The Antirenaissance – Magic of the Elements

Part III

by / 18 October 2024

Art does not feel like abstracting from nature, but, at the same time, it is not content to record it. It engages in a contest, with matter, but remains, perhaps as never before, on its own plane. This way of doing things was recognised in the most elegant way by Tolomei, in the letter we quoted almost at the beginning of the chapter: “mixing art with nature, one cannot discern whether it is the work of this or of that, indeed now it seems a natural artifice, and now an artificious nature”. In this perennial ambiguity, is the genuine truth of the time. In the 17th century, artifice will eventually prevail over nature, not resolving the dilemma, but eliminating it. This can be seen, among other things, in Bartoli, when he describes, with unparalleled vividness, but betraying its meaning, the hydraulic marvels of Tivoli and Frascati. According to him, the master who did such works “does not owe the material to others, but the material is obliged to him with the honour of such noble work”, having transfused into waters that would have gone “crawling so vilely over the earth among muddy banks, barely worthy of animals to drink”, nobility, Bartoli, with typical Baroque arrogance, concludes: “Is this not overcoming matter with work? and making it one’s own?” The initial quality of the material is buried ‘in the magistery of art’. The sixteenth-century craftsman, on the other hand, believed he was ennobling art by burying it in matter.

It would, therefore, be a grave error if I were to put myself in Bartoli’s position to explain the 16th century’s attitude towards the elements. Michelangelo, who was at the same time a supreme artist and a supreme artisan, did not at all agree that artifice was enough to create a masterpiece: but he spent months on the Apuan Alps searching for marbles that already concealed the forms he intuited in them, even though he could not see them, and in one of his famous sonnets he declared that even the sculptor’s imagination is subordinate to the figurative vocation of the marble block he has to work on.1 From this point of view, he is not only more humble than any Baroque sculptor, but also much more modest than the fifteenth-century artists, and the very skilful and uninhibited Gothic stonemasons, for whom the problem was not so much respect for the material, as the possible hostility, deafness, or lack of respect towards it:

form often does not accord 
with the intention of art, 
because the material is deaf to respond
(Paradiso 1 127-129)

It is necessary, then, in our critical consideration, not to forget the relationship between the desire for knowledge and interest in nature, one that also took place outside of science. The form, given to matter, is intended to express, I repeat, the ‘concept’. This is enough to distinguish the biological taste of the 16th century from the apparently similar taste of the 19th century, when, with ideas that would certainly have pleased Riccio, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre proposed that gutters should be transformed into hydraulic apparatuses, capable of spurting water over the roofs of houses and churches, that chimney pots should be shaped like craters, so that the smoke would come out and create fascinating effects. Romantic craftsmen filled the new bourgeois houses with semi-natural and semi-artificial objects, turning them into chambers of wonder, or rather, receptacles of dust and psychological oppression. They brought back seashells, nautical shells, corals, crystals (this time of glass), chandeliers with rainbow reflections, bowls bent to imitate a perpetual trickle of water, hell-warmers, monster and bird-shaped wing and fire guards.2


The Gate of Knowledge (from Henri Khumrath, Amphitheatrum sapiente aeternae solius verae, 1608, with engravings from 1602)

Romanticism had a mystical, pantheistic, biomorphic concept of nature in its own way, and a certain inquietude in relation to it. But, perhaps as a result of being too nourished by literature, it did not possess a real capacity to feel the material. On which the figurative schemes applied or superimposed are extrinsic, derived from exoticism, taken from the pictorial tradition of the academies or from classical repertoires, not devised ex novo as intuitions flashed upon contact with the elements.  They remain unadorned embellishments or disfigurements, sometimes superfluous. To find something akin to 16th century humility, in more recent civilisations, we must descend much closer to us, perhaps even to the informel, that is to say, to a stylistic revolution that, at least initially, took place under the banner of the material rather than that of the image, also as a reaction to iconographic inadherence, or the consumption of traditional artistic themes.3

The 16th century, moreover, is singularly capable of transcending its own imagerie to accept very different motifs and subject matter. We know, it is true, very little about Renaissance exoticism, and especially about the first contacts, in terms of style, between Europe and pre-Columbian art . The evidence we possess is however impressive. Dürer, upon seeing the works of Mexican art exhibited in 1521 in Antwerp, on the occasion of the entry of Carlo  V, left a record in his diary of unparalleled enthusiasm4 (and given the great German painter’s vast knowledge of European art, far more decisive in critical terms than the expressions of appreciation of travellers and conquistadors, such as H. Cortéz, regarding the goldsmiths and featherwork).

“In all my life,” writes Dürer, “I have seen nothing that has so gladdened my heart as these things. For I have seen the wonders of their art and marvelled at the subtle ingenuities of people from countries so far away. And I don’t know how to express what I felt.” Not even for classical art did Dürer indulge so much in praise.  And perhaps no classical work of art has ended up so preciously enshrined, after being fitted with onyx eyes and a gold costume sprinkled with jewels, in a niche of silver and gilded bronze, as the Olmec mask donated in 1572 to Albert V of Bavaria by Cosimo I de’ Medici, and later recorded in the inventories of the Schatzkammer in Munich together with other idols from Mexico, evidently favoured by the court.  Eighteenth-century framing thus consecrates almost two centuries of appreciation.5 With regard to featherwork, the Bolognese Aldrovandi could not refrain from describing its masterpieces as superior to the legendary ones of Apelles.6 For the highly sophisticated men of the sixteenth century, the art of ethnography was therefore not a curiosity, but an authentic lesson in ingenuity and style, and perhaps even in formal directness and sincerity in the use of matter: just as in the first decade of the twentieth century in Paris.  It would be valuable to have a study showing us how similarly ‘primitive’ art, both non-European and local, could serve in some instances to move from elegance to strength, from mundane modeling to immanent, powerful structuring, from the finished to the partially unfinished.

