Читать книгу Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914 - Colin Platt - Страница 7

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.’