VAN DER GOES, HUGO
(ca. 1440-1482). Flemish painter, active at Bruges until 1478, when he entered a monastery. Although he painted for a brief period after he became a lay brother, he suffered from profound depression and abandoned his art. His best-known work is the Portinari Altarpiece (ca. 1476), executed for a wealthy Florentine businessman active in Bruges and placed in his family chapel in Florence, where it was much admired. Other works include The Fall of Man (ca. 1470), a Lamentation (ca. 1470), the Monforte Altarpiece, treating the Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1472), and two late works which are sometimes interpreted as showing evidence of the artist’s emotional instability, a Nativity (ca. 1480) and The Dormition of the Virgin (ca. 1480), depicting the death of Mary.
VAN DER WEYDEN, ROGIER
(ca. 1399-1464). Flemish painter, in his own time considered second only to Jan van Eyck among Northern European artists. Influenced by both van Eyck and Robert Campin, he produced a large body of brilliantly colored and exquisitely detailed paintings in a number of genres. His earliest major work, Deposition from the Cross (ca. 1435), is notable for its striking depiction of emotion. In 1450 Rogier made the jubilee pilgrimage to Rome and left behind two paintings that show Italian influence, Virgin and Child with Four Saints (also called the Medici Madonna) and Farewell at the Tomb. In general, however, his work after 1450 shows little significant Italian influence. He painted many portraits, among which the most striking are Portrait of Francesco d’Este, Portrait of a Lady, and Philippe de Croy, the latter paired with the most striking of his treatments of the theme Virgin and Child.
VAN EYCK, HUBERT AND JAN
Flemish artists, brothers. Another brother, Lambert, and a sister, Margaret, were also painters, but almost nothing is known about their work. Relatively little is known about Hubert, the elder of the two famous brothers. He seems to have headed a workshop at Ghent and to have died in 1426. Only one painting is securely attributed to him, Three Marys at the Tomb, and it survives only in a copy painted about 1440. Several early van Eyck paintings are variously attributed to Hubert or Jan, such as The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment, both dated 1420-1425. Some art historians have even speculated that Hubert was a fictitious artist, though this is not the prevailing view.
Jan van Eyck, on the other hand, is a well documented figure with many surviving paintings, some of them signed and dated. He was born about 1490, worked in the 1420s in Holland and at Lille, but was also active as a member of the court of Duke Philip the Good at Bruges. He not only served as the duke’s court painter but also became a member of diplomatic delegations in 1426 and 1427 and executed an extensive mission in Spain and Portugal in 1428-1429. The most famous van Eyck work is the Ghent Altarpiece, also known as the Altarpiece of the Lamb, a collection of panels that quickly became an object of admiration for visitors to the Netherlands. This vast work seems to have been begun by Hubert but was left unfinished when he died in 1426. At some later date, probably not until the early 1430s, Jan took over the project. Since it was finished by 1432 and Jan would have had no time to work on it before January 1430, it seems likely that much of the work had been completed (or brought close to completion) by Hubert before his death, but there is no way to determine which panels are mostly the work of Hubert and which the work of Jan. The most striking parts of the altarpiece are the central panel in the lower range of the open altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb, a symbolic eucharistic scene inspired by the Book of Revelation, and the two nude figures of Adam and Eve placed at the far left and right of the upper range of panels.
Jan settled in Bruges in 1430, married, and purchased an elegant house. After completing the great altarpiece, he continued painting, recognized as the greatest figure of the Flemish school of painting. Many of his works survive. Among the best known of them are Madonnas, of which Madonna and Child with Saints Michael and Catherine (1437) and Madonna with Chancellor Nicolas Rolin (1435) are noteworthy. Jan painted many portraits, of which the early Portrait of Tymotheos (1432), probably a portrait of the court musician Gilles Binchois, and Man in a Red Turban (ca. 1433), perhaps a self-portrait of the artist, are the most striking. In a class by itself is his Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434), which is more than a wedding picture of an Italian merchant and his bride, but is intended to be a legal record of the marriage and contains a number of striking symbolic elements including a representation of the artist himself reflected in a mirror, present because he is a witness to the wedding vows. The work of Jan van Eyck (especially, but not exclusively, the great altar-piece) was widely admired, not only in the Netherlands but in many parts of Europe. Some of the earliest enthusiastic descriptions of his work were written by Italian travellers.
