Book Talk transcript : S05E02 — The Renaissance artist and the Enlightened despot

Jill Kitson: Hello and Welcome to Book Talk. This week: the Renaissance artist and the enlightened despot...Clive James and Peter Porter in the second of six programs on the artist and politics, from Plato to the present.

The Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter are long-time Londoners who share an equally long friendship. When they talked about the relationship between the Renaissance artists and their powerful patrons, Clive opened the conversation:

Clive James: Peter, we ended last time having wrapped up the entire ancient world and forecasting the pre-Renaissance period. In other words, we're skipping over the Middle Ages, which is a very large thing to skip, but we do find, as the quattrocento looms in Italy, that we're faced with a phenomenon that really interests us about the relation of the artist to politics, and here we really mean the visual artists. They needed big walls to work on and expensive paint and they needed a patron and they got one, in fact they got several, and this is the real mark, isn't it, of the Renaissance as it flowers, is the relationship between the artist and, we might call him the enlightened despot — the person who rules the city.

Peter Porter: You could argue, of course, and people have done, that the subject matter was dictated by the tough guy as well as the chance or the opportunity or the selection...

Clive James: Well, the church had dictated the subject matter, hadn't it? I mean, Fra Angelico wasn't at liberty to paint anything except religious subjects in his cloisters. But yes, the enlightened despot started to say what he wanted.

Peter Porter: Well, every artist has to have some material. You notice, of course, how individual patrons and chaps that can afford things, begin to want themselves worked into the pictures and so you get this concept known as the donor, usually a very small person, a man and his wife and his children. But that is only a minor example of if you were a merchant in Prato or something you could do that. I was just thinking, for instance, that I have a friend who is a composer of music, who has not even a faintest touch of belief in the Christian religion, yet he almost entirely composes religious music simply because it has the most accessible form of subject matter, and he therefore uses it for that purpose. But when it comes to the big deals, you've got the basic principle — it will be religious — but the person who sets up the situation — the Pope, or some Renaissance prince, you know the Ortenzi princes of Ferrara or the Medici in Florence — they are going to use Christian subjects but it's going to reflect on them because they set it up. It's interesting if you read that famous book which was published about the middle of this last century, about the merchant of Prato, this man Datini...

Clive James: By Iris Origo... still a good book...

Peter Porter: A very good book, and what she talks about there is that every time this business man...he was basically a business man. To this day Prato is still the headquarters of the Italian mercery and clothing business...he gets closer to death, he gets closer to...more of his dirty deals are reflected...he builds another temple. In some respects it is out of the whole sense of mankind's not being certain of itself that comes the beautification of structures and...

Clive James: Well, let's call them the princes and the dukes and even the merchants, leaving the Popes out of it for a moment; but these princes and dukes and merchants had such power that they could draw talent even out of the north. It is quite extraordinary how some of the Dutch painters really flourished when they were imported into Italy, or else their pictures were. I think, actually, Roger van der Wayden may even have gone there, I forget the details. But the great altar piece in the Uffizi was an import from the north. So the Italian princes were actually controlling the artistic world across Europe, they had immense influence. The secret of the influence surely must have been partly the freedom they gave the great artist to become great and to become self-conscious for greatness. Now, Botticelli was actually a humble human being, humble enough that he listened to Savonarola when Savonarola said, 'Your pictures are blasphemous, burn them.' And Botticelli, unfortunately, did burn the pictures instead of burning Savonarola, which happened later. But what really marks out, even in the pre-Renaissance period, the artist from any previous time was not only that they had names, they became very self-conscious of themselves as individual creative beings. They were very proud in that way, and that's something quite new under the sun, and to express themselves, what they had in them, became an imperative...I often wonder what the relationship was, for example, between Paolo Ucello and whichever Medici prince it was who ordered those three paintings for his bedroom. I think it was Lorenzino or Lorencio...

Peter Porter: No, it was earlier than that, it was at more or less the same time as Lorenzo the Medici...

Clive James: Anyway it was a Medici order wasn't it — 'Give me three paintings of a battle scene for my bedroom.' And Ucello, of course, took the opportunity to paint three of the great pictures in history.

