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Giotto's O and Courtly Competition in the Cinquecento

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Giotto's O and Courtly Competition in the Cinquecento GIOTTO’S O AND COURTLY COMPETITION IN THE CINQUECENTO KERR HOUSTON Performance certainly seems like a ready conceptual tool for think- ing about much of the work produced in the Renaissance. —Rebecca Zorach The past few decades have witnessed a growing willingness to read Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Archi- tects as an example of what Paul Barolsky influentially termed “imagi- native literature” and “literary artifice.”1 As a part of this turn, which eschews a merely positivist reading of the text and emphasizes instead its creative, playful, and typological aspects, scholars have revisited Vasari’s well-known anecdote involving Giotto’s O. As Vasari tells it, a courtier source: notes in the history of art. fall 2019. © 2019 by bard graduate center. all rights reserved. 0737-4453/2019/3901-0006 $10.00 sent by Pope Benedict IX, who wanted to learn more about the artist and his work, arrived at Giotto’s workshop and asked for a drawing, that he might send it to His Holiness. Giotto, who was most courte- ous, took a paper, and on that, with a brush dipped in red, holding his arm fast against his side in order to make a compass, with a turn of the hand he made a circle, so true in proportion and circumfer- ence that to behold it was a marvel. This done, he smiled and said to the courtier, “Here is your drawing.”2 The courtier, understandably unsettled, wondered aloud if the artist might produce another more conventional drawing, like the ones he had received from Sienese masters. But Giotto assured him that the draw- ing would suffice and encouraged him to deliver it to Rome. And so, sending to the Pope the other drawings and the names of those who had made them, [the courtier] also sent that of Giotto, relating the method that he had followed in making his circle without moving his arm and without compasses. Wherefore the Pope and many cour- tiers that were versed in the arts recognized by this how much Giotto surpassed in excellence all the other painters of his time.3 To Barolsky and similarly minded scholars, the value of Vasari’s story lies not in its historical veracity—which, of course, is debatable.4 Rather, its primary interest concerns what the story implies about Vasari’s own interests and aims. For Barolsky, the story of Giotto’s O reveals Vasari’s interest in positioning Giotto as a man of exceptional wit and in relat- ing his own biographical project to a range of literary precedents.5 For Andrew Ladis, meanwhile, the story is significant because it allows Va- sari to establish a theme that resounds throughout the rest of his proj- ect: the ability of painters to deploy visual trickery in astonishing their audiences.6 The specific interpretations may vary, then, but each of these approaches depends upon the fundamental assumption that Vasari’stale, even if it is historically inaccurate, offers an important window into his intentions and priorities. Giotto’s O and Courtly Competition in the Cinquecento 47 Here I would like to build on that idea by reading Vasari’s anecdote in relation to a specific aspect of his reality: the landscape of mid- cinquecento courtly culture. Vasari spent much of his adult life in the courts of Cardinal Ippolito Medici, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, granting him a profound understand- ing of the conventions of Renaissance court life and the possibilities that it afforded. Thus, as Patricia Rubin observes, Ippolito’s cosmopol- itan court offered Vasari “a model for an ideal career,” while relations with Alessandro strengthened Vasari’s “desire to be a devoted servant in a flourishing court.”7 Moreover, Vasari’s Lives is very much a product of courtly culture: the project was first conceived in the Farnese court and is ultimately characterized both by a voice that reflected courtly prac- tices and by a political dimension that has been called explicitly Medi- cean.8 In short, the story of Giotto’s O was composed in and for the courtly culture in which Vasari lived. And that culture was defined by intense social competition and con- spicuous performativity. Indeed, recent scholarship has repeatedly shown that Renaissance courts were a fiercely competitive environment in which individuals vied to stand out and to attract attention.9 In an en- gaging study of comportment in sixteenth-century Italy, Douglas Biow emphasizes what he terms “a performative practice, a mode of behav- ior: the art of being conspicuous.”10 Such a mode of behavior is appar- ent in many Renaissance texts related to court life but is perhaps most famously manifested in the first two books of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, in which the speakers regularly