VARCHI, BENEDETTO
(1503-1565). Florentine humanist. He studied law at the Universty of Pisa and Aristotelian philosophy at Padua, but because of his inherited wealth was free to devote much time to mastering Greek and Provençal. His support of the uprising against Medici rule of Florence in 1527 forced him into exile, but in 1543 Duke Cosimo de’Medici permitted him to return to the city, where he became a member of the ducal court, joined the Florentine Academy, and lectured on Dante and Petrarch. In 1547 Cosimo asked Varchi to write a history of Florence, and his Storia Fiorentina, based on careful use of documents and frank in its criticism of some of the Medici, is now regarded as his principal work, but it was not published until 1721. His contemporaries admired him for his vast memory, his rich lingistic knowledge, and his poems in both Latin and Tuscan. He wrote a comedy, La suocera / The Mother-in-Law, orations, works of literary criticism, and a grammar of the Provençal language. Varchi’s treatise Er-colano was a contribution to contemporary debates on language and supports the humanists’ contention that usage is more important than authority and reason in determining good practice in any language. He defended the use of the contemporary Florentine form of Tuscan against critics who attacked usages not found in the great 14th-century writers. On the other hand, as a great admirer of the "Three Crowns" (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), he also argued that a good stylist must be familiar with the language as used by the best writers of the past.
VASARI, GIORGIO
(1511-1574). Italian artist and architect, best known as the author of a highly influential history of art. The son of an artisan of Arezzo, he received a good vernacular education and had sufficient command of Latin to read works in that language, but not to write in it. He moved to Florence in 1524 as a member of the household of Alessandro and Ippolito de’Medici and maintained connections with important literary figures of his time. His artistic training began in Arezzo, where he worked with a French glass painter, but later he associated with more important artists, including Andrea del Sarto and Rosso Fiorentino. Vasari had strong support from the Medici family and from important figures at the papal curia. As a painter, he was highly productive, heading a large workshop and accepting commissions great and small. His Deeds of Pope Paul III, painted for the pope’s grandson Alessandro Farnese in 1546, and his paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence (1555-1572) were his most notable achievements as a painter. He was also an architect. The Loggia of the Uffizi Palace in Florence (1560) was inspired by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. He designed the De Monte chapel in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio at Rome, and rebuilt the Gothic church of the Pieve in Arezzo.
As a painter and architect, Vasari was successful and competent, but not especially memorable. His greatest achievement was literary, his book Le vite de’piu eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani / The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550; enlarged edition, 1568). In this topic he expresses admiration for classical art as a standard of excellence and notes its decline in the fourth century. The art of the subsequent period (medieval art) was inferior, in part because it produced images that were flat rather than natural-looking. He attributed the beginning of a revival of good art to the late 13 th century because of the paintings of Cimabue and especially Giotto. He defined a second era of "rebirth" that began with the paintings of Masaccio and the sculptures of Donatello. The third and most perfect period was defined by the works of the three great High Renaissance artists, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
In general, success in realistic representation of nature was the standard by which Vasari judged the quality of each age and each artist. His three-part division of Renaissance art, and his definition of medieval art as inferior and Renaissance art as a new age of artistic glory, influenced all subsequent art critics and historians, and while his denigration of medieval art was largely abandoned during the 19th century, his categories for classifying Renaissance art still are influential. His book also provided useful biographical information on individual artists, especially useful for those of the High Renaissance period since many of their pupils and other contemporaries were still alive when he wrote.
