MARKS OF OPULENCE
The Why, When and Where
of Western Art 1000–1900 AD
Colin Platt

Epigraph

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book One, Chapter xi.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE A White Mantle of Churches

CHAPTER TWO Commercial Revolution

CHAPTER THREE Recession and Renaissance

CHAPTER FOUR Expectations Raised and Dashed

CHAPTER FIVE Religious Wars and Catholic Renewal

CHAPTER SIX Markets and Collectors

CHAPTER SEVEN Bernini’s Century

CHAPTER EIGHT Enlightened Absolutism

CHAPTER NINE Revolution

CHAPTER TEN The Gilded Age

Notes

Index

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Profile of Colin Platt

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the Book

A Critical Eye

The Bigger Picture

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You’ll Like …

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About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘The simple truth’, wrote Philip Hamerton, ‘is that capital is the nurse and governess of the arts, not always a very wise or judicious nurse, but an exceedingly powerful one. And in the relation of money to art, the man who has money will rule the man who has art … (for) starving men are weak.’ (Thoughts about Art, 1873) Hamerton was a landscape-painter who had studied both in London and in Paris. However, it was chiefly as a critic and as the founding-editor of The Portfolio (1870–94) that he made his contribution to the arts. In 1873, Hamerton had lived through a quarter-century of economic growth: one of the most sustained booms ever recorded. He had seen huge fortunes made, and knew the power of money:

But [he warned] for capital to support the fine arts, it must be abundant – there must be superfluity. The senses will first be gratified to the full before the wants of the intellect awaken. Plenty of good meat and drink is the first desire of the young capitalist; then he must satisfy the ardours of the chase. One or two generations will be happy with these primitive enjoyments of eating and slaying; but a day will come when the descendant and heir of these will awake into life with larger wants. He will take to reading in a book, he will covet the possession of a picture; and unless there are plenty of such men as he in a country, there is but a poor chance there for the fine arts.¹

In mid-Victorian Britain, it was Hamerton’s industrialist contemporaries – many of them the inheritors of successful family businesses – who were the earliest patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites. A generation later, it would be American railroad billionaires and their widows who created the market for French Impressionists. ‘You’ve got a wonderful house – and another in the country’, ran a recent double-spread advertisement in a consumer magazine. ‘You’ve got a beautiful car – and a luxury four-wheel-drive. You’ve got a gorgeous wife – and she says that she loves you. Isn’t it time to spoil yourself?’² If one man’s trophy asset is a BeoVision Avant, another’s positional good is a Cézanne.

Positional goods are assets, like Cézannes, with a high scarcity value. They appeal especially to super-rich collectors, wanting the reassurance of ‘those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves’.³ But for the fine arts to prosper generally and for new works to be commissioned, the overall economy must be healthy: ‘there must [in Hamerton’s words] be superfluity’. ‘Accept the simplest explanation that fits all the facts at your disposal’ is the principle known as Occam’s Razor. And while economic growth has never been the only condition for investment in the arts, it is (and always has been) the most necessary. Collectors pay high prices when the market is rising; even the best painters need an income to continue. It was Sickert, the English Impressionist, who once told Whistler, ‘painting must be for me a profession and not a pastime’. And it was Sickert’s contemporary, Stanhope Forbes, who confessed to his mother, just before his fortunes changed: ‘The wish to do something that will sell seems to deprive me of all power over brushes and paints.’ Forbes’s marine masterpiece, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885), painted in Newlyn the following year, at last brought him the recognition he had craved.

Before that happened, Forbes had depended on the support of well-off parents. And very few aspiring artists, even today, can succeed without an early helping hand. ‘Princes and writers’, wrote John Capgrave in 1440, ‘have always been mutually bound to each other by a special friendship … (for) writers are protected by the favour of princes and the memory of princes endures by the labour of writers.’ Capgrave (the scholar) wanted a pension from Duke Humphrey (the prince). So he put Humphrey the question: ‘Who today would have known of Lucilius [procurator of Sicily and other Roman provinces] if Seneca had not made him famous by his Letters?’ Equally, however, ‘those men of old, who adorned the whole body of philosophy by their studies, did not make progress without the encouragement of princes’. In Duke Humphrey’s day, ‘it is not the arts that are lacking, as someone says, but the honours given to the arts’. Accordingly, ‘Grant us a Pyrrhus and you will give us a Homer. Grant us a Pompey and you will give us a Tullius (Cicero). Grant us a Gaius (Maecenas) and Augustus and you will also give us a Virgil and a Flaccus (Horace).’⁴

There have been patrons of genius in every century: Abbot Desiderius in the eleventh century, St Bernard in the twelfth; Louis IX in the thirteenth century, Jean de Berri in the fourteenth; Philip the Good in the fifteenth century, Julius II in the sixteenth; and so on. Tiny seafaring Portugal has had three of them. Manuel the Fortunate (1495–1521), the first of those, could build what he liked out of the profits of West Africa and the Orient. Then, two centuries later, John V (1707–50) and Joseph I (1750–77) grew rich on the gold of Brazil. From the mid-1690s, word of the new discoveries in the Brazilian Highlands had spread quickly throughout Europe’s arts communities. And Western art can show few better examples of what biologists call ‘quorum-sensing’ than the instant colonizing of Joanine Portugal by foreign artists of all kinds – by the painters Quillard, Duprà and Femine, by the sculptors Giusti and Laprade, by the engravers Debrie and Massar de Rochefort, and by the architects Ludovice and Nasoni, Juvarra, Mardel and Robillon – most of whom returned home just as soon as the gold of Minas Gerais was exhausted.

Brazil’s ‘vast treasures’ included diamonds as well as gold, with sugar, hides, tobacco and mahogany. And the splendours of Portugal’s Rococo architecture under its Braganza kings owed as much to the fortunes of returned colonial merchants and administrators. In London a little later, Charles Burney, author of a four-volume General History of Music (1776–89), recognized the creative link between a thriving business community and the arts:

All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce; and they will, in general, be found to have pursued the same course … that is, like Commerce, they will be found, upon enquiry, to have appeared first in Italy; then in the Hanseatic towns; next in the [Burgundian] Netherlands; and by transplantation, during the sixteenth century, when commerce became general, to have grown, flourished, matured, and diffused their influence, in every part of Europe.⁵

London, when Burney wrote, had taken the place of Brussels and Amsterdam as the commercial capital of the West. And Burney’s artist-contemporaries, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, included Joshua Reynolds and George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs and Benjamin West. When they were joined shortly afterwards by William Blake, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, even the French had to acknowledge the excellence of British art – of Constable as a cloud-painter and of Turner as a colourist – indisputably of world class for the first time.

Commerce and peace go together. In Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address as President of the United States of America, he called for ‘Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.’ And in 1801, nobody knew better the profits of neutrality than Jefferson himself – planter, statesman and architect-connoisseur – presiding over the unprecedented growth of the republic’s economy when almost every other Western nation was at war. Erasmus had written movingly in 1517 of ‘the wickedness, savagery, and madness of waging war’, and had castigated princes ‘who are not ashamed to create widespread chaos simply in order to make some tiny little addition to the territories they rule’.⁶ Yet just two centuries later, ‘I have loved war too much’, confessed Louis XIV (1643–1715) on his deathbed. And during the Sun King’s long reign, even building – his other passion – had come second to campaigning; for the two main construction programmes at Louis’s enormous palace at Versailles – the first from 1668, the second ten years later – corresponded closely with rare intervals of peace. Charles XI of Sweden (1660–97), a contemporary of the French king, inherited an economy almost destroyed by war and by the military adventures of the Vasas. In the next generation, Sweden would be reduced to penury again as his son, Charles XII, took up arms. But for almost twenty years from 1680 (when Charles XI declared himself absolute) neutrality was the policy of his regime. During that time, Sweden’s treasury was replenished and its war-debts were cleared, leaving a sufficiency in Charles’s coffers to complete his country mansion at Schloss Drottningholm, near Stockholm, and to start another big Baroque palace in the capital.

‘Money’, wrote Bernard Shaw in The Irrational Knot (1905), ‘is indeed the most important thing in the world.’ And it is usually the very wealthy who control it. Yet there have been exceptional episodes in the history of Western art when the arts have been governed neither by princes nor connoisseurs, but by the ‘tyranny of little choices’ of the many. In recession-prone Europe, after the catastrophe of the Black Death (1347–9), few individuals were seriously wealthy. However, there has never been a time when more money has been spent on memorial and votive architecture than under the collective sponsorship of the gilds. After the Reformation, when the pains of Purgatory had been forgotten, it was the individual investment choices of men of modest means that supported the Dutch Golden Age. ‘All Dutchmen’, noted the English traveller Peter Mundy in 1640, fill their parlours ‘with costly pieces (pictures), butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes … yea many times black smithes, coblers, etc. will have some picture or other by their Forge and in their stall.’ There were more than two million new paintings on Dutch walls by 1660. ‘Their houses are full of them’, said John Evelyn.⁷

I end my book at the First World War, when many were asking what constituted art and what, in the last resort, it was for. ‘Is that all?’, asked the Modernist critic, Roger Fry, in his Essay in Aesthetics (1909), quoting a contemporary definition of the art of painting (‘by a certain painter, not without some reputation at the present day’) as ‘the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments’.⁸ Fry, of course, had much more to say. Yet he was writing at a time when ‘the visions of the cinematograph’ (Fry) and the ‘death of God’ (Nietzsche) had caused many of the old certainties to fade. The Fauvists in Paris and the Expressionists in Berlin were all reading Nietzsche at the beginning of the last century. They were as committed as the philosopher to new ways of seeing, but would probably have agreed also with his ‘sorrowful’ conclusion – reluctantly confessed in Human, All Too Human (1878) – that the arts would be the poorer without religion:

It is not without profound sorrow that one admits to oneself that in their highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind, and they could not have been so without believing in the absolute truth of these errors. If belief in such truth declines in general … that species of art can never flourish again which, like the Divina commedia, the pictures of Raphael, the frescos of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic but also a metaphysical significance in the objects of art.⁹

Almost the last of the religious artists in the grand classical tradition was the Parisian decorative painter, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (d. 1898). Puvis’s simple line and his non-naturalistic colours were strong influences on many Post-Impressionists. Yet, wrote Gauguin in 1901, ‘there is a wide world between Puvis and myself … He is a Greek while I am a savage, a wolf in the woods without a collar.’¹⁰ Twenty years earlier, Van Gogh had spoken similarly of the ‘savageries’ in his work: ‘so disquieting and irritating as to be a godsend to those (critics) who have fixed preconceived ideas about technique’.¹¹ Maurice de Vlaminck, the one-time Fauvist wrote: ‘I try to paint with my heart and my loins, not bothering with style.’¹² But necessary to modern artists though such primitivism had become, there was nothing naïve or unsophisticated about the avant-garde painters showing their work in London in 1912 at Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. ‘It is the work [wrote Fry] of highly civilized and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook … They do not seek to imitate form but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life … they aim not at illusion, but at reality.’¹³

Stimulated by rising prices, popular interest in the arts had never been higher than in the last decade before the Great War. ‘Art has become like caviar’, wrote the German critic, Julius Meier-Graefe, in 1904; ‘everyone wants to have it, whether they like it or not.’ However, ‘it is materially impossible [Meier-Graefe warned] to produce pure works of art at prices that will bring them within the means of the masses’.¹⁴ And a substitute had been found in the speculative commissioning of important new works – William Frith’s The Railway Station in 1862, or Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death eleven years later – for subsequent engraving and mass-sale. Frith had been uncertain about his subject until Louis Flatow, the dealer, took it up. ‘I don’t think’, Frith wrote in his Autobiography and Reminiscences (1890), ‘(that) the station at Paddington can be called picturesque, nor can the clothes of the ordinary traveller be said to offer much attraction to the painter – in short the difficulties of the subject were very great.’¹⁵ Yet such was his painting’s enduring appeal that engravings of The Railway Station were still hanging on parlour walls two generations later, when Clive Bell wrote:

Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith’s Paddington Station … But certain though it is that Frith’s masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture – and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means badly painted … Paddington Station is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document … But, with the perfection of photographic processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose … (they) are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence.¹⁶

Where Frith’s world ended and Bell’s began is debatable. In the 1890s, William Frith R.A. – ‘Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and of the Order of Leopold; Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, and of the Academies of Stockholm, Vienna, and Antwerp’ – could still count on the support of the great majority of academicians in counselling aspiring artists to study ‘the great painters of old’, while predicting that ‘the bizarre, French, “impressionist” style of painting recently imported into this country will do incalculable damage to the modern school of English art.’¹⁷ However, when the once-fashionable Berlin Realist, Anton von Werner (1843–1915), looked back in 1913 on his long career, all he could see was waste and failure: his careful art overtaken by the daubs of the Expressionists.¹⁸ Some believe Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (1850) to be the first ‘modern’ work; others see Manet’s Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (both of 1863) to be Modernism’s beginning; and there are those again who would prefer to start only with the Cubists. However, what is certain is that the ‘incessant work’ of a Werner or a Frith – ‘The whole of the year 1861, with fewer interruptions than usual, was spent on The Railway Station’, Frith noted in his journal¹⁹ – was no longer demanded of the successful modern artist; and money, as a consequence, had lost its power. There is only one nation today – the United States of America – where art convincingly follows money, and where ‘superfluity’ still makes everything possible. Take, for example, the extraordinary architecture of present-day Chicago. ‘Recognisableness’, wrote Aldous Huxley in Art and the Obvious (1931), ‘is an artistic quality which most people find profoundly thrilling.’ And sixty years afterwards, Hammond, Beeby and Babka, architects of the Washington Library Center (1991), were to give Chicago’s literati a cornucopia of such references: from the Library’s rusticated base, through its rundbogenstil façade, to the huge grenade-like exploding terminals of the pediment.²⁰

The Grand Projet still lives on in modern architecture. And there are more big country houses being built in Britain today than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. At Mexico’s Guadalajara, Jorge Vergara, a self-made billionaire, has hired the world’s most famous architects, including the Deconstructivists Philip Johnson and Daniel Libeskind, to build him a showcase of their works. In Seattle, Bill Gates’s huge new mansion is set to become the largest private palace of his 1990s generation: the nearest equivalent, a century on, of George W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House (1888–95) – prodigal emblem of America’s Gilded Age. But as national economies continue to grow, the pre-eminence of the individual patron has been lost. John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), second-generation banker and art-collector extraordinary, was wealthier than any of the Vanderbilts. He began serious collecting only in the 1890s, yet was able to amass, before his death, a remarkable hoard of paintings and drawings, manuscripts and incunabula, ivories and enamels, tapestries, maiolica and oriental porcelains, second to none in the West. The like would be impossible today. In 1913, J.P. Morgan’s personal fortune, it has been estimated, could have met the entire investment needs of the United States of America for as much as a third of that year. To do the same now would require the combined fortunes of the top sixty super-rich, with Bill Gates (‘the world’s richest billionaire by a wide margin’) accounting for barely a fortnight.²¹

For better or worse, the individual collector-patron has lost the power to transform an entire culture. We are unlikely, that is, ever to see again another Peter or a Catherine ‘the Great’. But the arts too have changed radically since the birth of Modernism. And if I end my ‘essay’ – the word is Jacob Burckhardt’s – with the Fall of the Old Empires and the Academies’ dying breath, it is because nothing thereafter has been the same. An essay, I warned my students, must have an argument. And I return repeatedly in this book to money as the driver of high achievement in the arts, and to the transforming power of great riches. However, I have never seen money as the sole begetter of high quality, any more than Burckhardt himself thought the ‘genius of the Italian people’ (Italienischer Volksgeist) the only explanation of the Renaissance. ‘In the wide ocean upon which we venture’, Burckhardt began The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), ‘the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.’²² I take his point entirely; for one very good reason why Burckhardt’s Civilization has become a classic and is still read today, is the candour of that disavowal of omniscience.

My final paragraph is an apology. In the course of my argument, I have given many important artists too little space or, in some cases, have failed to mention them at all. One missing person is the Copenhagen painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), master of the psychologically-penetrating portrait and quiet interior. Like the Unknown Warrior, he shall stand for all the rest: in memoriam.

CHAPTER ONE A White Mantle of Churches

Rodulfus Glaber (c. 980–c. 1046), chronicler of the Millennium and author of The Five Books of the Histories, witnessed two millennial years in his lifetime. The first was the Millennium of the Incarnation of Christ (1000); the second, the Millennium of his Passion (1033). While disposed to tell of miracles and portents, of plagues, of famines and other horrors, Glaber’s message in neither case was of Apocalypse. Instead he chose to write not of the Coming of Antichrist nor of a Day of Wrath, but of a Church resurgent and victorious:

Just before the third year after the millennium [Glaber writes of 1003], throughout the whole world, but most especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches … It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.¹

Cathedrals, monasteries, and even ‘little village chapels’, Glaber continues, ‘were rebuilt better than before by the faithful’. And of this, as an untypically restless monk who never stayed long in one place, Glaber had considerable experience. He was at Saint-Bénigne at Dijon when, in 1016, Abbot William (990–1031) consecrated the new church he had rebuilt ‘to an admirable plan, much wider and longer than before’. And it was to Cluny’s Abbot Odilo (994–1048), whose famous boast it was (echoing Caesar’s) that he ‘had found Cluny wood and was leaving it marble’, that Glaber came to dedicate his Histories.

