamente essere chiamati. ====<Ibid., 90v.>====
    
   (Virgil says that the masses always turn to the worse.  From this comes
   the shakiness, the temporariness, and the infinite number of orders, so
   varied, which often one finds in the city, which might more readily be
   termed confusion than order.) 
 
Palmieri's world is hierarchical and fundamentally ideal.  He thinks of
villainy as restricted to the weakest parts of the population,  
villani
and plebei.  His viewpoint is too distinctly that of the landlord
and of the orderly citizen for him to sympathize with Arcadian norms.  His
aesthetic makes no allowance for art that does not display magnificence.

Some theories of wealth actually esteemed it as a prize for moral behavior:
``niuno bene si pu\`o acquistare senza la grazia di Dio.'' ====<(one
acquires no possession without God's grace).  Goro Dati in his Istoria
di Firenze, cited by Jordan, 1986, p.~194, n.~13.  Cf.  ``La fortuna
\`e uno de' seni di Dio,'' Tagebuch, p.~202; and San Bernardino, in
urging the rich man not to be tanto villano
as to refuse alms, ``Quel denaio \`e di Dio,'' San Bernardino, 1989, II,
XL, 53, p.~1181.  Such an attitude is implicit also in Agostino Chigi's
denomination of himself as magnificent upon his very tombstone.>====
This left little room for admiring the virtues of the simple life of
shepherds and peasants or even the voluntary poverty of scholars.  But
there was more to the theory of wealth than praise, as there was more to
conceptualizing poverty than blame.

Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), for example, in a dialogue on the problems
of wealth and avarice written c.~1428, described one of the
heterodoxies which challenged any straightforward justification of wealth.
One of his interlocutors (soon refuted) claimed that the desire for money,
even the desire for money in excess of natural needs, is innate.
====<Oppel, 1977, pp.~564-87, analyzes the dialogue in detail, as well as
responding to the article by Baron, 1938.   He takes the work to be a
response to sermons by San Bernardino (a man of patrician origin, who,
particularly in his Latin writings, was sympathetic to the usefulness of
wealth).  Poggio, of humble birth, is more willing to blast the vice than
is the Franciscan.  See further Marsh, 1980, esp.  pp.~38-54 and Rabil,
1991, pp.~60-62.>====
Were this the winning voice of the dialogue, it would be tricky indeed to
separate avarice from a virtuous accumulation of wealth.

These books about the justification of wealth could not have been more
topical.  Cosimo de' Medici, patron and friend of the none-too-wealthy
Poggio, was richer than his social station permitted, and everybody knew
it.  Undoubtedly Cosimo was magnificent, but without fitting completely the
traditional type for magnificence.  His grandson, though less wealthy, was
dubbed ``il Magnifico''; Cosimo's persona was too modest to complement his
lavishness.  His balancing act---extending sufficient magnificence to salve
his own conscience and mollify his detractors while playing the role of the
ordinary citizen, one able to joke and be joked with---made magnificence a
less pristine concept.

Pius II, the scion of an impoverished noble family, was deeply offended by
Cosimo's wealth and power.  The banker was richer than Croesus, judged the
Pope, and his palace worthy of a king.====<The old legend that
Brunelleschi's plan for the Medici Palace was abandoned for the sake of
modesty and Michelozzo's chosen instead, may well be viewed with
suspicion.>==== He went so far as to characterize Florence as Cosimo's
whore.====<Piccolomini, 1974, I, p.~354.  He did allow that there was
less pomp in Florence than in a king's realm.>==== He was not alone in his
criticism.  Frederick III, upon seeing the palace of Cosimo, is reported to
have fumed:  

   O quante villanie e parole ingiuriose ha
   supportato a' suoi giorni questo uomo, fin che egli ha arricchito.
   Ottimamente giudicando che tutti colori, i quali, fuor della solita
   felicit\`a de gli altri, di povert\`a o di basso luogo, riescono
   grandi, sono suggetti a gli od\^i e alle villanie di
   molti.====<Domenichi, 1923, no.~201.>====
    
   (Oh how many insults and hurtful words this man has borne in his day, up
   until he made himself rich.  Establishing very well that all those, who,
   beyond the normal happiness of others, from poverty or low station, become
   great, are subjected to the hate and insults of many.) 
 People of rank were as outraged about Cosimo's wealth as many a bourgeois
was about the enriched contadino.  But, unlike the contadino,
Cosimo was powerful enough to try to counter this public denigration of his
right to magnificence.

In sympathetic accounts, a princelike Cosimo is shown acting as a
personification of nature at its most decorous, dispensing gifts according
to desert.  One facezia (joke) tells of a ragged scholar who came to
Cosimo saying that he had been attacked and robbed.====<On the
image-making of Cosimo through facezie, see Alison Brown, 1992,
pp.~108-09.>====
 Cosimo asked whether in fact he hadn't lost at gambling and therefore was
so destitute.  The litterato replied that in fact this was true, that
he had lost [at the game of Fortune] while Cosimo had won.  Marvelling, so
the story goes, Cosimo gave the man clothes and money. ====<Domenichi,
1923, p.~135, no.~264.  The story is also told by Domenichi, no.~351.
The equation of poverty with misfortune was traditional; implicit therein
was the threat inherent in seeing a poor man who warns like the traditional
memento mori skeleton, ``I was once as you are now...'' Cf.~a
Carnival song:  ``O signori siete pietosi/a' poveri bisognosi!/Miserere a'
pianti nostri,/poveretti sventurati!/... La medesima fortuna/ci fa andar
mendicando,/qual vuol sempre a ogni luna/che andian sempre stentando:/non
gli manca dove o quando/mandar sotto i valorosi!,'' The singers then excuse
their presumption by citing their great hunger (``e la gran necessitade/ci
fa s\'i
 prosuntuosi''); Canti Carnascialeschi del Rinascimento, 1936,
pp.~10-11.>==== On the other hand, when he offered pear muscadel to a  
cittadino and the guest commented that they served that fruit to pigs,
Cosimo replied that such was not his custom and ordered the beverage
removed.====<Domenichi, 1923, no.~182.>====
 Distaste for pretense coupled with wit  triumphed in this instance over the
dictates of magnificence.

             
A defense of Cosimo's wealth from a theological perspective was written by
the Augustinian Timotheo Maffei in the mid-1450s. ====<Maffei, 1742,
XII, pp.~150-68.  On which see Jenkins, 1970, XXXIII, pp.~162-70; and
Gombrich, ``The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,'' 1978, pp.~39-40.  Further
on Cosimo's place in Florentine politics, see Molho, 1979, pp.~5-33; Dale
Kent, 1978, pp.~69-71, 286-87; and Field, 1988, pp.~10-35.>====
 This dialogue includes, indeed commences, with an attack on Cosimo's
worldliness.  The Detractor brings to bear arguments that have a familiar
ring:  magnificence is the extreme of which liberality is the mean; it is
but an ``inane gloria'' to seek the immortality of one's name; I who am of
mediocre fortuna cannot conduct similar good works and my soul should
not therefore be faulted.  When it is explained that even a pauper may be
magnificent in his mind, the detractor is sufficiently mollified to give up
his envy of Cosimo and praise him instead.  Cosimo is able both to be
munificent and magnificent; the indigent have other means of achieving
glory, by their labor and by undertaking dangerous tasks.  One can, in
other words, be magnificent of spirit as well as of means.  This version of
a theory of the superiority of faith over works might conveniently convince
the poor not to resent the wealthy.

             
The contentiousness of Cosimo's wealth was long lasting.  In Donato
Giannotti's Republica Fiorentina of the 1530s, Cosimo is held up for
admiration.  A certain amount of greed, or desire for ``piaceri mondani,''
is here taken as natural, vindicating the refuted position in Poggio's
dialogue.  What titillated the reader in Poggio's time has become common
sense.  Because Savonarola thwarted such desires, he came to a bad end.  By
contrast, according to Giannotti, Cosimo allowed members of the  
popolani class to become noble or mediocri and in doing so made the
city more virtuous.  For a city, Giannotti says, will be more virtuous if
it has more mediocri, provided they refrain from imitating the
dowries, meals, and clothes of the rich they cannot afford.
====<Giannotti, 1990, pp.~85, 201.>====
 Cosimo is the best possible example, for he was magnificent without
upsetting the prevailing norms of private life. ====<Ibid., p.~202.>====
 He was decorous according to his social position and magnificent according
to his wealth---or so it seemed to this later Florentine, writing during
the establishment of the Duchy.

It was, however, the popolani Cosimo courted, not the lower  
plebei having no political rights.  Moreover, Giannotti makes no moral
claims about Cosimo:  ``sanza che egli era di natura liberale, si sapeva
anco servire delle ricchezze in acquistare grandezza'' (without being
liberal by nature, he knew still to use riches to obtain
grandeur). ====<Ibid., p.~109.>====
 Poggio Bracciolini had, rather daringly, been willing to entertain
fictively the idea that avarice could be understood as a virtue because its
effects were occasionally good; by Giannotti's time, magnificence---even
magnificence distinguished from prodigality---no longer need be associated
with virtue.  On the level of the city as a whole, moderate spending was
preferable to magnificence.  The mystique of inordinate wealth was gone.

Cosimo's career changed irrevocably the premise that magnificence implied
majesty.  He tarnished, at least for some, the reputation of magnificence,
which in turn catalyzed the idea of elegance, and thereby the Arcadian
vision of nobility, apart from dignity and grandeur.  The newer aesthetic
urged citizens to be proud of moderate status.  It did so not only because
patronage was widening, but because the status of magnificence itself was
less secure.

Generally, though, the naturalism of Renaissance art not only served to
engross the viewer more effectively and brought him or her into sympathy
with religious or historical tales, but it also implied that art (and its
patronage) was in moral accordance with nature.  The naturalism of
Renaissance art visibly opposed the heterodox idea expressed by Poggio's
renegade interlocutor, that wealth disobeyed nature's laws and limits.  In
the sixteenth century, a less complacent understanding of the effects of
wealth did in fact correspond with the relatively flagrant overturning of
the limits of naturalistic style, a shift now called Mannerist style.  A
change in social attitude helped make possible a lesser naturalism in art.

These social and philosophical shifts were the underpinning of the
development of the poesia as competitor of the grander, more
semantically straightforward istoria.  The poesia does not laud
wealth and grandeur, neither that of antiquity nor that of the Renaissance.
Based on the pastoral ideal, and dedicated to themes of love rather than
heroism, the poesia was the most recognized of various alternatives
to art in the high style, though it usually shared with the istoria
some link to ancient text.  In the pictorial world of the poesia, and
later in that of its descendant the capriccio, it was no longer
obligatory even to provide the illusion of gold, let alone to use gold
leaf.  Moreover, the importance of rustic ideals in Renaissance culture
extends beyond even the most inclusive definition of poesia or
pastoral, encompassing even satire of pastoral as itself effete and
artificial.

The pastoral ideal did not become important for painters until a certain
evolution in the ideology of wealth had taken place.  The esteem granted to
magnificence was gradually eroded by that accorded to the more moderate
quality of liberality.====<On Aristotle's linkage of the two and
Renaissance recognition thereof, see Feuer-T\'oth, 1990, pp.~35-45.>==== Once
art could be praised as elegant rather than richly ornamental, a visual art
dedicated to the rustic mode became possible.  Artists had incentive to
make images that could fit into this category of approval, images which
used crude technique to disguise delicate sensibility, rags to reveal
beauty, inexpensive materials to display genius.

 Nel paese nostro di Lombardia non s'hanno questi rispetti;
anzi molti gentilomini giovani trovansi, che le feste ballano tutto 'l
d\`i nel sole coi villani e con essi giocano a lanciar la barra, lottare,
correre e saltare; ed io non credo che sia male, perch\'e ivi non si fa
paragone della nobilit\`a, ma della forza e destrezza, nelle qual cose
spesso gli omini di villa non vaglion meno che i nobili; e par che quella
domestichezza abbia in s\'e una certa liberalit\`a
amabile.====<Gasparo, in Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del
cortegiano, II, x (In our territory of Lombardy, one doesn't have these
scruples; on the contrary, one finds many young gentlemen that at holidays
dance all day in the sun with peasants and play with them throwing the bar,
fighting, running, and jumping; and I do not believe that it is bad,
because in this they are not making a comparison of noblity but of strength
and dexterity, in which things often the men of the farm are not less
valiant than nobles; and it seems that this familiarity has in itself a
certain likable liberality).>====
 
             
 The section entitled ``La vie rurale'' in Raimond van Marle's magisterial
compendium Iconographie de l'art profane (1931-32) contains
remarkably few illustrations of Italian Renaissance art.====<There are
some late-medieval examples:  notably from Nicola Pisano's fountain at
Perugia with its cycle of the Labors of the Months.  The fresco cycle at
Trent with the same theme is included, and frescoes with scenes of everyday
life at Avignon, which by extension belong to Italian art.  Ambrogio
Lorenzetti's fresco of the countryside under Good Government and Giotto's
portrayal of Joachim's shepherds also appears.  Among International Gothic
artists, drawings by Giovannino de' Grassi and Pisanello of oxen, an ass,
and a ram are included, an ox from a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, and more
oxen in details of reliefs by Ghiberti.  From the Renaissance more
restrictedly speaking, only Jacopo Bellini's drawing of a vintage conducted
by putti, a drawing of two laborers by Baldovinetti, and an engraving after
Bassano showing the hunting and husbandry of summer are illustrated.  A
drawing by Leonardo of a man digging and a fresco by Masolino at
Castiglione d'Olona of putti doing the same receive mere mention as
does the episode of mowing hay in the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara.>====
 Scenes of laborers appear there as a carryover from the cycles of the
months typical of religious illustration during the Middle Ages rather than
as indicators of new interest in the mundane and in issues of relative
status.  One might well be led to believe, and moreover as ``a fact that
must be accepted,'' that ``the peasants and the urban poor play a very
small part in the Renaissance culture [or, more plausibly, in the Italian
art] that must interest us now.'' ====<Baxandall, 1972, p.~39.>====
 
Judged by how infrequently and how peripherally they appear, Renaissance
peasants are indeed minor characters in the artistic panorama.  Yet they
need not be thought of as incidental.  They offer a glimpse into relatively
atemporal pictorial realms; the peasant in his tatters tends to be less
specific to a particular time and place than his more fashionably dressed
lord.  They also indicate, however obliquely, very real social tensions of
a period reassessing problems of wealth, education, and artifice, as well
as the relationship of these to virtue.

The peasants of Renaissance art which probably come most readily to mind
are the background figures of Giovanni Bellini's paintings and of painters
in his ambient.  Giovanni's peasant spectators were developed on the basis
of work in the notebooks of his father, 
Jacopo Bellini, and so transport us
from the genre studies typical of International Gothic art to the
atmospheric naturalism of the Venetian Renaissance.  The humble figure is a
type which survives stylistic epochs, this being possible in part because
of its lack of compositional status.

The numerous experimental figure studies and compositions collected in
Jacopo's notebooks include almost ten sheets devoted to drawings of the
members of the laboring class, sometimes represented with considerable
dignity [fig.~4].====<Degenhart and Schmitt (1990, p.~457 with further
references) sometimes call them ``street scenes'' in their catalogue, while
allowing for their possible allegorical or other signification.  Subsequent
references to the notebooks of Jacopo Bellini refer to Degenhart and
Schmitt, 1990.>==== It has been suggested that 
Jacopo identified
with such people, being himself the son of a tinsmith or
plumber;====<Eisler, 1989, pp.~106-07.  Interestingly enough,
``Belin'' is a name that crops up in low-style poetry:  see Padua, 1894,
p.~46, from ``Scene contadinesche del 1400,'' and (Folengo, 1987, p.~120) a
``Gianni Belino'' in Folengo's ``Zanitonella,'' l.~683.  On Titian's
presumed association with a writer of macaronics, see Schupbach, 1978,
pp.~147-91.>==== but he may also have found them exotic, like the Turks and
like figures all'antica that otherwise populate his pages, types
that, by the end of the fifteenth century, would be appearing in the  
intermezzi of aristocratic banquets in Venice.  His teacher Gentile da
Fabriano had used a modicum of drabness and low life to set off the
brilliantly spangled and brocaded rich, even to the extent of showing a
mugging in the background of his Strozzi Adoration of the Magi
 (Uffizi).  Jacopo in his drawings went further, on occasion treating the
peasant with downcast eyes to as much space on the parchment as the
caparisoned knight.

As would his son later, Jacopo uses the solitary figure as a spectator of
religious truths apparently too great for a peasant's fathoming:  a
pedestrian on the left page seems able to witness the Ascension of Christ
on the facing page, although he shows no sign of reaction (London, fol.
58v-59); again on a left page, a peasant trudges homeward past the three
crosses, on the far side of them and seemingly oblivious to them, while on
the right page the Lamentation takes place (Paris, fol.~52v-53); in a
Presentation of the Virgin, a poor man stands by the stairway, a great
stairway based on that of the courtyard of the Doge's Palace (London, fol.
58).====<He stands more or less in the position of the famous old
woman of Titian's Presentation of the Virgin
for the Scuola della Carit\`a, on which, see Rosand, 1982, pp.~111-18.
There is no corresponding figure in the painting Jacopo made of this
subject, a predella panel for the Brescia Annunciation altarpiece.>====
A degree of class insult may indeed be present in these images of an inert
humankind, but the amount of page given over to these figures without
explicit characterization as evil, their quiet behavior, and the very
private use of these drawings, indicate that they are not meant to elicit
conventional sneering.  Because occasionally Jacopo allows the peasant an
entire page otherwise bereft of human figure, the effect can be even more
poignant than in Giovanni's paintings.  The peasant acts as Everyman, with
whom the viewer has no wish to empathize, but with whom he necessarily does
in part.

Jacopo's son initiated the practice of painting peasants as a standard
pictorial element lacking any clear and definite iconographic function.
Most of Giovanni Bellini's peasants exist as dully colored brushstrokes
amid the grasses and trees.  Compositionally they are almost as minor as
dead trees and rabbits.  Their actions, their individuality, their beauty
are understated or unstated altogether.  To be able so to transform the
human figure was itself a major artistic accomplishment, all the more so
since Bellini did this without bleeding all meaning from the form.  The
landscape is different for the presence of these peasants, even though we
should not take it for granted that their connotations are necessarily
consistent from one painting to the next.

In the middle ground of Bellini's Sacred Allegory in the Uffizi
appears a darkly hued shepherd,====<It is impossible to say with
certainty whether the darkness is spelunkal or pellicular.  The facial
features might well be taken as African, yet the extended ankle seems of
lighter hue than face and hands.>====
 and in the background are various peasants [fig.~5].  Never yet crucial to
interpretations offered for the painting, they are treated in two basic
ways, either as complementary to or as contrasting with the holy space of
the marble terrace.  One recent treatment dubs these ``bucolic figures''
and finds that the background figures convey a ``sense of well-being and
harmonious existence in the natural world.'' ====<Goffen, 1989,
pp.~116-17.  Land (1984, pp.~61-66) observes the middle and background
figures in some detail, avoiding any iconographic explanation, instead
satisfying himself that they show the reconciliation of naturalism and
imagination; del Bravo (1983, pp.~691-704) deems the shepherd to be
Virgilian, symbolizing by his placement in a cave the limits of earthly
contemplation.  On blacks in Italian society at this time, see Devisse and
Mollat, 1979, pp.~187-94.>====
 The dark shepherd of the middle ground is acknowledged, though not
explained.  Similarly, the landscape has been said to amplify the meaning
of the painting by showing how the ``Church extends her message to the
lonely figures on the promontory and to the common folk beyond the
river.''====<Delaney, 1977, pp.~331-35.>====
 Others emphasize the river as dividing the composition, and see the
posture of the shepherd as one denoting melancholy.====<Braunfels,
1956, p.~8; Coltellacci and Lattanzi, 1981, pp.~62, 76.>====
 
The shepherd, situated near the main vertical axis of the painting, is
dressed in bright red, a minor compositional element we ignore at our
intellectual peril.  Why this unusual presentation of a shepherd?  He is in
fact also a goatherd, and he shares his ground with a centaur.  He is
neither privy to the courtly scene in the foreground, nor has he access to
the rustic cross in the middleground.  The dark cast of the skin may be
intended to distinguish him as a non-Christian shepherd and so as a rustic
in the boorish sense.  He is hidden in heavy shadow whereas Christians are
brightly lit. ====<It is worth noting that the herdsman in the far
middleground of the Frick St.~Francis
 is actively at work, and his
attitude of distraction (i.e., concentration upon the mundane) appears to
contrast with the intense contemplation of the saint.>====
 His pose, rightly recognized as one of melancholy, should thus signify the
``tristizia'' of the contadino, pair to his
``malignit\`a.''====<E.g., Arlotto, 1954, p.~218.>==== His presence in
the painting seems subtly to introduce a note of tension into a painting
otherwise of placid adoration.

In the middle ground of Bellini's two versions of the Death of St.
Peter Martyr there occur again peasants who play a role by no means minor,
again to be looked upon with reprehension [fig.~6].  The painting in the
National Gallery, London, the larger version and usually thought to be the
earlier, includes on the right a shepherd who sits facing into the woods,
accompanied by a dog, an unsaddled donkey, and a child helper.  This
section of the painting is quietly, reassuringly pastoral.  The inclusion
of the child suggests the presence of Christ in the scene, although on some
inarticulate level without direct symbolism.  Elsewhere, the foreground
landscape is a site of violence.  The saint is brutally martyred.  Directly
behind him, peasants chop down trees.====<On the status of the two
versions, see Fletcher and Skipsey, 1991, pp.~4-9.  They suggest that the
National Gallery version be dated c.~1507-08, and they cite a
precedent for the inclusion of the woodcutters.>==== As angels might augment a
composition of Madonna and Child, so here naturalized devils do.
====<Peasants may be expected to appear more worldly and less holy than
shepherds.  For instance, in the 
Madonna of the Meadow 
in the National Gallery, London, the peasant is placed close to the
emblematic battle between stork and snake, rather than in utter quiet.>====
 They amplify the dire deed in the foreground; their axes echo the blows of
the murderers' daggers.  In the version at the Courtauld Institute, London,
the trees thus struck actually shed blood.====<In general, the use of
symbolism is more overt in the Courtauld version; observe the juxtaposition
of Brother Dominic's outstretched hands and the sheep, and, as noted by
Fletcher and Skipsey, 1991, the centrally located domini cane.>====
Whether an allusion to Virgil's and Dante's bleeding trees or
not,====<Aeneid III, 22ff., Inferno, Canto XIII.>==== the
inclusion of such peasant figures has taken us closer to the surreal than
to the real.  These peasants serve to arouse the viewer's horror more
fully, and most definitely not as mere genre elements.

Not all of Bellini's peasants play so ominous a role.  In general they
induce us to think of humans as diminutive and nature as large.  They live
in a world whose scale is fundamentally different from that of monumental
saints and warriors.  This is almost another art than that of linear
perspective with its relentless analytic focus and its insistence on
measurement.  Pictorial space makes these figures seem less important
rather than more.  When nature shows fewer signs of human domination,
humans are correspondingly less imposing.  The shepherds and peasants in
the backgrounds are tesserae in an expressive whole, rather than
informative by contour and pose in themselves.  Shrinking the figure of the
peasant often reduced the need to characterize him at all, as happy or
dignified, loutish or sullen.  In the exceptional case of Bellini's  
Feast of the Gods (Washington, National Gallery), even the Olympians come
smack down to earth and refuse to bother to exude pictorial dignity.

These pictorial understatements should not be placed in the camp of
Venetian art, alienated from Florentine developments.  For there are points
of contact, as well as suggestive correlations.  Mantegna, Bellini's
brother-in-law, resident first in Padua, then Mantua, may well have talked
with Alberti about matters high and low in the years leading up to the
Florentine's death in 1472.====<See Emison, 1994.>====
 Likewise Giorgione may have shared such ideas with Leonardo when the
latter visited Venice after the fall of Milan in 1499.  Before either of
these encounters, Donatello lived and made art on the rustic, plain end of
respectability, in congenial correspondence to the unpretentious persona of
his patron Cosimo de' Medici.  The Mary Magdalen (Florence, Museo
dell'Opera del Duomo) in wood, made originally for the Baptistry, remains a
shocking representation of a self-abusive ascetic, a work exploiting the
frailness and relative cheapness of the medium.  Vasari's story that
Brunelleschi criticized Donatello's Crucified Christ in S.~Croce,
also in wood, for making Christ into a peasant, implies that Donatello's
rusticity may have been harder to accept than Cosimo's.

In 1483 Hugo van der Goes' Portinari altarpiece (Uffizi) arrived in
Florence.  The shepherds in that impressively large painting stole the show
from the prettified and staid doll-like donors in ritualized prayer
posture.  The Portinari altarpiece demonstrated that an art portraying the
lower classes could impress, that the beauty of extensive landscape might
compensate for the stark features of realistic visages.  Within twenty
years, the lesson was renewed and re-enforced by the arrival of D\"urer's
prints throughout Italy.====<For the argument that D\"urer's woodcut
proposal for a Monument to Commemorate a Victory over the Rebellious
Peasants may betray a ``deep ambivalence'' on his part, see Greenblatt,
1983, pp.~1-29.  Bia\lostocki (1957, pp.~195-202) similarly found both
pity and irony.  See further Schweikhart, 1978, pp.~111-36.>==== Pontormo is
notable among Florentines for his attention to those works, as Ghirlandaio
is for his focus on the Portinari altarpiece.

Even the elegant art of Botticelli is not alien to these matters.  The
ragged male shepherds in his London Adoration of the Magi [fig.~7],
like little brown insects on a vast web of architectural geometry, belong
to the long but fragmented history of the visualization of the unadorned,
as surely as do Pontormo's peasants at Poggio a Caiano [fig.~8], negligent
figures with casually exposed limbs, caught in snapshot-like
poses. ====<For an elaborate interpretation of this as a ``deceptive
pastorale,'' actually an allegory of Medici decline and renewal, see
Cox-Rearick, 1984, pp.~117-42.  See also the splendid two paragraphs on the
painting as an ``icon of privacy,'' ``a network of charming class border
violations,'' in Struever, 1992, pp.~144-45.>====
 Although they are tucked away rather than made protagonists, nevertheless
the t\^ete-a-t\^ete between the boy in brown and the youthful dandy in
Pontormo's Joseph in Egypt (National Gallery, London) [fig.~9] might
well remind us of Giorgione's 
Concert champ\^etre 
(Louvre).====<According to Vasari, the boy in drab clothes eyeing his
more flamboyant companion is a portrait of Pontormo's pupil, Bronzino:
thus a characterization of the artist as abased relative to the art he
creates.>====
 
If stylistic continuity is used as the measure of coherence, looking in
Italian Renaissance art for peasant subjects uncovers no strictly coherent
phenomenon.  No great models emerged in Italian art, so one image of the
peasant owes relatively little to another.  Even the like of the Portinari
altarpiece and D\"urer's prints had scattered effects as models.  But
stylistic discontinuity is not to be conflated with insignificance.  Our
aim is to grasp what it was possible to achieve in conceptually unstable,
visually less prominent realms.

             
 A Renaissance idea of Nature not wholly ideal perhaps offends historians'
ideals of the Renaissance more than historical fact.====<Weise, 1961,
is a fascinating book which does for Italian Quattrocento art what Jan
Huizinga did for Flemish, namely, isolate its late-medieval character in
its realistic stylistic traits.  Although not a work of art history, it
does make use of works of art as examples and explicitly opposes
W\"offlin's idea of continuity between Quattrocento and Cinquecento
attitudes toward the antique.  Weise emphasizes the leap into some ancestor
of the sublime with Raphael's style and Ficino's anti-naturalistic
philosophy as a factor in this.  He sees the new culture as more masculine
in character (vol.  I, p.~43).>==== To allow the ordinary and imperfect a
significant part in Renaissance life and thought inconveniently curtails
the heuristic importance of the ideas of concinnitas and human
dignity as a kind of nobility for all.  What place is there for  
villani, men and women whose lack of freedom was their defining
characteristic, in the Renaissance that forms the antithesis of the human
servility of the Middle Ages?  And what place is there for compositionally
and figurally simple works of art in the Renaissance that produced the  
istoria with its variety and vastness in triumphant contrast to stark and
elementary icons?

But much has changed since Burckhardt described the Renaissance.  The
expectation of historical climax or crystalline moment shared by not only
Hegel and Nietzsche, but Vasari and Voltaire too, has yielded to the
potential of la longue dur\'ee.  Change in methodology changes our
understanding of a period; indeed historians have become increasingly
sensitive to the possibility that the significance of a period lies more
nearly in the act of periodization than in any historical truths.  An
advantage of the history of la longue dur\'ee is the relative
absence of that periodizing intervention.  The new medieval histories of
Lynn White, Marc Bloch, Aron Gurevich and others have their correlates if
not consequences in the modified Renaissance art histories of E.H.
Gombrich, Michael Baxandall, and Joseph L.  Koerner, in which notions of
making and matching natural vision to art, literary language to art,
personal and social codes of selfhood to art, are all more compatible with
the new history, seen with fractal indifference to matters of scale, than
with that old one plotted in apogees and fallings off.  Our task as
historians of the Renaissance is now to de-emphasize those well-established
notions of period, dependent as they are on sometimes artificial climaxes
and crises, to look at slower change than the stylistic shift from
International Gothic to Early Renaissance or Renaissance to High
Renaissance, let alone that old bugbear, the transition from High
Renaissance to Baroque.  One of those slower changes involves more
attention directed toward species of imperfection, meaning parts of art
imperfect not because they fall short of empirical truth, but because they
fall into a category of what we might call idealized faultiness, of lack of
perfect beauty which nevertheless has aesthetic validity:  the low
style.====<Cf.~Moxey, 1989, Ch.~V and 1994, pp.~241-64, esp.  the
latter on the intersection of the concepts low, female, and popular for
German art.  In the Italian case the conflation of low with popular is not
so readily accomplished.>====
 
                             Nelle pitture piu ne move il colore, anzi che
                             le linee, percioche meglio rappresenta la forma
                             dell'huomo & piu ci inganni:  cosi la bugia
                             mescolata con la verisimiglianza piu ne tira a se,
                             & ne commove, che'l semplice parlare ove ne sia
                             veruna arte.
====<Anonymous, 1550, p.~44:  ``In painting
color moves us more than lines, since it better
expresses the form of man and fools us more:  thus
lie mixed with truth attracts us more, and moves us,
than simple speech in which there is no true art.''>====
 
             
``Realism'' is, par excellence, a problem of la longue dur\'ee
rather than an indicator of a particular stylistic moment.  The art
history of Northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has
better grappled with questions about verisimilitude, the absence of textual
bases, and alternatives to a serious moralizing function than that of
Italy.  This is due in part to the relative continuity north of the Alps
between the medieval and Renaissance periods.====<In northern
Renaissance art, the history of the representation of the peasantry is
cardinal to its entire history.  D\"urer made notes for himself on norms
for a variety of kinds of beauty (``eine dicke Frau,'' ``eine sehr lange
Frau,'' ``lange d\"unne Frau,'' ``sch\"one starke Frau,'' ``starke
Frau,'' ``eine junge Frau,'' ``schlanke Frau,'' ``starken Mann,''
``sch\"onen starken Mann,'' ``schmalen Mann,'' and, not least, ``nach
Vitruv, vollst\"andige proportion des Mannes'')---more kinds of female
beauty than of male, incidentally; D\"urer, 1966, II, pp.~163-277.
Brueghel elevated to oil painting from prints the pictorial type of the
peasant festival, or kermesse, to which eventually many artists, not
least Rubens, contributed.  A lively art-historical debate on how to
interpret these works began in the 1970s.  Ought the contemporary viewer to
have laughed at these roistering folk, cuttingly or with sympathy?  One art
historian's object of mockery has proved another's lodestone of the human
condition.  And when is a disguised symbol not a symbol at all, but
realism, a use of visual components that discourages interpretation beyond
the literal level?  See Alpers, 1972-73, pp.~163-76; and idem, 1975-76,
pp.~115-44; idem, 1995, Ch.~1; and Miedema, 1977, pp.~205-19.  Miedema
takes as typical of Italian art a lost painting by Michelino da Besozzo
described by Lomazzo.  See also Carroll, 1987, pp.~289-314; Moxey, 1989,
pp.~35-66, and the review of the same by Koerner, 1991, pp.~144-49;
Mellinkoff, 1993, pp.~137-40.  The question of northern or southern
precedence used to seem more essential; see M\"untz, 1886, pp.~557-90,
and for a more recent consideration of northern versus southern modes of
vision, Degenhart, 1940, pp.~423-28.  Epperlein (1975, pp.~79-149) surveys
German art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, also including some
provocative woodcuts of the period just before the Peasant War of 1524-25.
See also Scribner, 1981.  On the medieval case, see Alexander, 1990,
pp.~36-52.  And on disguised symbolism, inter alia, Emison, 1995,
``Paysage Moralis\'e.''>==== In Italian art, the characteristic accomplishment
of which is  highly rhetorical images, these issues pertain to the low style. 

A drawing attributed to Timoteo Viti
 (1469/70-1523 active in the ambient of Raphael)====<216 x 258 mm.
Pouncey and Gere, 1962, no.~256, p.~152.  Metalpoint and brush heightened
with white on brown prepared surface.>==== may serve to indicate the type.
 A nude male, head in hand, sits beside his unused viol [fig.~10].  The
nudity indicates that the setting is probably in antiquity, despite the
inclusion of a modern instrument.  Details of the instrument are lacking,
and there is a pentimento in the toes of the figure.  The field is but
approximately framed.  The drawing, done in three tones, is more complete,
more atmospheric, than a preliminary sketch would likely be.  The artist's
marks are deliberately approximate.  Without being sketchy, they are more
suggestive than definitive of form.

Inaction displays the contents of the soul and does so with calculated
vagueness.  Akin to (among others) the shepherd in Castiglione's  
Tirsi who has lost his pleasure in the shady woods, the sparkling springs,
and the meadows, who forsakes his role as master of the herd, this figure
turns away from the art of music, and implicitly from art itself.  His gaze
is abstracted:  he is spell-bound by inner visions, making us understand
the limits of visual art and the vastness of imagination.  It may be, as
has been hazarded, that this is Orpheus---a pastoral character in that
nature sympathizes with his songs====<And, moreover, the subject of an
eclogue by Pomponeus Gauricus, 1504.  See also Walker, 1958, p.~19, who
notes that Renaissance representations of Orpheus most often feature treble
viol or violin; and Chastel, 1975, pp.~175-76, which takes Orpheus as the
epitome of ``le mythe de l'artiste id\'eal.''>====---but it is essential only
that this musician in a landscape be recognized as one who sits amid
nature, having left off art.  He presents an ideal of mood rather than of
deed, and, moreover, a contemplative mood that is not in the least monastic
or even didactic in any direct way.

As a drawing, this work may have been for the private reference of the
artist.  Whether it was or not, whether Orpheus is the subject or not,
whether there is any textural reference direct or indirect, the work
belongs to the extended pastoral genre, and to the project of realism, by
virtue of the privileged status it accords to the emotions of
disappointment, despair, and disillusion and the connection it suggests
between these and the quiet of landscape.  The artist makes no pretense to
omniscience, no avowal of the perfect adequacy of vision for grasping the
things of the soul; the viewer, in turn, duly recognizes art even in this
lack of art.


The rivalry between high and low developed over centuries; the Renaissance
plays a relatively small, though perhaps nevertheless key, role in that
evolution, one more easily recognized in the writing of Boccaccio and
Rabelais than in the visual arts.====<See also, Wood,
1993, Ch.~3, esp.  pp.~173-76.>==== Nevertheless, within the exercise of a
still highly symbolical vision, such figures appeared with increasing
prominence, particularly in less costly works, or as background motifs in
paintings.

The low style obliged the viewer to impose meanings on
material left in a relatively crude state.  
Viti's drawing not only allows  but encourages such a
response.  Despite being peripheral to the Renaissance as it has become
famous, low-style works may make the Renaissance worth knowing again and
more thoroughly in our own time, less heroic itself than that of the early
historiography of the Renaissance.

                             Molte cose agresti & selvaggie nascono ne
                             nostri campi, le quali quantunque di lor natura
                             cattive sieno, elle sono per\`o inditio chiaro di
                             fertile terreno:  cosi gli affetti dell'animo per se
                             stessi cattivi, fanno per\`o testimonianza di non
                             cattivo ingegno (se vi si aggiunga buona
                             disciplina).
====<Anonymous, 1550, p.~82:  ``Many things
rural and wild are hiding in our fields, which
however bad they may be in their nature, they are
nevertheless a clear indicator of fertile land:
thus the emotions of the soul, in themselves bad,
nevertheless bear witness to a mind not bad (if
there is adjoined good discipline).''>====
 
             
Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for
display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as
signs of quite personal emotions rather than subscriptions to publicly
vaunted ideologies.  Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of
them is a classic pastoral idyll (perhaps no such thing was ever created in
the visual arts).  The rozzo stile is to be understood as more
comprehensive than that.  The issue is not only who is represented but
whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically
affirmative art.

On at least one occasion it was explicitly asserted that the visual arts
were unlike poetry with respect to differentiation of genre.  Such was the
opinion in 1547 of Benedetto Varchi, academician at Florence and in general
an advocate of learned, intellectual images.====<His peculiar
reasoning was that poets described different kinds and professions of
people, and painters only bodies, and ``tutti i corpi sono ad un modo,
cos\`i quegli de' principi come de' privati''; Barocchi, 1971, I,
p.~265.>==== But it is also true that poetical and rhetorical theories were
primary fonts of theory about the visual arts.  The license for
alternatives to the grand manner expressed in literary theory must have
suggested now and then, or have been appealed to in support of, the
development of more diversified ways of understanding visual art.  Varchi's
refutation in itself suggests the possibility.

In Sperone Speroni's dialogue on love, Tullia (di Aragona, a courtesan)
responds to Nicolo Gratia's description of the ways in which men are able
to know God.  Nicolo says that God's grace toward these different grades of
men is as various as the ways in which courtesans love men.  Tullia
counters by comparing such men to human figures in paintings that are
splashed on with little proper form:  

   Questa vostra ragione
   \`e simile molto alle dipinture, lequale noi vulgarmente appelliamo  
   lontani:  ove sono paesi, per lequali si vedono caminare alcune piccole
   figurette che paiono huomini:  ma sottilmente considerate, non hano parte
   alcuna, che \`a membro d'huomo si rassomigli.
   
   (Your argument is very like those paintings commonly called lontani,
   in which one sees little figures walking through landscapes, which, when
   looked at closely, have no part that resembles human limbs.)
   ====<Sperone, 1546, p.~22.  Gratia cites Brocardo as the source of his
   argument.  A very similar passage occurs in Taegio, 1564, p.~23v:  ``queste
   vostre ragioni & poesie mi paiono pitture & perspettive di paesi, ove da
   longi si veggono caminar certe picciole figure, c'hanno somiglianza
   d'huomo, le quali d'appresso considerate non hanno pur segno di forma
   humana.'' The antecedents of these sketchy figures begin to appear in the
   more ``realistic'' art of Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna, and 
   Ercole Roberti;
   see, e.g., Meiss' mentions of ``ghostly figures,'' ``pallid figures''
   (1964, p.~29).>====

A casual acknowledgment of differing types of painting this
certainly is, but all the more precious for being so.====<And
contrasts in this with Paolo Giovio's reference to Dosso Dossi's  
parerga; on which Plinian category, see Gombrich, ``The Renaissance Theory
of Art and the Rise of Landscape,'' 1978, pp.~113-14.>==== Sperone demonstrates
that paintings were thought about abstractly, that their formal qualities
might have metaphorical application.  Perhaps, like genre painting, such
freedom of interpretation had long been around in less conspicuous form;
still, Sperone's remark in the mouth of Tullia gives us definite proof that
the lesser genres of painting were taken quite seriously and might affect
thought and expression, sottilmente.

             
If it is fair to characterize the high, grand style of painting as seeking
to arrange the most beautiful figures in the most harmonious composition,
then in practice there were numerous alternatives.====<There is a
shift, between the time of Alberti and Vasari, toward praise of the nude
over and above the istoria (Alberti, like Aretino and Pope Pius IV,
had not wanted the private parts displayed in art), but this alternative
norm (disadvantageous to Raphael) still belonged to the heroic, grand mode.
In the north, a treatise on rhetoric of 1531 by Philip Melanchthon forms a
notable exception.  See Kuspit, 1973, pp.~177-202.  Melanchthon associates
the high style with D\"urer, the middle with Gr\"unewald, and the low
with Lucas Cranach, at the same time allowing for the mixture of levels, as
with tones in music.  For an analysis of a complementary text of 1532, see
Parshall, 
``Camerarius,'' 
1978, pp.~11-29.  Gombrich (``The Leaven of Criticism in
Renaissance Art:  Texts and Episodes,'' 1976, p.~131) suggests a
sixteenth-century critical dilemma (especially during Vasari's time)
between the value of simplicity, understood primarily as accordance with
the laws of perspective, and ease of execution.  He derives this most
directly from Melanchthon's comments about D\"urer.  But if one
extrapolates from simplicity to genre (there is no specific reference to
perspective anyway), the comment potentially has implications for much of
the art of D\"urer's time, let alone Vasari's.  If D\"urer understood
the essential relation between art and nature as one of simplicity, it goes
against expectation that the advantages of a low genre would not have
occurred to him.  He did, of course, illustrate Theocritus for Pirckheimer,
but the consequences need not be circumscribed so literally.>====
 As with non-finito in Renaissance art, the low-style  work
functioned as a magnet
to attract art, or as a catalyst, the true art being either in the mind of
the artist or in the mind of the canny observer.====<See further on
the enhanced role of the observer in Renaissance art, Shearman, 1992.>====
 Both use the physical object as a token rather than as an end in itself,
thereby obviating the possibility of admiring what is mere artifice.

             
As was said of Michelangelo, the artist who justified non-finito, so
one might say of pastoral:  that having seen or read one such work, one
knew them all.====<Dolce, pp.~170-73.>====
 The type bore more significance than the details inherent in the examples
because the art was essentially thematic rather than dramatic.  It
stimulated interpretation and the experience of mood.
And just as the idea of the pastoral poet was more
important than any particular passage, so too 
was the type of the low-style artist more important 
than any particular work or any particular artist's
personal reputation.





                                 CHAPTER 2

                            Picturing Pastoral
 

                             Il divenire subitamente pastore ne mostra la
                             eccellenza del suo ingegno, in quanto subitamente fu
                             tanto e tale, che in breve spazio di tempo comprese
                             per istudio quello che opportuno era a devenire
                             pastore, cio\`e datore di pastura agli altri
                             ingegni di ci\`o bisognosi.
====<Giovanni Boccaccio, interpreting a dream
had by Dante's pregnant mother, in ``Tratatello in
Laude di Dante''; see Vite di Dante, Petrarca e
Boccaccio, c.~1904, p.~67:  ``The suddenly
becoming a shepherd shows us the excellence of his
mind, in how suddenly he was so much and such, that
in a short span of time he grasped by study that
which was fitting to become shepherd, that is, donor
of sustenance to the other minds needy of this.''>====
 
             
 In the third century B.C., Theocritus invented pastoral poetry, a
conversational and witty form relative to the already established epic and
lyric.  His Greek eclogues were published by Aldus' Venetian press in 1495.
Of broader and more direct importance for Renaissance poets was Theocritus'
Latin imitator, Virgil.  He seemed more impressive than Homer, let alone
Theocritus, if only because he had written in three different levels of
style:  pastoral, bucolic, and epic.  This progression, from low to high as
he aged, was one of the bases for the understanding of literary style
during the Renaissance.  Donatus (fourth century A.D.) in his much-perused
Life of Virgil described three voices, or
$\chi\alpha\rho\alpha\kappa\tau\acute\eta\rho$.====<On the early
history of the theory of levels of style, see O'Sullivan, 1992.  The first
explicit use of the tripartite scheme belongs to Theophrastus ( 
c.~370-288/5 B.C.) See also Bia\lostocki, c.~1965, pp.~9-35.  He
points out that when Alberti tried to apply the tripartite scheme to the
orders, the grand was also what one might call the rough, i.e., Doric,
whereas subtile was assigned to the Corinthian.  For a basic and fun
introduction to pastoral, see Marinelli, 1971; see also Taylor, 1964,
Rosenmeyer, 1969, and Empson, 1935, pp.~11-12:  ``The essential trick of
the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich
and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the
universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned
and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the
best way).  From seeing the two sorts of people combined like this you
thought better of both; the best parts of both were used.  The effect was
in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two
sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective
elements of the society he lived in.'' For the visual arts, see Freedman,
1989 and Cafritz, et al., 1988.>==== These are:  tenuis,
$\acute\iota\sigma\chi\nu\graveo\varsigma$ (plain, unadorned);  
validus, 
$\acute\alpha\delta\!\rho\acuteo\nu$ 
(mighty, powerful); and  
moderatus, $\mu\acute\epsilon\sigma o\varsigma$ (within
bounds).====<In addition, he analyzed the work according to three
genres of style:  dramatic, in which the characters themselves speak, as in
the eclogues; narrative, as in the first three books of the Georgics;
and mixed, as in the Aeneid.>==== Servius (also fourth century) similarly
spoke of Virgil's three characters for the poetical voice, humilis,
grandiloquus, and medius.  Renaissance theorists followed suit.
Renaissance authors routinely echoed this scheme.  Landino (1424-92) refers
to the ways of speaking (genus) as humilis, sublimis, and
mediocris.  Jodocius Badius Ascensius (1462-1535) calls these
intentions or, better, propositum ac ratio.  Antonius Mancinellus
(1452-1506?) refers to the dicendi genera as huber,  
gracile, and mediocre:
 
   Huberi dignitas atque amplitudo est.  Gracili venustas &
   subtilitas.  Mediocre in confinio est utriusque mondi particeps.
   
