Chapter 80
Patronage: the support of writers, artists and scholars by the great; its benefits, servility and decline.
123 passages · 53 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Patronage names the support given to writers, artists and scholars by those who hold wealth and power: princes, popes, nobles, ministers and states. The idea covers more than the transaction itself. It asks why the great should support learning, what the arts gain and lose by that support, what the dependant must do in return, and whether the arrangement ennobles both parties or corrupts them. It is a great idea for these books because so many of them came into being under it. They were commissioned, pensioned, housed, protected or dedicated to some great man. Some were written in open revolt against it. Read together, they record a long experiment in the relation between genius and power, running from the household of Pericles to Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield.
The first question is why the great bother at all. Machiavelli gives the statesman’s answer: a prince should show himself a lover of merit, honouring excellence in every art and rewarding those who add to the greatness of his state1. Browne is more suspicious. He holds that the wiser princes favour scholars not from any zeal for learning but from a desire for lasting fame and a fear of the historian’s pen2. Pliny shows the same exchange from the patron’s side without any embarrassment. A poet who praised him deserved marks of his bounty, for the poet’s gift of enduring praise is fitly repaid by the patron’s generosity3. On this view patronage is a commerce in reputation. The writer confers immortality, and the great man pays for it.
Against this rather cool account stands the theory that genius must be fed. Cellini argues it to the Pope directly: princes who give artists a competence water the roots of genius, and talent flourishes when it is nourished, as Julius II showed in giving an office to Bramante4. King Francis, in Cellini’s telling, puts it as a kind of partnership. Prince and artist share a fortune, the one finding a man after his heart and the other a prince who furnishes the means5. Burns gives the same idea a pastoral image. Nature, pitying the helpless poet, attaches him to the truly great as a vine to a supporting tree, and on that ground he claims the right to lean on his patron Graham6. Elsewhere he asks the whole land to befriend the Muses’ servants7. In Burns the patron is no longer necessarily a single great man; he may be a public.
A broader claim holds that learning itself has been preserved by its protectors. Burke credits the nobility and the clergy with keeping learning alive through turbulent ages. Learning repaid them with usury, and he warns that without its protectors it falls to the mob8. Carlyle traces the medieval universities from gatherings around teachers like Abelard into corporate bodies under the patronage of kings anxious for their people’s culture9. Newman finds the same pattern in antiquity: Athenian professors grew rich enough to become patrons of their own student clients, and Rome brought the state endowment of chairs10. Hume notes that the emperors pensioned professors of every philosophical sect, an encouragement learning needed in its youth11. Smith adds an economist’s caution. Public and pious endowments for educating churchmen crowd the profession and lower its rewards12. Support of learning has consequences beyond the gratitude it earns.
The exemplars cluster around a few names. Plutarch shows Pericles placing Phidias in charge of all the artists and works of Athens. Yet the sculptor’s envied dependence exposed his patron to the slanders of the comic writers13. Newman makes Cimon and Pericles the founders of Athens’ intellectual fame, welcoming Ionian teachers and encouraging Phidias and Anaxagoras14. In Herodes Atticus he finds a private fortune spent entirely on letters. Herodes paid Polemo a vast sum for three declamations, built a stadium and theatre, and housed students in his villas15. Shelley notices a darker side. The bucolic poets found patrons among the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, and they were the last voices of a declining creative age16. Above all stands Maecenas. Dryden reads the Aeneid as a work that served Augustus and the Roman families with praise17. He traces the same bond forward to Chaucer, whom Henry IV favoured as a trumpet of his praises, as Augustus favoured Virgil and Horace18.
Renaissance Italy is Macaulay’s great instance. There kings, cardinals and merchant princes honoured Petrarch, founded professorships and lavished money on the arts, until patronage became a fashion among the great19,20. Cellini’s editors supply the minor figures: Cardinal Gonzaga at Mantua21, and Giovanni Gaddi, who housed Annibale Caro, though Caro never grew attached to him22. Poliziano dedicated his Epictetus to Lorenzo de’ Medici, from whose collection the book came23. Machiavelli’s case is the most instructive. Clement VII commissioned his Florentine history, and Macaulay finds both patron and writer honourable in it, since the Medici are treated candidly despite the bitterness of dependence24,25.
In England the patrons are noblemen and ministers. Emerson remembers houses like Penshurst and Wilton that sheltered Sidney, Jonson and Milton26. Dryden thanks a row of noblemen whose bounty reached him whatever their politics27. Johnson shows Addison rising through Somers and Montague28, until his patrons fell and Halifax complained that genius had no encouragement. Godolphin then rewarded Addison’s Blenheim poem with an office29. Voltaire records that a projected English academy, under Bolingbroke and Oxford, died with Queen Anne30. Hazlitt thinks Pope almost the only poet rewarded in his own lifetime31.
