gilbert, c., when did a man in the renaissance grow old_#a2d6

When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?Author(s): Creighton GilbertSource: Studies in the Renaissance, Vol. 14 (1967), pp. 7-32Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2857158 .

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When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?

Ricardo Krautheimer anno aetatis suae

septuagesimo perfecto

; HE TERMS ofthis enquiry emerge from the text of

@ a patent issued by the Duke of Parma on 30 January IS62. It appoints a new architect to act in association iR with Giacomo Vignola, the distinguished master who

E g had long been in charge of his building activities. The new appointee is Giacinto Vignola, son of Giacomo

and previously his father's assistant. One can think of several reasons why such a step might be taken, then or now, but in any case it indicates that the Duke wanted to keep Vignola, make him content, and continue the same style of work.

Our chief interest, however, is the reason which the patent explicitly offers; it iS 'in order to subtract labor from his father's age' ('per scemar fatiga all'eta del padre').l Today too the same reason might lead to this action, as also might a decline in health or an increase in work load. We see it particularly with men having a personal skill, whether senior partners in law firms or head gardeners, who are induced to 'take it a little easier' by giving a son a coequal status. But in one respect the circumstances diSer from our habits completely, as we learn when we find that Vignola was then fifty-four. It seems beyond argument that today we would not arrange for someone lilie an architect to reduce his work at fifty-four by reason of advancing age. To resolve this discrepancy, we might first question whether the

patent really means what it says. Perhaps Vignola is being falsely called old to conceal the true reason for the appointment which was less honorable, such as a too blatant nepotism. Age may not have been, indeed, so strong a stimulus here as nepotism, but the excuse of age has further implications. Evidently a false excuse in a document must avoid extreme implausibility, by saying what people will readily accept, because it often is true. Thus old age at fifty-four must have seemed normal or at least not outlandish as an average, even if not applicable to

1 M. Walcher Casotti, II Vigolola (Trieste, I960) I, 265.

[ 7 ]



8 WHEN DID RENAISSANCE MAN GROW OLD?

Vignola. If the offered reason of old age, on the other hand, does not conceal, but is irrelevant to Vignola because it merely uses a routine clerk's formula, the same deduction follows. Whether it means to be true, or means to lie, or doesn't care, the difference from our habits remains. If we still wish to discount it, the only apparent basis for doing so is that it is a slip of the pen, an approach which a study based on documents presumably would use only if a mass of other documents contra- dict this one.

A kind of error might be present if there were a mistake as to Vig- nola's age. It is quite true that Renaissance practise differs from ours in that people were often vague or inconsistent about their own ages, as we sllall see. For a man in the fifties, a small sample suggests that one to five years were often added to his age and sometimes still more. How- ever, there is indirect but attractive evidence that Vignola, as well as his son and others informed by them, knew his age with rather unusual precision,2 so that the difficulty seems unlikely to be resolved along those lines. Here too such a hypothesis can apparently be entertained if other instances cast doubt on what seems to have happened here. Thus we must turn to other reports.

Near the end of the account of Salviati in his Lives, Vasari remarks that 'Francesco's death was a tremendous hurt and loss to the art, because, although he was fifty-four years old, and unhealthy, he was at any rate continuously studying and working.'3 The middle of that

2 I October I507, the date which has ever since been accepted as Vignola's birth date, first appears in the first biography of him, written by Ignazio I)anti and published some thirteen years after the subject's death. Danti got most of his information from Giacinto Vignola, and this item is hardly likely to belong to the minority that he got elsewhere; since sixteenth-century biographers did not go to archival birth records, family knowledge or record is the only normal source of such facts, and, since most people did not know the year of their birth with assurance, it rarely appears in lives. It is hardly ever mentioned in Vasari's Lives, nor, interestingly enough, in the lives of artists by Baglione (I642). Baglione had an active feeling for chronology, arranging his biographies under the pontificates when the artists came to Rome, and nearly always giving age at death. But he seems to give birth dates only for Vignola (taken from Danti) and for Pietro Bernini, whose son was available to be asked, suggesting that he liked to have them when he could. From this it seems probable that Giacinto knew his father's birth date, which his father had told him, and that their interest was unusual. If their date was wrong, the relationship to the I562 patent is not affected, since all concerned presumably thought it was right.

3 G. Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi (Flor- ence, I88I), VII, 39. (All further references to Vasari are to this edition, and cite volume and page only.) 'Fu la morte di Francesco di grandissima perdita all'arte, perche se bene aveva cinquantaquattro anni, ed era mal sano, ad ogni modo continuamente studiava e lavorava.'



CREIGHTON GILBERT 9

sentence, a casual parenthesis of reinforcement, is thereby the more valuable in suggesting an accepted attitude: to work and study when one is fifty-four, and unhealthy, is beyond the usual expectation. Again unlike our approach today, and consistent with Vignola's reduced labors, this comment indeed seems to wipe out the second doubt suggested in his case, that he was thought old only because he was mis- takenly considered rather older than fifty-four.

Again, however, this apparent distance from our views might not mean what it says. Perhaps Salviati's exertions were unexpected only because of the combined years and poor health, and would be expected if only one or the other were present; the age of normal retirement from labor would then perhaps resemble ours. Although the ordinary reading of the sentence, it seems to me, is that Vasari is piling one disability on another to make his surprise more vivid and reasonable, still this second reading is legitimate. What disproves it is that the sentence is not fresh here, but restates another used two pages earlier. A matter of months before Salviati died, Vasari had verbally urged him to slow down: 'since he was rich, along in years ("d'eta"), poorly ("mal complessionato"), and not much good for labor any more, he should see to it that he lived quietly.'4 This series of grounds for retirement illustrates more effectively the way in which the arguments do not add up to one, but are 'ad abundantiam' four, two being the two which will recur in our sentence. This might still be doubted, but the conclusive observation is that Salviati is 'd'eta' in one sentence and 'fifty-four' in the other, both times as an isolated fact, not only by linkage with others. Since he is looked upon as 'along in years' two pages before he is looked upon as 'fifty-four,' fifty-four is an age on the declining side of working maturity, regardless of the factor of health, and that is our concern.5 Thus the two cases of Vignola and Salviati converge, and suggest a change between sixteenth- and twentieth-century western 'cultures' of an extent more familiar in the reports of anthropologists about cultures separated in space.

4 VII, 3 6.

5 By an odd quirk, Vasari's feeling that Salviati's continued work at fifty-four is unusual has a parallel when, at other points, he records his birth as in ISIo, his death as in I563. Thus Salviati would have died a year before he reached this age beyond the usual working span (VII, 5, 40). This is a minor instance of the inconsistency on reports of age that will be explored below, and no conclusions should be drawn from it. In any case it does not affect Vasari's expressed view of what it meant to be fifty-four, our concern at the moment.




Before surveying a large number of other cases, I would like to suggest a further stage to which this pattern would in turn lead. It has to do with persons of unknown birth date, to whom there is during their careers a reference as old, which has been used by scholars to help in guessing the year of birth. If Vignola and Salviati are indicative, it would seem that we have been using this evidence inaccurately because sre have assumed that our own attitudes apply. An example which will be explored later is the painter Jacopo de' Barbari. When he had for some years been court artist to the Regent Margaret of the Netherlands, she awarded him in I5II/I2 a 'pension' in recognition of his 'debilita- tion et viellesse.'6 This reference is the one helpful point of departure for reconstructing his birth date. Specialized literature has found it easy to deduce that he was born between I440 and I45o, i.e. that when called old and weak he must have been at least sixty-one.7 And yet his case is like that of Vignola and Salviati, or, if anything, less far along. The document provides for his working in the future, so that perhaps we must suppose he was not as old as Salviati, whose continued work seemed in unusual conflict with his years. Other pointers too will suggest thatJacopo was less than fifty-four when his 'viellesse' was recorded. Yet such a suggestion must expect incredulity, so that I hasten to the next cases.

