Gotham Diary:
The Broccoli Problem II
24 July 2014
Before the beginning, there was the Church, and only the Church. All eyes were on God.
Let’s not quibble about when that changed. It certainly didn’t happen overnight. Let’s just say that, in the wake of the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the late 1340s, it was clear that the Church was no longer the only source of culture. There were princes and their courts. Priests were no longer the only Europeans who could read, or who read for pleasure. This had been the case for some time, perhaps, but let’s remember that Dante’s Comedy was Divine, and contrast that with the starkly secular entertainments of Boccaccio and Chaucer, the latter dying not quite a hundred years later. This was the beginning of the beginning of early modern Europe.
Just to keep things bold and simple, easy to apprehend, let’s consider the twinned cultural explosions that changed the face of European culture in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, the roughly simultaneous introduction of moveable type and the importation of Greek learning that followed the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. It was at around this time that Lorenzo Valla, an early modern philologist, demonstrated that the document by which the Papacy claimed secular control of Europe was an imposter, a charter composed several centuries too late to be legitimate. This was the end of the beginning of early modern Europe.
In between these two points, the princely court arose from its foundations. The foundations were, of course, military, and we will not explore them here. The courts built upon them in early modern Europe were, in contrast, centered on peace-time activities (although the hunt was always a form of preparation for war). Foremost among these was the exchange of influence and benefit. The prince required the support of his leading subjects, and this need was met by the influence of certain courtiers. In exchange, the prince dispensed benefits — pensions, offices, feudal rights, even valuable objects. The success of the court (and that of the sovereignty it commanded) depended on the smooth operation of this exchange.
If the prince had to learn how to distinguish good advice from bad, and loyal courtiers from potentially treacherous ones, so courtiers had to learn how to be influential. There were what we call social skills, such as the subtle leverage of deference and the careful modulation of praise and blame, to be mastered. There was also a great deal of knowledge to be amassed. It was vital for the influential courtier to know the history of his own court as well as those of neighboring ones. Very early, courtiers learned to conceal the effort that they took to acquire the polish and sophistication increasingly demanded of courtly appearances. The Italian word for this concealment is sprezzatura. The greatest concealment of all was the courtly palace itself.
Princes and their courtiers began to live in buildings that were not military fortifications (even if, like the great palaces of Florence and Rome, they could be defended from the mob). Instead of the naked tools of warfare, princes surrounded themselves with gardens and artworks, all of which advertised, indirectly, a princely potency that could thrive in peace. The presence of women at court made it clear that the prince no longer needed to live in an armed camp. War, sadly enough, did not go away. But it became detached from the daily life of the prince and his leading subjects. At court, a non-military war, long known by the name of “intrigue,” was fought among courtiers. This was the competition for access to the prince and to the benefits that he had to offer. At some courts, intrigue could be quite literally deadly, but princes and courtiers alike were aware that too much poison was bad for business. Courts and their exchange systems worked best when court was widely seen as a desirable place to be.
Thus were born the pleasures of the early modern court. These included music and dancing, which for several centuries the courtiers provided for themselves. They also included places in which to walk and talk. These places, the public parts of palaces and their gardens, were decorated by professional artists, and the conversation was inspired, increasingly, by books written by professional writers. The most successful artists and writers worked in harness, taking for the subjects of their productions the histories of the ancient world.
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We are so accustomed to the look and feel of the European Renaissance that we forget how anomalous it was in the history of human affairs. In an era of increasing state power, the most privileged men and women professed to take an interest in the stories of a vanished world, one that they romanticized and claimed to regard as superior to their own. Why did they do such a thing?
At the beginning, it was probably just the pursuit of novelty, but as the richness of the ancient storehouses became clearer — with the manuscripts from Istanbul as well as from unearthed statuary such as the Laocoon — the tales of Greek gods and goddesses, shepherds and shepherdesses, bizarre metamorphoses, heroic adventures, and imperial exploits served as a code. Once upon a time, these tales were widely known to many people, but now they were not. If you knew them, you were in. If you didn’t, you were ridiculed and rejected. So, if you wanted to be an ambitious courtier, you read up on Aeneas and Caesar, equally “real” figures. You learned to identify Diana and Vulcan in the frescoes and canvases that adorned the palace wall. It may have had nothing to do with influence or the exercise of power, but it granted access to both.
We may may never get to the bottom of the synergy between the ancient lore and the idea of beauty that took hold in the Western eye during this early modern period. The ancients had, of course, developed an eye for beautiful sculpture, and this was more or less imitatively revived. But the painters of the Renaissance undertook something new, or at any rate something that had not developed very far in ancient times: the sensuous representation of naked flesh. The ambitious courtier had to know not only who Venus was, but how beautifully the painter had captured her breasts. It goes without saying that he had to learn to look at lovely nudes with a high-minded attitude cleared of any coarse response. As a final fillip, the courtier might rattle off a few apposite lines, not of Ovid or Horace, but of the new poets writing in the vernacular.
Princes regarded the sophistication of the court as an asset in itself. Cultural ostentation became an expression of temporal power and authority.
This was the nexus in which European art was born and established. Until the Twentieth Century, its eye informed the general ideas of beauty and desirability that prevailed among privileged and educated men and women. It governed the patronage of artists by princes, whose complaints about commissioned works invariably concerned the alleged absence of beauty.
Then, shortly before World War I, an influential assortment of artists decided to fire their patrons. The eye for beauty closed. More anon.
Daily Blague news update: Get It In Writing.