Renaissance Studies Vol. 1 No. I

‘Equal excellences’: Lornazzo and the explanation of individual style in the

visual arts MARTIN K E M P

The cult of the individual artist, as an individual with a recognizable creative personality worthy of biographical attention, may fairly be regarded as one of the signal characteristics of Renaissance art. The assessment of individual artists plays a prominent, even dominant role in the later literature on the period, taking its cue from the new genre of biographies of artists that arose in the Renaissance itself. It is surprising, therefore, that this phenomenon has not been analysed in a more sustained way with respect to the attitudes towards artistic individuality in the period itself. The rise of the notion of genius has been discussed, to be sure, but the framework within which the separateness of individual style was explained - above all in the sixteenth century - has only incompletely entered the foreground of historical analysis. The researches of those students of the period who have examined the nature of humanist writing on the visual arts-in particular Michael Baxandall and David Summers amongst recent authors - have naturally addressed the question of individual style at various points, but I think there is a good deal to be gained in drawing out this theme as a defined topic in its own right.’

I hope that it will prove a rewarding theme, not only for its intrinsic interest but also for the light it throws on the nature of Renaissance writing on the visual arts, particularly the remarkable burst of underexploited literature in the second half of the sixteenth century. It will also bear productively on the perennial question of the tension between systematic

T h e studies on which this paper is based were undertaken at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in connection with a forthcoming book on The Science ofArt. The research was generously financed by the Institute, the Levcrhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the British Academy. The paper was presented as the Annual Lecture of the Society of Renaissance Studies at the Warburg Institute on 10 January 1986.

I M. Baxandall, Giorto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971) and Painting and Experience in Fiftcnrth Century Italy (Oxford, 1973); and D. Summers, Michehngelo and rhc Language o j A r t (Princeton, NJ. 1981). I am alsohappytoacknowledgeDavidSummers’s ThJudgcmentojSense (Cambridge, 1986),whichl wasfortunate enough to read in typescript at a vital stage in the preparation of this study. See also N. Ivanoff, ‘I1 concetto dello stile n e b lettvatura ardstica del ’po’, Qucrdmri dcll’Instifuto di Sforia deN’Arfe dell’ Universitcl degli Studi di Triesrc, 4 (1955).

0 1987 The Society for Renaissance Studies. Oxford University Press

2 Martin Kemp

imitation and individual genius, a problem which persistently tormented theorists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.

In teasing out the Renaissance attitudes I intend to begin by approaching the fifteenth century through a relatively systematic examination of three topics, increasing in complexity:

(I) The recognition of the existence of individual style; (2) The description and critical analysis of the different styles; (3) The construction of an explanatory model for individual style in terms

of its deepest causes.

In the sixteenth century the first two topics will occupy relatively less attention, since they may be taken more or less as read. It is only in this later period that the causes of individual style became a matter of widespread attention, culminating in Lomazzo’s explanatory model, which is probably the most complete of any before the nineteenth century.

In the fifteenth century, particularly during the early phases in the establishing of the theoretical and critical literature on the visual arts, a clear framework for the acknowledgement and description of individual style did not emerge in a consistent manner. There are a number of reasons why this should have been so- beyond the obvious fact that we are witnessing the infancy of modern critical discourse and would not expect the visual properties and linguistic formulae to fall into immediate harmony.

The central reason is that the dominant thrust of art theory in the fifteenth century was devoted to the promotion of a set of principles which lay beyond the vagaries of individual style. Alberti, who set the tone for such endeavours, was inherently distrustful of individual ingenium in as far as it was equated with capriciously individualistic inspiration. His use of the famous topos in Seneca of the writer (or artist) as a bee gathering honey from a variety of different kinds of flowers shows this distrust clearly. Whereas Seneca used the analogy to show how the creative individual can breathe his own particular spiritus into the resulting compound, Alberti exploits it to illustrate his argument that the artist should draw the rules from nature rather than relying ‘upon one’s own ingegno on setting about paintings as do most of the painters of the present day’.2

This tendency to place emphasis upon qualities other than those, specific to the individual does not of course mean that any of the theorists believed that a totally anonymous, ‘absolute’ style was either possible or desirable. If we look at the three theoretically minded artists in the era before Leonard0 who expressed the keenest sense of individual inventiveness, namely, Brunelleschi

2 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972). w-8. Cf. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistuiae morales, 84.

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 3

(as represented in Manetti’s early biography), Filarete and Frances0 di Giorgio, we will observe an untroubled mingling of praise for absolute rule and for the unlimited inventive powers of the individual ingegno ~rfantasia.~ In’ a sense, I think we are seeing here an instance of the truism that a problem only becomes a problem when someone says it is. It was taken for granted that individual artists possessed particular abilities, even to the extent of specializing in specific genres of painting for which they showed a special talent. Perhaps the most obvious example is Simone dei Crocejssi, the Bolognese trecento painter whose name referred to the off-the-peg crucifixes which were his stock-in-trade. In this context, the recognition of individual qualities would have been taken for granted without being articulated within any critical framework, let alone requiring profound explanation in relation to the eternally valid rules of art. However, the increasing efforts devoted to the definition of such rules, alongside the rise of the cult of the artist in biographies, meant that this easy framework of untroubled assumption could not persist.

It is significant that the first direct attempt by a theorist of art in the Renaissance to address the question of individual style should have been made by Cennino Cennini, an author less constrained than Alberti by allegiance to a set of codified theories. I think it is not unfair to say that Cennino’s intellectual ingenuity has been consistently underrated. It is obviously true that the vernacular, cook-book quality of his Libro dell’arte is strikingly different from the humanist sophistication of Alberti’s De pictura, but this should not lead us to overlook his consistently shrewd eye for usable ideas from the world of learning. I have drawn attention elsewhere to his ingenious use - at some remove - of the Horatian notion ut pictura poe~is .~ When we turn to his ideas on individual style, we find a no less effective adapting of literary notions. When discussing the education of the young artist, he recommends the choice of one master as a model for style: ‘as you go from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his air’ (di suo maniera e di suo aria).5 If the student attempts to embrace the manners of different masters, his style will become fantastic and confused. Upon the solid foundation of the style of a particular master, the young artist’sfantasia will permit him or her to build a distinctive way of painting: ‘you will find, if nature has granted you anyfantasia at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good’.

3 M. Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis to Fkuia”: the quattrocento vocabulary of creation, inspiration and

‘4 Ibid. 368-9. 5 Cennino Cennini, If fibro dell’urte, ed. P. Thompson (New Haven, Conn., 1932), IS.

genius in the visual arts’, Viator, 8 (1977). 346-98.

4 Martin Kemp

The worthy Cennino, in his own particular way, has introduced a number of the key motifs in the later discussions of individual style in the Renaissance. His sense of the advantages of studying one particular exemplar is, like his use of Horace’s ut pictura poesis, related to a humanist topos. Cicero had set the pattern by recommending only one master for the aspiring orator, in a passage glossed for the fifteenth century by Guarino’s lectures on Cicero’s Rhetorim6 Closest to Cennino in argument, date and geographical origin is Pier Paolo Vergerio’s I 396 letter arguing against Seneca’s eclectic theory: ‘one should take a single writer - and him the best - whom one imitates before all others. . . So one should do what painters of your own age do, who, though they may look with attention at famous paintings by other masters, yet follow the models of Giotto alone.”

