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WITHDRAWN FROM U. OF P. LIBRARY —
A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
TAKEN FROM THE WORK OF
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
BY
LIEUT.-COLONEL ALFRED PEARSON
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
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PREFACE.
It had been often represented to my husband that
his ‘‘ Renaissance in Italy” in a shorter form would
be acceptable io many who are without the leisure or the
inclination to take up the subject in the character of
students. But though, through siress of other work,
he was indisposed to return to the subject, he was quite
willing that our friend Colonel Pearson, who has been
associated with us for some years at Davos, and who ts
well acquainted with Italy, should carry out his own
wews as to what might be interesting and useful to
those who would be satisfied with the subject in a more
popular form. Ii will be seen, therefore, that in the
choice of his materials Colonel Pearson’s object has
been fo select and arrange for those who know Italy,
or hope in the future to do so, whatever may sustain or
promote an inierest in its history, its art, and its
literature. With regard éo the success with which this
may have been done, it was my husband's thought to
WITHDRAWN FROM U. OF P. LIBRARY
ace
vi PREFACE.
record here the opinion he frequently expressed—that
the intention of his large work had been thoroughly
appreciated by Colonel Pearson, and ws essence repro-
duced without any important omission. To have seen
this reflection of it, in a form which he agreed might
attract a larger public than he had appealed to, was, tt
may be well to add, a source of great pleasure to him
during the last winter of his life.
J. G SYMONDS.
AM HOF, DAVOS PLATZ:
August 11, 1893.
CONTENTS
I. THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE .« «
Il. Tue Risk or tHE Communes, . . .
III. Tue Rute or tHE Despots. . . .
IV. Tue Porrs of THE RENAISSANCE . . ,
V. SavonaROLA: ScouRGE AND SEER...
VI. Tue Rar or Cuartes VIIL . .
VII. Tue Revivat or LEARNING. .. .
VIII. Tue Firorentine Historians .
IX. Literary Society aT FLORENCE. . .
X. Men or Lerrers aT Rome anp Nappies .
XI. Miran, Mantua, AND FERRARA.
Deer STP Ine ARTS, 06 ef oe fe
XIII. Tue Revivat or VERNACULAR LITERATURE
XIV. Tue Catuotic REACTION. . 2. 2. ©
SN Se eee ee ee ec ee ae
A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
I.
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE,
eee word Renaissance has of late years received a
more extended significance than that which is im-
plied in our English equivalent—the Revival of Learn-
ing. We use it to denote the whole transition from the
Middle Ages to the Modern World; and though it is
possible to assign certain limits to the period during
which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any
dates so positively as to say—between this year and
that the movement was accomplished.
In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena
of the Renaissance to any one Cause or Cir- Various
cumstance, or limit them within the field Er
of any one department of human knowledge. naissance.
If we ask the students of art what they mean by the
Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the
recovery of antique monuments. Students of literature,
philosophy, and theology see in the Renaissance that
2 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
discovery of manuscripts, that passion for antiquity,
that progress in philology and criticism which led to a
correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in
poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate
analysis, and, finally, to the Lutheran schism and the
emancipation of the conscience. Men of science will
discourse about the discovery of the solar system by
Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and
Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. The
origination of a truly scientific method is the point
which interests them most in the Renaissance. The
political historian, again, has his own answer to the
question. The extinction of feudalism, the develop-
ment of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
monarchy, the limitation of ecclesiastical authority and
the erection of the Papacy into an Italian kingdom, and,
in the last place, the gradual emergence of that sense of
popular freedom which exploded in the Revolution:
these are the aspects of the movement which engross
his attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of
legal fictions based upon the false decretals, the acqui-
sition of a true text of the Roman Code, and the attempt
to introduce a rational method into the theory of mod-
ern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of
international law. Men whose attention has been
turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will
relate the exploration of America and the East, or will
point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the
arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the
telescope, by paper and by gunpowder ; and will insist
that at the moment of the Renaissance all these in-
stances of mechanical utility started into existence to
aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish,
LHE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE. 3
to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and
life-giving.
