The Face of the Court

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:51:30 +0000
Num. 13

Este culture in Bastianino's time, between classicism and new ferments.
The year 1573 was an annus mirabilis for the court of Ferrara. The gradual disappearance of the earth tremors that had been tormenting the city for two years, the fervid reconstruction of the buildings damaged by the earthquake, and the hope of a solution to the political problem through alliances with Spain and the Empire seemed to defer if not solve the problem of the feared devolution of the State to the Church.

Of course the court doctors knew of Alfonso's impotentia generandi, but it was still thought, even as the sun was setting on Este power in Ferrara, that diplomacy might be able to change the course of events; that, yet again, the model of such a refined court might serve as an example to the great nation states; and that the 'courtly' form would once more prevail as a unique political and cultural system.

The Este family, at least from the time of the great Niccolò III, had established their power through force of arms and, at the same time, by creating an idealized image of that power that attempted, in accordance with a precise design, to bring the idealizing forces of chivalry and the aristocratic world into line with the new humanism.
The results were extraordinary: Boiardo and the literary dignity of the chivalrous genre, so well suited to a court with feudal origins; the birth of the new humanist drama; classical culture as filtered by the aristocratic-chivalrous forma mentis; Schifanoia and the various pleasaunces of the Este family; Tura, Cossa, Roberti, and the birth of a new way of seeing and representing; but, above all, Ariosto, who took the themes of chivalry and of a bygone world to transform classicism into the supreme symbol of the new golden age, thereby consigning to the collective imagination the sense of the court, and in particular of the Este court, as the supreme model of an organized and harmonic life worthy of the happy times of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Therefore, the court stood out as the most reliable reference point during the transformation of the 16th century seigniorial state into the eroded version of that form of culture in the course of the struggle between France and Spain for the conquest of Italy. And Ferrara and the Este state, together with the Florentine, Roman and Venetian models, emerged with magisterial authority as one of the great capitals of Italian culture, along with Urbino, Mantua, and the small states of seigniorial origin.

But, more than any other city, Ferrara could count on a court that had opted for culture as the preferred tool of power and the justification of power. The policy line pursued by Leonello down to Alfonso I and, in part, by Ercole II as well, was that of making culture, the celebration of the glories of the Estes and their magnificentia, the badge of power, the endorsement and the justification of a way of governing.
The flourishing of courtly culture in the Ferrara of the Estes that was to reach its peak under Alfonso I is the logical consequence of a consistent line of development pursued by the Este rulers who put their trust in the formidable texture and organization of the courtly corpus to reinforce and legitimize the restrictions of a centralizing and often cruel power that nonetheless required to justify itself within a culture that was an expression of the court even when organized outside the Prince's entourage.

But under Ercole II the first cracks began to appear in that culture, which was thrust into a crisis not only for historical reasons such as the upheavals of Reformation and Counter Reformation, but by experiencing in loco the contradictions inherent to a profound renewal of the very concept of "court". It suffices to consider Ercole II's rebellious wife Renata and her political and cultural disagreements with the duke's entourage; her conversion to Calvinism; the contacts with Reformation culture that, although banned and opposed, undermined the foundations of courtly culture; the loss of the institutional, political, and above all cultural unity forged by the Este court to bolster up its own power.

The "Ruling Family" began to change, it became bureaucratic and lost the sense of belonging to a system. The epilogue to all this, which took place formally in 1598, when Duke Cesare's retinue set off through the Porta degli Angeli on its way to the new capital of Modena, had already been written by the culture that inspired the court - even before the political and historical denouement unfolded.
While the cracks in the courtly model can be seen as signs of a looming peril it is undeniable that the Estes made various attempts to reinforce their power and the tradition of power, over and beyond the established cultural tradition. For example, through the cult of living saints to be placed inside the nunneries protected by the court; or through the ritual whereby the ruler's body was exhibited as the simulacrum of a power that does not end with the material death of the Prince.

But of all the ways attempted the most promising proved to be that of the justification of power through the culture produced, reflected, and displayed by the court. Nevertheless, in Alfonso II's day the conditions required if power was to be retained were getting harder and harder to maintain while, on the other hand, the transformation of courtly culture no longer guaranteed that correspondence between the patrons and the intellectuals in their service.

It was not just a matter of the subjective and intrinsic conditions of the Este court, but of ongoing epochal changes that provoked the division between political exigencies and cultural response that had produced in Ferrara the poetry of Tasso or Bastianino's Michelangelesque fresco in the apsidal semi-dome of the Cathedral. At the beginning of his seminal work on Bastianino, Roberto Arcangeli puts forward a workable hypothesis.
The difference between Bastianino the decorator of the Castle and Bastianino the painter of the Last Judgement is arguably similar to that which led the Tasso of Aminta (written in Ferrara in 1573) to develop into the complex and thoughtful author of Gerusalemme Liberata, and finally the tormented man languishing in the prison of Sant'Anna. This judgement should be seen within the framework of the "great historical crisis" that Arcangeli descried in the painter's stylistic and artistic maturity.

The modernity so often mentioned in Arcangeli's fascinating pages, Goya, the Impressionists, and the modern painters of whom Bastianino was a forerunner, has its genesis in the epochal crisis that Tasso expressed so well; in that tormented consciousness that makes him the first real intellectual and poet of modernity.