Cennino’s actual terminology makes equally ingenious use of up-to-date frames of reference. Fantasia, the term which possesses such wide-ranging resonances in poetics and medieval faculty psychology, is obviously important. Most notably in the fifteenth century it was to become a central concept in Filarete’s idiosyncratic advocacy of his own inventiveness, and it came to play a key role in the early phase of Leonardo’s promotion of the creative powers of the painter. No less important are Cennino’s terms for style, rnaniera and aria. Muniera is the standard word, as in the rnaniera greca of the discredited byzantine style, but, as we know from previous analyses of mannerist theory in the sixteenth century, it was to become a term loaded with significance.s Aria is less standard, and, at this date, more remarkable. A famous text by Petrarch gives us a good idea of what is meant:

In imitating a literary model, the writer should take care that what he writes is similar to but not the same as that which he is imitating. The similarity should not be like that of a portrait to the man it is portraying . . . but like that of a son to the father. In this case, even though there may be a considerable dissimilarity of features, yet there is a certain shadow, which our painters call an air (uerem), most apparent in faces and eyes, that causes the resemblance which, upon our seeing the son, recalls to our mind the memory of the father, even though every feature may be different if we resort to measuring: something hidden there has this effe~t.~

‘Air’ in this sense is somewhat different from Cennino’s individual style, which was particular to one artist. Rather it refers to a shared quality

6 Guarino, Commtum . . . super arfem novam M T C , Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 681, fol. 108r-v, quoted by Baxandall, Giofto and the Orators, 41 n. 66, Cf. Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV, iv, 9.

7 Pier Paolo Vergerio, Epistofario di P i n Paolo Vergerio. ed. L. Smith (Rome, 1934). 177; see also E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Wesfern Arr (Stockholm, 1960). 13.

8 See, above all, J. Shearman, ‘Maniera as an aesthetic ideal’, Renaissance Art, ed. C. Gilbert (New York, 1970). 181-221.

9 Petrarch, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti ef al. (Milan/Naples, 1955). 1018. See L. Spitmr, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, Md, 1963), 62; also the chapter on ‘Aria and Manien’ in Summers’s, The Judgement of Smse, and Michelangelo, 5 6 - 9 .

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 5

between a master and followers - much as we might refer to the Leonar- desque style of Luini in Milan. Either way, aria refers to the j e ne sais quoi of resemblance which can be discerned instinctively but not described in words. It has something of t h i s quality in Angelo Galli’s poem in praise of Pisanello, in which the artist is credited with ‘arte mesura aere et desegno / Maniera prospectiva et naturale’.1° This sense of ‘air’ as a peculiarly visual property, elusive of definition, may also suggest a further reason why the early Renaissance experienced di&culty in articulating the features of individual style. Petrarch implicitly acknowledges that it is a matter for ‘sensing’ rather than verbal formulation. We may go further and say that when the early Renaissance writers on the visual arts looked to their favourite literary models for adaptable criteria, they would find only the most limited guidance in pinning down the elusiveness of individual style. One contributory factor is that individual styles in literature had not been (and indeed cannot be) discriminated with the same minute degrees of intuitive judgement as those in visual arts. I think it is eternally unlikely - computers or no computers - that discrimination of literary style will ever be able to achieve the level of nuanced refinement that can define the graphic styles of, say, Raphael, Guilio Romano and Francesco Penni around 1520 (albeit with more than enough room for continuing disagreement). To a larger degree than usual, Renaissance writers on the visual arts had to invent their own new framework for the analysis of the individual styles of artists. When we turn more systematically to our three themes - recognition, description and explanation - we find that the classical authors and the humanists who looked towards them in the fifteenth century provided limited guidance.

I Recognition of the existence of individual style

It was here that the classical authors provided the most promising guidance. Cicero’s acknowledgement of different but comparably estimable talents in his D e oratore was unsurprisingly taken up by Lorenzo Valla and applied to his hypothetical connoisseurship of sculpture by Phidias and Praxiteles. Valla is able to delight equally in their art because ‘I understand the diversity of the ingenium of the two artists’, compared to a less sophisticated observer who might feel impelled to judge one better than the other.’l In a comparable vein, Alamanno Rinuccini in the dedicatory letter of his translation of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana concluded his brief assessment of leading Florentine painters by noting that ‘they were all considered different

1 0 Quoted in G. Vauri. .& uite: I , Getitile da Fabriano ed il Pisanello, ed. A. Venturi (Florence, 1896).

I 1 L. Valla, D e uerofakoque bono, ed. M. de Panizza Lor& (Bari, 1970), as De voluptatc in Opera (Basle, 49-50. Set Shearman. ‘Maniera as an aesthetic ideal’, 186: and Baxandall. Painting a d Experience, 77.

1540). 953. Cf. Cicero, De ormre , 111. 7. See Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis to Fantasia”’, 390.

6 Martin Kemp

among themselves in their variety, yet very alike in excellence and goodness’.12 Pliny’s account of the various specialized contributions of the Greek artists to the development of the visual arts also provided a suitable model for the humanists, and gave Valla the key to incorporate individual style into the pattern of progress: ‘Each [painter] invents something different, and what each individual regards as excellent in the work of another, he tries to imitate and rival and surpass.’13

All this is much as expected, and reflects nothing more profound than the natural transposition of a critical framework from a familiar field, which had been developed to a point of some sophistication, into a cognate area which had been largely devoid of systematic critical judgements. However, there were also signs that more subtle visual discrimination of the j e ne sais quoi of individual hands was becoming apparent outside the humanist framework. In 1476 the widow of Augusto Beccaria complained to the Duke of Milan that three painters, Bonifazio of Cremona, Vincenzo Foppa and Jacopino Zainario, had produced unsatisfactory results in a L$e of Christ in S. Giacomo at Pavia. The nature of the complaint, as conveyed by the duke to the painters, was that their diverse hands had resulted in a work lacking unity: ‘we say to you and desire that you take care of it according to your obligation, by arranging that the painting is not done by so many hands as it would seem to be done, so as to make the work unharmonious (disfrmu)’.l4 A similar acknowledgement that artists generally manifested separate ‘hands’ can be inferred from Bartolomeo Fazio’s estimate that the works of Lorenzo and Vittorio Ghiberti on the Baptistery doors ‘agree together so well among themselves that they seem to be by one and the same hand’.15

z Description and critical analysis of the different styles

When it came to the detailing of the nature of the different styles, the humanist vocabulary began to visibly creak and groan. This is not to deny that a few of the more perceptive observers made a fair attempt at matching categories inherited largely from rhetorical theory and first-hand observa-

12 A. Rinuccini, Lettere ed orazioni (Florence, 1953). 104-8, and the text given by E. H. Gombrich. Norm arid Form (London, 1966), 13p-40, trans. pp. 1-2, and trans. C. E. Gilbert, Iralian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Docurnetits (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980), 18j-6.

13 L. Valla, Orario in prhcipio sui studii (1455), ed. J. Vahlen, Sirzungsberichre der Philosophisch- Hismriscliew Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaftcn, 62 (I 86~), 94-5. !See Baxandall, Giorro and rlte Orators, I I 8-20. 14 Quoted by F. Wittgens, Vincenro Foppa (Milan, 1949). I 14; trans. Gilbert. Italian Art, 126. For a

revealing discussion of the sense of an artist’s ‘hand’ with special reference to Mantegna, see M. Warnke, ‘Praxis der Kunsttheorie: Uber die Geburtswehen des Individualstils’, Idea. Jahrbuch dn Hamburger Kunsrhalle, I (1982). 54ff, esp. p. 56. I am grateful to Frank Zollner for drawing this to my attention.

15 B. Fazio, De viris illusrrihs (1456), chapters on ‘De xulptoribus’, rev. Vittorio Ghiberti. Text in Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 167.