VENEZIANO, DOMENICO
(ca. 1410-1460). Italian painter, probably a native of Venice, who settled in Florence in 1439 and under the influence of the works of Masaccio adopted the new Florentine Renaissance style of painting, though his use of color is reminiscent of the Venetian tradition. Very little is known about any part of his career, especially its beginning, and his productivity seems to have been rather limited. Yet he influenced later Florentine painting with his typically Venetian emphasis on color and light, and the ablest painter of the next generation, Piero della Francesca, is recorded as one of his assistants in the execution of a major commission, a fresco cycle of scenes from the life of the Virgin in the church of St. Egidio at Florence, which does not survive. The Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari attributed to him the introduction of oil paints into Tuscan art. This claim is no longer tenable, but he may have been among the earliest Tuscans to use oil effectively.
Veneziano’s best-known surviving work is the so-called St. Lucy altarpiece, a colorful and striking series of paintings for the church of Sta. Lucia de’Magnoli at Florence, which subsequently was divided. The central panel, Madonna and Child with Saints (ca. 1445), is now in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, but the predella panels are scattered. Other works of reasonably certain attribution are the early Adoration of the Magi (1439-1441), the Carnesecchi Madonna (ca. 1440), and three renditions of the Virgin and Child. One of his last works is Saints John the Baptist and Francis (1445-1461).
VENICE
City of northeastern Italy, center of a substantial territorial state during the Renaissance period, an active participant in Italian political and military affairs, and one of only two major Italian city-states to retain its republican political forms into the later Renaissance. Venice was founded during the sixth and seventh centuries when refugees fleeing the invasion of Italy by the Germanic Lombards took refuge on a small cluster of islands just off the Adriatic coast. By the year 1000 these small communities had coalesced into a municipality ruled by an elected duke (doge in the Venetian dialect) and several councils representing the merchant community. The city became rich from foreign trade, especially in luxury commodities (spices and cotton and silk cloth, among others) obtained through trade with the Muslim world and the Byzantine Empire. Early Venice had close contacts with Constantinople and regarded itself as in many respects a Byzantine rather than a western European community.
The city profited from the crusades by providing shipping and naval support to the crusaders, in return for which it acquired a share in the loot and (more important) commercial privileges in the Byzantine Empire and in the crusading states of the Levantine coast. During the 14th century, Venice contended with the rival commercial city of Genoa in a series of wars, mostly fought at sea. The War of the Chioggia (1379-1380) ended in a definitive victory for Venice, which from that time was the dominant commercial power in the eastern Mediterranean and acquired a number of island colonies (especially Crete). Although Venice had profited from its long relationship with the Byzantines, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was not a total loss. Venice retained control of many of its island colonies and developed an active commerce with the new Turkish rulers. In the 16th century, as the Turks became an increasing naval threat, Venice contributed significantly to the Christian fleet that defeated the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Venice remained a significant maritime power into the 17th century but gradually lost status as Mediterranean commerce declined in importance.
During its early history, Venice was exclusively a sea power and neither had nor desired territory in mainland Italy. Toward the end of their struggle with Genoa, however, the Venetians joined alliances against Giangaleazzo Visconti, the ambitious duke of Milan, whose expansion into northeastern Italy threatened to disrupt the city’s food supply and trade links through the eastern Alpine passes to northern Europe. Venice took advantage of the temporary collapse of the Milanese state after the death of Duke Giangaleazzo (1402) to acquire a large mainland territory and by 1422 had brought Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Belluno under Venetian rule. These territorial acquisitions changed the relationship of Venice to the rest of Italy. Before 1402, Venice studiously avoided involvement in Italian political conflicts. But with a mainland empire to defend, the republic could no longer function solely as a sea power tending to its business in the eastern Mediterranean.
