Raphael Then and Now: Renaissance Grace in Dialogue

Raphael Then and Now: Renaissance Grace in Dialogue Contributions from the book launch of The Grace of the Italian Renaissance with texts from the author Ita Mac Carthy, Patricia Emison, Paolo D’Angelo, Martin McLaughlin and Brian Cummings

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Cover: The Grace of the Italian Renaissance, Ita Mac Carthy, Courtesy of Princeton University Press This page: Detail Showing The Three Graces in the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes, Francesco del Cossa

Renaissance Grace in Dialogue Welcome The Grace of the Italian Renaissance was published in the anniversary year of Raphael’s death. For 500 years, admirers of Raphael consistently described him as the artist that most exemplifies grace, so publishing a book exploring that keyword seemed an apt celebration of his legacy. Yet although I’d like to be able to say we planned it that way, really it was just a happy accident. Happy for me at least, because Raphael’s anniversary offered the perfect occasion to discuss grace with thinkers and writers I had been reading and mentally conversing with for a long time. After more than a decade of carrying on conversations in my head about the questions they raised, the answers they provided and the ideas they generated, it was good to be able talk to them out loud. Even if that other great event of 2020 meant we had to talk in a virtual zoom-cloud rather than in person.

It is thanks to Richard Scholar and Marc Schachter, who organised and chaired a session called ‘Renaissance Graces’ at the Durham University Early Modern Studies conference in July 2020, and to Katia Pizzi, who hosted a launch of The Grace of the Italian Renaissance at the Italian Cultural Institute London in November 2020, that these conversations took place. It is thanks to me, however, and my abject failure (despite months-long acquaintance with Zoom) to record our conversations that we have decided to present them in this dia-blog sort of way. We hope that some of what we’ve said will invite a fresh look at Raphael’s grace and capture the enduring vitality of that early modern keyword.

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Paolo D’Angelo

Courtesy of Quodibet Editore

Courtesy of Columbia University Press

Paolo D’Angelo is Professor of Aesthetics at Roma Tre University.

ITA: Paolo, I came to your work on grazia’s close relative, sprezzatura, late into my own grace project. I’d read your book with Stefano Velotti on the concept of the “non so che” – or the je-ne-sais-quoi as we say in English (!) – and been inspired by the way in which you’d managed to track the history of an aesthetic idea as fugitive and indefinable as the non so che with such authority and control.

But your Ars est celare artem. Da Aristotile a Duchamp (2014), later translated into Sprezzatura. Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp (2018), eluded my attention till the last stages of writing my own book. I’m rather glad it did, too: because it spared me a serious bout of anxiety of influence! But also because it offers more food for thought than I could have digested at an early stage of research since it speaks not just of keywords but of key concepts and their travels across languages, cultures and time. As the change in title from Italian to English suggests, your book marshals a set of cognate terms that cluster around a central fugitive conceit and manages to navigate this polysemantic cornerstone 2

of aesthetics not just across the landscape of European aesthetics, but into the gardens of England and China, the iki of Japanese art and beyond. This project enriched my understanding of the grace of the Italian Renaissance, but it set down a marker for future research as well: into the terms that grazia draws to itself and into their afterlives. I have learnt an awful lot from your work.

PAOLO: Thank you, Ita! I have learnt a lot from The Grace of the Italian Renaissance as well, because I’d focussed on the aesthetic use of the word grazia in my own work and your book shows how the term is actually ubiquitous in intellectual debates of the time. It is, as you say in your first chapter, a veritable keyword in many fields, starting from art and literature and passing through social discourse, court literature, women’s writing, theology and politics. And more.

About every one of these fields, your book offers important insights and elicits responses as you extend your analysis through the four contexts mentioned in the second chapter: the humanist revival of antiquity; the religious debates of 16th-century Italy; the rebirth of classicism in art; and the language question.

Visual art and poetry are central concerns in your book, which opens with the frescoes of Francesco del Cossa in Palazzo Schifanoia. This first chapter gives us a brief but deep introduction to the iconology of the three Graces, while the last chapter deals with the intellectual exchange between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo. A key chapter confronts Raphael’s ease or facilità with the difficult manner of Michelangelo. Chapter five, meanwhile, examines the emblem used

by Ariosto in the first edition of his Orlando furioso and develops a very original excursus on grace and its opponent in court life, that is, ingratitude: the ingratitude Ariosto personally experienced in his relationships with the Este family leading him to complain: ‘non mi lasciò fermar molto in un luogo / e di poeta cavallare mi feo’. Poetry is the main subject of chapter three as well, with its diptych of two diametrically opposed standards of womanly grace: the heavenly grace of Vittoria Colonna and the oft-too-earthly graces of Tullia D’Aragona, the famous courtesan immortalised by Moretto da Brescia in the role of Salomé.