And here in our painting, alongside that on the rustic style, another typical 16th-century theoretical discussion is introduced, that on the unfinished7 (i.e. on the work of art that remains in the state of the rough draft, sketch, stain), preserving iconographic, perhaps magical, certainly symbolic links of structure with the fourth of the elements: the earth.

Initially, even according to Michelangelo, the unfinished is an original stage of chaos, it is the “matière informe et primitive“, from which must emerge “l’ordre bien constitubé“. But he soon ends up liking, more than ‘l’ordre constitué’, the dynamic, intermediary, germinating moment of birth. The rock has opened up, and the covering of the image has partly fallen away; but the giant or the caryatid remains more earthly than human, in a kind of murky somnolence, in a stage of repressed strength, and even of anguished slavery.8 Chastel9 rightly observes that the unfinished, precisely because it represents a phase of the creative process, has nothing to do with the idea of the fragmentary, connected by Renaissance man to the ruins, to the destruction of the completed work; but rather coincides with the hybrid “la forme qui confond, avec un sentiment aigu du caprice et du jeu, l’image des espèces, combinant le vivant et l’inanimé, le végétal et l’animai, le bestiai et l’humain en de constantes métamorphoses”. Chastel goes on to observe that the unfinished and the hybrid, precisely because they disarticulate and compromise the integrity of forms, are the clearest opposition to that clarity, articulation and precision of forms, which Wolfflin asserts as typical and distinctive of Renaissance style, to which therefore the poetics of the elements, exemplified here by us and so near to Chastel’s hybrid, opposes as another stylistic civilization, in the same way as the sixteenth-century attempts at a theory of the stain/sketch10 constitute the most serious threat in the informel sense, and the strongest opposition to the theory of proportions and geometric perspective. The speed and coherence of the process of revolt against the Wölffinian Renaissance can be seen by comparing Michelangelo’s torments and scruples, in the act of abandoning the finishing of the Prigioni, with the nonchalant decorative freedom with which a few decades later Buontalenti arranged these statues in the Boboli grotto, transferring them from a specific symbolism (the four parts of the world, or the four regions subjugated by the pontiff) to a more general symbolism ‘not without vague and subtle intentions, for sketched with incredible and marvellous artifice, these figures show every effort to want to come out of the marble to escape the ruin that is above them, and make one relive what they fabled to be. because sketched with incredible and marvellous artifice, these figures show every effort of wanting to come out of the marble to escape the ruin that is above them, and they recall what the poets fabled, when men were extinguished by the Flood, and the world was restored by Deucalion from stones.11

The more one examines this reversal of rapport, which is distinctly comparable to that which occurred in cosmology as a result of Copernicus’ discoveries, whereby man ceased to consider himself the heart, at least the physical heart, of the universe, the more one is astounded by the extraordinary consequences for cultural, iconography and even life itself. Architecture, as always, expresses the contrast between before and after, in the most dramatic and concrete manner.  The culmination of all the mental and technical efforts of the 15th century was, together with perspective, i.e. the optical organisation of the world, the dome: the grand symbol of the celestial vault.12 However, in contrast to the ziggurats and pyramids, which express a desire for ascension, for the union, on a higher level, between man and god, the dome is not so much on the outside as on the inside of the building: it is not a path, but a limit, and its function is not to stimulate an exit from the temple, but to eliminate all other more impure images of transcendence. It is difficult, perhaps, to think of a sharper and more violent contrast than the one between the 15th- and 16th-century spire (often blind on the inside and, in any case, for reasons of perspective shrinkage, as will also happen in Novara in the 19th century in Antonelli’s neo-Gothic dome, which lacks spatial amplification) and the dome. The cathedral too, after all, wants to be like a spire, it aims at the sky; its vaults move further and further away from the ground, the ribs cut and break them, rendering them insubstantial; the perspective movement of the visitor, who walks through the naves, removes from them even the last residue of weight and staticity; the tall windows, with their light that beats down on the vaults, separate the latter from the human and earthly band of the ambulatory and the arches, separates them from us, does not make us feel the pressure, the anguish. The dome is quite the opposite: it takes away any view, it eliminates any desire for motion, it is unreachable and ill-defined by the gaze, as well befits a transcendence; but it encloses, it delimits as an obligation of faith, indeed it even removes any desire for evasion. In a great Gothic basilica, the visitor circulates continuously, never resting. Under a dome he stops, having reached its centre. In other words, the dome’s function is to project the sacred onto the ground, to imbue, from above, a space, an audience, or an officiant with value.

The late 16th century opposes the dome with a theme that is quite unusual in the Christian Occident, and with an archaic dramaticity: the grotto, whether natural or artificial. The grotto, in a certain sense, is like Dante’s inferno, an upside-down dome, pointing towards the earth, instead of towards heaven. But it is, even more, an inverted spire. Its area of greatest interest is not so much the brighter part as the darker part; towards that darkness we must proceed, knowing that we are not striving towards knowledge, but towards mystery. The grotto, moreover, especially if artificial, has the capacity to accompany us and progressively plunge us into the heart of nature. Its decoration, in fact, is not abstract, like that of the dome, but naturalistic: its walls are lined with tufa and shells, famous sculptors hasten to place reproductions of all the animals of the earth in it; automaton-makers evoke songs of birds and Orpheus taming wild beasts, while in transparent glass basins, on the top of the vault, where the light filters through, coloured fish swim. One may well think of these grottoes as being like eastern gardens, especially Japanese (because of their respect for nature). But in Florence it is not so much a question of respect as of conquest. Just the presence of Orpheus taming the beasts, or the enigmatic woman taming the dragon at Pratolino, is enough to indicate the will to conquer. At Pratolino, again, we see frescoes in the grotto, probably inspired by Agricola’s woodcuts, of the workings of the mines, as a figurative poem about the conquest of the land.13