The revival of Milanese territorial expansion after 1425 forced Venice to fight on land in order to maintain its food supplies and access to its markets in northern Europe. Although the Venetians were unable to prevent the accession of Francesco Sforza to the Milanese throne and only reluctantly approved the peace treaty of 1454 that recognized his title, the settlement left Venice secure in its mainland territories, a situation that prevailed until the French invasion of Italy in 1494. In the ensuing chaos of wars, alliances, and betrayals that left the rival kings of France and Spain in contention for control of Italy, Venice was often gravely threatened, especially during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517), which was essentially a plot by the pope, the emperor, Spain, France, and several Italian powers to attack and loot the Venetian mainland state. When political conditions stabilized between 1530 and 1559, Venice was the only Italian state to avoid control by the ultimately victorious foreign power, Spain. Although the city’s relative power gradually grew less, it survived as an independent republic until conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797.
The success of Venice in preserving its independence and maintaining control of most of its mainland territories was due partly to its isolated geographical location offshore. But the main reason for its survival was that its republican political system provided a remarkably stable and competent government that played the game of international politics with great skill. The other major Italian republic, Florence, had an unstable and frequently violent political history and ended up as a duchy ruled by the Medici family. The very different republican constitution of Venice provided considerably less political freedom but gave the city an orderly administration that endured. The city began with a government consisting of the doge, who was popularly elected for life, and a number of councils dominated by the wealthy merchants. In 1297 the leading families of the mercantile aristocracy, originally numbering some 200 families, declared the permanent closure of the Great Council, the largest of the city’s conciliar bodies. This assembly of some 240 members had already usurped the right to elect the doge. The closure of the Great Council meant that henceforth all executive and judicial offices and all powers of legislation were in the hands of a legally defined noble class. Non-noble citizens (that is, members of families not represented on the Great Council) could never hold any civic office with real political power, though they could receive administrative appointments and serve as salaried employees. A handful of additional families were added to the nobility in the 14th century, but after 1380, the membership was permanently sealed.
Since the Great Council was too large to formulate policy, a Senate of 60 members did most of the real work of government, making the Grand Council mostly a pool of men eligible for high office. The Senate appointed ambassadors, conducted and determined foreign policy, chose the important magistrates, and appointed governors for the island colonies and the subject cities on the mainland. A particularly notorious part of the constitution was the Council of Ten, created in 1310 after a faction of aristocrats had plotted a revolution. This council, appointed by the Senate, maintained internal security. Although careful rotation of its membership kept any individual member from being powerful, as a group this council had great power. It could arrest, interrogate secretly, torture, or do anything else it judged necessary to ferret out plots. It was always alert to make sure that the doge was not plotting with outside forces to introduce foreign troops and seize power for himself, and in 1355 it arrested and executed a sitting doge who had conspired to do just that. This was an incredibly complex political system, but it functioned with remarkable efficiency. Despite occasional personal misdeeds and peculations, the Venetian nobility maintained a high standard of dedication to public service.
Venice had a large ecclesiastical establishment and was deeply observant of the external forms of religion, an observance reflected in the prominent role of the clergy in the many processions and ceremonies that embellished public life. The city treasured the supposed relics of St. Mark, acquired from Egypt at great cost in the ninth century. It had many elegant and costly churches (137 in 1493) and a large population of priests, monks, and nuns. Wealthy men and women left large sums to churches, monasteries, and hospitals, and Venetians of every rank participated in the scuole or fraternal organizations that financed poor relief, care of orphans, assistance to the sick, and other social services. Yet even while it was enthusiastically pious and strictly orthodox, the city was in many ways very secular and rationalistic in its management of religion. Members of the clergy were totally excluded from eligibility for all political offices and from the deliberations of the Senate and Great Council. The city appointed all bishops in its territories. Although Venice remained solidly Catholic during the Reformation, both individual heretics and heretical books and ideas were common. The local government exercised its own censorship of the press but refused to allow the papacy or any other external agency to exercise any control that might endanger the profitability of the local press, which had made Venice the greatest publishing center of Renaissance Europe. The city had its own inquisition, appointed and controlled by its own secular government.