What I’d like to linger on today, because of my own expertise, is the second chapter on Baldassare Castiglione and Raphael and the Idea they both had of grace. I’d like to look more closely at that well-known definition of grace that Castiglione gives in his Libro del cortegiano which I quote here in the early 20th-century Opdycke translation: But having before now often considered whence this grace springs, laying aside those men who have it by nature, I find one universal rule concerning it which seems to me worth more in this matter than any other 3

in all things human that are done or said: and this is to avoid affectation to the uttermost and as it were a very dangerous rock, and, to use possibly a new word, to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura in Italian] that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought. (Book. I, 35) Where does the idea that the essence of art consists in concealing art come from? Castiglione gives us at least two important hints: one takes us back to the rhetorical tradition, the second to the ancient theory of painting. Conte Ludovico quotes “two very excellent orators of antiquity” and in fact at the beginning of Cicero’s De Oratore we find the figures recalled by Castiglione. The two orators are Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius. The first… did not so much wish to be thought to have learned nothing, as to have the reputation of looking down upon learning […] while Antonius held that his speeches would be more acceptable to a nation like ours, if it were thought that he had never engaged in study at all.

(Cicero, De Oratore, 2.1.4.)

In Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, meanwhile, we find the following comparison of the ancient painters Protogenes and Apelles, which is all about the concealment of art to make art: [Apelles’ Art] was unrivalled for graceful charm, although other very great painters were his contemporaries. Although he admired their works and gave high praise to all of them, he used to say that they lacked the glamour that his work possessed, the quality denoted by the Greek word charis […]. He also asserted another claim to distinction when he expressed his admiration for the immensely laborious and infinitely meticulous work of Protogenes, for he said that in all respects his achievements and those of Protogenes were on a level, or those of Protogenes were superior, but that in one respect he stood higher: that he knew when to take his hand away from a picture as noteworthy warning of the frequently evil effects of excessive diligence (Pliny, Natural History, Book 35, 79-81).

Now, this idea that art is more perfect the more it hides its artistry undergoes a complex and somewhat surprising development over the course of time. I’ve tried to sketch this history in my book, Sprezzatura. Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp (2018). I show how we find it in reference to cosmetics and women’s parure, for instance, in Torquato Tasso: 4

Non sai ben dir s’adorna o se negletta Se caso od arte il bel volto compose.

Di natura, d’amor, dei cieli amici Le negligenze sue sono artifici (Gerusalemme Liberata, II, 18) (You can’t quite tell whether she adorns or neglects herself. Her negligence is the artifice of Nature, of love, of her friendly stars) And we find it, later on, referring to eloquence in Blaise Pascal’s «la vraie éloquence se moque de l’éloquence».

It features in art theory and art literature from Lodovico Dolce’s dialogue L’Aretino (which you discuss in your book) to Lomazzo, Franciscus Junius, Scannelli, Bellori and there may even be an echo of this idea of concealing art in the Modernist motto: “Less is more”.

Perhaps the most unexpected heir of Castiglione’s precept is to be found in garden theory. When describing Armida’s garden, Tasso adapts those familiar words from Il cortegiano: E ciò che il buono, e ‘l caro accresce a l’opre L’arte, che tutto fa, nulla si scopre (And that which most beauty, most wonder brought, Nowhere appeared the art which all this wrought) Famously, the great Italian scholar of English literature Mario Praz saw in those lines a direct link connecting the Italian mannerist garden with the so-called ‘English Garden’ perfected by eighteenth-century ‘Capability’ Brown.

The idea that art is more perfect when it is hidden is only one use of grace explored in The Grace of Italian Renaissance. It deals with many other themes as well and I appreciate the richness of its references, the reliability of its scholarship and the clarity of its style.

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Brian Cummings

Courtesy of Brian Cummings

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York.

ITA: I was introduced to your masterful study, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (2002), by an anonymous someone who reviewed – and rejected – one of the many grant applications I made from research councils to fund my grace project about a decade ago. Your book was a revelation to me, making sense of the analogous developments in the language arts and in theology that paved the way for Reformation and CounterReformation in 16th-century Europe. It encouraged me to think more carefully about the interconnectedness of literary and religious culture, of literature and theology, of language and thought. But what can you tell us in 2020 about the genealogy of that study and how has your thinking developed since its publication?

BRIAN: Well, the first thing to say is that just this morning I finished a 500-page manuscript of my 2012 Clarendon Lectures for OUP, so forgive any gracelessness or incoherence! You ask for a genealogy of my own work on grace 6

and I’m going to say a little, too, about its relation to your beautiful new book.