In point of fact, Glaber probably owed his life to Abbot Odilo. For it is thought that he was at Cluny during the three famine years when ‘the rain fell so continuously everywhere [that] no season was suitable for the sowing of any crop, and floods prevented the gathering in of the harvest’. ‘Heu! proh dolor!’, Glaber laments, ‘Alas! a thing formerly little heard of happened: ravening hunger drove men to devour human flesh!’² But then, in the next millennial year, the Almighty intervened and the chronicler’s tone again lightens:

At the millennium of the Lord’s Passion [1033], which followed these years of famine and disaster, by divine mercy and goodness the violent rainstorms ended; the happy face of the sky began to shine and to blow with gentle breezes and by gentle serenity to proclaim the magnanimity of the Creator. The whole surface of the earth was benignly verdant, portending ample produce which altogether banished want.³

Glaber died in 1046. And long before that time, ‘like a dog returning to its vomit or a pig to wallowing in its mire’ (Glaber again), the rich had reverted to type: ‘they resorted, even more than had formerly been their wont, to robbery to satisfy their lusts’. However, it was in 1046 also that the Emperor Henry III first intervened in Roman politics. And the new reforming papacy of Leo IX (1049–54) and his successors would bring about triumphantly in a very few years almost everything that Glaber had desired. ‘Everything flows and nothing stays’, said Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Greek philosopher. And of the many changes which Glaber witnessed in his own millennia-crossed lifespan, none were more important than those which were the consequence of vigorous economic growth.

Improving weather and more reliable harvests, technical innovations in agriculture, the absence of plague, the retreat of invading armies and the banning of private war – even the supposed efficiency gains of a new feudal order – have all been given credit for this increase. And certainly the two main exogenous factors in the late-medieval Recession – a deteriorating climate and heavy plague mortalities – were neither of them present at this time. Nevertheless, the scourge of famine would return regularly to Western Europe every three or four years for many centuries yet; while the only agrarian revolution to bring permanent relief to the poor began in the nineteenth century, and not before. ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’ had cried the bishops after 1033, their croziers raised to heaven; ‘Peace!’ had echoed the crowd with arms extended.⁴ Yet the Truce of God, thus proclaimed so charismatically in the aftermath of famine, was broken almost as soon as it was made.

That collapse of public order during the millennial decades, causing a widespread flight to lordship in almost every Western society, was instrumental in promoting what some historians have described as a ‘feudal revolution’.⁵ And if almost every element of that revolution has since been challenged, nobody now disputes that the tax-raising royal governments of the ninth (Carolingian) and twelfth (Capetian) centuries sandwiched between them a long and dismal interlude of violentia. At this directionless time, when vendetta ruled, the building of private castles was yet another sympton of mounting lawlessness. Yet Europe’s population and its economy kept on growing. In Glaber’s Burgundy, the Churches of Saint-Philibert at Tournus, Saint-Bénigne and Cluny were the subject of major rebuildings. To the north and west, Saint-Rémi at Reims, Saint-Martin at Tours, Saint-Hilaire at Poitiers, and Bishop Fulbert’s Chartres were all being rebuilt in Glaber’s lifetime. In Germany simultaneously, the cathedrals at Augsburg and Strasbourg, Hildesheim, Goslar and Paderborn, Speyer, Trier and Mainz, were either rebuilt completely or substantially extended, as were many of the larger abbey churches.⁶

Building on this scale, which may call for special skills, cannot usually be done without money. And it is no surprise, accordingly, that this building boom coincided precisely with what is now widely recognized as ‘the most significant period for the early growth of the use of coin in Western Europe … witnessing the real start of a money economy’.⁷ In the mid-960s, a prodigious new silver source had been found on the Rammelsberg, just above Goslar in the Harz mountains. Some thirty years later, the mines were in full production and would pay, among other things, for Goslar’s new cathedral, built in the 1040s, and for Henry III’s enormous Kaiserhaus in that city. Huge contemporary coin hoards, their principal constituent being Adelaide-Otto silver pfennigs from central Germany, have been found in Sweden. And it was the Rammelsberg mines again that furnished the silver for the locally-minted coinages of Russia and Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which would play a major role in Christianization. Furs from the Baltic, wine from the Rhineland, wool and cloth from England and Flanders, were all to be bought with German ingots. But equally important for European rulers everywhere was their growing understanding of how a coinage worked, its symbolism as meaningful as bullion weight. It was Vladimir the Great, Prince of Kiev (977–1015), who brought Christianity to Russia in the late 980s. And a significant function of his new coinage on the remote Christian rim was to spread the propaganda of Church and State. On one face of Vladimir’s coins is the political legend ‘Vladimir on the throne’; on the reverse is an all-powerful Christ Pantocrator.⁸

On Swedish coins of this date, there is a cross on the reverse; on the coins of contemporary Poland, a church is shown. And Vladimir of Kiev, having set up pagan idols in his pre-conversion days, at once became a builder of Christian churches. He owed his baptism in 988 to an alliance with Byzantium, sealed by his marriage the following year to Anna, sister of the Greek Emperor Basil II (‘the Bulgarslayer’). And he dedicated his first Kievan church to the eponymous St Basil (d.379), monastic legislator and Bishop of Caesarea. Neither Vladimir’s Church of St Basil nor his Cathedral of the Dormition (Church of the Tithe) have survived. But both are thought to have been based directly on Byzantine originals, and it was Constantinople again which set the style for the new stone churches of Yaroslav, Vladimir’s son. Yaroslav the Wise (1019–55) ‘loved religious establishments and was devoted to priests, especially to monks. He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night.’ During Yaroslav’s reign, the same chronicler adds, ‘the Christian faith was fruitful and multiplied, while the number of monks increased, and new monasteries came into being’. Of Yaroslav’s new churches, the most important was the huge multiaisled and cupola’d Cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev, described by Bishop Hilarion as ‘adorned with every beauty, with gold and silver and precious stones and sacred vessels … wondrous and glorious to all adjacent countries … another like it will not be found in all the land of the North from east to west.’⁹ And whereas the bishop’s praise was surely generous, for Prince Yaroslav himself was in the audience, Hilarion had already built a cathedral of his own at Rostov east of Novgorod, knew Kiev’s many churches (said to number more than 200 before Yaroslav’s accession), and could recognize superior quality when he saw it.

Novgorod’s Cathedral of St Sophia, built in the mid-century by Yaroslav’s son, again had a Byzantine model. Yet there are borrowings here also from Western Romanesque. And it was the contemporary development of long-distance trading systems – to the Baltic (and the West) from Novgorod, to the Black Sea (and Constantinople) from Kiev – that chiefly funded the construction of these great churches. Beneficial to all, such silent revolutions are much more likely to survive than military conquests. ‘Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight’ (Psalm 144) ran the legend on a Frankish sword-hilt found in Sweden.¹⁰ But it was Christian wealth rather than force of arms that defeated the Viking gods, and it was towns as much as churches that spread Christ’s message. Well before 1200, by which time Novgorod and Kiev were each as large as London, urban centres had multiplied across Russia. And although every new town of this period was market-based, none was just about money. Thus it would be said of Baltic Riga, founded in 1201, that ‘the city of Riga draws the faithful to settle there more because of its freedom than because of the fertility of its surroundings’.¹¹ And while Riga’s situation as the crusading headquarters of the Livonian Knights of the Sword was necessarily unique, there was nothing exceptional about the liberties it shared with almost every market-town in Western Christendom. ‘Perhaps the greatest social achievement’, writes Susan Reynolds, ‘of towns in this period was that they offered a way of life that was attractive. People flocked into them and … went on coming.’¹²

It was the steady flow of immigrants, attracted by freedoms denied to them in rural hinterlands, which kept the towns intact through the famines and feuding of the late eleventh century. When Goslar’s silver ran out, as it had begun to do already in the 1050s, most towns survived the consequent recession. But aristocracies everywhere had learnt to love good living. And one result of the growing silver shortages of the second half of the eleventh century was to focus attention, both north and south of the Alps, on those regions which were still bullion-rich. It was not by chance alone that German interest in Italy revived sharply from the mid-eleventh century. And it was in Italy, south of Rome, that German knights first encountered Norman mercenaries. ‘Accustomed to war’, wrote William of Malmesbury (d.1143), half-Norman himself, the Normans ‘could hardly live without it’. They are ‘a warlike race … moved by fierce ambition … [and] always ready to make trouble’, was the verdict of another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis (d.1142), who, after spending most of his life among them at the abbey of Saint-Evroult, knew the Normans as ‘the most villainous’ of neighbours.¹³ Unable to tolerate another’s dominance and always spoiling for a fight, Norman adventurers carved up Southern Italy between them. They took Capua in 1058; drove the Byzantines out of Calabria by 1071; the Lombards out of Salerno by 1077; the Arabs out of Sicily by 1090. They became the masters of Malta and Corfu. Silver-rich England, always the North’s most tempting prize, made a kingdom for Duke William in 1066.¹⁴

Windfall fortunes, won and held by force, need legitimizing. And it was through the Church that the Normans laundered their new money. In the Conqueror’s England, there was hardly a major church which was not at once rebuilt by its first Norman abbot or reforming bishop. But whereas the scale of this new construction – as at Bishop Walkelin’s Winchester – was almost without precedent, and while some of these great churches – in particular, William of St Calais’s Durham – could readily bear comparison with the most advanced continental buildings of their day, it was not in England that Norman patronage was most productive. Southern Italy allowed its Norman appropriators to take everything they wanted from a long-established melting-pot of cultures: Latin, Byzantine, and Saracenic. It was in Norman Apulia and Capua, Calabria, Salerno and Sicily – not in Lombardy or in Germany, in England, France or Russia – that the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’ first originated.

This Renaissance was not limited to the arts. However, it was in church-building, in particular, that scholar-priests and princes found common ground. And one of their earliest cooperative ventures was at Monte Cassino, in Norman Capua, the sixth-century birthplace of Benedictine monachism in the West. It was there, after Richard of Aversa drove the Lombards from Capua in 1058, that Abbot Desiderius, with Richard’s help, made Monte Cassino a busy hive of the arts, drawing on every culture of the region. And it was from Desiderius’s new church that Abbot Hugh of Cluny (a visitor there in 1083) took some of the ideas – the Byzantine vault and the Saracenic pointed arch – which he would re-use almost immediately in his comprehensive rebuilding of Cluny III. Another eminent Monte Cassino scholar, the Latin poet Alfanus, was raised to Archbishop of Salerno in 1058. And when, two decades later, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Salerno as well, it was Duke Robert’s sudden riches which built Archbishop Alfanus a fine new cathedral, equipped with costly mosaics in the best Greek tradition and with great bronze doors (as at Monte Cassino) from Constantinople.¹⁵

The dedication of Salerno Cathedral in 1084 was one of Gregory VII’s last public acts as pope-in-exile. Following his death in 1085, Abbot Desiderius, against his better judgement, accepted office as Victor III. And Desiderius, in turn, was succeeded by Urban II (1088–99), a former prior of Cluny. Each had Norman support. Gregory VII (1073–85) had first enlisted Normans as his principal allies against the Germans; Desiderius, when pope as much as abbot, remained dependent on the support of Norman princes; and Urban II’s great Crusade, preached so charismatically at Clermont on 27 November 1095, would probably never have reached Jerusalem without their leadership.

Only five years before, the successful expulsion of Sicily’s Arab rulers by Roger ‘the Great Count’, younger brother of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, had established a model for Christian renewal in the Mediterranean. And Sicily’s enormous wealth, fuelling Crusader hopes of similar booty in the East, was in truth far more real than the legendary golden pavements of Jerusalem. Significantly for the arts, that wealth was almost entirely Mediterranean-based, combining seaborne commerce – the Arab, Byzantine, and (increasingly) North Italian trades – with the export of Sicily’s high-quality grains. And the island’s new rulers soon found it more convenient to forget – or ignore – their Norman origins. Roger II, crowned King of Sicily and Apulia on 25 December 1130, had been Count of Sicily since 1105 and Duke of Apulia from 1122. At Roger’s cosmopolitan court – over which he presided with Byzantine pomp – French and Latin, Greek and Arabic were all in common use. And although, from Roger’s death in 1154, the Latinization of Norman Sicily appreciably gathered pace, it would be a long time yet before incoming Latin settlers outnumbered the indigenous Greeks, and almost as long before the last Arab merchant left Palermo.¹⁶ Roger II’s two outstanding buildings – the new cathedral at Cefalù and his Palatine Chapel at Palermo – were both begun soon after he was crowned king. And in this exceptional context of cross-fertilizing cultures, whereas each church is of Latin (or Romanesque) plan, the expensive high-quality mosaics which ornament both buildings are unmistakably Greek, while the pointed arches of Roger’s palace chapel, and its rich stalactite-style ceiling, are just as obviously of Arab inspiration. That identical mix of Latin, Greek and Arab, on an even grander scale, again characterized the new cathedral at Monreale, west of Palermo, built by William II (1165–89). King William, Ibn Jubayr relates, spoke Arabic. And the pointed arches of Monreale’s nave arcades and cloister, completed in the 1180s, are at least as Saracenic as those of the Palatine Chapel of William’s grandfather. Similarly, while Monreale’s plan is Latin, its mosaics are Greek. And it was for those mosaics in particular – political in purpose, spectacular in spread, enormous in cost, Greek in execution, yet Latin in subject – that William II’s huge cathedral was most admired.¹⁷

In late twelfth-century English art, some significance attaches to William II’s marriage in 1177 to Joanna of England, Henry II’s daughter. And there are contemporary English wall-painting schemes, even in remote country churches, which quite clearly have a Byzantine cast. However, the great majority of English pilgrims had always travelled to the Holy Land by way of Sicily. And it was most probably a Greek icon, brought home by one of those, which furnished the inspiration in c. 1150 for two high-quality miniatures (‘the Byzantine Diptych’) in Henry of Blois’s Winchester Psalter. A decade or so later, there is even more direct evidence of a migratory Sicilian art in the Morgan Master’s extraordinary contributions to Bishop Henry’s great Winchester Bible of 1160–75. And that same Master’s exquisite Palermo-based miniatures would themselves become the model for the Byzantine-style frescos, contemporary with Monreale, of the Holy Sepulchre Chapel at Winchester Cathedral.¹⁸

Such links are obvious. Nevertheless, the strong Byzantine presence in Western art – in Germany and France, as well as Italy and England – was both too early and too general for eastward-looking Sicily to be its source. A more likely genesis for this characteristically twelfth-century emphasis in the arts was Abbot Desiderius’s rebuilding of Monte Cassino. When planning his great church, Desiderius had visited Rome in the mid-1060s to buy antiques: ‘huge quantities of columns, bases, architraves, and marbles of different colours’. But there had been no native-born mosaicists or opus sectile (ornamental marble) paviours at Monte Cassino when work began, and Desiderius had accordingly used imported Greeks to train his younger monks in those forgotten arts ‘lest this knowledge be lost again in Italy’. ‘Four hundred and fifty years have passed’, wrote his friend Archbishop Alfanus, ‘during which this kind of art has been excluded from the cities of Italy; [but] something that had been alien to us for a long time has now become our own again.’¹⁹

That instinctive reaching back into the past for renewal in the arts came to be closely identified with the missionary reforming programme to which Desiderius, as a Gregorian, was committed. While never a fanatic in Gregory VII’s cause, Desiderius followed the pope in condemning lay investiture (royal intervention in church appointments) and simoniacal ordination (clerical office obtained by purchase), and came to support the separation of Church and State – of Papacy and Empire, King and Bishop, God and Mammon – which was what the Investiture Contest was all about. In the almost three centuries since Leo III’s coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor in the West on 25 December 800, German theocracy had travelled too far. And as Desiderius looked to Rome for his direction in Church reform, so Rome’s anti-imperial reforming popes, seeking renewal in building also, took inspiration from Monte Cassino. What resulted was an architecture which, while more antiquarian than scholarly, was archaeologically correct in a way not seen again for three centuries. Rome itself, as Desiderius had discovered, was rich in re-usable antiquities. And when Innocent II (1130–43) began his huge new church at Santa Maria in Trastevere, he was free to plunder Ancient Rome for his materials. Innocent II’s grand parade of columns with their antique Ionic capitals, his re-used sculptured brackets on their classically straight entablatures, his archaizing marble pavements and rich mosaics, would all have been familiar in Early Christian Rome. The model for Santa Maria in Trastevere was no church of its own period but the fifth-century basilica, still standing today, at Santa Maria Maggiore.²⁰

In the long papal schism which began with Innocent II’s disputed election and ended only with the death of the antipope Anacletus II in January 1138, the pope’s most capable lieutenant was Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard was a reformer of quite a different kind, finding his inspiration in the poverty-driven austerities and literal truths of the primitive Church. Yet there was nothing in the least austere about the lavish mosaics and pavements of Santa Maria in Trastevere. And the church Bernard built at his newly acquired abbey of Tre Fontane on Rome’s Via Laurentia, exactly contemporary with Innocent’s own, was so stripped-down and bare as to be seen as a reproach, inviting unfavourable comparisons. Bernard himself never hid his real feelings. ‘What business has gold in the sanctuary?’, he asked, in a characteristic borrowing from the feisty Neronian satirist, Persius Flaccus (fl.34–62). ‘To speak quite openly, avarice, which is nothing but idolatry, is the source of all this … for through the sight of extravagant but marvellous vanities, men are more moved to contribute offerings than to pray … [and while] eyes feast on gold-mounted reliquaries and purses gape … the poor find nothing to sustain them.’²¹

There was room, in point of fact, for a renewal of both kinds, each finding its rationale in the fourth-century Church. Nevertheless, it was Bernard’s populist message which caught the tide. ‘See’, exclaimed Orderic Vitalis, echoing Rodulfus Glaber at the Millennium, ‘though evil abounds in the world, the devotion of the faithful in cloisters grows more abundant and bears fruit a hundredfold in the Lord’s field. Monasteries are founded everywhere in mountain valleys and plains, observing new rites and wearing different habits; the swarm of cowled monks spreads all over the world.’ But while generous in his praise of Bernard’s valiant white-monk ‘army’ – a favourite Bernardine metaphor – Orderic (the black monk) was perfectly aware as he wrote of a major public-relations disaster in the making. Old-style Benedictines like himself had always worn black.