After the Roman Inquisition was created, the city insisted on having its own observers present whenever papal inquisitors held a trial of a Venetian citizen. While it expected its own citizens to be loyal Catholics, it did not trouble the many foreign Protestants (especially Germans) who came there to do business or to study at its great university in Padua. Neither did it tolerate any open proselytizing by foreign heretics among its own citizens. Although direct confrontation with the papacy on ecclesiastical matters (as distinct from purely territorial and political issues) was difficult for any Catholic state of the Renaissance, Venice lived through a period of papal interdict during the War of the League of Cognac after 1509 and a far more difficult period of interdict in 1606, when the city government required the clergy to administer the sacraments of the church in defiance of the papal interdict.
Even in the Renaissance period itself, Venice was widely hailed as the most beautiful city in the world because of its location on many small islands and the use of bridges and boats rather than streets and wheeled vehicles for most local traffic. The principal church, the basilica of St. Mark, was a medieval structure (11th century) showing strong Byzantine influence. The Doge’s Palace, the central location of government, was built in the 14th century and has many Gothic elements. Venetian art remained very traditional, but a distinctive Venetian Renaissance style of painting emerged in the work of the Bellini family. The Venetian style became influential beyond the Veneto region through the work of Giovanni Bellini’s short-lived pupil Giorgione and Gentile Bellini’s extremely long-lived pupil Titian, who is generally acknowleged as the city’s greatest painter and worked not only in Venice but also for leading Italian and foreign rulers. His successors were the realist painter Veronese and the mannerist Tintoretto, both of whom were highly regarded.
Venice was also traditional in educational and literary culture and adopted the new Renaissance humanism rather slowly. Florentine humanism dominated the 15th century, though Venice, with its long tradition of contact with the eastern Mediterranean, was a principal point of contact for the entry of Greek language and literature into the West. The transplanted Byzantine bishop and scholar Johannes Bessarion willed his rich library of Greek classical and patristic texts to the city of Venice, not to Florence or papal Rome. By the end of the 15th century, the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro was one of the most highly regarded humanist scholars in Italy, attaining a reputation rivalled only by his Florentine contemporary Angelo Poliziano. From late in the 15th century, the city had several of the rare female literary figures of the Italian Renaissance, Cassandra Fedele being active from the 1480s, the courtesan-poets Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco in the earlier 16th century, and Lucrezia Marinella toward the end of that century. The city had a rich society of academies and informal salons where both Latin and vernacular literatures were discussed. It had many private schools and tutors and maintained at public expense two excellent schools, the Latin grammar-school at San Marco and a more advanced school on the Rialto for lectures in philosophy. The intellectual life of the city was also influenced by the scholastic culture of the nearby University of Padua, which came under Venetian control in the early 15th century.
Venice was the center of a rich musical culture in the 15 th and 16th centuries, and the basilica of St. Mark was second only to the papal curia at Rome as a center of church music. The choir directors and organists of St. Mark’s included some of the greatest figures in early music, even though many of them in the earlier period came from the region of northern France and Flanders dominated musically by the court of the dukes of Burgundy. Figures like Adrien Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Gioseffo Zarlino, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and Claudio Monteverdi were associated with St. Mark’s for important parts of their careers, and Venice shared with several princely courts a central role in the development of Italian opera in the opening decades of the 17 th century.
VERGARA, JUAN DE
(1492-1557). Spanish humanist and priest, the most influential Spanish follower of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, whom he met in the Netherlands in 1520. Born at Toledo and educated at the University of Alcalá, he attracted the attention of the university’s patron, Cardinal Ximénes de Cisneros, and about 1514 was made a fellow of the College of San Ildefonso, the principal center of humanistic studies in Alcalá. Also in 1514 he received the M.A. degree, and during this period he participated in the editorial work on the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a project sponsored by Cardinal Ximénes. Vergara was a skilled Hellenist and in addition to work on the biblical project produced new Latin translations of Aristotle. About 1516 he became secretary to the cardinal. In 1517 he completed a doctorate in theology at Alcalá. He travelled with the imperial court to the Netherlands and Germany in 1520-1521 and entered the service of Guillaume de Croy, the successor to Ximénes as archbishop of Toledo.
