What Did the Renaissance Patron Buy?

Gilbert, Creighton E., Renaissance Quarterly

. . . the absurdity so current in romantic art history, of taking it for granted that it was the painter or sculptor who was responsible for the subject matter of the work. The employer . . . gave his orders as he would to a carpenter, tailor or shoemaker. The artist could be creative and personal to the extent of his natural and acquired capacity, but always within the conditions imposed by the person who gave the order.

- Bernard Berenson(1)

Patronage study is an active subcategory of current work in art history. A 1994 issue of a journal devoted to it cites recent conferences on the subject in Washington, Melbourne, and Hamburg.(2) It postulates that the reasons for the subjects of works of art are clarified when we have detailed knowledge of a patron's interests. Berenson is an interesting advocate for this approach because his own work is very different. It is part of the social history of art, which in a pure form (probably never actuated) might treat the object of art as an item of production and exchange, much as wool textiles might be treated in the case of Florentine merchants. More commonly, the work is viewed as a product of two energies in which the artist articulates, by rendering shapes, the message assigned by the patron. This most often makes the patron the more interesting figure, as one sees in the greater intensity of analysis of his part. A difficulty - which seems generally understood but, regrettably, little articulated - is the uniqueness of each work of art, unlike a bolt of cloth, so that with each commission the two persons concerned address a new problem. Hence the social history of art seems less successful than other social histories in building up findings about large trends seen in objects, except when it focuses on popular production, mass art, or to use a new term assigning more prestige to it, "low art." Yet when, as is more frequent, the social history of art deals with what investigators consider aesthetically admirable, and they have to investigate all patrons, the information about them may indeed not be much trouble to collect, but is often harder to connect with the works they bought.

For Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, the chief overt source of patron desires is in contracts, which are their purchase orders. Collections of these have been published in books on art and society, notably about fifty precis selected by John Larner and about twenty-five full texts by David Chambers.(3) This material seems disappointing. Meyer Schapiro, the notable social historian of art, found that Chambers's cases rarely extended beyond specifying pigments, sizes, and delivery dates - quite like what we might have found for bolts of cloth, and unchanging for most items in a given medium, in this case movable paintings.(4) The one variant in each contract is the subject matter, but it too is limited to a standard formula such as "Saint Jerome" in the case of a figure, or for a narrative "The Adoration of the Magi," i.e., a short title of the same kind that today we adopt for captions under the illustrations in art history books. The one further specification found fairly often is the relative placing of such elements, to the right or left of others or the like. Because we are much interested in the individual differences between one Adoration of the Magi and another, and in our present context postulate patron control over those differences, such contracts are of little help, nor do other, rarer, documents often do more. Hence it has become usual in patronage studies to turn to looking at the works, noting special distinctions of props, gestures, or facial expressions, and then assigning these to patron instructions.

Because there seems little evidence for this, one might question the foundation of these studies. The general lack of any statement of theory by social historians of art is a further difficulty. A rare presentation of one theory by Leopold Ettlinger is thus welcome, the more so in that it appears in a well-qualified study of a particular monument. He found that it was "nothing unusual" for patrons to determine imagery "down to details."(5) His book is based on the view that the work he discusses - the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel walls - was determined so as to propagandize for a political policy of the pope through unusual detailed features. That Ettlinger wrote just as the current style of social art history was emerging may have made him more explicit. He had no contract to cite, but others who do describe the formulas about pigments and so forth as establishing "extremely detailed" "assertion of control."(6) If what the contracts require is indeed being taken as the main basis for such controls, their degree of detail does seem to leave a lot uncontrolled. Berenson's formula matches the contracts better, if they are taken to assign to the "creative or personal contribution" everything but titles. Schapiro, while also calling these contracts "minutely detailed," added that with respect to the "taste of the time" the patron "respected the artist's judgment," not only in styles but in the "beliefs and values of the age." If so - and the contracts seem in harmony - patrons diminish in interest as to art history, and the most promising focus of social art history would seem to be artists. A sympathetic discussant of the present investigation proposes to define the "current art historical assumptions on this question: . . . the patron determines the iconography of the given work" while the artist is in charge of "style and presentation." One may accept this but still see a problem: can one separate the two roles where iconography shades into presentation? How far is the patron's assignment of a title determinant of the image? If we do not agree that a title constitutes "detailed control," is there a basis for deciding who usually controlled the details? This question is the theme here.

