On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow

that men made themselves into conspicuous individuals in the period while also participating in male group identities that they sought to exceed was by rising in the church hierarchy and being great military leaders. Cardinals, to be sure, sought to enrich themselves, acquire honor, and assist the papacy in creating the state—in this instance the church—as a major temporal power that would endure in time, while condottieri sought to excel in the art of military affairs, which was one of the great master arts of the Italian Renaissance and certainly a foundational art that Machiavelli deemed absolutely necessary for the prince to master in order to succeed.¹¹ Visual artists, of course, were routinely employed to highlight not only the corporate but also the individual achievements of great cardinals and military men. They pictured these men in a manner that revealed how their accomplishments, honor, status, wealth, and power depended upon their affiliations with all sorts of activities that men typically and collectively engaged in. But they also characterized them as lone, sometimes heroic individuals, even as we are made cognizant of their indebtedness to various communities, customs, and sodalities.

      Now no one in the Italian Renaissance—not the most adept man of arms adhering to Machiavelli’s strategy of innovation in military matters or the most adept cardinal pursuing Cortesi’s strategy of self-promotion in religious matters—should or could be construed as possessing an absolutely “pure, unfettered subjectivity,” in Greenblatt’s memorable phrase.¹² I take this as a given, a “finding,” to borrow and adapt from the language of the social sciences, that we can consider “robust” in that it holds up to scrutiny whatever prior variables we seem to introduce into our discussions. Hence even when the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze sculpture of him (figs. 1 and 2) is presented in heroic isolation, we can readily recognize that Colleoni—his manliness emphasized through the motif of testicles incorporated into the statue in light of his family name (Colleoni/“Coglioni”)—wears an armor that links him not only to military activities generally but also to culturally normed conceptions of how armor functioned in shaping and representing male identities. In addition, Colleoni is singled out and glorified because he putatively led his soldiers to protect and serve a community, just as he owes his ascent to the Venetian senate (or so we are led to believe), which collectively approved of the sculpture and inscribed itself onto the pedestal with the initials “s.c.” (senatus consulto; by decree of the senate). Furthermore, with his fierce, bronze face fashioned to recall the Emperor Galba, Colleoni is meant to serve, in a distinctly classical mode, as an inspiration for other like-minded leaders to take up the Venetian cause, just as other statues of military leaders were expected to serve as such honorific, exemplary monuments. And, to be sure, he fits into a traditional type of the ancient equestrian figure, such as the most famous extant one of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio in Rome (fig. 3), even as Verrocchio deviates from that foundational classical model by putting the horse much more conspicuously than ever before into a twisting, energetic motion.¹³ Similarly, even when the cardinal Pietro Bembo is pictured sitting in pensive isolation in Titian’s portrait of him (fig. 4), we can readily recognize that the scarlet biretta and mozzetta Bembo wears tie him to religious activities generally and the community of cardinals in particular. Likewise, his beard signals, as beards were wont to do, his manliness in a profession so blatantly defined by and for men, while the book he holds, regardless of what he happens to be reading, inevitably alludes to his role as a sophisticated and famous humanist within the broader community of a res publica litterarum (republic of letters). Finally, the pose he strikes, including the decorous gestures he adopts, presents him with culturally approved modes of comportment for the male elite.¹⁴ These men have “attributes,” in other words, that signal who they are within a broad set of group classifications, much as saints bear attributes identifying them as specifically who they are, while linking them all along to the broader community of the blessed of which they are always a part. Moreover, the images themselves were fashioned not by artists operating freely and independently, crafting works on spec in an impersonal, wide-open market, but within a workshop, guild, and patronage system in which consumers dictated how things should appear and works of art were contractually and collaboratively produced.

      FIGURE 1. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Detail of Colleoni’s highly delineated and particularized face in profile.

      FIGURE 2. Andrea del Verrocchio (1436–1388), Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, ca. 1479–1492. Campo dei Santi Giovanni and Paolo, Venice. Reproduced by permission of Mauro Magliani. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Colleoni statue seen from below.

      FIGURE 3. Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, erected 176 CE. Campidoglio, Rome. Reproduced by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

      FIGURE 4. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576), Cardinal Pietro Bembo, 1545. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Reproduced by permission of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

      All this, I take it, is true. Yet however much Verrocchio has idealized him as an equestrian hero with facial figures resembling those of the Emperor Galba, and however much Colleoni is represented as a stalwart, rugged figure whom we are implicitly meant to measure over and against an imperial classical type (as well as over and against modern, competitive revisions of that very same classical type brilliantly designed, for instance, by Donatello in his sculpture of Gattamelata in nearby Padua, fig. 5), we are also no doubt meant to recognize Colleoni as a distinctive and singular condottiere who is celebrated because he protected and preserved Venice, leading his soldiers to victory in military affairs. Similarly, however idealized the portrait of Bembo may be as Titian has captured a stern yet “sublime” vision of him, and however much we are meant to situate the imperious and slightly frowning Bembo within a set of broad classifications that define him and make him who he is as a model figure commanding profound respect for anyone gazing at his portrait, we are also no doubt meant to recognize Bembo as specifically Bembo, as that distinctive and singular humanist patrician within the church who proved to be such a seminal figure of religious affairs.

      FIGURE 5. Donatello (ca. 1386–1477), Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata, 1453. Piazza del Santo, Padua. Reproduced by permission of Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY.

      Needless to say, I have no hard evidence to back up these assertions. I possess no letter from Bembo indicating that he wanted to appear as distinctly and singularly him and no one else when it came to fashioning an accurate, up-to-date likeness of him that would somatically register his own peculiar, individual “motions of the mind.”¹⁵ Similarly, I can find no injunction from Colleoni insisting in his last will and testament that the statue crafted with the money appropriated by the state should capture him as specifically and individually him and no one else, although Colleoni did indeed request that the statue be placed in Piazza San Marco, which in fact it was not, precisely because the Venetian senate deemed it to be too bold and individualistic a gesture to erect it in such a uniquely privileged spot (fig. 6). Nevertheless, as we reflect on