The grotto has within itself something of the static, something outside of time: in a certain sense, the last great Renaissance monument that concludes, so to speak, the Medici period, Michelangelo’s Sacrestia Nuova in San Lorenzo, is already a grotto: a church that is like the compendium of an entire civilisation, from its origins to its conclusion, with alternating phases of optimism and anguish. Death puts time to sleep; and the light, which falls from above, is singularly devoid of modulations due to clouds, or the passing of the hours. Not even raising the eye from the bottom, where the decoration is richer, and perhaps was meant to be rustic, does one perceive the presence of a process of ascent. The grotto itself is not something eschatological: it is not an act of otherworldly hope.  Dante’s ‘lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate’, in Bomarzo is paraphrased into ‘lasciate ogni pensiero’, to be integrated perhaps into ‘ogni pensiero terreno”. The grotto brings man back to himself, isolates him from blinding appearances, places him in the most authentic heart of reality.

What we are writing here may seem once again to be an a posteriori reconstruction, a literary interpretation, let us say, inspired by the millenary religious history of the grotto, as indicated by Saintyves, Eliade and Hautecoeur,14 from which we learn that even Christian sacred grottos, such as that of the Nativity in Bethlehem, were the sites of even more archaic cults, generally devoted to the cult of the earth and fertility, dating back to the most ancient prehistory.  Or, it may seem suggested by the myths widespread in every civilisation, about the grotto as the place of man’s origin, or as the basis of his moral rebirth: “We could multiply the citations”, writes Saintyves,15 “and show that from one end of the world to the other, the cave was considered to be the progenitor or the matrix. On its sides are born the world and men, the sun, the moon and its stars; from its bosom light gushes forth, not only that which illuminates the landscapes of the earth, but that light which illuminates souls. The cavern is not only the matrix of the world and of men, but… it engenders souls and gods to immortality.”16

It may seem, again, that our exegesis is an illicit or unproven extension to the Occident (regarding these artificial grottos, skilfully inserted into gardens and where philosophical symposiums were also held, as in the Orti Rucellai17) of the Taoist custom of using grottos as places of religious initiation.18 Fortunately, in order to dispel all these accusations (which are not serious, however, as even a vague knowledge of the universal cult of the grotto, which not only a humanist, but a theologian could already deduce from the texts at hand, would eventually lead to the same results), we know that a famous and very successful text was available to the Renaissance, dedicated to the symbolic exegesis of the grotto, according to the ideas of Platonism; which is, the De antro nympharum, by Porphyry,19 the first edition of which was published in 1518, with a dedication to Leo X, and which was reprinted continuously. The correlations between the cavern described by Porphyry and the grotto of Pratolino, excavated in the heart not only of an artificial mountain, but of a mountain shaped on the image of the personification of a mountain, are so suggestive that they allow us to deduce, with considerable certainty, the moral ideas and life programme of the person who had it built, that is Francesco I.

The sacred cavern stands in a forest, and a spring emerges from it. It is sacred because it is a symbol of the world, according to the ideas of an antiquity already remote from the time of Porphyry; malleable and shapeless like the earth, but above all similar to the formlessness of our cognitive situation, the cavern is as dark as the essence of the forces hidden in nature is dark and mysterious, which we desperately seek to know. Our eye is arrested by its obscurity as our soul is arrested before the virtues of the unknown essences. Even entering and proceeding into the cavern is tiring, given the stony hardness of the walls. Yet, its darkness, or rather, its penumbra, is also luminous and playful: it allows us to approach the essence of things that the too intense light of day, according to Plato, would impede us from seeing. The grotto, moreover, is adorned, at least in the cult of Mithras, with symbols and figures of all earthly elements and climates, and is therefore like a book to be read. It is, moreover, the point of contact with the beyond, the way to immortality. At the mouth of the grotto stands the olive tree, the symbol of divine wisdom, and therefore one must enter it pure and worldly, in body and spirit: ‘Leave all thought, ye who enter here’. This wisdom will be transmitted to us through the secret ways of the mysteries, it will in a certain sense be the earth itself that speaks to us in a kind of incubation. Francesco I, an alchemist, interested in the transformation of the elements and in occult knowledge, who invented porcelain, counterpoises, melted quartz, studied plants and animals, was equally thirsty to discover the unknown essences of natural forces; but his research, as we know from his contemporaries, did not take place in conversation, but in isolation and secrecy.  Pythagoras, too, in Samos had made for himself, in the park, an artificial grotto ‘which was his true philosophical home’.20

It is curious to observe how the reversal of interests, which we have exemplified, is accompanied by a radical transformation of the humanist’s very way of living in private, and especially that of the prince, who, judging by the rooms built for his retreat and meditation, is placed, until the end of the 15th century, at the apex not so much of politics but of cultural life. I am alluding to the studioli, or small rooms, which are one of the most extraordinary creations of the Renaissance, from whichever point of view one studies them, whether as art, or as a sociological and psychological clue.

