The Antirenaissance – Magic of the Elements

Translation and editing by Matthew Didemus and Filippo Scafi

“I am convinced that Battisti’s notion of the real is what finally binds together much of this otherwise eclectic book. He uses the word in reference to the city of wood behind the classicizing stone facades, the breaches in decorum that distinguish the nonheroic sculpture of Donatello, the tutelary presences invoked by personal emblems and portraits, the fears one experiences hearing a fairy tale or visiting the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo – in short, all the nonsymbolic meanings of things.”
– Cole, Wood, 2013, emphasis added.

The Renaissance is undoubtedly a period of conflict and sublimation. For a long time, however, historians and theoreticians looked at the Renaissance as a decisive cut between the (re)birth of a universal humanism and systematic understanding of cosmos, on one side, and the chaotic mess and obscurity thought to characterize the medieval period. It is precisely in this classicist context  that Eugenio Battisti’s groundbreaking L’Antirinascimento was first published in 1962. Overlooked in the moment of its publication, where Hegelianism and Benedetto Croce’s aestheticism reigned nearly undisputed, and, despite being released as part of Fetrinelli’s popular I fatti e le idee series, it was initially received with little fanfare—its mannerism, the nearly unsustainable erudition and multiplicity of iconological references rendering it unable to find its place. Despite all this, his work would ultimately become to be seen retroactively as a ‘lost’ classic, prescient of the paradigm shift that would later occur in Renaissance scholarship though its nonlinear, and almost Braudelian, engagement with folkloristic and popular traditions and their interplay with topics such as apotropaic magic, alchemy, automata, witchcraft and Wunderkammern. Drawing on the work of Aby Warburg, whose pioneering work in the early 20th Century foreshadowed a transformation in historical and social sciences, he descends into the subterranean folkloric tradition in search of the “connective tissue” that binds the seemingly incongruous elements that constitute The Anti-Renaissance (p.54). Umberto Eco notes in his 1991 eulogy to Battisti that the long term effect of the Anti-Renaissance’s  “pioneering” anti-historiographical approach was so profound, and the gap which it pried into the image of the Renaissance as a cohesive period of equilibrium was so wide, that it in fact shifted what was once at the margins to the core,  re-constituting  the very “nucleus of the Renaissance”(Eco, 1993). The “avantgardism” of Battisti emerges clearly if compared to other major (and more celebrated) thinkers such as Carlo Ginzburg, and the microhistoric approach, as well as Bakhtin with his singular analysis of popular culture, to name just two. The Anti-Renaissance pre-dates the latter’s Rabelais and his World by three years, and Ginzburg’s seminal The Cheese and The Worms by almost fifteen years, anticipating some crucial conceptual and methodological transformations in the social sciences. 

Following Battisti’s disdain for “classical coherence” and embracing contradiction, The Anti-Renaissance is at once brash and subtle. One the one hand Battisti identifies an affinity in the anti-Renaissance with modality of the demonic. In this sense it is a polemic against what he sees as a mummified classicism “whose figurative ideal is above all stasis”, a search for a mode that prefers the “dynamic, tumultuous, indefinite, protean, psychologically aggressive, repulsive or seductive”(p. 52).  While at the same time making the more subtle move of asking: what if the question of Renaissance is not that of a passage between cultural narratives, systems, worldviews, but a problem of scale of analysis? What if the conflict of that moment was not between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, “but between humanistic culture and popular tradition”? Battisti’s work revolves all around a vertiginous series of descents and ascents, from the folkloristic to the court, from the earthly magic to the heights of humanism, from the chthonic to the firmament. The central thesis is that “in Italy the popular was absorbed into high art so there was no need for popular as a separate entity” (Cole, Wood, 2013): in fact, an endogenous form of a colonization process. At stake there is an understanding of cultural revolutions and epistemic translations that resists any kind of sublimating tendency, and an interest in unveiling – instead of rejecting and suppressing – all those points in which encounters between different modes of understanding and systematizing knowledge produce crucibles of matter and ideas. As Battisti highlights in regards to popular tradition, “[a]s soon as the latter became self-aware, it also acquired the ability to oppose, first, its forms of superstition, then, its magical images and its world of ideas against the literary tradition of the courts.” Chasmotics extracted and translated the chapter “La magia degli elementi”, “where he gets closest to a sense of subjectivity […]. The idea there is that the Cinquecento saw an ‘insurrection of the material’: artists discovered that nature had a dynamic they could identify, indulge, and stimulate, and as a result art became humbler. It’s an exciting argument inasmuch as it’s a complete inversion of our conventional account of the period, which sees the sixteenth century as willfully artful and post-naturalistic. Battisti sees art not as a mastery of nature but as negative capability.” (Cole, Wood, 2013). This magisterial work offers a peculiar way to understand, read, and explore the multifarious phenomena that constitute our ideas of “culture” and history, reflecting around the tension inherent in the human drive to bring order to a chaotic universe, but also to what this ordering entails at a level that brings about, silently, the concepts of memory and unconscious.