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 7

tion. Filippo Villani, in his late trecento compendium on Florence and its famous citizens, was the first to face in extenso the problem of encapsulating a series ofartists’ characteristics in a few phrases. Villani is generally stronger when evoking the effects of masterpieces by Giotto, rather than characteriz- ing the way that his works differed in manner from those of other artists. However, in praising Maso di Banco as ‘delicatissirnus omnium’, Stefan0 for imatatio . . . in figuratis corporibus’ and Taddeo Gaddi as excellent in ‘edificia et loco tante arte’, he did achieve a rudimentary kind of differentiation between their various visual skills.16 Rinuccini, in the 1472 letter from which we have already quoted, did less well than Villani. His statement that the works of Filippo Lippi are ‘more rich (omatus) than the images made by Giovanni (Fra Angelico)’ does not give the observer much guidance. l7

That the problems may be more a reflection of existing vocabulary than of visual awareness is suggested by the failure of artist-authors to make more subtle differentiations. Perhaps the weakest aspect of Ghiberti’s account of trecento artists is his difficulty in categorizing their styles, in contrast to his vivid description and praise of their works. Maso is said to have ‘introduced short cuts’ in the art of painting; Ambrogio Lorenzetti was ‘most noble in composition’, ‘very expert in the theory of art’ and ‘much better and far more learned than any of the others’ in Siena; while Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi are credited as ‘gentile maestri’.Is Some fifty years later Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, left little room in his rhyming chronicle for estimates of individual artists, and the comments he did make are far from unambiguous. Did he mean that Piero della Francesca - ‘antic0 piu’ than the Pollaiuolo brothers-was simply older or more ‘antique’ in style!l9 By categorizing the young Perugino as a divin pictore he may have been describing the pious air of his paintings, though I suppose he could also have been alluding to Perugino’s actual character. (The two factors should not, as we will see, be regarded as separate.)

However, from the middle of the century we can watch the critical vocabulary coming to bear more adeptly on the problem of individual style. Michael Baxandall has effectively examined these developments already, but I think it might be helpful in our present context to review the key texts for their underlying attitudes. The texts are Bartolomeo Fazio’s D e viris

‘.

16 F. Villani, Liber I-& ciuitatis Fiorentiniaefamosis ciuibus (1381-2), ed. G. C. Galletti (Florence, 1847). 5.

17 Runuccini in Gombrich. Norm and Form, 13g-40. 18 L. Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. J. von Schlosser (Berlin, 1916). 41-2. 19 G. Santi, La vita e lagesta di Federip di Montgeltro, Duca d’Urbino, ed. L. M. Tocci, 2 vols (Vatican,

1985). xxu, 674. See L. Bek, ‘Giovanni Santi’s “Disputa d e b pit!xra”-a polemic treatise’, Analccta romana insriruri Danici, 5 (I-), 75-102; also Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 113; and R. Dubos, Ciovanni Santi (Bordeaux, 1971). 54%

For Villani’s chapter on painters, see especially Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, -8.

8 Martin Kemp

iflustribus, Cristoforo Landino’s Dante commentary and, less expectedly, a report on Florentine painters from the agent of the Duke of Milan about 1490.

Fazio’s chief interest for us in our present endeavour is for his recognition of the specific aptitudes of particular artists for particular parts or kinds of painting. Even Gentile da Fabriano, whom he admired above all the other Italians, and considered ‘suited to all kinds of painting’, is recognized especially for ‘his decoration of buildings’.20 Similarly, Pisanello is ‘credited with almost a poet’s talent for painting the forms of things and representing feelings; but in painting horses and other animals he has in the opinion of experts surpassed all others’. Donatello, not unreasonably, is singled out for ‘faces that live’, a phrase that Fazio annexed from Virgil’s Aeneid .

This recognition of horses for courses is acknowledged in an even more specific form by a report on a loose page in the Milanese archives in which Ludovico Sforza’s agent characterises the few leading artists, presumably for potential employment:

Sandro Botticelli, most excellent painter on panel and on walls: his works have an aria virile and show the highest ratiovality and harmonious proportion. Filippino son of the excellent Fra Filippo: pupil of the aforesaid, son of the most noted master of his time: his works have an aria p iu dolce: I do not believe they show as much skill (arte). Perugino, notable Master: and particularly on walls: his works display an aria angelica, and very sweet. Domenico Ghirlandaio, good master on panels and better on walls: his works have a buona aria, and he is expeditious, and handles a lot of work. All the aforesaid masters have proved themselves in the chapel of Pope Sixtus, with the exception of Filippino. But all of them subsequently have at the [Villa of] Spedaletto of the Magnifico Lorenzo and the palm of victory is unresolved.21

Perhaps only the aria virile of Botticelli jars with modern estimates, but this assessment is explicable as a reference to the strength of linear description which characterizes Botticelli’s draftsmanship.

The more expansive literary judgements in Landino’s preface to his 1481 edition of Dante stand alongside the Milanese report as an indication of the progress made in the critical categories for individual style in the late fifteenth century. Landino’s brief summaries of the essential nature of the various manners make splendidly sharp differentiations. Masaccio’s style is ‘puro sanza ornato, because he devoted himself solely to the imitation of truth and to the modelling of figures’, while Filippo Lippi’s works are ‘gratioso et ornato et artificioso sopra modo’, Fra Angelico’s are ‘vezoso et divoto et ornato molto’, and Desidero da Settignano’s are ‘very great and delicate and

20 Text in Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 105ff. 21 Quoted by P. Muller-Walde, ‘Beitrage zur Kenntnis des Leonard0 da Vinci’, Jahrbuch des Koniglirh

Prcusisrhen Kunstsammlungen, 18 (1897). 165; trans. Gilbert, Italian Art, 139.

‘Equal excellences’: Lornaxzo 9

charming and of the highest grace’.12 Uccello and Pisanello are, in the Fazio manner, both regarded as having specialized talents, the fomer as a ‘great master of animals and landscapes, skilful in foreshortening because he understood perspective well’, and the latter is ‘particularly adept at animals’. Not the least impressive is his splendid characterization of Castagno: ‘he was a great draftsman with great modelling, enamoured of the difficult aspects of art and of foreshortening, very lively and vigorous, with sufficient facility in execution’.

It was perhaps inevitable that this increasing tendency to cast artists in particular roles according to their natural abilities should have been accompanied by a feeling that the greatest artists of all should transcend the limitations of perfection within a single area of the art. We all know Leonardo’s insistence that the painter should be ‘universal’, but he had, in Giovanni Santi’s eyes at least, been preceded by Mantegna:

For all the several aspects of this art He possesses the full united body More than all men in Italy or other part. One finds sometimes indeed that some great men Excel in one alone. . . . . . What many a high intellect Has demonstrated in most excellent painting Shines out in him with all its terms perfect.13

This opinion of Mantegna’s infallible universality was not shared by his patron, Ludovico Gonzaga, who explained to the Duke of Milan through his ambassador in 1475 that ‘Andrea is a good master in other things, but in portraits he could have more grace.14

3 The causes of individual style

At the same time as encapsulating the aria of the individual masters, the first tentative steps were being taken towards an explanatory model for this phenomenon as a phenomenon.

The obvious explanation, which goes (and went) largely without saying, was that all men are made by God in individual ways and have talents for

22 C. Landino, Commrnto . . . sopra la comedia di Danthc Alighim’ (1481). quoted by 0. Morasini, ‘An historians and a n critics, m. Cristoforo Landino’, Burfington Magazine, 95 (1953), 267. See also Baxandall, Painting and Expnicncc, I I&. 23 Santi, La vita, xxn, 6 6 8 7 0 . 24 Quoted by R. Signorini, ‘Federico 111 e Cristiano I nella Camera degli Sposi’. Mitr Kunst, 18 (1974).

332; trans. Gilbert, Ifaiian Art, 131.