To continue with Ettlinger's case study, his hypothesis is that besides the literal theme of the lives of Moses and Christ, with its traditional message of prophecy fulfilled, the Sistine frescoes also argue for the pope's objection to the conciliarist movement and his assertion of papal supremacy. Lacking documentary basis, Ettlinger finds support, as indicated, in the differences between these frescoes and earlier ones on the same subjects. He supports the assignment of these differences to that cause by showing that the pope had this viewpoint, and on two points of broader art historical theory. One is that the details so explained have too much theological sophistication to have been within the artist's capabilities; hence the patron must have introduced them, quite likely assisted by a specialist from theology or humanism. That the artist would have been unable to master such things is likely enough, but the theory may be lacking when it allows only one other possible provider. Artists with unusual commissions are on record in the period as having called in their own advisors, thus diminishing patron control; this will be discussed below. The second point of theory is that we must have accepted the scholar's particular reading of the extra messages in the monument, yet consensus in such cases is rather rare among scholars, while the proposals are very numerous. To be sure, rival interpretations by others tend to involve equally sophisticated explications, yet when all readings remain less than firm, there is room to debate their common postulate.

Ettlinger offers a further more mundane support for his underlying postulate in his phrase "nothing unusual," i.e., that there are enough known cases of patronal input of complex detail to make it plausible when not recorded. In fact he cites just two cases as firm; the same two recur in other scholars' comments, raising the question whether these (even if solid) are the norm or oddities. Chambers's set of twenty-five contracts includes only one with such complexities, and it is one of Ettlinger's two. This, the contract between Isabella d'Este and Perugino, will be explored below. Ettlinger's other case, probably the most often cited of all, is the letter of 1424 that Leonardo Bruni wrote to a patron group, a major guild, offering a program for a work it was commissioning: the famous bronze Doors of Paradise of the Baptistery of Florence executed by Lorenzo Ghiberti. However, as Ettlinger does not add, the doors did not make use of this program. Within the general theme of the Old Testament a number of different stories were shown. Richard Krautheimer, in his fine book on Ghiberti, noted the discrepancy, but at once added as "likely" that the patrons would have turned to another humanist, since that was "established custom."(7) However, he cites no prior cases, nor is any known to me; perhaps it was a matter of general belief. He does cite, very suitably, involvement of two other humanists in this same project.(8) One record, probably reliable though known only from an eighteenth-century description of it, reports that the patrons went to Bruni only after being dissatisfied with "some learned men's" scheme for the stories; this might mean several programs or one by a group. The other record is a letter of 1424 from one Florentine humanist to another, calling the patrons hasty. "I hear they have consulted Leonardo Bruni, and from that brilliant start I guess other things." His reaction has plausibly been called sarcastic. This writer did not know of the probes before the one to Bruni mentioned in the first record. We have a series of consultations that were unsuccessful. They may represent custom, but the unique records may instead match the unique status of the doors, a monument of extraordinary cost, visibility and prestige.

One further record claims to name the inventor of the program that was used. Ghiberti writes in his memoirs for his son and collaborator that he was "given a free hand to do the door in whatever way I thought."(9) It is agreed that the claim means the iconography (because other factors were consistently in the artist's control in any case, and so are not mentioned by him), but Krautheimer rejected it as false. He points as his basis to Ghiberti's errors in the description of the doors that follows, but this argument seems less strong when one reflects that it would with equal force prove he did not execute them, as he did. To stipulate humanist advisors is not unreasonable, but we know from Ghiberti's other writings that he himself sought out such persons, whose information on minor classical texts and on technical problems he then copied. If one of them offered him a program, the important difference for us, as against one obtained by the patrons, would be that it would come not as an order but a proposal which he could manipulate quite freely, choosing what he thought workable.

If he did on the other hand receive a program from the patrons, the Bruni letter is our only good evidence for what it would have been like. It turns out to be just like the contracts, made up of a list of titles only. One line at the end, however, points to providing more details and symbolism. Bruni there first sets up an interesting theoretical distinction between two factors desired in good art, "pleasure in beautiful design and significant meaning"; - which sound rather like the more recent "form and content." Assigning these to two producers, he ends: "I would like to be near whoever does the design, to have him adopt every meaning that the story carries."

The formulation "more details later" recalls clauses in some contracts providing that artists would later get more instructions. Though Larner exaggerates in saying they are found "often,"(10) he and others have reasonably found in them a support for the existence of detailed instructions despite their absence from the contracts. They hardly ever survive, and may generally have been verbal as Bruni implies. Yet it is also notable that outside the contracts they would not have bound the artist with any of the legal force present in the case of the pigments and schedules, and one must ask whether, unlike us, patrons found them a less important factor.

