Mobility, geography and style in sixteenth-century art theory and practice

The phenomenon of "mobility" in the period known as the Italian Renaissance is often associated with the voyages of discovery undertaken by such figures as Christopher Columbus or Hernán Cortés to the New World. Their journeys went far beyond the geographic boundaries laid down by ancient texts; their verbal reports in addition to the visual artifacts they brought back to an astonished European audience challenged the largely undisputed authority of classical thinkers. There is, however, another realm of discourse that is just as relevant to the study of mobility during the Renaissance, one located not in the caravels that crossed the Atlantic, but in the footpaths and waterways connecting the mosaic of city-states in the Italian peninsula. Fulfilling commissions at princely courts, travelling with ambassadors, undertaking pilgrimages or trips borne out of curiosity, Italian artists and their journeys were memorialized, celebrated as well as criticized by their contemporaries. While art historical scholarship has traditionally understood these travels as an uncomplicated physical transfer from point A to point B, this dissertation aims to resurrect the surprisingly controversial status artistic mobility occupied in early modern thought.

In seeking to restitute the debates that revolved around artistic mobility, my analysis asks the following questions: What language--metaphors, tropes and figures of speech--did art theorists employ to describe the mobility of artists? How did this discourse inscribe itself within Renaissance aesthetic concerns? Finally, what was the relevance of this discourse to the religious, political and cultural battles that erupted between the regions of the Italian peninsula? At the heart of the controversy surrounding mobility, I argue, was Renaissance art theorists' ambivalent stance towards the impact of the foreign upon an artist's style. Sojourns abroad could both spread an artist's fame and disseminate his style, while at the same time inducing the harmful effects of contagion, exile and amnesia. I contend that over the course of the sixteenth-century, Renaissance debates on mobility shifted from conceiving style as a shield protecting the artist from exposure to the foreign to a performative device that displayed knowledge of the variety contained in the world at large.