In 2002 I published a book called Grammar and Grace, and like the new one, it was a while in the making. Actually, the seeds of that book go back to my first year as a graduate student in Cambridge. Indeed, further still, to when I was at school in the sixth form. In those days, I won’t tell you when, all our teachers were priests or priestesses to the great god T.S. Eliot, and his sacred text Four Quartets. I can’t say I like ‘East Coker’ anymore, though it has a vatic appeal. Anyway, these are the lines I couldn’t explain, but needed to in order to impress my teacher: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

As I began my thesis a few years later, trying to explain the small matter of how the Reformation might matter to literature (we didn’t get much advice on research questions in those days), the book that made all the difference was Martin Luther’s Lectures on Romans. If you don’t know it, this is not a book but a set of lecture notes Luther made to teach from in Wittenberg in 1515 to 1516, the year before he got famous. It is an astonishing book, especially in the manuscript, which was lost, twice, but is now found again; that’s another story. Luther is in the white heat of making sense of the theology of justification, the big issue of his life. He was trying to distinguish it from iustitia, the legal term in the Latin tradition by which a person always gets what they deserve. Luther was learning to link it to the very different linguistic tradition in Hebrew round the root s-d-q. This, as in the Hebrew texts Paul was making sense of, means “right” or “straight”. The key point is that God is sdq, and only God is. You can’t always get what you want, Luther realised. But what you definitely can’t get is salvation, let’s call it “grace”, by good works. Everyone in the theology schools of the late middle ages, like Gabriel Biel, knew that. But what Biel said was that if you have faith in God and the church, God will treat what you do (your works) as if it was good enough. You do what you can (facere in quod se est). For Luther this was not working. It obeyed Roman law but ignored Hebrew law. In Lectures on Romans, he says, “our good works, therefore, do not constitute righteousness (iustitia) but they are our prayer for righteousness” (p. 85). You might imagine the connection in my head with Eliot.

We can’t use faith or hope as substitutes for works in Biel’s equation, as that would turn faith into works, and “hope would be hope for the wrong thing”. But Luther makes it worse than Eliot, because not only is it not possible for us to be justified in that way, in the very act of thinking we are justified we become unjustified.

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Grace involves “humiliation”: a stripping away of consciousness to bare minimum.

“We can never know whether we are justified”, he says (p. 105); or even “whether we believe”. Indeed, being justified lies precisely in not believing ourselves to be justified, in being humiliated by this, and then just waiting on God: the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Grace, Luther concludes, is a free gift; the only free gift. All other gifts are part of a gift economy, by which we receive something in return. But grace asks for nothing.

I still think it’s an amazingly original and even beautiful piece of thinking by Luther. It also expresses something very interesting about theology, which I tried to analyse in my book. Theology is not a list of doctrines, it is a way of thinking and a way of writing. Grace is Luther’s trope of the impossible in writing, and that is what he thinks faith feels like.

Which brings me, friends and colleagues, to Ita’s book. It lies in my office, locked down, so I can’t access it to read it to you. But it argues, I feel, that grace, whether in art, life, or the afterlife, stands for something that is infinitely desirable and yet not attainable by human effort. What she does so sensitively is to trace this paradoxical and elusive idea through the Italian Renaissance, looking at artists, theologians, and poets alike. Her readings of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Vittoria Colonna, among many others, show how exquisite this impossible idea is. What she has done, in a way that I would have thought was improbable if not quite impossible, is to show how the artistic and poetic and theological meanings come together. When I was a graduate student and told my friends I was working on grace, they said (well, the nice ones said) oh great, you are working on Castiglione and sprezzatura, all that Italianate Renaissance stuff, and I said, well no, not that grace. And they thought I was mad. I probably was. However, the senses of grace that are about delizia or piacevolenza are still about impossibility, about something you can’t get, or touch, or perhaps even feel, except by approximation. I’m reminded of another brilliant Princeton University Press, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, by David Summers, which examines keywords in art, theory and practice: not only fantasia or furore, but also stupore, terribilità, and best and most Luther-like of all, difficoltà. Recently my former student Ambra Moroncini has made a connection, like Ita, between those terms in art and poetry, and in Reformation theology. Normally, and my friends then and now are no exception, we make a large instinctive divide between sacred and secular. It is thicker than the Iron Curtain and more existential than the new passport controls in post-Brexit Eurostar. It doesn’t have to be that way. Ita shows us how.

It is a super book, and you should all read it.

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Patricia Emison

Massacre of the Innocents engraving

by Marcantonio Raimondi © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Patricia Emison is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of New Hampshire.