   (The copious sort has dignity and fullness.  The unadorned has prettiness
   and subtlety.  The mediocre is within these bounds and partakes of both
   worlds.)
    
             
 These he exemplifies using not only Virgil's major works but also
characters from Homer.  Ulysses shows the magnificent type; Menelaus the
repressed or tamed type; and Nestor the mixed.  This basic tripartite
scheme was widely known and accepted, a standard element in any commentary
on Virgil and so on nearly any thinking about poetry.  For literature,
then, the grand or magnificent style existed as one among three.

             
Although Renaissance writers expressed the greatest admiration for epic,
with its themes dominantly of wrath, they most often wrote pastoral, with
its themes dominantly of love.  Dante's Commedia was but the first
example of an extremely ambitious work in the low style:  written in the
vernacular, for the most part about ordinary folk who have no stake in
conventionally grand actions determining the fate of peoples.====<Cf.
Auerbach, 1965, p.~297ff.~on sermo humilis and stil nuovo.>==== In
addition to this somewhat aberrant example of the low style, Dante also
wrote Latin eclogues.

Giovanni del Virgilio, so called for his Bolognese lectures on that author,
wrote a Latin poem to Dante in 1319, suggesting that Dante should earn the
crown of laurel and ivy already assumed by Alberto Mussato and that he,
Giovanni, would award it.  He begged Dante to stop ``casting pearls before
swine'' by writing in Italian.  Popularity (vulgo judice) should be
beneath him.  Dante modestly, learnedly, and wittily chose to reply with a
Latin eclogue, casting himself as Tityrus (Virgil's alter ego), and
declining the distinctly unofficial invitation.  Giovanni responded in
pastoral vein, changing his invitation to a request for a visit---``Come to
the milk-pail!'' (Ad mulctrale veni).====<The plan was that Dante
might meet Mussato at Giovanni's house (a somewhat unrealistic invitation,
for although Mussato did go to Bologna, poor Giovanni did not rate an
introduction, at least not without Dante as his guest).  For these, and
Dante's putative second reply, see Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio,
1971 (reprint of 1902).  Another fly in Giovanni's ointment is that Dante
was a White Guelph, Mussato a Ghibelline.>====
 
Writing in some cases after the plague of 1348, Petrarch too imitated
Virgil in Latin eclogues.====<For Petrarch's direct effect upon the
visual tradition, see Prince d'Essling and E.  M\"untz, 1902.>====
Characteristically, he availed himself of that genre's tendency toward
lament and complaint:  the sixth eclogue is actually entitled Pastorum
Pathos.  In the first, under the name of Silvius, Petrarch declaims
against the worldliness of his times, in particular, of the church.  In
another, female interlocutors, a rarity in pastoral poetry, mourn Laura
(under the name of Galathea).====<``Undecime Egloge,'' in Petrarch, 1906, 
pp.~156-59.  See also on Boccaccio's more lovelorn, less allegorical
eclogues; Boccaccio, 1987, xxiii-lxxii.>====
 As these examples from Petrarch indicate, the low genre allowed for a
different emotional content than the high, recriminating instead of
stalwart or even congratulatory.

Not until much later, still with Virgil as primary model, was Italian
pastoral introduced.====<See Giorgi, 1915, pp.~140-52; and Grayson,
1956, pp.~16-29.  Boccaccio is credited with writing the first vernacular
pastoral, Alberti the next, c.~1430.  In 1481 Bernardo Pulci
published his Florentine collection, including contributions by Girolamo
Benivieni.  The volume was well known in Naples because Boninsegni
dedicated an eclogue dated 1468 to Alfonso.>==== As Bernardo Pulci wrote in his
introduction to a translation of Virgil's eclogues, gathered together with
various Italian eclogues and published in Florence in 1481:
 
   insino dalla prima pueritia sommamente mi sono dilectato per
   fare experientia se lartificiosa elegantia del rusticano metro in materna
   idioma per modo alcuno si potessi exprimere.====<Pulci, 1481, unpag.>====
    
   (since my youngest childhood I have taken enormous pleasure in making
   experiment whether in any way it would be possible to express the
   artificial elegance of rustic meter in the mother tongue [vernacular].)
    
 He was, he confessed, ``mosso dalla dolceza de pastorali canti & daltri
sensi che assai maravigliosi in essa si legono'' (prompted by the sweetness
of pastoral songs and by the very marvelous meanings that one reads in
them).  The matter is ``cose simplicissime & rusticane,'' his own  
ingegno has but ``piccole forze.'' Yet this is poetry for the learned,
dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici.

The most published of vernacular eclogues was L'Arcadia by the
Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazaro.  The title refers to a wild part of the
Peloponnesus mentioned by Theocritus.  First drafted in the 1480s, the work
was pirated in Venice in 1502 and then published in Naples in 1504,
followed by numerous editions, especially in Venice and including Florence
and Bologna. ====<See on Sannazaro, Folena, 1952; Boillet, 1977,
especially for the relevance of contemporary political problems
to the text as it evolved over two decades or more; Kennedy, 1983,
including study of allegorical references in the text; and Tylus, 1992,
pp.~109-23.  On actual conditions of fifteenth-century shepherds in
Neapolitan territory, including the death of 700,000 sheep in the winter of
1474-75, see Marino, 1988, pp.~24-28.>====
 Sannazaro's mixture of prose and verse was the most complex and coherent
pastoral composition of the time.====<Among the many studies of
Renaissance pastoralism, see in particular Snell, 1945, pp.~25-41; and
Stracke, 1981.  She claims (p.~18) a continuity between Italian pastoral
and Dutch realism.>==== Antiquity now had its own antiquity, purer than Rome
and freer of political issues still divisive in the Renaissance, such as
Brutus' role in the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Neither Virgil nor Theocritus had used the first person, as Renaissance
poets including Sannazaro often did.  Although Virgil had incorporated
well-recognized autobiographical references, he had done so only under the
veil of allegory.  The modesty of his implicit identification with the
shepherd Tityrus was appropriate as a posture of address to his patron, its
fictiveness being suitably transparent.  Having situated himself more
immediately amongst the shepherds, Sannazaro proceeded to distance himself
by indicating his transitory residence there.  He dwelt in Arcadia under
both the names Sannazaro and Sincero, making it clear that in reality he
was no shepherd.  His birth, he asserted more than once in the text, was
respectable (``non da oscuro sangue'').====<In the epilogue Sannazaro
reasserts how he came to Arcadia, ``non come rustico pastore ma come
coltissimo giovane, bench\`e sconosciuto e peregrino di amore.'' A longer
self-description opens Prosa 7.  He explains how his great-grandfather had
been rewarded by Charles III of Durazzo and how his father and grandfather
suffered reversals under Joanna II, so that he was ``in modesto fortuna
nudrito.'' Domenichi, 1923, nos.~65, 66, describes Sannazaro as ``uomo
molto nobile, di raro ingegno e faceto.''>====
 
Using the first-person voice allowed the Renaissance writer to imagine
himself living among the ancients as no other standard literary device did.
At the same time, one's guise as a shepherd needed to be understood as a
fiction.  Pastoral literature deliberately gave up the pretension to truth,
or even verisimilitude, on a literal level.  One took antiquity less
seriously in order to take oneself all the more so.  Adopting the guise of
a shepherd demonstrated nobility of spirit, distinct from the potentially
misleading trappings of worldly rank.  Just as nothing was more despicable
than the hick who claimed noble parentage and assumed the markings of rank,
so, by convention, nothing was more worthy than the courtier who acted the
part of a lovelorn shepherd, naturally virtuous in a natural setting.  Less
authentically shepherd's songs in the hands of Virgil than of Theocritus,
Sannazaro's pastoral was even more suave than Virgil's.====<As well as
being more exclusively heterosexual.>====

              
Although Sannazaro's poem intermixed with prose was not meant for
performance, his consciously assumed persona links his text with pastoral
plays.  The dialogue form common to pastoral poetry lent itself to
enactment, typically during Carnival.  Traditionally, this was a time when
boundaries between high and low were relaxed.  In one such play, Baldassare
Castiglione's Tirsi, which the author performed with his cousin
Cesare Gonzaga during Carnival season of 1506 at Urbino, one shepherd
greets another, ``Dio ti salvi, pastor nobile e raro'' (God bless you,
noble and outstanding shepherd).====<Castiglione, 1889, p.~287.  See
Guidi, 1977, pp.~141-86; on the political allusions, esp.  pp.~163-66.  It
was, as Guidi observes, a relief in the endangered court at Urbino to
subscribe to the fiction that love was the prime issue.>==== Such a salutation
again marks off modern pastoral from ancient.  A similar tone cannot be
found in Virgil.  Typical instead would be, ``Quo te, Moeri, pedes?''
(Where are you going, Moeris, afoot?), short and to the point.  In
Theocritus there is a different way of avoiding urbane eloquence:  ``Be
your fair mouth filled with honey and the honeycomb, good Thyrsis; be your
eating of the sweet figs of Aegilus; for sure your singing's as delightful
as the cricket's chirping in spring.'' ====<Theocritus, I, 146-48,
Loeb Classical Library, tr.  J.M.  Edmonds, 1960.>====
 Virgil's shepherds were a bit more dignified than the plainspoken, more
humorous bumpkins of Theocritus, who complain about beetles and foxes as
well as praising women and song.  Still, nobile is not an epithet
Virgil used of a shepherd.====< In Eclogue IX a song is said not to be
``ignobile.'' The distinction is slight, but still falls short of acclaim
as noble.  It is, moreover, directed at the song rather than at the
shepherd.>====
 
             
Castiglione's shepherd is acknowledged as noble, ostensibly in
sensibility rather than by pedigree (although the actual status of these
performers was by no means negligible).  Two concepts developed over the
course of centuries---love and antiquity---have intervened and changed the
lowly shepherd into a complex type even before allegorical interpretation
begins.  That Castiglione's shepherd Jola is in love suffices as
credentials for his noble spirit.  For love, it is routinely admitted
during the Renaissance, is ennobling:
 
   Amor \`e graz\"\iosa e dolce voglia, 
     Che i pi\`u selvaggi e pi\`u feroci affrena; 
     Amor d'ogni vilt\`a l'anime spoglia, 
     E le scorge a diletto e trae di pena; 
     Amor le cose um\`\ili ir alto invoglia, 
     Le brevo e fosche eterna e rasserena; 
     Amor \`e seme d'ogni ben fecondo, 
     E quel ch'informa e regge e serva il mondo.====<Bembo, 1961, from
   Stanze (a 1507 Carnival entertainment at Urbino), p.~548.  Put
   negatively:  ``Gentileza e vero amore/Non regn\'o mai in cor villano,/Perch\'e 
   mal se caccia fore/La ranochia del pantano''; Bauer-Formiconi,
   1967, p.~346, Barzelletta 8.  And earlier, ``Amore in cuor villan non ha
   suo loco,/ch'amor per suo virt\'u vizio abandona''; Franco Sacchetti,
   ``La Battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze,'' Cantare Terzo, 30.>====
    
   (Love is a welcome and sweet volition that restrains the most savage and
   most fierce.  Love purges every baseness from souls and leads them to
   delight and away from suffering.  Love prompts lowly things to become high,
   the transitory and gloomy to become everlasting and serene.  Love is the
   fertile seed of every good and that which guides and rules and serves the
   world.)
    
 Love establishes nobility as a function of virtue rather than of birth and
wealth.  The less tangible quality, true nobility, is greater than worldly
status:
 
    Che giova posseder cittadi e regni, 
     E palagi abitar d'alto lavoro, 
     E servi intorno aver d'imperio degni 
     E l'arche gravi per molto tesoro, 
    
   Esser cantate da sublimi ingegni, 
     Di porpora vestir, mangiar in oro, 
    
   E di bellezza pareggiar il sole, 
     Giacendo poi nel letto fredde e sole?====<Bembo, 1961, p.~556.>====
    
   (What joy is it to possess cities and realms, and to live in highly
   wrought palaces, and to have servants around appropriate to empire, and the
   vaults heavy with treasure, and to be lauded by sublime minds, to wear
   purple, to eat on gold, and to look as beautiful as the sun, lying then in
   a cold and solitary bed?)
    
 What is more, nature acts as guarantor of the shepherd's nobility by
sharing in his state of distress:
 
   Spesso per la piet\`a del mio dolore 
     Scordan le matri dar latte agli agnelli.====<Bembo, 1961, p.~284.>====
    
   (Often, through sympathy with my sorrow, the ewes forget to give milk to
   the lambs.)
    
 When he is in love, the poet finds Nature reflecting his moods, thereby
reversing the usual hierarchy by which the poet imitates nature.  Thus the
poet encroaches upon the divine, creating a new nature in his own image.

This oxymoron, a noble shepherd, made pastoral more important to
Renaissance society than it ever had been to Roman or Greek.  The artistic
sensibility, defined as paradoxically noble and refined even while rough
and natural, nearly personifies Nature.  This is made clear in a commentary
on L'Arcadia 
by Tomasso Porcacci (b.~c.~1530), 
first published in 1558:
 
                
    Ancora nelle bocche de gli uomini e rozi Pastori stanno bene i colori
   rettorici, che la Natura per se stessa c'insegna usare.  Veggonsi queste
   poche parole dette a Montano, tutte piene d'artificio, come ben fanno
   coloro, c'hanno cognizion dell'arte, il quale io non discopro, per esser
   come chiaro ad apparente a tutti.
   ====<Porcacci's commentary on Prosa 2, in Sannazaro, 1720.>====
   
                 
   (Even in the mouths of men and rough shepherds the colors of rhetoric go
   well, since Nature itself teaches their use.  One sees this in these few
   words spoken by Montano, full of artifice, as is well done by those who
   know art, which I won't explicate, because they are perfectly clear and
   evident to everyone.)
    
Porcacci 
busies himself as much with the explication of tree types and
bird species as literary allusion.  He describes Sannazaro's task as
providing ``ornata descrizzione... senza mai uscir de' termini
dell'umilit\`a pastorale'' (ornate description... without ever leaving
the limits of pastoral humility).
====<Porcacci's commentary on Prosa 9, in Sannazaro, 1720.>====
 
For all its dedication to simplicity, Renaissance Arcadia is a complex
place.  It has become a land in which the shepherd is ennobled and the
rustic is made elegant.  The pose of humility has been co-opted by the
proud, for purposes of pride.  Petrarch's Latin epic failed relative to his
vernacular poetry.  The same was to be true of Sannazaro's Latin epic.  The
istorie of Raphael in particular were so great a success partly
because they achieved what writers had failed to accomplish:  the
representation of grand and heroic action in the tradition of epic and
tragic poetry.  The challenge of modern poetry actually lay elsewhere, in
adjusting the lover's voice of supplication to the point that it became as
admirable as the beloved, despite the self-deprecation of the one and the
vaunting of the other.

Pastoral poets elevated the status of the shepherd singer, even to the
level of nobility; they also used the lowest genre of poetry to address
themes not exclusively of humble type.  Sannazaro, for example, showed
signs of discontent with the limitations of the pastoral
genre.====<See Kennedy, 1983, pp.~52-53, for examples in which
Sannazaro expresses his resentment against his situation as a writer about
mere love.  At other times he espouses the humble theme of love and
renounces higher ambition:  see pp.~80-81.>====
 In the verse conclusion to the eleventh part, Ergasto sings:
 
   E perch\`e al fine alzar conviemmi alquanto,
     lassando il pastoral ruvido stile, 
     ricominciate, Muse, il vostro pianto.  
     Non fa per me pi\`u suono oscuro e vile,
     ma chiaro e bello... ====<In Prosa 11, Sincero remembers fondly
   ``de le magnificenzie de la mia nobile e generossisima patria,'' another
   deliberate break with the general praise of the rustic and humble lives of
   the shepherds.  See also Prosa 7.>====
   
                 
   (And because in ending it suits me to leave somewhat the rude pastoral
   style, begin again, Muses, your lament.  Do not make for me the humble and
   lowly tune any more, but clear and beautiful...)
    
             
 There is precedent for this in Virgil's eclogues:  the Sixth begins with
an apology for his rustic Muse (``agreste Musa'') and a reference to the
epic that he will later write.  But the actual mingling of rustic with
noble song is more deliberate in Renaissance pastoral.  In Virgil it was
mere foreshadowing of his epic ambitions destined to culminate later.
Sannazaro's language seesaws between the praise and dispraise of things
crude.  In the Proemio, for example, he favors ``le rozze Ecloghe da
naturale vena uscite'' (the rough eclogues extracted from natural lode),
only to defend the trees shortly thereafter, in Prosa 1, as not ``s\`\i
 discortesi, che del tutto con le loro ombre vieteno i raggi del sole
entrare nel dilettoso boschetto'' (not so discourteous that their combined
shadow forbade the entrance of sunlight into the delightful
grove).====<See further, on Sannazaro's expressions of diffidence
about his rozzo stile, in his Sonnet XXXV, Kennedy, 1983, p.~46, and
further, pp.~57-58.>====
 
Alongside the admirable, outstandingly natural form of rusticity that is
the object of the pastoral life, there exists in Renaissance pastoral a
strong version of rusticity that is consistently censored, the descendant
of the traditionally abhorred uncouthness of those not upper class and
urban.  Such is the case with a servant of the shepherds, Ursacchio,
described unfavorably as rusticissimo.====<Prosa 6.>==== Even
shepherds should be rustic only up to a point.  Galicio sings  
leggiadre verses, ``tra rustici pastori non usitate.''====<``not used
among rustic shepherds,'' Prosa 4.>==== By contrast, the artless (studio
inani) hills and woods amplify a sensibility that is simple without
falling into excessive rusticity.  Natural plainness or coarseness
contrasts with artificiality, but may conflate with---and thereby
redeem---art itself.

Courtesy is not to be given up along with pomp.  While things rozzo
may be good, so is cortesia.  Sannazaro, when he advised his readers
``de la tua selvatichezza contentandoti'' (content yourselves with your
wildness), spoke in some part ironically, for he meant a  
selvatichezza not without suavezza, grazia, delicatezza,
letizia, to borrow a few of the words used in portraying his rustic
haven.  ``'L soave stile e 'l dolce canto'' both are and are not possible
in Arcadia.====<``Poi che 'l soave stile e 'l dolce canto/sperar non
lice pi\`u per questo bosco,'' Ergasto in Egloga X; and in Prosa II,
``s\`\i dolcemente sonando la sua sampogna che parea che le selve pi\`u
che l'usato ne godessono.''>====
 Like Giorgione's Dresden Venus, separated from the ground by her
satin bedding with gold embroidery, the figure both does and does not meld
with the newly legitimated landscape.  A more perfect symbiosis between
figure and ground would have been a less perfect result.  The ideal of
visual concinnitas was weakening, since it was inadequate to register
conflicting ideals.

The themes of modesty and simplicity inherent in the pastoral genre
rendered it a quasi-moralizing art.  The emphasis is as much on ``quasi''
as on ``moralizing.'' The still, shadowy, remote atmosphere of these
paintings helped to diminish the potential resemblance between the
shepherds portrayed and the poor folk who might otherwise have received
alms.====<Certain statuettes by il Riccio are daringly confrontational
in this respect, using art to depict dire poverty.  See also Ch.~3,
this volume.>==== In the picturing of Arcadia, the poor were conveniently forgotten
while virtuous simplicity was remembered.

As the major monument of a genre which eschews major monuments, the  
Concert champ\^etre [fig.~2] is an aberrancy rather than the defining
member of a category of painting.====<On which see, inter alia, Paul
Holberton, ``The Pastorale or F\^ete Champ\^etre in the Early
Sixteenth Century,'' in Manca, 1993.>==== It occupies a middle ground between
the most mournful Arcadian scenes, in which a lonesome shepherd droops (for
example, Giulio Campagnola's Shepherd Boy [Hind 10]) and the
jolliest, most venereal scenes, for instance an anonymous Outdoor
Concert now in Pavia [fig.~11].====<Giulio's Boy is not quite
solitary.  The head of the old man, lower right, lends familiar thematic
content and suggests a sharing of songs.>==== The Concert champ\^etre is
large in scale for a pastoral work of art, and the dignity implied by size
is expressed also in its avoidance of either frivolity or despair.
====<An interesting precedent for the Concert champ\^etre, for
example, is a painting attributed to Bernardo Parentino in Berlin, dated
probably before 1488.  It shows gypsies beside a marble fountain.  See
Zygmunt, 1966, p.~18, n.~8.  and Berlin, 1975, no.  1628A.  N.B.  the
engraving of two aristocrats in a landscape, one playing a lute (H.
E.III.39, dated 1470-85).  This incongruous image is one extreme, as
Parentino's painting of gypsies is the other, from which emerges such a
painting as the Concert champ\^etre.>==== Even as that painting is meant
to be taken seriously because it deviates from either expectation, more
ordinary pastoral imagery would tend to be discounted as slight.  Pastoral
performances were frivolous theater and intended as such.====<A late
commentator on Sannazaro's L'Arcadia, Giovanni Battista
Massarengo (1596) worried about the ill-fit between that text and comic
norms, including the autobiographical aspects (one might even say
self-portraiture).  Having divided comedy into two types (onesto,
gentile, piacevole and fallace, vile, buffonesco) he includes  
L'Arcadia among the former:  ``non hanno del ridicolo le contese
pastorali, i giuochi di Massilia, le favole dipinte al tempio di Pale, i
varimodi d'incapar gli ucelli, ed altri passi di quest'Opera ch'io
taccio?''>==== Just as Bembo wanted to be remembered not for the  
Stanze, but for the Prose della Volgar Lingua, and different things
can be learned about him from each, so some low-style works are ``come il
pesce fuori dell'aqua [che] la sua vaghezza e piacevolezza non ritiene''
(like the fish that out of the water does not keep its prettiness and
pleasingness).  Paolo Giovio was so blinkered by the theory of the grand
epic style that he thought nothing could be more divine than
Sannazaro's Latin poem on the birth of Christ, De Partu Virginis.
This is a misconception as astounding as the prejudice that Petrarch's
greatest achievement was necessarily the epic Africa, and one which
warns us that contemporaries may be as blind as historians.

In the Concert champ\^etre, we see not only a realistically dusty
shepherd with his flock in the middleground, but one of the most
astonishing figures in Renaissance painting---a shaggy-haired boy in brown
tattered clothes---sitting side-by-side with a dandy in bi-colored
stockings and opulent satin.====<It is worth remembering in this
regard the topos of friendship between high and low persons:  ``i principi
grandi sogliono dilettarsi molto degli uomini di questa sorte,'' Domenichi,
1923, p.~249.  This sentiment has a long history:  Dante wrote to Can
Grande, in quite different circumstances, ``non minus dispares connectantur
quam pares amicitie sacramento.''>==== No virtuous ancient, he is an example of
modern excess in contrast to the simple, but seemingly also modern,
shepherd. ====<See Emison, 1991, ``Concert.''>==== Antiquity has
lost ground to the Veneto as the preferred place for the imagination to
dwell, not least because the imagination is being used increasingly to
offer criticism of the present.====<The priority of antiquity as a
model for language and literature was also being called into question,
partly because as Rome became more the symbol of a re-established papacy
and less a place of lost greatness, it became more an object of fear and
rivalry, less of nostalgia and sorrow.>==== The Concert champ\^etre is
a modern and a vernacular painting, in contrast to the antiquarianism and
the sonorous Latin of, for instance, Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi with its
ceiling decoration based on Seutonius (itself juxtaposed to the more
vernacular court portraits below).

The publication of Sannazaro's L'Arcadia
 corresponded approximately with Giorgione's inauguration of a new kind of
painting, based on the depiction of landscape often inhabited by figures
neither holy nor heroic.  Only loosely a narrative, the book tells the
story of Sannazaro's indefinitely long stay among the shepherds and his
journey back via a Dantesque cavern.  Still, this prose narrative, broken
into sections, reads like mere stage directions for the interspersed
lyrical songs.  Even in Giorgione's cardinal example of a pastoral
painting, however, there is a discrepancy between the painter's and the
writer's versions.====<On Sannazaro's significance for Italian
painting, see Fehl, 1980, pp.~139-47.>==== Sannazaro is engaged in the
paradoxical task of making art that denigrates not merely artifice, but art
itself.  In the memorable prologue to L'Arcadia, the babbling brook
is held up as a corrective to the elaborately carved marble fountain,
threatening the happy alliance between art and magnificence from within:
 
   Chi dubita che pi\`u non sia a le umane menti aggradevole
   una fontana che naturalmente esca da le vive pietre, attorniata di verdi
   erbette, che tutte le altre fatte di bianchissimi marmi, risplendenti per
   molto oro?
   
   (Who doubts that human minds find a fountain naturally ensuing from living
   rocks, surrounded by green growth, to be more pleasing than all the others
   made of very white marbles, gleaming with much gold?)

The fountain or well in the Concert champ\^etre is
thus wrong, according to Sannazaro's text.  Art intrudes where the natural
font should have sway.  The artist has found a different fulcrum than the
writer in this balancing act between the demands of art and nature.  His
picture surely is meant to endorse proper pastoral attitudes such as that
enunciated by Sannazaro, yet the painter is less prepared to introduce
utter plainness into a magnificent Venetian palazzo than the author.
The decorum of pastoral was always based on incongruities, but painting and
poetry each had its own decorum of incongruity.


                             Non sono le mura n\`e le richeze quelle che
                             salvano le citt\`a, ma gli uomini singulari:
                             mancando gli uomini mancano le citt\`a.
====<``Neither the walls nor riches are those
that save the city, but the exceptional men:
failing the men the city fails,'' da Bisticci,
1862, pp.~43-44.>====
 
             
 Wealth being one of the fundamentally difficult issues for a society
poised between domination by the Church and a world of mercantile states,
pastoral was a place where it was particularly disesteemed, radically in
accordance with theory.  The dilemma of both wanting and scorning public
honor is the source of the inconsistencies Sannazaro's text admits toward
things rustic:  he praises the festivities and ornaments of Naples, even
while decrying the modern era; and celebrates rozzo stil even while
denigrating it.====<Proemio; Egloga X.>==== So it is not quite accurate to
say that Arcadia is a never-never land where love promises bliss and where
misery has no more cause than unhappy love.  It does indeed provide a place
of otherness, where fleetfooted nymphs displace women in heavy brocades and
clogs, and ardent shepherds share tales of love rather than of grace and
favor.  Pastoral was a context in which men were humble and poor and yet
more truly noble than at court.====<A sentiment not exclusive to
pastoral, but found in other low-style poetry:  ``Ricco non \`e chi ha
denari o stato,/Ricco \`e colui che di uirt\'u
 \`e fornito./Pouer non \`e chi di virt\'u \`e dotato,/Pouere \`e
 quello che \`e del senno uscito./Ricco non \`e chi ua di panni
ornato,/N\'e pouero \`e colui che \`e mal uestito./Nascere in
pouertate o in riccheza/Non pu\`o toglier, n\'e dar la gentileza'';
Bauer-Formiconi, 1967, p.~322, no.~428.>====
 There they live and love without greed, for nymphs bring no dowry.  The
basic elements of pastoral offer an indication of what was thought
contaminating in daily Renaissance life:  the finery of women, the venality
of love, the increasingly mercenary aspect of society, and the intrusion
into Arcadia (read:  Italy) of both avarice (read:  the foreigner invader)
and corruption more generally (read:  the flattery endemic at court, simony
in the Curia).  For while Renaissance pastoral may have begun as a salute
to ancient literature and to even more ancient purity of mores, it readily
shifted to an oblique acknowledgment of a discouraging present.  The
laments of love expand into laments against luxury and avarice.  Whereas
Virgil as shepherd had generally praised his patrons at Rome, Renaissance
pastoral poets were more critical.  Now the shepherds genuinely complain.
They go so far as to use pastoral to complain that the possibility of
pastoral has been lost:
 
     Fu gia il bosco gryneo frondoso & florido
     In ogni parte e pini ivi cantavano
     Et hor ciascuno e isponoso & horido====<Franciscus de Arsochis
   of Siena, in Pulci, 1481.>====
    
   (Formerly the wood was leafy and flowery in every part, and there pines
   sang.  Now everything is thorny and dire.)
    
 And further,
 
     Per la avaritia che le mente accilia
     Hoggi il pastor di mille cure impacciasi
     Et tal la festa e a lui qual la vigilia
   
   (Because of avarice that furrows the brow, today the shepherd is weighed
   down by a thousand troubles and the feast is for him like the fasting.)
    
 
This revisionary aspect extends to that remnant of the heroic ideal that
survives in pastoral.  Formally, landscape itself takes the role of figure,
ideal in its unity and monumentality, active in its changing light and
color, but fundamentally anonymous.  The only character in the literary
version of pastoral who comes close to the heroic type is the glorified
poet shepherd, the Daphnis figure, dead and lamented though immortal
through his song.  The pastoral poet is thus exalted beyond mere hero, and
becomes divine.

             
Parmigianino's etched Lamentation
 [fig.~12],====<B.  XVI, 5, 330 x 236 mm, 1530s.>==== might seem
straightforwardly of the grand manner.  Its structure is narrative; the
history it relates is among the most profound and affecting.  Nevertheless,
its conception suggests ties to an aesthetic stance that challenged heroic
norms, which explored that range beyond ordinary heroism which was allied
with the lowly and humble.  Some of these might mistakenly be masked under
the rubric of Mannerist characteristics:  the sensuality, 
especially of the
female figures; the idiosyncracy and boldness of the artist's presence in
the linear streaks and dashes; the high pitch of emotions.  But, if taken
as essentially a pastoral or low-style image, Parmigianino's  
Lamentation acquires more complex meaning, inherent from the level of the
mark on the paper to the overall expressive tenor.  It recalls, subtly but
significantly, the topos of pastoral lament.

             
The  Lamentation is one of the few standard subjects of Renaissance
art that normally leaves the viewer distressed, the  Crucifixion being
another.  As such, it has a natural affinity with pastoral, all the more so
since death, both its anticipation and its memory, is a primary theme in
pastoral poetry.  Other than the idle singing of songs, funerals and even
suicides are the most likely events in the world of idealized shepherds.
Metaphorical death is a topos in love poetry more generally.  Frequently
the woman is said to make her lover long for death by leaving his desire
unsatisfied or even to kill him thus.

Parmigianino's Lamentation might naively be taken to show us less a
dead hero than a woman towering over a limp and passive
man.====<Parmigianino's etching is often titled the Entombment,
but the action seems to me significantly that of lamentation rather than
movement toward a sepulchre.>====
 In other words, the imagery of female supremacy, so common in love poetry,
is displayed.  Sexual innuendo has infiltrated the image; the weakness of
man before woman is explicit.  The crown might even mistakenly be taken, at
first glance, as intended for the woman, so aligned are the heads of the
couple.  Since the spatial recession is compressed, the crown appears
nearer to the woman's head, although it is more directly above Christ's.
The ambiguity is but apparent---we know of course for whom the crown is
intended.  Nevertheless, the potential for doubt is telling.  That figure
at Christ's head, his competitor for the crown of thorns, seems, unusually,
to be Mary Magdalen, with the fainting Virgin displaced to the right.  This
Magdalen protects Christ, tentlike, possibly a formal echo of
Michelangelo's Piet\`a but modified to suggest the sympathy between
man and woman.====<The figure of the dead Christ derives from Perino
del Vaga's Adam for a fresco in the Creation of Eve, S.  Marcello al
Corso, Rome, or possibly from some common model.  See Popham, 1966,
p.~398ff.; Providence, 1973, no.~93; Bacou, 1984, no.~84.  The ultimate
source for the design seems to be a figure in Michelangelo's Battle of
Cascina.>====
 
Whereas Mantegna's and Raphael's Entombments are typical of the
high style in putting the tragic, heroic corpse, Meleager-like, at the
center of pathetic response, Parmigianino's composition sweeps over the
limp figure almost carelessly, to the formal advantage of the mourners.
This scene is less balanced, less naturalistic, less intelligible in the
relationship of parts to whole.  Compositionally, it is not even clear
whether the crown of thorns is being removed or awarded.  The forward
momentum of the figure holding the crown implies the latter, though only
the former makes narrative sense.  The open, seeing eye, so important a
compositional element in most Renaissance art, does not figure here.  The
closing of many eyes here suggests the importance of obscurity to the
meaning of the image, as does also the inexact drawing.====<The
precedent of Leonardo is apropos here; N.B.  the extraordinary downcast
eyes of the Madonna of the Rocks
 (Paris and London).>==== We see a group rather than a gathering of
individuals.  Pathos has been emphasized, rather than the tragic figure as
icon.====<For Sannazaro, in Egloga XI, funereal grief is identified as
a point at which the low style is no longer suitable, and the Muses are
appealed to in reaching for a different style than ``'l soave stile e 'l
dolce canto''; see Kennedy, 1983, p.~136.>==== The mourners do not concentrate
the viewer upon the figure of Christ but distract from it.  The
formlessness of the cliff, which stands in place of a skyscape even as it
gives form to the composition, constitutes a non-finito as deserving
of recognition as Michelangelo's.  That indefinite hatching exists not only
as a sign of Parmigianino's hand at work, his maniera, but because
finish and high definition have been abandoned for expressive effect.  The
roughness of the etched line is used the better to convey a parlous world,
a world in which one's own consternation is the single most comprehensible
element.

The great striding figure (Nicodemus presumably) presents the crown of
thorns as though it were the funeral gifts customary in pastoral.  In
Bion's ``Lament for Adonis'' (c.~100 B.C.), for instance, garlands
and flowers are thrown upon the grave, that the flowers now may die
too.====< Ivy crowns (hedera serta) are presented, for instance,
along with flowers and foaming milk at the tomb Sannazaro imagines for
himself in his Elegia Prima; and on leavetaking when going into exile, he
extends to his villa crowns woven with tears (et mea flentis/Serta
cape) in Epigrammi III, 6.  Later, in a pastoral lament for Duke Cosimo
I, L'alteratione:  Egloga di Mutio Manfredi per la morte di Cosimo,
1574, ivy and laurel are brought to the tomb.>==== The motif of the arm raised
in salutation and presentation implants traces of jubilation in a scene
otherwise of utmost grief.  The clearly Christian reference of the thorns
is muted against the hatching of the cliff behind, and the crosses present
in a preparatory drawing were later eliminated, thereby muting the
specifically Christian content.====<For preparatory drawings, see
Popham, 1971, nos.~62, 71, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 408, 555, 765.  A
composition in reverse is accepted by many as another version by
Parmigianino, a view I do not share.  See Oberhuber, 1963, following
Zani, 1802, and Copertini, 1932, vol.~II, p.~57.  Landau and
Parshall, 1994, p.~269, follows Oberhuber.  Copertini takes Bartsch's
(i.e., fig.~11) original to be a work of Jacopo Bertoia and Bartsch's
Guido Reni to be Parmigianino's.  See also Oberhuber, 1966, p.~176 and
idem, 1963, pp.~33-36.  On other versions of the composition, see
Fr\"ohlich-Bum, 1921, p.~43, pl.~34, Richardson, 1980, nos.~17, 19,
and B.~XII, 184, 61, a chiaroscuro woodcut by Zanetti.>==== The viewer is
induced to think of death and funeral not so much as solemn and ceremonial,
as celebratory.  Pastoral poets occasionally conflated the dead shepherd
with the dead Christ, and so it is here:  Christ is mourned as a pastoral
protagonist.====<For pastoral poems deliberately reminiscent of
Christ's death, see Girolamo Benivieni's ``Aegloga Quinta---Atheon,'' in
Bernardo Pulci, 1481, unpag., in which the pagan shepherd's body is
attended as ``el corpo sancto''; and Giorgi, p.~150, discussing the
eclogue of Ser Jacopo Fiorino Boninsegni, Ganimede morto, that was
performed at Eastertime of 1480; and---not pastoral, but still
poetical---Pamphilo Sasso, Strambotti, 1501, unpag.:
``Apparecchiate i veggio la mia croce/per patir pene como gia fu
Christo... Hely hely Lamazabathanin/o deus meus cur me
dereliquisti/... in manus tuas domine commendo.''>==== Within the confines
of an ordinary sheet of paper, Parmigianino has contrived to match the
funeral rites of Christ against those of shepherds in Arcadia, finding in
both what Nietzsche would later call the festival aspect.  The crown of
laurel here appears as a crown of thorns; the grief of pastoral is latently
equated with Christian grief.

The crown of thorns appears often enough in scenes of Lamentation, though
usually upon the ground or still piercing the head of Christ.  Botticelli,
exceptionally, showed the crown held up by either Nicodemus or Joseph of
Arimathea, in a painting now in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.  But the
gesture there is clearly one of displaying the instruments of the Passion
as a reminder to the worshipper:  the crown is held stiffly in one hand,
three nails in the other.  Parmigianino's great looming figure is
unprecedented in its prominent positioning.  Within the powerful diagonal
of light arm and dark cliff, the crown of thorns is nearly invisible.  The
gesture overwhelms its object.

Carpaccio's Berlin Entombment alludes more overtly, although less
sympathetically, to the pastoral genre.  In the foreground, the body of
Christ lies upon the stone of unction.  In the landscape background,
silhouetted against the sky, two shepherds keep company with their flock
[fig.~13].  One stands against a dead tree, playing a shawm, an instrument
seldom associated with mournfulness; the other, who sports a feather in his
cap, sits opposite.  They convey carefree innocence, very likely
complicated by connotations of pagan error.====<On the attribution of
this painting to Carpaccio, despite addition of Mantegna's name at some
early date, see Phillips, 1911, pp.~144-52; Lauts, 1962, no.~36, p.~238,
dated c.~1505.  He observes that some of the figures are taken from
the vertical Entombment engraving after Mantegna, B.~2.  See further
Hartt, 1940, pp.~25-35.>==== Their attitude seems playful to the point of
self-incrimination.  By contrast, Parmigianino does not pit the pastoral
aspect against the Christian but allies them.

Pastoral endorsed the notion of death as desirable:  ``felicissimo sia
colui che pu\`o
 morire.''====<(Very happy is he who can die); Bembo, 1960 (Gli
Asolani, I, xiii), p.~339.  Death and attempted suicide are both
persistent in, for instance, Sannazaro's L'Arcadia.>==== Accordingly,
funeral rites in Arcadia involve wild celebration.  Sannazaro had gone so
far as to compare the dancers around the tomb of the much-revered Androgeo
to satyrs awaiting their beloved nymphs in the woods at 
midnight.  ``Godi,
godi, Androgeo,'' is their benediction cum incantation as they present
vases of milk, blood, and wine, along with fruit and
flowers.====<``Rejoice, rejoice, Androgeo.'' Gifts are brought to the
tomb of Melissa in Prosa XI and to that of Meliseus in Egloga XII.  See
Andrea Navagero, ``In Almonen Alcippes fastidio mortuum,'' in Carmina
quinque illustrium poetarum, p.~43, and Castiglione, ``Alcon,'' in  
Renaissance Latin Poetry, 1980, p.~204; as well as Sannazaro,  
L'Arcadia, v, viii, x.  See Norlin, 1911, pp.~294-312.>==== By implication,
Parmigianino likens the funeral of Christ to the funeral of an ordinary
shepherd, and the mood of the holy mourners to the desperation mixed with
exuberance of lamenting rustics.  His Lamentation is a scene of
fragility and brokenness; the figures experience psychological storm.
Parmigianino's relatively large etching is allied with pastoral imagery in
its compositional diffuseness, in the apparent sympathy between figure and
landscape (made palpable by the similarity of etching stroke), and in the
relatively greater emphasis upon a diffuse sense of loss than upon the lost
thing.

Parmigianino's fainting Virgin suggests a female analogue of
Laoco\"on,====<The lad to her right is studied directly from that
sculptural group.  Although it may be no more than coincidence, it is worth
noting that in the Greek tradition, related to pastoral and as
distinguished from Latin lament, the Virgin is much less restrained in her
grief; see Alexiou, 1974, pp.~68-69.>==== a study in emotional abandon, but
with long neck and breast exposed.  Although she is less utterly desperate
than that doomed priest, she is very much weaker, a forebear of Bernini's
St.~Theresa
 in her limp, open form.  Her eyes are closed and her
mouth open.  The matching of the proferring arm of Nicodemus against an
anonymous female gesture of delay and horror directly behind bears witness
once again to a degree of erotic frisson.  Man reaches; woman
resists.  As in many other works of the low category, grief is paired with
sexuality, and death too:
 
    Donque de vita Amore e la cagione:
     E la Morte de Amor resolutione.
   
   (Thus Love is the cause of life and Death is the resolution of
   Love.)====<Fregoso, 1510, unpag.>====
    
 Love poetry rightly belonged in a different genre than heroic narratives,
because it supported a different theory of what it was to be human.  This
corpse is more shepherd than Meleager.

Parmigianino was the first Italian artist to use the relatively crude
medium of etching for more than rudimentary purposes.  He utilized the
logical connection between a humble medium and a humble mode of style.
Other etchings he made were more explicitly pastoral, showing shepherd
boys, as well as the remotely, yet distinctly, pastoral etching of a man
and woman embracing in a wood (usually dubbed Mars and Venus)
[fig.~14].

As pictures of noonday light by Bellini and his predecessors extolled
declarative and highly accessible content, so flimsy line now has
metaphorical value itself, affecting the meaning of the composition.
Despite his heroic stature, Nicodemus is not the focus of attention.  The
etching exposes a passive, delicate, and quite feminine humanity.  The body
of Christ is supported by a woman alone.

Parmigianino by no means rejected the grand manner typical of his admired
Raphael.  But here, he adjusted the stylistic content of this canonical
religious narrative to make it compatible with the lyrical lament of
pastoral.  The result is that, rather than the conventionally
allegorizable, and ultimately unanguished, lyric of Petrarch, and unlike
most Lamentations with their actors wearing unmistakably tragic masks, this
pictorial lyric vacillates irreducibly between tumult and calm, sorrow and
celebration, spirit and body.


I have been competing with your contadino here:  he has
been cultivating the fields, I the mind; he the gardens and vineyards, I my
few little books; both of us have been working to produce twofold fruit for
you at Fiesole.====<In June 1479, Poliziano wrote to Lorenzo de'
Medici from the villa at Fiesole, comparing himself (despised by Lorenzo's
wife Clarice, not incidentally) to a peasant there; quoted by Hankins,
1990, vol.~II, p.~450.>====
 
             
             
Appropriately for its function as a mouthpiece of discontent, Renaissance
pastoral poetry is more distressed, more wildly distraught, than Virgil's.
In this lies its sympathy with the Petrarchan tradition.  Petrarch's lyrics
were, broadly speaking, pastoral:  they were laments about ``i passati
tempi,'' about suffering, about love and death, and they were appeals to
nature for sympathy.  Castiglione directly quotes Petrarch in Tirsi
(``La noia e il mal della passata via'').====<Camillo della Valle
(Fillide:  Egloga pastorale, Ferrara, 1584) deliberately incorporates
verses from Petrarch (and Ariosto).>====
 Like Petrarch, the ``nobile e raro'' shepherd knows oppression and gloom.
The restricted range of expressivity decorous for heroes and saints is left
behind.  Christians in general, nobles in particular, were not ordinarily
allowed to acknowledge, let alone grieve over, unhappy love, unredeemed
death, and other moods of dusk.  The new art made these themes its own.  As
even Alberti, champion of the istoria, acknowledged, mournful
subjects appropriately received cruder (inculto) treatment than happy
ones.====<Alberti, 1975, pp.~44, 51.  ``Versi piangiosi ed inculti''
contrast with those ``pi\`u lieti e pi\`u
 soavi.''>==== The category inculto could be used as a code for distress,
with no adverse reflection upon the poet's skill.  The more pastoral tended
toward desperate lament, the more anti-heroic it was.  Virgil had kept the
genres relatively distinct, the shepherd merely unheroic.  He had lifted
the low style out of comedy, making it in essence more analogous to the
heroic mode than it had been in the hands of Theocritus.  Sannazaro created
an ideal based on renunciation and powerlessness, the shepherd who, without
being Christianized, opposed the dominant ideal of the virtuous, composed,
controlling hero.  The humble protagonist took the place of the ``hero'' of
the piece, rather than Virgil's offstage, quasi-deified patron.