On 2 May I5I7, Michelangelo wrote to Domenico Boninsegni, the business agent of his Medici patrons and his day-to-day contact with them, complaining of the pressures on him. 'Besides,' he says, 'because I am old, I don't feel like losing so much time over these marbles to let t]le Pope gain by two or three hundred ducats.'8 Writing'sone vecchio,' and deducing that he must be jealous of his time, he was forty-two. Michelangelo was a valetudinarian, and kept on calling attention to his advanced years as a talking point for nearly fifty more years afterwards. Not only was he negotiating with his patron, he was enough of an egoist to express self-pity in terms which a more detached temperament

6 A. de Hevesy,Jacopo de' Barbari (Paris-Brussels, I925), p. 37.

7 P. K[risteller], article 'Barbari' in Thieme-Becker Kunstlerlexikon, between I440 aIld I450; A. de Hevesy, op. cit., p. 8, 'vers le milieu du siecle'; L. Servolini, Jacopo de' Blrbari (Padua, I944), p. 45, about I440. All others have accepted the statements of these sttlndard works, except that I anticipated the present expression of doubt briefly in the article 'Barbari' in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (I964), VI, 44-46.

8 M. Buonarroti, Le lettere, ed. Milanesi (Florence, I875), p. 384; The Letters of Michc>langelo, tr. and ed. E. H. Ramsden, (Stanford, I963), I, I05-I07, gives the annota- tion cited infra.



CREIGHTON GILBERT ll would have recognized as unpersuasive. The most recent editor of

Michelangelo's letters evidently found the remark so contrary to fact that it lleeded explanation or excuse: 'He was only forty-two, but he undoubtedly felt old before his time, owing to the strain and the hard- ships he had undergone.' But svas it out of the ordinary to call oneself old at such an age? Pietro

Aretino was as aware of the effect of his words on people as Michelan- gelo was not. Writing that the speed of his literary composition has diminished, he knows where to assign the blame: 'Old age is slowing down tny wits, and love, which ought to stimulate them, is putting them to sleep; I used to do forty stanzas in a morning, now I barely assemble one.'9 He was forty-five. The noticeable smile of the selS conscious stylist here may make us unwilling to take his remark serious- ly. Yet it does have a marked parallel, complaining that he can no longer do so many jobs, to Michelangelo's totally unsmiling one.

Such overtones of uncertainty seem absent in the case of another individual, Erasmus. His poem 'On the Discomforts of Old Age' was written when he was forty or a few months less, during a journey to Italy in I 506. It applies both to himself and as a general rule, and to the present rather than the future:t°

. . . How lately did yoll see this Fresh Erasmus blooming in mid-youth?

Now, quickly turning about, he Begins to notice the hurts of pressing old age,

And move toward a chmge, Unlike himself....

Nor is there any complication induced by Erasmus's not having a firm idea of his own age or being ill. A few lines previously he has given us the general rule of which he offers himself as an illustration:

. . . And sooner thm we clearly Experience ourselves as living, we, quickly

Interrupted, cease to live. The fleet deer, md the chattering crow, live

And flourish for centuries.

9 Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Pertile (Milan, I959), III, Pt. One, I05. 'La 1 * * .. . . ... . veccnlala m lmp]grlsce 1 mgegno....

10 Tlle Poems of Desiderius Erasmus, ed. C. Reedijk (Leiden, I956), pp. 28>290. Reedijk and those citing him translate the title rather freely as 'On the Approach of Old Age' which perhaps reflects an unwillingness to believe it can be meant literally. Yet neither the title, Carmen de Senectutis Incomodis, nor the text is cast in an anticipatory mode.




In man alone, at once, after the sewnth Five year-span, and at hardly complete,

Dried-up old age ara the body's strength. Nor is that enough, but befbre

The speeding life has turned the tenth fivar-span It does not fear to attack

r_11 * * r s s r s 1 ne lmmortal part ot man, urought trom healren ....

Age replaces youth between thirty-five and fUrty, and death comes befbre fifty. This text has rich links to others. It confirms the earlier assertions that age in the early fbrties slows down work; here it stires the body's strength.} It suggests more than they did why age came at this point: it was because death fbllowed soon after. Erasmuss statement that death came at fifiy was a true one. It is commonly remarked that the expectation of life in the Renaissancewas about fbrty years, and that is confirmed, although we lack statistics, by the continuance of the same figure in the nineteenth century when we have them. But almost as commonly it is discounted by attributing the low expectation to the large extent of infant mortality's aff*ectq the averages. Yetit seems that in fact adults did not have many more years when considered separately. The author of a recent monograph on population history, duly empha- sizing the sparse data, believes that sthe material available sllggests that any agricultural society, whether sixteenthzentury Italy, seventeenth- century France, or nineteenth-century India, tends to adhere to a defi- nite set of patterns in the structure and movements of birth and death rates,' and that sall available information for numerous societies seems to indicate that the 44agricultural'S life expectancy at birth generally averages twenty to thirty-five years. Also those who reach the age of five have little chance of surviving beyond fifty.'ll

This material suggests that in one respect Renaissance and modern approaches do coinade. Both roughly conceive of the beginning of old ag;e as a point five to ten years less than the modal age of death, making it begin in one case at fbrty and in the other at sixtfive.la The agree-

11 C. M. Cipolla, The ESnotaic Sstory of WOrS hpU>t108 (Baltimore} I962), pp. 78, 82. By sagricultural society} Cipolla means everything between the neolithic age and the industrial revolution, an approach well-baed but not familiar to students of Renaissance thought. This stimulates the question whether the small minority of city dwellers might have a different life span; the artists discussed infra died on average in the mid-fifties, which does not suggest a significant variation.

12 The present study is assuming that people today begin old age at sixty-five} though it is surprisingly hard to confirm this by a formal statement. Yet our habit may be most striking when it emerges azidentally} even in a sociological work based on statistics.



CREIGHTON GILBERT 13

ment of the available statistics and the social scientists' inferences with the remark of Erasmus on expectation of life may reduce the incredulity natural as a response to the passing remarks of Aretino and Vasari.

Erastnus also has a link to other texts in his comment on mid-youth giving way to old age and thus excluding any reference to being middle-aged. This recurs in another text, published in England in I534. Sir Thomas Elyot, best known for his pedagogical manual The Governor, was connected with the tradition of Erasmus's English friends, but liis book The Castle of Health is in every sense far from the humanistic. It is a popularizing medical handbook, which went through eleven editions; one must suppose that it not only influenced but reflected widespread attitudes, and its advice on herbs, diets and exercise certainly suggests that. Among many diagrammatic formulae in the first book, on the body and its qualities, is one which begins: 'Ages be foure.' It specifies:l3

Adolescency to xxv yeres, hotte and moyst, in the whiche time the body groweth

Iuventute unto xl yeres hotte and drye, wherein the body is in perfyte growthe.

Senectute, unto lx yeres, colde and drie, wherein the bodye beginneth to decreace.

Age decrepite, until the last time of lyfe, accidently moist, but naturally cold and dry, wherein the powers and strength of the body be more and more minished.

'Senectute' at forty, when the 'bodye beginneth to decreace,'is certainly consistellt with the personal reports of Michelangelo and the others quoted. To be sure, Elyot's omission of middle age might seem to make his diagram rnore acceptable to us at the cost of reducing its substantial difference from us. The Renaissance did call forty old, olle might infer, but when it said old it simply meant what we mean by middle-aged, a term it did not use. Such a view would seem to be supported by Elyot's inclusioll of a later phase after 'senectute,' from sixty on, which indeed makes tlle phase before sixty sound middle-aged. Such is the case, but it is equally the case that between forty and sixty, the Renaissance noticed most people stopped work and died. That means 'old' as we mean it.

Thus R. Tartler, in Das Alter in der modernen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, I96I), does not fix the year when old age begins because, he says, it is variable and intangible (p. I I); then he specifies (p. I9) that his tables are based on persons sixty-five and up !