ITA: Though we’ve only just met, Patricia, I feel like I’ve known you since I came across your brilliant essay on grazia right at the beginning of my own project. Published in 1991, it still bristles with the lively intelligence of your close and sensitive readings. It starts with the suggestion that describing paintings, and Raphael’s paintings in particular, as having grazia is about the most characteristically sixteenth-century thing one can do with them. Asking ‘what […] is grazia when it is not God’s?’, you carefully read Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano and judiciously select other sixteenth-century texts that offer insights into the word’s kinship with cognate terms like gentilezza, grandezza, dolcezza and aria. This preliminary excursus into the language of grace soon gives rise to a question about visual grace: ‘How, then, to paint grazia, this quality that is more of the soul than of the body?’. You answer the question with exquisite analyses of the female figures in Raphael’s painting, women such as this one in the Massacre 9

of the Innocents and the Fire in the Borgo as well as in Marian images such as the Madonna della Sedia and the Sistine Madonna. For you, style is the greatest innovation of High Renaissance art, and Raphael’s style is distinctly feminine, combining theological, social, and sexual graces to furnish paintings whose grace is as naturally beautiful as it is artificial and divine. Would you say those things hold true in 2020 or have you changed your thinking on the grace of the Italian Renaissance?

PATRICIA: Well, let’s start with what a few words on ‘the Italian Renaissance’. It is a period that can be studied for its dedication to understanding the natural world, as having laid the groundwork for developing a scientific outlook, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and, ultimately, modernity. Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century famously characterized the period by using the metaphor of a veil “woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession’’ which melts as Renaissance learning advances. This is certainly part of the picture, but I have to say that the multifarious concept of grazia provides an essential balancing element, and grazia did not last as well as a cultural value in subsequent centuries.

Grazia, more adhering to the young than the old, more allied with the spontaneous than the rote, belongs to that which cannot be measured. It flows forth naturally, even exuberantly or impetuously, and winningly. Its pertinence to the long period that begins c. 1500 and lingers in some form through, for example, Madame de Staël (d. 1817), centers on its easy elision of matters spiritual with matters immanent and even carnal. Beauty, Renaissance thinkers might sometimes agree, could be analyzed; its foundations lay in proportionality and symmetry. Because of this, creating beauty might be considered part of the liberal arts. Grazia, by contrast, represented the ideal of an ideal; it pushed the concept of pulchritude beyond the objective into a realm that was intuitive and compelling rather than merely recognizable. By relying on the concept of grazia, Renaissance writers signaled their hopes for an opposite to realpolitik (or less anachronistically, an alternative to Machiavellian recommendations): that human relationships would be governed by ideals based in love rather than fear.

It is worth knowing what would be ideal, even if it is never put into practice, Baldassare Castiglione counsels in his book on the ideal courtier. Grazia is a special kind of ideal—an ideal one may actually glimpse, in life as in art. And not only in visual art: when Isabella argues on behalf of Antonio’s life in Measure for Measure, he being undeniably criminal toward her and yet beloved by Mariana, that is an act of grace: Isabella counsels the Duke to act as love dictates rather than in a coldly rational or eye-for-an-eye judgement.

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Vasari sprinkles the Third Part of his Lives of the Artists liberally with the word grazia, which for him expresses how the figures in what he considers to be the best, most advanced style of Florentine art move, as though choreographed: smoothly, expressively, and attractively. The word is first attached primarily to Leonardo and Raphael, though he works to apply it also to Michelangelo, and in particular to the problem presented by Michelangelo’s art: that it is not confined to the accepted aesthetic rules, inherited from the ancients and in particular from Vitruvius. The way in which he describes Michelangelo’s ability to work as someone who had assimilated the rules rather than someone who is obeying the rules owes a good deal to Vasari’s evident familiarity with Castiglione’s book on the courtier (arguably the single most important book for understanding the early sixteenth century, and one in which Raphael plays a part, in absentia, like Castiglione himself).

But it may be hazarded that Vasari not only borrows from Castiglione but that he strategically incorporates Castiglione’s vocabulary into his own discussion as bait for readers who belong to the ambient of patrons rather than to the world of craftsmen. We may take it that he is trying to make Renaissance art important to the people who in the discussions Castiglione’s book purports to record had allotted a rather small, though significant, role for art in the life of the courtier. Vasari endeavours to make art more meaningful to them as exemplifying, abstractly, their own pressing issues of how to comport themselves in tricky situations. They need to behave as Vasari’s ideally beautiful figures move, entrancingly. Ascanio Condivi, a man as close to Michelangelo as was Castiglione to Raphael, when he writes about Michelangelo does not use grazia to describe the sculptor’s style. This omission supports the idea that Vasari chose to do so not because it was considered the normal way to describe it, but as part of a larger strategy to sell Michelangelo’s style to the right people by convincing them that the concept of grazia, about which they had a professional concern, pertains to the art. They will then find the art all that much more central to their lives.

