us, Poggio ‘had many witty stories to tell of adventures he had encountered in England and Germany when he went thither’, among them a favourite tale of a four-hour English banquet during which ‘he had been forced to rise and bathe his eyes with cold water to prevent him from falling asleep’. Poggio – ‘the foe of all deceit and pretence’ – was also wickedly dismissive of Northern scholars. But one of the things Poggio reported, and which was confirmed by other travellers, had particular resonance for the arts. ‘The nobles of England’, Poggio wrote, ‘deem it disgraceful to reside in cities and prefer to live in country retirement. They reckon a man’s nobility by the size of his landed estate. They spend their time over agriculture, and traffic in wool and sheep.’33 In contrast, Florentine noblemen preferred the urban life, while it was in the big-city populations of north and central Italy that the artists of the Renaissance found their patrons.
Some seventy years later, the Venetian author of A Relation of England (c. 1500) would again observe that ‘there are scarcely any towns of importance in the kingdom’, the exceptions being London, Bristol and York. Few Englishmen, furthermore, with the exception of the clergy, ‘are addicted to the study of letters’, even though ‘they have great advantages for study, there being two general Universities in the kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge, in which are many colleges founded for the maintenance of poor scholars’. Yet neither their rustic predilections nor the poverty of their scholarship prevented the English from being ‘great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England’. And with English cloth just then commanding a higher premium than ever before, their self-esteem was not without cause. ‘The riches of England’, the Venetian continued, ‘are greater than those of any other country in Europe … This is owing, in the first place, to the great fertility of the soil … Next, the sale of their valuable tin brings in a large sum of money to the kingdom; but still more do they derive from their extraordinary abundance of wool, which bears such a high price and reputation throughout Europe.’34 Where sheep paid for all, it was less a horror of the new which excluded the Renaissance from the North than the sufficient quality of the life-styles already practised there.
That quality was the more welcome for following the long contraction which Professor R.S. Lopez was the first to identify as ‘the economic depression of the Renaissance’.35 Every part of Europe was affected by it. Fertile, mild of climate, and well-situated for the London market, Kent is still commonly known as England’s ‘Garden’. Yet even in this most favoured location of middle-income yeoman farmers, new housing-starts fell off appreciably in the mid-fifteenth century, to recover again only in the 1470s.36 Nor can it be doubted that a currency crisis so prolonged and so severe as simultaneously to threaten Medici solvency and close the Flemish mints must have brought many larger projects to an end. That the crisis was less punishing to the arts than to the economy in general was owed to a combination of special circumstances: to mortalities so unremitting as to destroy individual families and bring fortunes together, to paranoid investment in soul-care provision, and to a culture of ‘magnificence’ and free-spending. Another contributory circumstance was civil war.
One prominent casualty of the depression was the Malatesta principality of Rimini. And there, towards the end of 1461, with his city half-empty and nothing left to tax, Sigismondo Malatesta found himself unable to keep the literati in his household or pay his artists. Even work on his half-finished tomb-church of San Francesco – Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini – would have to stop, and the only remedy left to him was war.37 On this occasion, Sigismondo’s enemy was Pius II, whose hired captain in the field was the Malatesta’s next-door neighbour at Urbino. And two years later, it would be Federigo da Montefeltro’s decisive victory over Sigismondo and his mercenaries that almost trebled Urbino’s territory, raising its lord – already the most famous condottiere of his day – to the wealth and magnificence of a prince. Duke Federigo (1420–82), a ‘Mars in the field, a Minerva in his administration’, typifies the century’s virtues and its vices. But what his history makes quite clear is that there was no way for a fifteenth-century nobleman, however sophisticated his education or spreading his estates, to prosper on good government alone. Federigo was a poor man when he came by chance into his inheritance. It was the vendetta, essentially, that made him wealthy. With as much blood on his hands as any Mafia godfather, Federigo’s ambition to rebuild his Urbino palace was status-driven: ‘to make in our city of Urbino a beautiful residence worthy of the rank and fame of our ancestors and our own status’.
Where Federigo differed from most other captains of his day was in his schooling. He had begun his education at the Mantuan academy of the great humanist teacher Vittorino Rambaldoni da Feltre (d.1446). And his favourite reading in later life remained the usual humanist texts, with a particular professional preference for the histories of Livy and for the De Bello Gallico of Julius Caesar. ‘In arms, his first profession’, recollected Vespasiano, who had sold him many books, ‘he was the most active leader of his time, combining strength with the most consummate prudence, and triumphing less by his sword than by his wit.’38 And in truth, the bookseller reasoned, ‘it is difficult for a leader [today] to excel in arms unless he be, like the Duke, a man of letters, seeing that the past is a mirror of the present’. More followed:
As to architecture it may be said that no one of his age, high or low, knew it so thoroughly. We may see in the buildings he [Federigo] constructed, the grand style and the due measurement and proportion, especially in his palace, which has no superior among the buildings of the time, none so well considered, or so full of fine things … As to sculpture he had great knowledge … employing the first masters of the time. To hear him talk of sculpture you would deem it was his own art. He was [also] much interested in painting, and because he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste he sent to Flanders and brought thence a master [Joos van Gent] who did at Urbino many very stately pictures, especially in Federigo’s study, where were represented philosophers, poets, and doctors of the Church, rendered with wondrous art. He painted from life a portrait of the Duke which only wanted breath.39
That portrait was long thought to have been the formal double-portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro and Guidobaldo, his infant son, now more usually attributed to Pedro Berruguete, the Castilian. And the long-term presence at Federigo’s court of two such major foreign artists, while saying something also about their own crisis times at home, is tribute enough already to the range and intelligence of the duke’s patronage. But the portrait has other intentions. Its first and most obvious emphasis is on the duke’s worldly success and magnificence. Duke Federigo displays his chivalric honours: the Garter of England and the Ermine of Naples. The great book he is holding is bound in the distinctive scarlet livery of what he had always intended from the first to be ‘the finest library since ancient times … bought without regard of cost’. A richly dressed Guidobaldo, at his father’s knee, holds the sceptre of government and promises the continuity in the Montefeltro dynasty which is the second major message of the painting. That continuity had not been easily achieved. Federigo himself had been born illegitimate. He had succeeded his murdered half-brother at Urbino chiefly because the much younger Oddantonio had no son. Then two of Federigo’s own natural sons – the talented Buonconte and probably Bernardino also – had died of the plague; while the pale and delicate Guidobaldo of the Urbino double-portrait was the cradle-sick last child of what was otherwise a quiverful of daughters.
Berruguete’s painting is not overtly religious. It lacks even the usual close attendance of a saint. Yet we are told that ‘as to works of alms and piety he [Federigo] was most observant. He distributed in his house every day a good quantity of bread and wine without fail, and he gave freely to learned men and gentlefolk, to holy places, and to poor folk ashamed of their case.’40 Federigo’s charity, we may assume, had some design. There