Celebrating the Florentine Renaissance

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Katie Campbell reports on ‘The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–1600’

Once again, this year Florence’s Strozzi Palace produced a magnificent summer exhibition, taking a topic of wide general interest with specific relevance to the city of Florence, drawing out fascinating themes and presenting them in an easy, accessible manner.  This show has now moved to the Louvre, giving even more people a chance to enjoy it. While focusing on sculpture, the exhibition also features inscriptions, coins, ceramics, maps, paintings, wooden models, plaster casts and Roman artefacts and antiquities to explore how the rediscovery of classical culture in the 13th and 14th centuries led to the artistic and cultural ‘Renaissance’ of 15th^-century Florence.  The exhibition also describes a fascinating chapter in the history of the city, charting the shift from public to private art, as the most prestigious commissions moved from the powerful republican government with its celebrations of civic pride, to individual oligarchs promoting their own dynasties.

The exhibition is divided into ten distinct sections, which together present a picture of the evolution of ideas, motifs and methods in the arts of early Renaissance Florence.  The first section, The Legacy of the Fathers, is dominated by the spectacular Talento Crater, a large marble urn from the 1st century AD, carved with an elegant Bacchic scene.  With its sinuous, sensual, intertwining nudes this must have been a bolt of lightning to the pious artists of the late middle ages.  Displayed in Pisa in the 13th century, the Crater became one of the most widely admired, most diligently studied and most copied artefacts of the time. Its influence is clearly discernible in the work of artists from Giotto to Michelangelo.  This section is fleshed out with works by 13th and 14th-century French and Tuscan sculptors, notably some figures by Nicola Pisano and his assistant, Arnolfo di Cambio, which combine the elegance of the Gothic with the newfound humanity of the Classical style. 

Section II, The Dawn of the Renaissance, explores how Florentines fused Humanist ideas with civic pride to promote the idea of Florence as heir to the Roman Republic.  The power of the Florentine Republic, and the ensuing peace and prosperity, encouraged a wave of civic pride, which is demonstrated in the proliferation of grand public sculptures.  Among these, none is grander than the new bronze doors for the famous Baptistery.  The exhibition features the 1401 Sacrifice of Isaac competition panels submitted by Lorenzo Ghiberti (who thus won this competition to create the Baptistry doors) and Filippo Brunelleschi, both of which demonstrate the influence of classical models as well as the brilliance of contemporary technical innovation.  

As images of virile young heroes began to adorn public spaces, citizens started reassessing their own ideals and identities.  The exhibition goes on to explore evolving  ideas of citizenship; the rehabilitation of the equestrian monument from despised emblem of aristocratic privilege to esteemed image of protective condottieri  (mercenary soldiers); the Christian appropriation of pagan imagery, most intriguingly in the theme of spiritelli – those demonic, winged, child-like figures of classical antiquity which became the ubiquitous angels and putti of the Renaissance; the impact of sculpture on painting; experiments with perspective, and the importance of sculpture in promoting a classical – and indeed realistic – ideal of beauty. 

The final sections have a particular wry poignancy.  Beauty and Charity explores how Cosimo the Elder Medici, the unelected ‘father’ of the republic, managed to promote Florence as the venue for the 1439 meeting of the Pope, the Byzantine Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople to discuss the Union of the Eastern and Western Churches.  This important international event gave rise to a new wave of public sculpture, though the focus shifted from civic to religious institutions as hospitals, hospices, orphanages, confraternities, convents, monasteries and other public welfare establishments used the new ideas of beauty to promote Christianity while proclaiming Florence as ‘the City of God’. 

Ironically, while the presence of the Council of Florence ensured the city’s supremacy in Europe, it also marked the rise of the Medici family, which effectively spelled the end of the Republic.  The exhibition’s final section, From the City to the Palace, charts the shift from public to private art as affluent merchants and bankers, following the Medici example, supplanted the civic authorities as the most prestigious patrons.  Commissioning grand works, they inaugurated an era of splendour with lavish residences filled with fine furnishings and exquisite works of art – portraits, busts, sculptures and paintings, celebrating themselves and their allies.  This shift is vividly demonstrated by the grand wooden Model of the Palazzo Strozzi created in 1489 when the palace was the city’s most magnificent private residence.  This contrasts with another wooden model featured early in the exhibition: Brunelleschi’s 1420 Dome of Florence Cathedral – an iconic emblem which, nearly a century before, had ushered in the new era of civic pride. .. 

The catalogue, edited by the exhibition’s curators, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Marc Bormand, is a tour de force with superb illustrations, detailed notes and bibliographies for each of the featured items and a series of excellent essays placing the wider subject in its cultural context.  At 550 pages and nearly half a stone in weight, however, the catalogue is inexcusably heavy, inconvenient to carry and awkward to use.  Apart from that, however, the exhibition is a delight – for scholar, amateur or casual tourist.