Subject: Rat Art 2 Sender: jya@pipeline.com (John Young) Financial Times, September 7, 1996, p. XVIII. Money as the root of all art What was true of the Renaissance is still true today, Lisa Jardine tells Christian Tyler. It's the fat cats who make the art world go round Who made the European Renaissance? Scholars, scientists, artists? No, says Professor Lisa Jardine, it was the fat cats who made it -- bankers, traders, dukes and cardinals. With her book, *Worldly Goods*, the London University professor claims to have cut a 19th century umbilical cord to the Renaissance and broken the mirror held up by scholars such as Jacob Burckhardt. She accuses him of stamping the Renaissance with the colours of Germanic idealism, making it "pure and untainted by money or greed" -- and "comfortably Aryan". Is she telling the real story? Or is she trying to shock by giving that revered episode of European history, a mischievously modern, consumerist spin? The author was radiating a south of France tan and a pair of neon-red sandals when I met her in her trendy Bloomsbury flat. The answer, she said cheerfully, is both. But did not Burckhardt also recognise the importance of patronage? "Patron implies a person of delicate sensibility who finds a like mind in the artist," she replied. "I prefer the word 'employer'." Was not Cosimo de'Medici (who founded the Platonic Academy in Florence) a person of sensibility? "Well, I would ask how you know. Here was a very wealthy banker, who made money wheeler-dealing around Europe. Investing in art and literature was one way of showing that you had gone beyond the mere urge to become rich. To that extent, it's exactly like today. Cosimo was no better and no worse than a Saatchi or a Hong Kong billionaire with gold-plated bath taps." Her book, intended for a general audience. is finely illustrated and full of descriptive detail -- a shoppers' guide to the Renaissance -- but somewhat short on argument. Its originality is in the synthesis, she told me. A specialist on the period, she has made much use of others' research -- a fact she duly acknowledges. She quotes the historian who dug out the contract details for Titian's bedroom paintings of big nudes. They show these were not classical allegories but pin-ups commissioned by the Duke of Urbino and Cardinal Farnese for their erotic impact. "They liked big nudes and had the good taste to pick an artist of renown." Her publishers describe Jardine as "one of our most high-profile media dons". I asked her what she thought of the label. "It's a silly description," she said. "It just means my name is recognised and I'm a don." Her name is recognised from her radio broadcasts. She also presented Nightwaves on Radio Three until she was removed for being too heavyweight (or, she thinks, too expensive). What is not so well known is that she is the eldest daughter of the polymath Jacob Bronowski, the father of media donnery, whose Ascent of Man series was a television landmark in the early 1970s. "He was a hard act to follow," she laughed. Were you overshadowed by him? "No, I adored my father. And since he had no sons I was his first-born son. I owe all my intellectual confidence to my father: he treated me like an intellectual equal." Though married for the second time to architect John Hare. she uses her first husband's name professionally: Nicholas Jardine is professor of the history of science at Cambridge. Is she a revisionist? No, because she does not pretend the Renaissance never happened. "I'm standing the argument on its head," she said. "There was indeed a key moment in the European tradition in the 15th century, and that was the burgeoning of a complicated commercial world. It was the commercial world which gave birth to the Renaissance in art and learning. It's that way round." But she confessed an "evangelical" motive. "I am fearful, or alarmed, at the way in which we disparage our own commercial acumen now. The arts and literature are in danger of being pushed into a little enclave. There is a danger of our believing that we are philistines, that European culture is only about trade, banking, investment and that in some distant penumbra there are arty people who have nothing to do with all this." Your mission is to provide a Renaissance that entrepreneurs can identify with? "I believe the relation between commercial vigour and the urge to create and support beauty and art go together," she replied. "No period of economic decline has produced great art; bullish financiers backing what they like are the lifeblood of High Art." "This is the whole story, as I would see it. Of course," she added, "you always plough your own furrow very hard. so this is overly focused." You have overstated the case, you mean? "I stated the case very strongly because it's having to compete with a consistently different message. It has to be stated strongly. It's not a partial case." Why did earlier historians get it wrong? "They left out the eastern Mediterranean. They demonised the Islamic world as the infidel against whom all this was a reaction. Now I'm 100 per cent Jewish stock, and I first noticed that the Jews were missing from the intellectual history of the Renaissance. "The Ottoman empire was as magnificent, as cultivated, as huge a patron as the empire of the Hapsburgs. And it was the Ottoman empire that taught the west the fine points of financing trade." Aren't you doing what you say Burckhardt did, tailoring history to suit modern preoccupations? "I don't think I'm saying that. I'm not pushing the borders out. I'm anti-nationalistic. I want us to recognise the richness, the multinationality ..." Multicultural? "That's a horrible word." History was a snapshot, she said, and a snapshot taken 50 years ago would always look like a daguerrotype. "If you shift the metaphor, history is always a conversation with the past, in which you can only converse with the past in a language you both understand." The problem is, I said, that the historian is more like a painter than a camera. And in your dialogue you can easily drown out the voice of the past. "But the voice of the past is many voices. Different interlocutors of the present will be able to dialogue with different voices of the past. You may drown some out. But I'm saying the ones that I'm drowning out have had a very good hearing." Isn't your thesis in danger of being dismissed because it doesn't recognise that amazing achievements were notched up? "Of course the answer to that is, I'm taking those for granted." But which is more interesting for us, the market mechanism or the objects themselves? "I am saying the painting has to be looked at alongside bed panels and boxes and spices and tapestries. They all belong together. I'm saying it is historically inaccurate to hive one set off. Indeed, it's a falsehood, because panel paintings were the least valuable thing at that moment. Durer said he wasn't going to do another painting because he didn't make any money." Artists were in it for the money? "No. it wasn't just for money. They were driven by their expertise and skill. Saying that commerce produces a climate in which it becomes possible for people to exercise their talents in more flamboyant and exciting ways is not the same thing as saying they just do it for money." Are you saying the modern market will produce an artistic revival? "No. But l have every confidence that the things the Saatchis are buying are more likely to be what we are looking at in 100 years' time than the art that a committee of academics in a gallery is buying." Today's Renaissance Men, she suggested, were people like Bill Gates of Microsoft (who paid $31m for a Leonardo scientific manuscript), Andrew Lloyd Webber (a collector mainly of Victorian painters). and the Getty family. So the bankers, brokers and chief executives ... "Please keep buying." They're not just conspicuous consumers? "No, they're creators of taste." Is there sign of another Renaissance anywhere in the world? "What we have now is continuity. It isn't dead. All around us voices of doom are saying we're clapped out. We're not clapped out. And if we say we are we'll turn into an Iraq -- a culture which has no culture." I thanked her and got up, but she was not through with me yet. "If you write with passion and with a strong focus you will always be accused of overstating your case," she said. "I don't just write as a contribution to knowledge. l write to change the world. To shift a large weight you have to give it an exaggerated shove." It's a temperamental thing? "Yes. Shifting the conventional wisdom is really what I'm about." She sounded happy. But your view of the world may be squint, I said. "If Leonardo had thought that he would never have painted the Mona Lisa." *Worldly Goods, A New History of the Renaissance*: Macmillan. L25. [Photo of Jardine omitted] [End]