Now however, as if to make a show of righteousness, the men of our time [the Cistercians] reject black, which the earlier fathers always adopted as a mark of humility both for the cloaks of the clergy and for the cowls of monks … they specially favour white in their habit, and thereby seem remarkable and conspicuous to others … they have built monasteries with their own hands in lonely, wooded places and have thoughtfully provided them with holy names, such as Maison-Dieu, Clairvaux, Bonmont, and L’Aumône and others of like kind … [so that] many noble warriors and profound philosophers have flocked to them … [and others] who were parched with thirst have drunk from their spring; many streams have flowed out of it through all parts of France … through Aquitaine, Brittany, Gascony, and Spain.²²

‘Do as none does and the world marvels’ was a proverb (his biographer tells us) often on Bernard’s lips and ever in his heart.²³ And there is no doubting that his timing was impeccable. Furthermore, while his message was wrapped persuasively in the age-old language of renewal, Bernard’s policies were more radical than they appeared. It was at Cïteaux, wrote Philip of Harvengt in the 1140s, using the familiar reformer’s code, that ‘the monastic order, formerly dead, was revived; there the old ashes were poked; it was reformed by the grace of novelty, and by zeal it recovered its proper state … and the rule of Benedict recovered in our times the truth of the letter’.²⁴ But ‘as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also’ (James 2:26). And those many ‘workshops of total sanctity’ which so exhilarated Philip would not have survived long – let alone multiplied as they did – had they failed to make their way in the real world. Throughout the Catholic West, and deep into its marches with Muslim Spain and the Slavic East, there had never been a boom quite like this one. The Cistercians were not the only monks to make a killing.

O how innumerable a crowd of monks [apostrophized Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny] has by divine grace multiplied above all in our days, has covered almost the entire countryside of Gaul, filled the towns, castles, and fortresses; however varied in clothing and customs, the army of the Lord Sabaoth has sworn under one faith and love in the sacraments of the same monastic name.²⁵

Peter the Venerable’s increasingly démodé Cluniacs had long ceased to function as the Lord of Hosts’ front-line troops. However, they had already profited hugely from the new reforming emphasis which their long-lived abbots, Odilo (994–1049) and Hugh (1049–1109), had each helped promote in his turn. And what the reforms had begun to bring to them, even before 1100, were large numbers of parish churches, with their tithes and other offerings, formerly treated by lay owners as private property. It was Leo IX’s Council of Rome in 1050 which urged the restoration of all lost church revenues to their clergy. And that was immediately the message of Bishop Airard of Nantes in the 1050s, having in mind – he told his hearers – that ‘in France more than elsewhere the wicked custom has grown up that ecclesiastical revenues, tithes, and oblations are usurped by others than the ministers of the churches to which they rightly belong, and sustenance is evilly transferred from the clergy to laymen and from the poor to the rich.’ Airard’s message came too early to win general support; and he was driven from office in 1059 in favour of a pastor of the landowning party. Nevertheless, he had already secured the release before that time of several parish churches, including those of Rodald ‘who set an example to others and gave up everything he possessed and left it to me what to do with it, and I gave it all, just as it had been given to me, to St Martin and the monks of Marmoutier’.²⁶

That first eleventh-century trickle of church transfers rose to a flood after the triumph of the reforming party at the Concordat of Worms in 1122 had brought the Investiture Contest decisively to an end. And it is very clear that, as the conscience of lay proprietors increasingly got the better of them, the contemporary rebuilding of parish churches throughout the West owed more to changes of ownership than to population growth, to landowner wealth, to developing ritual, or any other cause. One especially well-documented example of such a rebuilding, where the new church still survives, is an arrangement of the 1170s by which William, son of Ernis, gave the English Cluniacs of Castle Acre three acres in Long Sutton ‘in the field called Heoldefen next the road, to build a parish church there. And my wish is that the earlier wooden church of the same vill, in place of which the new church will be built, shall be taken away and the bodies buried in it shall be taken to the new church.’²⁷ Long Sutton, in the fertile Lincolnshire fens, was a developing market-town, and its church was ambitious from the start. For another century and more, church and town continued to grow in unison, before the Great Pestilence brought calamity and recession.

‘Each man [they say] must have a beginning, for the fair lasts but a while.’²⁸ And for many reforming clergy, both in the twelfth century and the next, that beginning could come only in the towns. In particular, that was true of the regular canons – Augustinians for the most part – who, as priests as well as monks, attracted endowments which almost always took the form of parish churches. Then, in the thirteenth century, it was in the towns again that the friars – Dominicans and Franciscans, Carmelites and Austin Friars – made their homes. Not so the Cistercians, nor other ‘hermit-monks’, whose statutes from the start had provided that ‘none of our monasteries is to be constructed in towns, castles or villages, but in places remote from human intercourse’.²⁹ Paradoxically that policy, far from removing their abbeys from the natural growth-points of the economy, located them initially on those expanding frontiers of wealth – of clearance and reclamation, of conquest and new settlement – at which major development was still possible. Frontiers are hostile places. And when, in 1112, a young Burgundian nobleman, Bernard of Fontaines, joined the little community of ascetics settled since 1098 in ‘the wilderness known as Cîteaux … where men rarely penetrated and none but wild things lived’, it was weak and on the point of collapse. Yet just as soon as Bernard had absorbed Cîteaux’s disciplines, he left it again to found his own community in its image. And it was from Bernard’s Clairvaux – with Morimond and Pontigny and Cîteaux itself – that the huge expansion of the Cistercian order almost immediately took place, so that just forty years later, on Bernard’s death, there would be well over 350 abbeys in a mighty monastic family which even its rivals acknowledged to be ‘a model for all monks, a mirror for the diligent, [and] a spur to the indolent’ of all convictions.³⁰

‘That was the golden age of Clairvaux’, wrote William of St Thierry, re-telling the story of Abbot Bernard’s first two decades, when ‘men of virtue, once rich in goods and honour and glorying now in the poverty of Christ, established the Church of God in their own blood, in toil and hardship, in hunger and thirst, in cold and exposure, in persecution and insults, in difficulties and in death, preparing the Clairvaux of today, which enjoys sufficiency and peace.’³¹ But Bernard’s first ‘little huddle of huts’ at Clairvaux, ‘strangled and overshadowed by its thickly wooded hills’, was quickly filled to bursting by the many who hurried there to join him. And the standard Cistercian abbey of the order’s main expansion period – with ‘no statues or pictures’, with ‘windows of clear glass’, and with ‘no bell-towers of stone’ (provided the statutes) – would have had much more in common with the new Clairvaux II after 1135, when the saint at last agreed to its rebuilding. ‘Should you wish to picture Clairvaux’, begins a famous description of Bernard’s second abbey, ‘imagine two hills and between them a narrow valley, which widens out as it approaches the monastery. The abbey covers the half of one hillside and the whole of the other. With one rich in vineyards, the other in crops, they do double duty, gladdening the heart and serving our necessities, one shelving flank providing food, the other drink.’ Characteristically, though, it was not in his account of Clairvaux’s buildings – as a Cluniac might have done – that the Cistercian author came to life, but in his transparent delight in the tumbling waters of the Aube and in the ‘smiling face of the earth’.³² It was another Cistercian writer, Gilbert of Swineshead, who described the site of his own English abbey as ‘a secret, cultivated, well-watered, and fertile place and a wooded valley [which] resounds in springtime with the sweet song of birds, so that it can revive the dead spirit, remove the aversions of the dainty soul, [and] soften the hardness of the undevout mind’. And it was a third, Walter Daniel, who found Paradise (no less) in the wooded hills and dashing streams of Aelred’s Rievaulx.³³

Of Abbot Aelred, Walter wrote: ‘This man turned Rievaulx into a veritable stronghold for the comfort and support of the weak … an abode of peace and piety where God and neighbour might be loved in fullest measure.’ To Rievaulx, ‘monks in want of brotherly understanding and compassion came flocking from foreign countries and the farther ends of the earth’; and no restless ‘rolling-stone’ was turned away. Yet Rievaulx’s lush meadows, like those of its Yorkshire sister-house at Fountains, had only lately been ‘a place of horror and vast solitude … thick set with thorns, and fit rather to be the lair of wild beasts than the home of human beings’. And the gentle Aelred, abbot from 1147, was as much successful manager as caring father. Before his death in 1166, Aelred had more than doubled Rievaulx’s size in ‘monks, lay-brothers, hired men, farms, lands and chattels’, leaving it well equipped to support an even greater company than the already huge throng of 140 choir-monks and 500 lay-brethren and servants which had packed the church on feast-days ‘like bees into a hive, unable to move forward for very numbers’.³⁴

Aelred was a Cistercian of the second generation. And by his death, many white-monk houses had ceased to live by the austere code of their founders. One sharp contemporary verdict on what the Cistercians had become – especially worth attending because delivered by an admirer and reported by an abbot of their own order – is that of Wulfric of Haselbury Plucknett, a well-regarded Somerset recluse. Wulfric, said Abbot John of Ford, his biographer:

clasped all Cistercians in a close embrace, like sons of his own body, or rather of Christ Jesus. He lauded the Order to the skies and never hesitated to direct to it those who came to consult him about reforming their lives. There was only one matter, according to this friend and champion of our Order, in which the Cistercians displeased God: when it came to lands made over to them, they exercised their rights too freely and, more intent on law than on justice, seemed insufficiently mindful of their duty to those men committed to their lordship.³⁵

However, the problem for the Cistercians, as for the other rural orders of the twelfth-century reform – the Carthusians and Tironensians, the Gilbertines, Premonstratensians and Grandmontines – was that both in the quality of their recruitment and in the largesse of their friends, support was very rapidly falling off. To meet their continuing building commitments – and Aelred’s hugely expanded Rievaulx was only one of many white-monk houses already rebuilt almost entirely before 1200 – Cistercian abbots everywhere had begun accepting those very properties, from feudalized lands to parish churches and their tithes, which their predecessors had on principle rejected.³⁶ Those earlier abbots had invariably made sure that their houses were sufficiently endowed. And few Cistercian communities ever ran much risk of the wretched poverty felt, for example, by the hermit-monks of Grandmont, struggling to maintain themselves on a mountain-top so ‘stern and cold, infertile and rocky, misty and exposed to the winds’ that even ‘the water is colder and worse than in other places, for it produces sickness instead of health’.³⁷ Yet from the mid-century already, the very success of the Cistercians had begun to cost them dear, losing them the respect and loyalty of just those powerful men and women for whom the soldierly discipline of Abbot Bernard’s troops had always been their principal attraction.

Bernard had communed easily with princes. However, the West’s most affluent patrons – bishops as well as dynasts – were beginning to find other homes for their money. One major beneficiary would be the Friars Mendicant, who arrived with the new century. But before that fresh distraction, the rebuilding of Europe’s cathedrals had entered a new phase, driven at least in part by popular piety. ‘We have begun the construction of a larger church [at Aix-en-Provence]’, promised Archbishop Rostan de Fos’s encyclical of 1070, addressed to all the faithful of the diocese, ‘in which you and other visitors will have space enough to stand … We ask each of you to give what he can, so as to receive from God and us a full remission of his sins … [then] for everything you give, you will receive a hundredfold from the Lord in the day of Judgement.’³⁸ And it was pilgrims again, drawn to Chartres Cathedral by the Virgin’s shrine, who had contributed to its rebuilding after the great fire of 1020. At Chartres, the chief attraction was an ancient image of the Virgin ‘about to bring forth’, with the Tunic she was wearing at childbirth. And there were already some lone voices – among them that of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent – who spoke out eloquently against the folly of such cults.³⁹ Yet there is no mistaking the furious passion of those Chartres citizens who, as their new cathedral neared completion in 1145, ‘in silence and with humility … [and] not without discipline and tears’, dragged waggon-loads of stone and wood to aid the works. ‘Powerful princes of the world’, wrote Abbot Haimon of that same scene, ‘men brought up in honour and wealth, nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and, like beasts of burden, have dragged to the abode of Christ these waggons loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life or for the construction of the church’.⁴⁰ But already Haimon’s emphasis was on the high birth of his devout penitents, and it was from the rich that the works received their funding. Thus when, on 10 June 1194, Chartres Cathedral burnt down again, what made another start feasible was not the Sisyphean labours of the city’s ardent poor but the solid wealth of its prudhommes and their friends.⁴¹

Cathedral-building is almost always long-term. And those great twelfth-century programmes at Laon and Notre-Dame de Paris, at Norwich and Canterbury, at Zamora and Salamanca, at Tournai, Worms and Mainz, all took generations to complete. Cologne Cathedral, the most ambitious yet, although begun at a fine pace in 1248, was not finished until the late nineteenth century. However, the mere fact that so many ambitious projects were launched at the same time says much for the health of the economy. Rhineland Cologne, always a minting capital, was at the centre of a revival which, after more than a century of bullion shortages, took off again in 1168 with the chance discovery of an important new silver source at Christiansdorf (later Freiberg), in Meissen. In less than twenty years from that first opening of Freiberg’s seams, the circulation throughout the West of hundreds of millions of silver pfennigs had transformed its trading economy.⁴²

For cathedral-building bishops everywhere, the fact that this new wealth was largely created in the towns gave them whatever assurances they still needed. With population on the increase and labour cheap and plentiful, the ideal context had been established for daring programmes of new works characterized by leap-frogging ambition. Silver-rich Cologne remained for generations the most insanely ambitious project of them all. However, a seductive target had been set. And Cologne’s challenge, taken up first in 1386 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, tyrant of Milan, was then accepted by the canons of Seville. It was one of those canons who, in 1401–2, made the famous boast: ‘We shall build a cathedral so fine that none shall be its equal … so great and of such a kind that those who see it completed will think that we were mad.’⁴³

And that, in just a century, is what they did.

CHAPTER TWO Commercial Revolution

Europe’s commercial revolution is now sometimes seen as beginning at the Millennium, with that ‘birth of the market’ and ‘transformation of town/country relations’ which Guy Bois has located within a few years of 970.¹ However, most historians would date it later, and all agree that it was in the long thirteenth century – from the 1150s (or a little earlier) to the 1340s (or a little later) – that genuine surpluses built up, to result in the huge cathedrals of today. Cologne was only one of many Western cities which grew spectacularly in the twelfth century, adding two new circuits of defences; Rheims, at least doubling its size, was another. Both then began cathedrals – Rheims in 1211, Cologne in 1248 – on a scale so vast that nobody could have known how they would end. ‘Spend and God shall send’, the cathedral-builders told each other; ‘God loves a glad giver’, they advised their friends. But prayer was not the only funding strategy they employed. Abbot Suger, in the previous century, had shown the way. Before beginning on the rebuilding of his abbey church at Saint-Denis, Suger’s first priority had been to set about the recovery of his rents. Only after that, he reported, ‘having put the situation to rights, I had my hands free to proceed with construction’. Even so, he had been concerned about the future: ‘[but] when later on our investments became more substantial, we never found ourselves running short, and an actual abundance of resources caused us to admit: “Everything that comes in sufficient quantities comes from God”.’² Yet in 1148, when Suger told his story, a more reliable source of funding was the rising rent-roll of his abbey, having all the wealth of Paris on its doorstep.

With the economy speeding up and money no longer tight, one circumstance especially favoured large-scale building. ‘Thou shalt not lend upon usury’, ran the ancient teaching of the Church, whether ‘usury of money, usury of victuals, [or] usury of any thing that is lent upon usury’ (Deuteronomy 23: 19). And while frequently disregarded from the thirteenth century if not earlier, that doctrine remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages, holding back the evolution of money markets. It was not, for example, until late in the seventeenth century that London developed fully the sophisticated banking and commercial systems which helped make it into Europe’s largest city. And before that time, the unresolved problem of the urban rich was where – if not in land or treasure – to keep their money. In compensation, towns before the plague were good places to live: they were free, well-protected, and expanding quickly. But where fully a third of Europe’s cultivable land-space was already alienated to the Church, and where most of the remainder was locked away in the protected family holdings of the nobility, what was left sold only at a premium. Confident in their own abilities and anticipating little profit from the fields outside their walls, the comfortably-off citizens of Chartres, Bourges and Rheims, of Beauvais, Tours and Amiens, were the more easily persuaded to put their money into building when almost every other option was circumscribed.