13 TSle Castel of Helthe, First Book, sigs. Iob-IIa. Professor Mark Eccles kindly located this passage for me.




Hence Renaissance 'senectute' equals our middle age as to the count of years, but not as to what happens during it, and so the reports do have significance. Possibly Elyot and others described two kinds of old age because the earlier one, the usual time of death, still did not show the drastic bodily decline that might seem to belong to the term; that is reserved for 'age decrepite.'l4

Slight traces of the concept 'middle-aged' can be found in the Ren- aissance, it should be stipulated. It seems to mean what it means today to the extent that it always means 'less than old' and so in the Renais- sance means 'less than forty' ! In Elyot's set of terms it would match 'iuventute,' between twenty-five and forty. Thus the earliest report of the adjective 'middle-aged' by the New English Dictionary, in I676, by a lucky chance is subject to check. It refers to 'the admirable M. Leibnitz, scarce yet middle-aged.' The NED does not point out that in I676 Leibnitz reached thirty. The noun exists centuries earlier (the lack of a adjective suggests that it was not very common) both as a phrase and as

14 The reader who, like myself, has thought Shakespeare's seven ages were the standard number in the Renaissance, may wonder about the prevailing patterns. Happily Cesare Ripa (Iconologia, I630 ed., pp. 224-226) analyzes this matter with all the fullness alld references that could be desired in a modern study. He cites ancient authors who divide life into: three parts (Aristotle De Caelo); four (Hippocrates, Avicenna); five (Fernel, the French medical and cosmological writer of the early sixteenth century); six (Isidore of Seville); and seven (apparently Piero Valeriano). He prefers four, which he calls the most frequent and attributes to medical tradition. This sounds like Elyot, but does not use the same four parts, listing instead adolescence, youth, manhood, and old age. Only the fivefold division divides old age in two. The six- and seven-fold divisions are obtained by subdividing youth, and Ripa rightly says the various schemes do not conflict. He does not directly offer ages in years for each part of life. He does say, in the sevenfold division, that infancy lasts seven years, boyhood fourteen, and so on, but this produces absurdities if it is translated back (youth changes to manhood at forty-eight) alld Ripa evidently does not do so. Indeed he says that the ages are not measured by years. But elsewhere in his book he does offer such measurements; see below, n. 65. On the other hand Elyot's system is identical with Dante's in convivio, IV, 24. I am very grateful to Professor Allan H. Gilbert for calling my attention to this passage. Dante's four ages are adolescence, youth, old age (senettute), and senility (senio). While this is like Elyot further in the age when youth begins, twenty-five, the other ages differ; old age begins at forty-five and senio at seventy. If we now find forty-five a rather late point to begin old age, Dante offers several reasons. He first says opinions differ, and then that he will disregard the views of the medici and the filosofi (scientists or the learned generally) and give his own reason. It is that life comes to a peak at thirty-five, because Christ died just before decline might have begun, and that further youth must rise and decline symmet- rically, ten years before and after thirty-five. Since this abstract schema consciously rejects nledical ideas, it seems no special pleading to suppose that Dante's year for starting old age does not reflect contemporary social attitudes. Yet it probably did influence later literature, and so might be reflected by Elyot with modifications influenced by the medici.




a single word. Among the NED's citations of it, Donne's use seems to be least vague as to the calendar age meant: 'That all thy spring, thy youth, be spent in wantonness, all thy summer, thy middle-age, in ambition.' It would seem more natural to match spring, youth and wantotmess with Elyot's 'adolescency,' up to twenty-five than with his next Ullit, up to forty, and the former choice produces the same result as the Leibnitz passage.15

There exists an assertion of the fifteenth century, made vigorously and at length by a speaker about himself, which sets the beginning of old age earlier still than Erasmus's thirty-five to forty. It is also notably close to the author's keenest concerns rather than a remark in passing. FranSois Villon devotes most of his work, after all, to the systematic anticipation of death. In The Testament, following the famous first line announcing that the poet is in his thirtieth year, stanzas 22-23 bring his insistence that he is in old age. It is scarcely surprising in a man who is writing his will.

Je plains le temps de ma jeunesse, (Ouquel j'ay plus qu'autre galle Jusques a l'entree de viellesse), Qui son partement m'a cele....

Alle s'en est, et je demeure, Povre de sens et de savoir, Triste failly, plus noir que meure, Qui n'ay ne sens, rente, n'avoir.

One who is 'more black than ripe' must be in the latter part of'viellesse.' And, as Michelangelo's editor said of him, Villon had led an unusually hard life. Yet even so we need not accept his statement as reflect- ing any received attitude or even his own equable judgment. It seems

15 The same result, making a rare 'middle age' equal iuventute and the span from twenty-five to forty, results from the one explicit text offered by the largest Italian dictionary (Tommaseo, s.v. eta). Boccaccio writes: 'He was a youth of middle age', (Era un giovane di mezza eta). Rather oddly Tommaseo attaches to this citation a definition of mezza eta as 'between old and young'. As shown by the previous note, Dante's mezzo del cammin di nostra vita at thirty-five is for him the midpoint of youth; whether this concept i nfluences the somewhat separate concept of middle age cannot be explored here. A set of four paintings of the ages of man by the seventeenth-century painter Pietro della Vecchia (Paul Ganz Collection) on loan to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is there labeled: Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, Old Age. The third ofthese titles, natural to our outlook, is wrong, as is obvious from its content, dominated by black-bearded soldiers in encampment. It should be Manhood (virilita), consistent with the scheme favored by Ripa for his preferred four-part pattern.




to be rare or unique, and is in any case contradicted by some of the evidence above, a difficulty which has not arisen before. We are, after all, dealing with a great master of the grim, making his impact by hy- perbole. But his lines may have for us the incidental virtue of defining what statements on the subject are and are not exaggerated. It is a proper rejoinder to the texts quoted here to propose that some of them are exaggerated. Indeed some of the statements on such a theme are likely tO be exaggerated ones, so that some must be discarded. But at least the nost extreme are not those of Erasmus and Elyot. Obviously statistics are what one wishes for, but since there are none

on life spans, none can be hoped for on attitudes. One can only collect as many instances as possible; these cases, appearing tn the material that comes to an art historian, are here presumed to be not diSerent from those that another investigator might collect, but certainly they too should be assembled.16

It is, however, possible to construct some quasi-statistical data, almost of the questionnaire kind. The raw material is the Lives of Vasari, apparently the largest group of Renaissance biographies whose author used first-hand information rather than previous lives; to maintain that character, the following survey is restricted to the later biographies (in volumes five, six, and seven of the classic Milanesi editio1l). The 'questionnaire' rests on the presumption that when we speak of the death of someone who, we consider, did not live a full span of years or reach old age, we are likely to include in our expression of sorrow the point that the death was untimely. Certainly today it seems natural to say this of a former cabinet member who died at sixty-two, for example.l7 The presence or absence of this phrase in a long series of Vasari's commiser- ating reports of deaths may tell us what he considered to be the beginning of old age, provided that each report includes the exact age, real or

16 Further instances, pro or con, are of course solicited. The present enquiry, not merely cutting across standard disciplines but hardly related to them, seems to evince vividly the worth of a journal concerned with Studies in tZle Renaissance. The problem also seems to belong to that epoch rather than to later ones (when the better documenta- tion of birth dates undercuts the problem) or to earlier ones in which data seem to be too sparse to combat any false assumptions or even to develop them. See M. Bloch, FeMdal Society (Chicago, I964), pp. 72, 74, on the absence there of any birth dates or ages for any persons except rulers, and the unreliability even of those. Bloch's remarks on shortness of life and on the fact that 'old age seemed to begin very early, as early as mature adult life with us' are of special interest.

17 The lXtew York Times, 3 September I966, quoting President Truman: 'The untimely death of Howard McGrath, an old colleague and friend ....'




supposed; the cases listed below include this factor explicitly in most cases, although in a few, as will be mentioned, it is only implicit. To justify this device, it must also be shown that Vasari did indeed

use this phrase habitually. The same part of his work readily yields instances. When Bartolomeo Torri dies, Vasari continues with: 'the loss of whom while young . . .'; of Girolamo Santacroce he says: 'Although he was snatched from us by death in the finest point of his life, and when greater things were hoped from him . . .' . Cavazzola 'died young . . . precisely when he was beginning to give a sample of what was hoped from him at an older age'; Francesco dai Libri the younger 'died young and of excellent expectation'; Pierino da Vinci died at 'such a young age.'l8

The thirty-odd cases in the three volumes in which Vasari reports the age at which his subjects died show that he is thoroughly consistent. Deaths before a certain age regularly include a comment that they are untimely, and after that are neutral; at still older ages, they may be neutral or may include a remark about advanced years.

Two of the artists, Bartolomeo Torri and Pierino da Vinci, died in their twenties. As already quoted, their youth was commented on, and it would certainly have been strange if it had not been.

