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In 1963, shortly after graduating from an elite English boarding school, I went to Florence, Italy, where I stayed for about six months. I enrolled in the then-well-known drawing school, Studio Simi, which was a gathering place for those interested in the visual arts, as well as those seeking professional art education. Our daily regimen was to draw in the mornings—from both classical casts and live models—visit museums and churches in the afternoons, and travel to other cities on weekends. We were lodged in an old-fashioned but elegantly furnished pensione, called the Mona Lisa. Today, we might categorize this interlude as a "gap year" experience, or scrape up some credit for it in the guise of a study-abroad program. But on the terms that I did it, it could also be seen as occurring on the tail end of a much older English tradition, that of the young gentleman on his Grand Tour, rounding out his education.
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This is not an incidental matter, because it goes to the heart of why one was there, what one sought to acquire, and most of all, how one perceived the art one was exposed to. I believe that the only book packed in my suitcase, before leaving England, was a copy of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in 1860, and still-then a "must read"). To this I soon added a Random House edition of G.F. Young's The Medici, first published in 1930. It is worth pausing to consider just what kind of induction to adult life this was providing. The funding for this trip had come from my maternal grandfather, a prominent Anglo-Greek merchant banker, whose grand London house was modeled on the Florentine Palazzo Strozzi, built by the Medici's rivals. At the time, I did not fully realize the weight of symbolism embedded in these circumstances. Yet, here I was in Florence, with Burckhardt as my guide and the Medici—and my grandfather—as role models! What I did understand was that here before me were the approved models of "good taste" and inspiration for cultivating the patrician lifestyle. That we were looking at a Madonna and Child by Fra Filippo Lippi, a Venus by Sandro Botticelli, and a John the Baptist by Andrea del Sarto was paramount—that is, in terms of their power to instill "good taste." That one was made for a church altar, the other for a private bedroom, and that the third was ambiguous enough to pass in either context, was incidental. For many, even in our less elitist society, it still is.
Thus, scholars and laypersons alike typically consider such works under the rubric of Italian Renaissance art, admire them for their associations with the emergence of a secularized humanistic culture, from which derives our own, and study them predominantly in terms of stylistic evolution. Art historical writings and university courses have long presented Italian Renaissance art in this way. For instance, James Beck, in one standard survey,1 constructs a three-generational model by which to understand the evolution of style in Italian Renaissance art, dividing each generation into a lyric and a monumental current. In the twelve pages dedicated to Fra Filippo Lippi, for instance, Lippi is placed in the monumental current of the first generation, after Masaccio, and no mention is made of the religious significance of any of his works, although most were made to serve religious functions. Beck attends exclusively to formal matters, such as figure construction and the treatment of space, light, and draperies, as well as consideration of influences on the artist and the evolution of his style.
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