Where they began was on the rebuilding of their cathedrals. But with the arrival of the friars, from early in the thirteenth century, another popular receptacle for surplus profits opened up. It was in 1210 that Francis of Assisi’s Regula Prima was first approved at Rome, and as late as 1216 that Dominic of Caleruega’s Order of Friars Preachers was formally recognized by Pope Honorius III. Yet so well targeted were the Mendicants, closely focused on the towns, that Matthew Paris (a Benedictine of St Albans) would say about them by the mid-century:

Brothers of many orders swarmed, now Preachers [Dominicans], now Minors [Franciscans], now Cruciferi [Crutched Friars], now Carmelites … The Preachers indeed and the Minors at first led a life of poverty and the utmost sanctity, devoting themselves wholly to preaching, hearing confessions, divine services in church, reading and study. Embracing poverty voluntarily for God, they abandoned many revenues, keeping nothing for themselves for the morrow by way of victuals. But within a few years they were stocking up carefully and erecting extremely fine buildings.³

Writing in 1250, Matthew Paris had seen the friars triumph over his own brethren too many times. And what he neglects to mention is that it was not always – nor even usually – the friars themselves who had chosen to build with such magnificence. Both the Dominicans and the Franciscans – the two senior orders – had insisted from the start on simple life-styles. ‘Our brothers shall have modest and humble houses’, runs a Dominican constitution of 1228, ‘so that the walls of houses without an upper room shall not exceed twelve feet in height, and of those with an upper room twenty feet, the church thirty feet; and their roofs should not be vaulted in stone, except perhaps over choir and sacristy.’⁴ And when, in 1260, Bonaventure (the ‘Seraphic Doctor’) brought the Franciscans back to unity after the divisions which had followed their founder’s death, his new statutes insisted that no churches of the order should have bell-towers of their own; that expensive vaults (as with the Dominicans) should be limited to the presbytery; that the only stained-glass imagery should be in the great east window over the high altar; and that ‘since exquisite craftsmanship and superfluity are directly contrary to poverty, we order that such exquisite craftsmanship, whether in pictures, sculpture, windows, columns and suchlike, and any superfluity in length, width or height above what is fitting to the requirements of the place, be more strictly avoided’.⁵

Such ‘superfluities’ had indeed characterized a great number of Franciscan churches, not least the huge basilica at Assisi itself which Brother Elias began building, soon after Francis’s death in 1226, in clear contravention of the saint’s explicit wishes. Yet it was overeager patrons, in almost every case, who had commissioned them. ‘King Louis’, wrote Jean de Joinville in his hagiographic history of Louis IX of France (1226–70), ‘loved all people who devoted themselves to the service of God by taking on the religious habit; none of these ever came to him without his giving them what they needed for a living.’ And while it was the Franciscans and the Dominicans who profited most from that largesse, Louis bought land also for the Carmelites on the Seine near Charenton, ‘where he built them a monastery and supplied it, at his own expense, with vestments, chalices, and such other things as are essential for the service of our Saviour’; he provided a site and built a church for the Austin Friars ‘outside the Porte Montmartre’; and he gave the Friars of the Holy Cross (Crutched Friars) a house ‘in the street once known as the Carrefour du Temple, but now called the rue Sainte-Croix’. In this way, boasts Joinville, ‘the good King Louis surrounded the city of Paris with people vowed to the service of religion’.⁶

‘They have already encircled the city’, sang Rutebeuf, the jongleur, taking the opposite view; ‘God keep Paris from harm/and preserve her from false religion.’⁷ And it was undoubtedly the case that Louis IX’s too obvious advocacy of the friars in their long mid-century dispute with the secular masters of the University cost him much support in his own capital. ‘There were times’, Joinville admits, ‘when [even] some of those who were most in his confidence found fault with the king for spending so lavishly on what seemed to them over-generous benefactions’.⁸ Yet the friars, whether as preachers to urban audiences or as buriers of the dead, were in no danger of losing their appeal. It was in Louis’s own Sainte-Chapelle – built at huge cost in the 1240s to house his most precious relic, the Crown of Thorns – that the king and his family heard the friars preach on many occasions. And high on the list of Louis’s favourite preachers was that same Bonaventure, once himself a famous teacher in the Paris schools, who restored order to the Franciscans in 1260. Over a quarter of Bonaventure’s sermons while minister-general are known to have been delivered on return visits to Paris, when the king was very often in his audience. They satisfied an addiction as powerful in Louis IX as the passion of Henry III, his English brother-in-law, for hearing masses.⁹

With Louis’s monumental reliquary rising before him as a challenge, Henry III was at least as determined to build a shrine of his own of similarly exemplary magnificence. Begun in 1246, when work on the Sainte-Chapelle (consecrated in 1248) was still in progress, Henry’s abbey church at Westminster replaced the demolished pre-Conquest church of King Edward the Confessor, whose canonization in 1161 had made him the focus of a developing cult to which Henry was personally devoted. No materials were too expensive nor spaces too grand for a work of such intense royal piety. Yet Henry was impatient to see it finished: ‘Because the king wishes that the works of the church of Westminster should be greatly speeded up (multum expedirentur)’, orders Henry III’s testy writ of 30 October 1252, ‘Henry, the master of the said works, is directed to have all the marble work raised this winter that can be done without danger.’¹⁰ The cost of this one project was enormous; Westminster alone (of all Henry’s many building enterprises) absorbed the equivalent of more than a year of the royal revenues, and contributed significantly to the popular unrest which culminated in the Baronial Revolt of 1263–5. Yet as Louis IX had told his critics: ‘I would rather have such excessive sums as I spend devoted to almsgiving for the love of God than used in empty ostentation and the vanities of this world.’¹¹ And where ‘magnificence’ in every gesture was routinely demanded of a king, there was little to be gained by royal parsimony. A generation later, in typical Mendicant-speak, the Dominican Federico Franconi would invoke a pagan Greek philosopher to justify the pious works of Louis’s nephew Charles II, King of Sicily (1285–1309):

According to Aristotle, Ethics 4, it is the part of the magnificent man to go to great expense and to make donations, and especially in connection with God and the building of temples. Thus our lord King Charles acted as befits a magnificent man and went to great expense and made gifts to knights, counts, and the like … How great were the gifts he made to clerics and religious! Indeed, too, how many were the churches and monasteries, how many were the convents that he built and endowed!¹²

Magnificence was as desirable in the government of cities also, for as the Florentine patrician, Pagolantonio Soderini, would later explain to his fellow disputants in Francesco Guicciardini’s political Dialogue of the 1520s: ‘Although cities were founded principally to protect those who took refuge in them and to provide them with the commodities of everyday life, nevertheless their rulers are also responsible for making them magnificent and illustrious, so their inhabitants can acquire reputation and fame among other nations for being generous, intelligent, virtuous and prudent.’¹³ But public works, in the last resort, are usually funded by private wealth. And probably the most significant contribution the friars ever made to the self-esteem of Europe’s cities was to give wealth-creation recognition in the Church. It was to Aristotle again, only recently become accessible in translations of their own making, that Mendicant scholars turned for a less condemnatory view of personal profit – deemed, until then, to be no better than exploitation – which began with the defence of private property. Aristotle, in his own day, had seen nothing wrong with private property. And for the Aristotelian Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, not only was personal wealth no sin, but the rich stood a better chance of being virtuous: thus ‘exterior riches are necessary for the good of virtue, since through them we sustain ourselves and can help others’.¹⁴ Contemporaneously, it was the Franciscan master Guibert of Tournai, teaching alongside Aquinas (the ‘Angelic Doctor’) in the Paris schools, who assured the class of merchants that ‘gold and silver make neither good men nor bad men: the use of them is good, and the abuse of them is bad’: in effect, that there is nothing sinful in buying and selling provided always that the motives are not base.¹⁵ And while some of the friars’ other rationalizations of money-making – of interest (‘usury’) as an acceptable charge for venture capital, and of a fair (or ‘just’) price as being whatever the market would bear – were more problematic, they were nevertheless entirely successful in promoting Christ the Good Merchant (Bonus Negotiator) as a commerce-friendly figure, on a level with Christ the Lawyer (Advocatus) or Christ the Lord (Dominus).

Taking the sin out of commerce was never more necessary than in this century of growth, when profits were accumulating all the time. And what made that growth significant – for the arts as for all else – was that a substantial proportion of it was real. The poor have few protectors. And when Pisa first expanded from its original walled core of just 30 hectares to the 114 hectares of 1162, and then again to the 185 defended hectares of 1300, it was less to enclose the shantytowns of migrant workers than to shelter the spreading suburbs of the rich.¹⁶ Florence, over the same period, grew by almost eight times: from 80 to 620 hectares. And while Genoa, the wealthiest of the Lombard cities, always stayed much more compact, the huge increase in trading volumes which the Genoese experienced through the thirteenth century in particular – well beyond even their considerable population growth of some 230 per cent – is the clearest possible demonstration of rising affluence.¹⁷

What Genoa and other Mediterranean cities enjoyed throughout the long thirteenth century was a consistently favourable trading balance with the commodity-starved but silver-rich nations of the North. Italian luxury goods – silks and linen, worked leather and fine woollens, armour and weapons, precious stones and spices – were all exchanged for northern silver. And although the bulk of the accumulated bullion was then passed on immediately to Naples and southern Italy, to North Africa, Asia Minor and the Near East, much also stuck to the fingers of Lombard middlemen. In direct response to that abundance, Italian interest rates fell sharply, from a typical 20 per cent at the beginning of the century to less than half that figure before its end, bringing the cost of a commercial loan in Genoa down as low as 7 per cent, in Venice to 8 per cent, in Florence to 10. And while personal loans were more expensive and usury (even as Mendicant casuistry had redefined it) was still condemned by the Church, every circumstance now favoured the entrepreneur.¹⁸

With bills of exchange in regular use and with book money increasingly substituting for real, the first to benefit were the citizen-bankers of northern Italy. They challenged one another like young bulls. ‘The noble city called Venice’, wrote Martin da Canale, its thirteenth-century chronicler, is ‘the most beautiful and delightful in the world’; the Piazza San Marco is ‘the most beautiful square in the whole world, and on the east side is the most beautiful church in the world, the church of the lord Saint Mark’. And when, on the eve of the Black Death, Agnolo di Tura (‘called the Fat’) recorded the completion in 1346 of the great piazza, or Campo, at Siena, he was equally confident in awarding it the crown as ‘the most beautiful square, with the most beautiful and abundant fountain and the most handsome and noble houses and workshops around it of any square in Italy’. Chief among the newest and grandest of those ‘handsome and noble houses’ was Siena’s enormous Palazzo Pubblico, for which the clinching argument had been that ‘it is a matter of honour for each city that its rulers and officials should occupy beautiful and honourable buildings, both for the sake of the commune itself and because strangers often go to visit them on business; this is a matter of great importance for the prestige of the city.’¹⁹ And what then came to be exhibited in Siena’s heart of government – the Sala de’ Nove (Chamber of the Nine) – was Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s huge fresco cycle of The Effects of Good and Bad Government in Town and Country, among the most impressive didactic paintings ever made.

Both Ambrogio and his brother Pietro (also a major painter) are believed to have died in the Black Death. And another casualty of that catastrophe was the projected extension, finally agreed as late as 1339, of Siena’s already big thirteenth-century cathedral. A huge new nave was to have been built on the line of the existing south transept, enormously increasing the floor area. But construction had begun to falter even before the plague reached Siena in the spring of 1348, and the entire enterprise was abandoned soon afterwards. As a display of citizen hubris roused to fever pitch, Siena’s failed Nuovo Duomo would be difficult to match. Yet it has a parallel in the new cathedral proposed at Beauvais a century earlier, following the fire of 1225: ‘the tallest structure ever built in northern Europe and certainly the most ambitious cathedral project of the High Gothic era’.²⁰ Bishop Miles’s Beauvais Cathedral, like the Nuovo Duomo at Siena, was never finished. There was a major collapse of the upper choir in 1284, the great crossing tower (only recently completed) fell in 1573, and the long nave of the original plan was never built. But if pushing technology to its limits may sometimes end in tears, it was a luxury that the newly affluent could well afford. John de Cella, Abbot of St Albans (1195–1214), headed one of the wealthiest of the English black-monk houses. He won the praise of his monks for his rebuilding (‘in every detail faultlessly’) of their ‘new and splendid’ dormitory and ‘very beautiful’ refectory. Yet it was Abbot John also who made the grievous error of entrusting his most prestigious project, the rebuilding of the western show-front of his substantial abbey church, to Master Hugh de Goldcliff – ‘a deceitful and unreliable man, but a craftsman of great reputation’. Then

It came about by the treacherous advice of the said Hugh that carved work, unnecessary, trifling, and beyond measure costly, was added; and before the middle of the work had risen as high as the water-table, the abbot was tired of it and began to weary and to be alarmed, and the work languished. And as the walls were left uncovered during the rainy season the stones, which were very soft, broke into little bits, and the wall, like the fallen and ruinous stonework, with its columns, bases and capitals, slipped and fell by its own weight; so that the wreck of images and flowers was a cause of smiles and laughter to those that saw it.²¹

The schadenfreude of John de Cella’s critics would certainly have been shared by Abbot Samson of Bury (1182–1211), in whom even his biographer saw something of the night. Abbot Samson, Jocelin of Brakelond tells us, ‘was a serious-minded man and was never idle … [But] as the wise man [Horace] said, no one “is entirely perfect” – and neither was Abbot Samson.’ Always more manager than spiritual father of his community, Samson ‘appeared to prefer the active to the contemplative life, in that he praised good obedientiaries (office-holders) more highly than good cloister monks, and rarely commended anyone solely for his knowledge of literature unless he also knew about secular matters.’²² Those secular matters, to Abbot Samson’s mind, included the keeping of meticulous accounts. And the highly professional accounting practices of which Abbot Samson and his generation were the undoubted pioneers, helped extract the maximum profit from the land. Soon after his election, it was on Abbot Samson’s command that

A complete survey was made, in each hundred, of letes, suits, hidages, foddercorn, renders of hens, and other customs, rents, and payments, which had always been largely concealed by the tenants. Everything was written down, so that within four years of his election, no one could cheat him of a penny of the abbacy rents, and this despite the fact that no documents relating to the administration of the abbey had been handed on to him from his predecessors … This was the book he called his ‘Kalendar’. It also contained details of every debt he had paid off. He looked in this book nearly every day, as though it were a mirror reflecting his own integrity.²³

It was under Abbot Samson’s sharp-eyed management that the great court at Bury echoed once again ‘to the sound of pickaxes and stonemasons’ tools’. And effective financial controls, from that time forward, would greatly ease the lot of the rebuilders. When Canterbury Cathedral’s choir was rebuilt after the fire of 1174, it owed at least some of its new glory to pilgrims’ offerings at the shrine of Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered there just four years before. However, the greater part of the required funding, both of this and later works, was always less piety-driven than rental-led. While frequently in debt to Sienese bankers among others, the cathedral’s monk-custodians – the third richest monastic community (after Westminster and Glastonbury) in the kingdom – never stopped building at any time.²⁴

Canterbury’s monks could handle debt more securely, and over a much longer term, because they were able to calculate very exactly what was owing to them. One of the cathedral-priory’s earliest rentals, dating to about 1200, brings together in one place all the information its obedientiaries might need for the resolution of future disputes. Not only, that is, did it record the names, rents, and payment-dates of the priory’s Canterbury tenants, but it gave locations and measurements also, beginning with the Northgate tenement of Roger fitzHamel’s sister, who paid sixpence at Michaelmas for ‘land lying behind our almonry wall; its breadth to the north 26 feet, length from the street towards the west 110 feet’.²⁵ Nobody until that time had kept records of such precision. Yet so fast-developing was the economy, and so urgent was the need for new mechanisms of control, that within less than a generation of those first monastic rentals, almost every major landowner would keep the same.

It is the survival of such records that makes possible for the first time convincing estimates of growth in this century. Thus the estates of Christ Church Canterbury are thought to have almost doubled their net worth through the long thirteenth century; Westminster Abbey’s assets grew by more than twice in the same period; the monks of Battle and the bishops of Ely nearly trebled their receipts; and the income of the bishops of Worcester rose by four.²⁶ Even allowing for inflation, such levels of growth are exceptional. And while it was the grander projects of the already rich which inevitably attracted the first funding, some residue trickled down to the localities. In the majority of English parishes, the rector was also a major landowner. And in clear recognition of the continuing affluence of his class, the chancels of many parish churches – widely acknowledged by that date to be the rector’s personal charge – were rebuilt on the most generous of scales. Not only were the new chancels of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England much larger than before, they were also conspicuously better furnished – with canopied piscina, triple sedilia and priest’s door in the south wall; carved reredos behind the altar; founder’s tomb and Easter Sepulchre to the north. In the post-Plague recession after 1349, such rectorial investment fell off sharply. And when, after a gap of half a century or more, building began again in many parishes, it was the parishioners’ nave rather than the rector’s chancel which claimed the rebuilders’ first attention, dread of Purgatory (not surplus wealth) being the spur.²⁷

There was little, however, even just before the plague, to stop the rich growing exponentially richer. For while it is probably true that population growth was slowing before 1300, and although serious subsistence crises may already have developed as early as the 1260s in some regions, it was never the rich who paid the price.²⁸ As the supply of labour went on growing, its cost fell still further; as the demand for land rose, so rents rose also; as husbandry intensified on overcrowded plots, tithable yields continued to increase. Some have seen Europe’s widespread famines of 1315–17 as the critical divide, when population advance turned into a retreat. And for Jacques Le Goff, ‘the combination of poor technological equipment and a social structure which paralysed economic growth meant that the medieval West was a world on the brink … constantly threatened by the risk that its subsistence might become uncertain … only just in a state of equilibrium’.²⁹ But try telling that to a Sienese banker or to some wealthy prelate from the North. And many historians now take the view that it was the onset of the Black Death in 1347–9 – not overcrowding nor soil exhaustion, not a deteriorating climate nor a commerce-averse Church – which ended medieval Europe’s golden age. ‘France’, concludes James Goldsmith, ‘did not face a serious economic or demographic crisis in the half-century prior to the Black Death. France was not trapped in a Malthusian-Ricardian dilemma in which population increase outstripped food production. France was not overpopulated in terms of its economic structures and there was no shortage of land.’³⁰ In practice, every circumstance still combined in the last half-century before the Pestilence to deliver yet more riches to the fortunate.

