The Renaissance is usually sold as a burst of genius, and it was, but it was also a business: contracts, deadlines, patrons with opinions, and printers watching the cost of paper. These stories keep the famous names and go looking for the odd corner of each one, from a pope's beard to a globe with a continent missing.
Every tile in a The Renaissance game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Artists
nine stories
1He tried to hand the ceiling to Raphael
On the tile: Michelangelo
Vasari says Michelangelo tried by every means to shake the burden off his shoulders, and proposed that the pope give the ceiling to Raphael instead. The pope insisted. Bramante built a scaffold hung on ropes that pierced the vault, and when Michelangelo asked how the holes would be filled, Bramante said he would think about that afterward. Michelangelo had a new one built on props that did not touch the walls. Painting with his face turned upward, Vasari adds, left him for months unable to read a letter or study a drawing except with his head tipped back.
Above the convex mirror in the Arnolfini portrait, in a flamboyant hand, van Eyck wrote "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434": Jan van Eyck was here. The mirror below reflects two men stepping into the room, and the National Gallery wonders whether one is the painter himself. It says the illusion relied on skill, not on any unusual pigments. He worked quickly, using his fingers and brush handles as well as the tips, left a thumbprint by the shadow of the dog's leg, and scratched the bristles of the brush hanging by the bed into the paint.
For a painting this famous, the Birth of Venus left almost no paper trail. The Uffizi notes that nothing was written about it before 1550, when Giorgio Vasari described it at the Medici villa at Castello. It is tempera on canvas, not wood like Botticelli's Allegory of Spring, and canvas was widely used in the fifteenth century for decorative works destined for noble houses. The likely Medici connection hides in a pun: the orange trees were a family emblem, because the orange was then called mala medica.
Uccello laid the broken lances on the ground in a deliberate grid, an early workout in perspective, and then pushed his luck. The fallen soldier is foreshortened backward, his shoulders larger than his feet. Three panels showed the battle of 1 June 1432, and they hung together in a large room of the Medici palace overlooking the garden. Lorenzo de' Medici appropriated them before 1492. They now sit in London, Paris and Florence, which is why the set is hard to picture whole.
5The good news arrived on the feast of the Annunciation
On the tile: Ascoli1486
Ascoli Piceno was ruled by the pope, and in 1482 the town was granted a degree of self-government. The news arrived on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, and from then on the town marked the feast with a great procession. Crivelli's altarpiece of 1486 celebrates both messages at once. A flash of light carries the dove through a convenient golden hole in the wall to Mary, while on a bridge behind, a man reads a message, perhaps news of the papal grant, delivered by the carrier pigeon caged nearby.
Massys painted an old woman in a headdress already out of fashion, and the picture has been insulted ever since. A seventeenth-century mix-up gave her the nickname the Ugly Duchess. In the Victorian era the painting, or one of its many versions, gave John Tenniel the face of the Duchess for his illustrations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The National Gallery thinks she was probably not drawn from life at all, but a folkloric character from the world of carnival, borrowed from Leonardo's grotesque heads.
Piero della Francesca's father hoped he would become a merchant like him, and Piero was thoroughly trained in mathematics. The National Gallery calls him the first artist to write a treatise on perspective, De prospectiva pingendi, which uses mathematics to explain how to paint objects in proportion so that they appear as they are seen in real life. His Baptism of Christ, which the gallery calls his earliest surviving work, is hard to date, and estimates run from about 1437 to about 1460. Its famous calm owes as much to arithmetic as to faith.
8Seventy years at work, and the last decade the boldest
On the tile: Titiandied 1576
Titian was active by about 1506 and still working when he died on 27 August 1576, of the plague then moving through Venice. He had been born around 1490, though no document has been found that fixes the year. The surprising part is the ending. From the late 1550s his brushwork loosened, and in his final years he pushed the paint so far from tidy description that the National Gallery reaches for the phrase magic impressionism, three centuries early.