Peter Porter: A lot of that happened in that time. You see, it's interesting if you read through the history of Italy of that period is that most of the fighting was done by condottieri who were especially hired troops. There wasn't all that much (there was sometimes) of the murderous stuff that took place later in the Thirty Years War, when towns were sacked and people who were not involved in the war were all put to the sword. Mostly the fighters killed each other, there was not much sacking of towns, there was some of course. I think that the high Renaissance and the early Renaissance are both good examples of a time when ideas took over from practicalities, in many ways. You can see how wonderfully practical they were if you read the history of what Michelangelo actually had to do in order to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, you recognise what a practical man he was, but at the same time he was putting forward a whole set of icons and ideas, and I think that this is all through the Renaissance; it's amazing how consistent the imagery is.

Clive James: Well, he couldn't have done that unless the despots, princes and dukes themselves, were becoming more civilized, and I think Yeats held up the Duke of Urbino as being the great example of just how civilized one of these characters could get.

Peter Porter: But he was a hired hand, he was a fighter...

Clive James: He was that at first, that's how he got his city, and then he wanted to decorate it didn't he? So what was the deal between him and Mantegna? Did he bring Mantegna in and say, 'I'm going to give you a free hand here' or did he say, 'I want this and that and that.' Do we actually know?

Peter Porter: We can guess that once you've bought the right man you then can say to him what bits you'd like decorated. He can then say, 'Well look, I'd like to do this bit rather that than bit'...

Clive James: So Julius the Second actually said to Michelangelo, 'I've got a ceiling up there and I want you to cover it.'

Peter Porter: Precisely, and don't forget he was also decorating what was a family thing because his uncle, the famous Pope Sixtus the Fourth, was the great father of papal nepotism, and this was in honour of the Della Rovere family...

Clive James: So that's where Sistine comes from, from Pope Sixtus?

Peter Porter: Yeah, from Pope Sixtus the Fourth, and there is a marvellous painting by Melozzo Da Forli showing Sixtus sitting on the throne surrounded by all the people who were his nominations, including a very young handsome-looking Giuliano Della Rovere who became Julius the Second. I mean, it's also...you decorated your family forever. If you go to Verona and you look at the so-called Ache Scaligere, the interesting thing is the monuments to the ruling families, the Della Scala family, are outdoors not indoors so that people can see them and they know that the family is going on living after its death. I think power, as such, is always going to live best in decoration. It's not going to live fervently after the powerful person is gone.

Clive James: When you look at Florence and Rome in relation...I've always thought that Florence was the European movies of the Renaissance and Rome was Hollywood. Rome was where they went to make the wide-screen spectacles. It did highlight a fact about the visual arts — not just painting but sculpture too — is that it needed funding, it needed capital; there was a relationship to money. The artist had to go to the people who had the resources and that necessarily brought the artist into relation with the person who had the resources, and he either had to approve of what that person did or shut his eyes. And there was quite a lot of eye shutting that went on, obviously.

Peter Porter: Well, it's interesting too that the cities that are the most renowned for having produced so much art were both great commercial cities — Florence and Venice. Rome was only an administrative centre, it had very little commerce, and the decoration of Rome was something undertaken more or less in the middle of the Renaissance, by Popes who got a bit embarrassed at living in a third-rate rabbit hutch of a city, which of course in the past had been the great imperial capital but which had fallen into desuetude. And so the decoration there was different. There it was done in mainly to draw attention to the centre of this Christian world, whereas in Florence and in Venice particularly, and of course in some of the minor dukedoms as well, the purpose there was to draw attention to the local ruler, but of course you had to use universal symbols, and the universal symbols were the symbols of Christianity.