In the meantime, many had come to take prosperity for granted. There was never a time, for example, when skilled craftsmen lacked employment on the increasingly ambitious building programmes – three churches in two centuries – of the wealthy canons of Guisborough, in northern Yorkshire. Masons settled permanently in Guisborough township, they raised families to succeed them, were buried in the church’s shadow and left money to the priory’s fabric-fund in their wills.³¹ And while religious communities of every allegiance, confident in their rent-rolls, frequently took on greater projects than was prudent, very few came to grief as a result. Other wealthy Yorkshire houses where new construction never stopped included the near-neighbours, Cluniac Pontefract and Benedictine Selby. Both had contracted huge building debts before the end of the thirteenth century, as had the normally affluent canons of Augustinian Dunstable, forced to cut their commons to make ends meet:

We decided [Dunstable’s chronicler relates] that one portion of conventual dishes of every kind should be set before two brothers. Of the other economies made at that time [1294], as regards the number of dishes in the convent, as regards the almonry, the reception of guests, and the management of the household, you will find the particulars entered in the old book of obits [of this priory].³²

Yet not one of these communities ever ran much risk of failure. And it was their still substantial wealth, over two centuries later, that made them such tempting targets for suppression.

What boosted building confidence – probably more in these pre-plague generations than at any other time – was an economic climate in which even the most feckless noble landowner could do no wrong. Few would ever match the hands-on farming skills of Walter de Burgo, custodian from 1236 of Henry III’s southern manors, who raised their value – through intelligent investment in marling, seed and stock – by as much as 70 per cent in just four years.³³ However, agricultural regimes on England’s great demesnes would continue to improve throughout the thirteenth century, assisted by the circulation of such contemporary manuals of good practice as the Seneschaucy and Walter of Henley’s Husbandry. And every Western property-holder, great and small, obtained at least some benefit from the flow of German silver which had begun to run again more freely after the new discoveries at Freiberg in 1168, irrigating every economy through which it passed. Most particularly, all employers throughout this period shared easy long-term access to cheap labour. And not only were wages falling in proportion to landowner wealth, but new levels of skill were developing in many crafts and trades as greater specialization was driven by overcrowding. Good craftsmen are rare at any time. But much rarer is the situation where high skills and low rewards coincide with unfettered wealth-creation at patron level. When, from the 1250s or even earlier, this began to happen in the West, what resulted was affordable quality in every category of the arts, unleashing ingenuity and invention.

Of the extremes of that invention – always expensive and occasionally perverse – there is no better example than the multiple shafts and complex tracery of a big ‘Decorated’ cathedral like Exeter, in south-west England, rebuilt almost entirely between 1270 and 1340 at a time of unprecedented landowner prosperity. Walter Stapeldon (1307–27), twice Treasurer of England and the refurnisher of Exeter’s choir, was probably the wealthiest of the five bishops who oversaw these works during the seven decades they took to complete. However, it is to Bishop Peter Quinel (1280–91) that the costly sixteen-shafted ‘Exeter pillar’ is usually attributed; and it was Quinel’s pillar that set the standard for all that followed. Two centuries before, at Anglo-Norman Durham, single drum columns had supported the arcades; at Transitional Canterbury, after the fire of 1174, paired ‘Roman’ pillars were chosen for the renewal of the choir; the builders of Early English Salisbury, not otherwise shy of decoration, believed four-shafted piers ornate enough; and even Henry III, never one to spare expense, had settled on piers of just eight shafts for Westminster Abbey. Quinel doubled that number to sixteen.

Exeter Cathedral is provincial work, over-ornate and alarmingly top-heavy. More refined in every way was the king’s new choir at Westminster, in the Court Style of Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle. Other characteristically tall and slender churches in the French rayonnant tradition had included Suger’s Saint-Denis (rebuilt from 1231), with Beauvais and Amiens, Tours and Troyes, Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Thibault and Carcassonne; in Germany, Cologne and Strasbourg; in Spain, Toledo and Leon. Such huge devotional spaces required furnishings of similar quality. And Walter Stapeldon’s enormous throne at Exeter – ‘the most exquisite piece of woodwork of its date in England and perhaps in Europe’³⁴ – was a typical response to that challenge. But with no lack of cash-rich patrons, excellence spread out in all directions. Medieval England is not generally remembered for its art. Yet it was in these decades in particular that English wood-carvers and stonemasons were at their most inventive; that English tilers and potters worked at a standard never afterwards repeated; that English brasses and memorial sculptures were at their liveliest and most original; and that English Court Style painters, as in the Thornton Parva and Westminster retables or the De Lisle and Queen Mary psalters, were the equal of any in the West.³⁵ Of the many English glazing schemes also commissioned in this period, none was more important than the glazing in 1305–40 of York Minster’s new rayonnant nave. Last to be completed were the cathedral’s three west windows. And so close were these in style and subject-matter to the best French paintings of their period that their makers were almost certainly Paris-trained.³⁶

English miniature-painters are known to have worked in Paris in the early fourteenth century. And some would have learnt their art in the thriving atelier of Jean Pucelle (d.1334), illuminateur to Philip the Fair and his successors. Pucelle, in his turn, had learnt from the Italians, while the Italians themselves, including the great Sienese panel-painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (fl. 1278–1318), who was an important influence on Pucelle, took as much from the North as they gave back. For all, the common factor was extravagant commissions. Thus Duccio’s big Maestà, which took three years to paint, was commissioned in 1308 for the high altar at Siena Cathedral: the most prestigious location in the city. And the ingenuity and high invention of Pucelle and his assistants would have fallen far short of what they actually achieved had their virtuosity not been stimulated by the connoisseurship of Capetian kings and of the Valois who, from 1328, succeeded them.

Those increasingly sophisticated rulers of pre-plague France had owed their schooling in public patronage to Louis IX. And what St Louis did for the arts in thirteenth-century France had its closest parallel in the German empire of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Frederick, as Holy Roman Emperor (1220–50), had only nominal suzerainty over Italy north of Apulia. He was never in total control of his German lands. Accordingly, it was in Frederick’s southern Italian kingdom, which he held absolutely from 1208, that he spent the greater part of his reign, creating a Court in Sicily and Apulia as brilliant as any that had surrounded the Norman ‘Great Count’, Roger I Guiscard, and his heirs. Apostrophized as Immutator Mundi (Transformer of the World), Frederick never lacked his admirers. He was a new David – claimed Henry of Avranches, one of the more extravagant of those – a new Charlemagne, a Caesar, or a Robert Guiscard; he was intellectually on a par with Plato and Cicero, Ptolemy, Euclid and Pythagoras.³⁷ The Franciscan Salimbene, in contrast, stressed the downside of his rule, where ‘all these parties and schisms [between Guelf and Ghibelline] and divisions and maledictions in Tuscany as in Lombardy, in Romagna as in the March of Ancona, in the March of Treviso as in the whole of Italy, were caused by Frederick, formerly called emperor.’³⁸ Yet like him or not, there was no denying the force of the Emperor Frederick’s example, whether in the revival of antique scholarship or in the arts. ‘O fortunate Emperor’, exclaimed another of his circle, ‘truly I believe that if ever there could be a man who, by virtue of knowledge, could transcend death itself, you would be that one!’³⁹ And indeed Frederick, the classical scholar, was one of the first Western rulers to pay intelligent tribute to Antiquity in his buildings. There were Roman-style busts on Frederick’s great triumphal arch at Capua; at Castel del Monte, his Apulian hunting-lodge, the pediment of the big portal, supported by attached pilasters with neo-Corinthian capitals, is also Roman. Such overt imperial symbolism was hardly new. However, the Holy Roman Emperor was ruler also in the North, and what resulted at Castel del Monte – and probably at all of Frederick’s buildings, very few of which survive – was an eclectic mixture of the authentically Antique with northern Gothic and Apulian Romanesque.

It was the same merging of traditions in the sculptures of the Pisani (Nicola and Giovanni) and in the paintings of Duccio and Giotto, Simone Martini and Lorenzetti, which first breathed life into the Italian Renaissance. Nicola Pisano (fl. 1259–78) was an Apulian. And it was probably his familiarity with the Roman-derived work of the artists of Frederick’s Court that enabled him to bring a new understanding of classical sculpture to his adopted city, using it to good effect in the five pictorial panels of his pulpit for the Baptistery at Pisa. Another major influence on Pisano’s work was Gothic figure-carving, which he would have seen in portable form on the Via Francigena (the busy trade route south to Rome), even if – as seems likely – he never set foot in the North. Both Rome and the Gothic North were influential also on Giovanni Pisano, Nicola’s son: ‘not only equal but in some matters superior to his father’, wrote Giorgio Vasari (d.1574), architect and prosopographer of the Renaissance. And what most appealed to Vasari in the Pisani’s work was a new realism and truth to Nature lost (he believed) from Late Antiquity until their rediscovery by the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) ‘who alone, by God’s favour, rescued and restored the art [of good painting], even though he was born among incompetent artists’. It was Giotto, the barefoot country-boy of Vasari’s sometimes fanciful narrative, who soon after being brought to Florence by the established painter Cimabue ‘not only captured his master’s own style but also began to draw so ably from life that he made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years’. And it was just that break with tradition, earning Nicola and Giovanni a chapter of their own in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550), that he saw also in the sculptures of the two Pisani, who ‘very largely shed the old Byzantine style with its clumsiness and bad proportions and displayed better invention in their scenes and gave their figures more attractive attitudes’.⁴⁰ What Vasari did not say was that much of that ‘better invention’ was not Italian at all, but had been learnt from the Gothic masters of the North.

Strikingly, for ‘invention’ has not always commanded such support among the rich, there was no lack of commissions for the new art. Giotto, in Vasari’s long account of his career, was pressed to work in Florence (repeatedly), in Assisi and Pisa, in Rome and Avignon (home of the exiled popes), in Padua and Verona, Ferrara and Ravenna, Lucca, Naples, Gaeta, Rimini and Milan. And, characteristically, it was not just among cardinals and princes that he found his patrons, but in a wealthy Paduan banker like Enrico Scrovegni, heir to one of the greatest private fortunes ever put together in the West, whose commissioning of Giotto’s masterpiece, the Arena Chapel frescos, is thought to have been intended as an act of expiation for the notorious usury of the super-rich Reginaldo, Enrico’s father.⁴¹

Generous funding also followed the Pisani. Nicola’s Pisan Baptistery pulpit had been much admired. And five years later, in 1265, an almost identical (but larger) pulpit was commissioned for Siena Cathedral, with seven pictorial panels in place of five. Then, shortly after the Siena pulpit was completed, it was again the Pisani’s workshop – largely Giovanni’s by this time – that was commissioned to make a civic fountain for Perugia, long a stronghold of the Guelfs, which had found itself at last on the winning side. It was following Charles of Anjou’s decisive victory over Conradin’s Ghibelline forces at Tagliacozzo in 1268 that the Perugians entered a new era of exceptional self-confidence and prosperity. One expression of that new confidence was the founding of a university; another, the completion of the long and costly aqueduct which would eventually debouch into Perugia’s Fontana Maggiore. Deliberately linking the two events, the Pisani’s sculptured fountain carries allegories of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts; there are political reminders – the eagles of the Empire, the griffon of Perugia, and the lion of the Guelfs; there are saints, kings and prophets; there is Eulistes (legendary founder of Perugia) and Melchizedek (Priest of the Most High God), with, between them, the two egregious civic dignitaries in office at the time: Matteo da Correggio, podestà of Perugia in 1278, and Ermanno da Sassoferrato, capitano del popolo. ‘And as Giovanni [Pisano] considered he had executed the work very well indeed, he put his name to it.’⁴²

It was the unremitting feuding of Guelf and Ghibelline, still continuing in the 1280s, which caused Brunetto Latini to write: ‘War and hatred have so multiplied among the Italians that in every town there is division and enmity between the two parties of citizens.’⁴³ But what perpetuated those enmities was never as much vendetta, however politically inspired, as the tensions of a society in which only money mattered – and mattered more because it was abundant. On the steps of the Virgin’s throne in Simone Martini’s Maestà, painted in 1315 for the Great Council Chamber at Siena, there are verses which read: ‘The angelic flowers, the rose and lily/with which the heavenly fields are decked/do not delight me more than righteous counsel./But some I see who for their own estate/despise me and deceive my land’.⁴⁴ Yet it was precisely that pursuit of individual fortunes that had made the Sienese wealthy; and Simone Martini painted largely for the rich. Simone’s Maestà in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico was once thickly gold-encrusted; his St Louis of Toulouse (1317), painted for the Angevin Robert the Wise of Sicily, was embellished further with gold and precious stones; his Annunciation (1333) for Siena Cathedral has a ‘chocolate-chip’ richness which contrasts absolutely with the ‘plain vanilla’ of the Giottos at Assisi.

There are frescos by Simone also in the double basilica at Assisi, where his sumptuous St Martin Cycle, in the Montefiore Chapel of the Lower Church, recalls the particular devotion of an Italian cardinal, Gentile da Montefiore, for a Gallo-Roman bishop, Martin of Tours (d.397), whose following was principally in France. And while plainly influenced by Giotto’s art, Simone’s St Martin frescos have a distinctly Northern flavour, owing more to a contemporary Court Style miniaturist like Jean Pucelle. The distinguishing characteristics of that style were a bold use of brilliant colour (including much gold) and the repeated tiny brush-strokes of the illuminator. But such techniques are expensive, even on a manuscript’s much smaller scale. And when re-used in the 1320s on Simone’s frescos at Assisi, they could only have been realized with funding so unlimited that cost was no longer a consideration.

The times were certainly ripe for that expenditure. For in the long history of Western patronage there have been comparatively few such episodes of immoderate private wealth – industrializing America at the time of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan was another – and none which have lasted quite as long. Then, towards the end of the 1340s, came the reckoning. ‘After great heat cometh cold’, warned a proverb of those years, ‘let no man cast his cloak away.’⁴⁵ After the smiling summers, the drenching rains; after plenty, dearth; after centuries of remission, the return of Plague; and after boom, recession. ‘Even in Arcadia, I (Death) am … Et in Arcadia ego.’

CHAPTER THREE Recession and Renaissance

‘Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague’, wrote Ibn Khaldun of the first onset of the Black Death, ‘which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out … The entire inhabited world changed.’¹ He was right, of course. Yet he could not have known, as a contemporary witness of the Great Pestilence, just how long-lasting those changes would prove to be. Reduced by at least a third in 1347–50, Europe’s populations either stabilized at that level for the next 150 years or fell still further. And while some of that reduction was arguably inevitable – a necessary purge following centuries of growth, bringing people and resources back in balance – what followed was a recovery so sluggish and so unequal as to put a blight on the economy for generations. Downsizing a labour force is effective only if what is left provides a springboard for future growth. Yet there was to be little growth of any kind before the 1480s at earliest. And the real tragedy of the Black Death, in the longue durée, was Western society’s lamentable failure to rebuild.

That failure was more complete in some localities than in others. Norway, at one extreme, lost 64 per cent of its pre-plague population between 1348 and 1500; whereas England, over the same period, lost nearer 50 per cent, and others went down by just a third. These are estimates only, of which the accuracy has often been disputed. But even if wrong in detail, what the figures clearly show are conspicuously low replacement rates across the population as a whole, frequently barely adequate for survival. The most successful urbanized economies of the first half of the fifteenth century were Burgundian Flanders and Republican Florence. Both were especially attractive to skilled immigrants and, in part as a result, became the leading contemporary capitals of the arts. Yet the population of the Flemish cities, for all the magnetism of their wealth, continued to drift downwards through much of the fifteenth century, with no recovery of any substance before the end of it. And in Florence likewise, whereas population losses had bottomed out by the 1420s, there was then no upward movement for half a century at least, so that there were still markedly fewer Florentines in 1500 than there had been in 1347.

A severe and exceptionally long-lasting demographic collapse was thus the shared experience of almost all late-medieval communities in the West. And very little of what happened after the Black Death makes sense without reference to the pestilence. However, bubonic plague was just one element of a general retreat which, while certainly triggered by the Black Death in 1347–50, very rapidly developed its own momentum. That first outbreak of the disease had killed huge numbers, with some death-counts rising as high as 80 per cent even in remote rural communities. While increasingly an urban phenomenon, killer plagues then returned repeatedly for over three centuries before vanishing unaccountably in the 1700s. Yet plague was never the only – nor even the principal – population curb in the Western towns and cities it most afflicted. In late-medieval Europe, it was less bacteria that frustrated growth than full employment.

In practice, plague survivors were in great demand in every sort of occupation, and the jobs-for-all bonanza of the Black Death’s aftermath was self-perpetuating. Working women, in what is sometimes seen as their original ‘Golden Age’, were free at last to choose when to stop work and start a family. And in opting to marry later, only then setting up households of their own, they also cut the numbers of their children. Europe has many cultures, and neither the marriage patterns nor the household formation systems of North and South were then – or have ever been – the same. But whereas Mediterranean brides continued to find their partners before the age of twenty-one, post-plague northerners usually waited until their mid-twenties to make a match, and not infrequently stayed single out of choice. Where women married late and were prone to die in childbirth, where infant mortality was chronically high, where breast-feeding postponed conception for two years or more, and where life expectations, already low before the plague, fell still further, populations soon stopped growing. In short, the key demographic variable after the Black Death was arguably not mortality but nuptiality.