Julius II grew a beard during his war with the French and vowed not to shave until they were chased out of Italy. He shaved it off in March 1512, when events turned his way. That narrow window dates Raphael's portrait, and the National Gallery thinks it was painted soon after the pope came home from campaign on 27 June 1511. Raphael showed not a warrior but a careworn old man deep in thought, and the formula became the model for church portraits for the next two hundred years.
1A joke about his friend's name, made on horseback
On the tile: Erasmus1509
Riding out of Italy for England in 1509, Erasmus decided not to waste the hours on horseback on foolish fables, and began to make sport with the praise of Folly. He dedicated it to Thomas More and admitted why: "The first thing was your surname of More, which comes so near the word Moriae (folly) as you are far from the thing." He said he wrote it in about a week at More's house. It was printed in 1511, ran through many editions in his lifetime, and caused him so much trouble that he almost regretted writing it.
The Medici returned to Florence in 1512 and Machiavelli lost his office, his liberty and his city in quick succession. He wrote The Prince the following year in the country, and dedicated it to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, of the family that had ruined him, offering in a few pages everything he had learned in so many years. It never appeared in print while he lived. He died in 1527, and the book was published in 1532.
Thomas More published his Latin book about an ideal island in 1516 and built the joke into the name. Utopia comes from the Greek for no place, and in his letters More sometimes called it Nusquama, Nowhere. The second pun was there from the start. A short poem printed at the front of the early editions, credited to a poet laureate named Anemolius, the windy one, has the island declare that its name is really Eutopie, a place of felicity. Any plan too good to survive contact with people has been called utopian ever since.
Anatomy had been taught by a professor reading Galen aloud while a barber-surgeon did the cutting, which meant nobody in the room was checking the book against the body. Vesalius, still in his twenties, did his own careful dissections and looked hard at what he found. In 1543 he published On the Fabric of the Human Body, confirming Galen in some places and refuting him in many others. Galen had been dissecting animals. The illustrations made the argument visible.
Shakespeare died in 1616 without collecting his plays. Seven years later two fellow actors and shareholders in the King's Men, John Heminge and Henry Condell, brought thirty-six of them together in one volume, published by a London syndicate headed by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard. Eighteen had never been printed before, among them Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, and without the book they might have been lost forever. Researchers think about 750 copies were printed. Of those, 235 are known to survive, and the Folger Shakespeare Library holds the largest collection.
On 7 January 1610 Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter and noticed three little stars near the planet, small but very bright and set in a straight line. Over the next nights they moved, and on 13 January he saw four. He named them the Medicean Stars, in honor of Cosimo II de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. That name did not last. In 1614 the German astronomer Simon Marius proposed Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, names suggested to him by Johannes Kepler, and those are the names in use today.
Petrarch says that on 26 April 1336 he climbed Mont Ventoux, the highest mountain in the region, with his younger brother and two servants, and his only motive was the wish to see what so great a height had to offer. He wrote up the climb in a famous letter some time afterward. The same curiosity sent him searching libraries for lost classical manuscripts, and in 1345, in the chapter library of Verona Cathedral, he found a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to exist. He is also credited with creating the idea of a historical Dark Age.
A document called the Donation of Constantine claimed that the fourth-century emperor had given the pope the city of Rome and all the provinces of Italy and the western regions, and it had long been used to support papal claims to power. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla read it as a critic rather than a believer and showed that its crude Latin could not come from Constantine's time. Scholars now think it was probably composed in the eighth century. The future Pope Pius II privately conceded it was a forgery in a tract of 1453 that he never published.
Copernicus put the sun at the center of things, and his book was printed at Nuremberg in 1543; he held a finished copy on his deathbed. In front of his own preface sat an unsigned note to the reader, saying the system was a way of computing the motions and need not be true or even probable. Copernicus had not authorized it. The author was Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran minister who had taken over supervising the printing. Rheticus, who had managed most of it, crossed the note out in his own copy, and Kepler later showed who had written it.