             
Whereas for Virgil the shepherd's life was the given, the city an unknown,
the Renaissance poet is often in the countryside by virtue of exile from
the city, the avarice and wickedness of which he bemoans.  Sannazaro, who
portrays himself in L'Arcadia as exiled from Naples, actually suffered
exile in 1501-04, during which time he was probably revising the work.
Urbino sheltered the Medici of Florence and the Fregosi of Geneva when
Castiglione's pastoral Tirsi was written.====<Giamatti, 1984,
pp.~12-32, discusses exile as part of self-imaging; see also Starn, 1982
and Martines, 1974, who discusses how ``the condition of the exile made
possible the world of the gentleman,'' and diagnoses Castiglione's courtier
as a psychological and metaphorical exile.>==== Alberti, long an exile himself,
explained that exile from the city was properly thought of as noble rather
than ignoble, since it entailed a forsaking of envy and clamor for the
tranquility the soul desires.====<On the development of pastoral
between Alberti and Sannazaro, see Grayson's essay, ``Dell'antichit\`a
del buccolico verso e che circonstanze all'egloga si convengono''; Calmeta,
1959, pp.~12-14.>==== The poverty associated with exile is lauded.  It should
bring the contentment born of living without making immoderate demands of
nature, free from fortune:  ``Lieta poverta inimica delle sollecitudini
contenta di picciole & facile cose quale con pocha faticha & presto si
truovano & octengonsi'' (Happy poverty, unfriendly to cares, content with
small and convenient things which one finds and obtains quickly and with
little effort).====<Alberti, c.~1525, unpag.  Written  
c.~1440 and formerly thought to have been published in Milan,  
c.~1492, see Rhodes, 1982, pp.~141-55.  Twelve copies of that first
edition are known to survive.>==== Poverty, it is claimed, is the choice of the
man who is a friend both to nature and himself.====<De
republica, unpag.  The conclusion of Alberti's Intercenale
``Paupertas,'' ``a wise man should not tolerate even the least suspicion of
poverty,'' is highly ironical; Alberti, 1987, p.~50.>==== Alberti's voice in
De republica, reminiscent as it is of the Virgil of the Julian wars,
is only indirectly pastoral.  There are no piping shepherds in his text;
yet the essentials---the idea of a nobility defined by virtue rather than
bloodline, the idealization of poverty, the imitation of nature in order to
avoid artifice---are there.  The experience of exile, by Dante, Petrarch,
and Alberti among others, was one of the factors in molding a sensibility
for pastoral, and one of the factors that rendered this seemingly effete
genre profound.

Sannazaro, a couple of generations later, associated the retreat from the
city to the pastoral landscape more gloomily with irretrievable loss, loss
of his beloved and of even the possibility of honor:
 
   Lasso, chi pu\`o sperar pi\`u gloria o vanto?
     Morta \`e la fe', morto \`e
    giudicio fido.====<Ergasto, Egloga X.>====
    
   (Alas, who is able to hope any more for glory or honor?  Faith is dead,
   trustworthy judgment is dead.)
    
 The exile of a noble spirit epitomizes the decadence of modern times, in
stark contrast to the purity of a past devoid of avarice.  Alberti in the
country smelled laurel;====<Teogenio says to Microtiro in De
republica, ``Ma sediamo se cosi ti piace qui fra questi mirtii luogho non
meno delitioso che evostri Theatri & templi amplissimi & sumptuossissimi.
Qui Colonne frabrichate dalla natura tante quante tu vedi arbori ertissimi:
Qui sopora dal sole noi copre ombra lietissima di questi faggi & abeti:
& atorno adunque ti volgi vedi mille perfectissimi colori di varii fiori
intessuti fral verde splendere ifral ombra & vincere tanto lustro &
chiarore del cielo:  & da qualunque parte verso di te si muove laura indi
senti venire agratificarti suavissimi odori.''>==== Sannazaro reports that the
laurel has dried up, and the violets too.====<In the Epilogue, ``Le
nostre Muse sono estinte:  secchi sono i nostri lauri:  ruinato \`e il
nostro Parnaso,'' and Egloga X (originally the final one), ``secche son le
viole in ogni piaggia.'' Gloom had existed before, of course.  Cf.
Boccaccio, ``Fuggit'\`e ogni virt\`u, spent'\`e il valore/che fece
Italia gi\`a
 donna del mondo,/e le Muse castalie son in fondo,/n\'e cura quas'alcun
del lor onore./Del verde lauro pi\`u fronda n\'e fiore/in pregio sono,
e ciascun sotto il pondo/dell'arrichir sottentra, e del profondo/surgono i
vizi tr\"\iunfando fore,'' Boccaccio, 1958, XCIII, p.~111.>====
 
Whereas Alberti used the exile's voice to decry the greed and envy of the
city, Sannazaro with hopeless nostalgia laments his own
sadness.====<Or celebrates it, in a certain sense:  see the sensitive
analyses of Lambert, 1976, esp.~pp.~51-98.  She describes Sannazaro as a
``connoisseur, if not of suffering itself, of the gestures of sorrow.''>====
 For Alberti, poverty is lieta.====<Cf.  ``Cos\`\i \`e che
la necessit\`a abiti in casa de' poveri, quale dicono fu madre della
industria, e insieme colla industria sempre crebbe virtu,'' Alberti, 1966,
p.~71.>====
 Sannazaro is almost in hiding, secluded, ``con modesto animo''---a posture
unheroic to the point that it risks feminizing him. ====<Petrarch,
too, had written of nature in ways that might suggest a womanlike refuge
(``dulcis ameni ruris amor''/the sweet love of the country...), Epistole
metriche, XIV, Ad Guillelmum Veronensem, Petrarca, 1976, p.~162, and of the
forest as noble (``generosa'').  On the gender implications of Sannazaro's
text, including the metaphorical underworld it describes, see David, 1991,
pp.~2-7.>==== Male modesty was much more pronounced in mature Renaissance
pastoral than in ancient, reflecting the use of pastoral as a voice of
discontent with matters more inexorable than unsatisfied love.  As often as
they pursue nymphs, the shepherds in Venetian drawings sleep.

Long before Alberti, Petrarch had tried to reform Christianity and late
medieval society at the same time.  Wandering through the landscape,
preoccupied with thoughts of love, he took solace in nature because he
understood it to be God's creation:  love of nature, woman, and God was
reassuringly continuous.  For Sannazaro these have become discrete, or at
least the last two have.  Instead of the immunity from fortune that Alberti
finds in the countryside, Sannazaro suffers all the more once the landscape
amplifies his sorrow.  It is with bitterness more nearly than disdain that
he has left city concerns behind.  Experience of the divine, whether of Pan
and his followers or sympathetic trees and shadows, only mimics the human,
rather than abstracting from it toward a spiritual existence.  In quasi
fairy-tale fashion the very woods are disiderose
 and thereby humanoid.  For Alberti, as for Petrarch, nature had been more
ideal, if less friendly.  The same may be said of women.  The extremes of
distress and grief typical of Sannazaro and other sixteenth-century
pastoral poets exceeded Petrarch's precedent, as they also exceeded
antiquity's.

Despite having been written in the vernacular and widely published,  
L'Arcadia was never as integral a piece of popular
culture as Dante's Commedia.  Dante's work
was a peculiar kind of national anthem;
Sannazaro's a class manifesto.  Both offered laments for the problems of
contemporary life.  Neither piece of writing was particularly suited to
concrete visualization by artists, but both were fundamental enough to
their cultures that the attempt, usually less than literal, was repeatedly
made.  And as the difficulties of Dante's poem helped to license the
creation of more elaborate iconographies for experiencing religious
doctrine visually (e.g., the Spanish Chapel or the Strozzi Chapel of Santa
Maria Novella), so the accessibility of Sannazaro's text made it more
acceptable that pictures have less iconography and not much plot
line.====<Visual derivations from L'Arcadia should not be
arbitrarily limited to pictures:  on the garden at Bomarzo as a response to
Sannazaro (and Petrarch), see Lazzaro, 1991, p.~123, and Darnall and Weil,
1984.  The tempietto there is dedicated to the patron's wife.>====
 
Dante's great work was clearly a work of epic ambition and epic voice,
despite its use of the vernacular and the ordinary people populating its
stage.  Perhaps Sannazaro likewise wished that his L'Arcadia would be a
false example of low style but in vain.  The humble characters and the
generally unimposing diction presume a less straightbacked attentiveness on
the part of the audience than glorious epic.  Whether he wanted to or not,
Sannazaro helped to legitimize less learned art, yet for a more exclusively
elite public than Dante's.  In eliciting sympathy, rather than awe,
Sannazaro implicitly restricted the appropriate audience for the low style.
Likewise for the art of the rozzo stile:  the more self-consciously
it fit into that confessional category, the less public and popular an art
it was meant to be.  The collector of prints and cabinet paintings
developed new frames of mind for looking at art.

To play at pastoral scarcely meant privileging privilege less.  According
to Alberti, he who has ``fuggito lo strepito & fastidio della plebe''
(escaped the noise and annoyance of the masses) will recognize buoni
costumi as the only true ornamentation.  Escaping from the city was,
importantly, an avoidance of ``la plebe.'' At the other extreme, it often
implies an avoidance of courtly pomp, as when Pietro Bembo wrote to Clement
VII in an immodestly modest tone on the pleasures of foliage and calm:
 
   Mentre Vostra Santit\`a \`e stata questi passati giorni
   nel Teatro del mondo tra tanti Signori e tanti grandi uomini, quanti da
   niun che oggi viva, non sono stati insieme veduti altra fiata; ed ha posto
   in capo a Carlo il V.  la ricca e bella ed onorata corona dello Imperio:
   Io mi sono stato nella mia villetta; della quale ragionai a Vostra
   Santit\`a
    in una queta ed a me cara e dolce solitudine:  dove ho trovato sopra
   l'usanza degli altri anni la terra per longa serenit\`a di questi
   tracorsi mesi, e per la tostana tiepidezza dell'aria gi\`a tutta verde, e
   gli alberi fronzuti, e le viti per la maggior parte aver ingannato i
   contadini prima piene di pampini, che podate.  N\`e a me si ricorda
   giammai avervi veduto la pi\`u bella stagione di questo tempo:  Nel quale
   non solamente le Rondini, ma ancora gli altri uccelli, che il verno non con
   noi non soggiornano, ma ci ritornano di primavera, facevano risonar co'
   loro accenti il nuovo e chiaro, e pi\`u assai dell'usato caldo e lieto
   cielo.  La qual cosa mi ha fatto men portare invidia alle feste di Bologna
   ...====<Bembo, 1743, p.~7, letter from Padua on 7 April 1530.>====
    
   (While your Holiness [Clement VII] has been these last days on the
   theatre of the world, among so many lords and great men, whom none now
   alive have ever seen together before, and has placed on the head of Charles
   V the rich, splendid, and honoured crown of the Empire, I have been
   residing in my little village, where I have thought on you in a quiet, and,
   to me, delicious solitude.  I have found the country above the usage of any
   former years, from the long serenity of these gliding months and by the
   sudden mildness of the air, already quite verdant, and the trees in full
   leaf ... I could not therefore regret your festivities at
   Bologna).====<Excerpted and quoted by John Constable, ``Lectures in
   Landscape,'' in C.R.  Leslie, Memoirs on the Life of John Constable,
   R.A., London, 1937, p.~408.>====
     
 The aesthetic of rusticity was not so much an opposite to that of
urbanity, as it was a rethinking of strategy.  To be rough or countrified
in the right way was to be critical, even if benignly so, of what would
otherwise represent the pinnacle of society.  If it allowed Bembo to be
modestly, tactfully disdainful of the Pope's diplomatic maneuvers with the
Holy Roman Emperor, then it was indeed a powerful intellectual tool.  For
an artist, to be of rustic mold entailed a kind of minimalism, a voluntary
renunciation of the hitherto obvious ways to earn praise.  The Renaissance
had its own questions of canon.

Decorum still applied, even to those in pastoral or rustic guise.  As
Castiglione explained of a knight who might dress ``in forma di pastor
selvatico o altro tale abito,'' he allows himself ``una certa libert\`a e
licenza,'' reserving his serious efforts for his serious intentions (``usar
diligenzia ed attillatura circa la principal intenzione della cosa in che
mostrar si vole'').====<Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano,
II, xi.>==== In the case of the cavaliero, he will the more delight his
audience when his actual performance is not that of a simple rustic.  In
the case of a courtier donning pastoral garb, or a poet adopting the
pastoral voice, he might analogously bolster the underlying theory of
nobility as he appears to relax it.  When Baldassare Castiglione, Jacopo
Sannazaro, and Lorenzo de' Medici (among others) happily assumed the
persona of a shepherd and sang simple songs, they were no more leaving the
elaborate social niches in which they had hitherto been ensconced than was
the knight in taking the garb of a ``pastor selvatico.'' The point of
appearing rustic was to show oneself refined.

It is in Naples, Sannazaro's native city, that we begin to read in prose of
a shift of approval to more modest wealth, or even to honest poverty.  From
the pens of Sannazaro's associates, Guniano Maio and Giovanni Pontano,
come important treatises on wealth---not disguised under the traditional
heading, On Avarice, but called De maiestate (written in the 1490s)
and De liberalitate, De beneficentia, De splendore (all
published in 1498), respectively.

Maio, throughout much of De maiestate, reiterates the standard ideas
of the time.  Citing Aristotle and Cicero, he allows sumptuousness to be
appropriate to things divine or civic (``ad uso del ben commune''), and
also to persons of special dignity.  Riches are to be exploited not for the
pleasure of the rich but for their effect upon those not accustomed to them
or those in need of being taught where respect is due.  The degree of
magnificence that is seemly has nothing to do with personal income, but
only with the social status of the person displaying it.  A povero or
a mediocre persone should not display wealth even if he has it:
 
   che in tutte cose le quale facimo devemo avere respetto a la
   persona de sua dignitate e de che facultate pu\`o e vale, s\`\i che la
   magnificenza de la cosa corresponda a la eccellenza de l'auttore de la
   cosa.  Et imper\`o tale virtute non pu\`o accadere n\'e a povero,
   n\'e a mediocre persone, n\'e a omini cassi de onne dignitate e de
   amplitudine nulla, si che, ancora che alcuni siano facultosi et opulenti,
   deveno avere mensura in la magnificenza e pompa secondo loro dignitate e
   non secondo loro eccessive ricchezze. ====<Maio, 1956, p.~226.>====
    
   (that in all things that we do we ought to have respect for the dignity
   of a person and to what rank he belongs and deserves, so that the
   magnificence of a thing is appropriate to its maker.  And since such virtue
   cannot happen in the case of a poor or mediocre person, nor to men fallen
   from all dignity and of no resources, so that, should any still be powerful
   and rich, they ought to take the measure of their magnificence and pomp
   according to their rank rather than according to their excessive wealth.)

In this Maio is true to his courtly milieu.  The world should
be fundamentally simple, a place where signs signify unambiguously.  This
is familiar enough.  What is new is the re-appearance of a defensive edge
in discussing magnificence, or as Maio adjusts the frame of reference,
majesty.====<Cristoforo Landino, in his commentary on Dante,
associates majesty with the learned, high style, dignity with the
mediocre.>====
 
First, wealth is taken to be artificial rather than natural.  Then,
magnificence and elegance are understood as the natural reassertion of
decorum over the haphazardness of fortune.  Excessive expenditure, aimed at
swaying the masses, is disqualified as true magnificence:
 
   Sono appresso altre cose con magnificenza fatte pi\`u
   tosto a celebritate che a necessario uso in multe nature de spettaculi come
   sono iochi da piacere, farze, conviti, iostre, nupzie, esequii, triunfi,
   dove pi\`u se sole laudare la dannosa lussuria che la mediocritate, le
   quale sono a la presente volutate e non a la utilitate futura et imper\`o
   tale suntuositate acquista laude populare, placendo a la indotta turba
   pi\`u che ad omini de pi\`u sincero iudizio ornati. ====<Maio,
   1956, p.~228.>====
    
   (There are besides other things done with magnificence, sooner to
   celebrate than by a necessary custom in many kinds of spectacles such as
   games, farces, banquets, jousts, weddings, funerals, triumphs, where one is
   supposed to praise damnable luxury rather than mediocrity, which are done
   for immediate satisfaction and not for future utility and moreover such
   sumptuousness gains popular praise, pleasing the ignorant crowd more than
   men adorned with more sincere judgment.)
    
 Maio understands the essential issue of patronage to be good taste, or
that kind of elegance implicitly compatible with the pastoral aesthetic:
 
   Sono et altre opere de magnifico sunto apparate in lo culto
   domestico:  panni, drapperie, pinture, sculture, veste ricche, vascelli de
   oro, de argento et de altre materie, dove pi\`u la eleganza de le arte
   che 'l valore se estima. ====<Ibid., p.~228.  On the concept of
   elegance from Petrarch to Castiglione, with emphasis on the former, see
   Barbagli, 1961, pp.~63-94.>====
    
   (And there are other magnificent works of rich interior decoration:
   cloths, draperies, pictures, sculptures, rich gowns, vases of gold, of
   silver, and of other materials, in which one esteems more the elegance of
   the art than the value.)

Despite some ambiguity about whether the disregard for cost
extends to paintings and sculptures, or only to vases not of silver or
gold, the important point has been made that elegance is separable from
expense, beauty from ornament. ====<In the Attic Nights (XI, II,
2), it was recorded that up until Cato's time, elegance had been perceived
negatively, as akin to avarice.  Sannazaro's ``rozze Egloghe'' were ``de
ornamento ignude.'' On the elegance of their diction, see Folena, 1952.>====
 
Pontano, who wrote in the pastoral idiom himself, is an articulate
advocate of what we might dub the sola fide argument for wealth.  It
matters more whether one's spirit is generous than what is actually
accomplished with one's donations.  He shows no interest in the issue of
the right to be magnificent, but only in the manner, which is invariant
between a magnificent man and one of lesser means.  
Liberality, says
Pontano, may be defined as hospitality extended beyond a single person.  So
intent is Pontano upon analyzing the giver rather than the gift that he
stresses the importance of facial expressions during the act.
====<Pontano, 1965, ``De liberalitate,'' xvi.>====
 The magnificent man is critically described as more interested in
expenditure than in donation, in the action rather than the recipient.
Liberality thus appropriates some of the prestige which earlier writers had
allotted to magnificence alone.

Similarly in the case of beneficence, Pontano admires as good what is
possible for himself:  for instance, Duke Alfonso is praised for
dismounting into the mud to help an old peasant. ====<Pontano, 1965,
``De beneficentia,'' vi.>====
 In this Pontano gives no more evidence of compassionate concern for the
peasantry than did Bellini when he painted such people.  By pulling the
ordinary into a discussion of virtue (for such we can assume those
paintings to be), neither of them necessarily credits the peasant with
virtue, but both do ensure that virtue is not defined as the exclusive
prerogative of the highest class.  The topic of virtue is made to apply to
a world wider than the chivalric.  The peasant is not identical with vice,
if helping him can be assessed as virtue.

Whereas Palmieri had cited Virgil to express his mistrust of the
lowly,====<See Ch.~1, this volume.>==== Pontano does the same for a different
purpose, namely, to show his mistrust of crude wealth.  Virgil's Third
Eclogue is his authority for explaining that a work of art can be valuable
because of the artist who made it, though the object be of mere
beechwood. ====<Pontano, 1965, ``De liberalitate,'' xxvii.>====
 This epitomizes how radical is Pontano's thought about the interrelated
issues of wealth's prerogatives and antiquity's prestige.  What is rare in
art, and beautiful and elegant, is worth more than what may cost the most,
as the most magnificent man can similarly not be measured merely by how
much he has spent. ====<Pontano, 1965, ``De magnificentia,'' xix.>====

Like Poggio, Pontano calls avarice the root of all evil, but for him
avarice is perhaps less easily avoided.  He associates it particularly with
old age (an age, it is worth noting, almost absent from Arcadia, or at
least much less dominant there than in Renaissance
society).====<Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1985, p.~183, write of
Tuscany in 1427, ``Young adults appear crushed between a plethora of old
people and a swarm of little children.'' Venetian Senators, not to mention
the Doge, tended to enforce the will of the more mature upon the youth of
the city; on the ``extended adolescence,'' into their late 20s and 30s,
stipulated of Venetian men, see Ruggiero, 1985, pp.~13, 161.>==== Prodigality
he believes may accomplish some good, avarice none.  Avarice, moreover, is
incurable.

Poverty, Pontano explains, is shameful only in those who cannot accept it.
St.~Francis
 showed strength in poverty.  On the other hand, Alfonso of
Naples was prodigal and ruined his state.====<On the ambitions
expressed in Alfonso's personal imagery, see Woods-Marsden, 1990.>====
 It was thus partly on the basis of personal experience that Pontano
enunciated a deeply skeptical attitude toward the brute power of wealth.
Pontano is disgusted by the misuse of wealth of Galeazzo Maria, Duke of
Milan and brother-in-law of Alfonso, who gave money and even a silk suit to
an idler (nebulo) but would not give or even lend Pontano a book he
asked for.  He, Pontano, has displayed more liberality than these princes,
for he has given away his inheritance and lives on his earnings.

Pontano tells the story of giving money to a trumpet player not to play,
ostensibly because he lacked money enough to reward him for playing.  What
counts is not Pontano's patronage but his cleverness.  He thus echoes
stories about how Alfonso or Cosimo de' Medici had dealt wisely, if less
than openhandedly, with the importunate.  By virtue of wit, Pontano
displays himself as the equal of princes and the princely.

Pontano was never noted for piety, indeed quite the reverse; his
potentially radical perspective was not motivated by Christian teachings
but reflected his self-interest.  In Arcadia, there was no difference
between prince and humanist, as was true in Naples by his own description
of moral worth.  As with theories of nobility, in theories of liberality
humanists understandably worked to include themselves.  In both cases this
tended to push the statement of what was ideal with regard to wealth toward
the pastoral norm, abstracted from the facts of real-world status.  Since
nobility in Arcadia is not expressed by riches, a tenuous and sensitive
theoretical distinction between wealth and worth is enforced practically.
Its prestige resides in no small part exactly in this:  Arcadia represents
not the elimination of class privilege but its ultimate justification and
refinement.  The humanist writer and his patron exist there as equals,
disadvantaged by fortune and women but vindicated by virtue.  Like
Castiglione's concept of sprezzatura, Pontano's concept of 
liberality
makes proper behavior less a function of innate advantage than of education
and culture.

If a man's spirit can be princely though his actual deeds be minor in
scale, an artist too can be judged more by maniera than by the
established conventions of an impressive composition.  With charity what
matters more than the size of the donation is the gracious mien with which
it is given; in the aesthetics of maniera one judges the processes of
making art as an indication of anima and ingegno, rather than
measuring the result against nature.  One makes art differently, with less
finish and precision, in order to record maniera on the permanent
object.====<Pliny records that Seilanion damaged his sculptures after
finishing them, to record his dissatisfaction with them (XXXIV, 81).  This
most contrived non-finito expresses the insufficiency of human works
with particular vehemence.>==== And in doing so one is able to prove oneself of
greater worth than one would ever be judged on the basis of the art object
itself, no matter how fine it might have been.  By changing the locus of
judgment, the viable range of accolade shifts too.  In this way, there is
an intellectual continuity between debates about wealth, about artistic
genius, and about theology, a continuity which has consequences not only
for the contents of art but also for its forms.

Like Maio, Pontano reserves a special praise for elegance.  This is a term
compatible with pastoral ways of thinking, as magnificence is not.
``Elegance'' already had an important history as a term whereby to endorse
good styles of writing, particularly good Latin style.  When  Landino is
explaining the dependence of oratory upon the power of poetry, he says that
poetry brings elegance to things base and vile.====<``Chi non intende,
quanto nelle cose grandissime alti, nelle mediocre temperati, nelle vili et
basse eleganti sieno?'' Landino, 1974, p.~27, from the opening lecture for
his course on Dante (1473?).  Field (1988, p.~235) dates Landino's first
public lectures on Dante as early as 1456.>==== As such, it was a word familiar
in humanists' parlance, and so all the more easily adapted to this new
context, in which again it expressed a distinctively humanistic idea.  Now
the less-than-wealthy man is in a position to have better taste than the
wealthy one, as the learned man had, earlier in the process, gained the
right to be recognized as more virtuous than the noble by birth.  In
defining liberality and beneficence in such a way as to make them
universally obligatory---no one too poor to give, no one too strong to
receive---Pontano created a moral world like that of Arcadia.  The concept
of magnificence supported an aesthetics of copiousness and ornateness; the
concept of liberality allowed for an elegant art less insistent upon the
beauty of marbles and satins.  Appropriately De liberalitate was
dedicated to Azio Sincero, that is, to Sannazaro under his pastoral
epithet.====<See also, Trissino's Il ritratto, in which the
liberality of Isabella d'Este is discussed, magnificence being a quality
generally reserved for men with their greater financial resources.>====

As patterns of admiration changed in life, so they had to be adjusted in
art.  As liberality became a concept capable of complicating the honors
done to magnificence, that is, as the respect due to extraordinary wealth
became more moderate or even moved toward blame, pastoral and rustic art
moved from notebook pages to landscape backgrounds, and then, with
Giorgione, to foregrounds.  Humanist theory such as Pontano's caused the
aesthetic of International Gothic to atrophy, not bourgeois taste alone.
Such theory, not necessarily bourgeois in its origin, made it possible for
``bourgeois taste,'' a dislike for sheer material finery evidenced early on
by Alberti, to develop.  Perhaps the crux of the matter was not Masaccio's
rivalry with Gentile da Fabriano (which seems not to have been a
well-balanced match in Florentine eyes), but the technical ability to paint
light effects as metaphorically suggestive as any gleaming pastiglia work.
That was the artist's analogue for Pontano's gift given with gracious
demeanor, his evidence of intellect.  That shift in priorities, in many
ways difficult to reconcile with a more glorious image of the majestic
human figure, lies near the core of Renaissance achievement, arguably more
so than the humanization of ambition and the respect accorded to worldly
fame.  The low style had a part to play in Renaissance culture that the
high style could not.

             
Regardless of an individual's capacity to commission art lavishly,
possessing art that gloried in jewels, satins, and marbles became more
controversial---on aesthetic rather than purely moral grounds.  No patron
can ensure that ostentation will be received as good taste, and
particularly so when the epilogue to Sannazaro's popular text was
counseling, ``de la tua selvatichezza contentandoti.''====<``Make
yourself content with your roughness.''>==== The more magnificent the
appearance of a work, the less ideal it might have seemed.  Such change in
attitude was not absolute and categorical, but it was nevertheless real and
had concrete consequences.  Giorgione's Castelfranco Enthroned
Madonna [fig.~1], towering over a landscape, is not merely a novel
invention compared with Bellini's more aulic versions of the same subject:
it implies different societal patterns of respect.  A battered and rustic
set of buildings serves as attribute in the landscape for the foreground
figure of St.~Francis, 
just as figures in armor, notably at ease and
lacking mounts, appear in the landscape correspondingly opposite to 
St.~Liberalis the warrior.====<Such figures allude to the otherwise
incompatible ideals of the active and contemplative life.  Cf.~the
``soldier'' in La tempesta, discussed below.>====
 Perched skyward as she is, this is no humble Madonna; yet, compared with
the vaulted halls and ornate thrones of Bellini's Madonnas, her
presentation is relatively modest.  She could never dismount into the
throne room; she is paired with nature herself.

             
The high style inculcated respect above all else; the low style did not,
and therefore was a complicating simplicity.  Virgilian though the roots of
pastoral writing were, it seldom went so far as to advocate eating acorns
again.  In other words, the pastoral genre was used rather than espoused;
the heroic had been, at least wishfully, cleaved to.  As it was more
versatile, so was pastoral a more complex mode.  Crude and comic writing
about the countryside existed side by side with precious love laments.
Either might be the vehicle of social criticism.  As early as 1504,
Vincenzo Calmeta wrote of Sannazaro that ``con artificioso velame lavaricia
& alcuni altri detestandi vitii della corte di Roma lacerava'' (with
artful veil he attacked the avarice and other detestable vices of the Roman
court).====<Achillino, 1504, unpag.>====
 
Book illustration excepted, there are virtually no Renaissance attempts
to render an eclogue of Virgil's pictorially.====<Though see Emison,
1994, for the argument that Mantegna's engraving of Bacchanal with
Silenus
 does have such an origin.>====
 Since the imagery of pastoral texts is often not contained in action, it
can be recalcitrant to pictorialization.  How should one paint desirous
woods, the friendliness of darkness, the echoing of songs throughout a
valley?  In Arcadia even nature did not act altogether naturally, but was
sympathetic to the point of being magical.  How to paint ewes forgetting to
give milk to their young, in sympathy with the sad shepherd, as the poet
tells us in Castiglione's Tirsi?  How to paint in the first person,
the means by which the text asserts the immediacy, not merely the reality
long ago of the place and time it portrays?  Indicating the rustle of
leaves and the glint of light might be a step in this direction, but
painter and poet could converge to a lesser extent than in the more
objective epic mode, punctuated by mighty deeds.  Nevertheless, the impact
of Virgil's eclogues upon the making of Renaissance art was more vast than
this or the total number of overtly pastoral works would indicate.  The
eclogues provided not merely textual inspiration, but a way of thinking
about art and artists.

The type of the visual artist and the type of the shepherd were comparable.
Both were lower class and, moreover, endowed with natural genius for which
the full scope of cultivated manners and prerogatives was simply not
pertinent.  Tellingly, Mantegna, one of the first artists of whom it is
recorded that allowance was made for his conduct because of his artistic
calling, is named by Sannazaro as working within Arcadia.====<``ma
communemente questi magistri excelenti hanno del fantasticho e da loro
convien tore quello che se po havere,'' Marchese Federico to Duchess of
Milan, 1480, Kristeller, 1902, p.~538, doc.~79; Prosa 11 (Mantegna did in
fact design vases).  On a drawing and an engraving that seem to relate to
the designs Sannazaro described, see Kurz, 1959, pp.~277-80, and Evans,
1985, pp.~123-30.  Lomazzo, interestingly enough, paired Sannazaro and
Mantegna for their ``acuta prudenza''; see Lomazzo, 1974, II, p.~246.>====
Presumably Sannazaro picked Mantegna as an artist particularly famous for
his love of antiquity and his naturalism.====<Though Lomazzo's
comments on Mantegna suggest there may have been more to it:  ``Di
grandissimo grido e stupore a tutta Italia e fuori fu ancora il pi\'u, de
gli altri avanti da lui statti, Andrea Mantegna mantovano, grandissimo
stuppore dilla natura, il quale, essendo natto di bassa stirpe, e pasciuto
le pecore per i campi, tanto si alz\`o col valore dilla sorte e pi\'u
dilla sua virt\'u, che e' merit\`o di esser fatto cavagliero onorato a
spron di oro da Lodovico marchese di Mantova, essendo molto giovine, nel
voler mandarlo a Papo Inocenzio ottavo, che richiesto l'aveva; al quale
pinse mirabilmente diverse cose, per merito dille quali per tutta Itallia
altro non si udiva che il grido di Andrea Mantegna:  onde essendo con
grandissimi doni da quel papa premiato, se ne torn\`o a Mantova, dove
morse con dispiaceri de tutti''; Lomazzo, 1974, I, p.~103 (``Gli sogni e
raggionamenti'').>==== Perhaps he even knew the cragged, rustic types in which
Mantegna exercised a minor specialty and thought of them as parallels to
his own tuneful but sunburned and calloused shepherds.  In any case, the
two ideas---the artist of genius and the virtuous shepherd as persons
privileged beyond their class---became ripe together, and it is especially
in this that Sannazaro's reference to Mantegna is apt.  Because the
first-person narration of the poetry, with its assertion of the nobility of
the speaker, was unavailable to painters, the vital theme of natural
nobility was only obliquely alluded to in the visual versions of pastoral,
by light effects and by an implicit dependence on the literary tradition.

Unlike the heroic istoria, pastoral images rarely compliment
erudition.  This is a consequence of their not being so closely tied to
texts as istorie.  In pastoral images, lyricism translates into
images that are expressive without emphasizing narrative
structures. ====<On the importance of Petrarch's less narrative mode
also for Lorenzo de' Medici's Comento sopra alcuni de' suoi sonetti,
see Kennedy, 1989, pp.~46-67.>====
 In a woodcut by Domenico Campagnola (B.~4) [fig.~15], for example, the
landscape is the principal object shown.  Scattered across it are lovers
lying amidst a flock, a peasant or gypsy family trudging along with babies
and even a cradle strapped to the mother's back, some ramshackle, rustic
buildings, and some possibly ancient arches.  We look at sheep in a
landscape rather than heroes in battle, but more than this, in the case of
istorie, art proclaims itself as such, and in the art of the  
rozzo stile, it understates itself.  The one is unabashedly rhetorical,
the other merely anecdotal.  What Petrarch had done for Italian poetry,
ridding it of Aristotelian formalisms, Giorgione did for painting, by
discarding the usual conventions of pictorial ambitiousness.  Subsequently,
both Michelangelo and Titian, each in his own way, developed a kind of
visual incultezza which acted as surrogate for the poet's
first-person presence.====<See Ch.~3, this volume.>====

Pastoral is properly understood as a means to achieve a pictorial world
whose meaning is given abstractly and without great specificity.  It had
never been solely devotion to Virgil's early poetry that made pastoral
possible and even important to Renaissance society but an implicit faith in
the purity of life according to nature.  This devotion was not absolute but
responsive to standards such as gentilezza and urbanitas.
Pietro Aretino, quick to lament the courtier's servile lot, also
acknowledged that one week in the country was quite enough for him:
 
   Secondo me, in contado si dee stare una settimana e non
   pi\`u; peroch\'e in s\'i breve tempo l'aperto de l'aria, il selvatico
   del luogo e la rustichezza de la persone, con le novit\`a loro, pascono
   altri con grata conversazione.  Nel passar poi del termino detto, la
   ruvidezza del sito, con la stranezza dei suoi abitatori, converte ogni
   solazzo in noia; per la qual cosa \`e
    forza ridursi a le comodit\`a e a la civilit\`a.====<Aretino,
   1945, p.~38 [1537].>====
    
   (My opinion is that one should stay a week in the countryside and not
   more, because in that short amount of time the openness of the air, the
   wildness of the place and the rusticness of the inhabitants with the
   novelty of these things, provides others with pleasant conversation.
   Beyond that length of time, the rudeness of the place, and peculiarity of
   the residents, converts every amusement into annoyance, and it is necessary
   to get back to conveniences and to civilization.)
    

Pastoral succeeded because the things it was ``about,'' it was ``about''
uninsistently.  An art in which noble shepherds appeared, but an art that
was as much about light and color as about those same noble shepherds, both
affirmed the independence of nobility from wealth and comfortingly
discounted that very assertion.  To dignify that which already had dignity
was one function well performed by Renaissance art, both high and low.
Sentimentality toward things rustic was tempered by anxieties---both the
anxieties over death and sex that pastoral addressed directly and an
implicit tension between the noble shepherd framed in Virgil's self-image
and the actual contadino, the country bumpkin of life, who might
actually be threatening.  In the larger category of ideas about the rural
and rustic there is room for skepticism, satire, and caricature.  It was in
some ways unlikely that pastoral would become fashionable, especially
visual pastoral, in which the distinction between a refined shepherd and a
coarse one was harder to maintain than in literature.  Pastoral flourished
only as long as the relief at dealing with the issues of sexuality and
death in a play setting outweighed the discomfort of idealizing what was
actually routinely disdained.


                             paia che si sia effeminato il mondo, e
                             disarmato il Cielo...
====<Machiavelli, I discorsi sopra la
prima deca di Tito Livio, II, 2:  ``it appears that
the world has become effeminate, and the Heaven
disarmed ...''>==== 
 
             
 As with their literary counterparts, the stylistic point of pastoral
scenes is to return art to a primitively pure and simple state, thereby
foresaking the goal of ornateness as an expression of the quasi-virtue,
magnificence.  In the silence of these pictures, not much is done.  The
viewer, without hearing the song, must extract sentiments which cannot be
shown directly.  Figural action is nearly eliminated; the shady cool
landscape is as much the locus of movement and change as the figures.
Instead of giving the viewer more and more motifs and references to admire,
the artist began to reverse that tendency.  Lyrical meditation replaces
procedures of recognition---a radical change.  Pictorial anonymity
displaces iconographical specificity, which had itself previously displaced
reliance on abstract symbolism.  Whereas with the istoria, a richness
of iconographical effect had been an end in itself, now the elimination of
such effects became a means for achieving a different range of
signification.

Giorgione's La tempesta
 [fig.~16] is not an istoria, nor yet a typical poesia, for it
lacks reference to text and established iconography.  Its rarity, however,
is relative only to the visual arts, not to the larger context of all love
imagery in the period.====<Some of the following material was
presented at the New College Medieval-Renaissance Conference, Sarasota,
March 1994.  La tempesta is done in oil on canvas, 83 x 73 mm, dated  
c.~1505.  It was first mentioned in 1530 by Marcantonio Michiel, ``El
paesetto in tela cun la tempesta, cun la cingana et soldato, fo de man de
Zorsi da Castelfranco,'' and was at that time in the Venetian house of
Gabriel Vendramin.>====
 Within that larger context, the basics of the imagery---landscape, storm,
no narrative incident, non-noble man, and the nymph-like woman who is
evidently related to the type of the Virgin without being assimilated into
it---are unexceptional.====<The literature on La tempesta has
uncovered a number of more or less comparable images, many of them
subsequent; for the landscape elements, comparison should be made to
Sebastiano del Piombo's Resurrection of Lazarus of 1520, which reuses
the ruins, the dramatic lighting, and the water.>====
 
The history of responses to the painting begins in 1530 with Marcantonio
Michiel, a well-born Venetian who wrote of a painting by Giorgione, dead
then twenty years, which depicted a landscape with ``la tempesta,'' a
gypsy, and a soldier.  Frustrating though this jotting has proved, we are
lucky to have it.  Certainly interpretations which can account for
Michiel's phraseology have an advantage over those that cannot.  Taking the
iconographic blankness of Michiel's heading very seriously, Creighton
Gilbert posited in the 1950s, a time of subjectless art, subjectlessness as
a possibility here.  This, it seemed to him, was not a didactic painting,
but a genre painting.  Edgar Wind, ever a staunch supporter of meaning and
order in art, in the 1960s rallied the evidence in favor of an allegory:
Fortitude, Charity, and Fortune.  In 1978 Salvatore Settis argued that the
subject was Adam and Eve After the Fall, for he recognized a serpent
in the foreground dust.  In the 1980s, Deborah Howard and Paul Kaplan
independently suggested that the painting could be understood only as a
product of the Cambrai debacle in which Venice lost most of its territory
on the terra firma, including Padua, the emblem of which (or rather, of the
Carrara family) was now detected painted on the architecture in the
distance.  The painting's mood was the mood of Venice; its date, however,
needed to be shifted until after the outbreak of the War of the League of
Cambrai, that is, from c.~1505 to c.~1509.  Paul Holberton a
few years later turned back to Michiel and offered evidence to support the
idea that the seated woman is a gypsy.

The cumulative effect of these and other proposals has been to demonstrate
the number of pictorial tributaries which may be claimed on behalf of this
modest picture:  its sources may be found in classical or religious
imagery, or in Giorgione's own experience.  It features lightning, just as
had Apelles' famous painting from so long before; the three figures resting
in the landscape while the mother nurses is a grouping easily reminiscent
of the Holy Family; the landscape is approximately the landscape Giorgione
knew.  So distinguished a heritage this picture may claim, and yet so small
and unpretentious is the descendant itself.  Furthermore, given the drastic
change in composition, potentially also in conception, revealed by the
X-ray which showed a woman sitting on the bank in place of the soldier, no
one has suggested that Giorgione was working to the mandate of someone
else's invention.====<For a partial summary of interpretations
previously offered, see Pignatti, 1971, no.~13, pp.~101-02 and Settis,
1990.  Later interpretations include Holberton's review, 1991, pp.~126-29,
which proposes that the subject is a gypsy family, followed up in
Holberton, 1995; and Cioci, 1991, as a Mars and Venus.>====

In sum, many times the challenge of understanding this painting has been
understood as requiring that the three figures---nearly naked woman with
nursing, perhaps year-old baby, and young man dressed in urban although not
patrician clothes---be knit into a narrative whole, whether mythological or
religious.  A major obstacle in this endeavor is the disjunction between
the male gaze and the woman.====<It is worth thinking ahead here to
Titian's paintings of Venus and a Musician, in which he gazes so
unabashedly at the groin of the reclining nude.  In the history of the gaze
in art, as in other histories of art, Titian is very much Giorgione's
student.>==== Allegorical readings have also been offered, in response to the
absence of unifying action and the presence of potentially emblematic
elements, such as the famed streak of lightning and the prominent broken
columns.  Finally and not least, the painting has been taken to signal an
important step toward the acceptance of genre subjects.

The present interpretation hinges upon the difference between a didactic or
philosophical allegory on the one hand, and what might be called realistic
allegory.====<For other examples of exploratory allegory in the
Renaissance, see Emison, 1986.>==== The proposal is this:  that Giorgione's
painting is about love, without being about the inspiring qualities of
love.  Thus although the painting shares affinites with narrative,
allegory, and genre, it belongs instead to a new and less formalized kind
of pictorial musing, closer than anything else to low-style poetry---not
any specific piece, but in general.  The figures, although anonymous, carry
generalized literary references.  The combination of basic
elements---landscape, storm, absence of narrative incident, non-noble man
and nymph-like woman---are quite unexceptional in Renaissance literary
imagery, once we allow for disrespectful attitudes toward love.

It has often been thought, legitimately enough, that the streak of
lightning symbolizes Fortuna depersonified or raised to the status of
Jupiter tonans.====<As for the basic idea that this is
Giorgione's counterboast to Apelles' lost painting of lightning, no doubt
it is, as it is also likely to be a response to Virgil's description of
storm and then calm in the Georgics.  There is Georgic imagery in
Ovid's Ars amatoria; see Myerowitz, 1985, p.~109.  Uccello also
painted lightning, in the Chiostro Verde Deluge.>==== The imagery of
Fortuna and of Amor overlap, not surprisingly.  Fortune, though usually
feminized as a fickle harlot, was alternatively described as a Cupid past
puberty:  ``la nostra vita come avversaglia sia anteposta a tutte le
sagette de la potente fortuna'' (our life like a combatant is beset by all
the arrows of powerful fortune).====<Maio, citing Cicero, 1956, p.~64.
>==== Ovid writes of ``incerta Cupidinis aura'' (the uncertain breeze of
Cupid).====<Ars amatoria, II, ix.>==== Giovanni Bellini painted an
allegory of Lady Fortune in a boat accompanied by many
cupids.====<Goffen, 1989, p.~231, identifies the figure as Melancholy,
although there is no reason given for Melancholy to be out at sea, which
there is for Fortune, and she calls the globe that of Fortune.  
Cf.~Serafino dall'Aquila's poem which concludes, ``Ahi!  come \`e
 miserable tua sorte/Poi che servi ad Amor, Fortuna & Morte!''
(Bauer-Formiconi, 1967, p.~236, no.~141).  Given that Michiel described
the painting as showing a storm, a gypsy, and a soldier, if the 
gypsy can
be taken as a sign of venereal and even mercenary love (as the soldier
would be of a mercenary class), the comparison is most apt.  The pairing of
any two of these is quite common, the combination of all three less so.>====
The word fortuna could mean ``storm'' and lightning could be called
sagitta.====<As in Priuli's description of a storm at sea in
August of 1500, in which four Mantuans of high rank were killed when the
boat was struck by lightning---in accordance with divine judgment, comments
the Venetian chronicler of his city's traditional enemies.>====
 In the painting lightning and storm may signify the fickleness and
unreliability of love.====<The white bird on the slanting wooden roof,
close to the streak of lightning, may be intended to ensure that we see the
lightning in relation to love and sexuality, the connotations of
``uccello'' being commonplace.  Similarly the columns near the male figure
surely need not signify fortitude, but rather brokenness devoid of
connotation that a paragon of fortitude has done the breaking; they are
broken as the wall nearby is broken.  If they carry a more generalized male
connotation, that is secondary to the indication of desolation, ruin, and
Fortuna.>==== Conceivably Giorgione started from the idea of storm and came by
way of that to the theme of stormy love.

Storm served as a metaphor for sexual passion, as most famously in the cave
episode of the Aeneid, the final entrapment of Dido by Aeneas' 
divine
sponsors.  Petrarch used wind as a metaphor for passion (``del vento che mi
pinse in questi scogli'') ====<Petrarca, Rime, 80:  ``by the
wind that pushed me into these cliffs.''>====
 and lightning to describe the effects of love:
 
    Come col balenar tona in un punto,
     cos\`\i fu' io de' begli occhi lucenti
     e d'un dolce saluto inseme aggiunto.
   
   (As when lightning and thunder strike at one point,
     so was I by the beautiful gleaming eyes
     and by a sweet salutation together overtaken.) ====<Petrarca,  
   Rime, 110.  Cf.  Maio, 1956, p.~153, following Seneca's De ira,
   III.>====
    
 For Sasso, ``la donna e un mare/sempre in tempesta:  pero quel che
lama/cerca la morte.''====<(woman is a sea ever in storm, and he who
loves her seeks death), Sasso, Opera, 1501, CCCCXXXI.>====
 
In a less lofty rendition, the lady's glances are still like flaming
arrows and the feelings of love like being tempest-tossed.  The lover is
faithfully her servant and yet they remain estranged:
 
    Li sguardi tuoi furon saecte accese,
     che 'l tristo pecto e 'l cor mi trapassaro;
   
   Se l'affannato core in foco giace,
     s'allegra nel foco come fenice;
     se in mar turbato sto senza haver pace,
   
   Tristo chi spera per fedel servire
     trovar in donna mai vera mercede,
    
   ch\`e mutano ogni d'i vero disire
     co' inzegni, tradimenti e falsa fede!====<Luigi Pulci, 1887, p.~30.>====
    
   (Your looks were flaming arrows, that pierced my sad breast and heart;
   
   If the troubled heart lies in fire, it revives there like a phoenix; if in
   a wild sea I remain without having peace,
   
   Miserable he who hopes through faithful service ever to find in a woman
   true recompense, since every day her real wishes change amid devices,
   betrayals, and lies!)
    
