'An Academy for Doing'; I: The Accademia del Disegno, the Guilds and the Principate in Sixteenth-Century Florence

Abstract

In January 1563, the Florentine Accademia del Disegno was formally granted a constitution by its nominal capo (head), Duke Cosimo de' Medici. It seems appropriate that the driving force behind the formation of the Academy should have been the first great historian of the visual arts, Giorgio Vasari (the absent and ageing Michelangelo, hero of Vasari's book, had been proclaimed joint head with Duke Cosimo). Effective power, however, lay with a Ducal representative, the luogotenente, a position to be occupied, not by a professional artist, but by a lay person 'of rank and dignity': throughout 1563, and exceptionally for the following year until the Feast of St Luke in October 1564 this post was filled by Vincenzo Borghini, a personal friend of Vasari's, scholar, historian, and, as prior of the Ospedali degli Innocenti, an already experienced administrator. By harnessing the power of the Medici prince to this new organisation, the artists of Florence had created a new type of 'art institute', public yet strictly belonging neither to state nor civic life. Similarly odd, quasi-official foundations were to be made in Rome, Paris and London within the following two centuries, but the early development of the Disegno does not entirely conform to the model of the later academies, for in 1571, only eight years after the initial foundation, the then luogotenente, Jacopo Pitti, petitioned the Medici Grand Duke on behalf of the membership. He asked that painters should be released from the obligation to belong to the city's Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries (the Arte dei Medici e Speziali), to which they were formally bound, and that sculptors might be similarly released from the Fabbricanti, a conglomerate guild which by that date had swallowed up the old Maestri di Pietra e Legname (Masters of Stone and Wood). Pitti's letter contained more than a simple request for manumission from the guilds of Florence, however. It included a further petition to set up a magistrature to try civil cases, nothing less than a guild tribunal to arbitrate disputes between artist and artist, or artist and client. The Medici fiat is recorded beneath the copy of the letter preserved in the Florentine Archivio di Stato. A committee of reform was convened to which two of the most prominent founder members, Vasari and Bronzino, were nominated and, by the following year, the Accademia del D segno was incorporated into the Florentine Guild system. In the modern literature on the Accademia, this d velopment has been interpreted in two contrary senses. For Nikolaus Pevsner, stressing the uphoria of a Vasari who, in letters of 1563, spoke of the academy as a potential 'university' (studio or sapienza), the making of what might be called an academic guild in 1572 represented a confused betrayal of the original aims of the institution. Though Pevsner's view was partly based on the mistaken assumption that Vasari had withdrawn from the affairs of the Academy at the time of the change, it does not stand or fall by this. Rather, Pevsner contrasted two sets of regulations, the Capitoli of 1563, which, he claimed, represented a radical break with guild practice, and a revised set of Statuti (1585), which, while largely taken up with matters of procedure and the election of officers, contains a batch of rules relating to the location of workshops, the contractual obligations of masters and apprentices, and some curious l gislation on the signing of works of art; these Pevsner correctly pointed out were indistinguishable from those of a guild. B contrast, the 1563 Capitoli had laid down provisions for an educational programme. Young artists were to have been visited in the workshops of their masters and encouraged by members of the Accademia. Regular lectures on mathematics were to have been instituted, and anatomical demonstrations periodically held at the hospital of S. Maria Nuova. It is easy to see in these measures an embryonic and properly 'academic' curriculum which, while not yet attempting to replace workshop training by establishing the hegemony of a central school, was nonetheless designed to enable academicians to intervene strategically in shop practice. As for the lectures, they literarily institutionalised the Albertian commonplace that the proper exercise of painting, sculpture and architecture depended on familiarity with certain kinds of theoretical knowledge normally associated with the practice of the Liberal Arts.