It seems like humans always need to know who or what is the best in any category. Renaissance people were no different. A quest to find the superior art between painting and sculpture led to lengthy discussions about the purpose of art and the limits and qualities of each medium. The paragone, from the Italian verb paragonare (to compare), gathered some of the greatest minds of the time, including Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, and Benvenuto Cellini.
Painting and Sculpture During the Renaissance
Today, painting and sculpture are arguably the most respected and popular arts. However, during the Renaissance, the views towards artists were not as favorable as they are now. Following the medieval tradition, their abilities were regarded as no different from those of masons, carpenters, or goldsmiths. They practiced mechanical arts, which meant that physical labor dominated their work. In an age of intellectual innovation, this idea was detrimental to the status of the artists. That is why, embedded in the paragone, was the need to change this perception. Artists wanted their work to be accepted as liberal arts, the intellectual ones.
Leonardo da Vinci defended painting’s predominance in his Treatise of Painting. According to him: “Sculpture is not a science, but a very mechanical art […] the sculptor concludes his works with more tiredness of the body than the painter, but the painter concludes his with more tiredness of mind.”
Sculptors indeed required a tremendous amount of physical effort to break the stone with the chisel or to prepare the cast for works in bronze. But did that mean there was no intellectual labor involved in the process? These artists usually made preparatory drawings or scaled models and created a plan to achieve the desired result. Brute force would not have been able to create smooth surfaces with intricate details and features that look almost alive. More to the point, did painters not exhaust themselves working on large canvases for hours? One could think of Michelangelo, a sculptor and a painter, and ask if he did not feel extreme physical tiredness when working for the Sistine Chapel.
Imitation of Nature
The art of the Middle Ages did not require realistic representations of nature because it focused on the ethereal and divine world. However, in the 14th century, artists began to create realistic images. They abandoned the fear of blasphemy and iconoclasm that dominated past centuries. Now, artists competed to see which art imitated nature more accurately. Perspective revolutionized painting through the ability to create tridimensional spaces on a surface. Some consider this proof of the painters’ superiority because sculptors did not require extra effort to achieve this.
Benvenuto Cellini disagreed. He considered these paintings nothing but lies. As a prominent sculptor and author of one of the greatest Renaissance works, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, he defended his art form as being tangible and real. He also thought of painting as the shadow of sculpture. He noted that painters such as Michelangelo used small-scale models to prepare their compositions, which were superior to the preparatory drawings.
In the 16th century, sculptors took their given tridimensionality further by creating works with multiple points of view. The Mannerist style introduced the figura serpentinite (serpentine figure), where figures contorted in spiral-like Solomonic columns. For example, Giambologna’s famous Abduction of the Sabine Woman encourages the viewer to walk around it and discover new positions and narratives within it.
As Michael Cole notes, depending on the angle, the viewer gets a different impression. If, from one side, the Sabine woman looks to be violently resisting an attack, on another, we may be witnessing a lover’s embrace. According to Cellini, this made sculpture seven times better than painting. So, what if the paintings were flat? Vasari reminded his readers that painting had color, an important quality for successfully imitating nature. Moreover, da Vinci stated that painters added light and shadows to their works, while sculptors relied on external elements, such as location.
Durability
In 1527, the imperial forces of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire entered the Holy City, an event known as the Sack of Rome. Tragically, dozens of masterpieces were lost forever. This event alerted everyone about the fragility of paintings and gave sculptors tools to defend their art through the durability of marble or bronze. Giorgio Vasari included this point in his discussion on the paragone in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects. He stated that,
“they maintain that sculpture is by so much more noble than painting as it is more easy to preserve, both itself and the names of all who are honoured by it both in marble and in bronze, against all the ravages of time and air, than is painting, which, by its very nature, not to say by external accidents, perishes in the most sheltered and most secure places that architects have been able to provide.”
Nevertheless, Leonardo da Vinci refused to grant them victory, reminding his readers that,
“the sculptor says that his art is more eternal, […] to which I will respond that not for that is bigger the dignity of the sculptor, since such resistance comes from the material, not the craft.”
