Another byproduct of the ties between art and humanism was a rise in the social status of artists. In 1300, artists were considered crafts
people, and were usually members of urban craft guilds. Italy and northern Europe continued to produce many figures that enjoyed modest reputations as craftsmen, and artists’ affiliations with the guilds largely survived intact throughout the period. At the same time the most
accomplished painters, sculptors, architects, composers, and dancers enjoyed considerable reputations for their ability to create, and the modern notion of the artist as an individual charged with a powerful and unique vision began to emerge. This transformation can be seen in the
voluminous notebooks that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo kept, or in the Autobiography of the boastful sixteenth-century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini.

As the status of the artist as a creator rose, many of the arts also began to acquire their own histories and a sense of lineage. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Artists (1550) is now the most famous of the many histories of art that survive from the period, but many similar treatments of the history of music, literature, and dance were written at the time as well. A sense of achievement permeates many of these texts, a sense that is also to be found in the many theoretical manuals that treated the practice of the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and music. Writers often traced recent innovations in their fields, crediting key
figures with an enormous “divinely inspired genius,” even as they argued that these accomplishments proved the high status of a particular art form. In this way the defenders of various arts made use of the same arguments humanists had long exploited to defend their literary,
philosophical, and poetic works. In some cases the claims artists made for themselves and for their art likely fell on deaf ears. Despite his own powerful sense of his art as a divine gift, Michelangelo sometimes suffered treatment as a hired hand by the popes who employed him. They moved him from project to project at their whims, a fact that explains the many incomplete projects he left behind at his death. At the same time the enormous gifts of a Michelangelo, a Titian, a Palladio, or a Dürer gained wide recognition, and the greatest of Renaissance artists consequently rose to the status of gentlemen.


Another feature of Renaissance life points to the vital role that all the arts played as indicators of social refinement. In his nineteenth
century classic Burckhardt called attention to the great number of “universal men” that existed in the Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of these, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), adopted the motto “Man can do all things, if he but will,” and Alberti’s life be
came a testimony to the pervasiveness of his philosophy. Trained in law, he was also a humanist and took minor orders in the church, eventually finding employment as a secretary to the humanist pope Nicholas V.

While pursuing a life of active engagement in public affairs, Alberti became a practicing architect, sculptor, and painter, and his theoretical treatises on these subjects were widely read and disseminated among artists of the time. He was a gymnast, a horseman, a poet, a musician and composer, a theologian, a mathematician, and a philosopher. To his many other talents, Alberti also added skills as a comic, writing a number of popular spoofs on the lives of animals. This short snapshot of his many talents shows the role that the arts and humanities played in the Italian Renaissance.

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