The Gutenberg Bible is known as the 42-line Bible, and it did not begin that way. The first nine pages carry 40 lines and the tenth has 41. After that, most pages fit 42 by setting the lines closer together, presumably to save paper. It looks like a printer economizing partway through the job, on one of the very first books to come off the press. The Harry Ransom Center dates the printing to between 1454 and 1456 and puts the run at more than 150 copies. Forty-nine are known today, many of them incomplete.
The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 is a history of the world illustrated with 1,809 woodcuts, a number that sounds generous until you count the blocks that printed them: 645. Many views of towns and portraits of kings appear more than once with only the label changed, so one picture can stand for several cities and one face for several rulers. The book is also one of the best documented early printed books, and Paul Needham's census counts 1,287 surviving copies of the Latin edition alone.
A rhinoceros from India reached Lisbon on 20 May 1515, and King Manuel I of Portugal later decided to send it to the pope. A letter and a sketch by an unknown artist made their way to Nuremberg, and Durer made his woodcut from those without ever seeing the animal. He gave it hard plates like sheets of armor and a small twisted horn on its back, which no rhinoceros has. The print was magnificent and wrong, and it would not die: until the late 1930s it appeared in German school textbooks as a faithful image of the rhinoceros.
Magellan is the name on the voyage, but he was killed in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 and never came home. Juan Sebastian Elcano brought the Victoria the rest of the way and landed at Sanlucar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522, two days before the ship reached Seville and almost three years after the fleet set out. Of the two hundred or more men who had sailed in five ships, 18 came home on the Victoria. They had proved the size of the ocean by surviving it.
The story says Columbus faced down scholars who insisted the earth was flat. Educated Europeans had accepted a spherical earth since antiquity, and the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell finds that, with extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person believed otherwise. The real argument was about size, and Columbus lost it. He underestimated the earth's circumference by about a quarter, and the experts who warned that Asia lay much farther away were right. The flat-earth scene owes much to Washington Irving's highly romanticized life of Columbus, published in 1828.
6The first telescope patent application was turned down
On the tile: Lippershey1608
In October 1608 Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle maker from Middelburg often called Lippershey, asked the States General of the Netherlands for a patent on a device for seeing faraway things as though nearby. He did not get it. The government found the instrument too easy to copy, and that same month a second applicant, Jacob Metius of Alkmaar, asked for the same protection. Lipperhey was paid handsomely to build binocular versions instead. The news spread rapidly through Europe, and by the summer of 1609 Galileo had built a telescope of his own.
7Two parallel lines, because nothing is more equal
On the tile: Equals sign1557
Robert Recorde, a Welsh physician and mathematician, wanted to spare himself the tedious repetition of the words "is equal to." So in The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557, he set down two parallel lines of the same length. He called them Gemowe lines, meaning twin lines, because, he reasoned, no two things can be more equal. His sign was much wider than ours, and slow to catch on. Recorde died the next year, and no one used the sign in print again until 1618.
John Cabot, a citizen of Venice, sailed from Bristol in May 1497 in a small ship, the Matthew. On 24 June, St. John the Baptist's Day, he made landfall across the Atlantic, and exactly where is still much debated. Back in England, Henry VII's daybooks recorded a payment of £10 "to hym that founde the new Isle," and a pension of £20 a year followed. A letter to Venice reported that Cabot was called the Great Admiral and went dressed in silk. He set out again in 1498, and what became of him is unknown.
In 1512, when French troops took Brescia, a twelve-year-old named Niccolo was badly wounded in the face and afterward could speak only with difficulty, so people called him Tartaglia, the stammerer. As a mathematician he could solve certain cubic equations, and in 1539 Girolamo Cardano persuaded him to share the method on an oath never to reveal it. Tartaglia gave it as a poem. In 1543 Cardano was shown the same discovery at Bologna, written long before by Scipione del Ferro. Cardano printed it in his Ars Magna in 1545, crediting both men. Tartaglia was furious.
Jakob Fugger, called the Rich, founded a walled settlement of small houses at Augsburg in 1521 for needy townspeople. It is still there and still doing the job, and its foundation calls it the oldest existing social housing complex in the world. The base rent is 0.88 euro a year, the nominal value of one Rhenish guilder, never adjusted for inflation. The other condition has not moved either: residents say three prayers a day, an Our Father, a Hail Mary and the Creed, for the founder and the Fugger family.