‘People are not poor because they have large families’, wrote a student of household systems in modern India. ‘Quite the contrary, they have large families because they are poor.’² And, in contrast, it was the relative affluence of individual plague survivors – and particularly, in this context, of independent farmers and their wives – which enabled them to settle for smaller nuclear families with fewer children. Traditional extended family systems, while still very much alive in the Third World today, were dying out in north-west Europe by 1400. And those comfortably-off English yeomen and their womenfolk who built the solid oak-framed farmhouses of the fifteenth-century Kentish Weald, were never in the business of offering accommodation to all and sundry. In their big open halls – relics of a life-style once entirely led in common – the uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grandparents, in-laws and cousins far and near, came together only, as it were, for Sunday lunches.

It was thus high levels of employment and good wages in the West which enabled that critical threshold to be crossed between a ‘situation where people cannot afford not to have children [and] one where they cannot afford to have many of them.’³ And paradoxical though it may sound, it was this new post-plague prosperity that, by discouraging large families, helped put off demographic recovery. Another token of private affluence, of which the outcome was the same, was the single-person household of the unmarried working woman or merry widow. In Florence in 1427, one in four adult women were widows, and many had doubtless chosen to remain in that condition, coming to view the death of older spouses as liberation: ‘as if a heavy yoke of servitude (un grave giogo di servitu) had been lifted from their backs’, observed Lodovico Dolce in the next century.⁴

Ensnared by Mamma’s cooking, Florence’s affluent bachelors had been reluctant to leave home before their early thirties, or even later. And fathers who had married tardily were another obvious reason why European city populations, even before the plague, had always found it difficult to replace themselves. Traditionally, the gap had been filled by immigration from rural areas. But whereas new recruitment remained steady in the half-century following the Black Death, as the smaller and more marginal settlements lost out to the towns, that pool was drying up by 1400. Newly prosperous peasant families, with too much land at their disposal and too little labour of their own, remained (and kept their children) in their localities. For if the populations of big cities risked extinction in post-plague times, so too – and often more so – did village communities. The Tuscan city of Pistoia was a near-neighbour and dependency of Florence. And Pistoia’s contado (rural territory) had been haemorrhaging population since the late thirteenth century, losing more than 70 per cent of its pre-plague maximum by 1400. That figure conceals huge differences between well-situated lowland villages, which continued to keep up numbers, and remote hill-top communities already in the advanced stages of disbanding. Nevertheless the fact remains that Pistoia the city – regular plague-trap though it was – held its strength marginally better than the contado. When surveyed in 1415, Pistoia’s population had fallen from around 11,000 shortly before the Black Death to just below 4000, or a loss of some 65 per cent.⁵

‘Death was everywhere’ in post-plague rural Normandy, of which fully half the population had disappeared by 1380.⁶ In Castile likewise, in the wake of ‘the Great Death’, settlement desertions gathered pace as bubonic plague returned again in 1363–4, in 1374, in 1380, in 1393–4, in 1399 and 1400.⁷ But while Castile shed many villages in the Black Death’s aftermath, Normandy lost rather few. And here it was the weather, rather than plague, that made the difference. The hot dry summers and mild wet winters of temperate Europe’s high-medieval warm epoch had begun to break up shortly after 1250. And what followed was a much lengthier cooling phase, starting with the great sea-storms and coastal inundations of the late thirteenth century and persisting through the rest of the Middle Ages. Characterized by wild temperature swings from cold to hot again, with their associated floods and droughts, it damaged most particularly those outlying farming communities which, in two centuries of increasing overcrowding before the Great Pestilence, had pushed out settlement into the more marginal territories on the hillsides, in the marshlands, and through the forests. Too hostile to allow survival, Castile’s parched and barren uplands were among the first to be deserted, as were the thin-soiled hill-top settlements of Mediterranean Pistoia, and the eroded slopes of Bray in the otherwise lush green pastures of Atlantic Normandy.

Imposed rather than created, plague and a deteriorating climate were the two principal exogenous factors in the Great Recession of the ‘long’ fifteenth century. No Western European economy was unaffected by them. Yet it was the endogenous factors – made by man himself – which were more likely to touch the arts directly. Chief among these was the weakness of money systems: a combination of politically-driven debasements (almost always to finance a war) and of chronic silver shortages in the West. Precisely because such crises were man-made, their incidence and fall-out could differ spectacularly between neighbours. Weak currencies and bullion famines were everywhere the norm in fifteenth-century Europe. But in Spain, whereas Aragon maintained a strong currency, Castile’s was one of the weakest; and while bullion in Aragon was in short supply, Castile’s location on the trade routes north from Africa kept gold flowing through the markets of Seville.⁸

For prince and people alike, Philip the Good concluded in 1433, ‘ung des principaulx poins de toutes bonnes policies … es davoir monnoye ferme et durable, tant d’or comme d’argent’.⁹ And it is perfectly true that a weak currency – the very reverse of une monnaye ferme et durable – was especially damaging to the receipts of great landowners, dependent on long-term leases and sluggish rents. Inflation, on the other hand, suited rent-payers very well, leaving fifteenth-century governments with the dilemma that if they devalued, the aristocracy rebelled, while every attempt to strengthen the currency was certain to be resisted by their tenants. In the event, it was the nobility who cried loudest, swinging the balance in favour of strong money. And the regular savage debasements which alone had enabled Philip VI of France to pay his troops in the opening campaigns of the Hundred Years War, were already largely over by 1360. For the next 350 years, interrupted only by such short-term wartime debasements as those of 1417–22 and 1427–9, France pursued the strong money policy, supported by taxation, which best suited its tax-exempt nobility. Yet the attractions of a stratagem which – explained Guillaume le Soterel (treasurer general of Navarre) – allowed the prince to ‘strike coin as feeble as he likes to have the means to pay his troops to defend him and his people and his land’, were too powerful to resist in a crisis.¹⁰ And nowhere was this more obvious than in post-Black Death Castile, where four ‘spectacularly awful’ debasements – starting in 1354, 1386, 1429 and 1463 – each paid for a war but cost the maravedi, or Castilian money of account, as much as 95 per cent of its value.¹¹

In contrast, the post-plague Low Countries under their Burgundian dukes – Philip the Bold (1384–1404), John the Fearless (1404–19), Philip the Good (1419–67) and Charles the Bold (1467–77) – became a model of firm government and strong money. Yet precipitous debasement would return, if only briefly, at the start of Habsburg rule in the 1480s: again to pay for mercenaries. Nor had it been possible for the dukes, vastly wealthy though they were, to survive unscathed through the deeply disruptive bullion famines of the fifteenth century. The accompanying hiatus in Europe’s money supply imposed constraints of every kind on the economy. It had begun with the mid-fourteenth-century exhaustion and closure of the Central European silver mines, aggravated by hoarding and accumulations of plate, and by the steady drain of bullion towards the East. Severe by 1400, the famine was most complete in 1440–65, when so catastrophic were the silver shortages that every mint was empty and hardly a new coin was struck. Surrounded by a countryside in deep recession, mid-century Brussels (home of the Burgundian court) was one of only four Brabantine cities to ride the storm successfully, the others being Malines (the legal centre), Louvain (for its new university), and Antwerp (for its capture of the English cloth trade). Even so, for almost a generation from 1437 the Brabantine mint at Brussels struck no new silver coins, closing completely (i.e. for gold as well as silver) for rather more than half of that long period.¹²

Defaulting rulers, among them Edward IV of England, contributed to the crisis which, from the late 1450s, had enveloped even Florence, damaging the Medici and causing the collapse of several major banking families (the Baldesi, the Partini, the Banchi and their like) in the late autumn of 1464. ‘It is the greatest calamity that has happened in this city since 1339 [the bankruptcy of the Bardi and Peruzzi]’, reported Angelo Acciaiuoli, himself a banker, that December. However, Florence’s crisis proved short-lived, and of more general significance to the economies of the West was the all but total disappearance – ‘throughout the universe’, thought the councillors of Barcelona in 1447 – of an official silver coinage, along with the small change (petty currency or ‘black’ money) of everyday transactions in street and marketplace.¹³ Disadvantaged already by uncompetitive pricing and by the deflationary pressures of the Burgundians’ pursuit of hard money, the once famous Brabantine draperies, with their long-established German and French outlets, had only just survived the growing competition of English imports. Then, in the mid-fifteenth century, two decades of currency starvation wiped them out.¹⁴

A flexible economy – and Brabantine Malines had one of those – can survive just about anything. But whereas the weavers of Malines moved successfully into dyeing and leather-processing, gun-founding, furriery, embroidery and carpet-making, the more normal case was that of Flemish Ypres, unable to diversify or to make the required transition from the high-cost quality draperies of the traditional Low Countries industry to the cheaper cloths which alone could compete with English imports. There had been some 1500 looms at Ypres in 1311; by 1502, that number had fallen to just a hundred, while population had retreated by two-thirds.¹⁵ Flanders’ loss was England’s gain, with English cloth exports rising by as much as two and a half times between Edward IV’s debasements of 1464–5 and the early 1500s. However, England too had suffered devastating currency shortages in the mid-century. And the subsequent continent-wide success of English cloth – swamping the European markets in what would be likened thirty years later to ‘an immense inundation of the sea’ – was at least in part the product of a 1450s rationalization of the export trade, concentrating capital in fewer hands as those without access either to cash or to credit went out of business.¹⁶

‘I thank God and ever shall’, wrote John Barton (d.1491) of Holme, merchant of the Staple of Calais, ‘’tis the sheepe hath payed for all.’ And for a rich man like himself, obtaining credit held few terrors even in the worst of times, nor would he have been excluded, as lesser men might be, from those complex barter arrangements – exchanging wool for alum, cloth for wine or iron – which were all that the mid-century currency shortages allowed. By making the rich still richer, the post-plague bullion famine thus added another element to the already serious distortion of family inheritance histories created by exceptionally high mortalities and low birth-rates. If the generations are too compressed and wealth cascades too rapidly, and if a failure to reproduce, or the sudden death of heirs, brings unanticipated enrichment to distant kin, high levels of consumerism may result. In late-medieval Europe, such extraordinary windfall riches – a major factor, even then, in the funding of the arts – bore no more relation to the real health of the economy than the inflated lottery takings of today.

In those circumstances exactly, it was the deaths in quick succession of no fewer than six better-qualified heirs that catapulted John Hopton on 7 February 1430 into the spreading estates which enabled him to take a leading role in the rebuilding of his parish church at Blythburgh.¹⁷ And it was other swiftly acquired fortunes which made great church-rebuilders also of John Barton of Holme, of John Tame of Fairford, of John Baret of Bury, of Thomas Spring of Lavenham, and of the Cloptons (John especially) of Long Melford. These small-town English clothiers, protected from competition by the Low Countries slump, could expect to sell everything they produced. Nothing could prevent them getting richer. However, even in those Flemish cities which lost out most to English exports, there had been opportunities enough under Burgundian rule for the accumulation of considerable private fortunes. Mid-century Ghent – its looms fallen silent and its weavers out of work – was among the more prominent casualties of the recession. Yet just two decades earlier, a wealthy Ghent couple had nevertheless found the means to commission a high-quality painted altarpiece from the best artists of the day, pensioners of Philip the Good. Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s luminous polyptych, the Adoration of the Lamb (1432), was painted for the personal chantry at St John’s (now Ghent Cathedral) of Joos Vijd and Elizabeth Borluut. It was a ‘stupendous’ painting: huge and vastly detailed.¹⁸ And of course it was enormously expensive.

Other big commercial fortunes in the post-plague North included those of William Canynges, shipowning philanthropist of Bristol, and Jacques Coeur, merchant-financier of Bourges. Each would support an ambitious building programme – a cathedral-like preaching nave for St Mary Redcliffe (Bristol); a fabulous townhouse in Bourges – in which there is not the slightest evidence of economy. Likewise vast preaching naves, spectacular prodigy gatehouses, and big town halls characterized the more successful of the late-medieval German towns where, for example, by the early 1500s the taxable worth of some thirty-seven burghers of Nuremberg and fifty-three of Augsburg – each assessed at more than 10,000 Rhenish florins – would have ranked them among the top 1 per cent of Florentine taxpayers a century earlier.¹⁹ Meanwhile in Florence itself the number and scale of individual private fortunes continued growing. And it was the steadily increasing disposable wealth of Florence’s better-off citizenry which underpinned its continuing eminence in the arts.

By far the richest man in Florence in 1427 (the year of the great catasto or tax assessment) was Palla Strozzi. However, Palla’s son, Gianfrancesco, was to be among those brought down in the major banking debacle of 1464. And if even the greatest Florentine fortunes were thus so vulnerable to collapse, long-term investment in the arts in general – and in large-scale palace-building in particular – might have seemed in normal circumstances unlikely. In practice, the opposite was the case. New fortunes, unlike old, invite display; and Florence was awash with new money. By the 1490s another Strozzi, Filippo, had grown individually so rich that he was worth more than twice as much in real terms as the great Palla. It was Filippo who began building the huge Strozzi Palace, far exceeding his own family’s needs, which he then left unfinished on his death. Furthermore, Filippo and his contemporaries, as well as being distinctly richer than their early fifteenth-century counterparts, belonged also to a much larger group. There had been nobody in Florence in 1427 to equal Palla Strozzi. Just a century later, there were no fewer than eighty Florentine citizens at least as rich as Palla, of whom eight enjoyed fortunes twice as large.²⁰

For many of these, public patronage of the arts was acceptably part of the price of Florentine citizenship. Pride in their city was motivation enough. However, a more general occasion for investment in the arts was provided by after-death soul-care. Palla Strozzi’s many works of public piety, for which he expected (and received) recognition, included the commissioning in 1423 of Gentile da Fabriano’s splendid and hugely popular Adoration of the Magi altarpiece for the fashionable church of Sta Trinità. Likewise big donor figures feature prominently in the foreground of Masaccio’s almost contemporary Holy Trinity (1425–7) at Sta Maria Novella, where Domenico Lenzi and his wife kneel in adoration of the Crucified Christ, of God the Father, the Virgin Mary and St John. It was of this highly original work, admired more by other painters than by the art-loving public of the day, that Vasari later wrote: ‘the most beautiful thing, apart from the figures, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling drawn in perspective and divided into square compartments containing rosettes foreshortened and made to recede so skilfully that the surface looks as if it is indented’.²¹ And it is true that neither Masaccio’s mastery of perspective nor his intuitive understanding of classical architecture had any parallel in Florentine painting of his time. Yet there is a more traditional moral message in Masaccio’s Trinity. Below his two donor figures is a skeleton on a sarcophagus, painted with as much care as the rest of the fresco and accompanied by the ancient warning legend: ‘Io fuga quelche voi sete … I was once what ye are now; and what I am now, so shall ye be.’

Almost identical memento mori texts occur on twelfth-century tomb-slabs. They are used again on pre-plague morality paintings of The Three Living and the Three Dead, where the Dead confront the Living at a crossroads, and have no necessary association with the pestilence. In contrast, the cadaver-bearing ‘transi’ tomb – always more common north of the Alps than in Mediterranean lands such as Italy – gained broad acceptance as a funerary convention only in the fifteenth century, when at least some of the cadaver’s realism and much of its immediate impact were unquestionably owed to the everyday experience of the dying and the dead shared by sculptor and public alike. Even so, it was less contemporaries’ morbid preoccupation with sudden death which inspired the style than their abiding dread of the punishments of Purgatory. At the turn of the century when the transi tomb began – most influentially with the cadaver effigy of Cardinal Jean de Lagrange (d.1402) at Avignon – the naked and corrupt figure of a great prince of the Church served chiefly to demonstrate humility: ‘Miserable one [runs the cardinal’s inscription], why are you so proud? You are only ash, and you will revert, as we have done, to a fetid cadaver, food and titbits for worms and ashes.’ However, as the style spread to laymen, other purposes were added: to attract attention, to awaken pity, and to elicit prayer.²² At John Barton’s rebuilt church at Holme by Newark, there is the customary inscription in the big east window over the altar, calling on the devout to ‘pray for the soul of John Barton … builder of this church, who died 1491’. Identical orate pro anima (pray for the soul of … ) texts are repeated all over Europe in similar contexts. Yet on Barton’s canopied monument – paired effigies above, single cadaver below – the appeal is both more personal and more affecting: ‘Pity me, you at least my friends, for the hand of the Lord has touched me.’

Barton’s words were original, but his concerns were not. And never have prayers for the dead been invoked more assiduously than in the century leading up to the Reformation. Purgatory – where the shriven soul is comprehensively cleansed by fire and ice – was already an ancient concept when accepted as Church doctrine at the Council of Lyons in 1274. However, what had not been made so clear until that time was the clergy’s power of intervention. How long a soul must remain in Purgatory – ‘some longer and some shorter’ – would depend, the Church taught, not just on ‘whether they have done good on Earth before they died’ but also on ‘whether they have friends on Earth to help’.²³ And in the formal recognition of prayer’s supreme role in speeding release from torments so dreadful ‘that all the creatures in the world would not know how to describe their pains’, the first elements of a bargain were spelled out. ‘It is for the rich to pay, the poor to pray’, dictated the popular contemporary jingle. That implicit contract, once accepted by the wealthy, brought a flood of new investment to the arts.