The first of them – to mention the most famous – is that of Federico da Montefeltro, in the Palace of Urbino:21 a kind of delightful cell, which isolates the sovereign, not only from the life of the court, but also from that of the outside world. The environment is exclusively artefactual: at the bottom, a series of stupendous inlays reproduce the instruments of universal knowledge, codices, scientific instruments, sheets of music etc., arms. They also have the function of indicating what was found on the shelves behind, but seem rather their allegory. Interspersed, we find personifications of virtues, such as charity and hope, reminding us that culture, even for Federico, had to have a primarily moral purpose. And at the top, were images of the great men of antiquity: a now traditional motif of Petrarchan origin, and which gives Federico’s closed cell an opening, not in space, but in history. We feel like commenting on his withdrawal, from the world of the everyday into the historical, with Machiavelli’s famous letter: “When the evening has come, I return home and go into my writing room; and at the door I take off my daily robe, full of mud and lotus, and I put on my royal and curial clothes – and dressed accordingly, I go into the ancient courts of the ancient men; where, received lovingly by them, I eat that food which is mine and which I was born for him’”22 But Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori is from December 1513; Federico’s studiolo from 1476. Within forty years, if the conception of culture as a dialogue with the past had not changed among the literati of central Italy, it had, on the other hand, already been severely transformed in the areas subject to the influence of Flemish and transalpine culture generally.

We already have an inkling of this in the precious panel by Antonello da Messina, which depicts Jerome (the great saint of the humanists) in his study23 isolated, yes, from the outside world, grappling with books, that is, with history, but nevertheless, placed right on the apex of nature, so much so that the birds not only look out chirping at the ‘mullioned window’ at the top, but also climb up to the innermost step, to get food. As if this were not enough, two fragrant plants stand at the saint’s feet. Moreover, Saint Jerome himself is erected almost on his throne to dominate not only the bookish culture, but the entire civilised world: he appears in the midst of the playful background views of the well-cultivated countryside and the neatly tended, freshly plastered houses.

A decisive invitation to leave the library, to meditate in the open air, to move from reading to the observation of reality, are the famous studioli, unfortunately decomposed in the ducal palaces of Mantua24and Ferrara.25 Already their conception is revolutionary. They both both look out, architecturally, onto nature The one in Mantua overlooks an enclosed and protected garden: the one in Ferrara, under the influence of the poetic description of a pinacoteca, of the Filostrati, overlooks the Emilian plain and the sea far away on the horizon. Giamblicus writes of the Platonic philosophers: ‘They sought for their meditations the calmness that one breathes in the woods.26

The paintings decorating the dressing rooms seem almost to want to bring the forest, the plain, the meadow into the royal studio. Lacking in them is any heroic intentionality, any symbolic harshness. Beautiful goddesses and half-naked nymphs perform sacred and mysterious rites. Were it not for their sometimes accentuated eroticism and intellectual subtleties, these settings would be ideal places of escape: but we cannot overlook the philosophical importance of this dialogue, conducted through the paintings, with the divinities who govern nature, and even more, who control the human psyche. One can rightly speak of arcadia, but of an active arcadia in which man sets out to heal himself and to cure his passions. The dominating theme in these studies is that of the music of sentimental harmony.27

Already years earlier, in the wake of Petrarch, another sovereign, Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had equally loved rural mythologies, wrote:

Seek those who want pomp and high honours
The squares, the temples and the magnificent buildings,
The delights and treasures, which accompany
A thousand hard thoughts, a thousand sorrows.
A little green meadow full of lovely flowers,
A stream that bathes the grass around,
A little bird that mourns for love
Sprinkles/drizzles much better our ardours…28

These chambers are thus artificial paradises, a surrogate for escaping to the villa, but without the villains appearing to disturb peace and conscience, ready to rise up at gunpoint, not only in Germany, but right there, between Mantova and Ferrara.

The last of the great Renaissance studioli is that of Francesco I in Florence, from around 1570.29 We now find ourselves at the opposite pole. The setting is not only secluded but completely in darkness. It does not simulate a paradise, it creates an artificial night The man who enters them can repeat as Faust:

When the friendly lantern once again burns in our little cell, it is as if light were shining in our breast, and our heart would know itself. Reason once more speaks, and hope once more blossoms.30

It is certainly audacious to attempt to explain a 16th century man with the words of Goethe, even if between Faust and Francesco I there is the cultural consanguinity of both being alchemists. But similar ideas are expressed by some contemporary poets and philosophers and perhaps by Bruno, who manifests a similar fear of light. Man cannot make an immediate transition from ignorance to knowledge, but must proceed slowly by successive illuminations.  Shadow prepares sight for light. Night restores the soul: also according to Michelangelo.31

Not only. The humanist, turned towards history and the philological recovery of the past, is opposed by the naturalist, dedicated to cataloguing and direct, personal experimentation with substances and elements. The cupboards of Francesco I’s studiolo did not contain books, let alone musical instruments, but corals, quartz, metals, chemical substances, some of nature’s rarest monstrosities, and those marvels of artisanship that were best able to highlight and exalt the secret concepts of things32. The painters who decorated the doors of the cupboards, hiding such treasures from the impure curiosity of the uninitiated, on a subject by Borghini and under the guidance, in this case truly stimulating and freeing, of Vasari, composed, in honour of Francesco I, a true poem to the elements: water, fire and earth offer, through these allegories, entirely themselves to those who become silent and attentive to listen to their voice.

However, their allure is far more risky, for the soul and spiritual serenity, than the temptation of pagan books. To reach knowledge of the elements, silence, isolation, secrecy are necessary, as Albertus Magnus advised.33 It is indispensable, this quasi mystical preparation, which is a proper initiation to be repeated time after time.  But doubt, nevertheless, will remain greater than knowledge and certainty.  The solar renaissance, the Burckhardtian certainty of the dominating and knowing man is succeeded by a nocturnal, Shakespearean renaissance, troubled by bitterness, aware of its own limitations. In the grotto, into which the new humanist penetrates, it is not enough to play the zither of reason to overcome the ghosts of Avernus; perhaps a pact with the devil is not enough either. If the melancholic Francesco does not succeed in reaching per lucem ad lucem, it will certainly only rarely happen to him to reach per obscuritatem ad lucem.34 

The ‘nocturnalism’ (as Berti defines it,35 who rightly considers it one of the ‘disturbing’ aspects not only of the studiolo, but also of its pictorial decoration) moves us towards the sacred grotto, and is in Francesco I, as in Filippo II (whose gloomy tenement, behind the high altar of the church, in the Escurial, is already in a pythagorean sense, death in life),36 the product of a true religious crisis. A contemporary wrote, marvelling that ‘in such happiness of state and abundant power of all things, Francesco I never rejoiced and was much afflicted’.

