Paolo Uccello, The Counterattack of Michelotto
da Cotignola at the Battle of San Romano (c. 1455)
Wood panel, 182 x 317 cm. Galleria degli
Uffizi
Another example of the holistic and historicist nature of art
history: the sociology and economics of patronage, and its effects on the
fundamental aesthetic categories of Renaissance art, is essential to explaining
changes in the style and subject-matter of painting from Uccello to Caravaggio:
“It is in the problematic negotiations of working according
to ideas of facilitá (facility) and grazia in a social context that
required both urbanitá and civilitá-and quite specifically in the
complex political world of Florence-that the new style arising around 1515
found its role to play. When an actual
court was established in 1523 with the advent of Alessandro de’ Medici as duke
under aegis of the emperor, this art would supply a body of formal and critical
principles governing the new practices of literature and painting soon to be
aggressively sponsored by Cosimo I de’ Medici.”[1]
This kind of detailed historical and social context is why
the art historian always awaits further developments in the various fields of
the human sciences, always knowing that they will assist in the future
interpretation of painting and sculpture, but never knowing exactly how; for
artworks are creative improvisations of the cultures that produce them and the
interpretive practices that unfold them.
The historically singular, specific nature of any milieu will yield
artworks that are also historically, but also personally, singular.
[1]. Elizabeth Cropper, “Pontormo and Bronzino in
Philadelphia: A Double Portrait” in Pontormo,
Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in
Florence Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004 p. 8
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