 A woman's love, Pulci avers, is as unstable as the unquiet leaves of the
trees.====<Ibid., p.~29.>====
 
Since in La tempesta the woman and the man are distanced from one
another, and the woman is literally matronly, this can be no ordinary
painting on the theme of love.  Yet the exposed female and also the
distinct greenness of the palette imply the theme of love.  The verdant
landscape that so dominates the canvas suggests spring; green was
appropriately the color heraldically associated with love.====<Sicile,
herald to Alfonso V of Aragon (identified as Jehan Courtois), Le
blason des armes, Lyon, 1533[?], associates green with May, with  
liesse, with Venus and spring, youthfulness, love, joy, beauty and
permanence, and not least the sacrament of marriage.  See also Gavel, 1979,
p.~143.  Settis, 1990, suggests that the landscape is specifically one of
spring.  Botticelli's La Primavera is another outstandingly green
painting.>==== Storm recedes in spring, the season of love, as Sasso observed:
``El ciel non e seren fin chel bel mese/De Venere ...''====<(the
sky is not clear until the month of May); Opera, 1501, CCVII.>==== The
bridge in the background unites at a distance (possibly of time) the man
and the woman now shown in separation.  Even the love affairs of
literature's shepherds by no means always went unconsummated, despite the
prevalent theme of purity.  We may assume the same here.

The color, the reference to threat of storm, the present inactivity of the
figures, all imply that this is a picture of what cannot be done in the
high style:  love apart from its heroic narrative examples, a meditation
upon love itself rather than its protagonists.  This is no paean to Venus,
the only woman with child other than the Virgin regularly glamorized in
Renaissance art.  Despite her seat on a raised tussock, this woman's
humility is no mere token but a genuine lack of status.  The woman's
anonymity is one of Giorgione's great achievements, essential to our
understanding the painting as neither narrative nor a conglomeration of
personifications.

She is at once exposed in a fairly ungainly pose, legs splayed and sole of
foot showing, and crossed out, as it were, by the brambles between her and
the viewer.  No delightful nymph skipping through the glade, she is a woman
whose sexuality is as obtrusively evident and as mature as in the
simultaneously evolving courtesan portrait.  It is as though Giorgione's
Laura had been rethought as more plebeian and less desirable.  Her
glance is toward the viewer, if not forthrightly so.

Tomasso Porcacci in his commentary on L'Arcadia found himself in the
dilemma of defending Sannazaro against apparent misogyny on the grounds of
allusion to ancient authors in the lines from Egloga Ottava:
 
    Nel' onde solca, e ne l'arena semina,
     E'l vago vento spera in rete accogliere
     Chi sue speranze fonda in cor di femina.
   
   (A furrow in the waves, and seed in the desert sands,
     and the wandering wind in a net he hopes to gather
     who builds his trust in the heart of a woman.)====<Sannazaro, 1966,
   p.~86.>====
     
 Porcacci begins with firm apology for these harsh words of Sannazaro:
 
    Ancor che io sappia di certo la mente dell'Autore non esser di volere in
   questo luogo dar nota d'inconstanza, e d'instabilit\`a a tutto il nobil
   sesso feminile, di cui non si possono mai a bastanza descrivere le lodi;
   nondimeno per notare alcuna cosa in conformit\`a di quanto \`e qui
   scritto, dir\`o che per giudicio mio il Sannazaro tassa in questo
   ternario la femina in uno de' due modi; cio\`e
    o che'l cuor d'essa \`e tutto pieno di tutti i vizi, in maniera che
   niuno se ne pu\`o fidar punto; o che sia leggiero, e per rispetto della
   leggerezza d'esso non vi s'abboa da poter mettere speranza.
   
   (Still I know for certain that the intention of the author was not to point
   to the inconstancy and instability of the noble female sex, of which it is
   not possible ever to give enough praise.  Nevertheless, in observing
   exactly what he has written here, I will say that I suppose Sannazaro in
   this verse taxes women in one of two ways:  either that the heart of woman
   is full of vice, so that no one ever may trust them, or that it is fickle,
   and because it is so changeable it is not possible to put hope in it.)
    
 We find here the rare situation of a commentator obviously uncomfortable
with what his chosen author has undeniably set down.  He excuses Sannazaro
by citing Propertius and Virgil, who had spoken of women's falseness or
variability.  In this situation the Renaissance reader is asked to
reconcile two poorly reconcilable cultural truisms about women:  as a
class, they are at once noble and contemptible.  Similarly, Giorgione puts
the viewer in the position of dealing with the image of woman without
excluding either of these possible stereotypes.  She is desirable, yet
neither particularly pure nor good, no paragon of beauty and grace.

Moreover the callow male spectator on the sidelines is no empathetic
placeholder for the painting's viewer.  A shepherd might have been so, but
this is the dress of an urban servant.====<Newton (1988, p.~34)
identifies the youth as expensively dressed for his class (page, household
man-at-arms, junior member of a city guard are the possible occupations she
suggests), and somewhat daring in the exposure of his shirt.  On the vogue
for picturing soldiers and shepherds, and that this figure should not be
held a soldier, see Hale, 1990, Chapter 3; and idem, 1988,
pp.~405-18.  For an interesting comparison, see the pair of figures in the
background of Marcello Fogolino's St.~Francis Receiving the Stigmata
and Other Saints in Vicenza:  a knight in armor lying on the ground and a
figure very like Giorgione's standing next to him, holding a staff;
Ballarin, 1982, Inv.~A-35.  The implication would seem to be that such a
figure is more page than soldier.>====
 If in fact the figure is dressed as a member of the guardia, we
should feel ourselves obliged to wonder, at the very least, whether there
is not a pun on guardare
 (to watch), all the more so given the importance of unmet gaze in this
painting.====<It is worth remembering the blank forward stare of
Nicodemus in Parmigianino's Lamentation, analogously detrimental to a
tightly narrative interpretation.>==== His sixteenth-century clothing serves to
discourage us from taking him to be a personification.  Had the woman been
clothed too in sixteenth-century dress, La tempesta would more
closely resemble a small painting in the Museo Civico of Padua (which may
well be derived from Giorgione's painting) [fig.~17].====<Pignatti,
1993 and elsewhere, considers this to be an early Giorgione.>==== In this scene
of love, a lad proffers flowers to a lass, who sits on the grass holding a
naked child.  She is quite lavishly draped and the youth is attentively
seated, so that the type of Madonna and Child with donor or attendant saint
is invoked.  This Giorgione avoided.  He used nudity to exclude the
parallel with Madonna and Child and used clothing to avoid mythological
reference.

One stumbling block to any neat iconographical interpretation of La
tempesta has been the results of an X-ray showing that Giorgione painted
another bathing nude woman in the foreground, presumably later replacing
this figure with that of the soldier.  The change in specifics is no
obstacle to the general interpretation offered here.  With two women, one a
more conventional love object and the other the mother, or alternatively
with only one woman, that is, the bather, the viewer would still have been
invited to meditate upon the nature of love, not as the stuff of high
drama, not as the testing ground of greatness, but as quite ordinary.

What is most harmful in the world, Signor Bernardino asks Signor Hercole in
Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione (1575)?  The response is
``Fire, sea, and woman.''====<Crane, 1971, p.~415.>==== La tempesta
is of the same mold:  showing lightning, storm and water, and woman.  It is
significant that Michiel saw the man as a soldier, that is, as one
associated with death, frequently a pair to love,====<The equation of
love and death is ubiquitous.  Stefano Guazzo, in his ``La civil
conversazione,'' published 1574, answers to the question What is most like
death? Woman, for like death she follows him who flees, and flies him who
calls her (quoted by Crane, 1971, p.~415).  Cf.~Sandro Petri, ``Pazze
tutte le donne, che la morte/son di chi l'ama''; Tebaldeo, 1535, Epistola 2:
``Tu in braccio ad altra donna, & io a la morte''; Egidio, 1538, ``vivendo
mora.'' See further on the pairing of love and death, Dionisotti, 1958,
pp.~419-26.>==== as the gypsy is associated with unwholesome love.

A setting of ruins and landscape, hence of loss and landscape, is (as in
the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) an appropriate place for ruminating
upon devastating love. La tempesta is a painting of storm and fire,
and passionate love is like storm and fire:
 
   Le quali passioni, perci\`o che s\`\i come venti
   contrar\^i turbano la tranquillit\`a dell'animo e ogni quiete della
   nostra vita, sono per pi\`u segnato vocabolo perturbazioni chiamate dagli
   scrittori.  Di queste perturbazioni, quantunque propria d'Amore sia la
   primiera, s\`\i
   come di quello che altro che disiderio non \`e, pure egli, non contento
   de' suoi confini, passa nelle altrui possessioni, soffiando in modo nella
   sua fiaccola, che miseramente tutte le mette a fuoco; il quale fuoco gli
   animi nostri consumando e distruggendo trae spesse volte a fine la nostra
   vita, o, se questo non ne viene, a vita peggior che morte senza fallo ci
   conduce.  Ora per incominciar da esser disiderio, dico questo essere di
   tutte l'altre passioni origine e cape e da questo ogni nostro male
   procedere, non altramente che faccia ogni albero da sue
   radici.====<Bembo, Gli asolani (1505), xxi, 1960.  p.~352.
   Alberti used a tempest as a metaphor for the perturbations of the city,
   from which one escaped to the countryside.  Here, though the tempest is
   present in the countryside, it still symbolizes the mind's unease, not
   unlike the roaming stag of the Petrarchan tradition.  The association of
   unhappy love with the tempest is established also by Sasso, Sonetto CCXXX:
   ``O tempo ciecho obscuro:  e nubiloso/o natura crudel iniqua:  e
   fella/laqual miasconde la mia chiara stella/el vago volto adorno &
   amoroso/Oggi credeva haver qualche riposo/tocchar la biancha man morbida:
   e bella/sentir la dolce & accorta favella/che solo aquetta il mio pianto
   angososo/Non posso incontro ho il ciel:  la piogia el vento/e la fortuna
   chel mio ben non vole/under mi pascho sol dira:  e tormento ...,''
   Sasso, Opera, 1501, unpag.>====
    
   (Such passions, since they upset the tranquillity of the soul and every
   quiet of our life like contrary winds, are assigned the more expressive
   word perturbations by authors.  Of these perturbations how much rightly is
   Love the first, being none other than desire, still it, not content in its
   boundaries, passes into the estates of others, blowing thus on its torch,
   so that miserably it puts everything on fire; this fire consumes and
   destroys our souls often enough killing us or, if this does not occur, we
   certainly lead a life worse than death.  Now to begin with this desire, I
   say that it is the beginning and head of all other passions and from this
   come all our ills, just as every tree comes from its roots.)
    

La tempesta is small in size and low in manner, a depiction of
non-noble persons.  Its theme is love, the primary subject of low-style
poetry, and its presentation of that theme glorifies no one.  The broken
columns have not been rent asunder by some Hercules, and so need not refer
to fortitude.  More likely they refer to brokenness, possibly to
death.====<The stork on the building in the right background and the
putative snake in the foreground might be compared with the well-known
motif in Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow, London, usually
taken to symbolize a psychomachia.>==== We are in a world without heroes,
imbued (at least in the distant sky) with tumult, a metaphorical opposite
to virtue.  If, as the presence of man and naked woman suggests, the theme
is love, it is being shown as other than virtuous.  This work relies on no
easy equation of beauty and virtue; the human soul is not even the focus of
its attention.  That it was possible to paint this unrefined youth and
mother, neither one of which is meant to offer a model of beauty, implies
some notion of a low style.  The work is pioneering not only for the small
scale of the figures relative to the setting, but even more so for their
lack of dignified, exemplary presentation.  These are not poses for other
artists to crib admiringly, even if they had had access to the work.

Despite attempts to link the stormy situation of La tempesta
 to the fraught situation of Venice at war with the League of Cambrai in
1508-09, the painting very likely precedes those events.====<Kaplan,
1986, pp.~405-27, and Howard, 1985, pp.~271-89.  The painting has been
re-dated c.~1509 and the interpretation accepted by Hall, 1992,
pp.~218-21.>====
 This, however, is not to prohibit some degree of allusion to the
contemporary situation.  Such allusion, like the iconography itself, is
generalized.  The opposition of calm and storm, like that of man and woman,
is suggestive only.  And yet it is highly appropriate for the time.  The
basic idea of desiring retreat from passion is as characteristic of the
sixteenth century as it had not been of the fifteenth, during which the
power of reason was seldom publicly doubted.  And the dissociation of ideas
of love from ideas of virtue was as much of the time as syphilis itself.
There was a general opinion that excessive luxury, in its expansive
meaning, was to blame for Venice's, not to say Italy's,
troubles.====<Doge Loredan's denunciation of 1513 in the Senate,
concerning the violation of sumptuary laws, is quoted by Junkerman, 1988,
p.~257.  Such legislation long pre-dates the crisis of Cambrai, which,
however, accentuated perception of the problem.>==== This cultural
re-evaluation supported pastoral subjects in art, and this painting as
well, which is not, strictly speaking, pastoral.

Instead of virtue as compatible with heroic beauty, we find here a kind of
professionalism driving the production of art.  This is a recognized aspect
of Mannerism,====<On which, see the elegant study by Shearman, 1967.>====
the period during which workshop training broke down and the artist began
to function in what might be called a freer market of aesthetics.  La
tempesta is not a painting obviously classifiable as Mannerist, but it
does partake of this professionalism in daring to represent lightning,
storm, landscape, and river.  It is not high style because of the sort of
people represented, and that sort of person is represented because the
point is not the praise of virtue and learning as inalienable from each
other (a favorite theme of Leon Battista Alberti, for instance), but the
display of Giorgione's style, in combination with a sensibility less
attuned than previously to absolutes of virtue.  To insist on absolute
ideas of virtue was to rely on the high style, but if love has its vicious
aspect, then it may be conveyed hieroglyphically by a storm, a slut, and a
lackey.

Simple literary allusion is not what is at issue here, but instead broad
reference to a literary tradition in which love is deplored rather than
praised.  Common enough in poetry, this theme was harder to visualize:
painting had previously been almost exclusively an instrument of praise.
Not being in the grand manner, La tempesta need not present noble
individuals and accordingly need not praise.  It skirts the usual pictorial
practice of praise with discretion.

And so the work, although not learned, is nevertheless accessible primarily
to the literate.  It shares in the literary tradition rather than deriving
from it---a subtle accomplishment.  Like so much pastoral poetry, it
suggests the passage from love's anguish to sad resignation to one's lot,
both in love and fortune.  Sannazaro's Ergasto describes his amorous
anguish as both storm and calm:
 
   Caggian baleni e tuon, quanti ne videro
     i fier giganti in Flegra; e poi sommergasi
     la terra e 'l ciel, ch'io gi\`a per me il desidero.====<Egloga I.>====
    
   (Let thunderbolts and lightning flashes fall, as thick
     as the savage Titans saw them on Phlegra; and then
     heaven and earth be submerged, as I have long desired for
   myself.)====<Sannazaro, 1966, p.~33.>====
     
 And a few lines later:
 
    Non truovo tra gli affanni altro ricovero,
     che di sedermi solo appi\`e d'un acero,
     d'un faggio, d'un abete, over d'un sovero.====<Egloga I.>====
    
   (Amid my griefs I find no other remedy
     than that of sitting alone at the foot of a maple,
     of a beech, of a pine, or of a cork tree.)====<Sannazaro, 1966,
   p.~33.>====
    
 The pivot from storm to calm is what catharsis the pastoral genre has to
offer, in love and more generally.  The drama of the weather, of the
passing storm, does not amplify the passions of the figures but instead
dignifies them to the extent that they have found refuge ``dalla turba
della passioni soffiato.''====<Bembo, Gli asolani, 1960,
p.~313.>====
 
    Onde per cosa vera et indubitata tener ti puoi, che pi\`u di nascoso e
   pi\`u lontano da la moltitudine vive, miglior vive; e colui tra' mortali
   si pu\`o con pi\`u verit\`a chiamar beato, che senza invidia de le
   altrui grandezze, con modesto animo de la sua fortuna si
   contenta.====<Sannazaro, L'Arcadia, last sentence.>====
    
   (So as an indubitable truth you may hold it, that the more hidden and
   more distant from the masses one lives, the better one lives; and he among
   mortals that one may most truthfully call blessed, is he who without envy
   for the greatness of others, makes himself modestly content with his
   lot.)====<Sannazaro, 1966, last sentence.>====
    
 This pastoral sentiment lies at the heart of Giorgione's painting.  The
figures of La tempesta stand unmoved by the tumult of passion, yet
are themselves hieroglyphs of human, carnal love.====<
In Giorgione, 1981, both
Pedretti 
and Zampetti  suggest that the emphasis
ought more to be on the passing of the storm, with full emblematical
implication, than on the storm itself.  Cook (c.~1985, pp.~44-56)
also emphasizes the quiet of the scene.>==== The sun begins to break through
and shine upon the leaves, though they remain protected by light shadow.

The centuries of love literature that lie historically behind La
tempesta were designed to instill loyalty, from the strong to the weak as
well as vice versa.  The knight who was true even unto so weak a thing as a
mistress would surely be faithful to a master having actual power to his
name.  In the more urban society of the Renaissance, issues of fidelity
shifted increasingly to the woman (now granted increased opportunity).
There was accordingly less need to avow the indivisibility of love and
nobility, more incentive to berate the fickleness and venality of love.
La tempesta registers this historical shift, by showing love as a
matter of stormy emotions, even of the ignoble body, rather than of the
soul.  This man is not acting in a courtly manner toward this woman:  he is
lackadaisical to a fault.  His upper-class counterpart could not, but might
wish to, mirror this attitude.  The lower-class persona had more uses than
the strictly pastoral and more idealized ones; accordingly, the art of the
low style had wider boundaries than Arcadian ones.


                             Se voi osservate bene, vedrete che di et\`a
                             in et\`a non solo si mutano e' modi del parlare
                             degli uomini e e' vocaboli, gli abiti del vestire,
                             gli ordini dello edificare, della cultura e cose
                             simili, ma, quello che \`e pi\`u, e' gusti
                             ancora, in modo che uno cibo che \`e stato in
                             prezzo in una et\`a \`e spesso stimato manco
                             nell'altra.
====<Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi,
Milan, 1977, p.~129, no.~69:  ``If you observe well,
you will see that from age to age not only do the
ways of speaking and the vocabulary of men change,
the habits of dressing, the directives of building,
of culture, and similar things, but that which is
more, even tastes, in such a way that one food is
held in esteem in one time and often judged lacking
in another.''>====
 
             
 Few Renaissance images are overtly critical of women or derogatory about
love, but scarcity does not diminish the interest of those that are.  Those
which are covertly or ambiguously so deserve special attention, since they
imply dislocations in the accustomed patterns of viewing
images.====<See, e.g., Emison, ``Arcady,'' 1992.>====

Like La tempesta, Antonio da Trento's woodcut after a lost design by
Parmigianino [fig.~18] is iconographically unfamiliar.====<B.~XII,
p.~148, no.~13, 288 x 182 mm; probably made in the 1530s at Bologna.>====
 There is no reference to Antiquity as a source of dignity and virtue.
Harmony of parts, on both formal and thematic levels, has diminished.  Both
artists portray lusciously verdant places alive with shifting shadow.  Both
conceive of men as being emotionally akin to the landscape that surrounds
them.  Such a strategy is purely pastoral---implying a new, and more
profound, imitation of nature understood as capable of imitating man, or at
least of echoing his emotion.  In pastoral poetry the landscape mirrors
oneself and so becomes valuable.  Sannazaro, for instance, records the
herdsman Carino's appeals to the rivers and shores to remember him after
the misery of love has killed him.  He is to be assimilated into them; they
will remember him since he has so vividly experienced them.

There was a natural affinity between the rozzo stile in poetry and
works on paper.  There was also a link between the rozzo stile and
il colorito, the manner of representation that depended upon the
glimmer of tone amidst the play of light and shadow.  Form in such a
context is incomplete, fragmentary; abstracted color and shape take on
expressive values not subordinated to plot and character, as in the
jaggedness of a quick pen drawing.  In chiaroscuro woodcut Parmigianino's
aims could be humbler, or less strictly defined, much as the pastoral poet
could also aim for slightness of verse form.  The nude's face is obscured,
as is the precise emotional import of the image.  Instead every mark on the
page contributes to the idea that this is a world of the fragmentary and
the inculto.  Although an inexpensive work of art, this was never
aimed at a popular viewership.  Instead it belongs to an art about the
artistic legitimacy of imperfection.  Like many prints, it presumed
collectors of education and culture but not necessarily of vast means.

In this woodcut, whether or not the nude and the sculpture bear identities
is less crucial than in Albertian istorie.  The istoria is
strongly allied with portraiture; it is essential that the virtue displayed
be credited to some worthy person or at least to a personification.  This
woodcut, on the contrary, is a work with a high tolerance for lack of
identity, done at a time when painted portraits of anonymous persons were
beginning to be collected.====<This is a phenomenon difficult to pin
down, but at the very least the shepherd boys of Giorgione may serve as
examples.  An engraving of a woman in profile (H.  D.I.4) in the style of
Pollaiuolo is a possible earlier candidate.>==== As in La tempesta, the
question of personal identity has become less important.

A male nude in a landscape is juxtaposed with a massive tree trunk which he
faces, turning his back to the female presence and to the viewer as he does
so.  Although the nude is of heroic stature and situated approximately
upright, his posture is ungainly and lethargic.  The head is de-emphasized;
not much more than ear and hair is visible.  There may be a bit of drapery
under his head, and perhaps he sits on a piece of fur.  The bottom of his
foot is at the center foreground.  The female statuary bust is coiffed and
clothed in sixteenth-century fashion.  The back of her shoulders also faces
the viewer, although her head is turned so that her facial profile is
visible.  Her eyes seem to be closed, her mouth open---a voluptuous
posture, as in the etched Lamentation.====<Here the male is nude
and the female in contemporary dress; in La tempesta, the situation
is reversed.  In the Concert champ\^etre, there is no simple
analogy along gender lines to the opposition between art and nature, which
contributes to the majestic calm of the piece.>====

             
Were the main figure female, this would be a Dresden Venus,
re-oriented vertically (her accompanying Cupid restored), the vast
landscape recession gone, and the Cupid turned into a stone bust.  Each
discrepancy is significant.  Giorgione's painting might be termed high
style for its mythological subject, presented with all due dignity, its
vast recession, and the richness of drapery, a clear mark of status.
Parmigianino's powerful nude is presented unheroically, his power useless.
He slouches, as Michelangelo's ignudi may also be said to do, but
with the significant difference that this figure is listless and private,
nearly cringing.  The female presence is markedly terrestrial; the sky
scarcely intimated.====<It may be important that the composition
minimizes sky:  cf.~``Io ho piu volte \`a l'amorose selve/Girmen pensato
co'l recarmi morte,/Stanco, & satio di star piu in questa vita:/Ma lo
spirto divin, ch'io ho dal cielo/Si mi consiglia, che mi par tempo/Morir,
sperando assai di queste rime''; Martelli, 1533, 35.>====
 
             
The subject has been called Narcissus, presumably because of the
apparent rejection of the female icon by the nude with his back turned.
There is little reason to be confident of this identification.  The boy
Narcissus was consumed with self-love, whereas this mature figure seems
lost even from himself, hunched toward foliage and earth as he is.  Surely
much of the pictorial interest in that myth lies in the reflection mistaken
for reality, notably absent here.  There is no water visible, and the
obtrusive female bust would seem an odd representation of the fading nymph
Echo.  That the man's vigor is being wasted is evident, and very likely
this is for love, but we are not obliged to believe it is for self-love.
Perhaps, as is often true of print imagery from the time of Pollaiuolo and
Mantegna onward, the invention is more allegorical than narrative and
potentially not very uplifting as allegory.

The image is not overtly pastoral, for there are no sheep.  It would be
against expectation before the time of Jacopo Bassano to find so
burly a shepherd and always against the norm to find one nude.====<On
Bassano's reputation as the originator of Italian genre painting, see,
inter alia, Muraro, 1957, pp.~291-99.  Although the
topic of a low style in Italian art has never been systematically studied,
see the suggestive article by Bia\lostocki, 1978, pp.~169-73.  He
emphasizes the mutual isolation of Bassano's figures, both in their
poses and in the use of atmospheric shadow.  See also Rearick, 1992,
pp.~136-59.>==== Yet a figure could scarcely be placed in a more intimate
relationship with the landscape.  He seems to hug it.  His nudity is
natural rather than classically poised---a revolutionary
distinction;====<He is neither ``naked'' nor ``nude,'' one of not a
few cases for which Kenneth Clark's categorization is inadequate.>====
the landscape is its element rather than its backdrop.  The sculpted bust
belongs to a different world, the world of fashion and artifice.  It does
so both as sculpture and as female.  Women were conventionally reputed
artificial, particularly in diatribes against makeup as a deceit of which
men were the victims.====<E.g., the denunciation by Laura Creta,
entitled by the modern editor ``Curse against the ornamentation of women,''
Her Immaculate Hand, 1983, pp.~77-80.  Cf.~Reilly, 1991,
pp.~77-99.>==== 
%
%The presence of the bust implicitly identifies not only sculpture with
%artifice but also woman's ``paint'' (as makeup was called then) and hence
%painting too.
%
Parmigianino projects female presence here as sculpture, indeed that of a
fashionable contemporary woman, so that her artifice redounds on the
artificiality of sculpture and vice versa.  The diatribe against art that
defies nature's norms of simplicity may even include painting, as made-up
women were already commonly condemned as ``painted.''

The opposition between nature and art, so integral to pastoral, has been
emphatically aligned with that between man and woman.  The work of art is
literally lower than nature.  Rather than the woman being upon a pedestal,
the man is raised up on a stone ledge.  Meanwhile she, stone as she is (a
common Renaissance metaphor for lack of reciprocation), is situated on the
cold ground.====<Called by Sannazaro in Prosa IX, ``la dura terra,''
``hard'' being another adjective commonly used of women.>====
 Whether or not the analogy with pastoral themes was important to
Parmigianino, it seems fair to suppose that Parmigianino himself intended
that this be seen as a meditation on the irreconcilability of nature and
art, personified by man and woman.

We are not beckoned onto a stage in this composition but instead rebuffed
by a back.  The back tells us that nature is the preferred witness to the
sorrow we are not allowed to understand with the completeness customary to
more convention-filled art.  The hiding of what would ordinarily be shown
is a highly artistic device, cited by Pliny of Timanthes in antiquity and
by Sannazaro of an artist in L'Arcadia.  Alberti referred to
Pliny on
this point, in Book II of De pictura, explaining how Timanthes had
shown Agamemnon's grief at the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia by means
of a draped head, since he could not exceed the grief he had depicted of
Menelaus.====<
The association with Timanthes was perfectly clear to Sannazaro's
commentator Tomasso Porcacci (1558). See Sannazaro, 1720.>====
 Yet this
should not be taken as an infiltration of Albertian elements into an
otherwise low-style work.  Alberti appropriated an idea from the low-style
rather than vice versa, for in achieving expressivity through its negation,
in so transcending the need for highly practiced skills of drawing, the
Timanthian episode is a prime instance of making art artlessly, by genius
rather than by trained skill.  And the theme of Nature as witness to
sorrow, itself the product of love's failure, is quintessentially pastoral,
matched in poem after poem.

Parmigianino's woodcut, a sculpture in wood about sculpture's inadequacy,
epitomizes the complexity of low-style art.  A relatively convention-free
art is being used to denigrate artificiality.  Like Sannazaro's embedding
of art within art, of songs and ekphrases within literary text, the viewer
or reader is cajoled into accepting the framing work as natural by contrast
with the framed one.====<Or occasionally the framed one is the less
fictional, as when Sannazaro in Egloga X decries modern Naples and the
bitter poverty of the shepherds, referring to the historian Gian Francesco
Caracciolo as he does; see further, Kennedy, 1983, pp.~133-34.>==== These are
ways in which art conceals art.

             
Despite the absence of recognizable iconographic meaning, Parmigianino's
composition is no figure study stretched in Procrustian manner to serve as
a finished work.  Instead, it is a work of art so artless that there are no
customary strings to pull whereby to unravel a meaning that refers us to a
textual tradition:  Parmigianino has made an icon without using
iconography.

A work of art appears in this work of art as something other than a perfect
model of nature:  the difficulty of conceptualizing art as imitation of
nature is thereby acknowledged, at the same time that women are put in
their place, so to speak.  The former is a realization fundamental to the
preference for the rozzo stile, as yielding a more natural art.  One
abandons heroic art without by any means abandoning art altogether.  And
this is done, often enough, more at the expense of women than of men.  The
male may be shown as less active and powerful,====<Parmigianino may
well have meant to pun on tronco (stump, branch, trunk), referring
both to the objects in the image and the medium.  Perhaps he was even
punning scurrilously on troncare (to cut off):  cf.~Hind's A.I.93, a
tiny print of a knife-grinder, who stands with his back to the viewer,
facing the wheel, onto which Cupid aims his urine, seemingly also a
reference to the emasculated lover; and on the insulting phrase ``un albero
tagliato,'' see Emison, ``Arcady,'' 1992, pp.~271-92.>==== but the female is
paired with the roots of the problem:  avarice, luxury, artifice.


                             Chi colla spada, chi col pasturale,
                             poi la natura fa diversi ingegni,
                             e per\`o son diverse queste scale:
                             basta che in porto salvo si pervegni.
====<Luigi Pulci, Il Morgante, Cantare
II:  ``One with the sword, one with the
shepherd,/since nature makes different intellectual
bents,/and although these levels are different:/it
suffices that one arrives safely in port.''>====
 
             
 The application of theory to practice is not the general theme of this
book, for there was no developed theory of genres in the visual arts.
Instead the object of study is those untheorized practices with sufficient
consistency that they might potentially have been theorized.  For surely
the limits of theory are not the limits of thought.

There were reasons for not having an explicit theory of the low style in
the visual arts:  artists were defensive enough without taking on the
customary self-denigration of the low-style poet.  The patronage system for
the visual arts was less flexible than for the poet; there is no analogy
there to Bernardo Pulci's presentation of eclogues to Lorenzo de' Medici,
himself a writer of vernacular love poetry.  That is, the visual artist
rarely found himself able to adopt a humble guise which would paradoxically
effect for him a kind of parity with his social superiors.  Freedom from
the deference built into the patronage system was the privilege of
printmakers, since their works would not be seen as attributes of any
patron.

In distinguishing low and high as we are doing here (leaving middle aside
as corresponding roughly to portraiture), we need to beware the danger of
caricaturing either.  Istorie might be narrative or allegorical,
having a single figure or many.  Essentially low-style works such as the
Concert champ\^etre might include rich ornaments and stately poses
not out of place in the grandest of scenes.  These impure examples are as
important to the history of the rozzo stile as the works with nothing
grand about them, for they show most clearly that it was not lack of
ambition or ignorance, but variation in ambition, that produced certain of
the less magnificent works.

Raphael's subject in Il morbetto, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi in
Rome [fig.~19],====<B.~XIV, 417; 194 x 250 mm.>==== is directly 
Virgilian
and epic.  We see the suffering of Aeneas' followers from plague after
their flight from Troy to Crete and, in the upper left, Aeneas' dream
telling him to travel onward.  One might suppose that Raphael in choosing a
subject from the Aeneid
 was following his customary inclinations toward what came to be called the
grand manner.  Yet the bleakness of the scene and the darkness of the
physical atmosphere make this an unusual work within Raphael's oeuvre, his
other engraved inventions included.  Normally the painter appointed to
enunciate papal pride and self-confidence, in this more private work (for,
paradoxically, so an engraving could be), an epic situation is made the
stage for the articulation of regret passing into despair, expanding the
nuances of sorrow.  In short, an ostensibly epic subject has been treated
as a low-style lament.

Visually, this particular subject was an odd choice.  There is minimal
incident:  the Trojans are dying of plague, and Aeneas is warned in a dream
to abandon Crete.  The landscape is based on an unusual silverpoint drawing
of ruins, plausibly an al fresco
 drawing.====<Popham and Wilde, 1949, no.~801.  On the engraving, for
which stylistic dates range between 1512 and 1515, see Raphael a
Firenze, 1984, pp.~308-10.  It is not mere coincidence that Quednau (1983,
pp.~129-75) finds in this engraving a borrowing from D\"urer; the work is
outside of Raphael's normal stylistic range.>==== The figures Raphael adapted
from the fifth-century Vatican Virgil's illumination of this episode of the
third book of the Aeneid.====<As observed by 
Pierre de Nolhac,
cited in Raffaello a Firenze, no.~16.  The book was owned by Pietro
Bembo.>==== It was a piece of Virgil's poetry peculiarly sympathetic to a
Christian reading.  In his gloss on the lines inscribed in Raphael's
engraving---LINQUEBANT DULCES ANIMAS AUT AEGRA TRAHEBANT
CORP[ora]---Servius discusses the immortality of the soul (specifically,
the possibility of transmigration).====<``illam immortalem relinquetur
& non relinquet:  & ad diversa corpa transit:  ut & cum frigenda mors
anima seduxerit artus.  Sic enim nos relinquet quorum nihil praeter corpus
est.  Unde Palinurus:  Nunc me fluctus habet:  hoc est corpus quod solum
meum est.''>====
 Since one could find here some slight indication of Virgil's intuition
about
Christian revelation, the passage was of uncommon interest.

Perhaps for that reason, this passage from Virgil was the inspiration for a
poem by Raphael's friend Baldassare Castiglione, Prosopopeia Ludovici
Pici Mirandoli.  This poem likewise tells of a nocturnal visitation by a
lugubrious spirit.====<Castiglione, 1760, pp.~131-34:  Nox erat &
noctem superans candore nivali/Clara repercusso lumine Luna magis...
Ante oculos Picus visus adesse meos./Tristis erat facies, atroque inspersa
cruore,/Et lacerum ambusto tunc quoque crine caput./Obstupui, gelidusque
tremor per membra cucurrit.'' The Virgilian lines are as follows:  ``Nox
erat et terris animalia somnus habebat;/effigies sacrae divum Phrygiique
Penates,/quos mecum a Troia mediisque ex ignibus urbis/extuleram, visi ante
oculos adstare iacentis/in somnis, multo manifesti lumine, qua se/plena per
insertas infundebat luna fenestras...'' (III, 147-152), and following,
``talibus attonitus visus et voce deorum/(nec stupor illus erat, sed coram
adgnoscere voltus/velatasque comas praesentiaque ora videbar;/tum gelidus
toto manabat corpore sudor) (172-175).>==== Written during the siege of
Mirandola undertaken by Pope Julius II during the winter of 1510-11, a
campaign in which Castiglione was obliged to participate as the courtier of
the Duke of Mantua,====<See Hale, 1983, p.~152; and further Dumesnil,
1853.>==== the poem tells how Castiglione's dead friend Ludovico Pico della
Mirandola appeared to him with lamentations against the attack on his widow
and children.  The similarity between Virgil's poem and Castiglione's is
palpable, and the inference follows that Raphael made his drawing to please
the friend to whom the passage was so dear.  As the painter to the Pope he
could scarcely publicly lament the Pope's war, even after that Pope's
death, but he could allude to it, layering the historical reality, the
Virgilian passage, and Castiglione's unusually bitter lament as multiple
references for the design.  Those who wanted to see the work as epic could,
but Castiglione's circle would have understood how like pastoral this
engraving was.  If we ask ourselves, why would Raphael have chosen this
subject, the importance of the reference to Castiglione's poem in lament of
Mirandola is clear.  Like Virgil as pastoral poet, Castiglione was
protesting, and Raphael, by illustrating Castiglione's Virgilian epic
source, was showing his sympathy with Castiglione.

Understood through this unusual contemporary reference, Il morbetto
becomes not merely an epic illustration but a highly coded cry of
lamentation.  Within Raphael's oeuvre, it is a radically unidealized work.
Suffering and death ungraced by heroism are the stuff of pastoral.
Distinctively among his works, it is not Raphael's design in Il
morbetto
 that is straightforwardly the aesthetic object, so much as the breaking
down of that design through lack of heroic unifying action.  The center of
the composition is held by a mere term.====<Here surmounted by an
unusually dignified head, the term is often associated with Pan, fertility,
and pastoral antics.  It is a rustic, garden ornament.>====
 
With its shepherds and ruins, mother and child, and figures of halting,
bended-knee, stooping approach, Il morbetto is structurally related
to typical Adoration compositions.  Raphael even included ox and ass.
Parmigianino apparently recognized the compositional potential in Il
morbetto, for he designed an Adoration that seems deliberately
emulative [fig.~20].  Joseph is tucked back in the corner, as Aeneas is in
Il morbetto.  The sinister is displaced by the beatific:  the column
drums by an erect column; a sheep smelling its dead fellows by a
rambunctious ram strutting on hind legs.  Since traditionally the Adoration
of the Shepherds was the prime occasion for an artist to include the lower
classes and to verge thereby into the low style, if the Adoration-like
aspects of the composition of Il morbetto were recognized by many as
they were by Parmigianino, this would have helped to ensure that Il
morbetto was understood as diverging from the high style.

             
Like Raphael's Il morbetto, Parmigianino's Adoration and
Lamentation are punctuated by postures of self-distancing, by lifted
hands and averted faces.  In direct contrast to the figure recommended by
Alberti who beckons the viewer within the picture space, these figures warn
that we must shrink back from ruins and rusticity, that this picture space
is a foreign land.  It is a gesture of fragmentation, breaking up the
picture space, in an art previously dedicated to gestures of coherence.
The chiaroscuro, like the gestures, like rusticity in general, like the
bare feet and rough clothes, divides the parts of the composition and
discourages the viewer's close approach.  The essential in these images is
not recognition of the portrayed but recognition of the remoteness of what
is portrayed.

                             L'avere e 'l dar, l'usanze streme e strane,
                             el meglio e 'l peggio, e le cime dell'arte
                             al villanel son tutte cose piane,
                             e l'erba e l'acqua e l latte \`e la sua parte;
                             e 'l cantar rozzo, e ' calli delle mane,
                             \`e 'l dieci e 'l cento e ' conti e le suo carte
                             dell'usura che 'n terra surger vede;
                             e sensa affanno alla fortuna cede.
====<Michelangelo, Rime, from 67:
``Having and giving, odd and strange customs/the
best and the worst, and the apex of art/to the
peasant are all obvious things./His portion is the
grass and the water and the milk;/and the crude song
and calloused hands,/It is the ten and the hundred
and the accounts and his papers of usury that he
sees burgeon in the land;/and without fuss he yields
to fortune.''>==== 
 
             
 The pastoral life is inherently unteleological:  there is no ostensible
beginning, no possible grand action, and therefore no satisfactory ending
except death and uncomforted mourning.  And so the pastoral genre, whether
in its verbal or its visual formulations, is not a place suited to
narrative cohesiveness.  Pastoral pictures, if they were to be expressive
as well as naturalistic, tended to rely on devices other than the actions
and facial expressions of the human figure.  No narrative specifics would
clarify for the viewer the emotions of the protagonists.  Pastoral tended
toward one generic situation, that of unhappy love, and so the viewer who
recognized the earmarks of a pastoral scene could make his or her own way
from there.  In such a picture as the Concert champ\^etre, one does
not have to see any cause of sorrow, or any despairing actions, before
recognizing the mood as melancholy.  This coding of expressive meaning
within the quiet of nature was among pastoral's greatest resources.  A
pastoral painting does not brim over with implicit language as does a work
which dramatizes complex narrative.

             
Traditionally, the low-style writer, whether Virgil in his Eclogues or
Dante in his vernacular Commedia, used allegory to enhance the
respectability of his art, to lessen the disparity between high and low.
Virgil had not been writing simply about shepherds and their love affairs
but about confiscations of land or about the birth of a consul's heir.
Similarly, as Boccaccio observed of Petrarch's eclogues:
 
   ut Gallum fingeret Tyrreno calamos exposcentem, aut
   iurgantes inuicem Pamphylum et Micionem et alios delirantes eque pastores?
   Nemo edepol sui satis compos assenciet.
   
                
   (would he have taken such pains merely to represent Gallus begging
   Tyrrhenus for his reeds, or Pamphilus and Mitio in a squabble, or other
   like pastoral nonsense?  No one in his right mind will agree that these
   were his final object.)====<Boccaccio, 1956, XIV, x, p.~53.>====
    
 Girolamo Benivieni (1453-1542) was quite explicit about his allegorical
ambitions:  ``sotto rustici & pastorali concetti figuramente
descrivo...'' (I describe figuratively under rustic and pastoral ideas
...).====<Benivieni, 1522.>====
 
             
High and low subjects may have allegorical intention in common.  Specific
to pastoral, however, is a breach of decorum.  Benivieni apologized for it
in the introduction to his eclogues:
 
   se per ventura in qualche parte o per admistione di poetiche
   figure o per elegantia distilo o per alteza di materia non solamente in
   questa ma in qualunche altra paressi havere superata la semplice humile :&
   rusticana natura del verso bucolico:  scusami oltre alla auctorita degli
   antichi poeti latini...
   
                
   (if by chance in some part whether by putting in poetical figures or by
   elegance of style or by loftiness of material not only in this but in
   anything else I seem to have gone above the simple, humble, and rustic
   nature of bucolic verse, I crave pardon by appealing to the authority of
   ancient Latin poets...)
    
 Consciousness of this discrepancy between rusticity and allegorical
intention affected much of pastoral.  Being about shepherds, it should have
been light-hearted fare, and indeed the encounters between nymphs and
satyrs, visual and verbal, are sometimes comic.  Equally, the shepherd
might be a persona for Sannazaro, or some other well-born man, whose true
subject was more dignified than thwarted love.  With his talk of wilted
laurel and his graveside laments, Sannazaro insinuated that his theme was
loss more generally.  His beloved personifies everything that he loves.

The sort of allegory recommended by Alberti, in examples including the
Three Graces and the Calumny of Apelles, were didactic allegories of
virtue, and therefore fundamentally like heroic narratives.====<There
is a shift, between the time of Alberti and Vasari, toward praise of the
nude over and above the istoria (Alberti, like Aretino and Pope Pius
IV, had not wanted the private parts displayed in art).>====
 Pastoral, when allegorical at all, was less hortatory.  It described and
lamented, referring to more than was literally pictured, but it did not
affirm.  Unlike tragic or Christian grief, pastoral sorrow might have no
redeeming quality.  The high style attested to the existence of the ideal,
at least on the level of the individual soul; the low style justified
disillusionment verging on despair and uncertainty bordering on
uninterpretability.

Some paintings produced in Giorgione's Venice may contain some highly
abstract allegorical potential.  It was a commonplace of theories about
nobility to compare it with the immeasurable beauty of light, so resistant
to rational quantification.  Coluccio Salutati referred to the  
claritas of a noble, Poggio Bracciolini to lumen and splendor,
Giovanni Pontano to splendor once again.====<For a summary of
such literature in the Quattrocento, see Landino, 1970, pp.~3-11; see also
the more comprehensive Rabil, Jr., 1991.>====
 Such metaphorical descriptions tacitly supported the idea that inexactness
was endemic to any sophisticated definition of the concept.====<Others
had a more Damoclean touch.  Donato Giannotti, defining a concept of
nobility applicable within a republic, resolved:  ``Questi che possono
avere magistrati, sono quelli che noi chiamiamo nobili, s\`i come anco in
Vinegia, soli quelli che possono avere magistrati, sono gentiluomini,
cio\`e nobili,'' Giannotti, 1850, p.~17 (``Discorso intorno alla forma
della repubblica di Firenze,'' 1530s).>==== Family trees, after all, ought not
be adequate to measure a quality of the soul.  In visualizing pastoral, the
effects of light were portrayed with the new technique of oil paint, to
spectacular result.  The political and philosophical applications of
splendor as metaphor and the exploitation of oil paint's luminosity offer
an intriguing coincidence.  Among the ruminations that might have been
excited by the glimmering light of Venetian pastoral landscapes, certainly
the metaphorical description of nobility might be counted, all the more so
since the essence of true nobility was an established theme of the genre.
Conversely, as the metaphor of splendor, meaning glowing, reflected light,
came to bear more and more intellectual weight, so may the high-noon
paintings of the Quattrocento have looked emptier.  To those who were
becoming accustomed to mournful avowals like that of the shepherd
protagonist who ``la luce ha in odio'' (abhors the light),====<Sasso,
Strambotti, 1501, unpag.>==== a new art was wanted.  The darkening of the
palette as Renaissance shifts to High Renaissance correlates with a change
in sensibility as well as a switch to oils.

The established Quattrocento attitude, based on a prejudiced reading of
Horace, was that forms in a painting should be brightly lit, that obscurity
was tantamount to imperfection, and that a viewer should diligently peer at
a work.====<Trimpi, 1973, pp.~1-34, discusses the odd idea of
preferring poor light to look at a painting in some detail, suggesting that
what is meant is a private setting rather than a public one.  See, inter
alia, pp.~10-11.>====
 Pompeo Gauricus was the first to use Horace's familiar injunction as the
either/or command it actually is:
 
    Ut pictura poesis:  erit quae, si propius stes,
     te capiat magis, et quedam, si longius abstes.  
     haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri.
   