We, after having studied the new rapport with the elements that was established in the late Renaissance, are no longer surprised to find, in his very refined little studio (where the painters who worked there gave the best of themselves, and where the courtly art of the second half of the 16th century touches its extreme degree of elegance), so much affliction and so little serenity. And we also know the reason why not even on the most sweltering day and at the busiest hour does a glimmer of light, or an echo of a voice, enter. Everything is still and static, but not in tranquillity. All is waiting for a dark revelation to rise, through the walls, from the earth, to illuminate the anxious soul in the heart of its night.

It is of course possible to consider these phenomena that we have rapidly exemplified, schematically, as marginal episodes in the history of figurative styles, something ‘minor’, in other words like the minor arts from which they are produced. And it is also probable, precisely because of their being on the periphery, or outside the great debates then taking place on imitation, on the priority of painting or sculpture, etc., that contemporaries considered all this to be a fashion, a matter of custom, to use our current definitions.

The historian and the critic who pauses for a moment to consider the quality of these works (quality not only of fantastic invention, but also of technical achievement), and the monotony, the lack of verve, the lack of even artisanal ingenuity, the suffocating conformism of almost all the production by these same artists, which took place outside the milieu of taste we are considering, will inevitably come to one of two conclusions: Either these masters felt, in a very special way, the magic of the elements, so much so that they identified themselves with the theme as did not happen to them elsewhere; or the magic of the elements themselves had such a capacity for fantastic solicitation that they dragged the artists emotionally out of their normal path. This is the case of the artists of the studiolo of Francesco I, who gave in that cycle the best of themselves, and of late 16th century Florentine painting, without being able, afterwards, either collectively or individually, to recapture that level. And the case of Ligozzi, much greater as a scientific draughtsman than as a religious painter. It is the case of the decorators, architects, sculptors working for apparatuses, of Buontalenti himself. The artificial (posticcio) ends up prevailing, as a quality, over the real, over the constructed; the momentary over the eternal, the profane over the sacred, the magical over the rational.

Another striking observation is that the ‘poetics’ of the elements is by no means a constant, not even in the sixteenth century. It follows a broken evolutionary rhythm, which it would be worthwhile specifying, with meticulous documentation. A first wave, which already includes scenography, fireworks, fountains, decoration, practically coincides with the discovery of grotesques, and the first illustrated scientific treatises: it touches the penultimate decade of the 15th century and the first of the 16th century. The second wave seems to have taken place between 1530-40; the third coincides with the reign of Francesco i, and is the one that sees the European triumph of the Wunderkammern, of fairy-tale settings for intermezzos. This taste is therefore the work, like all great human creations, of a few generations, or rather, of a very few individuals in a very few years. And it is already, one might say, in itself a masterpiece of the arts.