I 0 Martin Kemp

different things. However, this ‘explanation’ does not suggest a mechanism whereby our individual soul is expressed in individual works of art. Nor should it be taken for granted in this period that there was an easy equation between an artist’s character and his works. And even if such an equation could be made, the predominant thrust of art theory in the quattrocento would have regarded it more as a potential source of ‘vice’ (to use Leonardo’s I

word) than as a desirable goal. Alberti, Ghiberti and Filarete are typical of the early phase of explanation,

inferring that talent is given by God (or ‘nature’) in different kinds and measures. Filarete’s explanation that each artist’s ‘own manner’ reflects the wisdom of God does not take us very far.25

The most ready mechanism for the explanation of the wide varieties of individual temperament on a systematic basis in the Renaissance was provided by astrology. We will see that this was the model adopted most avidly in the latet sixteenth century, and there is at least one indication that it had occurred to a fifteenth-century author. In his Storie jiorentine Giovanni Cavalcanti wrote:

Just as are the stars in heaven, so are the human creatures. And thus each human power (voluntd) differs from the others to the extent that the influences of the natures of the stars differ; so a particular power was in Pippo di Ser Brunellesco that was not in Lorenzo di Bartoluccio (Ghiberti), and a particular imaginative faculty (fantasia) was in master Gentile (da Fabriano) that was not in Guiliano d’Arrigo (Pesello), according to the different imaginations (fantasie) and understandings that men possess. . . and from this diversity of talents (ingegni) amongst men comes a corresponding diversity of skills (art9 .26

Cavalcanti’s assumption that there is an innate quality (voluntli) in each artist that is necessarily expressed in his works was complimented in the late quattrocento by a specific theory that began to infiltrate the writing on art from what for better or worse we call Neoplatonic philosophy. This was the notion of auto-mimesis, or, to use the contemporary catch-phrase, ogni dipintore dipinge 5e.27 The most philosophically cogent summary of this idea appeared in Savonarola’s sermons: They say that every painter paints himself. He does not paint himself as being a man, because he makes images of lions, horses, men and women that are not himself, but

25 Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, facsimile and trans. J. Spencer, 2 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 11, 489. 26 G. Gvalcann, Storiefiorentine (composed over the period 14zo-47), quoted by U. Procacci, ‘Di

Jacopo di Antonio e delle compagnie di Prttori del Con0 degli Adimari nel XV secolo’, Revista d’artc, 3 5 (1963). 3 7 0 . I am most grateful to Caroline Elam for drawing this to my attention. 27 See M. Kemp, “‘Ogni Dipintore Dipinge Se”: a Neoplatonic echo in knardo’s art theory’,

Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance. Essays in Honour of Paul Oskm Krisreller, ed. C . H. Clough (Manchester, 1976). 3 I 1-23; and G. Hartland, ‘Das Selbstbildnerische in der Kunstgeschichte’, Zeirschrii

frrr Kunstwisscnschaft. 9 (1955) . 97-124.

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo I1

he paints himself as being a painter, that is; according to his concept . . . So too the philosophers, because they were proud, described God in swollen and haughty ways.28

The implication is that Landino’s Fra Angelic0 painted ‘devout’ works because he was devout, while we would expect Castagno to possess a vigorous, assertive and challenging character. This was precisely how Leonardo glossed the idea:

If he [the Master] is brisk in speaking and motions, his figures will be similar in briskness; and if the master is devout, the equivalent character will appear in figures with bent necks; if the master is good-for-nothing, his figures will seem idleness portrayed from life; if he is ill-proportioned, his figures will be likewise; and if he is mad, this will be shown conspicuously in his narratives, in which his figures will be the enemies of reason.29

Leonardo’s development of auto-mimesis is both fuller than Savonarola’s and more simple-minded. Whereas Savonarola saw the concerto as reflecting the artist’s soul, Leonardo adopts a more literally biological attitude in which the soul forms our body, and our soul determines our judgement of beauty, and our judgement therefore determines that we produce figures resembling ourselves in superficial appearance. Given his overly literal translation of this idea, it is easy to see why he counsels the painter to ‘oppose studiously falling into the same shortcomings, in the figures he makes, that are found in his own person. And you should know that you must figure your utmost against this vice, since it is a fault that was born together with judgement’.30

Leonardo may be taken to represent the two potentially conflicting trends in fifteenth-century theory: the increasing recognition of the inventive power of the individual artist, as an equal of the poet; and the progressive establishing of a body of doctrine which stood over and above the vagaries of individual opinion. In the last resort Leonardo sided decisively with the rule of supra-personal law - in theory at least. We will see that the sixteenth- century answer, as it developed in mannerist theory, decisively shifted the balance.

From Durer to Lomazzo

The figure who stands conveniently at what may somewhat crudely be characterized as the watershed of the Renaissance interpretation of artistic

28 G. Savonarola, Prediche sopra Ezechiel (Venice, 1517). fol, 71v; trans. Gilbert, Ztalian Art, 159. 29 Vatican, Codex Urbinas Latinus. fol. ~ v . Treatise on Painting by Inonardo da Vinci, ed. A. P.

30 Codex Urbinas, fol. 45r, McMahon, para. 87. See also C. Pedretti, konardo da Vinci on Painting: A McMahon, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1956), pan. 86.

Losr Book (Libro A) (London, 1965). 53.

I 2 Martin Kemp

individuality is Albrecht Diirer. In one sense, Diirer’s theoretical endeavours place him firmly at the climax of the quattrocento desire to codify the impersonal doctrines of art. He insists that the painter should not rely on his own ‘blind judgement’, making a point virtually identical to Leonardo’s: ‘Many fall into error because they follow their own taste alone; therefore let each see to it that his inclination does not blind his judgement. For every mother is well pleased with her own child, and thus it also arises that many painters paint figures resembling thernselve~.’~~ His exhaustive search for systems of proportion to overcome the vagaries of individual taste - the search that was to earn the scathing comments of Michelangelo and Federigo Zuccaro later in the century - aligns him clearly with a tradition that runs from Alberti through Leonardo.

In other respects, however, his instinctive sense of the artist’s individual ‘hand’ and his philosophy of the artist’s creative powers show him to have been sympathetic at an early date to ideas that were to become increasingly prominent in later theory. His feeling for the ‘hand’ of the individual artist is all of a piece with his willingness to rejoice in the individual’s particular experience of ‘a comer of reality’ and, in the case of the famous water-colour of his dream, also of the inner reality of the particular mind.32 It was also expressed in his swap of drawings with Raphael, whose study for the Buttle of Ostia he inscribed: ‘Raffahell de Urbin who is so highly esteemed by the Pope made these naked figures and sent this to Albrecht Durer in Nuremberg in order to show him his hand.’33 That his sense of ‘hand’ was not merely a question of physical skill but also reflected the quality of the artist’s mind lies behind his statement that ‘one man may sketch something with his pen on half a sheet of paper in one day. . . and it turns out to be better and more artistic than another’s big work at which its author labours with the greatest diligence for a whole year’.34

Diirer was utterly committed to the view that there is a particular power planted in the true artist by the divine forces through which a man comes to be a man. This conviction is reflected in his attitude towards the nurture of the nature of individual talent in the young artist. In the opening section of a

31 A. Diirer, MS Sloane 5230 (London, British Museum), 14v. Durns Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. H. Rupprich, 3 vols (Berlin, 1956), 11. 100-1; and The Literary Remains of Albrecht Durn, ed. and trans. W. M. Conway (Cambridge, 1889). 180 and 199. For Diirer on aesthetic questions, see E. Panofsky, The Life and Art ofAlbrechr Durn, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ, 1971). 273f€. See also the chapter ‘Diirer on Judgement’ in Summers’s 7leJud~ement of Sense.

32 Schriftlicher Nachlass, I, 214-15. and trans. Conway, 145. 33 Vienna, Albertina, Bd. v. 17575, a drawing for the Banle of Osria in the Vatican. P. Joannides, The

Drawings ofRaphael (Oxford, 1983). no. 371, and trans. Conway, 33. 34 MS Sloane 5230, zIr, Schriftlicher Nachlars, 11, ~og-10, and Sloane 5231, 1 2 3 ~ 1x1, 270; trans.

Conway, 244. See E. Panofsky, Idea. A Concept in Art Theory, trans. J. S . Peake (New York, 1968). 122; and H. Beenken, ‘Durers Kunsturteil und die Struktur des Renaissance individualismus’, Festschrift H. Wo@n (Munich, 1934). 183E

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 13

draft for a comprehensive pedagogy of painting, he pays attention to both the mental and physical constitution of the student:

The first part of the Prologue tells us how the lad should be taught and how care should be given to his temperament. It falls into six parts: Item: that note should be taken of the sign under which the birth of the child occurred, with some explanations. Pray God for a propitious hour. Item: that his form and stature should be considered, with some explanations. . .35

To adapt Diirer’s own metaphor, we may say that the rude health of the young sapling arising from the divine seed should be shaped by the rules of art into a mature tree which bears beautiful fruit in unending abundance. The fruitful potency of the individual artist - a potency that is powerfully inferred by his self-portrait as a ‘divine’ genius - is encapsulated in his famous statement of the godlike fecundity of the painter’s mind: ‘a good painter is inwardly full of figures and if it were possible that he live for ever, he would have from the inner ideas, of which Plato writes, always something new to pour out in his

A creative theory of this kind, assigning a determining role to the process of inner generation - whatever its precise relationship to nature - was an absolute prerequisite if Renaissance theory was to develop an effective explanation for the manifestation of the individual soul in the work of art. Or, to express it in terms of the Neoplatonic philosophy which provided the philosophical base for the theory, it was necessary to presuppose that the concetto of the artist as revealed in his works was a lofty emanation of the pneuma or spiritus of the individual soul. Such a theory was also necessary if the idea of inner creation was to be welcomed rather than disparaged in Leonardo’s terms as an arbitrary fantasy that ‘begins and ends in the mind’.