Only two such texts are known to me. One is a supplement to Sassetta's contract for his great Franciscan altarpiece of 1439, and Banker in publishing it rightly pointed out that it fills this gap.(11) The contract alluded to it, noting that the artist must paint "those stories and figures as specified to him by the priors and friars, as more fully contained in the same instrument of agreements." It may then have had contractual force, and that might explain its rare survival. Further reinforcing it, the contract notes that the friars, wishing to "declare" the figures and stories to be painted, have read over the list and confirm that the artist "is held to and must" ("teneatur et debeat") paint these same ones in the indicated places.

However, the writing turns out not to be what all this might suggest. It reports first that two friars have been delegated by the rest to arrange the stories and figures "in the way that seems good to us and to the master together" ("si come pare a noi e al maestro insieme"). The artist's duty is not to the patron's say-so, as the contract alone would indicate - and that is usually all we have - but to the agreement between them.

The text's sixteen clauses then specify the images and relevant location of the work, the Virgin Mary and forty-one saints, but all but three of the clauses once again are limited to titles and names. Thus it does not extend patronal control at all beyond what contracts normally provide, as has been suggested in the absence of any such documents.

Of the three more special clauses, two involve the front and back predellas. The one on the back was devoted to a local figure in San Sepolcro, the Blessed Ranieri. We are given no titles for the scenes in his life, contrary to the procedure used in the case of Saint Francis in another clause. Instead, the friars will send them later (ve manderemo), so that, uniquely, this decision is postponed to a third phase. It will be suggested below that this happened hardly by coincidence in the case of the least familiar themes. If they then sent him the same kind of instructions as for the Saint Francis stories, they would again have been titles only. The second exceptional clause, for the predella with Christ's passion, provides only for choosing the most devout stories, or, one might say, those most likely to induce devotion ("quelle che sono piu devote"). Here the absence of titles cannot be explained as in the preceding case by unfamiliarity. Because the text specifies the entirety of what the painter is obligated to do, not to be supplemented unless so provided, there seems to be only one inference as to where the responsibility lay for choosing the themes, i.e., with the artist. Even if logical, this may seem counterintuitive. Yet it is vividly supported by the discussion of "devout" imagery by Francesco Datini in 1390-91, to be discussed shortly, and within this same text by the third unusual clause. This is the very first one, providing that the Virgin and Child are to be adorned with angels in the way the master thinks best ("come al maestro parra meglio"). Besides assigning a decision to the artist affirmatively, this is the only clause that extends from titles to the way a figure is treated, in an enriching way, and the two factors seem to go together well. It is the more striking because it involves the one most prominent and holy of the images in the work for the friars; the same occurs in the second and last such supplement to a contract known to me.(12)

Besides such supplementary papers (conventionally described by Larner as "provided by the patron and which the artist is to follow") and the humanist instructions most often exemplified by the Bruni letter, one other support was noted above for assigning "detailed" control of themes to the patron. This was Ettlinger's proposal of a political subtext for the frescoes of the Sistine walls, as an instance of sophisticated symbolic intent. Here again, while no record of the period seems to evoke that approach, a contemporary text seems to place quite a different slant on it. This is a letter to the patron, Pope Sixtus IV, not available when Ettlinger wrote, dedicating to him a translation of a classical work. It pauses to praise the pope at much length for building the chapel, whose size, quantity of tapestries, gold, and marble make "viewers fall into wonderment." The copious and beautiful religious decorations, representing the "two laws," show balanced figures full of beauty and the felicity of art, i.e., professional skill. The brushwork makes them seem to live, with infinite lines skillfully placed, appropriate colors, everything that shows perfect art of painting. The survey, here reduced to a small precis, concludes with the rich floor.(13)

The subject occupies the single phrase utriusque legis, correctly noting how the Old and New Testaments are paired. That is their literal title, without other levels or ingenuity of symbolism. Without those, the text indeed might be said to address only one aspect of the work; instead, the theme has a very small part in what makes one praise the pope for ordering it. This seems significant in that the writer, at the time, had been one of the pope's two private secretaries for two years. Proposing to flatter him, he must be allowed to have known how to do that, and his text is thus as good a candidate as one could ever ask to represent what the pope was proud of asserting here: he had commissioned excellent art. A nice support for this deduction exists in the next earliest comment on this fresco cycle, well known but usually dismissed as a trivial joke. Vasari's life of Cosimo Rosselli, one of the team who painted these frescoes, assigns more than a quarter of his space to the way the pope reacted to them.(14) The pope had promised a prize to the painter whose work he would judge the best; among other things he was distinguishing among their individual products. Rosselli, Vasari explains, was unhappily conscious of being the least good among the colleagues (Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino) and resorted to compensating with lavish gold leaf. He ended up winning, confirming the earlier praise for richness as a primary form of art criticism.