Four of the artists died in their thirties. Cavazzola at thirty-one and Girolamo Santacroce at thirty-five are also regretted for their untimely passing, as also noticed above. (The fifth artist noticed above as dying young, Francesco dai Libri, was not reported as being of a specific age, a common occurrence in the Lives.) But the other two deaths in the thirties are treated neutrally. Parmigianino died at thirty-six after being 'finally ... attacked by a severe fever.... He finished the course of his life on 23 August I540.' Taddeo Zuccaro's death at thirty-seven is also treated neutrally with respect to being untimely or not,19 which is striking since it is described at length, with accounts of his last illness, his farewells to friends, and the deaths of other artists around the same time. It is even pointed out that he died at the same age as Raphael. In that co1lnection, Vasari had consistently treated Raphael's death (in an earlier ,eneration) in pages of mourning but with no reference to his being -oung.20 Nor is there any in Raphael's famous epitaph. On the other hand a poem by Castiglione on Raphael's death, which Vasari

18 VI, I6 (Torri); v, 93 (Santacroce); v, 3I6 (Cavazzola); v, 333 (Libri); VI, I30 (Vinci). 19 V, 234 (Parmigianino); VII, I04 (Zuccaro). 20 IV, 3 83-3 86.




quotes, alludes as a minor matter to 'iuventa', and a letter writer had spoken of Raphael as a young man a few months before his death, when he was thirty-six.21 In addition to these remarks, Vasari mentions the living Veronese as 'giovane' at thirty-two.22

Nine deaths are reported of artists in their forties, not one being called untimely, even though again many are lamented for various other reasons. To quote a typical example, Franciabigio's character is praised at length, and then; 'Finally, having acqviired much by working much, since he had not had much instinctive invention from nature other than what he acquired from long study, he died in I524, at forty-two years of age.'23This andallthe other accounts,withoutthosefigures, couldnot be distinguished from those about much older men. In seven of them, Andrea del Sarto, Alfonso Lombardi, Franciabigio, Palma, Perino del Vaga, Genga and Sanseverino,24 the age in years is given. In two, Rosso and Polidoro, it is not, but allusions to teachers and historic events show that Vasari thought of them as dying in their forties, in which he was correct.25 The nearest we get to a contrary case is withJan Calcar, who in modern studies is regularly said to have died at forty-six.26 Vasari says he died young, but in no way suggests even an approximate age, and the modern figure is shaky besides. This indicates how far one must go to find Vasari calling a death in the mid-forties untimely.

Eight of the artists died in their fifties. Seven are reported neutrally, i.e. as having died at a normal age or full span, and any divergence is toward a suggestion that they had begun to decline. Salviati has been considered. Sogliani, 'at the end, being tired and in poor health, after

21 However, this appears in a rhetorical contrast between him and a 'senex . . . homo octogenarius.' (V. Golzio, Raffaello . . . nelle testimonianze del suo secolo, Vatican, I946, p.

28I.) Of later references to Raphael's death the most interesting is by a Brabanter humanist who says it occurred when he was about forty and adds that he would have gone still further had he lived usque ad senectam. Among many later comments, two call his death untimely, but neither shows knowledge of his age. (Op. cit., pp. 282, 285, 294.)

Golzio's rich assemblage of allusions to Raphael, who for us is perhaps the best example in the Renaissance of early death, may be large enough to permit the generalization that such a viewpoint about him then existed distinctly but only to a slight extent.

VI, 374-

23 V, I98. The recurring introductory word finally may sound more as if Vasari thinks he is reaching the end of long lives than is actually the case. It should probably be read less as 'at the end of a long list of events' than as 'this is the last item to report.'

24 V, 55 (Sarto); v, 7I (Lombardi); v, 248 (Palma); v, 630 (Perino); VI, 330 (Genga); VI, 334 (Sanseverino).

25 V, I73 (Rosso); v, I52 (Polidoro). 26 VII, 582; for the report of his dying young, see the text infra.




being tnuch tormented with the stone, gave up his soul to God, aged fifty-two.'27 Less vividly, Marco Calabrese, 'having reached the age of fifty-six, ended his life of an ordinary illness.'28 The same applies to Bagnacavallo, Giulio Romano, Benedetto Ghirlandaio, and Daniele da Volterra. The exceptional eighth person, Torbido, is held to have died in old age, 'vecchiezza'.29 But Vasari did not give his age; here again we merely find Vasari's apparent approximation endorsed by modern study, which makes him fifty-nine. He is thus included with a qualifica- tion, a;ain suggesting what it takes to find an exception to the pattern.

The hve survivals into the sixties include one difllcult case, Dosso. Vasari gives no birth or death date, but links both birth and death to other e+rents of dates known to us, although perhaps not to him. If both links are followed out Dosso died at sixty or slightly less, and modern study kolds that he died in his fifties. On the other hand, Vasari elsewhere inconsistently implies that he survived the event which he had first linked to his death. What makes these details worth repeating is that Vasari regards Dosso as distinctly old. 'Having already become old, he passed his last years without working....'30 of the others, Rondi- nelli and Bernardi are neutrally reported as dying just at sixty, while Antonio da San Gallo and Girolamo da Carpi are called old at sixty-one ('old, besides, and crotchety') and sixty-nine respectively. Finally, the two artists who passed seventy are Giovanni da Udine, treated neutrally, and Lotto, treated as old; Lotto's precise age is not given.31 Thus Vasari's whole testimony is consistent with Erasmus and remarkably consistent internally, making the sharp break in the late thirties, perhaps the more so in being clearly a matter of habit rather than conscious notice. Lndeed the pattern did not emerge in this study until it was complete. Finally, it is suggestive that Vasari wrote these lives when he was about fifty-five; if our sense of what is old advances with our years, his certainty at such an age that 'forty is old' is the more impressive.

On t]le other hand, all such evidence is discounted by the great unre- 27 V, I32; 'in poor health' is mal complessionato. 28 V, 2t2.

29 V, I79 (Bagnacavallo); v, 555 (Giulio); VI, 532 (Benedetto); VII, 70 (Daniele); v, 295 (Torbido).

30 V, IOO. Vasari had said that Dosso's birth was almost simultaneous with Ariosto's (in I474) alld that he was supported until he died by Duke Alfonso, so that he must have died before the Duke died in I534. Yet he also reports (loc. cit.) a painting being com- pleted in I536.

31 VI, 255 (Rondinelli); v, 375 (Bernardi); v, 469 (Sangallo, 'pur vecchio e cagionevole'); V, I84 (GlrOlamO); VI, 564 (Giovanni da Udine); v, 252 (Lotto).




liability of Renaissance statements about ages. Vasari himself, who was so historically conscious that he described Raphael's four early altar- pieces in the correct order, makes amazing mistakes. He neutrally reports Benedetto Ghirlandaio's death at fifty, which had occurred at thirty-nine. He correctly reports Tribolo's birth in I500, just as correctly his death in I550, and then says he died aged sixty-five. He gives Gherardi's tomb epitaph as authority for his death at fifty-six, but it exists and says he died at forty-seven.32 The apparent trend ofthese cases to add to each age will be explored below. But possibly his most egregious error is in saying that he, Vasari, had been eighteen when he was twenty-four.33 Such errors about the speaker and his family occur so often in the Florentine tax records of the fifteenth century that they are the norm, and take all possible directions, including errors about children and subtractions of age in any age group. Cosimo Rosselli's age is reported by his brother three times; the first and third agree, but if they are right the second calls him twenty-four when he was thirty. Such an error today would be considered impossible, suggesting a difference of'culture' in the anthropological sense. An infant brother of Baldovinetti appears on two reports three years apart, as three and then as four. An old lady who, from previous reports, should have been forty-five, is called sixty. Another appears four times; in the four years separating the first and second records she aged eleven years, in the next five years she aged the proper five years, and in the next nineteen aged ten years. A too large change, a too small one, and a correct one are reported for one individual in the minimum number of documents.34

32 These corrections were made by Milanesi in his edition of Vasari, VI, 533 (Benedetto Ghirlandaio); VI, 55, 98, 99 (Tribolo; Vasari's source for the correct birth year was Tribolo's father); VI, 244 (Gherardi). The large error about Benedetto Ghirlandaio, who lived in the late fifteenth century, may exemplify Vasari's greater vagueness about more remote figures. On this ground Benedetto should have been excluded from the set here assembled, but he is retained in it because his biography appears in a later place attached tO that of a younger relative. Having once set out to use all the data offered in the later volumes, it seemed best in such an ambiguous case to include him, keeping to the most mechanical criteria of choice and thus perhaps enhancing the statistical value ofthe results.

33 VI, 557. Again (VII, 6) Vasari says an event took place in I523, when he was nine. He was twelve in I523, but the event took place in I524 when he was thirteen. It is a turning point in his life, the cause of his going to Florence, but he had it four years too early. This either illustrates a downward exaggeration for the sake of drama, or a lack of a sense of one's age as we know it, or perhaps both.