Being ingratiating enables the courtier to exercise power over his prince without exciting the envy of other, rival courtiers or the resentment of his supposed superior. It makes him non-threatening at the same time it makes him more effective. It has to be unobjectionable or it shades into affectation. Just as Mona Lisa portrays a woman of fairly ordinary station as though she had the dignity and self-possession of a ruler, and yet as more than usually welcoming and gracious, so Castiglione’s courtier pleases those around him without sacrificing his ability to control them. Raphael studied the Mona Lisa intensely and repeatedly, not only for its composition but for the air of the figure. In Castiglione’s use of the word grace Vasari recognized a quality he placed at the core of artistic endeavor, namely, using style, disguised as like life, to fascinate the viewer. The grazia of Leonardo and Raphael, somewhat exaggerated in the hands of Correggio and Parmigianino, was most evident in the softness of the surface textures, the sweetness of the 11

expressions, and the gentle flow of limbs, fingers, drapery, and hair. As attractive to the eye as ancient sculpture, it was psychologically warmer.

Vasari, when he likewise viewed Michelangelo’s more muscular and contorted figural style as potentially compatible with the exponents of pictorial grazia, echoed the appreciation of Petrarch and Dante as complementary. The readiness in Renaissance aesthetics to see contrasting styles not as irremediably opposed owes something to the complexity of their ideas of divinity as the common source for both beauty and of art---God being both loving and terrifying. In the case of the courtier, beguiling grazia should be augmented by rapier wit, another tactic by which to insinuate his opinion effectively. In Book II of The Courtier, Raphael is reported to responded to two cardinals who criticized his fresco of the Repulse of Attila by saying that the cheeks of the apostles were too red with the riposte that they blush to see such men governing the Church. If it strains credulity to suppose that Raphael ever said such a thing so directly to his social superiors, he may well have defended his work wittily by saying this to others more discretely.

Castiglione tells the story as an example of the cultivated sense of humour required of a courtier, and so as a compliment to the painter. Yet the story also underscores the trickiness of behaving debonairly in a court full of disdain, and the consequent need to have a good deal more in one’s repertoire than simply being charming. The pairing of Petrarch and Dante in Italian culture, long after their deaths, yielded an aesthetics of protean complexity—of which Michelangelo took full advantage.

From Vasari’s somewhat contrived but highly influential point of view, the word grazia encapsulates all that oil paint made possible: the materiality of the pictorial world, a kind of spiritual communion with the figures portrayed that was not reducible to iconographic formulas, and an affirmation of benign but also ineffable and unfathomable power that could affect even the most quotidian reality. The quality was associated with Raphael above all others because he was seen as the most skillful painter of women’s beauty and at the same time the most decorous. His figures---whether religious, pagan, allegorical, or portrait--managed to combine the ideal with the real. His ideal of femininity tended toward the maternal rather than the Cytherean, albeit a very young and winsome version of maternal. And in the case of the Madonna della Sedia, that maternal figure is both evidently saintly and garbed fashionably, like a woman the viewer might actually encounter at such proximity, in such a chair, and at such an angle. It is as though Raphael had actually set himself the problem of painting a Madonna who embodied grazia in its many senses (“gratia plena” as Gabriel called her).

Likewise, with the barefoot Sistine Madonna: she steps tentatively as though to exit the heavenly clouds into our own world, her girlish demeanor the perfect foil to the Christ Child, who looks both babyish and assertive beyond his years. Painted as Castiglione was first drafting his book, the altarpiece might well prompt us to 12

wonder whether we do not see there the fruits of the two friends having talked together about how modesty needed to be blended with authority, and how the best art looked the most natural. The hair of the Christ child is tousled; the scarf, veil and cloak of the Virgin is ever so slightly disarranged, providing that improvement on nature that yet has the convincing and agreeable aspect of unpremeditated naturalism---grazia, as described by Castiglione.

Your new book on The Grace of the Italian Renaissance, Ita, integrates the various complexities of the word: its gendering on some but not all occasions; its religious significance blending into its political and social; its intermediary status between a capitalistic economy of calculated exchange and a feudal one of courtesy. All of these are rich topics, explored deftly and expansively. Art historians will also find here a welcome relief from the old stylistic periodizations that pit, e.g., the High Renaissance against Mannerism: the use of the word grazia flourishes c. 1500 and fades to some extent in the nineteenth century; it has antecedents in both the ancient (e.g., Cicero’s attempts to analyze altruism) and medieval worlds, yet it transforms during the Renaissance into a quality that has its most vibrant application in human interrelationships. Instead of looking on earthly beauty as implying the divine, Castiglione’s poetic take on grazia sets the tone whereby a spiritual quality imbues the body and becomes a quality of that person’s inner (yet potentially quite mundane) life rather than of celestial perfection. When, in the early twentieth century, Aby Warburg was fascinated by fluttering drapery or hair, he was responding to grazia (even if he did find it before the Third Period), i.e., to the possibility that elements of style implied something neither language nor reason could readily access. And when seventeenth-century theorists argued about whether colore was too sensuous and therefore lesser than disegno, they were, in some degree, arguing about the pleasure of seeing a beauty that was conveyed by bodies in motion (i.e., grazia) rather than by form as rendered in the more static abstractions of contour, analogous to reason.