   (A poem is like a picture:  one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you
   stand; another, the farther away.  This one loves obscurity; that one likes
   to be seen under a light.) ====<Horace, Satires, Epistles, and
   Ars Poetica, Loeb Classical Library, tr.~H.  Fairclough, Cambridge, 1929,
   pp.~480-81.  ``Itaque vestra poesis facit e sit up pictura quemadmodum enim
   hec spectari consuevit, alia longius, alia proprius, alia in obscuro, alia
   sub aperto & tunc creditur esse perfecta quum umbris luminibusque suis
   interstincta cognoscatur, ac nullius unque Iudicis iudicium vereatur.  Sic
   et illa quedam proferre debebit a loco proximiore:  quedam a longinquiore:
   quedam enuntiabit abscurius:  quedam apertius, modo rem solis lineamentis
   designatam:  modo perfectissime suis coloribus exornatam.''>====
    
 Gauricus dissociated the better apprehension of a painting from a studious
inspection of distinctly drawn forms.  A Neapolitan and sometimes a
pastoral poet, he himself imagined tender women lying ``Inter frondosas
lauros, & odoras myrthos'' (among leafy laurels and myrtle's
perfumes).====< Gauricus, 1504.>==== Such tolerance for ``literal''
obscurity signalled a basic change in manners of looking and a growing
tolerance for metaphorical obscurity.  Il morbetto and Parmigianino's
Lamentation are works that presume such new receptivity.  As a night
scene, Il morbetto is murkily lit; as an etching, the  
Lamentation also discourages close scrutiny.  Looking at art was becoming
less systematic a process, less a checklist of pre-established
expectations.

By the time pastoral became an important sub-theme in the visual arts, that
is to say c.~1505, not only were individuals ready to deplore the
contemporary situation, but the will to distance oneself from the prevalent
morality of the time had become about as endemic as such a stance logically
could.  Sannazaro, for instance, who had given all his loyalty to his king
and to Naples, nevertheless understood pomp negatively, as his epigram to
Cesare Borgia indicates.  At Rome, he wrote, the spectacles begin anew, and
the Colosseum is used again for combat (``Ne tibi, Roma, novae desint
spectacula pompae;/Amphitheatrales reddit arena jocos.'')====<See also
on Sannazaro's contempt for the Borgia, Kennedy, 1983, pp.~62, 68.>==== The
low-style poet embraced contrariety, using his pretense to simplicity with
irony, distancing himself at once from both plainspokenness and
artificiality.  The visual artist took on a similar task.  Works whose
themes may be more adequately stated as renunciatory statements than
affirmative ones, and whose technique does not permit the viewer to
perceive precisely and positively, belong to this tradition.  The works we
study here, which are not mere oddities in the history of art, show us
aspects of the heroic ideal's inadequacy for sixteenth-century Italians.
They imply a broader theory of Renaissance art than Alberti ever wrote.

Admitting basso ingegno and umile stile was not so much feigned
as deeply ironic.  A part of the culture which had taught that despair was
a sin, that virtue lay in the active life, was quietly turned on its head
by this craving for complaint, for self-denigration, for presenting virtue
as a characteristic of the oppressed rather than the powerful.  Genius was
now associated with futility and anxiety, or so Francesco Guicciardini,
historian and a politically disappointed Florentine of rank, thought:
 
   Lo ingegno pi\`u che mediocre \`e dato agli uomini per
   loro infelicit\`a e tormento, perch\'e non serve loro a altro che a
   tenergli con molte pi\`u fatiche e ansiet\`a che non hanno quegli che
   sono pi\`u positivi.====<Guicciardini, 1951, no.~60, p.~126.>====
    
   (Above average genius is given to men for their torment and unhappiness,
   since it provides them with nothing other than many more trials and
   anxieties that those who are more down-to-earth don't have.)
    
 Like Guicciardini, Sannazaro found himself unable to idealize the world in
which he lived.  Accordingly, he imagined himself as transferred into an
impossibly ideal and remote, yet melancholy and affecting, world.  Even so
Arcadia is distinctly less ideal for Sannazaro than for Theocritus:  now
the shepherds worry about petty theft.====<Egloga VI.>====


                                 CHAPTER 3
 
                          Inverting Low and High
 

                             Sono dua ispezie di uomini difficili a
                             sopportare per la loro ignoranza, l'una sono i
                             servi, la seconda i contadini.
====<Giannozzo Manetti, as reported by
Vespasiano da Bisticci, 1862, II, p.~96:  ``There
are two kinds of men difficult to bear on account of
their ignorance:  servants and peasants.''>====

             
 Traditionally, to be civilized was to be urban. So the narrator implies
in Antonio Fregoso's La cerva bianca, a rambling verse allegory about
love published initially in 1510. When the first-person narrator meets a
courteous hermit, he expresses surprise:
 
    Non mi parve in selve esser, ma in cittade,
    Tanto era di civil costumi pieno
    Che dove habita un hom preclaro & degno,
    Fa una citta col suo excellente ingegno.====<Canto Primo.>====
    
   (I seemed not to be in the woods but in the city, so replete with
   civility was his behavior. Where there lives a worthy and excellent man,
   he makes a city with his excellent self.)
    
 He expects the woods to be a dangerous place, as no doubt they sometimes
were.

The shepherd, whether Christ-like or Virgilian, often functioned as a
sympathetic type for Renaissance viewers, associated with peace and purity:
 
    Ivi tra lherba & i fiori lieti si vede
            mille pastori: che sicuro ocio pasce 
            et riposo tranquillo & puro fede.====<Benivieni, 1522,
   Eclogue 1.>====
    
   (Here happy among the grass and flowers one sees thousands of shepherds,
   that graze in quiet security and undisturbed tranquillity and pure faith.)
    
 Peasants might either be lumped indiscriminately with shepherds and share
their positive connotations, or they might not. ====<On observation of
this distinction in sacra rappresentazione, see Merlini, 1894, pp.~153-55.
Cf.~Boccaccio, Eclogue XII, Saphos: ``What has a shepherd to do
with farmers, pray? The latter drives his oxen through the fields to
cleave the earth, the former drives his sheep into the pastures, one with a
plow, one with a little rod'' (Quid, precor, agricolis est cum pastore?
Per agros/ille boves terram cogit rescindere aratro,/hic cogit virga
pecudes in pascua, etc.); Boccaccio, 1987, pp.~138-39.>====
 In moving from considerations of Renaissance pastoral and its extensions
to a study of attitudes toward rusticity more generally, we unfold a more
complex Renaissance, less molded by the precedents of antiquity and less
narcissistic. Although the noble shepherd could serve to mirror the
collector who owned the image, this was not usually true of the dusty  
villano or contadino.

When the bronze statue called Il Spinario was seen by Sanudo in Rome
in 1523, he described it as:
 
   uno villano di bronzo che si chava un spin da un p\`e, fato al naturale
   rustico modo che par a cui lo mira vogli dir qualcosa con lamentarsi di
   quel spino, cosa troppo excellente. ====<Zorzi, 1960-61, pp.~480,
   544.  On Sanudo's lack of pretension to Ciceronian elegance himself,
   see P.  Brown, 1988, p.~41, where his writing is described as ``thick
   reportage,'' and unedited.  On praising the representation of the otherwise
   unpraiseworthy, cf.~Vasari's description of Pontormo's Vertumnus
   and Pomona:  ``fece un villano che siede con un pennato in mano, tanto
   bello e ben fatto, che \`e cosa rarissima.''>====
   (a bronze peasant taking a thorn from a foot, made in the natural, rustic
   way so that he seemed to the observer to want to say something as he rued
   that thorn, a thing exceedingly excellent.)
    
 Not only does Sanudo take this rather sleek and comely youth, which has
sometimes been supposed to represent a shepherd boy, ====<At least by
the seventeenth century, the popular story was that it represented a
shepherd boy called Martius, who was removing a thorn only after having
delivered a message for the Roman Senate, who then commemorated his
dutifulness by commissioning the statue; see Haskell and Penny, 1981,
p.~308.>====
 as a villano, but as made al naturale rustico modo.
====<The figure's apparent age, not yet old enough to be lovelorn, may help to
account for the designation as villano. That he sees the boy as on
the verge of speech seems a more routine comment, not an explanation of
what it means to be made naturally, in the rustic manner.>====
 The same pose had been praised earlier, in reference to Brunelleschi's
quotation of it on the competition panel of 1401, for ``l'attitudine, el
modo e la fine di quello che si trae lo steccho del pie'' (the pose, the
manner and the finish of that one who pulls the thorn from the
foot). ====<Manetti, 1970, p.~49.>====
 The difference in language indicates a genuine discrepancy in perception
between the two accounts. For Brunelleschi's biographer, the figure
pulling the thorn was not different in kind from Isaac, both displaying
``el modo e la fine.'' Whether he identified ``quello'' as a shepherd or a
peasant or neither, we cannot know. But for Sanudo, the idealizing nudity
offered no impediment to an identification of Il Spinario as a
peasant. Sanudo, we may infer, is more attuned to a favorable idea of
rusticity than the fifteenth-century Florentine.====<Though it should
be noted that in a Florentine engraving dated by Hind to the 1460s, which
roughly reproduces Brunelleschi's relief, the two servants are much more
obviously rustic. They are barefoot (as Ghiberti's had been), simply
clothed, and one, equipped with staff and canteen, feeds the ass.>==== When Il
Riccio made a version of the famous Spinario not long after Sanudo's
encounter, he took care to show that the boy was a peasant. The terra
cotta figure is chubby, his clothes are torn, and he has contracted the
thorn through broken shoes. ====<Planiscig, 1927, p.~104, fig.~95.
Cf.~a mid-sixteenth-century female Spinario, in Bode, 1980, pl.~90,4.>====

As the lads in the Concert champ\^etre [fig.~2] indicate, it would be
wrong to insist categorically on a division between Arcadian simplicity and
contemporary rusticity.  Things pastoral might blend with things rustic,
and thus the distant past with contemporary life.  Sannazaro, when he was
given a suburban villa by Frederick III, called himself agricola,
while imagining himself neighbor to the nymphs.====<Epigrams, I;
Odi, I.  His sweetly singing shepherds worked with ploughs and spades and
yokes, or so it is implied in L'Arcadia.  Pontano used agriculture
as a ``symbol for the harmonious role of man in nature''; see Marsh,
1980, p.~110.>==== Luigi Alammani, writing at Fontainebleau in 1546, had
great esteem for the ``buon villan'' and the ``pio villano,'' even
``discreto,'' ``saggio,'' ``lieto.'' The peasant has become a symbol of
peace, ``sicuro almen nel poverello albergo.'' ====<Alammani, 1590,
p.~36.  The text, which includes laments about the condition of war-torn,
``serva'' Italy (``povera & nuda sei d'amici & d'arme''), holds France up
for praise rather than the peasantry per se.  Cf.~on the contentment of the
poor, Giovanni Falugi's Canace, 422-23, 456-57; and Domenichi,
1561, 1382ff.>====
 Jason de Nores even complained that rustic poetry might undermine city
life and be a:
 
    tacito invitar gli huomini a lasciar le citt\`a, & ad inamorarsi della
   vita contadinesca.====<Nores, 1587, pp.~38-41.>====
   (unspoken invitation to men to leave the city and to become besotted
   about the peasant life.)
    
 Given by his own statement that pastori and contadini are much
the same for him, we are in the interesting situation of seeing the type of
the good peasant being decried for its very goodness. On grounds of
decorum, it is inappropriate for lowly persons to be shown as good, or as
displaying urbanity rather than authentic rusticity. Should this prove the
case, either these rustic types have been shown without the necessary
degree of verisimilitude, or their representation teaches ``cattivi
costumi.''====<Bembo, in Prose della volgar lingua, Book I,
makes a related point: that Virgil in writing to contadini did not
write like a contadino and did not write for other than a highly
select readership. He does not condemn pastoral, as Nores does, but
instead argues firmly that the low style is not intended for a different
public than the high; Bembo, 1961, pp.~301-02.>====
 Such worries are only possible because the automatic pairing of  
villain with villainia is gone. Bartolomeo Taegio, writing in 1564,
described with admiration peasants he had watched at the vintage, singing
and lovemaking:
 
    Per le strade altro non si vedeva che contadini, carri,
   bigoncie d'uve, utri di vino, & certe piacevoli foresozze, che con cesti
   & corbe allegramente se ne andavano a spogliar le viti de frutti suoi, et
   dietro loro ne veniva una ciurma de briganti, i quali hora cantando con
   certe sue ribeche gratigliavano il cuore delle amorose
   villane.====<Taegio, 1564, Preface.>====
    
   (on the streets one saw nothing but peasants, wagons, vats of grapes,
   leather bottles of wine, and certain pleasing youths, who with baskets
   quickly despoiled the vines of their fruits, and behind them a rabble of
   rough folk, who now singing with rebecs were entertaining the hearts of the
   amorous peasants.)
    
 He goes on to cite illustrious ancients who had tended their own vines.

There is more to the literary theme of the contented or otherwise admirable
peasant than a perverse idealization. For Pamphilo Sasso (Modena,  
c.~1455-Lonzano, 1527), the peasant serves as a convenient prop for his
own low-style laments, rather than as an ideal type per se. He describes
the daily routine of those around him, among them country laborers, as a
backdrop for his own ``sorte fella,'' ``pena,'' ``lamento,'' ``crido, ''
and ``pianto.'' His Sonetto VI begins ever so quietly, with:
 
    Surge laurora el bon pastor se parte
                  da la capanna: e mena fuor larmento
                  el zapator el suo lavor intento
    va alla campagna: el iudice alle carte... ====<Sasso,  
   Opera, 1501, Sonetto VI, unpag. See also VII, LVIII.>====
    
   (The good shepherd arises at the dawn and leaves the hut, leading out the
   flock: the fieldworker intent upon his work goes to the field, the judge
   to the papers...)
    
 The shepherd epitomizes what is natural; he is ``contento di voler quel
chel ciel vole'' (content to will that which heaven
wants).====<Hieronymo Benivieni, Eclogue in 
Pulci, 1481.>====
 In comparison with such calm regularity, Sasso's distraction is made to
seem all the more miserable. He envies anyone not bound to ``lamoroso
giogo: che e dato a me per sorte mia'' (the yoke of love, which is given
to me as my fate). Peasant and shepherd serve interchangeably as his foil:
 
    El vilanel quando e: bene affannato 
                  pur si riposa alombra: el peregrino 
                  la notte: quando el giorno ha caminato
    Io vo sempre piangendo a capo chino. ====<Ibid., Sonetto CXXI.>====
    
   (The peasant when he is exhausted rests in the shade. The pilgrim at
   night, having walked during the day. I always go weeping, my head bowed.)
    
 The moral status of the peasant is not at issue. It is the act of seeing
him that matters, not the details of what is seen. The observer has
thereby been transformed from the recipient of art's power, a passive
viewer, to its creator. The art lies in his vision, not in the simple
peasant whose image he makes valuable to himself.

The viewer who graciously, like Sasso, allows himself to notice what might
easily have been overlooked, puts himself more definitely at the center of
the act of perception. Noticing the ordinary establishes the perceiver as
special---as no practitioner of the low style failed to be aware. Whether
contented or wretched, the shepherd and the peasant are mere adjuncts to
the drama of Sasso's emotions. The point is always that Sasso is
suffering. Comparison with the lowly, in any of their range of guises,
serves to show off his own ``destin acerbo e fallo'' (bitter and flawed
fate). The poor have, in his mind at least, become associated with
justifiable lament:
 
    Scio ben chio fo come el miser vilano
                  chindarno saffatica in van lavora
   
   (I know well that I am like the miserable peasant who in vain wears himself
   out in useless toil.)
    
 He appropriates such lament for himself.

             
The fact that shepherds and peasants were at times treated interchangeably
by writers suggests that images of peasants could serve to introduce
Arcadian calm into otherwise not-Arcadian scenes. The peasants who reap
the hay or make the vintage on the sidelines of the Palazzo Schifanoia
frescoes (1470s), for instance, may be taken to be just such icons of
normality.====<The peasant might potentially serve as part of a  
vanitas iconography: Sannazaro describes how the durus arator will
plough up the ruins of present-day Venice, Rome, or Naples, and say to
himself, ``haec quoque clara fuit''; Kennedy, 1983, pp.~78-79.>==== By seeming
always to have been as they are now, they introduce a note of stability and
hence of a certain kind of the ideal into the actual world of Ferrara,
without being any less real than the other persons depicted. The ideal is
thus neatly and seamlessly assimilated to the real in the person of the
tolerated peasant. At the same time they are also markers of land-based
wealth, and so they act as attributes of rank appropriate to a landscape
setting, as courtiers function in interior, aulic scenes.

             
The cultural values which engendered the high, heroic style had belonged to
foelix Italia, quite lost by the later 1490s. Beauty no longer is
routinely taken to complement virtue, nor industry genius. The poor---not
the saintly poor either---are held up as examples to the rich. But even
the ideals of the low style could suffer contamination. In Renaissance
Arcadia nature is a fallible ideal, a place where not only death but
deformity enters. Sannazaro's Arcadia was marred by rusticane
insidie====<Prosa I.>==== and selvatichezza,====<Prosa IX.>====
and his was not the only imperfect woodland.

Girolamo Fracastoro (Verona 1478-Incaffi, 1553), a medical doctor
trained by Pietro Pomponazzi in Padua, wrote in 1530 a poem about the
causes and cures of syphilis.  From this basically pastoral poem, complete
with apology for the lowliness of his poetical effort, the term
syphilis derives, for the first victim of the disease is a shepherd
named Syphilus.  This pastoral lament is not directed at lost love, but
toward the putrid, purulent lovers of an age in which nature reveals only a
staggering variety of contagion.  Italy, once divinely favored and rich,
suffers disease and invasion:
 
    Ausonia infoelix, en quo discordia priscam
    Virtutem, et mundi imperium perduxit avitum!
    Angulus anne tui est aliquis, qui barbara non sit
    Servitia, et praedas, et tristia funera passus?
    Dicite vos, nullos soliti sentire tumultus,
    Vitiferi colles, qua flumine pulcher amoeno
    Erethenus fluit, et plenis lapsurus in aequor
    Cornibus, Euganeis properat se jungere lymphis.
   
   O patria, O lungum foelix, lungumque quieta
    Ante alias, patria O divum sanctissima tellus,
    Dives opum, foecunda viris, laetissima campis
    Uberibus, rapidoque Athesi, et Bernacide lympha,
    Aerumnas memorare tuas, summammque malorum
    Quis queat? et dictis nostros aequare dolores,
    Et turpes ignominias, et barbara jussa?
    Abde caput, Benace, tuo et te conde sub amne,
    Victrices nec jam Deus interlabere Lauros.
   
   (Unhappy Italy! See to what straits dissension has brought thine ancient
   valour, thy ancestral dominion over the world. Is there any corner of thy
   land which has not suffered the foreigner's yoke, and pillage and grievous
   death? Answer, ye vine-clad hills, so little used to the clang of tumult,
   amid which Erethenus leads his pleasant stream, and with full branches
   seaward bound, hastens to join the Euganean waters.
   
   O my native land, so long fortunate, so long peaceful beyond all others; O
   land of my ancestors most blessed of the Gods, rich in possessions and
   fruitful in men, most happy in thy fertile plains and in swiftflowing
   Athesis and the waters of Benacus,---who can recount thy calamities and the
   sum-total of thine ills? Who can find words to match our sufferings, our
   infamy of dishonour, our barbarous destiny? Hide thy head, Benacus,
   conceal thyself beneath the waters, and forget thy Godhead as thou flowest
   amid laurels that no longer tell of victory.)====<Fracastoro, 1935,
   Book I, pp.~88-89. Though the verse is in hexameters, in the reference to
   the lack of powers of language, as well as in various apologies elsewhere
   in the text and in the legend of the shepherd Syphilus in Book III,
   Fracastoro mixes high and low style.>====
    
 Fracastoro described the disruption to the natural order by
appealing to the imagery of Arcadia, telling of a contagion among a happy
flock of goats. Even as the shepherd Syphilus, ``securus in umbra,''
pipes, the first goat coughs, collapses, and soon dies. During the quiet
of night while all the animals sleep, springlike youth are suddenly
stricken with the disease, which is understood untechnically as a sort of
plague. Their bodies become deformed and loathsome: the woodland nymphs
remain in mourning.====<Ibid., pp.~74-87.>====

In the case of Fracastoro the pastoral ideal was confuted; it could also be
the butt of parody. Angelo Beolco, called Il Ruzante, a Paduan who took
the part of a peasant in his plays, made mock of the pastoral shepherd as
being not at all an epitome of natural virtue but an extreme of
artifice. ====< Ruzante was more than a stage name for Angelo Beolco.
The cognomen played on the Venetian word ruzare, a sound, and the
Tuscan ruzzare, which has sexual innuendo; see Carroll, 1990, p.~100,
and idem, 1985, pp.~487-502. It was actually a peasant name; see
Padoan, 1981, pp.~343-75 and idem, 1980, pp.~35-50; Calendoli, 1985.
>====
 When in the Pastorale of c.~1518 (sc.~xi), the effete
shepherd Arpino asks the peasant Ruzante for help in burying Mopso, who
seems to have died of thwarted love, Ruzante takes his advances to be
sodomical. Ruzante is trying to catch a bird in a net to feed to three
empty mouths in his household, plus his sister, widowed by the Germans.
The shepherd walks up and greets him politely, ``Ti salve Iove, dolce
fratel caro'' (Jove save you, dear sweet brother), to which the startled
Ruzante has no seemly reply. The shepherd, employing literary, Tuscanized
Italian, invokes Pan; the peasant, in thick dialect, begs for pane,
or bread.====<On Ruzante's literary context, see Ulysse, 1987,
and further on this play Boillet, 1987,  Paccagnella,
1979, and Bonora, 1956, esp. pp.~18-27.>====
Rarely have the fragile conventions of a culture been so cuttingly
exposed.

Ruzante pointed to the hypocrisy of a society that ensconced nature as the
object of its art and then repeatedly denied any aspect of nature that was
vivo e franco rather than gentile. Taking up the pastoral
argument in a reformed, and less polite, version, written in Paduan
dialect, Ruzante asked in the prologue to La Bet\'\ia, whether a
bird did not sing more sweetly in the willow tree than in a cage, and
whether the cow did not give less milk in a city? The derivation from the
pastoral tradition is clear; Ruzante's prologue recalls the advocacy of
nature in preference to art in Sannazaro's prologue to L'Arcadia. The
difference is that the sentiment is presented as social satire rather than
as a simple truism. ``El naturale'' between men and women, he declared, is
the most beautiful thing there is, though only if you're not too hungry, as
he suggests in the ``Dialogo facetissimo,'' written during the terrible
time of famine in 1528-29. Or, as he addressed Cardinal Francesco Cornaro
during the same period, ``Vi so dire che la fame gli ha cacciato l'amore
via dal culo'' (I know to tell you that hunger has chased away love from
the backside).====<Beolco, 1967, ``Secondo oratione,'' p.~1210.>====
 
His later plays are more directly based on Roman comedy, and their
protagonists are reminiscent of the type of the clever slave. In the early
works, however, which were presented in Venice between 1520 and
1526,====<He performed there eight times during this period, seven of
these for a Compagnia della Calza; see Calendoli, 1987.>====
 the peasant type is used for less conventional ends. The peasant is one
whose freedom from artificial convention renders him on occasion almost
exemplary. That very freedom, however, has shocking aspects; the sometimes
saccharine taste of Arcady is gone. In Bilora (set in Venice though
probably never performed there), a peasant murders the rich Venetian who
has made a concubine of his wife.

A few of Ruzante's opening lines help indicate how the rozzo stile
extended beyond pastoral subjects. ``Puttana d'una vita!'' (Whore of a
life!) he exclaims in one case;====<Beolco, 1967, La Moscheta, 
p.~590.>==== ``Oh, maledetto sia l'Amore,/esso e chi l'ha creato!''
(Cursed be Love, both it and whoever made you!) and ``Potta anche
all'amore!'' (Fuck Love too!).====<Ibid., La Bet\'\ia, p.~156,
and the third sentence of Bilora, p.~548.>==== Ruzante's peasants are not
old-time heroes in unfancy dress. The old imprecation ``A furia rusticorum
libera nos, Domine'' (Save us, oh Lord, from the fury of peasants) recurs,
this time in the mouth of a peasant warning that ``noi contadini, quando
siamo infuriati, daremmo nella Croce!'' (we peasants, when we're angry,
will crucify them!).====<Prologue to La Moscheta, ibid.,
p.~586.>==== Ruzante's peasants belong to the real world in which ``dir
villania'' meant to insult, to seem a villano was disgraceful. His
peasants, even the parts he acted himself, can be as hateful as ever,
except that they are newly canny, in this case even self-aware. By this
they earn a modicum of respect.====<Cf.~the case in Sienese pastoral,
as described by Tylus, ``Colonizing,'' 1992, pp.~113-38.>====
 
Ruzante uses the voice of the dirty poor to attack the upper class of
Venice, thereby undercutting the ``proper'' use of the low style, i.e., to
denigrate oneself. We may well wonder that the Venetians failed to hear
the irony in such an effusive bit of prologue as:
 
    O Venezia ricca e bella, sangue reale, quando io parlo di
   te, tu mi fai stringere il cuore di dolcezza, sicch\'e non posso dire di
   te come vorrei.====< ``Prologo per le recite in Venezia,'' La
   Bet\'\ia, in Ruzante, Teatro, tr. from Paduan by L. Zorzi,
   p.~150.>====
    
   (Oh Venice, rich and beautiful, of royal blood, when I speak of you, you
   make my heart quicken from sweetness, so that I am not able to speak of you
   as I would wish.)
    
 Lest there be any doubt, richness, beauty, and noble blood were never
otherwise objects of Ruzante's praise: on the contrary, in his plays,
money and beauty are corrupt, good birth is associated with stupidity.
``Cose oneste'' in his world are ``le cacce, il cantare, il sonare, e cose
simili'' (hunting, singing, sleeping, and such things).====< 
Ruzante, Teatro, ``Dialogo facetissimo,'' p.~716.>====
 The use of Paduan dialect, which in Venice seemed merely amusing, could
connote sympathy with the cause of Paduan autonomy in the face of the
Tuscanizing and effete Venice. When performed in Paduan territories, the
same plays with revised prologues would have played quite differently.

             
Over the course of six years, Ruzante performed at least eight times before
prestigious, sometimes large, audiences in Venice. Usually during Carnival
season, the plays were performed, aptly enough, for Companie delle Calze
including the Giardini and Ortolani. Ladies were in attendance at some of
these occasions, which were held at the best houses in the city, even at
the Doge's Palace. Sanudo the diarist reports the performances not by name
of play but as entertainments ``a la vilanescha.'' Their competition was
other dinner entertainment in the manner of Moors, Germans, Hungarians,
pilgrims, or all'antica. Peasants, it seems, were still exotic for
Venetians. In general these entertainments, not Ruzante's alone, were on
the racy side. Even before his arrival in Venice, in 1508 comedies with
masks were being prohibited as lascivious and dishonest.====<Maria
Muraro, 1976, III, p.~328.>==== Sanudo reports that certain of Ruzante's
performances were found to be offensive, presumably because ladies were
present to hear such declarations as ``la merda \`e snaturale!'' or lies
dubbed the fifth element of nature.====<``shit is unnatural!''  
La Bet\'\ia, act I.>==== Then in 1526, worse than lasciviousness and  
parole sporce marred a party. At a dinner for which Ruzante provided one
of several plays, a plucked rooster was released. This, an insulting
reference to the rout of the French at Pavia the year before, caused the
Venetians embarrassment in front of French ambassadors. Ruzante may have
been held accountable; in all events, it was his last performance in
Venice, according to Sanudo's diaries.

             
In Ruzante's hands, the type of the tuneful shepherd reversed its
signification from the natural and pure to its opposite. His ridicule of
Arcadia suggests a factor in the dirtying of Jacopo Bassano's shepherds,
brawny in contrast to the delicate youths of Giorgione.====<On the
subsequent decline of peasant comedy, see [Raffaello?] Borghini, cited by
D'Ancona, 1891, I, pp.~602-03: ``al tempo de' nostri padri non si faceva
commedia, che buona parte del riso non dipendesse da un framesso de'
contadini. Oggi, come bassa e vile, e riso sciocco, \`e pure dimessa; e
sono successi i Bergamaschi, i Zani e' Veneziani, che in verit\`a sono
poco meglio, per non dir peggio.''>====
 Looking backward from Ruzante, we may wonder how robust the Arcadian ideal
had ever been, and whether there had not sometimes been a bit of humorous
irony in looking even at Giorgione's soulful paintings.====<The
interpretation of La tempesta offered above is but one indication
that his art was not limited to the serious exposition of ideals.>====
 
                             Chi a villan fa ben, a Dio fa onta.
 ====<Merlini, 1894, p.~171:  ``He who does
good to a peasant, injures God.''>====
 
             
The written record leaves no doubt that the peasantry was often bitterly
despised. In a text from the Veneto written within a few years of
Giorgione's death, peasants are made to accuse themselves of having
crucified Christ, on account of which they now and forever deserve their
bitter lot:
 
    Christo fo da villan crucific\`o;
    e stagom sempre in pioza, in vento e in neve,
    perch\`e havom fatto cos\`\i gran pecc\`o. ====<Anonymous,
   1910, p.~139.>====
    
   (Christ was crucified by peasants and we are always exposed to rain,
   wind, and snow because we have committed so great a sin.)
    
 This excerpt comes from an extended, crude poetical rant against the
peasantry, voiced in first-person Paduan dialect. What could be more
damning than self-hatred? Instead of pleading for sympathy, the peasant
voice, using doggerel, acknowledges that it has its deserts: We are
continually exposed to rain and wind and snow, since it is our great sin to
have crucified Christ. Others eat poultry; we eat turnips and nuts, like
the hogs. We have hatred within our breasts and eat in omelettes the
hearts of those to whom we show ourselves friends. We are called rustics
(rustici), and this is right; we are all false, with no more judgment
than a horse. We have been cursed since the day of the Flood.
====<Ibid., pp.~125-42. As this Paduan doggerel suggests, prejudice
against the peasantry is sometimes linked with anti-Semitism or
alternatively with misogyny. Another poem of the 1520s asserts, ``el vilan
sempre si tene/un zudese in vulgare,'' and yet another, ``o gente
cruda/peior hebreis/& in deis nulla fede...'' Italian Tracts,
1522-27, as bound in the British Library, ``Le malitie de Vilani'' and
``La vita de Vilani.''>====

Girolamo Priuli in his Diarii written at the time of the dark days of
the War of the League of Cambrai, reports on the dangerousness of il
popolo, which can rise and wreak havoc in an instant, like the wind, if
they see loot for themselves. ====<In northern Europe, woodcuts
directly register the potential for peasants to supplant the rich, or even
pope and king; see Epperlein, 1975, pp.~79-149.  And on the
fourteenth-century fear of il popolo in Florence, in the aftermath of
the Ciompi Rebellion, see Weinstein, 1968, pp.~30-31.>==== He proceeds to
record how, when the Venetians sent to Treviso for grain as preparation for
a seige:
 
    li vilani et citadini et li populi li bastava l'animo de dire, che non
   volevanno lassar ritornar indriedo le farine a Venetia et che le volevanno
   tuorle per la loro citade, che fu grande prosumptione de subdicti. Et da
   questo li sapientissimi lectori puol considerare a quel termine se atrovava
   la Republica Veneta, che ogni minimo vilanno et dischalzo ahoro voleva
   chalzitrare, et quanta ruina sia seguita per uno minimo sinistro di volere
   fare cum dishordine grande uno facto d'arme, chauxata per quella
   ruina veneta. ====<Priuli, p.~10, June 1509.>====
    
   (the peasants and citizens and hoi polloi were so forward as to say that
   they had no will to send grain to Venice and that they wanted it for
   themselves, which was a great presumption on the part of subjects. And
   from this my very wise readers will be able to understand in what a fix the
   republic of Venice was, when every least peasant and shoeless person wanted
   to have shoes, and what ruin followed through a minor accident of will with
   a military engagement in great disorder, causing thereby that Venetian
   disaster.)
    
 
We see acknowledged here, quite forthrightly, the importance of  
subdicti including vilani. For Priuli, the point of the war is not
that Paduan peasants helped Venice but that general insubordination caused
the calamitous losses (``mai achaduto una simele ruina in pocho spatio di
tempo et senza colpo di spada''; never had there occurred such a disaster
in so short a span of time and without the lifting of a sword).
====<Ibid., p.~14. There is no editing out of the chronicles of stories about
peasant violence. For instance, Sanudo tells how Girolamo da Carpi was cut
to shreds (``tajato a pezi'') together with thirty footsoldiers by
uncompensated peasant brigands during the War of the League of Cambrai,
August 28, 1509. He is careful to report that the peasants knew whom they
were butchering.>==== The treachery of those who would not send grain to Venice
impacted most directly, according to Priuli, upon the Venetian poor, though
in the latter case he means the ``poveri nobelli et citadini venetii.'' It
is not much exaggerated to say that, when describing bad times, all the
world is poor to Priuli: the Venetians who bought up the terrafirma
 paid too much, the Paduans who received these sums squandered them, the
lower classes betrayed Venice, and the Venetians hurt were ``molti Veneti
poveri, quali non haveanno altro da sustentar la vita et famiglia loro''
(many poor Venetians, that have nothing else with which to sustain their
lives and families). ====<Ibid., p.~13.>====
 Poverty is a natural code for misfortune, and yet misfortune is the fault
of the perfidious poor.

Priuli, it should be acknowledged, does cite injustices perpetrated by
Venetian magistrates upon their subjects, earning their hatred. The root
of the problem, for him, is excessive wealth and luxury, occasioning the
decadence of the ruling class.====<On the chronological stretch of
such themes of regret for the good old days, see Burke, ``The Repudiation
of Ritual in Early Modern Europe,'' 1987, pp.~234-35.>==== In turning from the
sea to the land, the good old ways were abandoned in favor of delicacies
and pleasures. Sodomy was carried on publicly and without shame, and the
monasteries degenerated into bordellos. The young men became themselves
vilani, ignorant of the world:
 
    stare sempre et pratichare cum contadini diventavanno
   vilani et pocho juditio et mancho constructo et conseglio se poteva avere
   da simele persone. ====<Ibid., p.~51, June 1509.>====
    
   (being always and acting with peasants they became peasants, and from
   such people one can have little judgment and less sense and council.)
    
 In Priuli's world, wealth and poverty function less as concrete opposites
separated by graduated steps than as powerful metaphors for two kinds of
evil, both of which may be termed villanesco.

Tommasino Bianchi de' Lancellotti of Modena wrote to 
Duke Ercole II on 10
March 1538 of disorders in the social structure resultant from the wars.
The villani have got above themselves, in manner of dress and
behavior:
 
    se la E.V. non ge mette le mani in detti villani con
   qualche bona provisione, nui [sic] andaremo tuti in ruina, perch\`e la
   sua pompa \`e granda, e poi lo giocho \`e pegiore e altre cose fatte a
   se che non li lassa lavorare, ultra che non sano lavorare: de modoch\`e
    sono cause della nostra ruina, ultra che patroni assai ne hano poca cura
   perch\`e non ge hano durato fatica aquistarla. ====<Bianchi de'
   Lancellotti, 1884, p.~222.>====
    
   (if Your Excellency does not intervene in the case of the said peasants
   with some good decree, we will be utterly ruined, since their grand pomp
   and gambling and worse does not permit them to work, besides which they
   don't know how to work: in this way they are the cause of our ruin,
   besides which many lords take little cognizance since they have come by
   what they have without working for it.)
    
 As with Priuli, the wars seem to precipitate a defense of the old order,
when things urban were separate from things countrified and the language of
rusticity was reserved for criticism and blame.

                             Natura fa l'opre sue rozze, & poi le
                             raccomanda all'arte, perche le limi adorni, et a
                             perfettione riduchi.
====<Anonymous, 1550, p.~31:  ``Nature makes
her works rough and then recommends them to art, so
that the finishing touches are embellished and
brought to perfection.''>====
 
             
 For all the fairly vicious condemnation of the lower classes, there were
times when they were spoken of and looked at favorably, without being
relegated to the background. In Ferrara, the aristocracy was protesting an
upstart bourgeois, no less than the poet Ludovico Ariosto's father,
Niccol\`o. In 1487 poems in favor of the oppressed peasantry expressed
the opposition of the aristocracy to Duke Ercole and his henchman
Niccol\`o.
 
    Ma i poveri villan, che con tormenti
    S'affatican pel ben della citade,
    che han fatto contro Dio, ch\'e tu li stenti?====<
    Milani, 1973, p.~300.  See also idem, 1980, pp.~369-412; see
   Dizionario biografico degli Italiani for further information on
   Niccol\`o Ariosto.>====
    
   (But the poor peasants, that with pains labor for the good of the city,
   what have they done against God, that you torment them?)
    
 It was threatened that denunciations would be printed and posted
throughout the piazzas of the city:
 
    E acci\`o che meglio ciascun possa intendere
    i furti di quest'uom sceleratissimo,
    lo far\`o a stampa in su le piazze vendere.====<Milani, 1973,
   p.~300.>====
    
   (And so that everyone can better understand the thievery of this most
   criminal man, I will publish his deeds and sell the account in the public
   squares.)
    
 Il popolo is urged to revolt, and in 1488 and 1489 two murders of
the Duke's officials took place. Nor were such writings, with their
indirect threat to the Duke, allowed to go unpunished. In 1495 Francesco
Cestarelli was beheaded for the ``certi bulettini'' he had written.
Nonetheless, Niccol\`o had been removed from office in January 1489.

Antonio Cammelli da Pistoia, who was in the employ of 
Duke Ercole I of
Ferrara until his firing in 1497, participated in this literary attack,
even assimilating himself to the complaining peasants rather than merely
sympathizing with them. Calling himself ``rustico e vile,'' describing his
``panni stracciati'' (tattered clothes), he said of himself, ``uno uom
senza dinar quanto par brutto!'' ====<(how ugly does a man without
money seem!), Cammelli, 1884, pp.~xxxviii, 68-69, 169. See also Cammelli,
1865.>====
 Reporting that contadini have come to him recounting their woes, he
wrote a series of sonnets denouncing Niccol\`o 
Ariosto:
 
    A Nicol\`o Ariosto pi\`u matto che mattisimo
    Ma i poveri villan, che con tormenti 
    S'affatican pel ben della cittade, 
    Che han fatto contro Dio, ch\`e tu li stenti? ====<Cammelli, 1865,
   pp.~47-57. The attribution of the sonnets is not certain. See Cian, 1939,
   pp.~360-84.>====
    
   (For Niccol\`o Ariosto, crazier than crazy. The poor peasants who,
   suffering, work for the good of the city, what have they done against God,
   that you keep them in want?)
    
 Niccol\`o, he asserts, is an ``avaro lupo'' (greedy wolf).

This solidarity with the contadini and his insistence upon his own
poverty demonstrates the vital strategy of taking pride in what might have
been held disgrace. ``Prendete adunque esempio dal villano'' was no longer
unthinkable. ====<``Take, then, the example of the peasant,'' ibid.,
``Capitolo della felicit\`a de villani del Sansedonio,'' pp.~210-16.>====
 Heroic example was no longer sufficient.

Ermete Bentivolgio, one of the opponents of Niccol\`o 
Ariosto, a
Bolognese and a cavaliere in the service of Ercole I of Ferrara,
wrote in a low style to express more general protest. Charles VIII's
invasion was imminent, and in September Ferrara allied itself with the
invader. Pastoral kinds of discontent would not suffice for such a
situation:
 
    quest'\`e materia da pi\`u rozo canto,
    da pi\`u infimo stil e vil tenore
   
   ... Per Frara ormai tocar bisogno
    pi\`u agreste suom, pi\`u rusticano e fosco
    como \`e de phistuleta e de zamprogna.====<Ibid., p.~294.>====
    
   (this is material of rougher song
    of baser style and vile substance
   
   ... For Ferrara today requires
    a ruder sound, more rustic and gloomy
    than that of pipe and reed.)
    
 Pope Alexander VI is also attacked: ``colui \`e pi\`u siguro ch'\`a
 pi\`u danari'' (he who has more money has more protection). The
aristocracy's own resentment of the power of money in this case helped to
dignify the peasantry.

This resentment of the power of money colored stereotypes of women,
fostering praise of simplicity and dispraise of urban extravagance. Just
as the enriched peasant excited anger and the humble peasant sympathy, so
did the ostentacious woman provoke scorn, her opposite praise. Maffeo
Veniero, a noble Venetian who lived from 1550 to 1586, found ``infinita
bellezza in mille strazze'' (infinite beauty in a thousand silk rags):
 
    In sta C\`a benedetta, e luminosa
    Vive poveramente 
    Sta mia cara d'amor bella, e strazzosa,
    Strazzosa riccamente, 
    Che con pi\`u strazze, e manco drappi intorno
    Pi\`u se discovre, i bianchi
    E verzelai fianchi... ====<``La Strazzosa,'' Capitoli
   burleschi d'incerto autore, 1599[?], pp.~195-202. On Veniero, see Graf,
   1888, p.~73, and Burke, 1993, pp.~80-81. The novelle of Bandello,
   also written at mid-century, are relevant here. See the detailed and
   suggestive article by Fiorato, 1977, who observes that,
   quite apart from the actual condition of the peasantry, their literary
   representation cast off the old negative stereotypes and even used the
   peasantry as a basis for a reform ideology. Not realism, since they
   reflected no changing reality, such characterizations supported political
   shifts toward absolute power (praising abasement relative to the beneficent
   lord, p.~100). Fiorato also places Bandello at a transitional point
   between Boccaccio and the humanists' faith in lay intelligence and a
   Counter-Reformation fear of superstition, in his tendency to show the folk
   of the countryside as susceptible to civilizing authority (p.~118).>====
   
   (In that blessed and light-filled house lived in poverty my beautiful dear
   love, and dressed in silk shreds, richly ragged, since with more silk
   shreds and less drapery around, more are her white thighs revealed...)
    
 Ripped clothes rather than unostentatious ones are his personal norm
(``Che trova salda fede in veste rotte'').====<``one finds reliable
fidelity in tattered clothes.''>====
 Latter-day though this declaration be, more of the time of Villamena's
engravings of laborers than Giorgione's Dresden  
Venus,====<Francesco Villamena (c.~1566-1626) was a pupil of
Agostino Carracci.>====
 the type of the rustic woman living in honorable poverty goes back at
least to Petrarch's Laura. She was commonly opposed to the corrupt woman,
whose avarice would lead her to prostitution or at least ``dishonesty'' in
the city. If the city was a place of virtue, it was so only for men. Many
a lover lamented losing his beloved to the lure of gold:
 
    O crudel povertate iniqua e ria
    cagion del mio dolor e del mio martoro
    lassami star non mi fare compagnia
    che par te me destrugge per te moro
    abandonato mha la donna mia
    vinta da lavaritia e dal thesoro
    sia maledetto amor toa signoria
    se se corrumpe per un pocho doro. ====<Sasso, Strambotti, 1501,
   unpag.>====
    
   (Oh cruel poverty unjust and wicked, cause of my sorrow and my suffering,
   leave me alone, don't keep by my side, since I am destroyed by you and I
   die on account of you. My lady has left me, conquered by greed and by
   treasure. Love, may your reign be cursed, if you are corrupted by a little
   gold.)
    
 
Having been sometimes held up as paragons of refinement, women came in
some cases, when refinement itself was criticized, to be more strongly
identified with avarice than with beauty, love, and virtue. The theme of
women's venality was by no means restricted to Ruzante's comedies. Here,
for instance, is Serafino dall'Aquilano's (1466-1500) formulation:
 
    Chi nasce al mondo per sua cruda sorte
    Pouer di robba & mai non muta stato,
    Li saria meglio riceuer[e] la morte,
    Che viver sotto s\'\i maligno stato,
    Perch\'e
    riceue el d\'i ben mille morte,
    E 'l ricco uince a torto ogni suo piato.
    Et per\'o nota, pouero amatore,
    Che sol si vince con denari amore!====<Bauer-Formiconi, 1967, p.~322,
   no.~430.>====
    
   (Whoever is born with the bad luck to be poor and never to change his
   fate would be better off dead than to live in such a nasty state, because
   he will receive every day a thousand deaths and the rich man will triumph
   wrongly over his every complaint. And so observe, poor lover, that one
   only wins love with money!)
    
 This tendency to treat love more pejoratively (and it is only a tendency,
in a matter not given to absolutes) we have already observed in connection
with our study of La tempesta and elsewhere. As disaffection with
the power of money threatened the respect accorded magnificence, so also
did it taint the feminine ideal.

                             Niuno danza, che sobria sia; altro non essendo
                             il danzare che specie di pazzia, anzi di stremo
                             furore.
====<Anonymous, 1550, p.~69:  ``No one dances,
in a way that is sober; the dance is nothing other
than a type of craziness, indeed of extreme
frenzy.''>====
 
             
 In fifteenth-century Tuscany a vernacular low-style poetry grew up, one of
whose primary subjects was the mockery of love. This mock-courtly
tradition was fostered by Lorenzo de' Medici. His youthful ``La Nencia di
Barberino'' is a love song from a rustic shepherd of the present day who,
in his distinctly inelegant language, courts the girl who seems to him
beautiful.====<The authorship of the poem is disputed; some would give
it to Bernardo Giambullari. I call it Lorenzo's here simply for the sake
of convenience (and following Rochon, 1963, pp.~357-434, who dates the poem
to 1472-73), not as a polemical stance. Contemporary printings of this
poem, together with ``La Beca,'' discussed below, were accompanied by a
woodcut showing a comely lass in broad-brimmed hat approached by a youth
presenting a flower. They are apparently not upper class, but by no means
ludicrous in appearance. On the place of Lorenzo and his circle in the
literature of the time, see Grayson, 1982, p.~214. On the cultural span of
the ideal of the beloved, see Dempsey, 1992, esp. pp.~112-13.>====
 With perfect sincerity he tells her that her teeth are whiter than a
horse's, that when she dances she moves like a millwheel, and that he is so
under her spell that he can no longer wield a hoe (he is both  
contadino and shepherd). He admires her competence in buying pigs. He
lists among her beauties the lack of cosmetics, then promptly offers to buy
her some when he goes to Florence on Saturday. As in the case of Ruzante,
the fictive self-identification with the peasant voice by no means
prohibits mockery of that same voice. On the contrary, both beloved and
lover are portrayed as ridiculous, though genially so. Art is spun out for
its fictive joys. It launches not only into the secular and the common but
the mildly ironic as well.