  1. See E. Battisti, Note su alcuni biografi di Michelangelo, in Scritti di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Lionello Venturi, Rome, 1956, pp. 335-336.
  2. On ornament 20 see, among others, J. Evans, Pattern, A Study of Ornament in Western Europe, 1180-1900, Oxford, 1931; Stephan Tschudi Madsen, Sources of Art Nouveau, New York, 1956.
  3. On the taste for matter, in the informal, see the large volume by E. Crispolti, currently being printed, and, generally in G. Dorfles, Ultime tendenze nell’arte d’oggi, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1961.
  4. This fact was underlined by P. Kelemen, Medieval American Arts, New York, 1943, I, 13 and by J. Charlot, Who discovered America?, in ‘Art News’, LII, 1953-4, pp. 30-33 and 49-51 Dürer was not the only one to express such an appreciation; as we now learn from Suzanne Collon-Gevaert, L’art précolombien et le Palais des Princes-évêques à Liège, in “Bulletin de la Société d’Art et d’Histoire du Diocèse cle Liège,” XLI, 1959, pp. 73-95, and from André Chastel, Masques mexicains à la Renaissance, in “Art de France,” I p. 299. The transport of the Aztec treasure to Northern Europe gave rise to sculptural imitations of the famous golden masks, later destroyed, even in funerary monuments, such as that of Card. d’Amboise, in the Cathedral of Rouen. This is a new chapter in exoticism (see R. Bezombes, L’exotisme dans l’art et la pensée, Paris, etc., 1953; E. Crispolti, ad vocem, in Enciclopedia Universale dell’Arte; V, coli. 36-42) in addition to the enduring oriental influences (see Leonardo Olschki, Asiatic exoticism in ltalian Art of the Early Renaissance, in ‘Art Bulletin’ 1944, 2, pp. 95-106 and Baltrušaitis with the works cited), and the still very strong Islamic art influences, about which it is worth mentioning, for Italy, this autobiographical note by Cellini, in Vita, I, c. 6, relating to circa 1524: ‘In those times I happened upon some small Turkish daggers, and the handle was made of iron as was the blade of the dagger; again the sheath was made of iron similarly. These said things were carved under irons with many beautiful leaves in the Turkish style, and very neatly applied with gold: which incited me greatly to the desire of trying again to toil in that profession so different from the others; and seeing that it succeeded me very well, I created quite a few works” (Florence, 1938).
  5. See Hans Thoma, Schatzkammer der Residenz München, Katalog, München, 1958, n- 974, p. 332, and reproduction in table 48.
  6. For Aldrovandi see chapter IX and footnotes 36 and ff. The statement quoted here can be found in Ornithologiae hoc est de Avibus Historiae Libri Xll, Bologna, 1599, pp. 655-6.
  7. On the subject of the unfinished, especially the Michelangelesque, there is a vast bibliography, but only in recent years has the problem been focused on from its proper point of view, that is, reconnecting it to the taste for the torso, for the ruin, for the rustic. In this sense, the results of the congress: DasUnvollendete als künstlerische Form. Ein Symposion, with contributions by M. Bémol A. Chastel, K . Conrad, H von Einem, D. Frey, J. Gantner, F. Gerke, J. Müller Blattan, J. A. Shmoll Gen. Eisenwerth, E. Zinn, published by J. A. Shmoll Gen. Eisenwerth, Berne-München, 1959. I use, in particular, the contributions of H. von Einem, Unvollendetes und Unvollenbares im Werke Michelangelos (pp. 69-82), and A. Chastel, Le fragmentaire, l’hybride et l’inachevé (pp. 83-89). It may be good to report two testimonies that are not very well known. Annibal Caro, in a letter dated 9 August 1561 praises Giuseppe Giova, for not having ‘retouched nor finished ’ a figure, in the manner of Mantegna (here is another testimony of his activity as a sculptor), saying: ’And you have done very well not to have it retouched nor finished because the torso as it stands is better and whoever broke it, did so to preserve the good and remove some imperfections that were there to be by the hand of a good master’. ed. cited by Aulo Greco, III, p. 75. Celeni, in his Vita, book I, c. X, uses an epigraph corroded by time for his brother’s tombstone: ‘This I had this name carved in beautiful ancient letters, all of which I had broken, except for the first and last letter. I was asked about the broken letters by those who had made me that beautiful epigram. I told them, those letters were broken, because that admirable instrument of his body was broken and dead; and those two whole letters, the first and the last, were, the first, memory of that great gain of that present which God gave us, of this soul of ours enkindled by his divinity; this one was never broken; that other last whole was for the glorious fame of his valiant virtues. This one liked it very much, and afterward, someone else made use of it in this way.’ Von Einem comments, symposium cited p. 72 “So here the unfinished state was not perceived as a deficiency, but has rather been perceived as a charm.” On the success of the Torso, see H. von Einem, Der Torso als Thema der bildenden Kunst in ‘Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,’ 1935.
    The problem was already being discussed in the 16th century. See Paola Barocchi, Finito e non finito nella critica vasariana, “Arte Antica e Moderna,” 1958, 3, pp. 221-235.
  8. This is Michelangelo’s idea, expressed in a series of testimonies. See R. J. Clements, in the forthcoming volume on the relationship between the poems and the artist’s figurative works.
  9. A. Chastel, art. Cit.
  10. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the poetics of the macchia, as elaborated in the 16th century, has very close affinities with the poetics of the Informal, which succeeded geometric abstraction (the major study by E. Crispolti, currently in print,is fundamental on its current theorisation ). What is lacking, to my knowledge, is an analogous overall study of the Renaissance, apart from the observations made by J. Baltrušaitis, Moyen Age Fantastique, pp. 211-20, and Chastel’s thesis, taken up in the volume on Medicean culture . The bibliography on this subject can be drawn in part, from those on grotesques, the ‘unfinished,’ the ‘rustic’ style, etc. The macchia has been mentioned several times in connection with Leonardo’s imagination. I will add a few supplementary notes: first, E. Panofsky, ‘Nebulae in pariete,’ Notes on Erasmus Eulogy on Dürer, in ‘Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,’ XIV, 1951, pp. 34-41, and the dedication premised by Pirckheimer on the translation of the dialogue by Lucian, Navis seu vita, Nuremberg, 1522 (see ‘Graphischen Künste,’ 1936, pp. 118 ff.; Hans Sedlmayr, Die ‘Macchia’ Bruegels, in ‘Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen Wien,’ N. F., 8, 1934, pp. 137-59. It could be carried out in ‘Ut poesis pictura,’ Chastel’s acute observation, symposium cited: ‘We find ourselves in a truly poetic state, in unison with nature, when the forms retain something of the ‘amorphousness’ of the dream, in contrast with the defined image’.The taste for the macchia, for the random and colourful juxtaposition, for the play of mirrors, is connected with the invention of the kaleidoscope, described on pp. 144-5 of G. B. Della Porta, De i miracoli et maravigliosi effetti dalla natura prodotti, etc., Venice, 1560.

  11. This happened in 1538-1585. Chastel observes, symposium cit.: ‘By placing the slaves at Boboli in an artificial grotto, Buontalenti was treating Michelangelo’s unfinished statues as elements of a ‘rustica’ setting. This is undoubtedly an important indication of the interpretation of the rustic style and its extraordinary vogue in the seventeenth century.’  See Bocchi, Bellezze di Fiorenza, 1581, ed. Cinelli 1677, pp. 138-9. But also Michelangelo’s lost David was placed, in France: like a wild man in the middle of a park. I refer to the description of Buontalenti’s Grotto, for Boboli, given by Baldinucci, Vita del Buontalenti, quoted from the edition of Notizie de’ professori, etc., ed. 1811, voi. VIII, p. 25.
  12. It is sufficient to recall, in this regard, the demonstrations given by K. Lehmann, The Dome of Heaven, in ‘Art Bulletin,’ March 1945, pp. 1-27; E. Baldwin Smith, The Dome, Princeton, 1950; and L. Hautecoeur, Mystique et Architecture, Symbolisme du cerche et de la coupole, Paris, 1954.
  13. The information that the grotto was decorated by mining works is given by Francesco De’ Vieri, Discorsi Meraviglie Opere di Pratolino e Amore, Florence, 1587. ‘In the grotto of said Mount, there are rooms, in which are painted all the mines, and men who quarry metals, and stones … “
    There is no doubt that the revival of the cult of the earth is linked to the perfection of the art of mining.  The same aesthetic admiration of stones and metals and connected since biblical times with mining; see, for example, the Book of Job 28, quote 5 to 11:

