3. The Post-Renaissance Gentleman-Artist. The list
of eccentricities in which artists indulged is long, var-
ied, and well-documented (Wittkower, Born Under
Saturn..., 1963). And the reality of this new type
of artist is thrown into relief by the violence of the
reaction against it. As early as the middle of the six-
teenth century the nonconforming artist with his
foibles and extravagances was no longer fashionable.
It was then felt that artists should unobtrusively merge
with the social and intellectual elite. Vasari himself,
to whom any form of excess was anathema, resorted
in his biography of Raphael to a technique of ideal-
ization: he depicted Raphael as the acme of moral and
intellectual perfection. According to him there was no
greater contrast than that between Raphael's grace,
learning, beauty, modesty, and excellent demeanor and
the majority of artists who showed a detachment from
reality, and displayed eccentricity admixed with mad-
ness and uncouthness (Vasari, IV, 315). Even before this
was written, the Portuguese painter Francisco de
Hollanda, who was in Rome between 1538 and 1540
and put in literary form the talks he supposedly had
with Michelangelo, ascribed the following statement
to the great master, surely in order to give it the weight
of highest authority:
People spread a thousand pernicious lies about famous
painters. They are strange, solitary, and unbearable, it is
said, while in fact they are not different from other human
beings. Only silly people believe that they are eccentric
and capricious
(Hollanda, 1899).
In the second half of the sixteenth century the pro-
scription of the eccentric artist was rather general.
Most revealing passages are to be found in G. B.
Armenini's Dei veri precetti della pittura (1587) and
G. P. Lomazzo's Idea del tempio della pittura (1590).
Artists are strongly advised to keep away “from the
vices of madness, uncouthness, and extravagance, nor
should they aim at originality by acting in a disorderly
way and using nauseating language....” Thus from
the mid-sixteenth century on writers disavowed artists
who displayed conspicuously a nonconforming behav-
ior; instead they created and advocated a new image
of the artist: the conforming, well-bred, rational phi-
losopher-artist, who is richly endowed by nature with
all the graces and virtues. From then onward artists
saw themselves in the role of gentlemen, and the public
complied with this idea. Although the anti-conven-
tional artist had come to stay, it may be claimed that
great gentlemen and great individualists such as Rubens
and Bernini, Lebrun and Reynolds embody most fully
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideal of the
artist as a versatile, unaffected, well-bred, captivating
man of the world. Much as they differed from each
other, these masters were all great individualists who
left an imprint on their time and later ages, not only
because of their art and through their art but also
because of their powerful personalities.
As early as the 1540's Francisco de Hollanda makes
Vittoria Colonna say that those who knew Michel-
angelo had greater esteem for his person than for his
work. Rubens' affability and prudence, erudition and
eloquence, alert mind, broad culture, and all-embrac-
ing intellect shine forth after centuries just as does
Bernini's spirited Italian individualism, gracing a man
of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of
conviviality, aristocratic in demeanor and “passionate
in his wrath,” as his son Domenico reports. Bernini's
triumphal procession from Rome to Paris in 1665 at
the invitation of Louis XIV was not only an ovation
to the greatest artist then alive and to a truly impres-
sive personality, but also illustrates most vividly the
revolutionary reassessment of art and artists that had
come about in less than 200 years. Indeed, the peak
then reached in the estimation of artistic genius has
hardly ever again been equalled. Nowadays no govern-
ment would take so much trouble to look after a trav-
eling artist and architect. Unlike Colbert, prime minis-
ters would scarcely go out of their way to make his
stay agreeable.
Among eighteenth-century artists, it was Sir Joshua
Reynolds who, in his country, attained a standing and
success comparable to Bernini's. Although he came
from a family of modest means and although neither
lavish praise nor public honors, neither his knighthood
nor his presidency of the Royal Academy changed his
essentially middle-class bearing, he “certainly con-
trived”—as his pupil James Northcote wrote—“to
move in a higher sphere of society than any other
English artist had done before. Thus he procured for
Professors of the Arts a consequence, dignity, and
reception, which they had never before possessed in
this country” (Northcote, 1818). At his death in 1792
a whole nation bowed before the achievement of this
great man. Three dukes, two marquesses, three earls,
and two lords were his pallbearers; ninety-one car-
riages, conveying all the members of the Royal Acad-
emy and scores of distinguished luminaries followed
the body to its resting place in St. Paul's Cathedral.
