The artist, through his work, makes a name for himself, but what name? During the Renaissance, he was usually referred to by his first name or by a surname. But to become famous, painters often tried to invent the name by which they wanted to achieve fame.
A first name, often two or three; a so-called “family” name – the “married name” for women; and for the latter the possible reminder of the original name, which is the “father’s name”: the patronymic. Or since a very recent law, the association of the matronymic with the patronymic or the replacement of one by the other. Such is the structure of people’s names in the West today.
Christiane Klapisch (the name of her husband) – Zuber (the name of the family she comes from, made famous by her great-grandfather, the painter Henri Zuber), has been questioning kinship, transmission and names in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance since the end of the 1970s. A useful question, because the system of naming that we have described follows rules that we are partially aware of as influencing the destiny of an individual, but of which we hardly know where they come from, that is to say how, or when, or exactly why, they were established. The challenge of the historian’s recent book is to apply her investigation to a specific corpus, that of the painters, sculptors, architects named in the Lives written by Giorgio Vasari in the middle of the XVIe century. By the title she chose, Making a Name: An Anthropology of Celebrity in the Renaissancethe author makes her ambition explicit: this time, it is not a question of examining the way in which a first name and possibly a surname pass from one generation to another, but of observing the situations of rupture, the circumstances in which one name is lost and another is acquired, if necessary several times during a life, and of studying how these assumed or sought ruptures reveal behaviors specific to the group of those who will soon be called “artists”, in the Italy of the XIVe – XVIe centuries.
The origins of the name
To demonstrate the novelty of the phenomenon that she highlights, this possibility of “making a name for oneself” through work that is increasingly distinguished from that of the craftsman, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber begins by recalling the achievements of anthroponymy, that is to say of this branch of onomastics, or the study of proper names, which concerns people.
At the end of the Middle Ages in Italy, she recalls, individuals were mostly known by their first name. This first name was considered their “real name” (nomen proprium), even if, borne by many other people as the stock of eponymous saints was limited, it was also regularly drawn from the family past, often being that of a dead relative who was thus “remade” (laugh).
However, it sometimes happened that the first name was followed, via the preposition “di”, by another or several first names: that or those of the father, the grandfather, the paternal ancestors. Such a system still prevails today in Iceland, where the artist Gudmundur Gudmundsson, in order to pursue a career in France, thought it prudent to choose the pseudonym Erro, while Olafur Eliasson remained “Olafur, son of Elias”.
The collective family name, the cognome in Italian, it appeared only late and initially only concerned the higher social groups: the nobles or important merchants – we think of the Medici, the Sforza. Sometimes, however, a nickname was given to a person of lesser status and remained with them: aptonym related to the profession (Vittore Carpaccio: Victor, son of the skinner), designation linked to the place of origin, or nickname linked to the physique (Masaccio, “the massive man”; Lo Scheggia, “the Little One”, brother of Masaccio), to an emotional tropism (Paolo Uccello, for the painter’s taste for birds) or sexual (Il Sodoma), it could or could not pass to sons and grandsons, as well as to daughters and granddaughters as long as they were not married.
The corpus: the names of artists in the Lives by Vasari
What is happening, asks Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, with the artists of Lives Vasarian? The question it poses is that of the possibility, for those whom the biographer does not yet name, of artist but whose talent and greatness he asserts, to invent and impose for themselves new and chosen names, which serve them, in place of the first name received at baptism or the name, names, inherited from their family.
In a context where aristocrats and bourgeoisie provided with a cognome supplied the orders, the book begins by recalling the advantage that painters, sculptors and architects had in being able to also argue for a collective name and to be able to construct around this name the myth of prestigious roots. Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo Buonarotti or Baccio Bandinelli thus drew arguments from ancient and fabulous genealogies, while Giorgio Vasari was mocked for his low origins: his surname, derivation of vasellariothe potter, said without remedy his recent extraction. The newer and more remarkable fact is that some artists who benefit from the advantage of a suitably esteemed surname, consider and agree to exchange it for a new, personal name, but which turns out to be in the best of cases transferable: a mononym which becomes a surname. Thus, after having built a convent in the village of San Gallo at the gates of Florence, the sculptor Giuliano di Paolo Giamberti agrees to become Giuliano da San Gallo, and then, by shortening, Il Sangallo. The loss of his family name, his father’s first name and his own first name, must have been compensated in his eyes by the pride of having “made a name” for himself, a name that his sons and even his brother and nephews took up.