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The hatred against witches, the terror of the demonic, which at times take on the characteristics of an inverted mysticism, are perhaps the most dramatic and disturbing episodes of the conflict, not between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, as was believed until not so long ago, but between humanistic culture and popular tradition. As soon as the latter became self-aware, it also acquired the ability to oppose, first, its forms of superstition, then, its magical images and its world of ideas against the literary tradition of the courts. But this exact antagonism between the cultured and the popular is also found within humanism, within the culture of the courts, within the hearts and imaginations of the artists themselves. After having attempted to uncover the figurative and archaeological roots of popular fairy tales and witch iconography, we will now make the opposite effort, to identify the popular roots of some of the most cultured and sophisticated aspects of the Renaissance: such as luxury crafts, emblematics, automata and fountains. This will be the programme of the following chapters.

Our point of view is now as though inverted with respect to the previous research, but, as we shall see, it will give us further proof of the vitality of the popular, attesting to its pressure within areas in which, until now, it has not been felt. And on the other hand, even if the direction from which we will look at the process is different, placing ourselves now on the side of the artisans and patrons, instead of that of the superstitious populace, we will almost immediately end up forgetting that we have placed ourselves in another point of investigation, so much so that the cultured and the popular, in the Italian Cinquecento especially, are intertwined everywhere. While witchcraft and black magic are certainly condemned, highly refined artisanship is exalted to such an extent that even architectural decoration, as had already happened in the Gothic period due to similar pressure from the minor arts, becomes meticulous, more the work of a goldsmith than a stonemason. Yet the persecution of witches and the elaborate drive for extreme refinement and elegance of natural materials have an identical moral root: fear of chaos. Fear that is also enticement, uncertainty, temptation. We do not feel fear except for what is about to win us over. In social and religious life, chaos was the swarming of superstitions, the resurgence of mysterious cultic practices that had been rooted in the millennia, as the classical writings and the strange rituals that accompanied them demonstrated, and above all the idea that the world was not only alive, pulsating, capable of breathing and generating, but susceptible to being modified, its laws inverted, by mysterious, irrational interventions, so that civil existence was as precarious on it as if on a fragile boat at sea. In art, chaos was brute matter; it was, perhaps, precisely that unfinished matter to which Michelangelo surrendered in despair, and by a pathetic paradox of taste, precisely in his highest masterpieces. Curiously, in terms of the unfinished, one of the most famous poets of the time, Ronsard, defines chaos as ‘ without art, without form and whole figure’.¹ And the craftsman is like God or like love that  ‘arondit’  the tiny bodies and their perfections’.²