praise forms of publicly vis- ible performativity. Musicians and dancers perform, we read, “to the delight of those who watched,” and the aspiring courtier is encouraged to play tennis, which is described as “one of those spectacles to which the presence of a crowd lends great attraction.”11 Later, one of the speak- ers maintains, “Neither is it unseemly for a man who feels he has talent in a certain thing adroitly to seek the occasion for displaying it.”12 In such passages, we repeatedly encounter what Daniel Javitch calls a gen- eral emphasis on “performative virtuosity.”13 48 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2019 Such an emphasis, however, constituted a problem for painters, who traditionally worked in relative privacy and produced conventional ob- jects rather than performances. This fact of creation for visual artists was not merely an abstract problem as painters were often paid less than singers or buffoni (jesters) whose value clearly lay in live perfor- mance (and who thus also enjoyed closer access to their patrons).14 Consequently, over the course of the cinquecento many painters seem to have responded by recasting their practice and by foregrounding their actions. In certain cases, this meant a studied eccentricity or a concerted effort to stand out through unusual behavior.15 But paint- ers also began to emphasize the process by which they produced their work. Thus, as Evelyn Welch observes, “It was the performance of art- istry as much as the artistic product itself that proved the key to success as a Renaissance court artist.”16 What did this mean in specific terms? Increasingly, painters seem to have worked before live audiences, executing quick sketches and por- traits in bravura performances that merged manual skill with a form of live, visual entertainment.17 As a part of this development, too, they of- ten worked on paper, instead of panel or canvas, using materials that could support rapid rendering. These changes led to a radical transfor- mation of the ways in which painting was discussed, as the traditional ideals of studio (study) and lavoro (work) yielded to celebrations of speed and virtuosity.18 One of the most famous examples of this emergent model of appreciation can be found in The Book of the Courtier, which extols paintings characterized by facility, ease, and a lack of apparent labor: paintings, that is, that seemed to embody what Castiglione fa- mously termed sprezzatura (studied carelessness).19 But the shift in taste is also apparent in a more general acceptance of unfinished works that feature sketch-like aspects.20 In any event, such changes allowed pain- ters to compete with the impermanent but compelling performances of musicians and clowns; or, as Welch puts it, “The rapid-fire drawing may have been the temporary, ephemeral creation that reconstructed the painter as an entertainer.”21 Giotto’s O and Courtly Competition in the Cinquecento 49 Always, though, such entertainment was ultimately aimed toward a very specific end. As articulated by Francesco Guicciardini in his Ricordi politici e civili of 1530, “Skill in this sort of entertainment opens the way to the favor of princes.”22 Displays of sprezzatura might im- press an artist’s immediate peers, and a veneer of indifference could temper the appearance of unseemly ambition, but acute observers of the courtly ambience certainly understood the fundamental impor- tance of attracting ducal or papal interest. Accordingly, in the words of Javitch, “The courtier exhibits his various skills in order to impress his sovereign and win his good graces. His displays of virtuosity are, in effect, bids for preferment and, just like his actual requests for favor, they are likelier to be effective when disguised by apparent reticence and nonchalance.”23 Vasari, of course, knew of all of this: he had likely read Castiglione, and as a painter, he had managed to thrive in a variety of courtly set- tings.24 It is far from surprising, then, to realize that his story of Giotto’s O neatly reflects a number of the patterns typical of court life in his own day. The artist, working in an implicitly competitive situation, turns to paper and deftly executes (“with a turn of the hand”) a perfect form. Vasari subtly but repeatedly draws our attention to the artist’s ac- tions (“he made a circle”); indeed, he claims that the courtier related those actions to the pope himself, thereby suggesting that the process by which the image was created held as much interest as the image it- self. And throughout, Vasari emphasizes the cool, refined politeness of Giotto, who produces his work smilingly and “who was most courte- ous.” Giotto, in Vasari’s telling, is at once a virtuosic artist, a performa- tive entertainer, and the very embodiment of sprezzatura.25 No wonder that the pope recognized the artist’s excellence.
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