Durer himself does not seem to have developed his ideas of creativity and individual temperament to the logical conclusion that Lomazzo was to draw: namely, that the humoural determination of temperament provides an explanation both for taste and the individuality of artistic style. However, Camerarius’ eulogistic and spirited pen portrait of Diirer in his preface to the Four Books ofHuman Proportion shows that at least one member of his circle was prepared to make direct correlations between Durer’s own balanced temperament, his physical attractiveness and his virtuous works of art. Camerarius based his interpretation on the general principles that ‘Nature’s Justice, extolled by Hippocrates . . . while it assigns a grotesque form to the ape’s grotesque soul, is wont to clothe noble minds in bodies worthy of them , . . The nature of man is nowhere more certainly and definitely shown

35 MS Sloane 5230, 4r-5r. Sclrriftliclw Nachlass. 11, 91-2, and trans. Conway, 171 and 188. 36 MS Sloane 5230.21r. Srhriftlirlw Nadlass, 11, log-10, and trans. Conway, 14). See Panofsky, Idea,

123-5 for the sources of Diirer’s statement.

14 Martin Kemp

than in the works he produces as the fruit of his art . . . What single painter has there ever been who did not reveal character in his works?’37

The humanist theory of creativity developed by Durer and in his orbit contains all the germs for the fully-fledged theory that was to emerge half a century later, though when we take up our three themes in subsequent sixteenth-century writing, we will find an enormous increase in the sophistication with which the ideas were handled in each of them. Francisco de Hollanda’s Michelangelesque attitudes are typical of the general frame- work for the later sixteenth-century ideas:

Just as mother Nature produces men and animals in one part and men and animals in another part, all made after one art and proportion, but very different from one another, so in the art of painting.. . great masters paint men and women and animals almost miraculously each in his own style and fashion (sua maniera e modo), very differently one from another, although they observe the same measures and principles; yet all their different manners may be good and deserving of praise in different ways . . . They differ from one another in air and shadow, and in drawing and colours; they nevertheless are all great, celebrated and illustrious; each has his different style (maniera) . . . each strives to imitate the natural and perfect forms that. . . conform to his own idea and i n t e n t i ~ n . ~ ~

The great monument to the recognition, definition and praise of the styles of individual masters is, of course, Vasari’s Lives of the artists. His major achievements most obviously lie in the first two of our topics - recognition and description - though we will find that explanatory models are more explicit than we might assume on first reading. The Lives have a double purpose. In the biographies he intends to concentrate on ‘methods, skills, particular styles’, endeavouring to ‘distinguish between the good, the better and the best, to note with some care i modi, le arie, le rnaniere, i tratti e la

fantasie of the painters and sculptors’. He also intends, particularly in his prefaces, to keep an eye on the ‘nature of the times’ in so far as these help us ‘to understand the causes and roots of the various styles, and the reasons for the improvement or decline of the arts at various times and among different people’.

Vasari is not only sensitive to individual styles, regional styles and period styles, but is also capable of distinguishing styles within the work of a single

37 J. Camerarius, preface to A. Durer, D e symmerria partium humanorum corporum (Nuremberg, Is32), in Schrijilichn Nachlass, I, 307-8, and trans. Conway, 13641.

38 F. de Hollanda, De la puihrra antiguapor Francisco de Holanda (1548). ed. E . Tormo (Madrid, 1921); trans. A. F. G. Bell as Four Dialogues on Painting (London, 1928). 74. See Summers, Michelangelo, 230-1 and 477 n. 30, where he rightly draws attention to Castiglione’s comparable statement (I2 Cortegiano, I, 37) on the equal excellences of Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo and Giorgione.

39 G. Vauri, L.e uire di’ piu eccellmri pitrori, Kulfori c architettori (1568), ed. A. Rossi, 9 vols (Mh, 1962). prehcc to part n, n, 80. For the translation I have used in part G. Bull’s in The Lives ofrhc Artists (Harmondsworth, 1965).

‘Equal excellences’: Lomarzo IS

artist. Raphael provides the locus classicus. Vasari considers that it is well worth ‘taking the trouble, for the benefit of our artists, to discuss his various styles (maniere)’ - as Raphael fell under Peruginesque, Leonardesque and Michelangelesque ‘shadows’ at various points in his career.40 Vasari’s Raphael realizes that ‘for all his diligence and study, in certain problems (dijicultci) he could never surpass Leonardo’, while in the portrayal of the human form ‘he could never rival the accomplishments of Mi~helangelo’.~~ ‘Therefore, as a man of great judgement he reflected that painters are not confined to making naked men, but can range over a very wide field’. Above all, Raphael came to be true to his own particular gifts: ‘Everyone should be content to do what he feels is natural to him and should never, merely to emulate others, want to try his hand at something for which he has no natural gift.’

The moral counterpoint to his praise of Raphael’s self-knowledge is his condemnation of Uccello, ‘who worked in opposition to his natural talents’, as had Pontormo and others. The actual life of Uccello expands on this theme. Uccello transformed ‘a fertile and spontaneous talent into something sterile and laboured . . . He was endowed by nature with a discriminating and subtle mind, but he found pleasure only in exploring certain difficult or impossible problems of perspective . . . An artist’s talent can truly express itself only when prompted by his intellect and when he is in a state of inspired rapture: it is then that he excellently demonstrates his divine and marvellous ideas (concetti) .’42

Vasari also indicates that events beyond the artist’s control can in exceptional circumstances exercise such a traumatic influence on his inner being as to find outer expression in his works of art. The curious example given by Vasari should not perhaps be taken too seriously, but it does confirm his belief in a mechanism of direct expression:

Parri (Spinelli) . . . was attacked with weapons by some of his relations, with whom he was engaged in a suit unknown to me; but because others soon arrived there, he was rescued to such effect that they could do him no harm. But, notwithstanding this, according to what is said, the fright which he experienced caused him not only to make figures leaning to one side but also henceforth to make them almost always have startled expression^.^^

Throughout the Lives the artists’ characters - God-given or acquired - and their works are all of a piece. We now so much accept this form of critical biography that its novelty can easily be overlooked. In one sense it is a

40 Ibid. IV. 103. 41 Ibid. IV, 104-5. 42 Ibid. 11, 55-6. 43 Ibid. 11,219. I am grateful to Sir Ernst Gombrich for drawing Spinelli’s curious case to my attention.

16 Martin Kemp

natural extension of the idea that ogni dipintore dipinge se, but its realization in a sustained way in a series of discriminating individual accounts within a broad historical pattern is very remarkable. Perhaps the closest parallel is Diogenes Laertius’ Lives ofthe Philosophers, and I think it might be worth at a future date exploring possible links between the two compendia. How Vasari himself equated character and product can be seen particularly nicely in the counterpointed biographies of Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi. Fra Angelico, almost inevitably, provides a lesson in devotion: ‘Artists who devote themselves to work of a religious or holy kind ought themselves to be genuinely holy and religious, seeing that pictures done by those who have little regard for their religion and little faith often fill the void with unworthy desires and impure longings, with the result that the work is censured for its impurity but praised for its craftsmanship and art.’44 By contrast to the virtuous friar, Fra Filippo ‘would give anything to enjoy a woman whom he wanted if he thought he could have his When Vasari praises Filippo’s paintings, his commendations are, like the references provided by professors for students of less than admirable character, as interesting for their omissions as inclusions. Filippo’s ‘paintings were always done with astonishing grace and finely composed and finished, and, consequently, he always won the highest praise and respect from modem masters’.46 The unmistakable implication is that artistry has been cultivated rather than devotion. His paintings of Madonnas, Vasari infers, reflect his lust for the sweet novice, Lucrezia, rather than reverence for the purity of the biblical Virgin.