Luigi Pulci responded to ``La Nencia'' with ``La Beca.'' Here the humor is
broader: his love is lame and has a beard, but you need see these things
only if you look. Antonio Cammelli of Pistoia (1436-1502) wrote another of
these poems, about how he had been made gentile by his love, so that
now he carries his mattock more upon the shoulder and in dances he
astonishes the contadini by his many bows. On Sunday he eats at
table with a fork, like cittadini, and never puts his hand in the
bowl. This is all due to his love, who possesses not only his soul and
heart but his guts and his pluck. ====<Cammelli, 1908, p.~200. On
Cammelli and the concept of a Pre-Baroque literature, witty and delightful
above all else, and the allied appropriation of popular forms for the poems
of high culture, see Bauer-Formiconi, 1967, pp.~39-48.>====
 
In Latin, and descending further into caricature, Poliziano wrote about a
voraciously lustful hag, ``In Anum.'' ====<Poliziano, ``Odae,'' 1970,
pp.~271-72.>====
 Her forehead is wrinkled, her hair is white and sparse, her old,
rotted-out, lifeless, huge breasts full of spider-webs, and so forth. No
longer is the poet in the guise of a suitor; on the contrary, he would
rather mate with a sow or an ass or a dog. In the vernacular again,
Francesco Berni, friend of Il Rosso and Sebastiano del Piombo, wrote of the
woman he loved, short and fat, silver-haired and squint-eyed, with white
lips, a big mouth, and black teeth. ====<Sorrentino, 1933, LIX.>====
 
The reader of such a poem remains apart from the world represented to
him, as is not the norm in the high style. He is encouraged to exercise
his prejudices and stereotypes. The completeness of the meaning of a work
in rozzo stile often depends distinctively upon the viewer's or
reader's active interpolation, rather than a highly prescriptive empathy.
The audience thus shares in authorship---a clear sign that the work is
intended for an elite.

Such a teasing tone is well compared with a set of eight metalpoint
drawings, sometimes attributed to Francesco del Cossa but also, quite
convincingly, claimed for Tuscany. ====<Meller, 1965, pp.~3-20,
compares them principally with the Schifanoia frescoes, suggesting
these figures might have been part of the foreground to the April scene;
see also the response by Eisler (1965, pp.~290-91), who finds them
Florentine, specifically the circle of Verrocchio.  Meller allowed
that the engraving might be Florentine, despite being based on Ferrarese
drawings.  G.  Dillon's entry in Tofani, 1992, 5.1-5.4,
reaffirms the Florentine provenance of the drawings and mentions parallels
in poetry (this is endorsed in the review by Fischer, 1992).  See
also Ragghianti and Dalli Regoli, 1975, pp.~22-25.>====
 These similarly depict wizened men in childlike postures. They epitomize
pictorially what rozzo art can be: they are skillfully drawn but
constitute an art allied with conversation rather than with prayer and
earnest supplication. One shows an old woman beating a man, presumably a
wife beating her husband, while he smiles [fig.~21]. Others show 
Morris dancers. The combination suggests, as in the engraving, that the idea of
many men dancing in honor of a woman raised scruples about issues of
dominance. The mincing men, capering in deference to the crone, encourage
ridicule of gender conventions as much as those of class.

             
             
 For a large and many-figured engraving, the 
Sausage Seller [fig.~22]
is oddly frivolous. This unattributed print is difficult to place
geographically and chronologically; it is isolated also
iconographically.====<Hind B.III.12; 382 x 565 mm; c.~1460[?];
Florentine[?]; six known impressions.>====
 It more nearly portrays contemporary life than antiquity or the biblical
past, tweaking the sense of normality of a society often characterized as
self-confident, ambitious, and idealizing. It belongs to the important and
neglected category of minor artists' distinctly unminor works. It
indicates something about what it was like to be an artist in the ambient
of leading Renaissance masters without investing in the values of the
antique, expressivity, and pictorial dignity. It seems the work of an
artist presenting himself as class clown rather than as star
pupil.====<Some of the following material was presented at the
Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, Toronto, Oct.~1994, in a talk
entitled, ``Of Sausages and Queens: An Engraved Caricature.'' My thanks to
Christopher Black for his comments on that occasion.>====

             
Assembled on a dancing ground in a meadow is an odd fellowship, a festival
of fools. Instead of finding the rich in the garb of the poor, as in
pastoral, we find the poor in the garb of the rich. Furthermore, the awkward desport
themselves as though they were graceful. The resulting satire is hard to
contain. Is this a mockery of courtly conventions, a flicker of
upper-class flirtation with seeing itself caricatured in the lower class,
or alternatively is it a denunciation of those that ape such upper-class
behaviors? Or is the satire more sexual than social?

In either case, we find ourselves---unusually---in a pictorial world that
allows rudeness. As a place Italian Renaissance art seldom takes us, it
deserves special attention. Samuel Edgerton claimed in his book,  
Pictures and Punishment, that pictorial satire did not evolve until the
seventeenth century, once realism could be seen as an intentionally comic
alternative to idealizing style.====<Edgerton, 1985,  p.~124.>====
For Edgerton, idealizing style in this
context implies High Renaissance. But in this print the idealizing mode
which the gruff realism mocks is merely Florentine social practice. Here
we are confronted not with mockery by one artistic style of another but of
art mocking a style of life. In this instance, at least, the claims made
for seventeenth-century art are based on an inadequate characterization of
the Renaissance, over-emphasizing the role of the ideal in that culture and
ignoring aesthetic interest in the ugly, the unseemly, and the lowly.

It is true that in cultures not dominated by Dante and Petrarch, namely, in
northern Europe, the pictorial subject of the ugly woman was less rare.
There the whole project of depicting the peasantry has a longer and more
obviously central history. D\"urer's Dancing Peasant Couple (B.
90) and Brueghel's Peasant Wedding (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches
Museum), whatever their moral implications as portrayals of workers
playing, are not often matched by the generally less cheerful appearances
of peasants in Italian prints and paintings. An exception is the predella
for Franceso del Cossa's Dresden Annunciation. In the Nativity
there, three boy shepherds skip and dance to the sound of a bagpipe
[fig.~23], perhaps the only foot-stomping Nativity of the
period. ====<Ruhmer, 1959, p.~77, designated as partly by a member of
the shop, perhaps Antonio Cicognara; Ortolani, 1941, p.~102.>====
 The boys manage to look happier even than the customary angels attending
at the birth of Christ, their exuberance uninhibited by thoughts of worldly
station. They are as gleeful as Donatello's happiest putti, though
in this case devoid of reference to antiquity.====<The analogy between
putto and shepherd is recurrent in Renaissance art. The painted  
ignudi of the Sistine Ceiling are relatives of putti and shepherd boys.
This is more obvious in the case of Pontormo, whose preliminary drawing for
the rustics at Poggio a Caiano shows figures closer to Michelangelo's  
ignudi (Uffizi 454F). In the reverse process, when Michelangelo revised
Signorelli's tondo (now in the Uffizi) of the Madonna and Child,
using it as the basis of his Doni Tondo, the shepherds were simplified into
nudes. Egidio da Viterbo, in his Sententiae ad Mentem Platonis,
equates angels with the ``divine shepherd'' described in Plato's  
Stateman, 275.>====
 Cossa's predella painting successfully defies all cultural prejudice
against things rustic. The visual arts often avoided outright vituperation
of the poor but seldom showed them so happy, even enviable.

Cossa's merrily dancing peasants would be at home in a northern European
kermesse. But the idea of a happy peasant never prospered in Italy,
whether because it was simply too preposterous or because the idea of a
sullen, loutish, or witless peasant was more useful. The boorish visages
of Hugo van der Goes' Portinari altarpiece were much more noticed than the
(admittedly much smaller and less prominent) dancers of Cossa. Extremes of
characterization tending toward caricature were at home in Italian art only
in the work of Leonardo; part of his greatness lies in that he was able to
use extremes during a time sympathetic to ideas of the mean.====<Even
his ideas of female beauty are fairly deviant, when compared with the more
oval faces of Raphael's women, for example.>==== When Ghirlandaio painted
adoring shepherds for the altarpiece of the Sassetti Chapel in Santa
Trinit\`a, responding to Hugo's larger triptych, he gave them less
stubble and slightly more refined gestures.

Like Cossa's Nativity, the Sausage Seller shows unusually
jovial peasants. Long ago it was even ascribed to Brueghel. ====<De
Witt, 1931, pp.~225-29, supposed that the print showed a ``spiccato
fiorentismo,'' and that the author should be some goldsmith working after
Mantegna's Bacchanals. ``Brugale'' was written in the margin of the
Uffizi's impression, De Witt suggests perhaps by Baldinucci. Hind also
believed that the engraving was Florentine and dated it in the fourth
quarter of the fifteenth century; Hind, 1938, B. III, p.~142. Zani, 1802,
pp.~60-66, and Schmitt, 1974, p.~208, attributed the engraving to
Squarcione because of the inscription. Cappelli, 1899, establishes that the
missing letters need not be from the middle of the word. Nevertheless, the
solution to that puzzle may be so simple as the word ``Salsicce,''
sausages.>==== 
 Its imagery seems less odd if taken as offering an analogy with, possibly
a precedent for, the comic poetry of Lorenzo's circle. The engraving, like
the poetry, documents an often-forgotten aspect of Florentine culture of
the later fifteenth century. They show not ``Quattrocentro realism'' but a
comic, low-style treatment of local social tensions. In the historiography
of Florentine Renaissance art, the impulse to show Florence as unique with
respect to surrounding court-based and aristocratic cultures has inhibited
our seeing Florence as complex in itself.

The Sausage Seller
 belongs to the low manner, since it is populated by the non-noble and
comic.====<The sardonic tone may also be compared with that of
Mantegna's Bacchanals; see Emison, 1994.>====
 The action is whimsical, if not outright bizarre. To the accompaniment of
two shawms, ====<Instruments which appear also in an embroidery of
Pollaiuolo's design, dated 1469-80, showing the Dance of Salome (30 x
22 cm). This reference, and advice on shawms, I owe to the ready kindness
of Prof. Mary Rasmussen.>====
 six crudely featured, merry men of various ages dance in a ring around a
richly dressed old woman, who carries a skewer with eight sausages on it
and a cloven hoof, seemingly a pig's hoof. The men, although they wear the
leggings of laborers, sport in some cases quite elegant tunics. The world
may not be fully upside down here---the common folk were indeed known for
their dances---but it has been much disordered.

At the center of the work is a beautifully habited woman who is not
beautiful. Quite literally we are shown an unpainted woman, the possible
implication being that more normative looks are the product of deceptive
cosmetics. Laughter and dislike need not be far apart, and male resentment
of the deception practiced by cosmetics was an engrained, though
ineffectual, opinion.

She holds the hoof as though it were a carnation or some other emblem of
springtime and innocence and wears a conspicuous belt that may label her
guise as that of a bride. ====<See Levi-Pisetzky, 1964, II, p.~279 and
III, p.~97; see also Herald, 1981, pp.~18, 180.>====
 Her headgear, fashionable again in the second half of the century, was
called either alla franchese or horned. ====<Beaulieu and
Bayl\'e, 1956, p.~86, where its popularity is dated to the 1370s with a
revival c.~1470; Levi-Pisetzky, 1964, II, pp.~278, 290, says they
were still worn in the 1490s; see also Herald, 1981, p.~50. Calamandrei,
1924, p.~91, dates the use of such headgear 1450-70, and quotes sumptuary
laws of 1456 and 1464 restricting the use of such fashion (which was seen
as foreign, as Flemish or French) and forbidding silver and gold brocades
for them in the later law. Cammelli, 1908, p.~173, wrote a poem denouncing
a villano pretending to be noble, who dressed alla franciucula.
>====
 The horns might suggest either cuckoldry or even Satan more
directly. ====<On the latter possibility, see Three Medieval
Views of Women, 1989, p.~55.>====

For an old woman, the dominant iconographic type is Envy. In Ovid, as in
Mantegna's engraved Battle of Sea Monsters (H.~5, 6), she appears as
an old and hideous hag. Yet both Ovid and Mantegna would lead us to expect
a hungrier-looking and eaten-away dame, not so fancily dressed as the
Sausage Seller. She seems to aspire herself to be an object of envy,
rather than personifying the same.

Despite the fanciness of attire, this is not a respectable sort of dance.
A proper, upper-class dance, one that could be claimed as a liberal art,
rather than vile dances by ``de' viziosi e meccanichi plebei...
coll'animo corrotto'' (some vicious and mechanical plebeians... with
corrupt soul) for motives of concupiscence, would be danced to the more
stately measure of a plucked instrument. ====<Ebreo, 1873, pp.~9-10.>====
 This dance has been associated with Carnival, with all the potential that
brings for finding Lenten or anti-semitic references in the pork motifs,
but such an identification is probably unduly specific. Nevertheless, the
Sausage Seller engraving does share the reckless, exuberant flavor of
Carnival songs, with their characteristic ironic celebration of craziness
(pazzia). Such a song lists not only the craziness of those in love,
of soldiers who die for nothing, of princes who pretend that they want
peace, of the ambitious religious, and of the merchants wanting gold, but
also:
 
    la plebe e tutti gli artigiani
    Che speran da' pi\`u ricchi aiuti e doni,
    Pazzi i servi e' villani
    Che stentan perch\`e godono i padroni. ====<Sandro Petri, ``Canto
   della pazzia,'' Canti carnascialeschi, 1883, pp.~107-08.>====
    
   (hoi polloi and all the workers that hope to get favors and gifts from
   the more rich, crazy the servants and peasants who exert themselves because
   it pleases the masters.)
    
 ``Pazze tutte le donne, che la morte/son di chi l'ama e volte ad ogni
vento'' (all the women are crazy, since they are the death of whoever loves
them and turned by every wind). Everyone is crazy and ``la 
pazzia sia
dolce cosa'' (craziness is a sweet thing), the singer concludes. In the
engraving, the crazy ``servi e' villani'' have got themselves actually into
the places of equally crazy ``pi\`u ricchi.''

The Morris Dance normally focuses upon a young damsel. ====<For an
example of a plate from Nuremberg dated 1528 that depicts a dance
celebrating an older and ungainly woman, see Wilberg-Schuurman, 1983,
fig.~32. On the history of Morris Dances, including a performance of one
for Leo X in 1512, and other Italian examples, see Halm, 1928, pp.~131-47.
There were tapestries at Poggio a Caiano sometimes cited as possible
originals for this design. In the inventory of 1492 they are called merely
``tre panni alla morescha o vero a uso di celone''; see M\"untz, 1888,
p.~93.>====
 Although a rare subject in Italian art, such dances were performed in
Italy. Antonio Fregoso in La cerva bianca describes the deity Comus
in Erotopoli as followed by a train of youths ``chi fa moresca,'' at
Carnival but also at weddings.====<See below, for more about Fregoso.>====
As noted above, the occasion spoofed in the engraving may be a wedding, a
time particularly associated with social pretentiousness and excessive
luxury. ``Una moresca'' is included as a sidelight during Castiglione's
pastoral play Tirsi, and sometimes moresce are recorded by
Sanudo as entertainments paired with Ruzante's plays.====<In the
parody of pastoral by Teofilo Folengo, ``Zanitonella'' (first published
1521), during a section of praise of Mantua (the poet's as well as Virgil's
home town), the frequency of dance and Morris Dances is mentioned (``Semper
in ballis godit et moreschis,'' l.~173), this much not in spoof.>==== They
could be used as intermezzi during the performances of Roman comedy,
alternatives to buffoons or nymphs.====<D'Ancona, 1891, II, p.~133,
reports a performance at Ferrara in 1499 of the Eunuch, with an
intermezzo consisting of ``una moresca di villani, che coltivano la terra,
seminavano le biade, e poi le tagliavano e battevano.'' Another performance
included a hunter speaking German who ``faceva dello ebrio.''>====
 A dance ``a la moresca'' would be used to bring an evening to a
light-hearted close, a tradition continued, for instance, in many
productions of Shakespeare's comedies. ``Far moresche'' is in fact one of
the forms of craziness (pazzia) mentioned at the beginning of Il
cortegiano (I, viii), along with poetry, music, love, dancing, horseback
riding, and fencing, as a possible subject for the evening's discussion.
So the zaniness we see in the engraving was not imposed ex nihilo.
Giddiness was part and parcel of the type.====<Within the history of
prints itself, one might surmise the same on the basis of a couple of
depictions of comic or amusing dances: the Fight for the Hose, H.
A.II.5; a Dance of Nude Men around a Nude Woman, H. A.II.12. It is
evident that dancing had a reputation not only for frivolousness but that
it was associated with the issue of woman's dominance.>====

In our print, men with bells on their ankles like professional fools adore
a woman manifestly unworthy, just as bumptious lovers court their grotesque
loves in the poetry of Lorenzo de' Medici and his cronies. As Fracastoro
noted, ``A robe of gold, although it is most beautiful in itself, will not
confer grace and beauty on a peasant, but will rather excite
laughter.'' ====<Fracastoro, 1924, p.~64: ``sicut.n.vestis aurea, qq
per se pulcherrima sit, apposita tum rustico non modo decorem, & ornatum
non afferet, sed risum concitabit magis: ita & si rebus comicis
maiestatem heroicam addas, omnia facies indecora,'' p.~160.>====
 Peasant or not, this old woman is the object of the viewer's ridicule even
as she elicits the dancers' admiration.

             
Foolish peasants and, occasionally, peasants who illuminate the foolishness
of others, also populate facezie, or anecdotes---themselves a rustic,
or crude, literary form.====<Poggio Bracciolini in his preface
apologizes, ``Quod si rusticores erunt, non recuso quin sentiant quod
volunt, modo scriptorem ne culpent, qui ad levationem animi haec et ad
ingenii exercitium scripsit.'' M\"untz (1894, p.~8) commented on the
disparity between the notable presence of the peasantry in the  
novelle of Sacchetti and Boccaccio and their near-absence in art.
Moreover he found their occasional inclusion strangely unrealistic and
deformed by the style all'antica. Poggio Bracciolini, the
notoriously lusty papal secretary later Florentine Chancellor, collected
Latin versions of such items; subsequent collections were usually in
Italian.>==== They generally present the peasant as witless, unsavory, and
vulnerable, particularly to the wiles of women. Their stupidity may render
their suffering unsympathetic; nevertheless, like the peasants of Ruzante,
they suffer from hunger and abuse by women and so make suitable comic
material for a male audience. Poggio recounts the case of a man,
``rusticanus & haud multum prudens'' (rustic and not very prudent), whose
new wife explained to him that she had two vaginas. One she convinced him
was superfluous and should be given to the local priest as
charity. ====<Bracciolini, 1964, p.~423. The passage is discussed in
Frantz, 1989, p.~21.>====
 Such stories bear an affinity with Cossa's drawing of the abusive wife or
such an engraving as Benedetto Montagna's Peasant Couple Quarreling
 (H.~12) [fig.~24]. As in Brueghel's peasant pictures, the humor of the
situation tends to overwhelm the didactic potential. The history of art
depicting foolish men is not an extensive one, but examples do exist, such
as a fifteenth-century engraving of monkeys robbing a sleeping pedlar 
(H.~A.I.77).

             
From time to time in these facezie, peasant men put non-peasant women
in their place, in which case the reader presumably is cheering on the
peasant. Domenichi recounts how a gentlewoman encounters at the door of
the church a pretentious yokel (``un villan rivestito, che faceva del
gentiluomo''). When she asks him whether there has been a mass for
peasants, he replies yes, and now comes a mass for whores; hurry and you'll
be in time. ====<Domenichi, 1923, p.~87.>====
 Another instance in which a contadino, also called a sawyer, has
dignity---to the point of being called ``galantuomo''---is a case in which
he eventually spurns a courtesan who has strung him along. ====<Ibid.,
p.~207. In any context other than that of putting down a woman, the
presumptuous peasant is treated with no uncertain animosity. A peasant
(subrusticis moribius et vita incultus) applied to the Duke of
Orl\'eans (brother of Charles VI) for nobility and was told dismissively
that riches he could easily gain, nobility never; Bracciolini, 1983, XLI,
pp.~182-83. For a similar story, see Domenichi, 1923, no.~447.>====
 
The facezie do include spunky good peasant girls who tell the
importunate man what he should be told.====<E.g., Domenichi, [1548]
1923, no.~71, 72.>====
 Though humility and dignity did not often find themselves jointly attached
to a female figure, in literature as in the visual arts, they were not
utterly incompatible. In Ferrara again, this time on panel, a female farm
laborer was painted, a heavy hoe delicately cast over her shoulder and an
equally substantial shovel grasped in her right hand [fig.~25]. She towers
over an inhabited landscape, averting her gaze, and carries two vine
cuttings heavy with grapes, all of which has led to her probable
identification as a personification of Autumn. ====<1.16 x .71 m. She
is also sometimes identified as Polyhymnia, a Muse credited with the
invention of agriculture. The attribution is disputed, as is the dating
(1450-65); Berlin, 1986, p.~314; Ruhmer, 1959, pp.~68-70; Ortolani, 1941,
pp.~83-138. In Bacchi's recent book on Cossa, 1991, p.~17, the painting is
called Polyhymnia and its author anonymous. Ruhmer (p.~88) also
associates with Cossa two engravings of peasants, one male, one female,
carrying goods (H. E.III.26,27, dated c.~1470-80).>====
 Despite her humble social status, there is nothing undignified about her
posture. Besides Mantegna, the usual stylistic comparison is to the
columnar figures of Piero della Francesca. It may have been more important
that she was a personification, and hence idealized, than that she was a
peasant. In any case, the result does not recall those spunky girls of the
facezie. Instead, this female figure, as startling in its way as the
Sausage Seller, combines the presence of a Fortitude or Justice with the
youth of the Annunciate Mary. Cossa's girl combines humility and dignity;
the Sausage Seller vanity and ridiculousness.

Previously, this engraving, signed ``SE,''
 has received attention due to its evident relationship with Leonardo's
caricatures, which it almost certainly predates. ====<Tietze-Conrat,
1957, pp.~22, 94-96, suggests a lost Leonardo original for both the Italian
engraving and an inexact copy by Daniel Hopfer.>====
 Gombrich seems to allude to the print in his article on Leonardo's
explorations of ugliness, ====<``During his youth he must have seen
such adaptions of Northern humour as the grotesque Morescas with their
absurdly dressed-up May Queen,'' ``Leonardo da Vinci's Manner of Analysis
and Permutation,'' 1976, p.~57. An astute association is made between
Leonardo's ``grotesques'' and his inability to take Petrarchan conventions
seriously.>====
 arguing that this should be called grotesque rather than caricature (as
seeking out ugliness rather than inventing distortions). Although Leonardo
has sometimes been credited with the invention of caricature in the years
around 1485, Gombrich easily demonstrated that there were precedents for
such studies of ugliness in Florentine engravings from the preceding
twenty-five years.====<See also, Gombrich and Kris, ``The Principles
of Caricature,'' 1952, pp.~189-203. In that essay of 1937-38 they argued
that caricature was properly an invention of the end of the sixteenth
century, in that caricature involves ``reshaping an individual as a type''
and is often done as a sketch rather than a finished drawing. Greek and
Renaissance artists practiced the grotesque instead, judged Gombrich and
Kris, which neither implied ``personal aggression'' nor exhibited a
masterful simplicity (according to Gombrich and Kris, the reductiveness of
caricature recalls infantile pleasures). The late date of the development
of caricature reflected, they argued, the necessary condition that belief
in the magical powers of images be already effaced before they are used
playfully for aggressive purposes and also the full-fledged confidence in
the sketch as a legitimate artistic task.>====
 
             
Again in his 1952 article on Leonardo's grotesque heads, Gombrich
asserted the importance of the distinction between what he called
``commonplace ugliness in reality'' and true caricature. Leonardo's
primary purpose was to prove the power of his art, Prospero-like, rather
than to assert the power of reason over magic, Galileo-like, as had been
described of true caricature in the earlier article. For Gombrich, the
engraving of the Sausage Seller is rightly called ``grotesque'' because it
belongs to the basic project of naturalistic imitation.

             
Gombrich's point is well taken: the traditional title Bambocciata
(caricature) is inexact or at least presumptuous. It is not the deviations
from ideal beauty that are humorous but rather the action as a whole.
Leonardo's figures are fascinating while repulsive; the dancers here are
not ugly with quite the same vengeance, not so breathtakingly appalling
that they serve to demonstrate the artist's mettle.====<Leonardo's
youthful Medusa's Head did just this for the the Duke of Milan,
although according to Vasari the subject was simply chosen in accordance
with the function of the buckler on which it was painted, to frighten the
enemy.>====
 More than monster-making is going on here, at least in the case of the
men.

The engraving combines misogyny with class prejudice, making a visual
argument against the trappings of wealth, at least when misappropriated.
It is a more complicated, visual version of the treatises of Palmieri and
others, fully compatible ideologically with the glorification of
magnificence in other circumstances. Yet the convention mocked here, the
adoration of Woman, is primarily an upper-class one, so the upper-class
viewer is not safe. In an art which encourages laughter, dignity is hard
to preserve on anyone's part. Indeed, in the parody of love mores by
Teofilio Folengo, ``Zanitonello,'' the male lover is most definitely
included in the fun. A rival lists his negative qualities (``Bertolus
niger est, pede claudicat oreque tardo balbutit, unius cui defit lumen
ocelli'') in a mud-slinging contest reminiscent of the parodies of female
beauty cited above.====<``Bertoldus is dark, his foot limps and his
mouth hesitatingly stammers, one of his eyes is blind.'' N.B. a
significant lack of symmetry: it is the rival rather than the subject that
is so described. On Folengo and macaronics, see Spackman, 1991,
pp.~19-34.>====

The peasant leggings on the men direct the viewer's mockery toward the
social pretentiousness of that class. But in the costume of the woman,
there is no such safety valve to ensure that she is seen as a masquerading
member of the lower class. Despicable as she appears, she is despicable
qua old and ugly crone, rather than as a peasant pretending to wealthy
status---in other words, she is despicable categorically by gender rather
than by class. The men are satirized for social pretentiousness, the woman
for being typically female. Women's lust for finery, men's lust for women
follow as do the apple and the Fall: this is a Renaissance commonplace.
Male resentment about female prestige is thereby given a moralizing cloak.

To call someone a pig was, then too, a standard insult, sometimes
anti-semitic. ====<``Ladri crudeli, porci e Farisei,/Che de la
s\`eta vi trovasti alhora/Che occiser Cristo, cum li altri zudei'';
Merlini, 1894, p.~3.>====
 Here, however, the point is no doubt directed at the woman. ``Porca'' and
``porcellone'' bear the slang meaning ``slut,'' following the Greek and
Latin $\chi o \hat\iota \rho o \varsigma$ and porcus, referring to
the female genitalia. ====<On the social semiotics of pigs, and the
description of prostitutes in Attic comedy as pig merchants, see
Stallybrass and White, 1986, pp.~40-41; and on ``porca'' as a standard
insult for women, Burke, ``Insult and Blasphemy in Early Modern Italy,''
1987, p.~97. It occurs in Folengo's ``Zanitonella,'' for instance,
``brusor, nec porca movetur,'' l.~729, and Aretino's La cortegiana,
V, xxi. Roma herself is called such by a Florentine, I, xxi, and by
another, IV, xviii.  See also Michelangelo's 
description as he instructs
Lionardo to hire a housekeeper for him: ``son tucte puctane e porche'';
IV, 1979, 16 August, 1550, MCL, p.~349.>====
 The basic idea was that the pig's snout openings resembled the female
labia.  Boccaccio referred to the ``porcile delle femine moderne''
(pigsty of present-day women):====< Boccaccio, 1965, p.~506, (in  
Il Corbaccio).>==== such insult, laced with metaphor, had long been a
commonplace.  The pig's hoof as attribute extends the satire of the print
beyond the issue of sumptuousness to that of venery.  Surrounded by her
many men, our aged bride, beyond the rescue of paint, is cast as a Madam, a
seller of succulent flesh of another sort. ====<``Porca puttana'' is a
phrase used by Folengo, Turin, 1961, p.~757.  Fracastoro's shepherd's
name Syphilus, in his poem Syphiliade of 1530, was sometimes glossed
as meaning pig-lover (``sus'' being Greek for sow).>====
 
As for the sausages, their phallic properties were as evident then as
now. As Mattio Francesi, part of the circle of low-style poets that
included Luigi Pulci and Bernardo Giambullari, observes in his ``Capitolo
sopra la salsiccia'':
 
    E un buccin si ghiotto, & si divino,
    Che se lo provi ti parra migliore,
    Ch'un becca fico fresco, & grasselino,
   
   (it is a bite so luscious and divine, that if you try it it will seem
   better to you than a fresh-picked plump fig.)
    
 and continuing in this lascivious vein,
 
    Questo non \`e gia pasto da tinello,
    Ma da ricchi Signori, & gran prelati,
    Che volentier si pascon del bordello. ====<Berni, 1555, p.~65.
   Antonio Cammelli described his suffering from la mal francese in a
   poem thus: ``son come un porco ogni notte arrostito''; Cammelli, 1865,
   p.~190. I do not, however, think that the engraving can be dated late
   enough to allow for reference to la mal francese.>====
    
   (this is no food from the servants' hall, but for rich lords and great
   prelates who gladly feast in the bordello.)
    
 
It is possible to be even more specific about the popular cultural context
of this image.  In Anton Francesco Grazzini's (Il Lasca's)
burlesque ``Lezione sopra il capitolo della Salsiccia,'' published in 1589
in Florence, extravagent praise of the local delicacy is diverted onto
Madonna Berta, a creature of the street markets.====<This seems to
clinch the Florentine origin of the print, especially in combination with
the Laurentian poetry.  See also, on the plebeian connotations of sausage
makers, Giraldi Cinzio's dispraise of Berni:  ``infelici mi pajono
quegli ingegni che spendono le lor buone ore in cos\`\i fatte scritture,
piene di nascosa disonest\`a, e di materie plebee, che sol dilettano
a'salcicciai, ed a simil sorti di genti,'' quoted by Graf, 1888,
p.~63.>==== She who invented the sausage became rich and famous through the
perfection of this best of foods, ``Madonna, e Regina di tutte l'altre
vivanda'' (Lady, and Queen of all other edibles).====<Il Lasca,
1589, see further, Fiacchi, 1829, pp.~261-70, Graf, 1888,
pp.~67, 75, and Rodini, 1970, p.~97.>====
 This poem in praise of Florentine sausage makes explicit the parody of
Petrarch's praise of Laura. The double entendre of reference to
prostitution is scarcely less mistakable. The commentator asserts that
Madonna Berta left several hundred ducats to the city and was honored by
having her portrait in the church of Maria Maggiore, as well as a marble
low relief showing her directing the making of sausages in the Baptistry.
Since popular parlance may well have created the character of Madonna Berta
long before the date of Grazzini's poem, a better title for this engraving
may well be Madonna Berta, the personification of Florentine
womanhood devoid of chastity. Thus we have here an image of degraded, yet
enriched, womankind.

Interpreting this engraving was never an issue for a fifteenth-century
viewer; that, we may assume, was straightforward. Neither intellectual nor
aesthetic gratification was the point. Instead, in this visual parallel to
a facezia, the disdained lower classes enact humorously real issues
of social status and sexual dominance. We are left to puzzle over which is
the more ridiculous: the obsequious behavior of upper-class men bound to
courtship rituals or the vanity of the adorned woman? The engraving gives
its collectors the chance to be ashamed of conventions they themselves
obey, by seeing them---unrealistically---as belonging to a class they shun.
The male, upper-class viewer of this engraving by deriding ``con i
contadini a far festa'' ====<To use Berni's words (to party with the
rustics); Sorrentino, 1933, p.~261. Cf.~Baldassare Castiglione, Il
cortegiano, II, ix-xi, where the advisibility of doing sports with one's
social inferiors is debated.>====
 distances himself from obeisance to the beloved.

The Sausage Seller parodies
Petrarchan adulation; at the same time, it anticipates the complexity
of attitude and object in Giorgione's Laura.
Giorgione's Laura, very natural in some ways and yet clearly ideal in
others, combines these two traits without blurring their distinctness.  She
is ideal not merely despite her earthy sensuality, but rather because of
it.  The tension between the ideal and the natural catalyzed the imagery of
women, the Madonna Berta neither least nor last.

Madonna Berta and a couple of other engravings from approximately the
same time, one illustrating a common visual pun on bird/penis and the other
showing peasants with sexually symbolic objects (H. E.III.26, 27), employ
the new, relatively undignified medium to take full advantage of the
association of the low style with scurrilousness. Just as the rustic
imagery of Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini eventually ceded place to the
upscale tendencies of Giorgione's refined shepherds, so, too, later
lascivious engravings leave the lower classes behind.====<E.g.,
Marcantonio Raimondi's notorious I modi and Perino del Vaga and Il
Rosso's series illustrating Loves of the Gods.>====
 The content, however, did not necessarily change as radically as the
figural types.

In the pastoral images yet to come, the rozzo stile achieved a place
safe from comedy. Instead of direct misogyny, there is male bonding. The
shepherds are young, beautiful, and noble. The women of the shepherds'
songs tend to be offstage, as distant, unreal, and securely ideal as
Petrarch's Laura.

Pastoral continues the themes of discontent with men's subservience to
women and with the avarice of the world, problems linked together in the
male viewer's mind. The idea of present decline is linked to the hegemony
of love and lust, and thus to the power of women. This may be more obvious
in the engraving, where class insubordination and female pretentiousness,
two favorite themes, dovetail. But also in pastoral, more explicitly in
the poetry than in the pictures, the rejection of an aesthetic of
ornateness implies reform not least because corruption comes by way of
money and women together. Outside the bounds of art, the banker and
chronicler Girolamo Priuli complained about the increasing pomp of Venetian
life in the beginning of the sixteenth century:
 
    Et li giovani veneti nobelli et altri citadini se facevanno
   belli cum tanti adornamenti, vestimenti aperti, monstrando il pecto,
   et cum tanti odori, che non era dishonestade al mondo, quanto ahora,
   in li vestimenti et adornamenti deli zuveni veneti cum acti
   luxuriossi et venerei, incitatorij ala libidine, che veramente non
   juvenes, sed mulieres vocari possunt. ====<Priuli, p.~35 (June
   1509).>====
    
                
   (And the young Venetian nobles and other citizens make themselves
   beautiful with so many adornments, unlaced clothes showing the chest, and
   with such perfumes, that there was never such dishonesty in the world in
   dress and jewelry as now by the youth of Venice, with luxurious and venereal
   acts, enticements to the libido, so that truly they can be called not young
   men, but women.)
    
``Per forza del danaro de homeni diventavanno femine'' (by the power of
money men were becoming women), he avers.

             
                              Color c'anticamente, al secol vecchio,
                              si trasser fame e sete d'acqua e ghiande
                              vi sieno esemplo, scorta, lume e specchio,
                              e freno alle delizie, alle vivande.
                              Porgete al mie parlare un po' l'orecchio:
                              colui che 'l mondo impera, e ch'\`e s\`\i grande,
                              ancor disidra, e non ha pace poi;
                              e 'l villanel la gode co' suo buoi.
====<Buonarrotti, Rime, from 67:  ``Those
that in olden days, in the golden age/satisfied
hunger and thirst with water and acorns/they are
example, guide, light, and mirror/and rein for
delights, as far as food.  Bring your ear to my
speech a little/he who rules the world, and that is
so grand/still desires, and has no peace then,/and
the peasant enjoys peace with his oxen.''>====
 
           
In Giulio Campagnola's engraving [fig.~26],====<H.~14; 182 x 117 mm;
Signed,``IVLIVS/CAMPAGNOLA/.F.'' 1510's; Paduan or Venetian; four
impressions known. A version of this material was presented at the
Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, San Francisco, Oct.~1995.>====
 no human figure is present, nor is human emotion directly implied. The
composition includes little more than the animal, the sapling, a ground
line, and a distant horizon. Purely on the grounds of visual impact, no
particular response seems to be enforced: the image is reticent. Yet at
other times this artist portrayed heroic protagonists, narrative action,
and great landscapes.

Much of our art-historical thinking is arranged biographically, and Giulio
in general is remembered almost exclusively for his technical achievements.
In this example, the delicate shading and texture in the rendering of
antlers, leaves, and the coat of the animal all demonstrate Giulio's
special talents. But it is a fault of our emphasis on elaborate
achievement within the history of art, with no allowance for a category of
visual restraint, that only the refined technique has earned Giulio
recognition.

The radical simplicity of composition itself helps to discredit the notion
that there is no more subject than the animal. Contemporary engravings
depicting animals for the sake of a nature study tend to show more habitat
and more action. In fact such scenes appear to derive from Giulio's
precedent, being, ironically, expressions of approval from artists who did
not understand his image. When Nicoletto da Modena (known to have been
active 1500-12) made a similar engraving (H.~44, cf.~anonymous version
44a), he amplified it significantly. Using a slightly smaller plate, he
added two deer, two stripling trees around the main one, ruins, foliage,
and an extensive landscape including architecture in the middle ground. In
two other derivative plates of the early sixteenth century, comparably
sized, by the 
Master of the Beheading of St.~John the Baptist, 
a doe rests
in a more elaborate landscape and a standing stag feeds. Each is perched
improbably on an islet. The former landscape includes ducks, frogs, and a
snake in the tree, tongue extended, who apparently intends to eat a bird or
two [fig.~27]. One of the birds has jumped off the branch, its claws still
spread. The latter work displays some of the earliest beetles in
Renaissance art, grubs soon to be licked up by the hungry stag. These
artists modify Giulio's frozen, heraldic animal study in the direction of
D\"urer's meticulous naturalism.

Giulio should not be discounted as a primitive, that is, as an amateur
artist incapable of this more profuse naturalism. His signature is more
pretentious than Nicoletto's, being given in Latin. He was educated as a
humanist and doubtless knew the theory of literary genres. His design,
though modest, is exquisite. The chain rests on a knob in the side of the
trunk, contrasting sharply with the pencil-thin shoot that rises on the
opposite side. The ultimate proof that this work is not minor, but
deliberately scaled down in style, is an interpretation of its meaning as
requiring modesty of form.

The engraving is not an impresa; there is no ready verbal precept
which matches the image. Nevertheless, the closest visual comparison to
Giulio's work is a diminutive painting, actually smaller than the
engraving, which decorated the verso of a portrait by 
Jacometto Veneziano
[fig.~28].====<10.5 x 7.7 cm. Pope-Hennessy, 1987, no.~96,
pp.~240-43; Szab\`o, 1975, pp.~54-56; Heinemann, c.~1959, vol.~1,
no.~V.142, p.~239, where the engraving is supposed to be directly
derivative.>==== Perhaps the male portrait was commissioned by the sitter's
widow, since the verso describes eternally steadfast love. The Greek
inscription ``forever'' (AIEI) appears as though carved into
porphyry. A hind lies contentedly tethered, by a golden chain, to this
memorial slab.====<Jacometto died in 1494; his work preceded Giulio's.
It is worth speculating whether the two portraits were not intended as a
pair, the nun being the retired widow of the male sitter. The sea storm
faintly visible on the back of the nun's portrait could then be taken as
another metaphor for her grief, again with Petrarchan overtones.>==== The
doe-like beloved is permanently bound to her love. The possibility exists
that Giulio's chained stag proclaims fidelity, analogously to this hind.
It would then be a sort of impresa minus an inscription, an image
used in place of an aphorism.

A second highly comparable, though later, example engraved by Giorgio Ghisi
displays a doe with a collar, standing beside a laurel, accompanied by the
Petrarchan, and ultimately biblical, inscription, ``Nessun mi tocchi''
(which we might translate ``noli me tangere''). This served as an  
impresa
 proclaiming the chastity of the subject, Lucrezia Gonzaga (1522-76), a
woman whose husband was long imprisoned by the Turks.====<See
Petrarch's sonnet perhaps better known in Sir Thomas Wyatt's version,
``Whoso list to hunt, I know where is a hind.'' Praz, 1944, p.~317, and
idem, 1964, pp.~95-96. The emblem is identified as Lucrezia
Gonzaga's and explicated by Ruscelli, 1584, pp.~273-77. See further
Boorsch, Lewis, and Lewis, 1985, no.~40, pp.~142-43, where the work is
dated to between the late 1550s and the early 1570s.>====
 
But why a stag in Giulio's image, a hind or doe in the others, whose
import is female fidelity? If this is taken to imply a shift from
proclamation of female fidelity to male, it is no small change. But the
sex of a symbolic deer was not necessarily coded to that of the human
subject. Tebaldeo Ferrarese actually described himself as feeling the
emotion of a doe (cerva), quivering before the leopard:
 
    Non tanto cerva timida e legiera
            Trema che vede a se propinquo il pardo
            Quanto allo bel conspetto io temo & ardo.====<Opera,
   Venice, 1535, Sonetto 51.>====
    
   (The doe, timid and graceful, does not tremble so much when it sees the
   leopard nearby, as I at the beautiful sight fear and burn.)
    
 Like poets, artists were not always scrupulous about coding
the parts of the lover and the beloved in the sex of the deer. In Antonio
Fregoso's Cerva bianca, the woodcut frontispiece of 1525, Venice,
shows the hunting of a stag [fig.~29].====<Reproduced by Gaston, 1991, fig.~14;
see also p.~285.>====  There is no stag in the poem. That for the
Milanese edition of 1510 depicted an unchained doe resting under a laurel
tree, near a spring [fig.~30].====<Samek Ludovici, 1960, p.~42, fig.~53.>====
Apparently either buck or doe, as animals of the hunt, could act
as symbolic objects of lascivious desire. Cupid was as much a huntsman as
Diana. And so deer of both types share the landscape with rabbits in the
Borgia frescoes of Susannah and in the Birth of Adonis in Padua
attributed to Titian.====<On the deer as symbolizing ``l'ardeur
sexuelle,'' appearing with rabbits in  Pinturicchio's Susannah fresco, for
instance, see de Tervarant, 1958-59, p.~64. Jacopo included three deer in
a scene of the Stigmatization of St.~Francis, which includes a hunter
and dogs in pursuit of a rabbit (Paris, fol.~64v-65 Cf.~Lucas van
Leyden's intriguing engraving of Nude Woman Feeding a Fruit to a Hind
(1509), B. VII, 153.). In this case it is hard to separate the deer that
pants for the Lord from the deer that is chased as the Lord himself is. 
Again in Jacopo's 
Paris. fol.~17, in front of a scene of Christ Among the Doctors,
two children feed greens to a hind and a stag; Degenhart and Schmitt, II-6,
Berlin, 1990, II-6, p.~325, n.~1, take this to be a parable of the
interaction between Christ and the Doctors. This seems dubious, but if
true, would be a rare case in which the tameability of the deer was its
foremost trait.>==== On the verso of Botticelli's small painting of  
Judith
 in Cincinnati, there are two deer (one clearly a stag) and two monkeys,
also symbols of lasciviousness and so emphasizing the Luxuria of Holofernes
rather than only his inebriation.====<On the latter, see Adams, 1956,
pp.~4-10; and Lightbown, 1978, vol.~I, pl.~7, vol.~II, p.~21.>====
 
The deer also has a venerable history as a symbol of ardent spiritual
longing: ``As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God'' (Psalm 42:1); ``My beloved is like a roe or a young
hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the
windows, shewing himself through the lattice'' (Song of Solomon 2:9);
``Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon
the mountain of spices'' (Song of Solomon 8:14). Jacopo Bellini included a
stag in his Louvre Madonna and Child with Leonello d'Este, and, in
his notebooks, numerous deer appear in religious scenes: at a spring
beside St.~Jerome, suggesting Psalm 42 (Paris, fol.~18v), and again with
St.~Jerome, so layered visually with the saint's crucifix as to suggest
St.~Eustace's vision (London, fol.~17).

The culture we tend all too readily to characterize by reference to the
Vitruvian man often referred itself, during its poetical leisure, to
emblematic deer barely glimpsed. Love, a subject of more diverse
connotations than heroism, was capable of serving as thematic matrix for
much of Renaissance thought. By its association with the theme of love,
the deer was a complex symbol.====<Elsewhere in Jacopo's notebooks
deer appear in combination with small children or putti.>====
 
             
 Antonio Fregoso's La cerva bianca, first published in Milan in 1510
and thus very close in date to Giulio's engraving,====<An illegitimate
member of the Fregoso clan, he was a courtier with Ludovico il Moro until
his fall, then retired in 1500 to a villa at Colturano to write, dying in
1532.>====
 exhibits both Dantesque and Neo-Platonic idealization of spiritual love.
The narrator Fregoso pursues his dogs, Desire and Thought, as they chase
the cerva bianca of the title. He meets in a meadow a distraught
man, Apuano; the latter had with the assistance of a fisherman's wife
seduced a nymph of Diana. When this was discovered, the beloved was
changed by the irate goddess into the beautiful doe of the title, ``fera
strana'' (unusual beast). She roams ``con suspectoso cor pien di paura''
(with suspicious heart full of fear). Apuano, for his part, now lives
quietly in seclusion, remote from ``il vulgo,'' ``vano & loquace,'' in a
palace (otherwise termed castle) of his own design, making children of the
ingegno, or mind:
 
    Et vivea con le Muse assai quieto:
    In la mia poverta ben ricca lieto.
   