Stone Painting
As the debate continued, rhetoric was not enough to prove a point. Competition drove innovation, and the issue of durability led painters to experiment. As previously shown, sculptors’ arguments were often dismissed as advantages of the materials, not their artistic or intellectual abilities. As the painter Pontormo put it, “sculpture is indebted to the quarries of Carrara even more than to the skill of the artist.” Therefore, in the mid-16th century, painters exchanged cotton canvas for stone and metal supports in a new technique called stone painting. Theoretically, these paintings would last as long as sculptures and achieve tridimensionality.
Giovanni della Casa commissioned Daniele da Volterra to paint David and Goliath on a slate, with instructions to do it double-sided. He even asked Volterra to make a clay model and use it to paint both sides. Today, the Louvre exhibits this painting very much like a sculpture in the middle of the gallery so that people can walk around it and appreciate both sides. So, is it an actual tridimensional artwork? As a painting, it is as close as it can get. Interestingly, stone painting evolved so that in the 17th century, painters stopped covering the parts of the stone and began using the patterns in them to add effects to their compositions. In this way, they also used the aesthetic qualities of the materials.
Benedetto Varchi’s Survey
Benedetto Varchi was a Renaissance humanist and member of the Accademia Fiorentina. His Due Lezioni (1559) contains his analysis of the paragone. According to him, sculpture and painting were both art forms that imitated nature; therefore, they were equally noble. The fact that one was better at colors and the other at durability was no different from comparing men’s height or weight.
Nevertheless, he gathered the opinions of eight artists through letters, considering them authorities on the matter due to their artistic achievements. The painters included Giorgio Vasari, Bronzino, and Pontormo, while the sculptors were Benvenuto Cellini, Niccolò Tribolo, Francesco da Sangallo, Battista del Tasso, and Michelangelo. Unsurprisingly, nearly all the respondents declared their art the superior one, echoing many of the arguments previously presented here.
Varchi adopted a diplomatic approach to analyze the arguments. He admitted sculptures took more time and physical effort. Although he conceded certain victories to painting in its imitation of nature, he recalls that animals were fooled by Apelles’s grapes in the same way that men fell in love with Praxiteles’ sculptures. The difference is that one imitated the effects (accidenti) of color, light, and shadow, while the other, its materiality. Furthermore, he brought up another crucial point that remains part of artistic debates today: the utility of art. From his point of view, sculpture was more useful, seeing as it could be part of columns and shelves. In terms of difficulty, no one could determine a victor if they did not practice both arts.
Michelangelo’s Thoughts
If practicing both arts gave a person the authority to settle the debate, then Michelangelo could have been the perfect artist to end this discussion once and for all. However, the greatest artist, called “the prince of sculptors and painters” by Cellini and “divine” by many others, avoided the topic as much as he could. Interestingly, he began his reply to Varchi by declaring sculpture the “lantern of painting,” being that the latter strives to resemble the former. Nevertheless, he admitted that Varchi’s reasoning had convinced him of the equality between the two arts. Instead of debating, Michelangelo believed it wiser to channel that energy into the creation of art.
The Verdict of the Renaissance’s Paragone: Drawing
In the middle of all these arguments, a third option emerged: disegno (drawing). Michelangelo, Varchi, and even artists like Pontormo agreed on the fundamentality of drawing in either art. For instance, Vasari wrote that drawing was the father of painting and sculpture. Furthermore, he emphasized that whatever advantages one art may hold over the other are ultimately balanced. There is some speculation about the authorship of this text, seeing that Vasari defended painting over sculpture in his response to Varchi around the same time.
The Renaissance’s Paragone in Hindsight
If the paragone never reached a consensus, what was the point? Well, it made people think. Even though there were no definitive winners, the dispute produced dozens of texts from authors in Italy and elsewhere discussing the qualities of each art form, their limitations, and their purpose. These were the beginnings of art theory and art criticism. The debate between mechanical and liberal arts also helped distinguish art from craft and science. Moreover, the dispute between painting and sculpture is just one of many paragoni. Other arts, like poetry and music, as well as sciences, were discussed and compared in other texts.