    La terra, da cui nasceva il pane,
    al di sotto è sconvolta da un fuoco;
    le sue pietre sono il posto dello zaffiro,
    e le sue zolle contengono oro
    È la strada che l’uccello non conosce
    né la scorge l’occhio dello sparviere; …
    nella selce stende l’uomo la mano,
    sconvolge dalle radici le montagne:
    entro le rupi egli scava dei canali,
    ed ogni cosa preziosa l’occhio suo vede,
    scruta anche il profondo dei fiumi,
    e le cose recondite porta alla luce

    As for the earth, out of it comes bread;
    but underneath it is turned up as by fire.
    Its stones are the place of sapphires,
    and its dust contains gold.
    “That path no bird of prey knows,
    and the falcon’s eye has not seen it.
    The proud wild animals have not trodden it;
    the lion has not passed over it.
    “They put their hand to the flinty rock,
        and overturn mountains by the roots.
    They cut out channels in the rocks,
        and their eyes see every precious thing.
    The sources of the rivers they probe;[c]
        hidden things they bring to light.

    The mine has, moreover, given rise to its own cultural mythology. Cf. George Schreiber, Der Bergbau in Geschichte, Ethos und Sakralkultur, Köln and Opladen, 1962. See, in this regard, the very rapid excursus by Wolf V. Engelhardt, Schönhieit im Reiche der Mineralien, in ‘Jahrbuch fiir Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,’ IV, 1958-9, pp. 55-72, which, however, gives minimal information on the Renaissance when among other things, a mining iconography of the highest quality developed (cf. H. Winckelmann, Der Bergbau in der Kunst, Essen, 1958). It may have been the proximity of the Tolfa mountains and their famous mines, which induced Cellini, who is one of the typical anti-Renaissance geniuses, to collect stones and shells? ‘In about a month there I stayed, and every day alone I went to the seashore, and there I dismounted, loading myself with the most diverse pebbles, snails and rare and beautiful niches’. Book I, c. V, ed. Florence, 1938, p. 75  And it will not have been the possession/ownership, today one would say of shares, of the main European mines by the Medici (news communicated to me by Vasoli) that induced their spirit to such profoundly earthly meditations?
    It is in fact in the mining sector that nativity scenes were created, landscape depictions based on polymaterial conglomerates, in which minerals play a very prominent role, with a sometimes distinctly surrealistic result. See for example the ‘mountain’ of quartz, shells, corals, coal from 1563 in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg. For further information and pictorial mining iconography, see H. Winckelmann and others, Der Bergbau in der Kunst, Essen, 1958.

  14. The literature on the ‘grotto,’ in the history of religions, is vast. We will limit ourselves here to indicating the studies connected to those classical and Christian precedents that could lead to the conscious Renaissance revival of the theme. Thus it will suffice to refer to Porphire, l’Antre des nymphes … suivi d’un essai sur les grottes dans les cultes magico-religieux et dans la symbolique primitive, by P. Saintyves, Paris, 1918; L. Hautecoeur, Mystique et Architecture, Paris, 1954, pp. 51 ff. d’histoire des religions, cit., p. 350 ‘La retraite dans la caverne (descente aux’ Enfers) est une épreuve initiatique classique.’ As far as the Renaissance is concerned, the theme of the grotto, in religious painting, appears with Mantegna (Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi, and its engraving), and triumphs decisively with Leonardo (The Virgin of the Roccie, Louvre and National Gallery); André Chastel, of course, did not miss the importance of this fact, in Art et Humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique, pp. 435-40
  15. Saintyves, cit., p. 56
  16. Saintyves, cit., p. 57
  17. On the Orti Rucellai, see the Memorie storiche, collected by Luigi Passerini, Florence, 1854. The grottoes were created around 1608.
  18. See Rolf Stein, Jardins en miniature d’Extrême orient, in “Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient,’42, 1943.
  19. For Porphyry, I have used the edition by C. Gesner, 1754. After 1518 there were printings in ‘28, ‘39, ‘41.  Porphyry’s commentary is based on Book XIII of the Odyssey. It should be noted that, in the same canto, the Grotto serves as Francis I’s study , also as a secret treasure chest, as Minerva induces Ulysses to hide there the gifts he received from the Phaeacians.
  20. A. Carcopino, Etudes Romaines, La Basilique Pythagoricienne de la PorteMajeure, Paris, 1927. The part concerning the symbolism relevant to our theme begins on p. 208. Pythagoras’ sentence is quoted on p. 215-6.
  21. On the study of Urbino, the best reconstruction so far is that given by P.Rotondi, in the volume dedicated to the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, 1950.
  22. The letter follows: “Where I am not ashamed to speak to them and ask them the reason of their actions; and they by their humanity answer me; and I do not feel, for four hours, any boredom, I forget all toil, I do not fear poverty,I am not dismayed by death; I transfer all to them.” The relationship with the culture is distinctly devotional.
  23. The best record of Antonello da Messina’s St. Jerome is that by M. Davies, The Earlier ltalian Schools, in ‘National Gallery Catalogues,’ London, 1951.
  24. On the dressing room in Mantua, commissioned by Isabella d’Este, whose paintings are now dispersed between Paris and Vienna, an adequate iconographic study is lacking. It is however, also in controversy with Wind, the analysis made by Lauts, in the biographical volume on the famous lady, Isabella d’Este Fürstin der Renaissance, Hamburg, 1952.
  25. On the dressing rooms in Ferrara, for Alfonso d’Este, see John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara, A study of Styles and Taste, London, 1956; and E. Battisti, Mitologie per Alfonso d’Este, in Rinascimento e Barocco, Turin, 1960, pp. 112-145.
  26. Quoted by A. Carcopino , Études romaines, La Basilique pythagoricienne de la Porte Majeure, Paris, 1927, p. 208.
  27. On the subject of music, see now Gunter Bandmann, Melancholie und Musik,Köln, 1960.
  28. Lorenzo de Medici, Opere, I, p. 83, Bari, 1913.
  29. An iconographic interpretation of Francis I’s ‘scrittorio’ is, as yet, lacking, although his paintings have been commented on and reproduced in colour by G. Briganti,La Maniera Italiana, Editori Riuniti, 1961, and although there is a detailed programme, preserved in the correspondence between Vasari and Borghini, and published by A. Del Vita in Zibaldone, Arezzo, 1938, pp. 47 ff.
  30. Faust, Study I, version and commentary by Guido Manacorda, p. 39, Milan, quoting from the 1944 reprint. But, remember also the Ode to Night, set to music by Beethoven.
    A comprehensive study on the poetry of the night in the figurative sixteenth century is missing, or I have been unable to find it. For the importance of the motif, see E. Battisti, Ombre et Lumière et la peur de l’homme, in Problèmes, 74-75, pp. 27-30. The theme of the night, as a casket of truth, connected to silence and meditation, recurs in Platonic literature (indeed I owe E. Garin various useful indications in this regard), but it is difficult to identify where the nocturnal ends up prevailing over the diurnal. 