When Cardinal de Croy died in 1521, Vergara became chaplain to the Emperor V. In 1523 he was offered the chair of rhetoric at Alcalá but declined it, and in 1524 he became secretary to the next archbishop of Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca. This position near to the center of ecclesiastical power in Spain made it possible for him to promote the growth of "Erasmianism" in Spain and also to influence the outcome of the Valladolid Conference of 1527, summoned to hear charges of heresy and impiety brought against the books of Erasmus by the mendicant friars. The conference adjourned without either condemning or endorsing Erasmus, an outcome that at the time appeared to be a great victory for the Erasmians.
In 1533, however, Vergara was arrested on suspicion of having tried to bribe witnesses against his half-brother, who had been arrested by the Inquisition on charges of sharing the heresies of the mystical alumbrados ("the enlightened ones"). Vergara’s connection with Erasmus became a basis for additional charges of promoting heresy, and even the efforts of his patron Archbishop Fonseca and his friend the inquisitor-general Alonso de Manrique could not secure his release. Vergara was imprisoned for two years, then tried and convicted of holding heretical opinions, and forced to make public recantation. He was heavily fined and imprisoned for a year in a monastery to do penance. He was released in 1537, but his conviction and imprisonment had undermined both his health and his reputation, and he lived the rest of his life in retirement at Toledo. His fall from such a high position marks the radical turn of the Spanish church away from the reformist humanism of Erasmus and the rapid destruction of the Erasmian movement in Spain.
VERGERIO, PIER PAOLO
(1370-1444). Italian humanist and educator. A native of Capodistria in Venetian territory, he studied at Bologna (1388-1390) and while there also taught dialectic, an experience that turned him against the contentious wrangling of logicians and toward interest in the moral philosophy and rhetorical eloquence of the classical authors Seneca and Cicero. Vergerio also wrote a Latin comedy inspired by the Roman playwright Terence. He then moved to Padua to study medicine and law (1390-1397).
Having become interested in the works of the pioneering humanist Petrarch, Vergerio went to Florence and with the collaboration of the city’s chancellor and leading humanist, Coluccio Salutati, completed an edition of Petrarch’s unfinished Vergilian epic poem, Africa. His efforts to win patrons either in Venice or at the court of Padua were unsuccessful. In 1398 he moved to Florence and became one of the cluster of talented young humanists who studied Greek under the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. Late in 1399 Vergerio returned to Padua to renew his efforts to gain a place at the ruler’s court, and about the same time he completed a doctorate in civil law. He later added a second doctorate in canon law. While campaigning to be appointed tutor to the Paduan ruler’s son, Vergerio composed his most important book, De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis / On Honorable Character and Liberal Studies (1403), which recommended study of humanistic subjects (history, moral philosophy, and eloquence or rhetoric) as the best way to prepare a young man for a life marked by ethical behavior and political responsibility. This topic had great influence on both the theory and the practice of education in 15th-century Italy.
After the Venetians annexed Padua in 1404, Vergerio moved to Rome, where he attracted attention by his orations on St. Jerome, whom he praised as the prime example of an appropriate balance between classical learning and Christian commitment. He gained employment at the court of Pope Gregory XII and also the patronage of his old friend Cardinal Francesco Zabarella, whom he accompanied to the Council of Constance in 1414. Later, he accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund on a long journey to the royal courts of Spain and Portugal in pursuit of an end to the Western Schism. He spent the rest of his life at Buda and Prague in the service of the emperor and in 1421 represented Sigismund at a colloquy seeking to end the religious division between Hussites and Catholics in Bohemia. After Sigismund’s death in 1437, he lived in retirement at Buda, where he died.