Yet neither any one of these answers taken separately,
nor, indeed, all of them together, will offer a It wasa
solution of the problem. By the term. Re- faa e
naissance, or new birth, is indicated a natural move-
ment, not to be explained by this or that characteristic,
but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which
at length the time had come, and in the onward prog-
ress of which we still participate. The history of the
Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or
of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the
attainment of self-conscious freedom to the human
spirit manifested in the European races, It is no mere
political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration
of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inven-
tions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly
became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long
lain neglected on the shores of the Dead Sea, which we
call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which
caused the Renaissance; but it was the intellectual
energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which
enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them.
The force then generated still continues, vital and
expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.
How was it, then, that at a certain period, about four-
teen centuries after Christ, to speak roughly, Certain
the intellect of the Western races awoke aa
as it were from slumber and began once required
more to be active? That is a question for it.
which we can but imperfectly answer. But a glance at
the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after
the dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire,
4 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
there was no immediate possibility of any intellectual
revival, The barbarous races which had deluged Europe
had to absorb their barbarism ; the fragments of Roman
civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated;
the Germanic nations had to receive culture and religion
from the people they had superseded ; the Church had
to be created, and a new form given to the old idea of
the Empire. It was further necessary that the modern
nationalities should be defined, that the modern lan-
guages should be formed, that peace should be secured
to some extent and wealth accumulated, before the
indispensable conditions for a resurrection of the free
spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which
fulfilled these conditions was the first to inaugurate the
new era. The reason why Italy took the lead in the
Renaissance was that Italy possessed a language, a
favorable climate, political freedom, and commercial
prosperity, at a time when other nations were still
semi-barbarous.
At the same time it must not be supposed that the
There were @aissance burst suddenly upon the world
signs of in the fifteenth century without premonitory
its advent. symptoms. Within the middle age, over
and over again, the reason strove to break loose from
its fetters. The ideas projected thus early were imma-
ture and abortive, and the nations were not ready for
them. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for vent-
uring to examine what God had meant to keep secret ;
Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated
nobles of Toulouse; Popes stamping out the seed of
enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the mas
terpieces of classical literature to make way for their
litanies, or selling pieces of parchment for charms; a
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE. 5
jaity given up to superstition ; a clergy sunk in sensual
sloth, or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled
the intellectual condition of Europe. It was, therefore,
only at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when
Italy had lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire
in her Communes of the thirteenth, but had gained
instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose
which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at
last began.
During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in
a cowl. He had not seen the beauty of ee
the world, or had seen it only to cross him- o6¢ lige in
self and turn aside, to tell his beads and the Middle
pray. Like St. Bernard travelling along sak
the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the
azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines,
nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun
and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead
over the neck of his mule; even like this monk, hu-
manity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the ter-
rors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways
of the world, and had scarcely known that they were
sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is a
snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man
fallen and lost, death the only certainty; ignorance is
acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission;
abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
life : these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic medieval
Church. The Renaissance questioned and shattered
them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn be-
tween the mind of man and the outer world, and flash-
ing the light of reason upon the darkened places of his
own nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church
6 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
was substituted culture in the classical humanities;
a new ideal was established, whereby man strove ta
make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is
his privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renais-
sance was the liberation of the reason from a dungeon,
the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.
An external event determined the direction which
Theawaken- this outburst of the spirit of freedom should
ing toa take. This was the contact of the modern
new ideal, = With the ancient mind, which followed upon
what is called the Revival of Learning. The fall of
the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the ex-
tinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now
accumulated forces of the new. A belief in the identity
of the human spirit under all previous manifestations,
and in its uninterrupted continuity, was generated.
Men found that in classical as well as Biblical antiquity
existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intel-
lectual, by which they might profit in the present. The
modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when
it learned what the ancients had achieved. The
guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the
moderns. The whole world’s history seemed once
more to be one.