With regard to the 16th-century artisan , and in particular Palissy, who better than any other represents its theoretical demands, it has been observed how, in his assiduous familiarity with matter, with chaos, he succeeds in taking a remarkable step forward on the path to science, in comparison to philosophical science.³ He remains, however, at the same time, a magician, an alchemist, an initiate. The cabinetmaker, the goldsmith, the carver of precious stones, the sculptor, the architect himself, when decorating, have an almost alchemic obsession with transforming, metamorphosing: the arid to dense crystal becomes a monster with gaping, dripping jaws; randomly veined marble blossoms into a seascape or alpine landscape;⁴ the glass becomes a shell, the shell is made shiny and lustrous as glass, the rock unfolds into the statue, and the statue sinks into the rock. In a certain sense, one is reminded once again of Gothic craftsmanship, its floral ornamentation, its monstrous and fantastic inserts, its apparent absence of patterns and content,⁵5 and also its ability to elude, through decorativism, the true character of its theme. But this juxtaposition, on closer inspection, turns out to be very false. The metamorphoses of 16th century man are far less sceptical, less capricious, especially when it comes to matter and, even more so, the four elements. It is a typically alchemistic metamorphosis: that is, it wants to go from one value to another, or rather, it wants to tap into the magic core of the substance, and express it. The 16th century craftsman is restless, he is not content with naive traditional interpretations, let alone biblical ones, but he by no means renounces symbolic mysticism; on the contrary, he feels it in a heightened way, due to its mysteriousness. Moreover, it is far more humble that the 15th-century craftsman, who had contemptuously imposed his proud and precise proportional design on every field where the public’s taste allowed it, making his geometric and mathematical vocation, purely rational, in the marquetry as in the carving of precious stones⁶ (which seems to be an exercise in ‘regular bodies’), in wood as in marble, and even in the modification of nature (for Alberti wanted the gardens divided into exact and regular flowerbeds).⁷ The sixteenth-century sense of nature (as, moreover, we have been able to magnificently understand it in Bomarzo) is something extraordinarily different. As Hess wrote⁸ many years ago, it is underpinned by “original capacities of Weltanschauung: a new spirit of tolerance towards the individual, the need to allow objects and existences to be valued in their most particular singularity and intimate individuality, abstaining from all external hierarchies and dependencies. Almost with sacred respect, Renaissance man approaches the long-depreciated realm of nature, to respect it in its inner principle and autonomy. Filled with interest, he contemplates the marvellous organisation of living things and plants, and all their expressions of flourishing and decay acquire meaning and value for him.

There is no shortage, of course, and we will see this in a later chapter, of men capable of transforming ‘holy terror’ into a cold spirit of observation. But for the artisan, grappling with the new materials, which came to him from the most unexpected and for him even unimaginable places, from the bottom of the sea and from the highest of glaciers, those same materials had not only a marvellous organisation to respect, and a cycle of development or degeneration, but a true magic and meaningful nucleus. The late Renaissance not only felt the world as animated, but wanted to translate its vitalism into images. In a certain sense, its vocation is a pictographic one: so that many of the works of the so-called ‘minor arts’, especially the most deformed and monstrous, which are in fact the highest in quality, are not only to be admired, but read precisely in search of that core. At few other times was art so much an intention of knowledge, albeit intuitive, enigmatic, esoteric.

What we have said is not a post quem exegesis for modernists interested in psychoanalysis, ethnography, or the history of religion, but rather a paraphrase of a speech by an architect-archaeologist, Pirro Ligorio, creator of the masterpiece Villa d’Este in Tivoli.⁹

Pietro Tosca, Fountain, Piazza della SS Annunziata

Saracchi, crystal goblet (Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum)

Vasari and assistants, the fireworks for the feast of St. John (Florence, Scala di Palazzo Vecchio)

A discourse he makes with reference to grotesques, but which it is permissible to extend, since almost all the furnishings, utensils, and furniture of the time also turn into grotesques, therefore, not because of a decorative whim, but because of their vocation to express concepts. They are, in other words, allegories of the secrets of matter and life. Ligorio writes, in fact:

If to the public at large they seem fantastic materials, they were all symbols and industrious things, not made without mystery… There are fantastic forms and, as in dreams, there were mixed in with the moral and fabulous things of the Iddij… nor were they found there, neither for a fantastic purpose, nor to show foolish and vicious things, nor to accompany with their variety and enchant the dwellings. On the contrary, they were made to astonish and amaze, so to speak, wretched mortals, to signify as far as possible the pregnancy and fullness of the intellect and its imaginations… and to show the accidents, to accommodate the insatiability of the various and strange concepts drawn from so many varieties in created things…¹⁰