   (And I live very quietly with the Muses, in my poverty well-endowed with
   happiness.)
    
 The castle, it should be noted, is remarkable for the shade it offers,
even at midday---a clear sign in a Petrarchan culture of the absence of
lust. Apuano is regarded by il vulgo as ``vano & leggero''
(worthless and unproductive) on account of his simple life spent prizing
``il sacro lauro'' more than treasure. Apuano's god, who dwells within
him, is Amor, but understood more profoundly than by the common people as
granting peace rather than grief. The narrator eventually comes round to
Apuano's way of thinking, having at first himself been tempted by the doe
of the title. He renounces the fruitless chase for women and remonstrates
with his unredeemed peers as:
 
    O vani cacciator senza consiglio
    Aspendere il precioso tempo & breve
    Seguendo uno animal fugace & leve
   
   (Oh silly hunters lacking counsel wasting the precious and brief time
   following a flighty and insignificant animal)
    
 Fregoso's poem shares in the tradition of idealizing the love object but
makes it quite explicit that the idealization of love need not entail the
idealization of a sexually desirable woman.

He passes through the barrenness of Diana's realm (``che in ogni loco dove
manca Amore:/ Bellezza esser non puo: ne alcun vigore''; anywhere Love is
lacking, there can be no beauty, nor any vigor). Then, in chains, he
endures the hard route through Anteros's realm. Finally Fregoso is led by
a sancta Nympha, savia guida, to the Temple of Letitia
(Happiness), the land of true love. There he pleads for release from the
chains, explaining that he has not only blamed but also respected Amor. As
he crosses a river between the land of Anteros and Amor, he is told:
 
    Donque tu sei pregion del Signor mio
    Sian benedectii lacci, & te catene
    Qual t'han facto subiecto a un tanto Dio
    Et stati son cagion de ogni tuo bene.
    Ogni altro tuo pensier manda in oblio
    Che chi serve ad Amor, si far conviene
    Crede (a me) ne tener mei dicti vani
    La bella Cerva troverai e i cani.
   
   (Thus you are prisoner of my Lord. Blessed be the knots and your chains
   which have made you subject to such a God and are the cause of each of your
   blessings. Send every other thought of yours into oblivion, for he who
   serves Love, should listen to me and not hold my advice empty, he will find
   the beautiful deer and the dogs.)
    
 He arrives at a mirabile landscape, in spring verdure,
with bird song, a place scarcely to be described by his basso
ingegno. There he finds an inculto & simplice Pastore.  
Villanelle, wearing garlands of white and red flowers, dance. Fregoso
laughs goodnaturedly to see the lovers sweat: ``Grati gli son quei stenti
& quei sudori'' (Pleasing to them are these efforts and
sweat).====<Canto 6.>==== The contadini are good because their  
Signor is. Finally he enters the city of Erotopoli, underneath a marble
arch inscribed, with a witty tip of the hat to Dante, ``Lasciate ogni
Tristezza o voi che intrate'' (Leave every sadness, oh you who enters
here). The lesson is, on the one hand, that spiritual love is the true
mark of status: il vulgo
 loves the body, and makes the beloved into Dea, whereas the narrator,
Fregoso, worships a Magna Mater. On the other hand, there is a notable
lack of prejudice against rustic persons: ``Amor gentil puo fare ogni
villano'' (Love is able to make every peasant genteel). Il vulgo,
rather than the peasant, personifies wrongheadedness, with the result that
many of the good qualities of the Arcadian shepherd are found here in an
un-Arcadian setting.====<It is often essential to the low genre that
admiration for simplicity specifically exclude il vulgo. If the
peasant is befriended, someone else must remain untouchable.>====
 The sight of happy peasants helps Fregoso on his way to virtue, without
their being credited with an inherent nobility of virtue. They have a
goodness which is distinguishable from natural nobility.

Otto P\"acht argued some time ago that the origins of landscape depiction
lay in literature, not in the visual arts at all. So it might be argued
for the origins of genre depiction.====<P\"acht, 1950, pp.~13-47.
See also Gombrich, ``The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of
Landscape,'' 1978, pp.~107-21.>====
 Fregoso in particular is not one to exclude the homely and unconventional
detail. The sweat of the lovers while dancing is one instance. Earlier,
he had described the progress made by his companion Ergotele, gentil
servo, through the alien territory of Anteros as like a baby hesitating to
let go of his mother in learning to walk, the child hesitating and wanting
to grasp a bench or a wall. In another such metaphor, the sight of
Erotopoli is likened to the sight of Rome. In the course of two stanzas
this sweet longing is described, setting in parallel the glory of Rome with
the power of Love.

In this, as in his inclusion of the peasant within a highly allegorical
setting, Fregoso makes an art analogous to many a religious painting or
print, decorated by a background landscape in which appear distantly
fishermen or other laborers. The main subject is didactic and
high minded---in this case, spiritual love set in pronounced opposition to,
but also tight correspondence with, physical love of women. The
ornamentation is that antithesis of ornament, motifs of humble persons.
The kinds of motif Fregoso uses already existed as independent compositions
in engravings, whether it be vistas of ideal cities, a baby in a walker, or
stray peasants. Priority in establishing a sensibility for genre motifs is
not what concerns us here but instead the self-consciousness with which the
low genre was used, both verbally and visually. At the start of his
allegorical poem and again later, Fregoso apologizes for the lowly style,
humile & piano. In the 1525 edition, a further apology, addressed
by Batholomeus Simonetia to the Candidi lectori, explains that the
style pedestre & humile may be justified by the precedents of
Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano and that he hopes this leggiadro
stile will enhance the reputation of the verse form used (octava
rima).

Fregoso's poem, indeed much of the love poetry of the period, is vivid with
imagery. We are made privy less to his reasoning than to his heightened,
and disjunctive, perceptions---a sunrise in which leaves shine like gold,
for instance, which might well recall the dabs of yellow paint Giorgione
used to depict leaves in bright sunlight. City and woods, peasant and
gentleman, are the types in which he thinks and sees, and to which he
affixes moral values---not as constants, but as the occasion demands. In
general, though, his poem is a paean to love desexualized, to the hunt, and
to letters. The basic scheme of thought may well seem reminiscent of
Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London), in which a
man in the background hunts in the company of a dog, while the foreground
action extolls mythological literature in which woman is deified and the
mortal hero thereby rid of her. In Fregoso's poem, too, divine love rather
literally takes the place of carnal love. The narrator of Fregoso's poem
ends up adoring a Madonna-like figure, Matrona veneranda molto.

             
             
 The Renaissance cult of love was larger than that of Neo-Platonism alone;
it both preceded and exceeded Neo-Platonic learning. Because of the cult
of love, women were exalted within a society riddled with contempt for
women; because of it ideas of male honor acquired a ``soft'' aspect,
appropriate to this second kind of war, in bedroom or bush rather than
battlefield; and because of it the literature of love flourished over that
of combat. Ariosto's Orlando furioso, first published in 1516, in
which warriors do silly things on behalf of love rather than singlemindedly
fighting the good fight against the Turk, indicates the self-consciousness
with which the potential absurdities of such an ideological system might be
regarded. There were times when love was taken seriously and integrated
into philosophy and religion. There were other times when it was not.
Although generally the visual arts were grand and serious, the probability
of an element of levity increases the farther we are compositionally from
grand norms. In Giulio's engraving we are far from such norms.

             
His very limited iconography depends upon common literary metaphors of the
time. The resting stag, the laurel tree, and the chain were all standard
in the literature of love and so in the low genre. The question then
naturally arises whether Giulio was making a specific literary reference.
Pamphilo Sasso of Modena, who wrote poems in honor of both Giulio and his
father Girolamo,====<Sasso, 1500, unpag. On Girolamo's links to
pastoral, see Umberto, 1907, pp.~62-72.>==== described the lover as a chained
creature:
 
    Nel principio d'amor: \`e la saetta
    iocunda: e grata: & la piaga mortale
    el cor non strugge: el foco non fa male
    la catena non troppa aspra e stretta.
   
   (In the beginning of love the arrow is welcome and pleasurable. The heart
   doesn't resist the mortal wound. The fire doesn't hurt; the chain is not
   too chafing and tight.)
    
 It would certainly be possible to interpret Giulio's image by
reference to this and other poems by Sasso, who avails himself as well of
the metaphor of lover as stag. But his poems fit into a large literary
tradition, and it is to that large tradition, including Fregoso, rather
than to any specific instance of it, that Giulio's imagery belongs. His
engraving's interpretation depends upon the viewer's familiarity not only
with the few stock symbols used but with the changing capacities of that
tradition during Giulio's time. Meaning may change more readily than the
instruments of making meaning, and many of the love poems by Sasso and
others are a good deal less reverent in tone than Petrarch's.

Like the deer, the chain has a long history in the imagery of love and
often has positive connotations. Petrarch, for instance, is bound by the
golden chain of Laura's hair. But the more the chain became an article of
courtly dress signifying allegiance to a lord, the more, in literary
contexts, the chain signifying fidelity in love became a thing to be
avoided. In an early stage of his poem, Fregoso complained of painfully
cruel chains:
 
    pena crudel, catene, & foco
    Quale e mortal che toller potesse?
   
   (cruel anguish, chains and fire/What mortal would be able to bear it?)
    
 Hieronymo Benivieni wrote of ``una aspra e indisolubile catena'' (a chafing
and irremovable chain), and addressed himself as ``O huom transformato in
brutta fera'' (Oh man transformed into an ugly beast).====< 
Amore, Venice, 1535. Boccaccio in Il Filocolo, Book II, describes a
dream in which ``una cerva bianchissima e bella'' and a lion cub figure the
beloved and the lover, respectively. They are returned to their proper
forms after falling into a clear spring. Previously, though, the doe is
captured with a golden chain and led away by two gyrfalcons, a case in
which the golden chain has no benign connotations.>====
 Pietro Aretino also alluded to ``la pi\'u vil catena che mai legasse
affetto di core umano'' (the most vile chain that ever afflicted the human
heart).====<Aretino, 1945, p.~127.>====
 
Lucrezia's doe as depicted by Ghisi is not chained at all, merely wearing
a collar. The hind in Jacometto's painting is chained but not to a laurel.
The chain in that work signifies the indissoluble nature of the love
allegorically portrayed; the chain cooperates semiotically with the
porphyry. Here, if we may take the laurel to signify female chastity, the
chained stag is likely to refer to the lover, content in that curiously
scant shade. For Petrarch, Cupid's fiery arrows are like the sun, hence
the desirability of the laurel's shade, and the chain that binds the lover
is Laura's golden hair. We may, then, have an image of a contented lover,
bound to his chaste love by her golden hair. But is he actually contented?
Does the potentially cruel chain, or even the sparceness of foliage, enable
us to claim otherwise?

The beloved who wanders like a doe is candida, lieta, gentile,
mansueta, libera, even timida in a favorable sense, as Jola says of
his love in Castiglione's Tirsi. Petrarch envisioned his
inaccessible beloved as a ``candida cerva.''====<Rime 190.>====
Tebaldeo, as noted above, compared himself to a timid cerva, and even
that was a positive image of sorts.

Conversely, when the lover is portrayed as a stag, this in itself is
reliably an image of disquiet. Petrarch himself complained that he had
been turned into a stag, chased by his dogs:
 
    ch'i' sent\`\i' trarmi de la propria imago,
    et in un cervo solitario e vago
    di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo,
    et ancor de' miei can fuggo lo stormo.====<Petrarca, Rime 23. Egidio
   da Viterbo (Caccia de Amore, Venice, 1538) compares himself to
   Actaeon, and the evasive thing he seeks as ``la bella fera piu libera e
   sciolte,'' ``isnella e cruda fera.''>====
    
   (I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag
   from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the 
   belling of my
   hounds.)====<
   %Petrarch's Lyric Poems, tr. R. Durling, Cambridge, Mass., 1976, p.~66.>====
   Petrarca, Lyric, 1976, p.~66.
    
 The stag may very well be free:
 
    Ma il tempo che consuma ogni ossa e nervo,
            Ogni indurata petra, ogni metallo
            Liber m'ha fatto come in selve cervo,
    Ne si stanco e affannato alcun cavallo
            Mai ritrovosse doppo va longo corso,
            Come io a lo uscir de lamoroso ballo,
    Spezate ho le catene e rotto il morso
            E posta al tutto Zephira in oblio.====<Tebaldeo, 1535, Egloga
   3.>====
    
   (But time which consumes every bone and nerve, every hard stone, every
   metal, has made me free like a stag in the woods. Never was any horse
   found so tired and provoked after it went on a long run, as I was on
   leaving the dance of love. I have split the chains and broken the bridle
   and blown it all away on the west wind.)
    
 Even so, the stag as lover has connotations quite unlike those
of the beloved as doe: \begin quote
 
Cervo ferito vo in monte in monte...
 El sol ho in odio: ogni splendore: e ragio
 il terren verde in qualche selva obscura
 hor sotto un pin albergo: hor sotto un fagio
 Et si fero \`e: il mio male sopra natura
 Che d'huomo son fatto un animal silvaggio
 & non ho pi\`u de vita o morte cruda...====<Sasso, Opera,
1501, Sonetto CXXIII.>====
 
             
(A wounded stag I go from mountain to mountain... The sun I despise,
every light, every ray. The green earth is hidden in some desolate wood,
now under a pine tree, now under a beech. And so beastly is my wrong,
beyond what is natural, that from a man I am made into a woodland animal
and share no more in either life or cruel death...)
 

             
In sum, it seems that a chained stag is not so slight a variation on a
chained doe as the frontispieces to Fregoso's poem might have
suggested.====<There is an engraving by Benedetto Montagna (H.~31)
which shows what one might describe as a contented and proud, self-tethered
male. He sits beside a palm tree, to which he has bound a rope, both ends
of which he holds in his left hand. Whatever its exact meaning, its
connotations are of resoluteness and autonomy rather than of servitude. In
an anonymous Florentine engraving dated 1465-80 (H.~A.IV,12), the
galloping stag clearly signifies the lover, the collared doe beneath a tree
the beloved---though ironically, as these motifs frame the image of a woman
setting rapaciously upon a recumbent youth. Cf.~also Ariosto's
mock-revenge on the woman Angelica, who when chained herself is contrasted
with Amor leading his chained servants; Ariosto, Orlando furioso, X,
97.>==== The static pose that had signified loyalty in the woman cannot be
taken so benignly for the man. It is a tweaking of the male image, akin to
Tebaldeo's description of himself as a timid doe. Giulio's Stag is
allied not only with the low genre of vernacular love literature but with
love literature's sardonic aspect. Obedience to the beloved is not being
held up here as exemplary but as potentially objectionable. Otherwise we
might expect the shade to be more ample, the laurel tree less flimsy, even
the testicles of the animal more discreetly tucked out of sight.

             
In the Venetian comedy of c.~1535-38, La Veniexiana,
self-advertised as ``non favola, non commedia ma fatto realmente accaduto''
(not fiction, not comedy, but fact [that] really happened),====<The
female protagonists are thought to be based on Anzola Valier and Valiera
Valier; anonymous, 1974, p.~23.>====
 the rapacious widow ironically named Angela gives the young man she
fancies a golden chain, stating in no uncertain terms that he will be her
prisoner:
             
 
    voglio che per amor mio tu accetti anche questo piccolo dono: questa
   catenina d'oro, che sempre \`e stata compagna della tua tettina, e questo
   smeraldino: l'uno, perch\'e tu ti ricordi che sei legato a me per
   sempre; l'altro, perch\'e tu sappia che l'amore mio esige che tu non
   tocchi altra donna che viva.====<Ibid., Act III, p.~120 (quoted in
   translation from dialect).>====
    
   (I want you for love of me to take also this small present: this
   delicate golden chain, that always should be companion to your breast, and
   this emerald: the one, so that you remember you are tied to me forever;
   the other, so that you know that your love for me necessitates that you
   never touch another living woman.)
    
 The young man has previously averred (not without mixed feelings and even
irony, for he is pursued by another, younger and also well-born woman):
 
    I venni libero a Vostra Signoria; ora sono legato pi\`u che se fossi un
   malfattore: vostro prigionero, prigionero di queste dolci
   mammelline.====<Ibid., p.~114.>====
    
   (My Lady, I came to you a free man. Now I am more bound than if I were I
   criminal: your prisoner, prisoner of those sweet breasts.)
    
 She, in fact, welcomes him to her palace by saying she wants nothing more
than to keep him as her prisoner.

Inversion may be specific to comedy, but it is also characteristic of love
culture. In L'Arcadia, the shepherd Elpino keeps a pet stag (``il mio
domestico cervo,'' Prosa Quarto), for the sake of his beloved. For her
sake he feeds the animal delicate morsels from the table, curries him,
adorns his antlers with roses, and plays with him. She, for her part,
yokes the animal and rides him. The deer also carries a necklace made of
shells and boar teeth, a token of the beloved's devotion. The animal, cum
lover, has been thoroughly domesticated and abased. And the Florentine
Luigi Pulci jocularly described the role of the lover as follows: ``ella
\`e la cervia, e i' sono una ciocciola'' (she is the doe, and I am a
snail).====<Luigi Pulci, 1887, p.~25. On a similar, although more
prosaic note, Alberti in Della famiglia describes the household in
which the woman is lord rather than servant as continually ``in tempesta''
(Alberti, 1969, Book III, p.~282).>====
 
In La Veniexiana the women have standing and wealth; the youth from
out of town is the object of multiple female ardor. Angela sighs, ``Egli
\`e il mio tesoro, i miei gioielli, il mio dio!''====<Ibid., Act I,
p.~80.>====
 (He is my treasure, my jewels, my god!) The youth in turn deifies her,
exclaiming, ``L'abitazion di Dio \`e questa! Oh, che casa ricca e
ornata! che bellissima luogo!''====<Ibid., Act III, p.~108.>==== (This is
God's house! Oh, what a rich and ornate house! What a beautiful place!)
Angela even calls her lover anima mia (my soul),====<Ibid.,
p.~110. For other examples of inversion in the admiration the women
express for the man, see p.~33. (Compare the inversion in Ariosto's  
Orlando furioso, when Angelica is chained to the rock.)>==== a phrase if ever
there was one that traditionally should belong to the man's utterances.
The play mercilessly spoofs the spiritualization of love, and
highmindedness in general. Even the supposedly exemplary ancients are
called---somewhat patronizingly---ingenuous, when it comes to the subject
of love.====<``Gli antichi immaginarono ingenuamente Cupido...,''
ibid., Prologue, p.~68.>====
 
             
 With no uplifting inscription, and no specific identification of the
parties involved, no narratively structured allegory, Giulio's use of
familiarly Petrarchan symbols need be no more idealizing about love than
Sasso's Petrarchan poems. By subtly undermining the iconography of the
Petrarchan love tradition,====<On which, see notably Cropper, 1976 and
1995, an explication of the thesis that ``the emergence of a desiring,
gendered beholder for these works of art was... closely related to
paradigmatic status of Petrarch's poetry of desire''; and on
anti-Petrarchan sentiment, see especially, Graf, 1888, pp.~45-86.>==== Giulio's
engraving heralds the possibility of artistic irony toward the more or less
officially promulgated images of Renaissance society.

Not all poems about love were for women; not all led to a happy ending.
There was a market for love imagery geared to male pleasure, one not
restricted to images of recumbent females. Love was, after all, a dominant
theme normally biased in favor of women, existing in a culture dominated
by men. At least on occasion the men chose to flatter themselves instead.
Giulio's image gratified the male public by showing the lover as
unnaturally enslaved, without openly spurning the venerable tradition of
Petrarchan love. Although perhaps more dignified an experience for the
male viewer, the Chained Stag is not so unlike Giulio's 
Penance of St.~John Chrysostom
 after D\"urer, in which the ex-lover is
humiliated, crawling on hands and knees. Although it might be heavy-handed
to label Giulio's Chained Stag 
satirical, it could fairly be called
ironic. It refers to female chastity, without lauding it or placing faith
in it. It refers to the lover's loyalty, again without lauding it. The
image is less heraldic and more humourous than it initially seems. The
stag looks the viewer---the male viewer---straight in the eye.

                             in otto giorni potrete far reina Italia, che
                             \`e serva.
====<Promise made to Giovanni dalle Bande
Nere before amputation in 1526; Aretino, 1945,
p.~4:  ``in eight days you will be able to make
Italy queen, that is [now] a servant.''>====
 
             
 Like Giulio Campagnola's Chained Stag, the engraving known as the
Young Prisoner [fig.~31], by a follower of Mantegna,====<H.~25,
252 x 132 mm, known in one impression. Hind dates the drawing to the
period of the Triumph of Julius Caesar, commissioned c.~1485 and
finished in the early '90s, the engraving not much later.>====
 portrays the lover as far removed from the heroic ideal, even as being the
better and more noble lover for being farther from the heroic
ideal.====<Later, Michelangelo would use it in one of his Rime, 
no.~25, where he speaks of his old-age love of something both natural and
divine. He begins, though, by describing a chained slave who has forgotten
to want freedom, contrasting that with his condition, loving without shame,
and gaining vigor from it. For references to other images of servitude,
see 
Buonarrotti, 1991, 
p.~102.>==== A walking youth in all'antica garb,
both of his ankles roped to a heavy ball, hefts a yoke on his shoulder
while looking behind him. He is barefoot though not poorly dressed; he
does not strain to move though his expression is fixed and grave. He is a
decorative figure rather than a boldly heroic one, his tunic hanging down
front and back like curling ribbons matched by hanging pieces of harness
above. He is not a peasant; on the contrary, his flowing locks indicate
his nobility. Yet he is shown in servitude.

The theme of male abasement before a female lover, sometimes herself
masculinized as having valore or as an opponent in war or as the
speaker's signor, was a literary commonplace:
 
    Onde hebbe la natura tal disegno,
    a far un corpo tanto signorile?
    onde hebbe il sapere, onde l'inzegno,
    a farti s\'\i magnanima e gentile,
    vaga, vezosa, honesta & senza sdegno
    honesta & mansueta & molto humile?
    credo che insieme natura & idio
    furon a farti, caro signor mio!====<Luigi Pulci,
   1887, p.~26.>====
    
   (Whence had nature such design to make a body so lordly? when had nature
   the knowledge, once the intelligence, to make you so magnanimous and
   courteous, pretty, lovely, upstanding and without disdain, true and gentle
   and very humble? I believe that together nature and God made you, my dear
   lord!)
    
 
Not only is the beloved a signor, but the lover calls himself  
schiavo:
 
    sappia ch'io sono il tuo servo perfecto,
    isventurato, meschino & dolente;
    i' sono il tuo amante poveretto,
    a te leale, fedele, ubbidiente,
   
   bench\'e alla tuo grandeza io non sia degno,
    tu non mi de' per\`o tener avile,
    ch\'e di piacerti semprema m'ingegno,
    angelica mia idea signorile.====<Ibid., pp.~5, 6.>====
    
   (know that I am your perfect servant, unlucky, shabby and sad; I am your
   poor lover, loyal to you, faithful, and obedient.
   
   although I am not worthy of your greatness, you should not therefore hold
   me as vile since I try very hard to please you, my angelic reigning fancy.)
    
 Castiglione's shepherd could call on a chorus of reinforcement when he
bewails his ``dolce perduta libertade'' (sweet lost
liberty).====<E.g., Serafino dall'Aquila's poem that opens, ``Piango
la mia dolce perduta libertade/E 'l dolce tempo che gi\`a
 possed\"\ia''; Bauer-Formiconi, 1967, p.~245, no.~174.>====
 For routinely the lover decries his situation as ``servile,'' even
``misero,'' the very title for the image of the Beggar in the Ranks and
Conditions of Men series. The lover pleads to his lady as does the
suppliant to the master, or, alternatively, as one does to God.
====<Speroni, 1546, p.~7, makes the analogy explicit.>====

The Sausage Seller was shown playing a role above her rank; the Yoke Bearer
condescends below his rank. He lifts his yoke effortlessly and walks
despite his ball and chain. The attribute of the yoke marks him a peasant;
the ball and chain and the stately mien deny the same. ====<Formally
he is reminiscent of figures in Mantegna's Triumph of Julius Caesar.
Probably nothing more definite should be claimed about the design. On this
problem, see Bellini, 1991, no.~106, pp.~124-28, discussing as an Allegory
of Servitude the signed and inscribed (SERVUS EO LAETIOR QUO PATIENTIOR)
engraving by Adamo Scultori and its antecedents; Zucker, 1984, pp.~128-30,
no.~.028, who takes the work to personify Obedience; Lightbown, 1986, no.
223, p.~492. See also Hind, 1948, V, pp.~30-31, no.~25.>====
 He is to peasant as Arcadian poet is to dusty shepherd.

The visual compatibility here of servitude and dignity establishes that the
theme is the noble lover's bondage to his lady,====<One need not go so
far as Tietze-Conrat, 1955, p.~208, who on the basis of a related drawing
at the Albertina inscribed ``Sic vota mea'' took the image as an allegory
of marriage. She took the author of the Albertina drawing to have
understood the original artistic intention, Ghisi not to have. The
Albertina drawing is reproduced in Birke, 1992, p.~32.>====
 as in Giulio Campagnola's Chained Stag.====<The dating of these
works is sufficiently inexact for it to be uncertain whether the engraving
predates Giulio's. A drawing by Giulio after the Prisoner exists, so
the basic point must be the contemporaneity of the two visual ideas, in the
1490s or close thereto. Although more impressions of Giulio's  
Chained Stag survive than of the Young Prisoner (which is a unique
impression), more copies of the Prisoner were made and well into the
sixteenth century.>====
 Like the Stag, it is an emblem rather than a narrative, and there is
no empathetic landscape. As in that case, religious symbolism has been
recycled in the cause of secular love, for the yoke is a biblical metaphor
for servitude to God. In Matthew 11:29-30, Christ preaches ``Take
my yoke upon you, and learn of me... For my yoke is easy, and my burden
light.''====<The suave yoke was a Medici impresa, used by
Lorenzo
 and by Leo X, the latter of whom was not loath to articulate
parallels between himself and Christ. In the case of Lorenzo, the impresa
alluded to Medici rule, the existence of which could be alluded to more
overtly after the death of Cosimo, when the yoke first appears. See
Cox-Rearick, 1984, pp.~34-39, and Rousseau, 1989, pp.~113-26.>====
 Formally, the figure is reminiscent of the type of Christ bearing the
cross.

However, the weight attached to the ankles of the Prisoner precludes an
explanation based on the easy yoke of Christ.  This figure is not bearing
an easy yoke in dutiful labor but instead the harsh yoke of bondage to a
woman.  Pamphilo Sasso wrote in his Strambotti:  ``Iugum meum suave
est dice amore'' (my yoke is agreeably called love).  In Sannazaro's  
L'Arcadia, as mentioned earlier, Elpino's beloved even makes a practice of
yoking the pet deer he has given her (``ansi di sua volunt\`a li para il
mansueto collo al giogo,'' Prosa IV) and Ergasto himself suffers this
humiliation metaphorically:
 
    Cos\`\i fui preso; onde ho tal giogo al collo,
    ch'il pruovo, e sollo pi\`u ch'uom mai di carne;
    tal che a pensarne \`e vinta ogni alta stima.====<Ecloga I.
   Sannazaro uses the same metaphor in writing to Guniano Maio: ``Instat
   saevus Amor, reficitque in cote sagittas,/Nec patitur presso colla movere
   jugo,'' Elegia VII.>====
   
   (Thus I was taken and from this I have such a yoke on my neck, that I bear
   witness to it, and I bear it more than any other man of flesh so that
   thinking of it defeats every other regard.)
    
 By not using the human figure, Giulio in the Chained Stag avoided
the shock of confronting either a rustic figure in the role of lover or a
noble figure enslaved. Giorgione's portrait-like paintings of shepherd
lads implied the same basic point---male weakness---though in his case
naturalism was not sacrificed. Part of Giorgione's artistic success rested
exactly in this: that he presented the idea of male deference without
visualizing in a discomforting way the self-abasement described by the
poets, using shepherd lads on the one hand, the aloofness of the ``lover''
in La tempesta on the other. The artist of this Mantegnesque
engraving chose more boldly to visualize the yoke of love.

The refined youth bearing a symbolic yoke, like a knight's insignia, still
reeks of feudal ceremony and the obeisance of knighthood. It subscribes
implicitly, as Giorgione's portrait types do not, to a theory of woman's
valore, as for instance in Boccaccio's love poetry:
 
   Se mi bastasse allo scriver l'ingegno la mirabil bellezza e 'l gran
   valore di quella donna, a cui diede il mio core.====<Boccaccio, 1958,
   LII, p.~52.>====
    
   (If I have sufficient mind to write about the wonderful beauty and the
   great valor of that woman, to whom I gave my heart.)
    
 
Yet The Young Prisoner is but a distant relative of the love poetry
from which it derives. The parallel poetic tradition which is wild with
distress; the print declares matter-of-factly, ``I am in servitude.'' The
viewer is not asked to share love's torment nor to witness the begging and
pleading of the male lover. Thus the engraving's design can be understood
as another early answer, like Giulio's Stag and like the 
Sausage Seller, 
to a pictorial problem more fully worked out in pastoral imagery.
Individually, the shepherds of pastoral imagery are not much more
expressive than this servant, but they are framed by evocative landscape.
The voice of complaint is made audible in the somber tones of the oil paint
depicting trees and clouds.

The Mantegnesque Prisoner is the product of a visual imagination
somewhat strange in the context of the visual arts, though at the same time
familiar to a society's communal visual imagination.  It shows lowliness as
a proper attribute even of the male aristocracy.====<Whatever the
identity of Pontormo's Halbaldier in the Getty Collection (Malibu),
the weapon he holds is not commensurate with the status implied by his
clothing.  Add to this the delicate chain he wears and his boyish youth,
not to mention the sensuous mouth and provocative stance in three-quarter
pose, and this painting begins to seem a relative of Giorgione's youths,
though with the familiar reference to war in place of sheep.>==== It is in
comparison with such an image of noble servitude that the full daring of
Giorgione's La tempesta, a notching down of the nobility of both love
and lover, can be assessed.

                              S\`\i come nella penna e nell'inchiostro
                              \`e l'alto e 'l basso e 'l med\"\iocre stile,
                              e ne' marmi l'immagin ricca e vile,
                              secondo che 'l sa trar l'ingegno nostro...
====<Buonarrotti, 1991, written for Tommaso de'
Cavalieri and dated c.~1534, no.~84, p.~197:
``Just as in pen and ink/style is low and high and
middle,/so in marble [there are] images lush and
base,/according to the method of extracting our
intelligence.'' On Michelangelo as poet, see
Gilbert, 1991, pp.~261-83.>====
 
             
The type of the shepherd had been frequently appropriated for purposes of
defining upper-class ideology, that of the peasant relatively rarely.  One
such instance, Michelangelo's portrait medal, given to him by Leone Leoni in
1561, shows on the verso an old beggar striding along with staff and dog
[fig.~32].  ``Beggar'' may be a slightly overstrong designation:  the rather
robust figure wears Phrygian cap and drapery rather than rags.  He carries a
pouch, which might belong to any poor person, and has been called a pilgrim
rather than a beggar.====<Diameter~.059.  See Pollard, 1983, no.~12,
p.~30, recording two examples cast in silver; Barolsky, 1990, pp.~44-48;
Howett, 1975, explores the comparison both with Bosch's exterior wings to
The Haywain and the Tarocchi.  See also Barocchi, 1962, IV,
pp.~1735-1738; in the eighteenth century, Bottari thought the verso a satire
against the Frabbrica of St.~Peter's, with which Michelangelo was having great
troubles at the time.  Lomazzo, 1974, Trattato, vol.  II,``De i
moti,'' p.~162, describes the work as ``un povero guidato da un cane,'' and
mocks the design as poor (the leash being unrealistically taut, he claims).
On the similarity of beggars' and pilgrims' pouches, see Wandel, 1990,
p.~89, n.~22.  And for a reference by Michelangelo to his ``alma pellegrina,''
Rime, nos.~244, 258.  On the visual relationship to images of beggars,
see below.>====
 
To understand the verso of this medal, we need to understand the theory
of the low style and the honor accorded to degradation, as these existed in
an Italy no longer herself fortunate and as Michelangelo conceived of them.
What is oddest about the medal is the combination of a person in need of
misericordia with a powerful and active physical frame. The author
of some of the most virile and heroic imagery of his time, Michelangelo
thoroughly understood and embraced its rustic antithesis, at least the male
half thereof.

Leone Leoni made the medal as a thanks offering in 1561, after receiving a
contract through the good auspices of Michelangelo. ====<It was the
tomb for Pius IV's brother, the Marchese of Marignano; see Vita, 1941,
pp.~53-55.>====
 The invention, however, may be Michelangelo's own. As early as 1510
Michelangelo had been searching for medals for Guglielmino Tanaglia, whose
own portrait medal showed him in the humble guise of a pilgrim, inscribed
``BONA FORTUNA.'' ====<
Pollard, 1984, vol.~I, pp.~476-77, no.~268; see also Il carteggio di
Michelangelo, 1965, letter of 26 Oct.~1510.  The design should also be
compared with the old man with a cane in the Salmon Booz Obeth
lunette of the Sistine Ceiling, and a preparatory drawing, seemingly a
drawing from life, of an old man with pouch, dog, and cane; Hirst,
1988, pp.~10, 36.  The idea of the human soul as a ``spirto pellegrino''
was common enough; Aretino used it of Lucrezia Ruberta in describing
Titian's and Sansovino's efforts to portray her, Aretino, 1957,
vol.  I, CXXX, p.~204.>====
 Michelangelo may have remembered this medal when his own was designed half
a century afterward. Whatever Michelangelo's role in creating the design
of his own medal, certainly he approved of the result. Vasari reported
that Michelangelo was pleased by the medal and that many copies of it were
made.

The inscription on Michelangelo's medal reads:  ``DOCEBO INIQUOS VIAS TUAS
ET IMPII AD TE CONVER[TENTUR]'' (Psalm 51:13). ====<King James
translation:  ``Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall
be converted unto thee.'' See Pollard, 1985, no.~719, pp.~1233-36;
de Maio, 1978, p.~373; Fehl, ``Crucifixion,'' 1971,
p.~340; Plon, 1887, pp.~164-65, 178.>====
 A product of the repressive Counter-Reformation times during the regime of
Paul IV, who snubbed Michelangelo in favor of Pirro Ligorio,
the medal has been taken to be a courtly manoeuver demonstrating
Michelangelo's orthodox fervor.====<See also, Waddington, 1989,
on the possibility that the medal may be interpreted as indicating
reformist sympathies.>====
 Blindness (established by the leadership of the dog and the use of the
cane) would then be taken as a metaphor for our relationship to truth
throughout our mortal lives.  The dog could symbolize orthodox Faith, the
sole reliable form of vision.  The theme of poverty would by this
interpretation possess no particular force, being incidental to the theme
of blindness, though possibly implying the humility of Michelangelo before
the might of the Church.  But if the dog symbolizes faith with no special
emphasis upon orthodoxy, the image may prove a more complex one, and
Michelangelo's response to Paul IV's severity no simple capitulation.

Alternatively, Michelangelo's exposure to the teachings of
Savonarola may be pertinent here.====<On
Savonarola's significance for artists other than Michelangelo, see
Hall, 1990, pp.~493-522.>====
 Among the insistent themes of the Ferrarese's preaching were the
obligations and rewards of charity, as well as the damnable guilt of
superfluity.  In words not so different from the warnings lovers issued
poetically to stinting beloveds, he exhorted the poor to claim their
rights:

   O voi che avete del superfluo, datelo a' poveri, che' non
   \`e vostro, portatelo alla Compagnia di San Martino, acci\`o che lo
   distribuischino alle povere persone vergognose, che molte volte muoiono
   della fame... voi, poveretti, andate a loro che distribuiscano le
   elemosine della citt\`a e sarete sovvenuti. Io vi dico che chi ha del
   superfluo lo dia a' poveri, ed ancora pi\`u oltre vi dico che gli \`e
   tempo da dare ancora pi\`u che el superfluo. ====<Savonarola, 1930,
   I, pp.~16-17, Nov.~1494.>====
    
   (O you who have more than you need, give it to the poor, since it isn't
   yours, carry it to the Company of St.~Martin, so that they can distribute
   it to the poor, shamed people, who often die of hunger... you, dear poor
   ones, go to those who distribute alms for the city and you will be
   sustained. I say to you, he who has extra give it to the poor, and
   moreover I say that the time will come to give even more than what is
   superfluous.)
    
 Savonarola expounded the doctrine that ``le persone simplice'' find
``questo lume della fede'' (this light of the faith) even more readily than
the wise and intellectual: Christ too was poor. ====<Ibid., p.~31.>====
 As for those not naturally poor, it was up to them to make themselves so.
Harsh though his directives were, free will was the very crux of
Savonarola's argument:
 
   la morte ti toglie le cose del mondo per forza; la carit\`a le toglie
   via per propria volont\`a. ====<Ibid., p.~43.>====
    
   (death will take worldly things from you by force; charity takes it
   through one's own will.)
    
Savonarola taught further that the divine is not found in any
representation of a created thing. The vanity of everything material is a
basic premise: ``Togli una pittura della tua propria immagine e vedi che
tu sei nulla'' (Take a picture of your own image and you see that you are
nothing): ====<Savonarola, 1930, p.~56.>====
 These sermons, delivered in the very month the Medici were expelled, are
virtually a gloss on Michelangelo's medal, designed many years later, both
advocating a spirituality based on renunciation.

Finally, the verso of Michelangelo's medal may be read as the portrait of
an artist who, even as he seems to renounce his notorious pride, makes a
statement in no way modest. He is indeed the beggar for whom divine grace
is needful. Yet his humble submission to the guidance of a dog, symbol of
faith, parallels the act by which he, as sculptor, submits himself to the
will of the stone.====<On Michelangelo's characterization of himself
as recalcitrant stone in no.~63, ``S\`\i amico al freddo sasso \`e
 'l foco interno,'' see Lauster, 1993, pp.~146-74.>====
 In both cases humility yields divinity.

The artist and critic Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600) characterized
Michelangelo as a Socrates. ====<Scritti, I, p.~292, in ``Idea
del tempio della pittura,'' cap.~xvii; cf.~p.~329, cap.~xxxi. Condivi
dubs him that instead for his extreme chastity; Condivi, 1887, p.~204.>====
 Socrates had been described by Alcibiades as a little Silenus figure, ugly
on the exterior, his arguments unpolished, but containing within godlike
qualities. Michelangelo likewise constructed a self-image based on the
idea of inspired vision that defies ordinary sight and ordinary authority.
Gruff and self-denigrating like Socrates, he also dressed plainly.

Michelangelo wanted, even needed, to think of himself as the poor man of faith, as
much so as he insisted upon the refined lineage of the Buonarrotti. His
wealth stayed in Florence, an intellectual abstraction to Michelangelo, who
in Rome lived as a poor man. He was melancholy and solitary, a type
associated equally with the uncivil peasant and with genius. His personal
habits having been the very opposite of magnificent, Condivi is at pains to
defend Michelangelo's character by pointing out his liberality to
others.====<That the divinely inspired genius was, beginning in Greek
times, an idea incompatible with wage earning, see further Kris and Kurz,
1979, pp.~113-14. Also see Barolsky, 1994, on Michelangelo's poem which
prefaces this book (pp.~58-62) and  passim.>====

             
Thus the directness with which Michelangelo believed himself to be divinely
inspired is the correlate of his deliberate self-deprecation. As when
Castiglione and others pretended to be shepherds, a fictive self-portrait
as a poor man need not be a modest gesture. Indeed, in the letter from
Leone that accompanied four of the medals, in 1561, he calls Michelangelo
``huomo divino.''====<V, MCCCXLVII, p.~244.>====
 Michelangelo is evidently both divine and humble, noble and poor,
compatibly. A man fiercely proud of his aristocratic lineage, Michelangelo
was also a man convinced that he was old and poor when he was
neither.====<And even before he could claim to be old, in 1512, he
advised his status-sensitive father in Florence: ``se voi non potete avere
degli onori della terra come gli altri cictadini, bastivi avere del pane e
vivete ben chon Cristo e poveramente, chome fo io qua, che vivo
meschinamente e non curo n\'e della vita n\'e dello onore, cio\`e del
mondo,'' Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, 1965, vol.~I, CVII,
pp.~140-41. Further on Michelangelo's idea of the character of the poor, a
letter to his father in November 1513, asking for ``qualche fanciullo,
figliolo di buone persone e povero, che fussi uso agli stenti,'' who will
come and do household errands for Michelangelo; CX, p.~145. Though
contrast his language when his plan for the cornice of the Palazzo Farnese
is insulted in 1547: ``non s'\`a
 d'aspectare altro da dua vilissimi furfanti contadini,'' vol.~IV, 1979,
MLXXXIII, pp.~267-68. On the facts of the Buonarrotti clan, see Spini,
1966, pp.~110-70. Strauss, 1966, pp.~469-75, concludes that there wasn't
much of one. For Aretino's mockery of Michelangelo's modesty, see Aretino,
1945, p.~237, from 1549.>====
 In that extraordinary and perhaps not merely legendary moment when the
artist told Julius II that the Apostles had been poor men and therefore he
would omit to put the finishing touches of gold onto the Sistine Ceiling,
he was making a statement more self-affirming than witty.====<This
version of the story is reported by Ascanio Condivi (it is relevant that
Michelangelo was paying for supplies himself). In later correspondence, he
uses the phrase ``povera cosa'' of the initial project, the Apostles alone.
See Cast, 1991, pp.~669-84.>====

             
             
The most pathetic poor person in Italian art of the Renaissance may well
be the Misero character in the Tarocchi series (H. E.I.1), naked and
shivering, snapped at by one dog and accompanied by a starving rat of
another dog, scratching its fleas [fig.~33]. Michelangelo cannot be
assumed to have known the Misero type, and is even less likely to have
remembered a Ferrarese engraving of a considerably less vigorous beggar
with dog and cane and plate [fig.~34], done in the later fifteenth century
and superficially similar to the design of the medal.====<He is,
however, reported by Condivi to have been interested in Ghirlandaio's
``libro di ritratti, nel quale erano dipinti pastori con sue pecorelle e
cani, paesi, fabbriche, rovine, e simiglianti cose''; Condivi, 1964, p.~25.
Vasari also reported on Ghirlandaio's interest in portraying peasants. In
the 1550 edition, Ghirlandaio is described ``ritraendo i contadini et ogni
altra persona che da bottega passava,'' while he was still a goldsmith. In
the 1568 edition, the specific reference to peasants was suppressed.>====
 But even if Michelangelo thought of the figure on his medal as a pilgrim
and was unaware of the precedents cited here, such a self-image bears a
more than coincidental similarity to images of the poor. That type would
traditionally, in a sacra rapprezentazione, have been humorous:
 
    ``Cieco, rattratto, e zoppo e sordo sono
    E scalzo e nudo, come voi vedete.
    Io non ho panno addosso che sia buono, 
    E 'l mio mantello egli \`e come una rete.''====< San Tommaso,
   D'Ancona, 1891, I, p.~611.>====
    
   (Blind, shrinking, lame and deaf am I, and barefoot and naked, as you
   see. I don't have any decent clothing and my cloak is like a net.)
    
 In the medal, though the effect is no longer comic, the imagery of
pilgrimage comes daringly close to the imagery of the peasantry.

Michelangelo freely associated with people his contemporaries saw as  
villani. Cellini described Michelangelo's servant Urbino, of whom
Michelangelo was apparently fond, as villanesco. Vasari tells how
Michelangelo, who would scarcely consent to work for a king, took it upon
himself to make a modello of the Crucifixion for a certain
Menighella, the nickname of Domenico da Terranuova (whose correspondence
with Michelangelo partly survives), ``pittore dozzinale e goffo di
Valdarno'' (a commonplace and clumsy painter from Valdarno) who made
paintings for contadini.====<See Barocchi, 1962, IV,
pp.~2121-23.>==== Michelangelo ``si metteva gi\`u lassando stare ogni lavoro
e gli faceva disegni semplici, accomodati alla maniera e volont\`a come
diceva Menighella'' (he would set everything aside and make simple drawings
for him, suiting them to the style and intention Menighella stipulated).
How one would like to see these deliberately simple designs by
Michelangelo! Vasari took the whole thing to be a joke, which no doubt it
was, as when Leonardo painted Medusa for a peasant's buckler. But it does
not strain the evidence past imagination to suppose that Michelangelo was
intrigued with what was low as well as with what was lofty. His genius, he
told Vasari, was owing to the air of Arezzo and the milk of the
stonecutter's wife who had nursed him. He wrote a long poem, replete with
genre imagery, about the happiness of the simple peasant, free of envy,
pride, avarice, and the true sort of baseness.====< Dated by Saslow
shortly before 1534; 
Buonarrotti, 1991, no.~67. For excerpts see notes 8,
268, 387.>====

More than any of his contemporaries, Michelangelo made the idea of
inexpressibility a theme of his art. This is a primary theme of the love
poetry in which he was steeped.====<See also Gilbert, ``Michelangelo's
Poetry: The Private Art of a Public Person,'' 1991, pp.~261-83.>==== As
Sannazaro puts it:
 
    Lingua non potria mai narrar, n\`e stile;
    Quante spine pungenti, e quante fiamme
    Eran d'intorno il periglioso laccio.====<Sannazaro, ``Rime for
   Cassandra,'' 1720. Cf.~Martelli, 1533, 15v: ``Ma perch'io veggio, ch'ad
   humano ingegno/Si alta operation tentar non lice;/Tacito col pensier
   v'adoro, e'nchino; and 42v: ``una ineffabile bellezza.''>====
    
   (The tongue may never tell, nor style, how many stinging needles, and how
   many flames, accompanied that dangerous noose.)
    
