47. On Renaissance art patronage
Why Renaissance patrons had more to gain by giving
I’ve recently been trying to understand how significant art got made in history. In the past I’ve found inspiration from the Italian Renaissance, and so I turned to the Renaissance once again. This post provides brief thoughts on the distinctive motives behind Renaissance art patronage, inspired by Mary Hollingsworth’s Patronage in Renaissance Italy.
My thoughts here are impressionistic and may be naïve, and I know for a fact that one or two of my subscribers know much more about this period than me! And so I’d love thoughts or corrections on my preliminary thoughts below.
The religious motivation
In the Italian Renaissance, powerful people built personal chapels and public works in part because of a motivation few have today - to make it into the good side of the afterlife. On the tail end of the medieval period, wealth was commonly seen in terms of the well-known Biblical refrain: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” And while Christian wealth got a better name during the Renaissance, this was in part due to the philosophical work of Renaissance thinkers trying to find common ground between pagan and Christian values. All of this intellectual work took time to come to fruition.
One answer in the meantime was for Christian princes and merchants to contribute to religiosity by means of generous artistic attention to biblical themes: statues of patron saints, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, images of the Madonna, and beyond. As the distinctive spiritual ethos of the Italian Renaissance clarified, these topics were complemented (but never supplanted) by odes to the pagan classical world.
The chance for glory
A second difference from our modern situation is that, especially in the early Renaissance, artists were seen more as technical craftsmen for executing the visions of patrons, whose name would be associated with the piece:
[It] was the patron who was the real initiator of the architecture, sculpture and painting of the period, and that he played a significant part in determining both form and content. Fifteenth-century patrons were not passive connoisseurs: they were active consumers. [...] In the fifteenth century, it was the patron, and not the artist, who was seen by his contemporaries as the creator of his project and this gave him the strongest possible motive for controlling its final appearance.
Historical memory gives us the image of rockstar artists like Michelangelo, but if Hollingsworth is right, that social identity either did not exist at the time, or was only solidified by the tail end of the Renaissance period.
By means of an analogy, in film we are awed by the idea of the auteur director. But if Renaissance patrons had supported a film industry, it would be producers and studios most lauded for impressive works of film, with directors and actors being something of an afterthought.
More to gain
To sum up - there is some chance Renaissance patrons simply had more to gain by patronage of the arts than art patrons have or see themselves as having today. The religious motivations of a world 500-700 years removed from our own cannot be underestimated. And in a certain way of looking at it, there was more glory to be gained by patronage as well, particularly in a time less shy about admiring statues of still-living men.
I may develop this post further when I finish Hollingsworth’s book.
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