Читать книгу Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914 - Colin Platt - Страница 8

‘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.