The Day the Renaissance Was Saved by Niccolo Capponi

Author:Niccolo Capponi [Capponi, Niccolo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-461-5
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2015-11-03T05:00:00+00:00

6

HORSES CAN’T EAT STONES

The bearded man was closely observing his assistants, who were staring intently at the cartoon on the wall in the great hall. He took a few steps back to gaze at the entirety of his composition, which was now beginning to take shape in the dimensions the artist had envisioned. It wasn’t just the end of the first phase of a large job (even though the city wasn’t paying him as generously as the princes he’d previously worked for); it was also a kind of revenge against the painter who’d been tasked with decorating the opposite wall. A fine fellow, that chap! The sort of man who would have tried Job’s patience in a single day. Which was why a colleague of his had broken his nose with a well-aimed punch. But it didn’t seem as though he’d learned his lesson. To this day, he did nothing but speak badly of the art of painting while glorifying sculpture, and, perhaps not without reason, he’d also become famous for his statues. One wondered exactly what he was trying to achieve with all those naked bodies, which, as the story went, he had included in his cartoon for The Battle of Cascina, a painting with which the city intended to celebrate another victorious campaign that had taken place a hundred and fifty years earlier. The bearded man was convinced that all that flesh on display was nothing but the transposition of a sculpture into a wall, and that it was still essentially a sculpture. At heart, this shortage of ideas was nothing other than the reflection of that abject, ungrateful land in the Casentino from which it was said the other artist hailed. For that matter, it had been precisely his adventure in the Casentino that had caused Niccolò Piccinino, whose likeness appeared in the middle of those cartoons he’d just hung on the wall, so many troubles.

No, painting was the art that could embrace and accommodate everything the eye perceived, something the deficiency of sculpture found it impossible to replicate: colours, perspective, the intensity of bodies and objects … the sort of completeness that couldn’t be found in any statue. Furthermore, when it came to depicting a battle, how could sculpture reproduce the effects of the dust, the clouds, the rain and the chaotic mass of fighters locked in fierce hand-to-hand combat? Of course, not all painters were capable of creating such uniform and harmonious compositions; truth be told, most of them could do little more than superimpose one layer of expressiveness atop another, without paying much attention to the distortions this created for the outside eye. That being said, the vastness of the hall didn’t allow him to create a perfect perspectival view according to the criteria of the great Leon Battista Alberti, and one therefore had to employ a series of visual tricks to try to reproduce the feel of an open-air countryside inside the four walls of that council room, regardless of how large it was.

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