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That there exists a relationship between art and morality can hardly be doubted. Nothing better embodies our abstract ideals and longings. Whether art can actually drive behavior, moral or otherwise, is an open question that I won’t attempt to answer here. Certainly, every religion and every totalitarian ideology have believed in the power of art to influence our actions.
The art of every age reflects its moral tone. Classical Greek art personified aristocratic excellence. Modern art gives shape to a kind of moral panic. Artistically, of course, all periods of history weren’t created equal. Among the greatest, and my personal favorite, is the Quattrocento (that is, “15th century”—but it sounds so much better in Italian) art of Florence, and not only because it is beautiful beyond words. At a wonderfully high level of execution, it manages to make real an ideal of humanity that I find more profound than a thousand volumes of moral philosophy.
The Quattrocento, to Florentine artists, was an age of moral seriousness. What does that mean? Among other things, I think it means that human beings, as represented in art, were made to seem like they faced important choices, on which they would expend considerable gifts
Quattrocento humanity was different from classical humanity. The Greeks devised a limited number of patterns for beauty or nobility; everything else was discarded and never seen in art. The Florentines, on the other hand, loved every form and shape of humanity and saw at least the possibility of glory in all. Quattrocento painters loved faces. They loved to represent crowds of individuals—handsome and plain, young and old, even Black and white—but all are powerfully human all are actors in a moral drama in which their individual decisions will settle the rule of good or evil
Quattrocento humanity was different from medieval humanity. Medieval Christianity considered the highest moral act to be renunciation. John the Baptist in his hair shirt, alone and eating insects in the desert, was the hero of this moral vision. The Quattrocento artists created—an abused word but quite true in this case—a new moral direction in harmony with the ideals of “civic humanism” propounded by thinkers such as Florence’s formidable scholar-chancellor, Leonardo Bruni [ [link removed] ].
That direction rejected escape from society and placed specific burdens on individuals in the community. They were to behave as citizens, not mafiosi, and help enrich the lives of their fellow citizens in the moral as well as the material sense. They were to be patrons of public buildings and public art, and benefactors to the poor. They were to serve the state without benefit and treat every person (at least within the city walls) with honor and dignity. Above all, they were to expect of themselves the highest achievements possible to our species, so that being human, and measuring life in human terms, could become an ennobling rather than a degrading experience.
There are at the Bargello museum in Florence three statues that illustrate these different moral perspectives, two by Donatello, the third once ascribed to him. The first I wish to linger on is the artist’s most famous creation, the David—without question a great work of art, glorifying the triumph of the flesh. David’s face is that of Antinous [ [link removed] ], the Roman emperor Hadrian’s boy toy, and his pose is all come-hither. This is the most pagan image I have ever seen, and that statement includes large serried battalions of bronze and marble men and women. This David signifies the surrender of the will to the flesh
The second statue—the pseudo-Donatello—is of the young John the Baptist, an emaciated adolescent, head wobbling on a skeletal neck, stick-like arms emerging from his hair shirt. This St. John is renunciation. He is the medieval ideal: Abandon your family, your community, the material world, and seek salvation in the wilderness
St. Francis was only a more charming version of this austere vision. He rejected his father and his trade, and went off to commune with the animals. If pagan sensuality is a great temptation, the St. John of the Bargello represents an opposite but equally great temptation: the wish to escape from the world, to live without human commitments, accompanied only by one’s dreams and fantasies.
Between these two statues is a third: Donatello’s amazing St. George. It is, in my inexpert opinion, the most magnificent piece of sculpture in all history.
St. George is neither a sensualist nor an escape artist. He belongs in this world. He’s a soldier, about to fight. His expression conveys a deep uncertainty about the outcome. But he won’t escape—his expression tells us that as well. He won’t run away because those things he is fighting for—his community, his honor, his integrity—are more important than his life. He is not a sensualist for the same reason: There are nobler ways of achieving humanity—and those must always be shared, must be a family matter, a community affair, and are thus unattainable to the sensualist
St. George is human as I would like to see the human race. He is not a superhero. His weaknesses are written on his face. He may be tempted to give up the fight, to party and enjoy life as the David clearly does. Or, being a saint, he may think it the better part of valor to chuck his armor, put on St. John’s hair shirt and disappear, alone, into the desert. Those are his doubts: his dragon. They must be fought every day, and the losses will no doubt equal the wins. But St. George wins in the fighting. His nobility is in knowing so deeply the likelihood of defeat, yet striving for victory
That is the moral seriousness of the humanists and the Quattrocento artists. They did not despise God or the flesh—far from it, they probably indulged in both more than we timid denizens of the 21st century dare to do. But they envisioned a middle way, a true humanity between God and the flesh, and they left us that ideal in hundreds of great works of art.
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