Pictorial representation deduced from an idea rather than mimicry of nature may be compared to Tasso's verisimilarity, rather than to history. The difference between history and poetry, therefore, is identical to the difference between the real and the verisimilar. The poetry and painting of crisis, of the historical crisis whose most immediate points of reference lay in the tyranny of the court, in the Inquisition, in restless conscience, and unhappiness as the stigmata and privilege of genius.
To this day, this tormented image of Tasso has an appeal and a legitimacy that, however, by no means exhausts the sense of his poetry. More than the personality of an unhappy poet, Tasso's new image restores to us the formidable sense of an intellectual design within and against the court, a universe of new knowledge that was changing not only the representation of the world, but was constructing the sense of modernity.

Bastianino is a great painter because, like Tasso, he understood the sense of the changes underway and applied it with consistent power and originality. In comparison with the outright masterpieces of Barocci, Titian, Tintoretto, and Bassano, Bastianino confirms Arcangeli's great insight to the effect that the minor painter in the Filippi workshop, the hedonistic and cheerful executor of grotesques and decorations, suddenly metamorphosed into the complex and tormented executor of the apsidal dome. And all thanks to the long wave of Este culture that rolled on and on over two centuries of artistic splendour.

In 1573, an apparently normal event like the first performance of Aminta in the garden of the pleasaunce at Belvedere was to emerge as one of the most symptomatic signals of the crisis affecting the state. What needs to be stressed here is how a work that was to enjoy enormous success was not only a representation of the court on stage but, at bottom, also the court's last attempt to confer upon itself a dignity and a role in harmony with the historic period: a dignity jeopardized, if not brutally disavowed by the real court.
But Aminta is no utopian theatrical version of the court, it is not an Arcadian scene: Tirsi is a poet; Aminta is of noble lineage like Silvia: Elpino and Mopso, rather than icons of the woods, are denizens of the court, characters invented to portray the vices and virtues of the only place that an intellectual like Tasso could and had to accept as the sole place worthy of poetry: the court.

In order to understand Tasso's relationship with the court it is sufficient to read with attention the long story that Tirsi-Tasso tells of his overtures to the Este duke. To recap the background of this pastoral fable, we know that Aminta, a shepherd, is enamoured of Silvia, a staunch devotee of Diana the Huntress and therefore an enemy of Love, who tells us in the Prologue why he thought of exercising his power not in the places where his mother wanted him to but in the woods where he revenges himself on the cruel nymph.

In this way he can inspire the emotion of love in uncouth breasts, thereby placing shepherds on a par with heroes; make the shepherds men of the court and apostles of courtly ideology; and finally ennoble the shepherd's pipe by comparing it to the noble cithara.
Yet again, poetry is indicated as the instrument and the means best suited to the structure of the court, which, nonetheless, also appears as a place of betrayal and corruption. At this point, the story of Tirsi and Aminta takes on the sense of an ideology, the supreme model that Tasso sees as the only acceptable place for those who aspire to the profession and dignity of poet.

The idealized sense of courtly culture becomes an ideological programme. But the honour that prevents men from loving in accordance with the principle s'ei piace, ei lice, is the justification of courts; it is the primary motivation invoked by the great crusading captain Geoffrey of Boulogne; it is the principle that Tasso invokes in the hope that Alfonso II might put himself at the head of the umpteenth crusade and it is that fundamental principle of the court that was to enmesh the ageing poet in a web of doubts and that was to lead to his writing a completely different work, the Conquistata.

The suggestion of the golden age becomes sin. The "bitter tragedy OF the human state" Tasso sees in the victorious last battle against the infidels is the same tragedy that pulses within the desperate humanity that moves restlessly beneath the vaults of the cathedral. Tasso never saw Bastianino's Judgement, a work that bears witness to the tormented zeitgeist.
The Bastianino that Tasso mentions is the artist who decorated the palazzina Marfisa, as may be deduced from the sonnet from 1581, Tu che le vere carte altrui colori, in which the painter is praised as the author of some fine portrayals of pagan subjects. Bastianino the painter of love, like Tasso the bard of love, had yet to become the most profound interpreters of the crisis about to overwhelm Ferrara and the courtly system.

If we take another look at the diffuse romantic image of Tasso the prisoner of the court or of the institutions that forced him to ponder on the role and sense of conscience, we ought to stress that it is the stimulus represented by the new orientation of the court that causes a crisis not only within the poet but within the entire culture at the ruler's service.

Thus it could be said that it is precisely the boldness of the change and the choice of cultural strategies bound up with the profound changes underway between the protestant Reformation and the consequent Catholic reaction that impinged upon a culture capable of renewing itself with splendid results, by representing that very crisis. A crisis whose co-ordinates lie in the elaboration of the classicism that is the real fil rouge of the entire span of the ancien régime.
Ferrara was a privileged workshop, not merely for the presence of Tasso at court and for his lucid analysis of the crisis but for all the new things that took a hand in the remodelling of the face of the court, be they the complex allegorical or theatrical spectacles of the day or the fad for the pastoral fable that represented not only an attempt to breathe new life into the theatre, but also an attempt to renew its content, no longer bound to the rules of tragedy and comedy.

But above all, it was music that proposed new themes and new solutions. Luzzasco Luzzaschi: Gesualdo da Venosa; the use of the so called "seconda pratica" that was to lead to the theorization of melodrama; the concerts that brought fame to the group founded by Margherita Gonzaga and her singers and players.

Yet again, immediately before Devolution, Ferrara produced a culture that was exemplary for the courts and not only for them. In this context, therefore, there is nothing fortuitous about the new and deeply pondered pictorial direction taken by Bastianino who, on the basis of that culture, and by elaborating the grand Roman and Venetian manner, interpreted an epochal change that heralded and concluded the abandonment of the city, for two hundred years the workshop of an exemplary culture.