 Michelangelo deliberately carried some of the aesthetic of love poetry
into his self-identity as well as into his work as artist.====<On
Michelangelo's interest in pastoral, see Barolsky, 1994, passim.>====
Distinctively among artists, he appropriated a self-denigrating tone, a
norm for poets. As poet-painter he was at once abased and exalted,  
basso yet divino
 in confrontation with the beautiful art object, love object of the artist.
More than any other artist, he pushed the inversion of high and low. The
high style, whose emphasis on variety was so inimical to Michelangelo,
asserted the full expressibility of ideas and emotions: the more copious,
the more adequate to thought.====<The contrast is more specifically
with Virgilian epic; Macrobius had contrasted the ``divine simplicity'' of
Homer with that ornamented type (Saturnalia, V, 16).>==== With this
Michelangelo broke, without resorting to old-fashioned symbols by which to
allude to the invisible. Instead he used the aesthetic of the low style,
making the relationship between abasement of the artist and elevation of
his object a primary theme of his art. ====<The ignudi
 may be understood, if only at some intuitive level, as visualizations of
the miserable lover---Petrarchan and pastoral as nearly as
Neo-Platonic---adoring the divine that is out of reach. They are
associated with pairs of putti, who are as close to Cupids as one would
want to come in the chapel of the pope, at the same time that they, like
the ignudi, visualize genius itself. Lavin (1990, p.~236) has
suggested that the ignudi ``are only adult, monumentalized versions
of the putti in the frames of the Ovetari Chapel.'' In any case it is clear
that the stripling was at least as ideal a type as the heroic nude, and
partly for its androgyny---quite apart from speculations about
Michelangelo's sexual orientation. When Trissino in I ritratti wants
to praise Isabella's voice, he describes it as not too feminine, but boyish
(``suave, e mansueto, come sarebbe quello di uno fanciullo''), Bembo as
interlocutor. Chastel (1959, p.~296) sees the ignudi as neither
angel nor symbol but as representing ``l'instance de la beaut\'e, gage de
l'acc\`es au divin promis \`a l'\^ame.'' Egidio da Viterbo ( 
Sententiae ad Mentem Platonis) equates angels with the ``divine shepherd''
described in Plato's Stateman, 275. Without going so far as to claim
that these are Platonic divine shepherds, we may claim that their nudity is
less heroic than humble, less all'antica than simply natural.
Chastel appears to have been quite right about the amorous implications of these
figures.  What is lacking is acknowledgment of the implicit abasement of
the viewer. The traditions of love poetry and of Neo-Platonism often
worked hand in hand, but I take the former to be the larger, more popular
phenomenon. It seems unnecessary to use Lomazzo's Neo-Platonic reading of
Dante as a gloss on love themes in the visual arts, not because there is no
connection, but because the theory had become so diffuse, so melded with
the tradition of courtly love, that I doubt whether its users would
recognize it under such a label. According to Chastel, p.~201, ``Le
dogme-clef du n\'eo-platonisme est l'immortalit\'e et
l'universalit\'e de l'\^ame,'' a belief so general as scarcely to be
adequate as a definition of a particular intellectual stripe. The theory
of the gradual ascension to divine love and the concomitant negation of
earthly love is irrelevant to much of the love poetry which casually
denominates the beloved as divine or as angel.>====
 
             
In general, the Renaissance culture of women was a gear working against
the hegemony of the heroic ideal.====<Some of this material was
presented at the CAA Annual Conference, San Antonio, Jan.~1995, in a talk
entitled ``Low and High in Artists' Self-Imaging,'' given in the session
``Remapping Arcadia,'' chaired by Gloria Kury.>====
 As heroism became a value out of sympathy with political realities on the
peninsula, feminine modesty and humility were appropriated for male culture
through pastoral and other low-style literature, and for artistic culture
through Michelangelo's transferral of such poetical modesty to the visual
arts. The language of love became the language of beauty in art.
Michelangelo, says Vasari, made the Vatican Piet\`a in love and
effort (``Pote l'amor di Michelagnolo e la fatica insieme in questa opera
tanto''). In the Sistine representation of the Division of Light and
Darkness, ``mostra amore insieme et artificio'' (he showed love together
with artfulness). The beautiful art object becomes the love object of the
artist, in confrontation with which the poet-painter Michelangelo is at
once abased and exalted.====<Aretino portrays Titian in competition
with Love in representing a woman; 1957-60 [1542], I, CLIII, p.~226.>====

Poetry aside, what was considered most divine in Renaissance culture,
without also being holy, was the female love object.  When divino
came to be an epithet for artists, Michelangelo above all others, it was
already routinely used of both poets and women.  In both of these contexts,
it had come to convey, on occasion, less sterling qualities than when its
context was more exclusively theological.  Used of women, divino
might still imply some distant analogy with the purity and unworldliness of
the Virgin Mary.  Or it might bear less complimentary connotations of  
pazzia, that wildness poets were sometimes accused of.

When women were called divine, it was sometimes ironical, othertimes
objectionable. If her beauty was called divine, this almost necessarily
set up a certain irony, in that it could be eternal only as she was
preserved in poetry. As Sperone elsewhere explains, it is for women in
their divinity to impregnate the anima of men;====<Speroni,
1546, Signor Conte in ``Dialogo della degnita delle donne.'' See also
Fregoso, 1510.>==== it is made clear that the real beneficiaries of such an
arrangement are the men. In La civil conversazione of Stefano
Guazzo, first published in 1575, Signora Giovanna, acting as Queen for the
proceedings, criticizes women who allow themselves to be praised as
immortal and divine.====<Crane, 1920, p.~418.>==== More chronologically
apposite is the play called La Veniexiana, in which the slapping of
such praises to and fro contributes directly to the comedy of the
piece.====<See Ch.~2, this volume.>==== It was in respect to women that the compliment
first became facile and so discountable as mere flattery.

             
Not surprisingly, it is in poetry that living artists are first recorded
being deemed divine.  Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, painter and
poet himself, referred to his close acquaintance Perugino as divine in
his La vita e le geste di Federico di Montefeltro, written after
1482.====<Santi, 1985, vol.~II, Libro XXII, p.~674.  His own  
ingegnio he calls but ``basso e finito.'' To be of ``ingegno e spirto
pelegrino'' is highly akin to being divine.  Summers, 1989, pp.~15-31,
associates the adjective peregrino with the noun stravanzie.
Giovanni Santi used the former compliment of Luca Signorelli only three
lines after calling Perugino divine.>==== Perugino is paired in a stanza
with Leonardo, ``par d'etate e par d'amori,'' but there is no necessary
implication that Leonardo too is divine.  The accolade apparently implies
no comparison with the divine deeds or doers of antiquity.  Instead, as
had been true in the case of the divine Dante, there is some deliberate
confusion between qualities of subject and author.  Perugino paints
divine figures with lifelikeness; this is enough to render him a divine
painter, as far as Giovanni Santi is concerned.

             
Ariosto first called Michelangelo 
divine, punning on his name in the
thirty-third canto of Orlando innamorato. For Ariosto, the familiar
comparison with the long-lived ancients is very much at the center of the
compliment. In the first stanza he lists the great artists of antiquity,
and in the second, those of ``nostri d\'\i'': Leonardo, Mantegna,
Giovanni Bellini, Dosso and Battista Dossi, Sebastiano del Piombo, Raphael,
and Titian, as well Michelangelo, cited as both sculptor and painter. This
opening to the thirty-third canto appeared only in the second edition, of
1536. The edition of 1516 had contrasted the ancient warriors and their
cortesia with the sorry modern mores, citing in particular, and in
conjunction with the cruelty of the Turk, the seige of Padua. Thus
dispraise of the ``cor villan'' in 1516 was displaced twenty years later by
praise of the divine Michelangelo.

The early occurrences in Giovanni Santi's epic and in Ariosto's romance
indicate that there is no simple continuity between a Neo-Platonic theory
of poetic fury and recognizing certain artists as ``divine.'' Ariosto
apparently uses the idea of a divine painter only because he pairs it with
that of a demon painter. As we read on from his paired lists of painters
old and new, he observes that none of the painters he has named was able to
paint the future, like the demons under the command of his magician Merlin.
Given the full context, his ``complimentary'' list implies an ironic
attitude. Nor is the comparison of artist with demon fortuitous: not only
was Ariosto himself a poet of the magical, but his own father 
Niccol\`o had
been attacked by poets who may have seemed demons to the son.====<See
above.>==== If painters are like poets, they too may be either demons or
divine. Ariosto's compliment thus diminishes the special status of 
divine
poets without greatly augmenting that of painters; it simply feeds into the
general phenomenon by which ``divine'' became a less and less elevated sort
of epithet.====<Ascoli (1987, pp.~298-99) comments on ``the
accusations of poetic lying, bad faith, and demonic pride'' implicit in
this passage and others. Orlando, whose ``alto ingegno'' is often referred
to, ultimately goes mad. Indeed, his genius contributes to his madness
(p.~312), another sign of Ariosto's renunciation of the idealizing
tradition of Petrarch, Bembo, etc.>==== Ariosto calls himself one 
of ``poco
ingegno'' at the start of the poem, where more usually in so vast an effort
an invocation of the Muses would belong. He sings not of arms and the man
but merely ``Di donne e cavallieri li antiqui amori/le cortesie laudaci
imprese'' (1516 edition).

The name Michelangelo
 means etymologically, in a mixture of Hebrew and Greek, the messenger who
is like God. It was partly in recognition of this that Ariosto wrote the
line, ``Michel pi\'u che mortale Angel divino.'' ====<On Ariosto's
actual knowledge of the modern artists he names, see Gnudi, 1975,
pp.~331-401.>====
 Pietro Aretino more or less immediately put the compliment to more
obsequious use. His correspondence of 1537 is sprinkled with the
adjective, in reference both to Michelangelo and Titian. Ariosto's passage
was well enough known that an interlocutor in Ludovico Dolce's Dialogo
della pittura of 1557 is made to cite it, saying that Ariosto ``distingue
in tal guisa Michel'Agnolo da gli altri Pittori, che lo fa
Divino.'' ====<(he distinguishes Michelangelo in such a manner from
the other painters, that he makes him divine);
Dolce also refers to this passage
in a letter to M. Gasparo Ballini; see Dolce,
p.~fifty-nine [sic]. For the passage referred to above, p.~92.>====
 Almost by poetical happenstance, it may seem, the epithet had extended
from women to artists.

The process, however, was more involved. Since divine beauty of the
beloved was a customary theme of low-style poetry, using the word  
divine of artists tended to reappropriate an important word of praise
which had been---it was thought---overlavishly granted to women. This
adulation was now reintegrated into the male ideal, which was in the
process made to extend beyond the heroic. The discourse of beauty that had
developed in love poetry was thus redirected toward men and specifically
toward artists. Both doubt and confidence were expressed in this expansion
of the adjective ``divine'': doubt in the heroic ideal, which was thus
supplemented, and doubt in the feminine ideal, which was thus being
subverted, and confidence in the act of awarding praise, confidence in the
importance of art. The profession of artist appropriated some of the
social importance that the conventionalized female love object had earlier.
Once routinely assigned to the ideal, and humble, beloved object, divinity
now attached itself to the artist. Anton Francesco Doni puts this baldly.
In a letter which opens ``O divino huomo'' he affirms that he prefers the
art of the divine Michelangelo to a divine flesh and blood woman:
 
    et di pi\`u quella Aurora [fig.~35] fa lasciare delle
   pi\`u belle et pi\`u divine donne che si vedesser mai per abbracciare
   et baciar lei. Et io, per me, soavit\`a
    maggior ho trovato in lei che in infinite altre di quelle che la natura ci
   ha dato per nostra consolatione.====<Buonarrotti, 1979, p.~161, letter
   of Jan.~12, 1543. Aretino puts it still more directly, punning on the
   courtesan Angela's name as he refers in a letter to 
   ``Tiziano divino
   e... la Zaffetta angelica''; in Oct.~1549, p.~239. On Angela del Moro,
   see Aretino, 1957-60, III, p.~195.>====
    
   (and more, that statue of Dawn makes me want to leave off with the
   most beautiful and most divine women ever seen in order to embrace and kiss
   her. I myself have found a greater comfort in her than in an infinite
   number of those that nature has given us for our consolation.)
    
 As the ideal of woman was the less honored, the artist was substituted.
The familiar pun on ingigno, to give birth, encouraged this kind of
thought-sliding. A man gives birth to ideas as a woman to children; the
analogy was a pathway by which the praise of women might be transferred
back to men. Aretino wrote to Michelangelo, for instance, of his ability
``ritrarre qualcune de le maraviglie di continuo partorite da la
divinit\`a che ingravida lo intelletto'' (to portray any of the wonders
that constantly are born from the divinity that impregnates the
mind).====<Aretino, 1957-60, II, CCXXI, p.~63. See also, Fregoso in
Ch.~2, this volume. The same metaphor was used by Socrates.>====

Far more women were recognized as divine than poets or artists ever were,
feminizing and cheapening the associations of the word. So by the time it
came to be used of artists, Michelangelo included, the word was beginning
to be less purely complimentary than when it had come to be used of
poets.====<In Orlando furioso, Angelica herself, called  
diva, Dea, and explicitly as well as implicitly angelica in
beauty (though not, as far as I know, divine), is of course more
enchantress than angel. By contrast, a real virgin, Isabella, ``era bella
s\'i, che facea il loco/Salvatico parere un paradiso'' (XII, 91).>==== Far
more women were recognized as divine than poets or artists ever were,
feminizing and cheapening the associations of the word. Even Francesco
Berni, comic, was called divine.====<In a poem by Anton Francesco
Grazzini, called Il Lasca; Berni, 1887, pp.~59-60.>====
 And when Gabriello Symeoni wrote satirically in the mid-sixteenth century
of the literary academies of his day, it was mockingly that he referred to
the requirement that one ``e'n petto haver lo spirito divino'' (have in
one's chest the divine spirit).====<Symeoni, 1549.>====

Moreover, the epithet could be less a genuine accolade than a mere
statistic. For increasingly it was recognized that the real measure of
respect resides with public opinion: ``Cioe la Nobilita tutta consistere
in opinioni, & la fama publica mettere alcuno come in possesso della
Nobilita.''====<``Thus nobility consists entirely in opinion, and
public report can make a person as though in possession of nobility,''
Romano Alberti, 
1585, p.~8.>==== By a not-too-tenuous extension, one might
claim that it is public opinion that makes art divine and noble. It is not
merely coincidental that a woman's reputation had always been understood as
subject to the whims of public respect.

When Aretino was portrayed by Titian in a woodcut frontispiece to poems
addressed to one Madonna Angela Sirena, he was shown as a shepherd beside a
laurel bush, she as a siren in the sky [fig.~36].====<100 x 123mm,
Aretino, 1537. See Rosand and 
Muraro, 1976, no.~42, pp.~194-95.>==== It was
a mixed compliment for both parties.

             
 The ready model for one operating beyond the bounds of reason was the
distraught lover, whose poetry would be crude in style and whose  
ingegno
 is made divine by love. Titian and Michelangelo, both of whose techniques
left the marks of fury upon the object, were divine like the lover rather
than industrious like the humanistically inclined artist characterized by
Alberti. They abrogated the theory of high-style art and the istoria
in favor of an unruly art which nature herself might well imitate. Nature
is said to have been remade by Michelangelo and Titian, just as in pastoral
literature the landscape grieves with the poet, conforming to his
outlook.====<``Michelagnolo; il quale ha messo in tanto travaglio la
natura e l'arte, che non sanno se gli sono maestre o discepole: altro ci
vuole per esser buon dipintore che contrafar bene un veluto e una fibbia da
cintura!'' Aretino, 1957, vol.~I, XXXII, 1537, p.~57; also in 1537,
XXXVIII, ``ne le man vostre vive occulta l'idea d'una nuova natura,''
p.~64. And of Titian, ``nel cui stile... vive occulta la idea d'una
nuova natura,'' DIX, 1549, p.~288.>====
 The furore of poets---and by extension, of artists---is potentially
but the correlate of the divine pazzia of the women who inspire them;
both offered an alternative to the norms of clarity and reason, sometimes
with direct allusion to the uselessness of reason and rank in a world that
has experienced recent catastrophic events.====<Vasari speaks of
Leonardo's pazzia. In a suggestive passage in the second edition,
Vasari quotes Petrarch to gloss Leonardo's inability to complete his works:
``l'opra fusse ritardata da des\`io, come disse il nostro Petrarca.'' See
also Landi, on the divine pazzia of women, and the pazzia of
the world in general; and on crazy poets, see also Berni, 1887, p.~42 ( 
Dialogo contra i poeti). The word capriccio, like pazzia,
enters the vocabulary of aesthetic ``approbation'' during the lifetime of
Michelangelo. See further Emison, ``The Ignudo as Proto-Capriccio,''
to appear in Word and Image.>====

The history of admiration of divine genius in the arts between the time
of Leonardo and of Titian offers a means of understanding the exchange
between art and society on a less literal level than the sharing of themes,
metaphor, symbol, and other intellectual commonplaces.  The  
non-finito of the impetuous divine artist reformulated the  
rozzezza of the low-style poet.  The concept of imitation, at least as
previously understood, was losing value at the same time that the concept
of low style was growing in use.  Rusticity need no longer imply a lack of
good style but instead was assimilable to the desirable end of cultivating
an improvisatory air.  It is no small shift, from admiring complexity,
elaboration, and learnedness in art to esteeming the felicitous ignorance
or abrogation of rules.  What was at issue was the presence of  
ingegno, be it even basso.  Castiglione's Cortegiano, for
all its ostensible idealism, documents this attitude, its sprezzatura
a way of being more perfect through imperfection, achieving what might have
been natural, namely grazia, through art.  The ``ideal'' thus lies in
the direction of being self-consciously unpolished.

Part and parcel of being cast as divine was being known as demonic in
some sense.  Not unlike Seilanion in antiquity (the artist who whacked
off pieces of his bronze statuary to show that he wasn't satisfied with the
finished product), the young Michelangelo broke off the tooth of the  
Faun he had imitated from a piece of antique statuary, in order to respond
to Lorenzo de' Medici's criticism that an old faun would actually lack
teeth.  This sopra-finito contains the germ of the mature
Michelangelo's non-finito, by which imperfection, born of wild or
crazy impulse, may be understood as a species of perfection.  The story
also presents Michelangelo's difference from other artists, even as a
youth, as eccentric rather than straightforwardly better.  Condivi
mentions Michelangelo's bont\`a e simplicit\`a in the
matter;====<Condivi, 1887, p.~26.>==== Vasari uses the same words.
These were the shepherd-like qualities by which Michelangelo found favor,
not the family claim to higher social status than it could afford.  Like
being pazzo, being divine raised one above the ordinary, but
without implying exemplary status---as when Ariosto paired magic and art.
A solution analogous to making the upstart contadino an object of
fairly good-natured fun, this sort of attention for deviance neatly avoided
threatening the status quo.====<An engraving by Zoan Andrea (H.~2),
which shows a kneeling, young nude with a laurel crown in his hand,
inscribed ``EL MATO,'' seems to fit the type of the lover, a type most
famously exemplified by Ariosto's Orlando.  The laurel crown often appears
in prints, awarded by a lady (see H.  A.IV,16, 36; cf.~also A.II.5).  The
engraving (like Bramante's Temple Interior, H.~1) might conceivably
have been a source for Michelangelo's Sistine ignudi, though there
the patron's oak garlands replace the laurel wreath.>====

Michelangelo thrived on these complexities.  The affinities between poverty
and strength, blindness and purposefulness shown on his medal were cardinal
to his thought.  He habitually thought of himself as poor and exploited
like a peasant, and as metaphorically blind, as one who had to find by the
touch of the chisel what was invisible within the block of marble.  Leaving
crude surfaces on some of his statues forced a blindness upon the viewer, a
literal embodiment of a faith akin to that of the blind pilgrim on the
medal. ====< Arguably, the beginning of the aesthetic of  
non-finito was Petrarch's vernacular love
poetry, sometimes titled by him ``Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.'' The affinity
between the rough finish of Michelangelo's Slaves and the norms of
the rozzo stile was apparent at least by the time of Michelangelo's
death, when his nephew gave four of the statues intended for the tomb of
Julius II to Cosimo I, who had a new, larger grotto constructed
to receive them.  Baldinucci later commented on the appropriateness
of the setting; see Mourlot, 1977, II, pp.~308-9.  On sculptures of
peasants for the Boboli Garden, done in the second half of the
sixteenth century, see Lazzaro, 1991, figs.~150, 191, 195, and also
pp.~150-54.>====

             
On the mundane end, Michelangelo thus instructed his nephew Lionardo to find a wife
without a dowry (though noble): ``guardare... solo a la bont\`a, a la
sanit\`a e a la nobilit\`a, e far conto, quando una bene allevata,
buona, sana e nobile non abbi niente, di torla per fare una limosina; e
quando questo facessi, non saresti obrigato a le pompe e pazzie delle
donne'' (pay attention... only to goodness, health, and nobility, and
consider in the case of a woman well brought up, healthy, noble but
indigent, taking her as a charity; and when you have done this, you will
not be obligated to supply the pomp and craziness of women).====<28
February 1551, MCVIII, 1979, IV, p.~358. Cf.~MCLXIII, p.~365, where one
poverissima is preferred, ``senza dote, per l'amore di Dio.''
Lionardo married Cassandra Ridolfi.>====
 The display of a humble type on the verso of his Michelangelo's medal was
thus utterly compatible with pride, couched in the low genre. The objects
of Michelangelo's art owed their divinity to him, just as low-style poets
gave the objects of their poetry a kind of divinity. As one poet plainly
put it: ``il mio servir per dea vi adorna'' (my servitude adorns you as
goddess).====<Cosmico, 1478.>====

             
                             [mothers] should teach their children
                             not to criticize anyone because of his
                             poverty or the low birth of his lineage or
                             other misfortunes, for they are sure to make
                             bitter enemies from such actions or develop
                             an attitude of arrogance.
====<Barbaro's ``On Wifely Duties,''
The Earthly Republic, Italian Humanists
on Government and Society, 1978, p.~225.>====
 
             
 Many of the literary descriptions referring to the lowest class are
specifically about male laborers. So this haggard and barefoot woman with
infant children, called here Peasant Mother 
[fig.~37],====<H. E.III.28, 168 x 94 mm, c.~1470-80, one impression known.>====
 can be no icon of normality as the peasant so often is, no alter ego for a
poet. This engraving confronts the viewer with an image of dire
misfortune. It is as though an ancient Roman were asked to buy an image of
the crucified Christ. This abject person, clothed in rags, despised by the
society to which the viewer belongs, is yet included in its art. Why?

Presumably she is no love object, if only because she carries three babies.
A woman who is not the object of either religious or civic devotion, and
not the subject of portraiture, is a rarity in Renaissance imagery.
Compositionally the work is as reductive as the tiny printed icons of
saints, but instead of being invited to pray, we are left either to scorn
or to sympathize. There simply was no type which combined the qualities of
virtuous, old, and female, so we may assume that this image does not praise
nobility under the cloak of praising poverty. Whereas many art-historical
projects involve looking for texts to ensure the normality of what got
represented, in this case ultimately we pursue disparity, for the sake of
determining to what degree the poor achieved a presence in art that was
denied them in literature, perhaps also in life.

She appears to be pregnant again; yet she is no icon of fertility and
abundance even remotely akin to Botticelli's drawing (British Museum,
London) of a graceful nymph bearing a cornucopia.====<On the pregnant
hag as a typical grotesque, see Bakhtin, 1968, p.~25.>==== The profile pose
which sets off her bulging figure keeps her remote from the viewer, more so
than the infants, at least one of whom gazes toward the viewer. Although
titled by Hind Beggar-Woman, no such action is shown. A satchel and
canteen are slung over her shoulder; she is not without possessions. Her
demeanor seems merely resigned. Perhaps she may be called a gypsy more
aptly than a beggar, as, it has been proposed, is the mother in La
tempesta.====<See Ch.~2. this volume.>==== Certainly Peasant Mother
 would serve as a less prejudicial title than Beggar-Woman.

Tellingly enough, an old and haggard woman was sometimes the type for
Poverty.====<E.g., the fourteenth-century relief by Giovanni di
Balducci from Orsanmichele, now in the Bargello. The woman holds a scroll
and is attacked by a cur.>====
 But the inclusion of the infants makes that an unlikely interpretation. A
woman with infants, and often with three such similarly aged ones, is the
type for Charity. But this woman is not nursing, and there is no display
of tenderness between mother and 
child.====<Cf.~Domenico Campagnola's
Woman in a Landscape, Seen from Behind, with Three Children, H.~19,
called by Hind Charity. If a Charity, it is a most unusual one.
More likely, a strict iconographical identification is inappropriate here.
See also the quite beautiful anonymous engraving, H. Plate 885, of a
mother and child, with two dogs nearby. Dogs often are associated with the
theme of poverty, though, other than being barefoot, this woman is not
apparently needy. Lucantonio degli Uberti's engraving of a woman with two
embracing children in a landscape, and rabbit (H. D.III.3).>====
 She looks more in need of charity than able to dispense the
same.====<Both the relatively early presumed date of the engraving and
the absence of evident malignity discourage identification as a witch.>====
 
Here, as in the case of the woman in La tempesta, painted as much
as several decades later, there is a particularity of circumstance that
discourages understanding the figure as a personification, while at the
same time, she has the status of a protagonist in a work not apparently
narrative. The humble medium of engraving is used here for a particularly
humble artistic task, one for which painting had no scope yet. Instead of
assimilating things rustic to things noble by virtue of the purity of
poverty, the artist in this case shows a woman as hopelessly poor and
uncouth and yet the artist's primary subject.

We might take this to be a piece of pictorial realism and designate the
work as genre. The dress of this woman is particularized and her gaze
remote, which may support the idea that this figure does not belong to any
iconographic type---as do a few other engravings from northern Italy in the
second half of the fifteenth century which might otherwise seem comparably
simple. One of these is a small engraving showing two peasants, in frontal
and profile views [fig.~38] sometimes attributed to Giovanni Antonio da
Brescia (H.~5) or Zoan Andrea, and more recently to the Premier
Engraver.====<See Washington, D.C., 1973, no.~87, p.~232. The
existence of the engraver Zoan Andrea has been questioned by S. Boorsch;
see London, 1992, pp.~55-66 and no.~57, p.~239.>==== It is, at any rate, more
closely tied to the school of Mantegna than the engraving of the
impoverished mother, both in technique and style. These figures, barely
discernible as two different peasants rather than two views of the same
figure, share with her the broad-brimmed hat and torn clothes.

Neither of the men is as strikingly static as the peasant woman. They are
stock figures, easily imagined within the context of an Adoration of the
Shepherds. They distinctly show attentiveness and deferential approach,
respectively. Other ``realistic'' engravings show peasants taking wares to
market and can thereby be seen as an extension of the traditional Ranks and
Conditions of Men, with Beggar and Servant starting the series. Within a
pocket of works showing the lower classes, done in Ferrara and Mantua in
the later fifteenth century, the engraving of the peasant mother is
especially curious because she fits the predictable types so poorly. She
is not a comic figure; neither does she perform any labor for which she
might be looked upon favorably. Should the viewer, then, neither scorn nor
sympathize? Are we supposed to gaze at an inexpressive figure
unemotionally? What would be the point of this exercise, so unusual in the
art of the time?

Like the Nude Man Seen from Behind 
and La tempesta, the 
Peasant Mother 
declines to idealize women. The sex of the poor person portrayed in
the engraving is crucial to its interpretation as an unusual image; most
imagery of poverty centered on the male, in part because the plight of the
needy woman was often complicated by prostitution. Because of this, it was
not only in the iconography of the Tarocchi that the Misero
 was represented as male. In San Bernardino's sermons preached at the
Campo of Siena in 1427, for instance, the poor man is paired with the
mendicant. Indeed, in at least one instance the person denying alms to
either of these types is cast as a woman, who makes the beggar wait and
then tosses a piece of bread out of the window onto his
head.====<Bernardino da Siena, 1989, II, no.~XL, 117, p.~1194.>====
Reinforcing this gender identification is the idea that the mendicant or
beggar betokens God himself: ``el povaro ti stende la mano in persona di
Dio'' (the poor man extends his hand to you in the person of
God).====<Ibid., XLI, 42, p.~1210.>==== When, rarely, San Bernardino does
describe a poor woman (povaretta), he again describes a niggardly
housewife whose only charity stipulates that any poveretta
 should first haul water, sweep, and spin.====<Ibid., XL, 138,
p.~1199.>====
This counts for nothing, he warns; this is not true limosina. Our
artist is careful to show a poor woman not assimilable to the type of
servant, as also not to the type of whore. She is deeply anonymous, like
so many figures in the low style.

The engraving is presumed Ferrarese. In that city the crude power of
wealth was as evident as anywhere. Borso d'Este was probably second only
to Cosimo de' Medici as an example of someone who had risen from a lowly
lot to a prestigious one. And he, too, had done so with the help of  
il popolo. He had been elected Duke by the proclamation of the people
over the rights of his brother Lionello's heir. In 1450, ``chiamante tuto
il populo: viva, viva lo illustre signore messer Borso, signore liberale;
e cos\`\i cum voluntade del populo di Ferrara, fu facto'' (all the
people shouted, long live the illustrious lord Borso, liberal ruler, and
thus with the will of the people of Ferrara, it was done).
====<Ferrara, 1933, p.~33. Cf.~Guicciardini, 1951, p.~137, no.~93: ``merita
grandissima riprensione el duca di ferrara faccendo mercatantie, monopoli e
altre cose meccaniche che aspettano a fare a' privati.''>====
 
Ferrara was a city with a less established bourgeoisie than Florence.
The nobility was remade by successive dukes as a personal base of support,
in Borso's case with the aid of reclaimed land. ====<Tristano, 1983,
pp.~97, 172-73, 293-96, 311-12, and idem, 1987, pp.~43-64; Torti, 1980,
p.~2 and passim; and Gundersheimer, 1973, pp.~127-72.>====
 It was, in other words, a place where the Duke's favor counted as much as
or more than birth (the Duke himself was illegitimate), and such favor was
often extended to those not noble without it. ====<See, for example,
the story of Ludovico Casella, counselor to Borso, who ``non era
gentilhomo, ma da la villa de le Caselle del Polesene de Rovigo''; he was
mourned at his death in 1469 by the whole town, ``da ogni homo amato,'' and
carried to the grave by gentlemen; Ferrara, 1933, pp.~58-60.>====
 Ferrara, then, was a society where neither the ensconced aristocratic
families held rein, as in Venice, nor a glorified bourgeoisie, as in
Florence. The power achieved in the dispensing of wealth was more evident
there than perhaps anywhere else in Italy, for Cosimo acted more subtly and
Alfonso, for instance, was both magnificent and
noble.====<Gundersheimer, Ferrara, p.~150, compares the
opportunities for the non-aristocratic in Ferrara to those in Florence.>====
 
Definitely not of the influential popolo which might or might not
yell ``Viva, viva,'' this woman is the epitome of neediness, and of
powerlessness---so much so that she does not actually beg, but only looks
needy, and more so than any man would look. Dire pitifulness on the part
of the poor, and especially the female poor, is generally excluded from the
visual arts at this time. Only rarely was even routine dispensing of
charity depicted.====<In a Pollaiuolo School drawing (Uffizi), the
mothers with small children and the crippled beggars are upstaged by the
vigorous angels toting shoulder bags of alms.>====

The case of images of poor men is typically quite different. The  
Misero in the Tarocchi series [fig.~33] is depicted not for the sake of
pity but in support of the social hierarchy understood as itself a natural
fixture. An engraving of a beggar (H. E.III.23), again accompanied by a
little dog, an isolated work rather than part of a series, is an even less
forlorn sight [fig.~34]. The man is comparatively robust, relatively well
clothed and not shivering, actually begging, and equipped with prayer
beads.

In another example, this time a painting, a laborer wearing brown, carrying
a barrel on his shoulder and a cane in his hand, occupies the foreground of
the panel in the Walters Gallery, Baltimore, which depicts an ideal
cityscape [fig.~39]. He limps across a piazza decorated with four statues
situated high atop columns. These statues represent the Cardinal Virtues,
but curiously, in place of Prudence there stands Abundance.====<Zeri,
1976, I, no.~96, pp.~143-51, dated c.~1500; Dal Poggetto, 1983,
pp.~71-78. She assigns the painting to the 1480s and to Luciano Laurana,
with the figures attributed to a collaborator, possibly Bartolommeo della
Gatta. The meaning she seeks in Augustine's City of God, as a lesser
level of the progression fully idealized in the corresponding Urbino panel.
Cf.~the drawing by Jacopo Bellini (Paris, fol.~64) showing such a porter,
in more detail, the crudeness of his features plainer, juxtaposed with an
armored knight astride a horse modelled on those of San Marco. For
suggestions of a symbolical reading of another porter, grouped with a
falconer and a man bearing a flowerpot, see Degenhart and Schmitt, 1990,
London, fol.~13v-14.>==== Why should Abundance takes the place of Aristotle's
fourth virtue; why, amid such opulence, does a poor man appear in the
foreground?

An anecdote, recorded more than once during the Renaissance, tells of a
poor servant in a marvellously richly appointed room. A visitor spat upon
the face of a servant, explaining his curious behavior by the fact that he
could find nothing else vile. ====<``Credendomi che voi l'aveste a
punto salvato per tale effetto,'' Queraldo speaking to King Peter of
Aragon, in Domenichi, 1923, no.~75, p.~34.>====
 The poor man in the Baltimore painting, like the servant in the story,
belongs in the rich setting because he contributes to its perfection. The
city needs the poor man; moreover, that need is acknowledged with a
directness which deserves our attention. No contradiction exists between
the wealth of the city and the poverty of the figure. This is true even on
the literal level: presumably he is carrying supplies. On a more
theoretical level, each is as it ought to be, since a city may be defined
as ``una communit\`a di abitanti distinti in poveri et ricchi, nobile et
ignobile, ambiziosi et abietti'' (a community of inhabitants differentiated
into poor and rich, noble and ignoble, ambitious and
abject).====<Giannotti, 1990, p.~79.>==== 
The city's wealth demonstrates its corporate prudence, by which the poor
man is kept in employment. Wealth or abundance, Aristotle implies,
makes prudence, or more exactly
$\acute\epsilon\lambda\epsilon\upsilon\theta\acute\epsilon\rho\iota\alpha$ 
(liberality) possible.====<Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X,
viii.4. This follows a discussion of Prudens, or
$\phi\rho\acuteo\nu\eta\sigma\iota\varsigma$.>====
Historical records repeatedly admit to bad times so dire that the lowest
classes were driven to eat grass for survival.====<This was true of
the Venetian peasantry in the years 1527-29, as reported by Sanudo. See
Padoan, 1978, p.~131. In the chronicles, the peasantry often is
pitiful---starving, or the victims of pillage, seen in the city usually
when dire conditions drive them from their homes and they are reduced to
beggary. For instance, on Sept.~11, 1509, Sanudo reports how poveri
contadini, men and women, with children and possessions, were fleeing to
the city from Piova: ``era gran extreminio a verderli venir.''>==== Against
such a historical reality, this figure's mere raggedness looks less in
conflict with the colored marbles and perfect pavements. We are shown not
the extreme of poverty but the mean, and this is to be taken as a good.
The theory of magnificence had a certain built-in tolerance for poverty,
often greater than the allowance that the art of magnificence made for the
sights of indigence. As Luigi Alammani would write much later:
 
    I pi\`u ricchi Signior, l'igniobil plebe
    Viverse insieme, ritenendo ogniuno
    Senza oltraggio d'altrui le sue fortune.====<Alammani, 1590, p.~42.>====
    
   (the richest lord and the ignoble worker live there together, each one
   not resenting the other's lot in life.)
    
 Wealth and poverty were more complex opposites than good and evil.

Borso and others of his ilk, both praised and blamed for lavish
expenditures, ====<Pontano praises as magnificent the houses he
provided for his followers; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II)
commented censoriously: ``He desired to seem rather than to be magnificent
and generous... even in the country he used gold and silver dishes'';
Piccolomini, 1959, p.~114; 1974, I, p.~406 (Book II). The contadini
and popolo were not gratified by Borso's decision to have a mountain,
called Monte Sancto, built in January 1471, according to the local
chronicler (``non era utile alcuno''); see Gundersheimer, Ferrara,
p.~155.>====
 might have found in the engraving of the Peasant Mother the proper
opposite to wealth, an image of poverty all the more suitable for being
female, her children implying her identification as peasant rather than
prostitute. For, to present the scheme crudely, women should be poor.
Liberality and magnificence were generally reserved for
men.====<Though see Trissino, 1524.>==== Although San Bernardino in his
sermons on charity singles out the old miser and the vain woman of rank
with her fancy clothes, most images of charity depict the benefactor as
male, as indeed was often the case. This engraving would ``work'' for the
Renaissance viewer, Ferrarese or not, because it presented a certain ideal
of womankind, as the proper recipient of male charity. This is the sort of
woman who will make the viewer manly by his magnificence rather than
effeminate in his luxuriousness. To be avaricious is an effeminacy,
according to Matteo Palmieri: ``sempre si debbe fuggire la avaritia la
quale \`e di si maligna natura che spesse volto infirma, & fa
effeminati'' (one ought always to flee avarice which is of so bad a kind
that oftentimes it renders one weak and makes one effeminate.)
====<Palmieri, 1529, p.~83v.>====

The spontaneity of the buying and selling of prints distinguished it from
the more prolonged patronage process by which paintings were
commissioned. ====<I see no reason to assume, in this case, that the
less expensive work of art was necessarily aimed at a less affluent public.
The imagery suggests otherwise.>====
 In a society which used turning away beggars as an index of loathed
avarice, the willingness to pay for an image of one in need of charity
could count as an easy token of liberality. The subject of such a work
triggered the impulse to give money. In a sort of decoy realism, one
engaged with the image rather than with the woman. She is to be seen in
relation to the types she abrogates, Poverty and Charity, despite the fact
that she neither begs nor gives. Handing over a coin for an engraving of a
beggar or peasant made intuitive sense in the same way that handing over a
large, contracted sum made sense for a painting that looked like a room or
a tract of land. And it could certainly be done with gracious expression,
as Pontano had emphasized in his treatise, 
De liberalitate.

The poor who appeared in art typically did so as part of a concerted effort
to perceive them as accessories to the rich, rather than in their own
right. In the Concert champ\^etre [fig.~2], a poor man has stopped
his labor to pay attention to a matter of the spirit purveyed by a rich
man. The women there, gathered in attendance like shepherds around a
Bellini Madonna, are tokens of the ideal; at the same time they are, with
deliberate moderation, indecorous. At the ideological center even of this
cardinal pastoral painting is wealth and its privilege. Wealth is being
idealized by being shown to be compatible with icons of purity, the nude
and the shepherd. The same is true of an engraving such as Peasant
Mother.

Like a nymph who resembles Venus without commanding the respect due the
goddess, the Peasant Mother derives from established types and then
is designed to prevent their accumulated meanings from transferring.  She
is not so beautiful as a figure of Charity; she does not so much personify
poverty as label poverty feminine and thus identify it with weakness.  In
its way, this is a highly decorous image.  As a work of art, it demands
respect neither for what it represents nor even for how it is represented:
it does not aspire to the status of masterwork, in any genre or style.  Far
from being a realistic image of poverty, it bears meaning as a signal to
dispense wealth.

There are many other static women in Renaissance art,====<Cf.~Emison,
``Lucretia,'' 1991, pp.~385-90.>==== but few others who are also old,
ugly, and without explicit narrative context.====<Cf., though, 
H.
A.IV.14, Old Couple as Lovers>====. One who occurs in a narrative context
but whose characterization seems to be a function solely of her
compositional role occurs in Benozzo Gozzoli's Drunkenness of Noah at
Pisa, Camposanto. She helps to establish the linear perspective effect of
the arbor without being so obtrusive as the damsels around her.>==== One such
crone in poor clothes is Giorgione's Col tempo
 (Accademia) [fig.~40]. In size and composition like a portrait,
Giorgione's Col tempo was probably painted a couple of years after
Leonardo's Mona Lisa. That painting discreetly broke with the
aristocratic type previously popular in Florentine female portraits,
presenting a bourgeois wife with whatever dignity and grace an almost
imperceptibly smiling woman could command. The woman of Col tempo is
not only outside the aristocratic type but ugly and downright lowly.
Giorgione, instead of discovering natural beauty in the absence of rich
ornaments (the nature, that is, which Leonardo professed to admire and
which to some degree is seen in Mona Lisa), personifies the nature
Leonardo had dreaded---the goddess of decay, dissolution, and deluge.

The woman of Col tempo is offered to the viewer as a memento
mori
 or at least a reminder of time's inexorability. But she warns us off from
women as much as from vanity, this antiquity offered in place of Antiquity
(as Berni said of his grandmother), and peasant offered in place of a
receding (or at least increasingly debilitated) feminine ideal. Although
iconographically Col tempo might seem less radical than the 
Concert champ\^etre because its moralizing theme is stated so
unmistakably, that would overlook the important similarity of the two.
Both are paintings of subjects underendowed with conventional pictorial
dignity.

The Peasant Mother presages this. It is not a comic work of art,
like the Sausage Seller and the Chained Stag, nor does it
present an ideal type, like the Young Prisoner and Michelangelo's
medal verso. It presents Woman without either idealization or mockery
though also not particularly realistically. It shows some commonality with
Leonardo's instructions to himself to go out and set down what he saw on
the street, but it is not a sketch after life. Nor is it a figure study
for incorporation into larger painted compositions, for what is presented
is not a common visual type. It exists because an artist had the idea of
making art without conventional beauty and without compositional
elaboration. Although the artist did not cleanly escape the iconographical
conventions of his time, the work is better understood in categories of
stylistic level than by iconographic types. Innovative and original, the
work is yet modest. It speaks in a rozzo voice yet expects our
attention. Here the nonadored, if not despised, has become the sufficient
object of art because the work is now understood as a prop for the viewer's
interpretative ruminations. The artist need not uniformly practice
unstinting ambition because it is understood that his art extends to the
choice of how rozzo or bello to make it. The issue of what is
artificial, what is artistic, what is natural, has become complicated by
the admission of a low art which is neither necessarily realistic nor
popular. One could now be low precisely for the sake of art. The print,
with its lack of strong surface allure and hence of ready rhetorical
potential, lent itself to the practice of omitting to provide the finish
associated with the high style, be it conceptual or visual. The more
overtly low the art, the more blatantly non-finito of  
invenzione
 as well as of mark, the more the obligation of the recipient to undertake
a meditative and relatively open-ended process of viewing.




                                Postscript
 

Marking out part of the breadth of Renaissance art has been our aim here,
rather than assembling a list of key low-style works. Although there are
many more works of the low style than have been mentioned here, none of
them can claim to be particularly key, for individual low-style works do
not generally generate reputation, either for the artist or for themselves.

As we redirect our attention away from images of the beautiful and
admirable, interpretation becomes more problematic. The response of
implicit endorsement of and identification with the figures represented in
high-style art is at odds with the age-old conditioned enmity toward the
peasant class or the haggard woman, for instance. But neither has our
primary aim here been to offer a corpus of images whose realism is hardest
to interpret because it comes closest to transcribing the highly complex
social interrelationships and unadulterated prejudices of the period into
art. Instead our plan has been to look at the history of expanding
patterns of interpretation.

The Renaissance play of volition in understanding these works of art is
necessarily open ended and never to be recovered in finalized form. In this
it resembles our own. As part of their makers' posture of modesty, the
images we have studied here flatteringly delegate an enhanced portion of
their invenzione to the viewer, thereby enhancing the potential for
an art which fails to endorse the status quo. Works in the low style were
finished when they had been understood, rather than when a certain
understanding had been reached. They allowed for parody in place of
praise, the pregnant omission of any overriding axis of idealization, and
the bleeding away of standard iconography and traditional meanings.

Renaissance art did not acquire the cultural weight it did merely by being
didactic, grand, and affirmative. Art had been that before, albeit without
the factors of classicizing reference and the eloquence associated with the
term istoria. The art senz'arte, which laid claim neither to
impressive scale nor expense, often not to rarity either, was looked at and
thought about with fewer constraints and implicit imperatives. Such works
tested the possibilities of non-finito as that relates to  
invenzione, whereas Alberti had conceived of invenzione as a
procedure finished even before brush was first lifted.

Our ongoing task consists of conceptualizing the many works of the low
style, or even the less than fully high style, as nexi of thought
potentially quite different from that characteristic of the heroic high
style: less reverential, less uniform, and potentially even more artful.