The instruments of patronage are pensions, posts, hospitality, protection, and the dedication that acknowledges them. Pensions were notoriously unreliable. France lured Descartes home with a thousand crowns that were never paid32, and Addison’s travel pension lapsed and left him in indigence28. Offices and livings were the commoner coin. Walton shows Donne waiting on uncertain court promises before the King made him Dean and the Earls of Dorset and Kent endowed him33,34. He shows Pembroke securing Bemerton for Herbert35. Franklin’s autobiography carries the institution into a new world. Governor Keith’s offer of patronage is flattering but hollow, and Franklin’s father wisely declines it36,37. Later the leading men vote Franklin public printer38. Hospitality and protection appear in Dryden’s thanks to the houses where he translated Virgil39 and in Burns’s elegy for Glencairn, who lifted a friendless bard from poverty40. They appear too in Darwin’s gratitude to FitzRoy, whose offer of a place made the voyage possible41.
Dedications form a genre of their own. Copernicus offers his book to the Pope as a learned protector who can shield it from slanderers42. Calvin turns his dedication to King Francis into a plea for the persecuted43. Bacon offers his Essays to Buckingham in acknowledged obligation44. Vespucci writes as Soderini’s humble servant45. Dryden calls himself an old servant, thanks his patron for bounty he never begged, and hopes the dedication will not shame him46,47. Voltaire praises Barclay’s dedication to Charles II precisely because it gave bold counsel instead of mean flattery48. The dedication could be a tribute, a petition, or a shield.
No book shows the daily texture of dependence so fully as Cellini’s. Francis I funds his silver statues, orders his treasurers to supply whatever the work requires, and heartens his servants by his magnificence49,50,51. Cellini credits the king with all his advancement52. He later tells Duke Cosimo that without a patron’s funds and trust no artist can achieve anything53. But between patron and artist stand intermediaries. The Cardinal never paid the promised pension and argued that wealth would make the artist leave49,54. Only then did the king resolve to provide for him55. In wartime Cellini went months without pay, and his request to depart was angrily refused56. In Florence matters were worse. Slow officials stalled his workshop57, Bandinello’s whispers cut the workmen’s allowance58, and the Duke promised aid he never supplied59. Cellini looks back with longing to France60,61. Yet he still refuses a Sicilian offer, praising his Duke as the greatest patron of the arts62. The artist remains bound, half grateful and half bitter.
That bitterness becomes the theme of the next group of texts. Caxton writes plainly as the Duchess’s servant, taking a yearly fee and bound to please her63,64. Thackeray portrays Swift dining with the upper servants at Moor Park on twenty pounds a year, in a cassock that was almost a livery, swallowing Temple’s condescension and resenting it65,66. He shows him too as boisterously servile toward lords who might advance him67. Flattery is the writer’s characteristic vice under such conditions. Dryden admits that a grateful flatterer of an old patron may be excused68. But he reads Virgil’s placing of Cato in Elysium as a study of Augustus’s temper, and he warns that not every patron has Augustus’s clemency69,70. Johnson censures Addison’s dedication of Rosamond to an unlettered duchess as servile absurdity71. Pliny had already noted the fawning applause that surrounded a lady patroness of pantomimes72.
From these costs comes the praise of independence. Epictetus scorns anxiety for Caesar’s favour; the philosopher without a patron is freer and richer73. Cowley’s Horace declines Augustus’s secretaryship and keeps the emperor’s friendship74, and his Virgil prefers the country to Rome75. Penn praises those who have no patrons to please76. Rousseau’s vicar prefers poverty to dependence77. Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield is the landmark. It complains of seven years’ rebuff and defines a patron as one who watches a drowning man and then encumbers him with help78,79. The editor calls it the moment literature was freed from patronage80. Burns makes independence a refrain. He can plough and need not bow81. He owes the King no pension or place and despises the venal gang of court poets82. Though he gratefully names Ballantine, he will be no hireling dedicator83. His moral is that to win the patronage of nobles one must first learn to live without it84,85. Tennyson counsels the patriot not to toil for pension or place86.
The complaint of decline runs alongside. Sidney laments that England’s poets, once favoured by kings, are left to base writers working for printers’ pay87. Dryden contrasts Maecenas with modern patrons who share his pretensions to poetry but not his liberality88. Voltaire sets England’s honours for men of letters against France’s meagre pensions and prisons89. Emerson’s Duke of Devonshire, wishing to be a Maecenas, is crushed by expense, while the aristocracy keeps artists socially at arm’s length90. Harrison carries the complaint into the church and the universities. Pensions and fellowships go by bribery, so that Homer himself would be turned away without a gift91. Patrons fleece the clergy they present92. He proposes that vacancies be filled from the universities by merit93. Burns attacks the Kirk patron’s right to impose ministers94.
What remains open is whether the alternatives to the patron are better. Sidney’s printers and Dryden’s subscribers point toward a paying public39. Burns himself appeals to the land at large7. Burke fears what becomes of learning when its noble protectors are gone8. Cellini insists that great works need great means53. Johnson insists that obligation forced on a man is no kindness78. Between the fed genius and the free one, these books render no single verdict.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Art 8c
See also: Art 8c