34 The Rosselli and Baldovinetti reports are in documents pub. by R. G. Mather, Art Bulletin xxx (I948), 45, 26; the old lady of forty-five in S. Orlandi, Beato Angelico (Florence, I964), pp. I76-I77, the second old lady in R. G. Mather, art. cit., p. 54. R. G.




All this suggests that there is no trend, but only a lack of concern about precision on age. But there may be a specific trend for old men to appear even older. When Brunelleschi was fifty he knew his age, but six years later he thought he was over sixty. Jacopo Sansovino died at ninety-three, according to Vasari and a still better source, Jacopo's son Francesco, who was a historian and wrote his father's epitaph; they exaggerated by nine years. Baldovinetti leaps from forty to sixty in ten years, when in probable fact he was going from forty-five to fifty- five.35 If there is indeed a trend toward calling oldish men older, it would throw some light on a phenomenon of Renaissance scholarship that arises often in particular biographies, but seems never to have been noticed as a recurring situation. It may be called the Castagno pattern. In it, biographers assign a birth date far too early, and later correct it upon the discovery of better data. So far as I have been able to learn there are no contrary cases (discounting shifts of no more than two or three years either way, which belong to another situation). Andrea dal Castagno, the classic instance, was cited in all literature before I920 as born cither in I390 or I4I0, but is now understood on rather full evidence to have been born in or near I42I.36 Such an error obviously

Mather's reports contain errors and must be used svith caution; this lady appears in them as the result of an interesting mistake. She and her son are a family group; he is a painter named Francesco di Stefano, born c. I424 and still living c. I469. Mather not surprisingly took these records to be those of Pesellino, a painter born in I422 whose real name was Francesco di Stefano and who lived alone with his mother. He therefore wrote 'I have proved the statement that he died in I457 to be inaccurate.' But if he had checked the statement that Pesellino died in I457, he would have found it to be a firm document, and would probably then have realized that there are two men sharing these factors of name and circumstances, with two sets of tax records, Pesellino who died in I457 and the second obscure painter who was living in I469. This cautionary coincidence will be mentioned further.

35 R. G. Mather, art. cit., 52-53 (Brunelleschi); Vasari, VII, 509 (Sansovino); Mather, art. cit., 27 (Baldovinetti). Brunelleschi possibly advanced his age in an attempt to evade the head tax, from which men over sixty were exempt.

36 Cf. F. Hartt, 'The Earliest Works of Andrea del Castagno', Art Bultetin XLI (I959),

I60, and F. Hartt with G. Corti, 'Andrea del Castagno, three disputed dates', Art Bulletin XLVIII (X966), 228. Hartt cites a tax record showing Castagno aged six in I427, which fixes his birth more precisely than before. But he th'en suggests he may have been born earlier, because 'it was customary for parents to understate the age of their offspring in order to prolong as much as possible the happy period when they could deduct for them as bocche rather than having to pay for them as teste' (I959, p. I60), that Castagno must have been born two years earlier because he appears as a testa, or adult over eighteen, in I437 (I966, p. 229) wrongly altering his I959 report that the adult tax began at fifteen, and that 'the one contention that no one is likely to advance is that a close-fisted Tuscan




makes us question the value ofthe earlier studies relating to him in other respects, the development of his art and his relations with other artists. In the I920S also Caravaggio's birth date was shifted four years later (according to the usual previous date; more than that according to some earlier studies), an important change in an artist who died at thirty-seven. In the I950S Fra Angelico's birth date was shifted about thirteen years later, again obviously affSecting the status of many paintings that had been considered his early work.37 Also in the I950S a wide- ly endorsed rereading of documents shifted Carpaccio's birth date ten years later. A recent writer on Dosso summarizes the present state of the question in saying: 'no one, I think, would any longer risk' rejecting the modern revision of his birth date a decade later.38

montanaro would ever have paid 3 soldi unnecessarily,' i.e. that the date may be too late but certainly cannot be too early. Although this hypothesis would make many wrong records seem consistent or rational and is therefore attractive, it is not tenable. Dependents remain bocche at all ages, and qualify for an unchanging deduction of 200 florins from capital worth. The head tax or testa is paid only on male dependents, between the ages of fifteen and seventy in the country and eighteen to sixty in the city (this double system is the source of Hartt's change, wrong for Castagno's father, a countryman). It is indeed a respectable amount, but is evidently conceived as paid out ofthe income of wage-earning sons living at home. What makes the hypothesis of understated age without any demon- strated cases most questionable is that the mistaken age declarations which it would explain (boys shown too young) appear mingled with others showing to the same extent girls shown too young, boys and girls shown too old, people of other ages with errors either way, and (as with Vasari cited above) boys shown too young when this explanation is not possible. Thus the hypothesis requires explaining the phenomenon in one way for some of the instances, which will not explain its identical pattern for the other instances. Rather than seeking a second explanation for the other cases of girls, etc., we must evidently abandon the theory which only explains boys shown too young, to evade the head tax, and with it the certainty that the age is positively a minimum and likely too young. A classic case of the omnidirection of the errors appears in Benozzo Gozzoli's tax record of I480. His oldest son is shown thirteen years older than in his last report ten years before, making him eighteen and thus just barely subject to tax (the pattern which in Hartt's concept could not occur) while his oldest daughter has aged only nine years ! (Mather, art. cit., 4I-42.) Pure error at some stage seems the best explanation. For a guide to the tax rules, see R. de Roover, The Rise and Fall of the Medici Bank (New York, I966), pp. 2I-3 I, 'The Florentine Catasto'; for the distinction of head tax in the country, see G. Poggi in Rivista d'Arte VII (I929), 43 i.

37 B.Joffroy, Le Dossier Caravage (Paris; I959), pp. 2I, 2I6, 2I7, surveys the history of this research. Although since I930 the old date I569 has generally given way to the well- proven I573, a writer in I958 could still give it as I565 without remark (G. Bazin, A History of Art, New York, I958, p. 30I). On Angelico see C. Gilbert, review of S. Orlandi, op. cit., Art Bulletin XLVII (I965), 273.

38 T. Pignatti, 'Proposte per la data di nascita di Vittore Carpaccio,' Venezia e l'Europa (I955), p. 224 f.; L. Puppi, Dosso al Buonconsiglio, Arte Veneta XVIII (I964), I9.




All these isolated alterations show documents correcting false assumptions, which reflected in turn Renaissance references to forty-five-year- old artists as 'old' taken to mean sixty-five, or else the cases of eighteen- year-old adult artists with shops taken to be at least twenty-five. The parallel to earlier aging is earlier maturing, which we have equally not taken into account; the commissions received by Mantegna and Raphael as masters at seventeen are impressive, but not prodigious. Indeed it seems to have been normal to have been established by twenty,39 and rare to achieve first prominence after twenty-five; all the artists in the preceding paragraph had come to their peak of success in their careers well before thirty. There seem not to be any late-flowering masters like David, Goya,40 Cezanne or De Kooning, who at thirty-five had not yet turned from imitative juvenilia to the kind of work by which we know them. Thus we have, taking our own habits for the norm, found that our estimate of the age of first recognition confirmed our estimate of when old age begins, so that together they seemed to make hypothe- sized birth dates firm indeed, but in fact they were both errors on the same side. If this is so, the Castagno pattern might be exploited in an organized way, by checking all our undocumented birth dates. Doubt of their accuracy might be signaled when two factors appear together:

39 C. Gilbert, 'The Earliest Work of Pordenone', Arte Veneta XVI, (I962), I53, briefly lists some eight cases. Others whose signatures, commissions, or the like show them independent and recognized at nineteen or twenty are Girolamo dai Libri, Domenico Campagnola, Correggio, Parmigianino, Moretto, Veronese, Perino del Vaga, Pierino da Vinci, Vasari, Muziano. When Pierino da Vinci died at twenty-three, according to Vasari, attention was paid to his untimely death but no one remarked that he had been exceptional in developing a career at such an age, nor have modern scholars, who seem to have entered unconsciously into Renaissance attitudes in a way that will be discussed below. (Milanesi rejected the birth date as too late, perhaps for this reason, but has not been confirmed by later specialists.) The broad question, parallel to the present study, is: when could a boy in the Renaissance be called a man? An answer may be suggested by two texts already cited. The fifteenth-century laws of Venice used by Pignatti to alter Carpaccio's birth date (toc. cit.) make a male responsible for buying and selling real estate withollt supervision at fourteen, and Elyot in I534 (op. cit., f. 4I) speaks of boys and then of 'Yonge men, exceeding the age of xiiii yeres.' Apprenticeships of painters most often ended at fourteen or fifteen, and Vasari, consistent with that, tells of a work painted at fifteen (though he may not have had that right) by an artist in competition with another who had 'been his competitor already in boyhood' (£:ia nelt'eta puerile; v, 596). Pending full study, we must certainly avoid the common remark that so-and-so must have been more than the reported twenty-two or so to receive such an important commission.