The Grace of the Italian Renaissance ranges effortlessly across cities art historians too often think about as separate entities: Florence, Ferrara, Venice, Rome. This key word is employed to unlock patterns of thought as best we can document them, roaming freely from subject to subject and modality to modality, and not least, from literary to visual evidence. We can now readily explore how writers and artists used, appropriated, and recast so exceptionally resonant a word as grazia. There is no one concept that made Renaissance thought radically able to incorporate the old traditions into building a new culture, but grazia is among those that can claim to have been not only exceptionally versatile but also transformative.

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Martin McLaughlin

The three Graces in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Martin McLaughlin recently retired as Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford where he is now Professor Emeritus.

ITA: I’m delighted to have had you as a real-life interlocutor, Martin, since even before I moved to England in 2003. Like so many young scholars, I benefitted enormously from your support and guidance at the start of my career and since becoming a little less young, I continue to value your ongoing support and friendship. As far as the grace project is concerned, you have always challenged me to think about beginnings, of where the story I wished to tell should begin and why. You’ve challenged me to do this in your own scholarship where you’ve problematized periodization and questioned those neat dividing lines that separate Medieval and the various stages of Renaissance culture. And you’ve challenged me from the side-lines of my own research as well, so often being the one who poses that tricky question at the end of the many talks and research seminars of mine you’ve had the patience and generosity to attend in Oxford and 14

elsewhere over the years. You’ve pointed out that many features I call characteristic of late 15th can early 16th-centure grace were already evident decades before in the work of Leon Battista Alberti. I wondered if you could say a bit more about the grace of Alberti for us today.

MARTIN: Thanks, Ita, as you know, I am always happy to talk about Leon Battista Alberti, particularly as a writer of literary texts and as a theorist of painting and architecture. A couple of years ago I was writing a chapter on Alberti’s reception of Vitruvius, particularly in his own ten-book treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, written in the mid-fifteenth century. Vitruvius, as you may know, mentions three essential elements in a building: solidity, utility and beauty (firmitas, utilitas, venustas). Alberti uses this triad several times in his own treatise, but he tends to link or at times to substitute that last term venustas with the word for grace, gratia, which is at the centre of your research. So, I had been thinking a lot about grace and cognate words in Alberti when your book came out.

One key element that emerges from Alberti’s reading of Vitruvius is that although the classical theorist never used gratia in the sense of the gracefulness or beauty of a building (he only uses it in the sense of ‘to give thanks to’, gratias agere), Alberti uses gratia very often with that aesthetic meaning that is so important to your survey. Since books 6-10 of Alberti’s treatise are devoted to architectural ornament, words such as grace and beauty (gratia, venustas, amoenitas, pulchritudo and so on) recur often in the second half of the treatise. At the beginning of book 6, Alberti states that there are three conditions that every form of building should satisfy: it should be appropriate for use, lasting in structure and fully equipped to display both grace and beauty (ad usum apta, ad perpetuitatem firmissima, ad gratiam et amoenitatem paratissima (DRA VI. 1 fin, p. 445; OAB 155). Alberti’s triad here is clearly a variant of Vitruvius’ three conditions, but with more emphasis on the aesthetic aspect (venustas) for which he uses two roughly synonymous nouns, gratiam et amoenitatem.

The same phenomenon is apparent in another key term in Alberti’s treatise, concinnitas, which means a kind of harmony: again, it is worth noting that Vitruvius never uses the term, but for Alberti concinnitas is a major aesthetic concept, signifying the essential harmony that should govern all parts of a building. He uses concinnitas many times, but he derived it not from Vitruvius but from his favourite rhetorical treatises by Cicero, those discovered in 1421, De oratore, Brutus and Orator, particularly this last work where concinnitas occurs at least a dozen times. So, in his relentless pursuit of originality, Alberti departs from Vitruvius even in the basic essentials of the artistic lexicon such as gratia and concinnitas. And, of course, he uses such terms, particularly gratia, in an almost 15

entirely secular way. As a result, I read with great interest your ambitious and highly original book, especially the first two chapters which trace the emergence of this Renaissance keyword, but we can say more about this later.

ITA: What questions, then, did my book raise for you?

MARTIN: As I said, I read your pioneering book with great interest. It begins with the literally graceful / grace-full ekphrasis of the Three Graces in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, before tracing the roots of the idea of grace. Renaissance scholars will particularly value your emphasis on the fluidity and mobility of meaning in grace and on its encouragement of reciprocity. Another element we all appreciate is the wide scope of the book, moving between literature and the arts, between the secular and the sacred, and addressing major figures such as Castiglione, Raphael, Ariosto, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna.