    The expressions, on a first reading, seem generic: thus in the Rime degli accademici occulti, pointed out to me by Garin, everything is reduced to expressions such as “La Notte tempo più accomodato del giorno alla contemplazione” (Night is a time more suitable than day for contemplation, p. 54). In literature and in poetry a real
    reversal takes place from the second half of the century; the difference between Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme is perhaps also underlined by a prevalence of light in the former, and of night in the latter. In fiction and in comedy, the shift is even more perceptible.

    In the figurative arts, there is no doubt that due to its sombre character, the painting of a Tintoretto for example, differs from that of the 15th century which is almost exclusively solar.  The 17th century partly proceeds along this path: see, for example, Rembrandt, where the relationship between darkness and meditation is even conceptualised in the figures of philosophers. In Ribera, with the figure of the poet (Homer), or the blind sculptor (The Blind Man of Andria), the opposition between inner light and superficiality acquires a dramatic and polemical resoluteness.The religious implications are not, as yet, discussed other than episodically: for example, the ‘School of Night’ of which T. Harritt is said to have been a member, G. Chapman, W. Ralegh, C. Marlowe, etc. Cf. M. Praz, E. A. Strachmann, The Textual Evidence for ‘The School of Night,’ in ‘Modern Language Notes,’ LVI, 1941, pp. 176-86; in them, however, the seduction by darkness is often accompanied by the terror of the physical night, considered, at most, a stage of regeneration of virtues (I base myself, for Chapmann, on the edition by PH. Brooks Bartlett, New York, London, 1941).  Regarding painting, unfortunately, Valentiner, in his very fine study Rembrandt and Spinoza, A Study of the Spiritual Conflicts in Seventeenth Century Holland, London, 1957, did not dwell on the master’s nocturnism, to which an issue of the magazine ‘Bizarre,’ also pointed out to me by M. Praz (September-October 1960): Charles Perussaux, Les Mystères de Rembrandt, was dedicated, but was only suggestive and literary. More relevant to our field of research, O. H. Lehmann, Faust in his Study,Text and Interpretation of the Magic lnscription; Ellen Ettlinger, The Subject ofRembrandt’s Etching, in ‘The Connoisseur,’ 1958, no. 568, pp. 118-19.

  31. See, for example, Sonnet 103 (Rime edition edited by Enzo Noè Girardi, Bari, 1960, p. 59).

    That which remains uncovered in the sun, 
    which ferments for a thousand different seeds and a thousand plants
    the proud peasant with the plough assails;
    but the shade alone serves man to plant.
    Therefore the nights more than the days are holy, as man is worth more than any other fruit.

  32. See, footnote 91.
  33. In the treatise De Alchimia, it is taught that the researcher must be silent and reserved, living in solitude, apart from men, bound to professional secrecy, which he must not reveal to anyone, avoiding all contact with princes and government. The passage is quoted by Seligmann, op . cit., pp. 154-5. Thus in Ramon Llull, De Ascensione.
  34. Berti, manuscript cited. But see already Frederick Hartt, Mantegna’s Madonna of the Rocks, in ‘Gazette des Beaux-Arts,’ 1952, II, p. 39: ‘The tiny, windowless Studiolo, which Vasari hollowed out of a dark recess of the Palazzo Vecchio to house the alchemistic pursuits of Don Francesco de’ Medici, and Iined with two rows of cupboards whose paintings could only be seen by artificial light, seems to us today the uttermost limit of the mannerist flight from reality.’
  35. I am paraphrasing the motto ‘cum numine lumen et in Iumine numen’ from the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae solius verae christiano-kabalisticum divino-magicum, nec non Physico-Chymicum Tertrunum-catholichon by Henry Kumrath 1608 (with plates from 1602), from which the illustration reproduced here is derived. Philip II remains, of all patrons, the one most in need of reappraisal; naturally not à la Montherlant.
  36. The aspect of religious crisis, ‘vanitas vanitatum’, can indifferently be connected with maximum devotional conformism or accentuated libertinism. Charles V, who with his abdication dramatically marks the transition in Spain from the solar to the nocturnal renaissance, as has now been ascertained, had his own solemn funeral celebrated while he was alive and participated in it. In Palissy, the religious implications are extremely revealing.
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