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