The details about cutting sandstone in Passage A and repositioning puppets and scenery in Passage B are similar in that they help to: the project. during the project. the project. 34 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-H31 3 3 Passage III HUMANITIES: This passage is from the book The Contempo- raries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World by Roger White. You could begin with the bottegas, where a suc- cessful artist of the Renaissance might have employed dozens of apprentices to help with all aspects of his craft. These workshops occupied a place at the center of a community. Pre-adolescents—not necessarily artisti- cally inclined ones, just neighborhood kids who needed work—progressed from simple tasks to more challeng- ing ones: mixing up batches of gypsum and glue for use as a painting ground, then transferring the master’s designs onto wooden panels or altar walls, then grind- ing pigments and making paints, and then, years later, executing parts of actual paintings. Each workshop was a small business and a school in miniature. In Florence, they predated both the forma- tion of a dedicated guild for artists and an academy of the arts. Each had its own way of doing things, and this proprietary technique, inseparable from the meaning of the art it produced, was sometimes even written down, ensuring the faithful transmission of the artist’s method. Ambitious assistants aimed to graduate from service and eventually hang their own shingles in town, com- peting with their former employers for commissions from churches and nobles, and in turn training the next generation of artists, world without end. The workshop system also explains the way artis- tic influence propagated in Renaissance Italy: through imitation. At the heart of the apprenticeship process was the act of copying. Assistants learned by reproduc- ing the master’s drawings, paintings, or sculptures (which, more often than not, were reproductions of other artists’ drawings, paintings, or sculptures) with the aim of perfect fidelity to the boss’s style. This prac- tice had the added benefit of generating a stockpile of reference material, closely guarded by the workshop, for use in future projects: You need a horse and rider, two cherubs, and Our Lady seen in left profile? No problem, Maestro. I’ll pull them from the file. The Flo- rentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio kept bound vol- umes of drapery studies (drapes at rest, drapes in a gentle breeze, drapes wrapped austerely around an apostle or opulently around a wealthy patron) to deploy in his commissions, like Renaissance clip art. But beyond the creation of these visual reference libraries, the practice of copying prepared the assistant for executing parts of actual artworks, according to the master’s specifications. Once the assistant’s work was up to snuff, he could be tasked with completing the tedious bits of a commission: some shrubbery along the road to Calvary, or the wings of the lesser angels in a Last Judgment. Certain very talented apprentices, it was said, couldn’t help but reveal their employers’ limita- tions by copying too well—in the way the precocious Raphael once outshone his master Perugino on an altar- piece job the latter artist was foolish enough to assign to the former. By 1610, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens had internationalized the workshop model, with teams of protégés in his Antwerp studio executing works for patrons from London to Madrid, while the artist himself traveled around hobnobbing with potential patrons and, in fact, performing diplomatic missions for the Spanish Hapsburg court; he was knighted, twice. The French Academy in the eighteenth century then centralized it, linking art training, productions, exhibition, and patronage in a monolithic, state- sponsored machine. The most successful artists of the period maintained extensive studios, with assistants drawn from the ranks of academy students, to meet the considerable demands of royal and republican commissions. As the influence of the French Academy waned and state patronage dried up, so too did the collabora- tive mode of the workshop. The new, private patron of the arts, drawn from the upper tiers of the bourgeoisie, bought modestly sized pictures for the home. The Salon des Refusés of 1863, an exhibition organized for French artists turned away from the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ annual show, marked a watershed in the aesthetics of artistic success. Manet, Whistler, and Cézanne debuted works there, to great public scandal and belated acclaim; in hindsight, it was better to have been rejected from the official Salon of 1863 than accepted by it. With this shift in the structure of patronage, the social coordinates of the artist were dramatically relocated: from the comfortable center of high-cultural life to its adventurous margins. © Roger White, 2015, The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World, and Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