As for the questions the book raises for my own work, in an important footnote you point out that Alberti in his treatise on painting uses the word for grace around 20 times, so this made me go back to Della pittura as well, in the way I had done for the architectural treatise. I considered in particular Alberti’s use of the terms for grace in both the original vernacular redaction of Della pittura and then in its slightly expanded Latin version, De pictura. I noticed that very often in moving from the vernacular text to the Latin redaction Alberti tended to expand the simple word grazia of the vernacular into a pair of Latin nouns, as you can see in these examples here: Alberti’s use of grazia/gratia in Della pittura (c. 1436) and De pictura (c.1440) 1436: From the composition of surfaces arises that grace (grazia) in bodies which they call beauty. (2. 35) 1440: From the composition of surfaces arises that harmony and grace (concinnitas et gratia) in bodies which they call beauty. (2. 35) 1436: I agree that a wide range and variety of colours contribute greatly to the favour and fame of a painting (alla grazia e lode della pittura). (2. 46) 1440: I agree that a wide range and variety of colours contribute greatly to the beauty and attraction of a painting (gratiam et leporem picturae) (2. 46) 1436: There is a kind of sympathy among colours, whereby their dignity and grace (dignità e grazia) are increased when they are placed side by side. (2. 48) 1440: There is a kind of sympathy among colours, whereby their grace and beauty (gratiam et venustatem) are increased when they are placed side by side.

(2. 48) (Note: In your book, you quote Cicero’s statement that venustas is appropriate

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to women as dignitas is appropriate to men (p. 49), so again here we see added emphasis on venustas in the Latin version of the treatise.)

1436: In a painting, the face that is known draws the eyes of all spectators, so great is the power (forza) of whatever is taken from nature. (3. 56) 1440: In a painting, the face that is known draws the eyes of all spectators, so great is the grace and power (et gratiam et vim) of whatever is taken from nature.

(3. 56)

So, in the treatise on painting, as in the architecture treatise, Alberti tends to expand single mentions of grazia into two almost synonymous nouns, gratia and another quality, concinnitas, lepos, venustas, vis. It’s almost as if the word cannot quite contain its semantic burgeoning. And this semantic range – which you explore in your book – is there in Alberti too. We find, in his work, grace as an aesthetic quality in art; grace as pleasing conversation; grace in relation to the exchange of favours. The one meaning that receives less emphasis in Alberti is the idea of grace as a gift from God. Though it is sort-of there in book 3 of Della famiglia, it is still presented in quite an earthly sense not a spiritual one: ‘pray to God that he grant your new bride the grace of being fertile’ (pregare Iddio che alla tua nuova sposa dia grazia d’essere fecunda). Have a look below to see examples of these usages: 1. God’s grazia (in the third book of Della famiglia): ‘come diceva apresso Senofonte quel buon marito a Socrate: pregare Iddio che alla tua nuova sposa dia grazia d’essere fecunda con pace e onestà della casa [‘pray to God that he grant your new bride the grace of being fertile’]’.

2. Grazia as a kind of graceful aura that surrounds certain names such as Alessandro, an idea that perhaps motivated his own name change when Battista became Leon Battista (Della famiglia): ‘E così e’ nomi leggiadri e magnifichi pare a me tengano buona grazia, e non so donde rendono la virtù e l’autorità in noi più splendida e più pregiata’.

3. Grazia in language: metaphors are said to have both strength and grace (Della pittura): LIONARDO. Considerate voi, Battista e tu Carlo, quanto in sé abbino forza queste similitudini (of ants, bees, spiders) insieme e quanta grazia.

4. Grazia in conversation, as in this comparison of Della famiglia with the symposia of antiquity by Plato, Xenophon and Plutarch: full of laughter and wit, but also full of prudence and wisdom, along with grace and dignity:-

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Né mi par questo, - disse Lionardo, - dissimile da quelli conviti filosofici, quali Platone, Senofonte, Plutarco descrissero, pieni di giuoco e riso, e non vacui di prudenza e sapienza, con molta grazia e dignità.

5. Grazia and beauty in De re aedificatoria: There is a further quality in which beauty shines full face: our term for this is concinnitas (harmony) which we say is nourished with every grace and splendour (id apud nos concinnitas nuncupabitur, quam eandem profecto omnis esse gratiae atque decoris alumnam dicimus). (9.5, p. 815) 6. Grazia in architecture achieved through beauty, symmetry and congruity of parts in De re aedificatoria: Beauty is a symmetry and congruity of the parts (consensum et conspirationem partium) of a building, that corresponds to what is demanded by harmony (concinnitas) which is the first and absolute rationale of nature (ita uti concinnitas, hoc est absoluta primariaque ratio naturae, postularit). It is this harmony (concinnitas) that architecture pursues to the maximum level; it is through concinnitas that architecture achieves its dignity, grace and authority and is held in high regard (hac sibi dignitatem gratiam auctoritatem vendicat atque in precio est). (9.5, p. 817)