Clive James: I think your emphasis is right, although we shouldn't forget the Pope and his private rooms. The Pope might be cultivated enough to commission, for example, Raphael, to do the paintings in the Stanze, which I think are the greatest paintings of the high Renaissance, bar none. But I think on the whole, Rome is a pretty disgusting spectacle compared to Florence or even Venice — or in fact even Orvieto. But when you consider the whole thing; you have got a fundamental shift in human history which has gone on until this day. Not so much among the writers who don't need it but in those who are going to work in expensive media, as it were, is that they have to form some kind of contact with power, and this involves them in politics. They either have to approve with the system or, if they're going to rebel against it, rebel against it in a way that still allows them to express themselves, which brings you, I think, back to the key figure — Leonardo da Vinci. Why is Leonardo different? Because Leonardo not only moves from job to job, he doesn't seem to care much about the job. He'll actually sabotage himself, he doesn't like this relationship.

Peter Porter: Well, he's one of those artists which I think we all have a great affection for — the artist who doesn't really want to profit from his art. On the one hand he's tremendously arrogant about how good he is but I imagine the impulse behind Leonardo was not so much, 'I'm the best', but put down this upstart from Casentino. It seems to me that all artists love competition. You're not supposed to love competition but they do love it. They don't love it necessarily meaning they're going to enter...we don't want a world where every aspirant pianist turns up at the great prize giving piano performance, but we do have a sense I think...Puccini, interestingly enough, (we're jumping a few centuries of course) could only really compose well when he knew somebody else was doing the same thing and could get ahead of him. I think you have to bear in mind how strong the competition was in those days. An anecdote I'm very fond of is that Michelangelo, who detested Raphael, was still prepared to say nice things about him if he thought it really was about good art. And I think that that is the same...

Clive James: That's an encouraging factor actually — throughout artistic history — is the grudging approval of the great artist who realises that somebody else is worth acknowledging anyway.

Peter Porter: There is a very strange oddity about the Italian development from about 1200, 1300 onward, that at the time of the Commune, that is to say before these individual princes began running it, and each of the Italian cities was more or less run by council, there was much greater political freedom than there was during the time of the Signori when the big princes were running it, but there was less art, or the art was less highly developed. And perhaps the sad lessons of the Renaissance is that you do need power concentrated in the hands of people with taste, but also willingness to use that power in order to propose the art. Unfortunately we've got plenty of examples, since the time of the Renaissance, of people with considerable power and no taste.

Clive James: I was going to bring up the case of Leonardo carving, I think one of the Sforza family in Milan, and they were a very, very important family and it was a very important artistic centre, but I think Leonardo carved the equestrian statue in ice, and was told at the time by...there's always someone standing over your shoulder saying, 'If you carve that in ice it won't last very long,' and Leonardo nodded his head and said in Italian, 'Yes, I know that, you idiot. That's the point.' And somebody probably told him that The Last Supper he was going to paint on a wet wall and it wouldn't last and he must have just not cared. I think we should just mention, because the painters and the sculptures are so spectacular that you tend to forget that two of the people who started the Renaissance, really, were Dante and Petrarch. Dante and his great poem, The Divine Comedy, a product of Florentine politics and the victim of it. If Dante hadn't been thrown out of Florence into banishment, into political impotence, there wouldn't be a Divine Comedy. So there the artist was in direct conflict with whatever the state was, which is a situation much more familiar to us.

Peter Porter: I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, Dante merely called it the Comedia, it was Boccaccio who was touring the whole of Italy giving lectures and added the Divina to the title, but I think that the faction is the point of that poem. I mean, you admire that poem more than I do, and I think that it's executed in magnificent verse is true, and that in fact by doing it Dante invented the Italian language, this is also true. The picture it puts together though, I find unedifying, in that it is directly out of faction, and that wouldn't matter so much in itself because it would have its own rules, but when faction is combined with the calling in of God on your side, which is something which all puritans do of course, but I think Dante's a tremendous puritan...