The symbolic and pictographic language of the grotesque does indeed narrate wonderful concepts; but unfortunately it follows no glossary, no syntax, no conventional or unitary scheme. It springs from time to time from the relationship with matter, whose soul it tries to discover, and is articulated in the most vague ways, since matter suggests, and does not speak, alludes and does not explain.  Even in one and the same species, such as crystal, it expresses itself in a manifold diversity of formal vocations, which always require new images and other technical solutions to highlight them. However, in this relationship, one can identify, during the 16th century, at least some constant modalities. The first, perhaps the most notable, is that the physical quality of matter (the liquid proteinity in water, the divine transparency in crystal and precious stones, the explosive violence in fire, the roughness of rock surfaces; the smoothness in hard stones) is accentuated in every way, exasperating it. The second constant, which is not as general, but characterises, in any case, the vast majority of the products, is the elaboration of matter in biomorphic, often animal-like form, in a vast series of associations (some intuitively comprehensible, such as the dragon-shaped firework, others enigmatic, such as the crystal block that becomes a bird). On closer inspection, the biomorphic form also serves the purpose of accentuating the value of matter, exalting, through association, its magical value. And it is probably due to the same active revival of the magical value of animals as in emblems, that zoomorphic images are applied to the more inert realm of minerals. We will have occasion to return to this problem several times: let us immediately begin the exemplification of the first constant by starting with the most formless of the elements, water, whose ‘concept’ is singularly hostile to rendering in a pictographic or anguished manner, refusing to assume any persistent figurations.

Eliade observes: ‘Whatever religious relationship it is in, water retains its function at all times: it disintegrates, it destroys forms, it washes away sins, it cleanses and regenerates together. Its character is to precede creation and renew it, but always without giving up its own mode, i.e. not being able to assume any fixed form. Water always remains in a virtual, germinal, latent state’.¹¹ The 16th century does not develop all these ‘concepts’ of water: it limits itself to three, which are, for example in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the creative germinativeness of water (its character is to precede creation); the fluidity of metamorphosis (not being able to take on any fixed form), and a third aspect, not emphasised by Eliade, namely musicality. Moreover, the fountain takes on a biomorphic type (culminating in Bernini’s famous Triton) at this very moment in its evolution.

Water springs from the earth, and is, at the beginning, indistinct from it: the Renaissance considers the four elements as fused, mixed, intertwined with each other, but especially water in its act of being born from the rock, blended with the earth as if it were still the second day of creation. In 1538, Annibal Caro, a man who was very curious about parks and gardens, described, as a great novelty, the villa of Monsignor Guidiccione dei Gaddi, near Farnesina, in Rome, where in a ‘rustic style’ was built ‘a rough wall of a particular stone, which in Rome is called asprone, a kind of black and spongy tufo, and are some boulders placed one on top of the other at random, or to put it more accurately, with a certain disorderly order, which make lumps, and holes where to plant grasses’. The wall was accompanied by a kind of cavern, also made of tufo stone, where the fountains were. The water, falling from them, ‘found a hindrance in certain small rocks, which, in breaking them, made more noise and scattered them in several parts’; and even from the vault drips fell from ‘some frozen white Tartars found in the fall of Tivoli, which are adapted to it in a manner that the groaning water naturally engulfs them’. From the grotto, a mock brook flowed among vegetation that ‘has a dullness and horror’, in a bed decorated with ‘little fishes, little corals, little reefs, little crabs, mother-of-pearl, snails’, along banks adorned with ‘maidenhair, scolopendia, museo and other kinds of water grasses’.¹²

In a page of genuine literary skill (it almost seems as if the fountains of the 16th and 17th centuries compel the person describing them to compete musically with them, with refined adjectives, with recurrences of rare names, with the overlapping and recurrence of vowel sounds, with sudden breaks in the period, resembling abrupt downpours and waterfalls), Claudio Tolomei, in another letter, 26 July 1543, takes up the following point and describes it in even greater detail:¹³

