Michelangelo and the Reform of Art & Painting in Renaissance Florence, 1500-1550

Another topic pursued throughout the book is that of the artist's curriculum. When, for example, Franklin underscores the importance of Leonardo's experimentation for Sarto's later exploration of the unifying effects of sfumatura, he also notes that the painters ultimately moved in opposite directions: whereas Leonardo tried to incorporate oil into his mural paintings, Sarto approached panel painting with a free, open handling that could have derived from his training as an affreschista. Though Francesco Salviati's greatest Florentine works are the monumental frescoes featuring Furius Camillus that he painted in the Sala dell'Udienza in the Palazzo della Signoria, Franklin points out that Salviati began as a goldsmith and suggests that the "decorative" nature of his style, his horror vacui, and his tendency to crowd spaces with ornamental detail might reflect that background. Beyond this, Franklin insists on the importance of following not only the Bildung of individual artists but also the development of lon g-enduring workshops. Not everyone, he asserts, shared Leonardo's conviction that it was the role of the ambitious artist to rethink the means and ends of painting. Denying that innovation was a universal value not only licenses Franklin to include less original artists, like Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, in his history, but also enables him to acknowledge the premium that extraordinary painters like Pontormo placed on the collective out of which they had come. Ultimately, the topic helps Franklin justify the boundaries he creates for the period his book treats: if Vasari's arrival in Florence marks the end of a tradition, one reason for this was that Vasari reorganized the painter's enterprise. Operating on a scale unprecedented in Florence, Vasari assigned the execution of his designs not to artists he himself had formed but to the most skilled young painters he could find. In many ways, Franklin observes, "Vasari had become a type of artist never before seen" (p. 240).

To follow the history of workshops and workshop training is to look at the nuts and bolts of period style, and it is not surprising that Franklin is critical of some earlier approaches to his subject. Franklin sets out, for example, to undermine the reductive, historically groundless stylistic categories that, as he sees it, continue to control our understanding of the period. We should not, he argues, categorize any of his book's paintings as "classicist" or "anticlassicist," as "High Renaissance or "Mannerist." Most of these concepts, he insists, are anachronistic, and none has satisfactory descriptive purchase for the art he is dealing with. "High Renaissance," for example, is inadequate because artists like Fra Bartolomen and Ridolfo Gbirlandaio, traditionally counted among its best representatives, do not actually bring any "Renaissance" to a culmination. Rather, they spin out conservative versions of an already entrenched style, pointedly resisting the challenges presented by artists like Leonardo. "Cla ssicism," for its part, fails because the qualities that define it have nothing to do with antiquity: "If there was an orthodoxy," Franklin writes, "it was best represented by the Umbrian Perugino and among Florentines Ridolfo and to some degree Fra Bartolomeo, but how their styles could be considered 'classical' in any very specific sense is most problematic, since the formal balance and unity of their work [were] largely the result of a repetitive working practice, rather than a distillation of qualities from ancient art" (p. 2). "Mannerism," finally, comes in for special abuse, on grounds that its Italian cognates, as used in the 16th century, point to styles that are actually antithetical to those normally associated with the phenomenon: "for Vasari and other contemporaries like Lodovico Dolce writing in Venice, the word [maniera] was most specifically elaborated relative to their critique of a routine art practice that produced monotonous images, such as those by Perugino, and not as a singular or positi ve term of style." It is misleading, he adds, when scholars today "expand on a term used in the period in a specifically pejorative sense to mean quite another style than that exemplified by artists such as Rosso or Perino del Vaga" (p. 14).