When Vasari came to combat public charges of impiety made against the ultimate artistic god of the Lives, Michelangelo, he used the pious austerity of Michelangelo’s life as evidence that the sculptor’s reverence for the‘ human form was directed by the highest motives: ‘he greatly loved human beauties for their imitation in art, being able to distinguish one beauty from another. Without this form of imitation it is impossible to achieve perfection. In this he was free of lascivious or disgraceful thoughts, as is shown by his very austere way (modo) of life.’47 Michelangelo was ‘sent into this world by God as an exemplar’ not only for the true style in art but also so that artists ‘might learn from his behaviour how to live’.

Of all the Lives, many of which are prefaced by moralizing pen portraits of the individualistic talents with which fate had endowed the artists, that of Michelangelo most clearly defines the celestial origins of individual genius:

The boy was born on Sunday 6th March, about the eighth hour of the night; and without further thought his father decided to call him Michelangelo, being inspired

44 Ibid. 11, 398-9. 45 Ibid. 11, 472. 46 Ibid. 11, 474-5.

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo I 7

by heaven and convinced that he saw in him something celestial and divine rather than normally mortal. This was evident in the child’s horoscope, which showed Mercury and also Venus in the house of Jupiter, peaceably disposed; in other words, the art of his hands and mind was destined to fashion sublime and magnificent works of art.48

The celestial, and more specifically the astrological explanation of artistic individuality became the norm amongst mannerist theorists, in keeping with their pronounced delight in complex metaphysics that would give the artist a privileged role in the revelation of the secret patterns in the divine universe. The same basic idea is expressed in various ways and at various levels by a variety oftheorists. Ludovico Dolce explained in his L’Aretino that the painter, like the poet, is a ‘child of nature’ and, therefore, ‘it is not to be believed that there is only one form of perfect painting’.49 ‘The complexions [tempera- ments] of men and their humours are different and each follows that to which he is naturally inclined.’ Some masters will be ‘calm, others terrible, others charming, others full of grandeur and majesty’. A more fully resolved account of the astrological-cum-temperamental interpretation of individu- ality is provided by Giulio Romano’s pupil, Cristoforo Sorte:

As the father of the Tuscan Muses, Frances0 Petrarca said in one of his sonnets, ‘Each had his fate from the day on which he is born’. And this natural idea, or we wish rather to say celestial instruction, is infused in us by superior bodies for this purpose, which not only helps us work but in the greater and more perfect excellences imperiously rules; whence painters have that same liberty that is usually conceded to poets, as is witnessed in their inventions and in styles [stile] different from one another. . . And from this it is that the images or figures they make are said to be their children, since ordinarily they retain something of this idea; and therefore, one sees melancholy in the images of some painters, in some other modesty, and in others a certain vicacity of spirit accompanied by a gracious and perfect i m i t a t i ~ n . ~ ~

As a specific example, Sorte describes the demeanour of Tintoretto, who was ‘pronto e presto’ in all his expressions and motions, and who was ‘led by a natural and celestial inclination’ to make corresponding works. ‘With perfect judgement in the portrayals and paintings that he makes from life, he sets down in a moment the darks, shadows and half-tones, the reliefs and flesh so well imitated, and done with such bold practice, velocity and quickness, that it is a marvel to see him work.’ Sorte’s account has the great

47 Ibid. 11, 234. 48 Ibid. 11, 1061. 49 L. Dolce, L’Aretino (Veniq, 15-57), in Truttuti d’urte de1 rinquecmto, ed. P. Barocchi. 3 vols (Ban,

1960). I. 1667; and M. Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetiun Art Theory ofthe Cinquecento (New York,

50 C. Sorte, Osseruuzione nelku pitturu (1580). in Tramti, ed. Barocchi, I, 299-30. Compare Paolo Pino IgC18). 1 ~ 8 - 9 .

in Trurtuti, I, 132-3.

18 Martin Kemp

advantage that it not only provides an interpretative model for tempera- mental individuality, but also can be seen to operate tellingly in practice with respect to the imitation of nature. Painting genuinely becomes, to paraphrase Zola, ‘a corner of reality seen and expressed through a temperament’. The ultimate development of this temperamental model, both as a model and as applied to the explication of the styles of particular artists, occurs in the work of Gian Paolo Lomazzo.

Lomazzo’s two treatises, the Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) and the Idea del tempio della pithrra (1590), reflect an enormously wide range of reading, the grounding for which must have been accomplished - like his highly perceptive study of a great variety of art - before his progressive blindness curtailed his reasonably successful career as a painter during his mid-thirt ie~.~~ Beyond the valuable work of his later editors, I do not think that Lomazzo has been given his due. It cannot be denied that he is a difficult and eclectic author, sometimes obscure in meaning and intermittently inconsistent. However, he was stretching different techniques of explanation, drawn from a variety of intellectual sources, to their very limits, and it is not surprising that a certain strain is apparent. He was also endeavouring to erect an intellectual edifice of unrivalled completeness for the worship of the visual arts in all their variety, and, like the builder of many a great and complex structure, he found that an occasional fudging of the dimensions and masking of the joins was inevitable. To answer our particular question of artistic individuality, he built a structure that could contain all the necessary explanations: the relationship between the visible and divine order of things; the sources of visual phenomena; the varieties of visual quality in the world; the varieties of individual judgement and taste for visual qualities; the position of the artist in this scheme; and the way in which individual character finds expression in works of art.

It is in the second of his treatises, the Tempio, that his ideas appear in their most develbped and organized form. His ‘temple’ is not only a conceptual structure symbolizing the art of painting but is also envisaged, like Guilio Camillo’s Solomonic temple of wisdom which he acknowledges as his source, as a specific physical structure.52 The temple is founded on a seven-

5 I For Lomazzo’s life and writings, see the following editions: Sm’rri nrll’arre, ed. R. P. Ciardi, z vols (Florence, 1974); and Idea def Tempio dclla Pirrura, ed. R. Klein, z vols (Florence. 1974). See also the essays by Klein in Form andMeaning, trans. M. Jay and L. Wieseltier (New York, 1979), 43-61,62-88 and 161-9 (also below, n. 58); and G. M. Ackerman, ‘Lomazzo’s treatise on painting’, Art Bull. 49 (1967). 317-26. 52 Idea, ed. Klein, 1 0 1 . Lomazzo’s text does ngt include unambiguous instructions for the precise

disposition of the elements in the temple, but his gist is clear enough. The reconstruction of the walls, dome and lantern, given here, which works against Klein’s identification of each of the governors with a part of painting, takes its cue from the following passages (Idea, ed. Klein, 101-5): ‘I1 tempio . . . 6 circondato da sette pareti intomo tra I’uno govematore e I’altro, tutti uguali, e nel vblto finiscono a1 for0

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo

Fig. I Diagrammatic ‘ground plan’ of some of the major planetary equivalences of the governors of painting, based on Lomazzo’s Idea del Tempi0 della Pittura (1590).

part design in both plan and elevation (see figs I and 2). In elevation are visible the successive strata of the parts of art - proportion, motion, colour, light, perspective, composition and forma - which in ascending order comprise the walls, vault and lantern. These walls are accompanied by a peristyle of caryatid columns representing the seven governors of art: Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari (Lomazzo’s master in Milan), Polidoro da Caravaggio, Leonardo, Mantegna and Titian. The physical constitution or ‘complexion’ of each of the caryatid statues is deeply locked into a series of

della h t e m a . . . Nei pareti circolari, sopn il pavimento, andranno collocati le sette propmione convenienti altresi ad m i governatori e pih in su, nel istesso parete. si poaano i xtte moti, piu alto i coloritti, poi i lumi e la prospettiva, la quale si estendera sotto l’architnve che e sopra la testa dei govematori. huesti sono le cinque parti della teorica. Ma quelle d e b la pratica co&cieranno mpn fi cornicione, nel vblto dove seguirvlno le sette parti della composizione, applicati a quelle. E pih sh ne l’istcsso aelo saranno le Kzte passi della forma s in al foro, l i dove scmde la luce che alluma tutta il tempio.’