Yesterday evening I dined in Treio in the garden of M. Agabito Belluomo, where I had three sweetnesses in one gulp, which almost three graces filled me with contentment and pleasure. The first was seeing, hearing, bathing and tasting that beautiful water, which was so clear and so pure, that it truly seemed virgin, as it is called…. The second was the ingenious artifice again found in making fountains, which can already be seen used in many places in Rome. Where art is mixed with nature, it is impossible to discern whether it is the work of this or of that, or whether it is the work of someone else, or whether it is an artifice of nature: this way, these times, they have endeavoured to resemble a fountain, which has been made by nature itself, not by chance, but by masterly art. These spongy stones from Tivoli add much ornament and beauty to these works, which, being formed by the waters, return to the service of the waters as their factures; and they adorn it much more with their variety and vagueness than if they had not received ornamentation from them. But what delights me most in these new fountains, is the variety of the ways in which they guide, depart, turn, lead, break, and now make the waters descend and now rise. For in one and the same fountain, other waters can be seen flowing broken among the roughness of those stones, and with a gentle roar breaking up in different parts, others in the hollow of various stones, like a river through its bed, with a small murmur gently falling. There are others, that by gushes in the air, rising, as if lacking the strength to rise, bend downwards, and in falling break into various drops, and with sweetest rain, like lovers’ tears, fall to the ground. Others are guided through very thin channels and come out with various spikes in different parts, and falling into the spring, they make the music of those waters sweeter. There are also some which, rising in the middle of the fountain, almost disdaining to be enclosed, swell and boil; others, not so proud, but rather fearful, tremble, and as if the sea were moved by a beautiful wind, they rise slightly. But there’s great delight to be had in those, which, being hidden, while man is all wrapped up in the wonder of so beautiful a fountain, at once, like soldiers coming out of ambush, open up, and unforeseeably assault and bathe others: whereupon there’s laughter and bewilderment and delight among all. Thus three waters are broken, other currents, those of gushes, those of pisps, one of boils, the other of tremolos. And I think the art will go so far, that there will be added others of sweats, others of dews, and perhaps some of blisters, and some of gurgles, and many other ways: as the most daring wit of man. Seeks ever with his feathers to go higher. Which can well be said together with Zoroaster: ‘O man, bold creation of the most audacious nature.’¹⁴ The third was a sweet courtesy of some gentlemen…

So the water flows from a kind of natural spring, drips from stalactites, and bubbles between porous stones, which preserve and respect the shape given to them by the water over the millennia. And the water is not constricted in a channel, it appears not to emerge from a fistula, but spreads freely in the bed of stones, with a “gentle roar”, or flows softly, sounding almost like “human lovers’ tears”, accompanied by other modulations and counter-chants to make “the music of those waters sweeter”.

Earth, water, and air, as vehicles for the arabesques of gushes and natural and artificial sounds. And all as a living presence, as an ongoing sensory dialogue. Man, amid this spectacle that anticipates by a century Bernini’s papal regalia in Piazza Navona, and by more than two centuries Trevi’s artificial mouth, is forced by sudden jets, to run, to laugh, to flee, to become, from spectator, protagonist.

It is not without reason that the pages we have quoted are meant to commemorate the novelty of the arrangement, in both cases inaugurated with symposia of friends. As banal as it now seems, and as much as it may have been spontaneously anticipated by the springs in the actual ruins of Campo Vaccino, it fits into the history of the arts as something not only unprecedented but revolutionary. The greatest artifice now lies, as Tolomei points out, in concealing the artifice, in other words, in letting the water and the spring speak for themselves as much as possible.

We are, in my opinion, on a different plane from, for example, the ‘rustic’ sources proposed in his treatise on architecture by Leon Battista Alberti, master of ‘varietas’ as well as ‘concinnitas’.

The ancients encrusted the caverns, & subterranean passages harshly with tiny pieces of pumice, or froth of Tiburtine stone, which Ovid refers to as living pumice. We saw some people plastering the museum of the caverns with green wax. We liked to see the cavern, where the water from the spring comes out, plastered with various shells of sea shells and oysters, some of which were reversed, and some straight with various colours arranged differently.¹⁵

There, it is the decoration, not the structure, that matches the natural environment of the fountain, despite the interesting mention of the ‘cave, where the water comes out’; the insistence on the variety of colours and the arrangement of the shells alludes to a regularisation of nature, rather than to a romantic ‘horror’.  Memory, moreover, when reading this short passage, immediately runs to the famous nymphaeums adorned with shells and mosaics in Pompeii; while the Roman sources described above bring to mind the marvellous humility of Chinese and Japanese pictorial landscapes.