‘For Jesus love pray for me’, urged John Tame (Barton’s contemporary) on his own founder’s monument at Fairford Church. ‘I may not pray, now pray ye, with a pater noster and an ave, that my paynys relessid may be.’²⁴ And by 1500, when John Tame died, provision for personal soul-care – the earliest form of health insurance – had become so everyday that it would routinely absorb up to a third of a testator’s estate. John Tame was a rich clothier, and he built a big church. However, when the even wealthier nobility took out policies of their own, what resulted were huge factories of prayer. One of the greatest of these was the Burgundian tomb-church at Champmol, near Dijon, newly founded in 1378 by Philip the Bold (d.1404) for a double-sized community of Carthusians. The Champmol Charterhouse has gone. But among the fine sculptures preserved on its destruction is Claus Sluter’s highly original monument to Philip the Bold himself, where the duke’s recumbent effigy, hands raised in prayer, has hooded mourners processing round the tomb-chest.

As Adam Smith once wrote: ‘With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.’ (Wealth of Nations). And Philip of Burgundy’s sculptors – Jean de Marville, Claus Sluter and Claus de Werve in succession – were indeed the best that money could buy, while his monks were the most highly regarded. When other religious orders, condemned for lax observance and widely blamed for God’s wrath, were held in low esteem, the more ascetic Carthusians continued to attract patronage from those so rich that they could afford the high costs of the very best quality intercession. Carthusians were expensive. Rejecting the life in common, they lived out their silent lives in spacious private cells set about a great cloister, and only their little-used churches were ever small. Nevertheless, for all their expense, as many as seven of the nine English Charterhouses were to be of post-1340 foundation, including big double houses at London (1371) and Sheen (1414): the first owing its scale to great City fortunes sometimes dubiously acquired, the second to the free-flowing conscience-money of Lancastrian kings, troubled by the murder of an archbishop. ‘Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay’, boasts Henry V on the brink of Agincourt, ‘who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up toward Heaven, to pardon blood.’ (Henry V, iv:i:294–6). And while the prayers of the destitute had particular worth, to those were now added the even weightier prayer barrages of Henry’s forty Carthusian monks at Sheen, next to his new manor-house, and of another sixty Bridgettine nuns at Syon Abbey (1415) across the river, storming Heaven together.

If soul-masses were indeed, as many supposed, ‘highest in merit and of most power to draw down the mercy of God’, there was no absolute limit to their numbers. What resulted was serious inflation. Whereas the endowment of between 1500 and 5000 soul-masses was considered usual – if by normal standards excessive – in the mid-fourteenth-century nobility of Bordelais, Bernard d’Ecoussans left provision for 25,000 masses for himself and another 10,000 for his forebears, Jean de Grailly bought 50,000, and Bernard Ezi doubled that number.²⁵ Prayer barrages of this density were clearly burdensome to heirs, as were the other works often associated with such programmes. It took, for example, very nearly half a century to wind up the personal soul-trust of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d.1439). And among the causes of this delay, hugely damaging to Richard’s heirs, was the commissioning in 1451 of a tomb and effigy of superlative quality – ‘to cast and make a man armed, of fine latten garnished with certain ornaments, viz. with sword and dagger; with a garter; with a helme and crest under his head, and at his feet a bear musled, and a griffon, perfectly made of the finest latten’ – to be housed in a splendid new chapel dedicated to the purpose and attached to the family’s collegiate chantry at Warwick Church.

While the Beauchamp investment was heavy enough, it could scarcely compare with that of many of the royal families of late-medieval Europe, or even of the greater princes of the Church. Exclusive Carthusians were again the first choice of Juan II of Castile to be custodians of the royal dead at Miraflores (Burgos), where an over-sized church began rising in 1442, to be ready at last by the mid-1480s to receive the sumptuous tombs of Juan II and Isabella of Portugal and of the Infante Alfonso their son, commissioned by Isabella of Spain (Alfonso’s sister) from the workshops of Gil de Siloé. A generation earlier, João I (the Great) of Portugal had made similar provision for his new dynasty. Mindful of the Virgin’s help in granting him a decisive victory over the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385, João (after some hesitation) chose a Marian order – Dominicans on this occasion – to tend the family tomb-church at Batalha, north of Lisbon. And there he still lies, in the most enormous state, next to Philippa of Lancaster, his English queen.²⁶

Philippa was the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt, son of one king (Edward III), uncle of another (Richard II), and father of a third (Henry IV). Her half-sister (by the duke’s second marriage to Constance of Castile) was Catherine, queen of Castile; and one of her half-brothers (by Gaunt’s third wife, Catherine Swynford) was the great priest-statesman Henry Beaufort (d.1447), ‘Cardinal of England’, Bishop of Winchester, and international diplomatist. In circles such as these, national frontiers had little meaning in the arts. Thus the architecture of Portuguese Batalha, in its primary phase, shows clear English influence, being an early demonstration of the close bond between the nations first established at the Treaty of Windsor in 1386. And when, in the 1430s, Cardinal Beaufort spent many months in the Low Countries on diplomatic missions to the Burgundians, he took the opportunity to have his portrait painted by Philip the Good’s most favoured artist, Jan van Eyck.²⁷ Beaufort was an old man when the painting was done, and he may already have been pondering his death-plan. Certainly, over the next ten years he took every known precaution to guarantee the comfort of his soul. While plainly confident of his ability to translate the wealth of this world into high-ranking ease in the next, Beaufort nevertheless made provision for an instant barrage of 10,000 soul-masses on his death. He endowed perpetual chantries at three great cathedrals (Lincoln, Canterbury and Winchester); made major contributions, similarly recompensed by prayer, to Henry VI’s mammoth educational charities at Eton and King’s College (Cambridge); and invested heavily in the rebuilding of the ancient hospital of St Cross (Winchester) as an almshouse or refuge ‘of noble poverty’. Even after these and much else, the residue of Beaufort’s estate was still substantial. All was to be spent – the cardinal instructed his executors – in such ways especially ‘as they should believe to be of the greatest possible advantage to the safety of my soul.’²⁸

It was this single-minded concentration on the soul’s repose which, whatever the announced purpose of the work in hand, inspired the great majority of fifteenth-century Grands Projets. Thus it was Archbishop Chichele’s clearly expressed desire in 1438 that the ‘poor and indigent scholars’ of his new Oxford college at All Souls should

not so much ply therein the various sciences and faculties, as with all devotion pray for the souls of glorious memory of Henry V, lately King of England and France … of the lord Thomas, Duke of Clarence [Henry’s brother], and other lords and lieges of the realm of England whom the havoc of that warfare between the two said realms has drenched with the bowl of bitter death.

And it was in this century, in particular, that the funding of universities attracted the attention of propertied but heirless bishops whose concern to improve the quality of diocesan clergy ranked second after the protection of their souls. ‘There never was a prelate so good to us as you have been’, wrote the grateful scholars of Oxford to Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury (1450–81), shortly before his death: ‘You promised us the sun, and you have given us the moon also.’ Yet Bishop Beauchamp, in point of fact, was among the less substantial of their benefactors.²⁹

Fifteenth-century Europe, half-empty and bullion-starved, was both socially and economically disadvantaged. Yet so general was the belief in the cleansing power of prayer that there has never been another time in the entire history of the Church when so much funding has been directed to just one end. Furthermore, if the costly death-styles of the wealthy had established a new climate for exceptionally generous investment in the arts, so also had the life-styles of those ‘great ones’ of the century – usually the same – whose chosen mode of government was to dazzle and overawe by exhibitions of conspicuous waste. Henry Beaufort, the ‘Rich Cardinal’, was dynast as well as priest. And for him as for his siblings (the sons and daughters of John of Gaunt) ‘dispendiousness’ and ‘great giving’ – the distinguishing marks of the generosus – were the inescapable accompaniments of high rank. ‘One morning, on a solemn feast’, relates Vespasiano da Bisticci (Florentine bookseller and gossip), taking his story from Antonio dei Pazzi, a fellow citizen, ‘the cardinal assembled a great company for which two rooms were prepared, hung with the richest cloth and arranged all round to hold silver ornaments, one of them being full of cups of silver, and the other with cups gilded or golden. Afterwards Pazzi was taken into a very sumptuous chamber, and seven strong boxes full of English articles of price were exhibited to him.’³⁰ Almost nothing now remains of a collection so extraordinary that even a Florentine banker was impressed. However, among the many treasures known to have stuck to the old cardinal’s fingers in his last acquisitive decade was the Royal Gold Cup of Charles VI of France, made in Paris for Jean de Berri in the late 1380s and subsequently presented to his nephew, the young king. Now in the British Museum, the cup is decorated on bowl and cover with fine enamel miniatures of the life, miracles and martyrdom of St Agnes. Yet for all its religious imagery, this precious vessel was (and long remained) a secular object, made chiefly for display and probably always intended for ‘great giving’.³¹

On Charles VI’s death in 1422 when by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes (1420) the infant Henry VI of England assumed his throne, the cup had come into the possession of Beaufort’s nephew, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford and Regent of France. And Bedford himself was a patron in the grand manner, both collector and acknowledged connoisseur. As would-be promoter of the fragile union of France and England brought about by Henry V’s marriage to Catherine of Valois (daughter of Charles VI), Bedford had frequent cause for political giving. However, his collecting instincts were not exclusively pragmatic. And the possession of objects of great value has always found much favour with the rich. One who caught the habit early was Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83), cardinal at the age of seventeen, whose particular private passion was for carved and engraved gemstones, both cameos and intaglios, many of them recovered from ancient sites. The cardinal’s other special interest was in books. While no great scholar himself, Gonzaga was the patron of leading contemporary humanists. And almost a quarter of his large collection was given over to the classical texts to which his friends among the literati had introduced him. As inventoried on Gonzaga’s death in 1483, his books included the poetry of Terence and Virgil, Horace and Ovid; the oratory of Cicero; the ethics of Aristotle; the histories of Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; the comedies of Plautus, the satires of Juvenal, the tragedies of Seneca the Younger, and many more. In his own tongue, Gonzaga read the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the short stories of Boccaccio, and the marvels of the explorer Marco Polo. In the cardinal’s library, the largest single category – 66 books in total – was made up of works of religion. Nevertheless, the contrast overall with the even greater collections of another clerical bibliophile, Guillaume d’Estouteville, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, was very striking. Cardinal d’Estouteville died the same year. But the Frenchman was no humanist. And while his library was extensive, his reading was chiefly limited to theology and patristics, to contemporary devotional writings, and to the law.³²

To be or not a humanist was never a stark choice for European intellectuals of North and South. In France, as early as the 1410s, Jean de Montreuil, Charles VI’s learned chancellor, was a collector of classical texts, a reader of Petrarch, and an admirer of Leonardo Bruni, the humanist scholar, who was later himself Chancellor of Florence (1427–44). And when Poggio Bracciolini, subsequently Chancellor of Florence in his turn, came to England in 1429 to comb monastic libraries for antique texts, he was welcomed there by Cardinal Beaufort among others. Yet what Poggio encountered could hardly have been more remote from his experience. ‘The past is a foreign country’, L.P. Hartley once declared, ‘they do things differently there.’ And equally unbridgeable in Poggio’s generation was the gulf between Mediterranean and Northern life-styles. On returning to Italy, Vespasiano tells us, Poggio ‘had many witty stories to tell of adventures he had encountered in England and Germany when he went thither’, among them a favourite tale of a four-hour English banquet during which ‘he had been forced to rise and bathe his eyes with cold water to prevent him from falling asleep’. Poggio – ‘the foe of all deceit and pretence’ – was also wickedly dismissive of Northern scholars. But one of the things Poggio reported, and which was confirmed by other travellers, had particular resonance for the arts. ‘The nobles of England’, Poggio wrote, ‘deem it disgraceful to reside in cities and prefer to live in country retirement. They reckon a man’s nobility by the size of his landed estate. They spend their time over agriculture, and traffic in wool and sheep.’³³ In contrast, Florentine noblemen preferred the urban life, while it was in the big-city populations of north and central Italy that the artists of the Renaissance found their patrons.

Some seventy years later, the Venetian author of A Relation of England (c. 1500) would again observe that ‘there are scarcely any towns of importance in the kingdom’, the exceptions being London, Bristol and York. Few Englishmen, furthermore, with the exception of the clergy, ‘are addicted to the study of letters’, even though ‘they have great advantages for study, there being two general Universities in the kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge, in which are many colleges founded for the maintenance of poor scholars’. Yet neither their rustic predilections nor the poverty of their scholarship prevented the English from being ‘great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England’. And with English cloth just then commanding a higher premium than ever before, their self-esteem was not without cause. ‘The riches of England’, the Venetian continued, ‘are greater than those of any other country in Europe … This is owing, in the first place, to the great fertility of the soil … Next, the sale of their valuable tin brings in a large sum of money to the kingdom; but still more do they derive from their extraordinary abundance of wool, which bears such a high price and reputation throughout Europe.’³⁴ Where sheep paid for all, it was less a horror of the new which excluded the Renaissance from the North than the sufficient quality of the life-styles already practised there.

That quality was the more welcome for following the long contraction which Professor R.S. Lopez was the first to identify as ‘the economic depression of the Renaissance’.³⁵ Every part of Europe was affected by it. Fertile, mild of climate, and well-situated for the London market, Kent is still commonly known as England’s ‘Garden’. Yet even in this most favoured location of middle-income yeoman farmers, new housing-starts fell off appreciably in the mid-fifteenth century, to recover again only in the 1470s.³⁶ Nor can it be doubted that a currency crisis so prolonged and so severe as simultaneously to threaten Medici solvency and close the Flemish mints must have brought many larger projects to an end. That the crisis was less punishing to the arts than to the economy in general was owed to a combination of special circumstances: to mortalities so unremitting as to destroy individual families and bring fortunes together, to paranoid investment in soul-care provision, and to a culture of ‘magnificence’ and free-spending. Another contributory circumstance was civil war.

One prominent casualty of the depression was the Malatesta principality of Rimini. And there, towards the end of 1461, with his city half-empty and nothing left to tax, Sigismondo Malatesta found himself unable to keep the literati in his household or pay his artists. Even work on his half-finished tomb-church of San Francesco – Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini – would have to stop, and the only remedy left to him was war.³⁷ On this occasion, Sigismondo’s enemy was Pius II, whose hired captain in the field was the Malatesta’s next-door neighbour at Urbino. And two years later, it would be Federigo da Montefeltro’s decisive victory over Sigismondo and his mercenaries that almost trebled Urbino’s territory, raising its lord – already the most famous condottiere of his day – to the wealth and magnificence of a prince. Duke Federigo (1420–82), a ‘Mars in the field, a Minerva in his administration’, typifies the century’s virtues and its vices. But what his history makes quite clear is that there was no way for a fifteenth-century nobleman, however sophisticated his education or spreading his estates, to prosper on good government alone. Federigo was a poor man when he came by chance into his inheritance. It was the vendetta, essentially, that made him wealthy. With as much blood on his hands as any Mafia godfather, Federigo’s ambition to rebuild his Urbino palace was status-driven: ‘to make in our city of Urbino a beautiful residence worthy of the rank and fame of our ancestors and our own status’.

Where Federigo differed from most other captains of his day was in his schooling. He had begun his education at the Mantuan academy of the great humanist teacher Vittorino Rambaldoni da Feltre (d.1446). And his favourite reading in later life remained the usual humanist texts, with a particular professional preference for the histories of Livy and for the De Bello Gallico of Julius Caesar. ‘In arms, his first profession’, recollected Vespasiano, who had sold him many books, ‘he was the most active leader of his time, combining strength with the most consummate prudence, and triumphing less by his sword than by his wit.’³⁸ And in truth, the bookseller reasoned, ‘it is difficult for a leader [today] to excel in arms unless he be, like the Duke, a man of letters, seeing that the past is a mirror of the present’. More followed:

As to architecture it may be said that no one of his age, high or low, knew it so thoroughly. We may see in the buildings he [Federigo] constructed, the grand style and the due measurement and proportion, especially in his palace, which has no superior among the buildings of the time, none so well considered, or so full of fine things … As to sculpture he had great knowledge … employing the first masters of the time. To hear him talk of sculpture you would deem it was his own art. He was [also] much interested in painting, and because he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste he sent to Flanders and brought thence a master [Joos van Gent] who did at Urbino many very stately pictures, especially in Federigo’s study, where were represented philosophers, poets, and doctors of the Church, rendered with wondrous art. He painted from life a portrait of the Duke which only wanted breath.³⁹

That portrait was long thought to have been the formal double-portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro and Guidobaldo, his infant son, now more usually attributed to Pedro Berruguete, the Castilian. And the long-term presence at Federigo’s court of two such major foreign artists, while saying something also about their own crisis times at home, is tribute enough already to the range and intelligence of the duke’s patronage. But the portrait has other intentions. Its first and most obvious emphasis is on the duke’s worldly success and magnificence. Duke Federigo displays his chivalric honours: the Garter of England and the Ermine of Naples. The great book he is holding is bound in the distinctive scarlet livery of what he had always intended from the first to be ‘the finest library since ancient times … bought without regard of cost’. A richly dressed Guidobaldo, at his father’s knee, holds the sceptre of government and promises the continuity in the Montefeltro dynasty which is the second major message of the painting. That continuity had not been easily achieved. Federigo himself had been born illegitimate. He had succeeded his murdered half-brother at Urbino chiefly because the much younger Oddantonio had no son. Then two of Federigo’s own natural sons – the talented Buonconte and probably Bernardino also – had died of the plague; while the pale and delicate Guidobaldo of the Urbino double-portrait was the cradle-sick last child of what was otherwise a quiverful of daughters.