20 Martin Kemp

Fig. 2 Diagrammatic elevation of the Temple ofpainting, based on Lomazzo’s Idea del Tempi0 della Pittura (1590).

complex astrological, elemental and humoural concordances, drawn from a range of esoteric texts, most especially Agrippa’s De occultu philosophia.

Each painter’s soul reflects the pattern determined by fate, according to a mechanism which Lomazzo derived from Ficino, as Panofsky has shown.53 Paraphrasing Ficino, Lomazzo explains that ‘beauty is nothing more than a certain vital and spiritual grace, by which the divine ray is first infused into the Angels, in whom can be seen the figures of the celestial orb, which are called in them exemplars and ideas; then it passes into the souls, in which the figures are called reasons and notions, and finally into matter, where they are termed images and forms’.S4 As the spiritus descends, so it is subject to the

5 3 Panofsky, Idea, 141-53, showing Lomazzo’s use of Ficino’s Sopra lo urnore o ver convito di Plarone

54 Idea, ed. Klein, 213. (1544). “9 3 4 .

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 21

successive influences of the planets in the particular configuration they occupy at our birth. In union with the four elements, these influences are manifested in the temperaments of man. As Lomazzo subsequently explains in his own words:

When it comes to the temperaments fashioned from the qualities by which all our bodies came to be so dissimilar to each other, they vary from one to the other to a greater or lesser degree, as may be read extensively amongst the mathematicians. But there can however be only four principle manners of dissimilarity, corresponding to the number of the elements and the force of their qualities, which, the mathematicians affirm, act as the foundation of all the forms or manners of the bodies.s5

In Lomazzo’s astrological terms the hot-dry qualities of fire correspond to the bellicose complexion of the choleric Mars, the hot-moist qualities of air to the sanguine radiance of Jupiter, the cold-moist qualities of water to the sober meekness of the phlegmatic moon, and the cold-dry qualities of earth to the unsettling profundities of the melancholic Saturn. The remaining three planets, the sun, Venus and Mercury, express their particular characters in a compound manner. In keeping with his sources, the characters of the seven planets are elaborately interwoven with a series of correspondences on the seven-part base. The resulting fabric involves the metals (from one of which each of the seven caryatid governors is cast), the animals, vices, vir- tues and colours, to name only a few. Since each of the artists takes his fundamental complexion from one of the planets - Michelangelo from Saturn, Gaudenzio from Jupiter, Polidoro from Mars, Leonard0 from the sun, Raphael from Venus, Mantegna from Mercury and Titian from the moon - the great artists are built inextricably into the cosmological system.

Thus the geniuses (genii) of the governors are ‘in their manners [personal and artistic] all dissimilar amongst themselves, but in such a way that in the part of painting to which they have been inclined by nature, and to which they have been directed by their art and industry, none may desire greater excellence. Rather they are elevated to such a height that they have deprived all others of any hope of being able to equal them in that part of painting.’56 This is in keeping with his Vasarian message that ‘one who knows his genius and follows it, exactly reaches the peak of excellence in that aspect of painting to which he is inched, as is seen in RaphaeY.5’ It might seem a natural procedure at this point to cement each of the governors to one of the seven parts of painting, and it is indeed possible to draw from Lomazzo’s subsequent account a set of correlations between each artist’s inclination and

5 5 Ibid. 2x7. 56 Ibid. 33. 57 Ibid. 25.

22 Martin Kemp

his special power in a particular aspect of art.58 But we may recall that the parts of art are arranged in the temple along the vertical co-ordinate, while the artists and their temperamental affinities are arranged around a horizontal co-ordinate in the ground plan. This means that each governor cannot be irrevocably identified with a single part of painting, but rather that each expresses his own particular characteristics in all the parts of painting. Thus the martial characteristics of Polidoro will be expressed in his characteristic way in proportion, motion, composition, etc., no less than in colour in which his fiery temperament will be expressed with hot boldness.

It is worth pointing out that Lomazzo’s system embraces the taste and judgement of the spectator no less than that of the artist. We all react according to our temperamental proclivities.

When someone sees four or six men or women, one or other will please him more than this or that, and the one which pleased him will be unattractive to someone else. And this may be understood in the arts. One of which we may abhor and the other adore, and thus it follows that all our natures [temperaments] are involved in all the arts. But this can nowhere better be seen than in the judgement or taste for beauty, which, even if a woman may be truly beautiful, she will, when seen by different men, not appear to be beautiful in the same way.59

Each observer will appreciate different aspects of her beauty, which ‘will be judged in many ways, according to the nature of their vision [la natura del loro vedere]’.

If it may be granted that Lomazzo’s temperamental astrology provides a coherent model for the expression of individuality in judgement and artistic invention, we are still left with the question as to whether such a conceptualized system could possibly be brought to bear successfully upon the actual products of individual artists, particularly those of the great artists amongst his governors. Although there are certain signs that visual evidence is forced overly hard into his pattern - something his blindness may have facilitated-it is remarkable how well he is able to use his system as an explanation for sharply characterized aspects of his governors’ styles. The most obvious example is the Saturnine Michelangelo, whose statue is cast in weighty lead and whose spiritual animal is the ‘terrible’ dragon. Michelangelo’s art displays a natural predilection for massive proportions, pronounced muscular definition, grandly sombre motions, subordinated colour, powerful shading, ponderously impressive foreshortenings, ‘fury of design’ and grandeur of conception. The way in which Raphael expresses the very different qualities of Venus probably does not require elaboration.

58 Klein does so in his ‘Les sept gouvemeun de l’art selon Lomazzo’, Arte Lombarda, 4. no. 2 (1959).

59 Idea, cd. Klein, 221-3.

277-87. but the resulting table is misleading.

‘Equal excellences’: Lomazzo 23

If we turn our attention to just one of the parts of art, colour for instance - passing in a horizontal plane around the temple - we can see both the power of the system and Lomazzo’s ingenuity in applying it with sufficient discretion (one of his own key words) to avoid some of its more potentially absurd consequences. Given Lomazzo’s adherence to the metaphysics of light in a late Neoplatonic manner, the transmutation of light into colour was of no small consequence in his theory of art. The basis for his view of the physical properties of light in the material world stood firmly in the Aristotelian tradition. Colours are seen as arising from proportional mixtures of light and darkness, resulting in a seven-part scale between the poles of white and black.60 Lomazzo’s five intermediate colours are pale (or violet), yellow, red, purple and green. Nor surprisingly Lomazzo integrates his seven colours into his system of astrological concordances: black is identified with Saturn, green with Jupiter, purple with Mars, red with the sun, yellow with Venus, violet (pallido) with Mercury and white with the moon.6l The next step is obvious. Each colour, in keeping with the late medieval system of colour symbolism - as taken up in Lomazzo’s time by Dolce and Borghini amongst others - is granted a temperamental potentiality and accorded a set of inherently expressive qualities of its own. Thus yellow evokes hope and rejoicing, red communicates revenge and courage, while black inclines towards sadness (as befits the colour of melancholy This view of the temperamental potencies of the colours stands in a tradition in the visual arts running from Durer’s Four Apostles to Rubens’s ready acknowledgement that his own appropriate colour was red, as befitted his sanguine v i g o ~ r . ~ ~

The natural consequence of this system might seem to be to identify each of the governors specifically with their planetary colour. However, just as Lomazzo was reluctant to tie his vertical governors to one of the horizontal strata of art in a rigid manner, so he stops short of spelling out this identification in its literal form. Each colour might ‘signify’ the planetary equivalent of each artist, but when it comes to using colour in paintings each governor will exploit the scale of colours in a way characteristic of his temperament. Thus, as we have seen, colour plays a subordinate role to other

60 Truftato, ed. Ciardi, 11, 168 and 266. The Aristotelian scales are to be discussed in this author’s forthcoming 77te Science of Art. See also M. Barasch. Light and Colow in the Italian Renaissance Thcory of Arr (New York, 1978); and J. Gavel, Colour. A Srndy OfIrs Position in the Ari Theory oj the Quattro a d Cinquccento (Stockholm, 1979). 61 Trurraro, ed. Ciardi, 11, 401-2, and (with a slightly different order), 185. 62 Ibid. 192fK Compare Dialog0 di M . Lodovico Dolce nel p a l e si ragiona della qualita, diversita e proprieta

dc i colori (Venice, 1565). which is based upon Anthonius Thylesius’s Libellus de coloribus. . . (Venice. I 528); and R. Borghini, I1 Riposo (Florence, I 584). 230% where ‘Baccio Valor? advocates an astrological system of meaning for colours.

