Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach

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Werner L. Gundersheimer

Patronage, broadly defined as "the action of a patron in supporting, encouraging, or countenancing a person, institution, work, art, etc.," has been clearly established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. It is virtually a permanent structural characteristic of all early European material high culture, based as it is on production by specialists. The effects of patronage are also pervasive in such diverse areas as appointments to secular and religious offices; the conception and creation of the structures and spaces within which people work, pray, and live; the execution of the artifacts of material and intellectual culture; the systems of transactions into which the behavior of social groups — families, clans, guilds, classes (whether economic, social, occupational, or sexual) — is organized, and through which the relationships of such groups to one another are expressed. Though for scholarly purposes we normally tend to use the term in more limited senses appropriate to the analytical objectives of our particular disciplines, it is important to recognize that particular patrons, and individual acts of patronage of all kinds and degrees, should be understood not only within their own immediate cultural context. They may also be subsumed within a more encompassing theory concerning the systemic effects of patronage in European social and intellectual history.

In order to develop such a theory fully, one would have to go far beyond the objectives and the limits of this essay. Such a task would require sophistication and skill in applying to an enormous mass of historical data concepts derived from the various social science disciplines. One can at best hold this up as a long-term goal for collective scholarship.

In the meantime, perhaps one may frame an approach to patronage as an early modern institution by taking a via negativa. Can there be a Renaissance society without patronage? What would be its essential characteristics? What aspects of patronly societies would anti- or a-patronly societies help us to comprehend? I shall try to trace out an answer to these questions in both theoretical and practical terms, or perhaps more accurately, fictive and historical, terms.

To the extent that Renaissance literature embodies social thought, systems of patron-client relations tend to be taken for granted. Both in the courtly societies depicted by Ariosto and Castiglione and in the somewhat less centralized aristocracies portrayed by Boccaccio, Alberti, and Machiavelli, people are expected to defer to, or accept protection from, their superiors. Even the most genuinely idealistic Italian texts of the fifteenth century link social aspiration with patronly sponsorship. Filarete's model city, Sforzinda, derives its name from the author's own patron, Francesco Sforza. More substantively, every social class in the city has its own distinctive architectural style, and, as Luigi Firpo observed, "crowning it all [is] a contradictory and useless element, a Renaissance prince." Contradictory and useless perhaps to Firpo, who wanted to advance Filarete's claims as an innovator, the first Renaissance Utopist. But for Filarete there could be no Sforzinda without the Sforza, no ideal city without a precisely articulated social hierarchy. While modifying and rationalizing them considerably, Filarete accepted the terms of social and political organization, and of cultural sponsorship, that he observed in the Italian urban world.

Although it is not difficult to find Renaissance Italians rejecting particular patrons (a tendency which in the case of artists has sometimes led scholars to infer a greater degree of independence of the system than most artists could have imagined), the most conspicuous instances of genuine attacks on patronage that I know of during the Renaissance come from Northern Europe. Here we may note in passing the position of Erasmus, as usual complex and equilibrated. Erasmus lived on patronage, as J. Hoyoux proved years ago, but he always appreciated its dangers. While willing to accept the occasional purse filled with golden coins, or a horse, or a case of some good wine, or even prolonged hospitality, he would not agree to the role of client as a definition of himself. For this reason he rejected many kinds of preferment, and in his writings referred with grave misgivings to those who permitted themselves to be so seduced. His was the privilege, relatively rare in his time, of what might be called the cultural "superstar." This is a colloquial way of expressing the fact that an identification with him produced greater benefits for his patrons than he could derive from prolonged attachment to them.

But Erasmus' reservations, both behavioral and doctrinal, are far from constituting a theoretical antithesis to patronage. For this we must turn to his intimate friend Thomas More. The Utopia confronts both social reality and ideality. It is, in the first instance, a ruthless indictment of a social world embodying extremes of dysfunction. As Martin Fleisher has observed, "Enclosures and rural depopulation, price revolution and debasement of coinage, unemployment, mendicancy, and vagabondage, gentlemen highwaymen, rebellious elements among the nobility and rural unrest, the transformation of the agrarian economy — we have here almost all the ingredients which go to make up what has been called 'Tawney's Century,' England in the period from 1540 to 1640." More's solution, embodied in Book Two, is an egalitarian society designed to prevent the appearance of economic, social, and political distinctions among men. There are, of course, differences in aptitude and ability, but these are not permitted to develop into permanent, let alone hereditary,...