Berruguete’s painting is not overtly religious. It lacks even the usual close attendance of a saint. Yet we are told that ‘as to works of alms and piety he [Federigo] was most observant. He distributed in his house every day a good quantity of bread and wine without fail, and he gave freely to learned men and gentlefolk, to holy places, and to poor folk ashamed of their case.’⁴⁰ Federigo’s charity, we may assume, had some design. There is another and larger painting at Urbino, more certainly by Joos van Gent, in which the duke is shown with members of his circle as witnesses of Our Lord at the Last Supper. The Communion of the Apostles (1473–4) is the central panel of a big and costly altarpiece, partly paid for by the duke but commissioned for their chantry by one of the wealthier confraternities of Urbino. Its purpose, unequivocally, was commemoration. Not many years before, Niccolò della Tuccia, similarly portrayed with the Madonna of Mercy (1458) at Viterbo, had sought to justify his presence in that company. He was there, Niccolò explained, ‘not out of pride or vainglory, but only in case any of my successors wishes to see me, he can remember me better thus, and my soul may be commended to him’.⁴¹ In Renaissance Italy, as throughout the Gothic North, neither the banker nor the soldier, the priest nor the scholar could ever entirely set aside their apprehensions. Art has never known a greater stimulus than fears of Purgatory.

CHAPTER FOUR Expectations Raised and Dashed

‘Money is like muck’, wrote Francis Bacon (1561–1626), ‘not good except it be spread.’ And in his own lifetime there was much more of it about. In complete contrast to the severe and prolonged bullion famines of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Central European silver production had enormously increased. The formerly rich but long abandoned silver sources at Goslar, Freiberg and Kutná Hora had been made accessible again by more up-to-date technologies. And the new silver mines at Schneeberg (Saxony) and Schwaz (the Tirol) had come into full production by the 1470s, to be closely followed in the next generation by those at Annaberg (Saxony) and Joachimsthal (Bohemia).¹ In 1542, in the first known formulation of the quantity theory of money (according to which price levels are determined by the money supply), Sigismund of Poland’s counsellors reported: ‘This year the unmeasurable increase of the coinage has raised the value of the gulden very much and will raise it still further, if nothing is done … When now the gulden (which is a measure and standard of everything bought and sold) rises and becomes dearer, it follows that everything brought from abroad and grown at home must become dearer too.’² ‘As for the reason [for these price rises]’, wrote Peter Kmtia, Palatine of Cracow, that same year, ‘nobody is so foolish as not to see that the multitude of coins is to blame, which is in no relation to either the gulden or the things to be bought, as it used to be in former times.’³

In his own terms, Kmtia’s analysis was perfectly correct: there was too much silver in circulation, forcing up the face value of the Polish gold gulden and causing prices to rise out of control. However, the population of the West was recovering swiftly also, and a superabundance of bullion – additionally swollen from the 1520s by Spanish-American gold and silver – was not the only explanation of the ‘price revolution’ which saw European prices, after their long stagnation, rise between three and four times in just one century. George Hakewill (d.1649), the English scholar and divine, saw this clearly. Writing in the 1620s, Hakewill recognized that it had not been ‘the plenty of coin’ alone which had caused the upward drift of prices but ‘the multitude of men’ – for ‘either of which asunder, but much more both together, must need be a means of raising the prices of all things’.⁴ ‘That the number of our people is multiplied’, wrote William Lambarde in the 1590s, ‘is both demonstrable to the eye and evident in reason’. And whereas Lambarde’s list of likely causes included the broods of married clergy – ‘which was not wont to be’ – he could also point more plausibly to the fact that ‘we have not, God be thanked, been touched [in England] with any extreme mortality, either by sword or sickness, that might abate the overgrown number of us.’⁵

Just as everybody by the 1590s had a view on overcrowding, so the contemporary price inflation produced a literature of its own, explanations ranging from usury (the old enemy) to enclosure (the new), from harvest failures and civil commotion to state monopolies and excessive government spending. Fashion also took its share of the blame. Poland’s youths, Bishop Tarlo had complained during the currency scare of 1542, ‘cannot go comfortably and smoothly without foreign merchandise as nourishment and clothing’.⁶ And seven years later, it was Sir Thomas Smith’s lament that ‘there is no man [in England] can be contented now with any gloves than is made in France or in Spain; nor kersey, but it must be made of Flanders dye; nor cloth, but French or frizado; nor owche, brooch, nor aglet, but of Venice making or Milan; nor dagger, sword, nor girdle, or knife, but of Spanish making or some outward country; no, not as much as a spur, but that is fetched [bought] at the Milaners [milliners].’⁷

Complaints of this kind are often heard, and are not usually given much credence. However, Sir Thomas – ‘physician, mathematician, astronomer, architect, historian, and orator’ – was no ordinary Colonel Blimp. And as one of the promoters of Edwardian England’s recovery from the chaos of Henry VIII’s Great Debasement, he was exceptionally well placed to appraise for himself the consequences of over-rapid growth. As to how it all began, historians today have yet to agree on fundamentals – ‘the price revolution was a phenomenon of [population-led] bullion velocity rather than of bullion imports’ (Harry Miskimin); ‘the price rises in England were not caused by the influx of precious metals but by … the upsurge of credit and the rise of banking and of the inland bill of exchange’ (Eric Kerridge); ‘the price revolution evidently began in Spain … [and was] a monetary phenomenon after all’ (Douglas Fisher).⁸ However, the fact remains that, after the long price stability of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, prices continued to rise through every decade of the next; that economies were growing and that their growth was real; and that it was not just prices which rose but profits also.

Much emphasis has been placed on the inflationary effect of large-scale imports of Spanish-American bullion. And it is undoubtedly true that inflation in Spain from the 1520s forced up price levels in other nations also. But the turn-around of the West’s economy had begun much earlier. And it was in the late 1460s and 1470s, when silver returned and the mints re-opened, that rents and other revenues became collectable again and that the purses of the rich were replenished. It was not American gold that enabled Ludovico il Moro (d.1505), the Sforza ruler of Milan, to attract Donato Bramante from Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci from Florence, but a strong revival of Lombard industry and commerce. In Florence, it was the recovery of banking profits from the 1470s that allowed Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent) and his fellow bankers to commission work of the highest quality from Andrea del Verrocchio and Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio. And what supported Andrea Mantegna at Mantua, Francesco del Cossa at Ferrara, and Piero della Francesca at Urbino, was always less the old-style profits of war of their respective Gonzaga marquesses and Este and Montefeltro dukes, than a very visible escalation of landed wealth. Baldassare Castiglione’s hugely influential dialogue, Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), while first drafted at Urbino in 1508, took many more years to complete. And his cherished recollections of life in Duke Guidobaldo’s palace – ‘the very Mansion place of mirth and joy’ – no doubt improved in the telling. But Castiglione (like Sir Thomas Smith) was an expert witness: a professional courtier all his life. And his final judgement, in consequence, carries weight. ‘There was then to bee heard’, Castiglione remembered of those long evenings of lively talk, ‘pleasant communications and merie conceites, and in everie mans countenance a man might perceive painted a loving jocundnesse … And I beleeve it was never so tasted in other place, what manner a thing the sweete conversation is that is occasioned of an amiable and loving company, as it was once there.’⁹

In April 1528, when his book was at last published, Castiglione was in Spain at the Court of Charles V, where he was Clement VII’s papal nuncio. Less than a year later, he was dead. However, there had been manuscript versions of Il Cortegiano in circulation for at least ten years before his death, and Castiglione’s book was an immediate success. Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) and Francis I (King of France) each received a presentation copy from the author, as did Pope Clement VII (Castiglione’s employer) and Isabella d’Este (his patron). Other recipients of complimentary copies included Eleonora Gonzaga (Duchess of Urbino), Federico Gonzaga (Marquis of Mantua), Aloysia Gonzaga Castiglione (the writer’s mother), and Ippolita Fioramonda (Marchioness of Scaldasole). Thomas Cromwell (the English statesman) is known to have possessed a copy as early as 1530; in the following year, Rosso Fiorentino (the Mannerist painter) had another; in 1545, a third was on its way to Peru.¹⁰ Translated first into Spanish (1534), then French (1537), then English (1561) and finally German (1565), nothing better demonstrates the aspiration, widely-shared across the West, for a life-style characterized by good talk and sensitive to the arts on the perceived model of Guidobaldo’s Urbino. It was Victor Hugo who once said: ‘Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. Of that divine tear and of that human smile the sweetness of present civilization is composed.’¹¹ He spoke in 1878 at a commemoration of the centenary of Voltaire’s death. But almost four centuries earlier, in Castiglione’s time, that synergy was already present at Urbino.

Jesus wept for Lazarus. In 1528, he had greater cause for weeping in his Church. Castiglione, the pope’s envoy, took Clement VII’s initial blame for the Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527. But there were many, even then, who saw the looting of Rome’s treasures by Charles V’s unpaid troops as a visitation of God’s wrath on Clement himself and on the venality and chronic nepotism of his Court. A decade before, the growing secularization of the papacy in the pursuit of dynastic ends had been a major cause of Martin Luther’s disaffection when, on 31 October 1517, he nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, thereby launching the German Reformation. His target in that year had been the Medici pope, Leo X (1513–21), second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. But already in 1509 it was the della Rovere warrior-pope Julius II (1503–13), nephew of Sixtus IV (1471–84), whom Erasmus had pilloried (but prudently failed to name) as ‘the deadliest enemy of the Church’, along with those earlier ‘impious pontiffs’ – Innocent VIII (1484–92), Alexander VI (1492–1503), and Sixtus himself – ‘who allow Christ to be forgotten through their silence, fetter him with their mercenary laws, misrepresent him with their forced interpretations of his teaching, and slay him with their noxious way of life!’¹¹ ‘They that will be rich [Paul advised Timothy] fall into temptation and a snare … For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.’ (1 Timothy 6:9–10)

It was Clement VII who reaped the whirlwind that the nepotistic Sixtus and his successors had rashly sown. Yet what must have struck most visitors to Rome, both before and after its Sack, was the ceaseless activity of its building sites. Sound money had returned during Sixtus’s long pontificate. What followed was urban renewal. It was to Sixtus IV that Rome owed the Via Sistina and the Ponte Sisto; to Alexander VI, the Via Alexandrina; to Julius II, the Via Giulia; to Leo X, the Via Leonina; and to Clement VII, the Via Clementia. In the 1530s and 1540s, following the Sack, it was Clement’s successor, Paul III (1534–49), who more than restored the ruined city with new buildings. But while this renewal undoubtedly gained momentum from the economic reforms which Sixtus IV put in place, it was never entirely the work of the popes. Sixtus’s reforms are now most often remembered for the institutionalization of the sale of papal offices which helped create an army of Roman sinecurists and placed a heavy charge on future revenues. Yet he had greater success in the short term. Along with much else, Sixtus freed his cardinals and officials, by protecting their heirs, to use the receipts from their church benefices for private building. Thus it was that Alessandro Farnese (Paul III), while still a cardinal, began building his enormous family palace, the Palazzo Farnese, on the Via Giulia. Then after election to the papacy in 1534, Paul nearly doubled the building’s size, spending almost a quarter of a million ducats on it before his death. Yet this was only one of the many new palaces and villas of Renaissance Rome, built by laymen as well as priests, both in the city itself and its Campagna.¹²

Paul III borrowed heavily to finance his many works. And it was largely with borrowed money that successive builder-popes – Pius IV (1559–65), Gregory XIII (1572–85), Sixtus V (1585–90), and Paul V (1605–21) – carried out their programmes of embellishment and renewal. They would have done so with more confidence because their credit was good, because their revenues were rising steadily, and – perhaps most of all – because the bulk of their new money, in contrast to earlier times, came directly from taxation of the Papal State.¹³ Even so, it would take over a century – and more than a million and a half gold ducats – to complete their flagship project, the new St Peter’s, which became one of the heaviest crosses they had to bear. Begun during the pontificate of Julius II – ‘a patron of genius and a lover of all good art’ (Vasari) – under the direction of Donato Bramante, this huge enterprise drained the papal finances and absorbed the energies of other famous partnerships: Antonio da Sangallo (d.1546) with Paul III; Michelangelo Buonarroti (d.1564) with Julius III; Giacomo della Porta (d.1602) with Gregory XIII and Sixtus V; and – following consecration – Gianlorenzo Bernini (d.1680) with Urban VIII (the bronze baldacchino) and Alexander VII (the Piazza).

On 18 April 1506, when the foundation stone was laid, both Julius and his architect were over sixty. Understandably, they were men in a hurry. It was Julius’s intention that receipts from the sale of papal indulgences should finance the work, there being long-established precedents for such action. However, another anticipated source of funding was rising revenues from the Papal State, the full recovery of which became the principal objective of Julius II’s high-profile military campaigns. ‘Here even decrepit old men’, grumbled Erasmus in 1509, ‘can be seen showing the vigour of youths in their prime, undaunted by the cost, unwearied by hardship, not a whit deterred though they turn law, religion, peace, and all humanity completely upside down.’¹⁴ But Erasmus wrote in private to Thomas More, his English friend. And neither Julius (on the field of battle) nor Erasmus (in his study) knew the damage he was doing to the Church. ‘I laid a hen’s egg’, reflected Erasmus after the event. ‘Luther hatched a bird of quite a different species.’ The incubator was Luther’s horror of indulgences.

There were many, from the first, who felt as he did. Within two years of publication in 1518, Luther’s polemical sermon on indulgences and pardons (Von Ablass und Gnade) ran into no fewer than twenty German editions. And already by the mid-1520s, there were great numbers of evangelical tracts in circulation in Germany, for many of which Rome itself – so-called ‘Whore of Babylon’, ‘Seven-headed Dragon’, ‘Gathering of Antichrist’, ‘Synagogue of Satin’ – was the enemy.¹⁵ That wild frenzy of pamphleteering – the Flugschriften of Luther’s followers – was a specifically German phenomenon. Yet it could not have happened, even in print-alert Germany, if economic recession had still gripped the West. In the event, it was those circumstances exactly which favoured the Roman papacy – new technologies (including printing), the return of sound money, easy access to cheap credit, and the beginnings of world expansion – that almost immediately split the Church.

Those were the circumstances also that encouraged movement in the arts, introducing the Renaissance to the North: to France under Louis XII (1498–1515) and Francis I (1515–47); to Germany and the Low Countries under Maximilian I (1493–1519) and Charles V (1519–56); to England under Henry VII (1485–1509) and Henry VIII (1509–47). It was the Urbino-born painter Raphael, Julius II’s talented protégé, whose fame (Vasari tells us) ‘spread as far as France and Flanders, and [also] influenced the work of Albrecht Dürer, the marvellous German painter and master of fine copper engravings’. Leonardo da Vinci, invited to France by Francis I, died there in 1519. And while Francis was less successful in attracting Michelangelo to the North, having no better luck with the Venetian painter Titian, he remained nevertheless an assiduous collector of their art, being among those contemporary potentates – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey, were others – who severally made Michelangelo ‘very honourable offers, simply to avail themselves of his great talents’.¹⁶

From 1529, when he began rebuilding Fontainebleau, Francis I assembled the cream of his collections in that huge palace. ‘All that he could find of excellence,’ recorded the architect-engraver Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau (d.1585), ‘was for his Fontainebleau, of which he was so fond that whenever he went there he would say that he was going home.’¹⁷ And one of the king’s most cherished possessions was Leonardo’s remarkable portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, of which Vasari wrote:

If one wanted to see how faithfully art can imitate nature, one could readily perceive it from this head; for here Leonardo subtly reproduced every living detail. The eyes had their natural lustre and moistness … The eyebrows were completely natural, growing thickly in one place and lightly in another and following the pores of the skin … The mouth, joined to the flesh-tints of the face by the red of the lips, appeared to be living flesh rather than paint … There was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original … Altogether this picture was painted in a manner to make the most confident artist – no matter who – despair and lose heart.¹⁸

That final parenthesis has been repeated ever since to explain a paradigm shift in Western art from the truth-to-nature realism of Leonardo and his contemporaries to the exaggerated gestures, long-bodied human figures, vivid contrasting colours, and extremes of light and shade of the Roman Mannerist painters of the next generation. But giants though the great masters of the High Renaissance undoubtedly were, setting new standards of unattainable perfection, the almost immediate rejection by their pupils of regularity in the arts – in sculpture and in architecture, as much as in painting – had more to do with aspiration than despair.

Following the Sack of Rome, it was in the North that many Mannerists found a welcome. Thus it was that Rosso Fiorentino, the bravura painter, who had been working in Rome in 1527 when assaulted and robbed by German troops, accepted the French king’s invitation to come to Fontainebleau in 1530–1, where he was appointed ‘superintendent of all the buildings, pictures and other ornaments of that place’. And it was at Fontainebleau most memorably, in the frescos and stucco ornament of the Galerie François Ier, that Rosso achieved his finest work. Certainly, Vasari was in no doubt that Rosso gained much more than he lost from his Northern exile, for ‘although in Rome and in Florence his labours were not pleasing enough to those who could reward them, he did, however, find someone to give him recognition for them in France, and with such results that the glory he won could have quenched the thirst of every degree of ambition that could fill the breast of any craftsman whatsoever’.¹⁹

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