A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Renaissance Art 65

Masaccio's Adoration of the Magi (1426).

Patrons of the arts often specified not only the subject of the work they
were commissioning but certain details as well, requiring, for example,
that specific saints be depicted. The size of the work of art and its price
were also specified, of course, including the cost of blue pigment or gold
for paintings and bronze or marble for sculptures. Cherubs cost more.
Although one of the dukes of Ferrara paid for his paintings by their size,
increasingly patrons paid the artist for his time—and thus his skill—as well
as for the materials he used. The contract for a work of art might specify
whether it was to be completed by the artist himself, or if assistants from
the master s workshop could be employed for certain parts. Patrons some­
times appeared on the canvas, as in the case of The Adoration of the Magi
(1426) by Tommaso di Giovanni Masaccio (1401-1428), which includes
portraits of the notary who commissioned the painting and his son. Con­
versely, patricians occasionally commissioned artists to humiliate their
enemies, as when a painter in Verona was paid to sneak up to the walls of
a rival palace and paint obscene pictures.

Renaissance Artists

Because of its basis in the craft tradition, in the medieval world painting

was considered a “mechanical” art. This made the status of the artist

ambiguous, because he sold his own works and lacked the humanist’s edu­

cation. Michelangelo’s father tried to discourage his son from becoming a

sculptor, an art that he identified with stone cutting. Michelangelo himself

sometimes signed his paintings “Michelangelo, sculptor,’’ as if to differen­

tiate himself from a mere painter. Yet, in his treatise on painting (1435),

the humanist Leon Battista Alberti, irritated by contemporary insistence

that painting was a “mechanical art,” insisted that the artist was no longer

a craftsman but a practitioner of a “high art.”

Of the artists whose social origins are known, the majority had fathers

who were urban shopkeepers or artisans, most often in the luxury trades.