40 But Goya wrote to a friend in I787 'I have become old,' although he 'was no more than forty-one' as a recent observer noticed (M. Levey, Rococo to Revolution, New York, I966, p. 208). By now the modern observer's hesitancy may be as familiar as the statement itself. Professor Robert W. Berger kindly called this text to my attention.




(I) a birth date is based on a reference to the artist's general age recorded later in his life, and (2) the birth date thus fixed leaves an early decade of his career blank as to known activities, and filled up either with attributed works only or the inference that he matured late. It is not hard to find more instances.

Bertoldo's career has the following fixed points in current standard works:4l (I) born about I420; (2) first recorded I460, as Donatello's assistant; (3) 'old in the I480S, when curator of the Medici garden and mentor of the boy Michelangelo; (4) died I49I. The third point is the sole basis for the first, and it is no basis at all. The birth date should probably be moved up to about I435, making him old at fifty rather than sixty-five. This avoids the forty-year blank, which is the truly implausible factor here, while old age in the fifties has only appeared to be.

The Pisan painter Turino Vanni is uncontroversially presented as follows:42 (I) bonn I349; (2) first recorded I390, after that often and regularly; (3)1tlI427 reports his age as seventy-eight; (4) receives an order for a painting in I438. If we are willing to doubt the third point, and suppose that he was not the seventy-eight he thought but about sixty-five, we can be extricated from the two problems of an early career that only starts at forty-one and a late one continuing to eighty- ine. That both could have happened should at least excite remark, but

they have been accepted because tlle document has, as always, been accepted as gospel. (Another difficulty, the objection that the blallk before age forty-one might result from accidental loss of records, is possible, but inconsistent with their random and fairly thick recur- rence thereafter.)

Girolamo Savoldo is regularly described as born about I480, on the sole ground of a reference to him as 'decrepit' in I548. This makes him appear to have joined the painters' guild in Florence at twenty-eight.43 A birth date some six years later is at least equally likely. Jan Calcar has been mentioned briefly. All modern reports say he was

(I) born I499 or I500. He was (2) first recorded I535 or I537, and thereafter very often indeed; and (3) last reported alive in I545, when visited by Vasari, who says that S0011 after this he died 'you1zg.' The data strongly suggest revising the birth date to I5I0 or I5I5, both to

41 J. Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Greenwich, I958), p. 3I8; C.

Seymour, Sculpture in Italy 1400 to 1500 (Baltimore, I966), p. 259.

42 E. Carli, Pittura pisana del trecento, la seconda meta (Milan, I96I), pp. 808I.

43 C. Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo ([diss.], University Microfilms, I956),

p. I4 ff.



C1E t! Tf T T1iT fq TT 1) T!S% ADltJtl 1 V1Y tJlDlJ£Al 25

avoid the implausible shift as late as irtfive from a blank to success, and also to be consistent with what Vasari seems always to mean by a youthfbl death, before irty five rather than before fifty. But this set of reports diSers from the previous ones in a curious way; there is no ele- ment offered to prove or support the biri date of I499 or I500. Indeed, a search for its first emergence in the literature proved baffling. Nothing relaiing to Calcar's biri appears in the early writers from Vasari to the seventeenth century, nor} for that matter} in the sparse modern literature of monographic articles.44 Instead it appears as a standard item in dictionaries of biography} including the major ones of Nagler} Wuro bach, and Thieme-Becker, although (a very rare situation) nothing in their entries nor in the works cited in their bibliograpliies provides a basis for it.45 So far as enquiry has been able to go, the date seems to have been spontaneously generated in dictionaries in the mlddle of the eighteenth century. Until a better explanation emerges, the best seems to be that it stems from a conl7entional assumption that Calcar must have been smature} when he received the great commission for the Vesalius illustrations in I538.46

1Ee case of Titian has probably occurred to the reader. The trall- tional account of his life runs that he (I) was born in I477, (2) first appears with a commission in I507; (3) recorded his age as ninety five in I572; and (4) died in I576. The death at ninety-nine of course has always drawn attention, along with the ariist's fame, so that unlike all the others iis case hz receved study. Gronau raised the ohjection iat Tiiian's first appearance is unlikely to have waited until he was thirty. 44 Vasari, Van Mander and Sandrart, the earliest sources} all begin when Calcar is

adult, as does Baldinucci in the late searenteenth century, not a primary source. In his life the missing birth date is actually marked by a dash, at least in a later edition (F. Baldinuc- ci} Notlzie de' Proori da Disegno, I8II , 336- snato morto I546'). The modern spalized ariicles ignore not only the birth date, but the asseriion of it irv reference works. J. WolSin ZeitErflfiler b1ldde K"rt XI (I876), 375-379} H. Hymans in L'art, XX (I883), 65.

45 The birth date is sil absent in the pioneering dictonary of artists by Orlandi, often printed in the eighteenth century. But it appears, surely not for the first time} iw the anonynlous dictionary issued in London in I7852 and always thereafter. A minority of early nineteenth-ceIltury dictionaries beginning with the outstanding archivist Ticozzi in I8IS, oSer the more intelligent guess 'born c. ISIo,} but this current has died out.

46 How unrealistic such a concept would be appears from thle fact that the giver ofthe commissioIl, the great anatomist Vesalius, was himself twentySfive at the time. A vivid explanaton for his choice of the unknown Calcar is suggested by the fact that Vesalius, as his name reveals, came from Wesel, while Calar came from Calcar} twenty rlliles downriver from Wesel on the Rhine. The meeting wii his Lansnann in Padua can well be imagined.




Indeed this is a stronger objection than Gronau could have known, writing before the late shifts of birth date for Caravaggio and others which indicate that such late emergence is unparalleled. But he did not convince those who relied on Titian's own statement that he was ninety- five in IS72, and Gronau's case was weakened because he agreed with his opponents that Titian must have known how old he was. He therefore had to suggest that Titian was lying to appeal for sympathy. A counterarticle by F. L. Mather, which conveniently assembles all the evidence,47 easily replied that an appeal by an eighty-five-year-old would hardly have been less impressive, and thus the traditional early birth date has survived, even though Mather was equally lame in trying to fill up the blank early years by supposing that a known apprentice- ship as a mosaicist lasted six years. Now that we know that the aged Titian is not a good witness of his age in anything like the sense in which anyone would be today, the position alters. Among the documents, the most valuable is perhaps a letter to Titian written by his friend Aretino in IS42, since it is the f1rst allusion to the artist's age as of the current date; Aretino remarks to him that he is in the ripeness of old age, 'la maturita della vecchiezza.' Assuming twentieth-century attitudes, Mather quite naturally reacted that it 'would be simply absurd' to speak so to a man in his f1fties. We on the contrary can now report that it would be normal, and even notice that, if Aretino was talking in the semitechnical sense defined in IS34 by Elyot, the term would cease to f1t after sixty. Happily, students of Titian have usually accepted the later revised birth date, very possibly because of a right instinct about all the factors, even though the factor of the Renaissance concept of old age might still seem unfamiliar. Jacopo de' Barbari, as hinted at the beginning, oSers an intricate case.

In the standard summary he (I) was born in or before I450; (2) iS first

recordedin I497, and thenin every year except one; (3) is described off1cially as 'old and weak' in I 5 I I; and (4) died about I 5 I 5- The blank early years are a more pressing problem here than elsewhere, because of their remarkable length up to age forty-seven, because of the diametric shift to constant records thereafter, and because special students seem to have done nothing to try to fill the blank. All this certainly seems to call for a revision of the birth date to the I470S. The early date has been supported solely by the report of his being 'old and weak', and this has some curious features. The f1rst is that it is always mentioned as being

47 'When was Titian Born?' Art Bulletin xx (I93 8), I2 i.




of IS II, although its date corresponds to March I5I2, new style;48 since all the other dates are being discussed in terms of new style, the birth date can on those terms be moved later by one year.