What do these examples amount to? Well, if all philosophy is just a footnote to Plato, I’m afraid that in what I’ve said today I’ve merely produced a footnote to one of your footnotes! But I do think it’s interesting that grace, in Alberti, covers most of the meanings you have explored in your book. Alberti is a precocious thinker, then, but it is hard to generalize about him since he is so untypical of his contemporaries As for future research directions, one of these might be to see if there are consistent differences in the uses of grazia in either the vernacular and Latin of other Renaissance writers (perhaps Ghiberti, who you mention in the same footnote?). Another direction might be to look at the use of the word in that apotheosis of ekphrasis that is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a very Albertian text. I am thinking of passages like the ekphrastic description (in book 1) of the statues of the Three Graces on top of a fountain which had been constructed ‘venustamente’. Here grace flows abundantly as the Graces’ nipples spurt water into the dragons’ heads on the rim of the basin below (p. 89; image p. 90). I leave you with this image as a playful reversal of your graceful opening ekphrasis of the three Graces in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.

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Last Words KATIA: Let’s turn the questions we’ve asked others back on you now, Ita. Can you sum up your contribution to the study of grace in a few words? And what’s next for Renaissance grace?

ITA: What do I think I have contributed to the study of grace? I hope to have done in my book the kind of thing we’re doing right now – which is to have brought together various scholars of grace as well, of course, as those original Renaissance graces they study – and to put them into dialogue with each other.

I’ve tried, in this, to be a good listener, a careful reader and a patient observer. And what has emerged from my listening exercise has been, I think, an interconnected profile of a word that is all-too-often misunderstood or greatly over-simplified.

What I hope my book shows is that over-simplification comes at a cost.

Because grace – then as now – is not always the benign and benevolent presence it purports to be. It’s not just an aesthetically pleasing quality too pretty to be taken very seriously. Nor does it merely indicate the taste and sensibilities of an elite culture too far removed from the material concerns of the average sixteenth-century Italian to be worthy of study anymore. Nor, in fact, is it just a disembodied spiritual gift, one we can only aspire truly to understand in a Christian afterlife.

It is – rather – all of those things plus more besides. It is a deceptively simple tool of persuasion, an expression of longing for justice and recognition, an object of beauty at a time when beauty did not – contrary to the rumours – abound; when human experience was not universally equal and when not very many lives mattered at all.

What’s next for Renaissance grace? I should hope that this dialogue points future scholars of the word in multiple directions. One can travel upstream (as Martin suggests) to the earlier fifteenth-century moment of its progression through history, one can travel downstream (with Paolo) to its afterlives; but there’s still plenty more to say about sixteenth-century grace too – not just in Italy but across Europe and beyond. As I say in the conclusion to my book, there are disciplines I’ve barely touched on: 16th-century music, dance, maths and natural philosophy are just some. I haven’t talked about the fate of grazia in regional Italian dialects and across the social spectrum. So, there’s plenty more work to be done there.

Personally, I don’t have to rush into new projects just yet. In the lovely – and, I have to say, very timely – pause for reflection that comes after publishing a book, I have time to indulge in seeking the presence and absence of grace in the world around me. Like Patricia, I find myself pleasantly surprised by unexpected acts of behavioural grace and – against the backdrop of a global pandemic and all the 19

headline events of this crazy year – I sense a revaluation of aesthetic grace, a new hankering after words and images that are moving, that elicit a response of some kind – of pleasure, of gratitude, of charity. I am certainly feeling, I think, the benefits of long-term and full immersion in Renaissance grace. Because it has sensitized me to the expressive force of twenty-first-century rhetorical grace as well, and attuned me – by contrast – to its more widespread lack in contemporary discourse: what you might call the disgrace of modern-day speech. I’ve written a post about this for the Princeton Ideas blog and I could speak at length about shining examples of oratorical grace and about equally outstanding examples of oratorical disgrace in twenty-first-century culture and society. I might end up – after any such rant – pointing out that eloquence is not grace unless it is guided by wisdom and virtue. And that these are, perhaps now more than ever, in short supply.

Soon, of course, my post-book hiatus will end and I’ll have to get back to proper research. And when the ripples caused by this book disappear, I guess I’ll have to launch another stone into the pond. But whatever stone I launch, I will be guided – I have no doubt – by a commitment to the ongoing relevance of Renaissance graces and to the persistent value of attending to the words and languages we live by.

That is what I tried to do in The Grace of the Italian Renaissance and it is now time to let the book go on its way. Launching my book (as I hinted above) feels like launching a stone into the middle of a river: the generous responses recorded here rippling out and generating further ripples and thoughts as they travel up and downstream. All books are snapshots in time, stones launched into rivers.

And even those who study times past can’t help but reflect the concerns of their moment, no matter how vehemently they deny it! As they do, the moment passes, the stone disappears. All you can hope for is that as the ripple widens, the next books begin to form.

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PietĂ by Tylonn Sawyer Courtesy of Tylonn Sawyer

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