Thursday, July 3, 2014

Florentine Art and Society



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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