The grotto, decorated with tufo and sponges, is also the outright negation of the traditional fountain (even though its interior may house it). The fountain, however, took the opportunity from this very example to transform itself in the most audacious, imaginative, unthinkable way, even disguising itself as an island, a mountain, a sea monster, or a giant. Before arriving at the giant mountain of Pratolino, at the islet of Aesculapius in Boboli, at the Hercules of the Orti Rucellai, the road was a long one: and while accepting Wiles’s thesis,¹⁶ of a clear contrast between Rome and Florence, whereby “the Roman fountains seem designed primarily for the display of water; the Florentine fountains exist rather for the display of sculpture” (but not because the two cities’ water supply was that different), it must be acknowledged that the evolution in the two cities occurred generally in parallel. It is only in the late 16th century that the architectural type of the basin supported by a pedestal, still of Gothic inspiration, was replaced by a more imaginative and synthetic structure, unified not only by the fall of water, but by undulating, organic lines, inspired by shells, fish, dolphins, sea monsters, almost as if to give the city’s water (think again of Bernini’s Triton in the arid Barberini square) a context of sea, lake or river. In Florence, it was Giambologna, together with Buontalenti, who succeeded in performing this true miracle, although considerably later than in Rome (from the descriptions of grotta rustica, with which we began our chapter, we have to go back to 1567 to find the grotto of the Villa Reale in Castello, to ’70 for the Appennino, the montagnole, the pavilions of Pratolino) and the final outcome is only in Tacca’s almost surrealistic masterpieces, erected in 1629 in front of Brunelleschi’s Loggia degli Innocenti, more than a challenge to symbolise, as we have already said, the victory of the anti-Renaissance in the very heart of the city that had contributed most to regenerating the classical order throughout Italy first, and then in much of Europe.

The fountain-makers, Coffin observes regarding the Villa d’Este, “treat water as a sculptor treats clay, moulding it into an infinity of forms”. And in their turn, the sculptors give to the aquatic heroes and monsters, moulded in order to immerse themselves in the basins which they create,  the fluidity of forms proper to water, as if they were, even more than imitations of marine beings, waves, jets, foams, waterfalls that have become, by the same virtue that allows us to see their mysterious intimate living forces, eternal stone or bronze. “Everything,” says Carla Manara about Montorsoli’s Orione fountain in Messina, another of the great masterpieces of this water magic (but the discourse can be generalised), “is united in a general animation, in which the individual elements participate chorally”,¹⁷ “there is a sensual pleasure in the unravelling of forms, rendering them supple and interweaving them in soft tangles that achieve, in their chiaroscuro contrasts and their articulation, free yet punctuated by voids, a total fusion of plasticism and pictorialism”¹⁸

Jacopo Ligozzi, drawings for drinking glasses (Florence, Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe)