Clive James: Well he's a tremendous theologist but he's also saying goodbye to theology; it's a turning point. And the human characters in The Divine Comedy are the assurance that theology is on its way out of the world, which Dante regrets. Also he could get beyond faction, and there's a great figure like Farinata, in The Inferno, rises from the grave and he's Dante's political enemy but Dante gives him magnificent words to say, so Dante probably was an intolerant man but his breadth of sympathy is rather broader than that. He's much closer to us than he is closer to the ancients. In other words, if art really was developmental, if it had a steady sequence, if it was an evolutionary growth, then you would hear Shakespeare coming in Dante, and in fact you do. But of course when you move to Shakespeare and move to England and the English Renaissance, the Renaissance in the north, you're getting a completely different relationship between the artist and power because the artist is much more free, or anyway under Elizabeth seems to be so.

pp; Well, it is Dante's cosmology which I find difficult. Shakespeare has no cosmology. One reason why Eliot and Pound, who I think had a kind of intrinsic snobbery in them, preferred Dante to Shakespeare...

Clive James: You get more medals for admiring Dante because he's further away from the common reader, isn't he?

Peter Porter: That's true, and it's also true, I think as they see it, that here is the last man who has a real command of the power of persuasive language, who is directing it in favour of a uniformity. Shakespeare has no uniformities. Shakespeare can be found in almost every attitude. It doesn't mean that Shakespeare doesn't have opinions but the opinions are sorted, they're sprinkled over the work, and I think that this was what, to me, makes Shakespeare a modern writer and Dante an ancient writer.

Clive James: But Shakespeare did have a horror of social breakdown. We can deduce that from all kinds of speeches and all kinds of plays and of course he could afford to have the horror of social breakdown because he was living in an age that didn't have a social breakdown, although they had the memory of it. He was genuinely grateful to Elizabeth of course, and the question lingers whether Shakespeare had something to hide, whether his family was secretly Catholic, like Donne's, but I don't think you believe that's true and neither do I. It seems to me that Shakespeare actually enjoys the political stability he lives under because it gives him complete freedom to question the whole history of mankind, relations between individuals, and not always be subject to the actual or threatened censorship of a ruling power. There were things he wasn't allowed to say but that was standard.

Peter Porter: Well the great thing for him, I think, and what makes the work so great, is that you are looking at one of the greatest observers of mankind who has ever been, and you are looking at a man who has tremendous powers of expression, and he is not using either his observation or his power of expression in pursuit of any one particular goal. He is looking at the subject matter, looking at the people who are involved and simply giving them the eloquence which is appropriate to them at that stage. I mean, you can, certainly if you want to, say you think that he felt strongly about this and that because there's an absolute evidence that he did feel strongly about it, or at least his characters felt strongly about it. I think perhaps you could say that he didn't like lawyers (I mean, who does), perhaps you could say...

Clive James: There's a moment in one of the plays when I think Jack Cade's on the loose — 'let's hang all the lawyers' — and it's meant to demonstrate Cade's irrationality but there's an unmistakable ring of sympathy.

Peter Porter: Yes, also in that same scene of the men of Kent invading London, is the wonderful moment where Cade's number two says to him, 'This fellow can write his name instead of putting a cross like an honest man,' and he replies, 'Here's a villain.'

Clive James: Let's talk about Shakespeare and politics though, in the plays that are nominally about politics or any way about history...

Peter Porter: Well I don't think the history plays are nominally about politics at all. I think the history plays are nominally about power, of course. I don't think it's political power because of the way in which the House of Lancaster and the House of York come into conflict. There is no genuine ideological difference between these two forces, but politics, in the ideological sense, certainly underlies Hamlet, certainly underlies Coriolanus, and what I like about Coriolanus is that everybody gets a chance as a commentator to say, 'Oh well, Shakespeare hated this and hated that.' The great thing about the even-handedness of Coriolanus is that the Patricians, as Coriolanus's mob were, are not only unimaginative and downright blockheaded and consumed by pride, they are also stupid, you know, they can't make things go...

Clive James: Coriolanus is himself, isn't he? Isn't he making a mistake in that he wants the popular approval but doesn't want to seek it?

Peter Porter: That's right, and on the other side the Tribunes are cowardly chaps that will take up any position which will help them, they're only out to get themselves. Everybody who hates modern leftist politics tries to take up Shakespeare's idea of the Tribunes in that play because these are men utterly out just to help themselves. On the other hand, anybody who dislikes aristocratic politics can look at what moves the Patricians in Coriolanus. One passage which I particularly like in Coriolanus; where, while he's gone to the war, his wife, Virgilia, and his little son are playing and she's doing tapestry, and his gruesome mother is encouraging the boy to kill butterflies with a sword...