To sum up so far, support for detailed patronal control of themes and other factors of commissioned art seems to have had three bases, the hypothesized learned advisor, the contract supplement, and the sophisticated meaning. Examples brought forward as especially strong by proponents were considered for each. Enquiry, however, suggests instead more active roles by the artists than postulated (Ghiberti's memoir, the Sassetta clauses) or a far stronger concern with the artist's accomplishment by the patron (Sixtus's secretary). Because the proponents' own examples generated these negative results for the formula (the one other most frequent citation, of Isabella d'Este, will emerge below) one might conclude that it is not to be maintained, but that would be thin at best. What follows is an assemblage of lively accounts of patron-artist relationships in the period, evoking not a simple formula but a nuanced range, specifically for iconography of painting and sculpture. Although these will be presented in approximate chronological order, it may be underlined that the passage from Trecento to Cinquecento seems not to mark any big changes, and it has seemed more helpful at times to group the accounts by other criteria. How patrons did their ordering shows more variety than permits a summary, from market strolls to files of correspondence, but it will be argued that there is a rather better definition of what they preferred to obtain.

Some of the simplest, and early, references match the case of Sassetta's predella of Ranieri. In 1407 Spinello Aretino contracted in the normal way to paint the life of Pope Alexander III in the town hall of Siena. The pope had been born in the town, and this was a new theme, but the images were in most cases reducible to people kneeling before rulers and the like. However, for a sea battle the patrons voted that Spinello should use "the paper that Betto di Benedetto provided (commodavit)."(15) Much the same circumstances had arisen in 1335 when Pietro Lorenzetti was working on an altarpiece for the Siena cathedral, and the committee paid for having a saint's life translated for the artist. The need for such help, Martin Davies remarked, is not surprising, because "the Bollandists themselves have confessed that they knew practically nothing" of this saint.(16) In both cases special descriptive texts helped the artist face an unfamiliar text for one part of a job, and the patrons had to take steps to include this theme, as with Ranieri. To be sure, patron input here is hardly different from proposing a relatively uncommon Bible text, which the artist would also go and read. The difference is between that uncommon text and the rest of his project where evidently he did not need anything similar, to judge by these documents. The latter case is, by extension, articulated in a contract of 1461 for Benozzo Gozzoli to paint saints with their "suitable and usual" costumes and "usual decorations."(17) Instructions go no further, because what is usual is evidently known to the artist already, as regular professional information. To extrapolate from the Ranieri type of report to the view that figures generally were "very precisely determined" by patrons does not seem justified.(18)

A much richer earlier record illuminates the "devout" clause in Sassetta's contract. This is a set of letters of 1390-91 from the very wealthy merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, to a friend in Florence who acted as his business agent there.(19) It offers the give-and-take of discussion about ordering a painting that would otherwise have occurred orally, as will be seen in a few later cases too. We have Datini's side in his own words and also when the agent quotes him back to himself (including phrases from letters that do not survive) and we have the artist's side also reported by the agent. On 22 December 1390, the agent tells Datini that his request to get a painting of Our Lord was too indefinite; did he want Him on the cross or in some other image? The artist Datini wanted is out of town, he adds, and he suggests another whom he had used himself. He reports the arrangements he had made with the latter, which once again were for titles, dimensions, and prices. A week later he reports that this painter has advised the Pieta as a theme, that is, "our Lord emerging from the tomb with Mary at his side," and names a price to include gold leaf. Finally he notes that the artist advised including some saints, and so he asks Datini to name any particular saints he wishes. This matches the well-established pattern in which saints in paintings are the particular patrons of patrons, so that the provenance of otherwise similar Madonnas may be inferred through them; indeed one may reasonably say that a choice of saint would not seem likely to be left to an artist even if other themes were.

Datini's reaction comes to us through the agent's next letter, which begins: "I have absorbed what you say …

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Publication information: Article title: What Did the Renaissance Patron Buy?. Contributors: Gilbert, Creighton E. - Author. Journal title: Renaissance Quarterly. Volume: 51. Issue: 2 Publication date: Summer 1998. Page number: 392+. © 1999 Renaissance Society of America. COPYRIGHT 1998 Gale Group.

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