63 Panofiky, Durcr, 234-5; and J . Held, ‘Rubens and Aguilonius: new points of contact’, Art Bull, 61 (1979). 257-64.

24 Martin Kemp

visual qualities in the art of the Saturnine Michelangelo, while lunar Titian is particularly praised for his light effects and such colouristic subtleties as tints of flesh that ‘appear to be true and alive’.64

The totality of Lomazzo’s system, of which I have only been able to give a glimpse in this context, is a considerable achievement, in its own right as a functioning model for the causes and effects of individual genius, and for the way in which he has been able to draw together the motifs we have seen developing in Renaissance theory. Within his own period, Lomazzo is perhaps the most comprehensively representative figure for the metaphysical complexities of mannerist theory. His allegiance to a system of symbolism for colour is altogether typical of the taste of the Italian theorists in the second half of the century for esoteric mysteries and occult diversions. Whereas Valla, typically for a fifteenth-century humanist, had dismissed with scorn Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s codification of fixed meanings for colour, we find a cluster of theorists of Lomazzo’s age eagerly embracing the traditional symbolism and elaborating it with eclectic anthologies of antique allusion^.^^ This occurs no less in Florence with Borghini than in Venice with Dolce and others.66 Where Lomazzo’s achievements surpass those of his contemporaries is that he is able to bring the formulae to bear upon the realities of artistic practice. Dolce, for instance, is quite unable to bring his writings on colour symbolism into a direct relationship with his perceptive discussion of painters and painting^.^'

The phase of art corresponding to Lomazzo’s elaborately metaphysical and eclectic theories of beauty and individual creativity is that of late mannerism, above all as practised in the most sophisticated courts. It is the phase of Annibale Caro’s esoteric programme for the frescoes in the Villa Farnese at- Caprarola, of the decorative scheme in Vasari’s own house and the programmatic cycles of Medicean paintings in Palazzo Vecchio.68 A surviving example of a small scale is Frances0 de Medici’s studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio, decorated under Vasari’s d i r e ~ t i o n . ~ ~ The iconographical plan, drawn up by Borghini, revolves elaborately around the four elements. The decorations are a conscious display of style (munieru, ariu, modo) in the absolute and individual senses, as each artist consciously and often eclectically

64 Idea, ed. Klein, 127. 65 Valla’s Elcgantiae, XM, criticizing Bartolo da Sassofmato’s Tractatus de insigniis et annis, quoted by

Baxandall, Giorto, I 15-16. 66 See above, n. 62. 67 For instance, in the account of Titian’s Venus and Adonis in Dolce’s letter to Alessandro Contarhi, in

Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, 212-17. 68 Vasari, Vitc, vn, 7ofT(for Caprarola), 241 (his house) and 254ff ( P h o Vecchio). See also T. S. R.

Boax, Giorgio Vasari. The Man and the Book (Princeton, NJ, 1 ~ 9 ) . 16871 (his house), 302-19 (Palm0 Vecchio).

69 L. B e d , I1 Principe dell0 Studiolo (Florence, 1967), and Boase. Ciorgio Vasari, 314K

‘Equal excelZences’: Lomazzo 2s

displays his particular skills in the ‘difficulties of art’.70 Nowhere did this style of art and thought find a more natural home than in the court of Rudolph I1 at Prague, and no artist more exactly expressed its knowing ingenuity than Guiseppe Arcirnbold~.~ It is becoming increasingly clear that Arcimboldo’s bizarre fantasies of anthropomorphic greengrocery and hardware are neither naYve visual games nor surrealism avant la Zettre. As the court poetry devoted to his images show, his paintings are full of sophisticated allusions to Rudolphine imagery. Some of the symbolism is notably close in spirit to Lomazzo, who much admired Arcimboldo’s paintings. The image of Fire, for example, is a tour deforce in the description of the martial temperament, expressing its fiery humour through colour and form.72 The wide-ranging systems of reference in Arcimboldo’s paintings deserve further exploration, not least in relation to his precocious invention of a colour notion for music as described by Comanini, another of the late mannerist theorists.73

The qualities of this phase of theory and art are thrown into sharp contrast by its radical questioning in the next generation. Rather than looking, most obviously, at one of the early baroque art theorists, we can catch the flavour of the criticism in the remarks made-by GaIileo: ‘certain capricious painters. . . occasionally constrain themselves, for sport, to represent a human face or something else by throwing together sometimes some agricultural implements, at others some fruits or perhaps the flowers of this or that season . . . If anyone were to pursue all his studies in such a school of painting, and should conclude in general that every other manner of representation was blameworthy and imperfect, it is certain that Cigoli and other illustrious painters would laugh him to scorn.’74 Such paintings are compared by Galileo to the eclectic compilations of Aristotelian arguments used by opponents of his radical observations. The great scientist’s arguments are symptomatic of the way in which leading ideas in the new generation were moving against the arcane eclecticism of Lomazzo and his contemporaries.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Lomazzo’s system passed into automatic obsolescence within a few years of its publication. The powerful strain in seventeenth-century academic theory that persisted in seeking

70 Compare for example the elaborately eclectic figure style of Machetti in the Baths of Pozruoli, replete with Michelangesque ‘difficulties’, and the genre scene of the Alchemists including a portrait of Francesco, assigned appropriately to the Fleming, Stadanus. See Boase, Giorgio Vasari, figs 212 and 110.

71 For Arcimboldo at the Court of Prague, see T. da Costa Kaufman, Variations ofthe Impdal Themc in the Age ofMaximillian and Rudolf11 (New York and London, 1978); and L‘ficole & P r q w (Paris, 198s).

72 Vienna, Kunsthistorixhes Museum. 73 G. Comanini, If Figirw overo delfinc della pittufa (Mannu. 1591). 249, in Scitti d’arte &l cinqwcento, 3

vols (Milan, n.d.), I, 445-8. See also thii author’s forthcoming The Science ofArt , and Gavel, Colour, esp. colour plate 111.

74 Discourses and Opinions ofCalileo, trans. S . Drake (New York. 1957). r p r , and S. Drake, Calileo at Work (Chicago and London, 1978). MO.

26 Martin Kemp

detailed equivalences between the properties of art and the patterns of meaning in the world continued to find much to admire in Lomazzo’s ambitious explanation^.'^ And although we, for our part, may regard his astrological mysticism as more curious than intellectually sustainable, we should not be reluctant to acknowledge that he was responsible for making ingeniously coherent sense of a number of the central questions that continue to concern us today -not least the problem of the sources for individual style. I certainly do not think that we can currently claim to be in possession of our explanatory model of a comprehensiveness and power comparable to that of Lomazzo.

University of St Andrews

75 For some preliminary remarks, see M. Kemp, ‘Yellow, red and blue: the limits of colour saence in painting, I ~ O C J - I ~ ~ O ’ , Nuturd Scimces und the Arts, ed. A. Ellenius (Uppula, 1g85), 103.