Looking at the
Renaissance
Artistic
identities
The growth and
importance of biography
Not all 15th- and 16th-century artists enjoyed the social advantages of
Brunelleschi and Van Eyck. The artist or artists responsible for the Cracow
botanical paintings, for example, remain quite unknown, even though this is a
work of considerable artistic merit. While this may be a historical accident it
is also possible that the function of the paintings as a winter garden for the
use of medical students overshadowed their aesthetic appeal. In other words, it
might have been classed more as a teaching aid than as high art. Although the
identity of the artist might have been known at the time, it was evidently not
considered sufficiently important to record it, nor did the artist identify
himself by signing his work. Even by the end of the 16th century, then, it
could not be taken for granted that the reputation and identity of artists
would be considered worth preserving. In fact, in the preface to his
Lives, Van Mander felt obliged to defend his enterprise against
potential critics who, he imagined, would not think a series of artists'
biographies to be of much interest.
A significant proportion
of the information that survives about Renaissance artists comes from the
researches (however inaccurate) of 16th-century biographers such as Vasari in
Italy and Karel van Mander of the Netherlands. Without them, the task of
matching surviving works of art with the artist responsible would be even more
difficult. Even here, there are major gaps. Van Mander, for example, included
only painters, not sculptors, and to this day relatively little is known about
the careers of Netherlandish sculptors.
What was it that motivated
16th-century biographers to rescue artists from oblivion? We have inherited a
system of values that prizes the so-called high arts of painting, sculpture and
architecture above 'mere' crafts. This distinction between art and craft goes
back at least in part to the Renaissance period. In medieval times all forms of
art were generally classed as crafts - work involving manual skill which,
rather than demanding innate talent and the application of the intellect, could
be acquired through training.
This does not mean that
artists were not valued in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, artists who
excelled might be highly regarded. Nevertheless, where art was traditionally
associated with manual crafts, the artist (theoretically at least) had no more
claim to fame than a weaver or house painter. Even Leonardo had problems
convincing his contemporaries of his worth because of the nature of his craft
and his relative ignorance of polished Latin. In Italy artists increasingly
claimed that painting, sculpture and architecture should be included among the
'liberal' or 'free' arts thought to involve the intellect - subjects such as
mathematics, music or grammar and rhetoric. Part of the significance of the
work of Vasari and Van Mander lay in the fact that, in the very act of writing
biographies of artists, they aligned painting, sculpture and architecture with
literature, and hence with the liberal arts.
Fame and anonymity »