1. Ronsard, Avant qu’Amour, from the Amours of 1552, cited in Robert V Meril and Robert J Clements, Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry, New York, 1957, p. 11.
2. Ibid. See, also in the cited work by Merril and Clements, The First Chapter Chaos, Creation and the World Soul, pp. 1-28
3. Paolo Rossi, Sulla valutazione delle arti mecchaniche nei secoli XVI e XVII, in ‘Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, ’ 1956, II, April-June, pp. 126-148, and now in I filosofi e le macchine (1400-1700), Milan, 1962.
4. See the relevant chapter in Aberrations, Paris, 1957, cited, by Baltrušaitis.
5. Many of the drôleries had a religious purpose and would end up in folk teachings; the place left for the comic in religious and convent life was considerably larger in the Middle Ages than it is now. A compelling relationship between drôleries and exempla, interspersed with preaching, has been established by Lilian M.C. Randall, Exempla as a source of gothic marginal Illumination, in ‘Art Bulletin,’ XXXIX, 1957, pp. 97-107.
6. A notable technical refinement in the shaping of precious stones to make them regular (and, at the same time, a progressive devaluation of irregular pearls, called, with a Portuguese word that would later have enormous fortune, baroque. See in this regard, in addition to Migliorini’s presentation on the term Baroque at the above-mentioned conference of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; the excellent essay by O. Kurz, Barocco: storia di una parola, in ‘Lettere Italiane’, XII, 4, October-December 1960, pp. 414-444) is identifiable in works of goldsmithing, and is also attested by literary sources: where the revival of the working of hard basalt is also praised.
7. This seems to be deduced from the description of the villa at Quaracchi by Giovanni Rucellai in Zibaldone (see the anthology edited by A. W. Perosa, London,1960, pp. 20-21).  The hypothesis that this park was connected to an idea of Alberti’s has been put forth by B. W. Ahert-Patzak, Palast und Villa in Toscana, Leipzig, I, 1912, pp. 165 ff.; Il, 1913, pp. 97-103.
8. Hans Hess, Die Naturanschauung der Renaissance in Italien, Marburg a. d. L., 1924.
9.  Regarding the villa see David K. Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, Princeton, 1960.
10. Cited in David K. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio and the decoration at Ferrara, in ‘Art Bulletin’ 1955, pp 192-3. The bibliography on grotesques has become enormous in recent years. It will suffice here to cite, for a general approach, Erik Forsmann’s magnificent volume, Säule und Ornament. Studien zum Problem des Manierismus in den noördischen Säulenbüchern und Vorlageblättern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Stockholm, 1956; and Friedrich Piel Die Ornament-Grotteske in der Italienischen Renaissance zu ihrer Kategorialen Struktur und Eustehung, Berlin, 1962 (“Neue München Beiträge zur Kunstegeschichte, III. “) But see also Kris-Gombrich, The Principles of Caricature, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York, 1952.
11. Eliade, Images et Symboles, pp. 199 ff.; Das Heilige und das Profane, p. 76.
12. Annibal Caro, Lettere familiari, volume I, ed. edited by Aulo Greco, Florence, 1957, no 61, pp. 105-109. I owe the reference to my friend Costanzo.
13. Letter to Giovambattista Grimaldi, from Book II of Letters, ed. Naples, 1829. Claudio Tolomei (d. 1555), was now involved ‘in the Vitruvian Academy,’ in which the future pope Marcellus II also participated; Vitruvius was commented on there by Ignazio Danti, Vignola, etc. Tolomei, for his part, held an architectural academy in the Colonna House in the presence of Michelangelo and others. A scientific programme of Vitruvian studies is included in his letter to Agostino Landi of 14 November 1542, Book III of the Letters. See Exercitationes Vitruvianae primae, hoc est loannis Poleni commentaritu criticus de M. Vitruvii Pollionis architecti X Librorum editionibus, Padua, 1739, pp. 50-62. It is more than likely that the rustic was also elaborated in connection with these Vitruvian researches.
14. L. B. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, book IX, c. IV, quoted from the Venetian translation of 1546, pp. 200 ff.
15. On Alberti’s taste for ‘varietas,’ see M. Gosebruch,‘Varietà’ bei Leon Battista Alberti und derWissenschaftliche Renaissancebegriff, in ‘Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte,’ XX, 1957, pp. 229-38.There was no lack however of examples in antiquity that were singularly close to those of the Renaissance, in the decorative treatment of natural caves, such as the cavern of the Villa Tiberiana in Sperlonga (illustrated in fi g. 16-23), based on shells, mosaics, and coloured plasters; see Furio Fasolo, Architetture classiche a mare, II Altre antichità del Litorale di Sperlonga, in ‘Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura dell’Università di Roma,’ no. 20-21, 1957, pp. 13. The cave was described by Tacitus.
16. B.H. Wiles, The Fountains of Florentine Sculptors, Cambridge, Mass., 1933, p. 19.
17. D.R. Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, Princeton, 1960, p. 38.
18. Carla Manara, Montorsoli, ‘Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Arte dell’Università di Genova,’ no. 2, 1959, in particular pp. 72-76, where there is a magnificent analysis of the new value the fountain takes on in Montorsoli (on pp. 83-86). She rightly notes in the artist, precisely because of a substantial divergence between Mannerism and other forms of anti-Classicism, ‘the continual persistence of irreconcilable elements, which show the incoherent coexistence not only of different figurative motifs but also of different contents, some all literary, the others vital and essential. … Nor does Montorsoli seek to remedy this dualism, this fluid spiritual situation with the continuous research and tormented intellectualistic subtlety that characterise certain Mannerist artists: he is probably not even aware of the crisis and only comes to realise his art in a gaiety and carefree escapism, without the problems of life, yet so close sensorially to life and nature” (p. 92). Apart from the presumption of spontaneity in this sensist approach, the analysis is subtle and fitting, and can make a fundamental contribution to the distinction between mannerism and, if you like, anti-Renaissance.