The circumstance of a work that results in the act of naming can also have less favorable results: Andrea del Castagno (a name linked to his village) was once called Andrea degl’Impiccati (“of the Hanged”) for having magnificently painted an infamous image, in other words a fresco representing an execution in absentia. We could also recall that Daniele da Volterra, another name of provenance, is known to posterity as The Braghettonethe Fly Setter, because he was responsible for pantying the nudes of the Last judgement by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
Aesthetic family vs. biological family
A historian of kinship, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber links the history of the name to that of families. She convincingly shows how in the milieu – to put it briefly – of Renaissance artists, the abandonment of a consanguineous identity involved not only the invention of a new personal name, but also the appropriation of existing foreign surnames, that is to say, the preemption of other artists’ names in order to symbolically construct stylistic filiations: that is, a substitution of kinship, the chosen aesthetic genealogy being preferred to the fortuitous biological genealogy.
These anthroponymic transfers occur most often, Klapisch-Zuber shows, in the context of master-student relationships. When he enters a master’s workshop and stays there for a long time, the disciple ends up assuming that he is no longer known by his cognome or with the series of names of the ancestors from whom he descends, but by his first name followed by the name of the man who trained him. The change of name almost inevitably occurs if the student inherits the workshop, and / or if he is adopted by the master, this even if adoption, in the Italy of the time, has a vague status or even no status at all. In Padua in the second half of the XVe century, Marco di Antonio di Ruggeri thus changed his identity during his life or at least ended up accumulating identities: first known professionally by the nickname of lo Zoppo (the Lame) because of a limp, he became lo Zoppo di Squarcione, because he was adopted by the embroiderer and workshop manager Andrea Squarcione who was also, for a time, the master and adoptive father of Andrea Mantegna.
But, as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber observes, it can also be the case that the filiations are of an imaginary and almost fraudulent nature, serving to assert artistic continuities that are in reality dubious. Thus around 1400, when the painter Cennino Cennini presented himself in his Book of Art (Il Libro dell’arte)as a so to speak direct heir of Giotto, via his master Taddeo d’Agnolo. So also when, to describe the Florentine school whose qualities and strong autonomy he emphasizes, Vasari builds his story in the form of family trees going back to a few rare ancestors, Cimabue and Giotto, of course, in the first place.
Today, the names of artists…
Making a name for yourself shows how Italian painters, sculptors and architects, at a time when they began to see themselves and to be perceived as distinct from simple artisans, knew how to play on their names in order to both mark their solidarity as a group and designate exceptional achievements within them. The book emphasizes several times that the Christian family was the model that allowed such an accomplishment: just as aesthetic bonds fictitiously took the form of genealogical bonds, so too, the relationships uniting masters and their students were ideally conceived according to paternal and filial duties, that is, with mutual respect and love as a basis, and yet in addition for the disciple, the possibility or even the imperative, of “doing better” than the one who trained him. In short, of prolonging a style while improving it and leading it to greater accomplishments.
Thus rooted in the cultural and social reality specific to XIVe–XVIe centuries, Christiane Klapisch Zuber’s book is nonetheless capable of encouraging us to reflect on the situation today. Because the personal identity rigorously fixed by modern legislation cannot prevent artists from being biased with the name they are supposed to bear. It is undoubtedly to distinguish himself from his father, the academic painter José Ruiz y Blasco, that Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Mártir Patricio Ruiz y Picasso – a very long and complicated name, it is true – chose at the beginning of the XXe century to sign with only his mother’s name. It is also certainly because his surname made it very difficult at the end of the XIXe century a career as a painter, that the French neo-impressionist Henri Edmond Joseph Delacroix anglicized his name to Henri-Edmond Cross. But why, while the architect Bruno Giacometti and the sculptors Alberto and Diego Giacometti maintained the “father’s name” (the painter Giovanni Giacometti), did the siblings known under the names and pseudonyms of Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Suzanne Duchamp, make the opposite choice? With the methods imposed by our century and the previous one, the study of the anthroponymic choices of recent artists certainly remains to be done. For this reason too, Making a name for yourself is a book that deserves to be read well beyond the circle of historians of late medieval and Renaissance Italy.