Clive James: Quite hard to do.

Peter Porter: ...and looking at the knitting that's going on, the mother, Volumnia, says, 'All the yarn Penelope spun in Ulysses' absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths.' And here is a statement, in fact, of why grandeur is the subject of plays, and why almost all of the plays which got people into the Elizabethan theatre, from Marlowe and Kidd onwards, are plays about grand people doing grand things. Shakespeare shows you, even a little line like that, that all the while, going on behind the grand men, are all the other things that happen.

Clive James: Shakespeare had a great sense of practicality and proportion. I think it's one of the things that Hamlet is about. Hamlet destroys himself and indeed the whole political texture by simply not attending to practical detail, and that's the real story of what happens when Hamlet dies and Fortinbras walks on. It's a standard producer's trick of updating at the moment, (and when I come to power, all the producers will be rounded up by the way)... The standard producer's trick to make Fortinbras a Nazi or something, put him in a totalitarian uniform, it's not really like that. Fortinbras is actually the house cleaner. He's the man who can actually do it, and when he comes on and says — all these bodies are lying around — he says, 'Sight as this becomes the field but here shows much amiss,' he's being a ruler and Shakespeare approves of it. Shakespeare is sorry for Hamlet but doesn't really approve of his dithering because the state's going to wrack and ruin. Shakespeare had a very lively sense that the state was run in a practical manner so that various things could take place in it under its aegis, and the arts being one of them. The idea of the state going to ruin was anathema to him.

Peter Porter: I think it's been anathema to almost all good artists but, however, people have recognised within that anathema, that individual ruin can happen even in a well-ordered state. So you move away from the Greek idea of tragedy to, what becomes, I think, the western European idea of tragedy, whereby whatever is happening around about you, the collapse of the self becomes a subject instead of the collapse of society and the collapse of how society regulates and puts things together. And it isn't long, I think, between, say, Hamlet and Ibsen, to discover the difference between the collapse of the power-man in the state and the collapse of the individual who has no power in the state, and I think we've moved forward into the 19th century, then into the 20th century, and now, I suspect, we're moving forward again, back into something rather more like what Shakespeare was involved with. We are seeing tragic figures today being reborn — they are our politicians, our rulers, and in some respects, they are just like the people in, say, Marlowe, just like Tamburlaine, but they don't have the eloquence.

Clive James: I've got a feeling that here, in this part of the 20th century, we're actually living with a great period in the arts where someone like David Mamet can write a movie like Wag the Dog, which is remarkably true and penetrating about politics, and brings all the conflicts alive in a sparkling manner, but none of this would have been possible without Shakespeare. That's what Shakespeare really did start, is giving everybody the speech. Somebody once said that the great thing about Shakespeare wasn't that he gave the king a great speech, he gave the man who opened the door a great speech, he gives them these two lines. And people, individuals in relation to themselves and each other and the state, in a way that had never been true in the ancient world, and that's the revolution that Shakespeare gave us, and we in the English-speaking countries tend to think that Shakespeare was the centre of everything. Other languages might think different. The French, notoriously, think that Racine is the key man, the Italians of course think of Dante, the Germans of Goethe, but we actually really know that Shakespeare was the one. But I'm convinced that a lot of what Shakespeare gave us that was so new and so complex was only possible because it was a period of relative stability and that period was coming to an end, and we quite soon move on to revolutionary times even in England, and the question arises — what on Earth the artist is to do when two factions are fighting it out?

Peter Porter: Well, I think instability ruined Milton.

Clive James: Instability ruined Milton is the title of our next episode.

Jill Kitson: Clive James, ending that discussion with Peter Porter, the second of six programs on art and politics, from Plato to the present. The third and fourth programs will be broadcast next month. The title of Peter Porter's new collection of poems is Afterburner. Clive's latest is The Book of My Enemy: Collected Poems 1958–2003. Picador publishes them both. And that's all for this week's edition of Book Talk.

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