Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
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