The second curious feature is more important. The function of the document in which Jacopo is old and weak is to grant him a pension. That appears to reinforce the suggestion of old age, and seems to have been assumed even by the most authoritative students to be an old-age pension.49 It is not, and iis reading again has assumed our patterns. Yet even today, when the chief meaning of pension is 'payment by goverllment in consideration of past services,' the Concise Oxford Dic- tzonary oSers as a second meaning 'payment to artists, etc., to enable them to carry on work of public interest'. What the document actually assigns to Jacopo is a 'pension et provision.' It is another unfortunate accident, almost a third factor of error, that while 'pension' has changed its main meaning, 'provision' has become obsolete, so that only 'pension' 11as been noticed. 'Provision' is the ordinary word for salary (apart from its other, easily separable meanings), regular pay for a post as distinguished from pay for a single task; Raphael received a 'provisione' from the Pope as architect of St. Peter's, while also being paid for specific paintings. Examples of the term are easily available.50 'Pension' is almost a synonym, as the use of both words here suggests,

48 A. de Hevesy,Jacopo de' Barbari (Paris-Brussels), I925, p. 37.

49 P. Kristeller in Thieme-Becker (II, I908, 46I) says thatJacopo was assuredly (zwar) born between I440 and I450 because (da) in I 5 I I he was provided with a pension as being old and feeble. While keeping close to the wording of the document, this use of it leaves no doubt that Kristeller assumed the pension to reflect old age in the sense of retirement, and thus discounted the later clauses anticipating Jacopo's future work.

50 On Raphael see Golzio, op. cit., p. 29. In Florence in I4I7 a will assigns a monk a salario overo provisione of twenty florins a year for saying masses, more than the annual earnings of a servant (Orlandi, op. cit., p. I80). A clerical income from a clerical source would probably be a pension; see below. Ghiberti was required by his contract to work all day on every working day, as one does who is a provisione (Vasari, ed. K. Frey, Vite, I, i, 354). Vasari offers many examples of the provisione as a regular salary: the four hundred scudi a year paid Girolamo da Treviso by Henry VIII (V, I38), the 'usual stipendio e provisione' paid to Salviati (VII, 30), a gran provisione offiered Vasari by the King of France (VII, 33), other cases (v, 554; VI, 366; VII, 86) and perhaps most vividly an anecdote about Antonio da Sangallo. He was annoyed because he did all the work as architect of St. Peter's but had the same provisione as one Melighino, a dull-witted old retainer who had been given the title to 'provide' for him. When the Pope asked Melighino for a sketch to compare with Antonio's and others, Antonio thought he was being teased and complained: 'Holy Father, Melighino is only an architect in jest,' but was told: 'We wish him to be an architect in truth, and you see that from the provisione.' As this neatly implies, the word does not mean salary for a job done but for a job held, a regular stipend for any cause, among which a pension after retirement can be included (v, 47I).




but can be subtly distinguished. A 'pension' is also a regular stipend, but may not be for doing anything; clerical benefices, smecures, and schol- arships seem to illustrate it. The 'pensionnaires' of the Villa Medici are the young artists on government grants. Luigi Lanzi received a 'pen- sione' on becoming director of antiquities in Floretlce, perhaps because he was an abbe.5l Most often the distinction from salary seems lost, as with the pensionaries, city managers, found in Dutch towns from the fifteenth century. A happy token of the distinction appears in Rome in IS23. Michelangelo, carving the tombs of the Pope's relatives, was oSered his choice, with the explanation that the pension had the advan- tage that it would continue after the patron died, but the disadvantage tllat the artist must take or orders and vow not to marry. (He took the 'provisione.'52) He was then 'old' at forty-eight, but obviously 110t thinking of an old-age pension. All of this obviously has no relation to age at all, and provisions are on record assigned to men who could not work.53 Apparently in the sixteenth century old-age pensions were so rare that no term for it existed.

Thus among three apparent statements inJacopo's pension document two are not really in it. It does not say that in I 5 I I he was old and weak and pensioned off, but that in ISI2 he was old and weak and granted an assured income. This also clarifies added clauses which have beell little emphasized, expressing the wish that he will continue working as in the past, and justifying the stipend on the ground that his weakness pre- cludes other earnings. The weakness was real, as we can tell from the other documents, which are medical bills, and from his death three years later. It may have accelerated his age. Thus the birth date in the ] 470s seems more likely than the earlier one. But the last and most spectacular complication is a painting, the 51 D. Bertolotti, 'Notizie intorno alla vita . . . dell'Ab. Lanzi,' in: Lanzi, Storia pittorica

della Italia (6th ed., Milan, I823), p. Viii.

52 Sammlung ausgewaeSllter Briefe an Michelagniolo, ed. I(. Frey (Berlin, I899), pp. 20I,

204. The provisiofle was fifty ducats a month. 53 Pope Sixtus IV gave the painter L'Ingogno a provisione when he became blind

(Vasari, III, 595), and the Duke of Ferrara gave one to Dosso when, in his fifties, he was living out his last years without working, as noticed above, although in the same passage Vasari contradicted himself by mentioning work done then. An internlediate case is Aristotile da Sangallo, who in his sixties w-as given a provisione of ten scudi a month by the Duke of Florence and told lle would be called for when needed, but was never asked to work (VI, 449). The patron's gracious gesture is to say it is not charity but a post with a prolJisione; this story seems very similar toJacopo de' Barbari's case. Thus the text about Jacopo does not indicate that he was working or retired, but the latter has always been supposed.




remarkable portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli, signed with the inscription 'Jaco. Bar. vigennis P. I495'. This report of the 'twenty-year-old' artist ill I495 would seem to fit the conclusion just reached, and oppose the traditional one. But instead it is usual to hypothesize two persons, the 'Jaco. Bar.' who was twenty in I495 and the other painter who first emerges in I497. To be sure, the hypothesis of doubles oSers also the argument that the style of the Pacioli portrait differs from the later works of Jacopo de' Barbari, but that point seems less forceful when it is observed that it arose only after the pension document became known; before that, the Pacioli portrait had been related to the others without question. Thus the view that there are two men depends entirely on the assumption that an old man is over sixty, and illustrates its great strength. For the two-man view requires acceptance also of an added series of coincidences,54 which are possible, though as implausible as old age before sixty has been thought to be, and which certainly would have been thrown out of court without its support. Once it is removed, the links between the paintings can also reemerge.55 To identifyJacopo 'vigennis' in I49S withJacopo 'vieux' in I5I2 will indeed still seem uncomfort-

54 The existence oftwoJacopos requires the following assumptions, partly summarized from the preceding, usually made without considering them: (I) one appears for the only time at twenty in I495, and the other first appears at an older age in I497; (2) both belong to the same subgroup ofthe painters in Venice (where Pacioli was in I495); (3) both are superior exponents ofthat style, successful in their contact with mathematical intellectuals, Pacioli in one case and Duerer in the other; (4) only one appears in documents. An interesting 'control' is provided by the proved existence oftwo Florentine painters named Francesco di Stefano, cited above, of the same age, and both the only sons of widows. While Francesco and Stefano are very common names, 'Bar.' may not stand for 'Barbari', so that the two cases may have an equal likelihood of coincidence as to names. But two factors found in the Francesco case do not reappear in the other: (I) of the two Fran- cescos one was notable, the other a completely obscure artisan, while bothJacopos were successful, so that the field within which we must look for two similar men is much smaller; (2) the problem of the two Francescos was fully solved by finding two sets of documents in the same archive, but only one set ofJacopo documents exists.

55 Bernard Berenson, who believed that there were two painters involved, provides a striking suggestion of their closeness to each other in style. His Venetian Painters of the Renaissance includes reproductions of the largest number of artists of this school ever collected, arranged in a continnum from artist to stylistically related artist. In the maxi- mum inventory, 'Jaco. Bar.' and Jacopo de' Barbari are adjacent. Thus they are two men but have virtually the same way of working aB l,vell as the same name. In general, criticism has found 'Jaco. Bar.' a Venetian in the late tradition of Antonello da Messina, and Barbari a slightly later Venetian in the orbit of Alvise Vivarini, who had been an imitator of Antonello da Messina. Thus with a known blank of some five years between their paintings, the diSlculty of blending the two persons seems not very great; elsewhere I have discussed two paintings that seem to me this personality's intermediate works. See 'Alvise e Compagni', Studi in Onore di L. Ve,tttlri (Rorre, I956), I, 284 ff*.