Vespasiano da Bisticci says Cosimo de' Medici's work as a banker and politician weighed on his conscience, and that Pope Eugenius IV advised him to put 10,000 florins into the Dominican convent of San Marco, near the Medici house. Cosimo rebuilt it, chose Fra Angelico to fresco the friars' cells, kept a double cell there for his own retreats and supplied the books for the library Michelozzo built. When the work was done, a papal bull declared the charity an expiation of sins. Its opening words were carved over the sacristy door.
Lorenzo de' Medici wrote sonnets and songs in his native Tuscan on the model of Petrarch. He opened his garden of ancient statues near San Marco for Florentine artists to study, and had the young Michelangelo living in the house and dining at the family table. He was a much less gifted banker. The Milan branch closed in 1479 because loans to the dukes could not be recovered, and Bruges suffered the same way. Cornered after the Pazzi conspiracy, he dipped without consent into the inheritance of two young cousins in his care, and later drew on the state treasury. The nickname the Magnificent survived all of it.
4The great gallery was built as a government office
On the tile: The Uffizi1560
The name gives it away. Uffizi means offices, and Cosimo I de' Medici had the building put up to gather the tribunals, guilds and agencies of Florence into one administrative headquarters. Giorgio Vasari, the same Vasari who wrote the Lives of the artists, designed it, and work began in 1560. Cosimo's son Francesco had Buontalenti add the Tribuna, an octagonal room for the family's masterpieces, finished in 1584. Over the next two centuries the building filled with the grand dukes' collections, and in 1769 Grand Duke Peter Leopold opened it to the public as a museum.
In a joust around 1450, an opponent's lance pierced the visor of Federico da Montefeltro's helmet and took his right eye and the top of his nose. The wound at first looked fatal and kept him in bed for months, and he was one-eyed for the rest of his life. His portraits dealt with it by using the profile. Piero della Francesca painted him seen from the left, to hide the missing eye, and that notched outline is the face he is remembered by. A Renaissance portrait was a negotiation, not a photograph.
6She governed Mantua while Venice held her husband
On the tile: d'Este1509
Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, was already governing the state in the spring of 1509 while her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, was away with the army of the League. That August the Venetians captured him in a night raid and carried him off to Venice. It was the hardest of her regencies, and she threw herself into negotiating his release. After he came home their quarrels grew sharper. In her studiolo she hung allegories commissioned from Mantegna, Perugino, Costa and, around 1530, Correggio. Italy's national biographical dictionary still calls her la Primadonna.
Everyone knows the ceiling, and rather fewer know where the name came from. The Sistine Chapel is named for Pope Sixtus IV, who had the old Cappella Magna remade and consecrated the new chapel on 15 August 1483, the feast of the Assumption. Its walls were already painted by then, with stories of Moses and of Christ done in 1481 and 1482 by Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli and their workshops. Michelangelo was not given the vault until 1508, so the famous ceiling went up over a room that was already finished.
8Venice elected its ruler and dressed him carefully
On the tile: Dogeabout 1501
Leonardo Loredan was elected doge of Venice in 1501 and held the office until he died in 1521. Bellini painted him about a year into it, in the white silk kept for the greatest occasions and in the corno, the stiff horned cap of the office. Bellini worked in oil on wood, blending the slow-drying paint so that no transition is harsh anywhere, which is how a ceremonial uniform ends up containing a living man.
Botticelli's Venus and Mars was probably ordered to celebrate a marriage, and its long, low shape suggests a spalliera, a panel set into the wall of a room at shoulder height or above. Such pictures hung in the camera, the bedchamber, which was a semi-public room where a couple might receive visitors. Four childish satyrs play with the sleeping god's equipment, one wearing his helmet over its whole face, another wriggling into his breastplate. The wasps may be a pun on the Vespucci family, since vespe is Italian for wasps.