30 WHEI!T DID REI!TAISSAI!ICE MAI!T GROW OLD?

able, and yet the contemporary attitudes previously studied suggest various appropriate ways in which it could have happened.56

If conventional wisdom remains the strongest power for rejection of these observations, they may in conclusion be supported by bnnging another convention to their aid. Thus we would certainly today call a notable person's retirement in the late forties and death in the early fifties abnormal; told of someone who retired and died, with no men- tion of unusual circumstances, we would exclude those ages from our conception of the events. Yet it is equally habitual for us to think of Shakespeare as an artist who had a full span of life, from early obscurity, to maturity, and then in the late style usually linked with The Tempest his period of'reposeful contemplation,'57 only after that retiring from work. It is shocking to recall that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest and retired at forty-seven, and died five years later; yet Shakespeare himself had also remarked that a man at forty was old.58 In a sense this study is intended only to induce a conscious general application of what we do when we think of Shakespeare in old age, in his forties.59 Nor is Shake- speare exceptional. Tasso, who died at fifty, dwelt on his 'infirmity and old age' in an unusually autobiographical essay, according to the unsur- prised but also unspecifying comment of a distinguished scholar in

56 The previous survey suggests three ways in which a twenty-year-old might become an old man in seventeen years. (I ) Literally following those figures, he was old at thirty- seven. This is not an absurdity, since it is stated by Erasmus, a Rotterdamer writing in ISo6, who presumably held the same views as a Brabanter clerk in I5I2. (2) Vigennis does not mean twenty-year-old in the exclusive sense of a single year, but might mean say twenty-three, a noun for which there is apparently no Latin adjective. (3) Jacopo was mistaken about his age to the same extent as Vasari and Cosimo Rosselli. Both in their twenties misstated their ages by six years, one too old and one too young. He would then be twenty-six in I49S, and a respectably old forty-three in ISI2. These suggestions reach the edge of what the evidence permits, but not beyond it. (The traditional view, old age as a minimum of sixty, does that.) Perhaps most plausibly, a partial presence of two factors would makeJacopo vigennis twenty-three (either by a three-year error or because Vigennis means that) and old at forty.

57 The phrase of the anonymous editor of Shakespeare's Historical Plays (Everyman Edition, eleventh repr., London, I927), p. Vii.

58 In Sonnet Two, beginning 'When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,' the thir- teenth line with the phrase 'when thou art old' is certainly a recapitulation of the first, with the same meaning.

59 When a poet died in I966 at fifty-three a fellow writer said he 'died youngish,' and the word strikes us as reasonable, but has probably never been applied to Shakespeare, who died at fifty-two. The contrast suggests that we consider Shakespeare old and thus adopt the Renaissance attitude which, when we are conscious of the age of even a Ren- aissaIlce person, we exclude. (Dwight Macdonald, 'Delmore Schwartz', New York Review of Books, 8 September I966, p. I6.)



CREIGHTOI!T GILBERT 31

Studies in the Renaissance in Ig63.60 Tasso wrote this at forty-one. In lists of people whom we accept as having lived full lives, without

noticing that their deaths are very early in our terms, Renaissance kings might have a large role. Henry VIII, who died at fifty-six, outlived ten of the eleven English rulers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the interminable Henry VI who died at forty-nirle. He also outlived his great rival Francis I (fifty-three), whose long reign spanned the patronage of Leonardo and Primaticcio, and just missed matching his greater rival Charles v (fifty-eight). These three are not unusual; their predecessors, Henry VII, Louis XII, and Maximilian, died at fifty-two, fifty-three, and fifty-nine years and ten months respectively, and all six, except Louis XII, left their mark by being long in power. This in turn was because they normally came to the throne very young, Henry VIII

at eighteen, Francis I at twenty-one, Charles v at nineteen, a fact again obscure to us because they took full power at once, and resulting of course from the age at death of their predecessors. Thus our failure to think of them as dying before their time, as we ought by our usual standard, derives in part from our failure to think of the predecessors as dying young, and as with the artists in part from our other convention of assuming maturity comes later. The case of the kings has two special advantages. First, unlike every one else they had birth dates that no one forgot, so that our sense that they lived full spans does not result from contemporary mistakes or vagueness.61 Second, they presumably had a better expectation of life than any one else, so that their arrival at old age may be treated as a ceiling for others. They too considered themselves old. When Charles v abdicated he apologized for weeping because he was 'old and feeble in all my members.'62

One group in the Renaissance outlived kings the Popes. Nor did they start their reigns at twenty-one. Popes may for our purposes be characterized as a group selected by longevity. Indeed Renaissance Popes, like those today, were old in the same sense of being much older than other people. The average age at death of Popes since I800 iS

seventy-nine, far above average. Simllarly, the average age at death of Renaissance Popes is sixty-four, also far above average. That mlght be a set of figures with which to formulate the change between the periods,

60 D. Della Terza, 'Tasso's Experience of Petrarch', Studies in the Renaissance, x, I75. 61 But the ages of rulers too could be exaggerated as they receded only slightly into the

past. Duke Frederick of Urbino died at sixty, but Castiglione, who lived at the court of his son, said he had died at sixty-five. (Cortegiano, I, iii.)

62 The phrase is quoted without remark in the article on Charles in the Encyclopedia Britaslnica.



32 WHEI!T DID REI!TAISSAI!ICE MAI!T GROW OLD?

since the Papacy has been nearly a constant. Other curious comparisons easily emerge: only three modern Popes died at seventy or less, only three Renaissance Popes attained that age. The median age at election of modern Popes is older than the median age at death of Renaissance Popes; the significance of this is that our habit is to think of both as old in the same marlner. Renaissance Popes were elected on average at fifty- four (very old, a normal age of death for kings) and had average reigns of ten years.63 That is close to twentieth-century American presidents, fifty-four on average at their first inaugurations and with a modal ten- ure of eight years. Another formula thus might be that, as these two groups are alike in arithmetical age, their unlikeness in cultura] or psy- chological age (the one group held to be at the peak of maturity, the other venerable) is the measure of the change.

The most recent historian of the Habsburgs alludes to Charles v's abdication speech and, as the reason for his step, ill health but not old age.64 If that is a suppression because it seemed unreasonable, we might instead prefer to recall that this Charles, who called fifty-five old, had been brought up in the Flemish court at the very time when the court painterJacopo de' Barbari got the 'pension' as an old man that has been held to prove he was over sixty. Evidently we must use the data in relation to the variety of situations,65 as when today the recipient of a Festschrift at seventy is understood to be shifting from more routine labors to a more active concentration on his research. Brandeis University CREIGHTON GILBERT

63 Of fifteen Renaissance Popes, only two lived beyond seventy-two. (For this purpose the Renaissance runs from the Council of Constance to the Council of Trent, I4IS-ISS°-) This casts an interesting sidelight on what must have seemed fantastic in Michelangelo's survival, for instance in ISS° when he was seventy-five and was the only living man included in the first edition of Vasari's Lives. Of course Vasari put him there in admira- tion, but his patriarchal status must have made it seem more natural. Paul III, elected as one of the oldest Renaissance Popes at sixty-six (beyond the average age at death of the others) lived to be the oldest at eighty-one, which would be normal today. His unique lont,evity also illuminates a passage in Vasari's life of Michelangelo that has seemed peculiar. When Paul was elected Michelangelo resisted his attempts to employ him, saying he was 'so old' that perhaps he could put him off*with words. But twelve years later he was working for him.

64 A. Wandruszka, Tlle House of Habsburg (I!Tew York, I964), pp. 98-99.

65 A large shift halfway toward our patterns may possibly have occurred in the seventeenth century. The twelve seventeenth-century Popes were on average elected at sixty- six and died at seventy-five, but this may also be a matter of post-Tridentine policies. Perhaps more interesting is the statement of Cesare Ripa that virilita runs from age thirty-five to fifty, and old age from fifty to seventy. (Iconologia, Padua, I630, p. three, pp. I76, I46.) This statement can be pinpointed to the year 1603; it does not appear in Ripa's first edition of IS93, nor the second of I602 which is a reprint, but does appear in the much altered third of I603. (Professor Allan H. Gilbert kindly made this collation for me.)



gilbert, c., when did a man in the renaissance grow old_#a2d6

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