During the Middle Ages, again, the plastic arts, like
A tresh philosophy, had degenerated into barren
inspiration and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid
in art. reproduction of lifeless forms copied tech-
nically and without inspiration from debased patterns.
Pictures became symbolically connected with the relig-
ious feelings of the people, formule from which to
deviate would be impious in the artist, and confusing
to the worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE. q
painter to copy the almond-shaped eyes and stiff joints
of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and,
even if it had been otherwise, he lacked the skill to
imitate the natural forms he saw around him. But
with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in
the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human
body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study.
The object of the artist then became to unite devo-
tional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with
the utmost beauty, and the utmost fidelity of delinea-
tion. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and
the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. Finally,
when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a
new world of thought and fancy was revealed to their
astonished eyes.
It was scholarship, first and last, which revealed to
men the wealth of their own minds, the pe en.
dignity of human thought, the value of thusiasm
human speculation, the importance of pepeepiant
human life regarded as a thing apart from edge.
religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages
a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and
the prose of Boethius, together with fragments of
Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace.
The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public
the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At
the same time the Bible in its original tongues was re-
discovered. Mines of Oriental learning were laid bare
for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions.
The Aryan and Semitic revelations were for the first
time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and
indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were wor-
8 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
shipped as reliques from the Holy Land had been
worshipped a few generations before. What is most
remarkable about this age of scholarship is the en-
thusiasm which pervaded all classes. Popes and
princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble
ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde, alike be-
came scholars.
There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates
The the temper of the times with singular felic-
legendof ity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated
hoes in Rome that some Lombard workmen had
discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the
Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, with the inscrip-
tion “Julia, daughter of Claudius ;” and inside lay the
body of a beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by
precious unguents from corruption. The bloom of
youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and
mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her
shoulders. She was instantly removed—so goes the
legend—to the Capitol; and then pilgrims from all the
quarters of Rome flocked to gaze upon this saint of the
old Pagan world. In the eyes of these enthusiastic
worshippers, her beauty was beyond imagination or
description ; she was far fairer than any woman of the
modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII.
feared lest the orthodox faith would suffer by this new
cult of a heathen corpse, and Julia was buried secretly
and at night by his directions. This tale is repeated
in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variation ;
in one the girl’s hair is said to have been yellow, in the
other glossy black. What foundation there may be for
the legend is beyond our inquiry; but there is a
curious document on the subject in a Latin letter,
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE. 9
which has not been published, from Bartholomzus Fon-
tius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus, minutely de-
scribing the corpse, as if he had not only seen but had
handled it. We may at least use the mythus as a par-
able of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men
of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty
in a tomb of the classic world.
Then came the age of the critics, philologers, and
painters. They began their task by digest- The diffi-
ing and arranging the contents of the “oyna:
libraries. There were then no short cuts gome,
to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries
of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of my-
thology and history. Each student had to hold in his
brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text
and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tra-
gedians had to be decided. Florence, Venice, Basle,
Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The
Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day,
employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion
and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain
the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punct-
uate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the
reach of monkish hatred or of envious time that ever-
lasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics.
All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship
sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men
who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of
Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task.
Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in
1498, Plato in 1513. They then became the inalien-
able heritage of mankind.
10 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE,
Not only did scholarship restore the classics and
encourage literary criticism; it also en-
couraged theological criticism. In the
wake of theological freedom followed a free
philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the
Church. To purge the Christian faith from false con-
ceptions and to interpret religion to the reason has
been the work of succeeding centuries. The whole
movement of the Reformation is equally a phase in
that accelerated action of the modern mind which at
its commencement we call the Renaissance. It isa
mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phe-
nomenon, or as an effort to restore the Church to
purity. It exhibits in the region of religious thought
and national politics what the Renaissance displays in
the sphere of culture, art, and science—the recovered
energy and freedom of the reason. In this awakening
it was not without its medizeval anticipations and fore-
shadowings. ‘The heretics whom the Church success-
fully combated in North Italy, France, and Bohemia
were the precursors of Luther. The scholars prepared
the way in the fifteenth century. Teachers of He-
brew, founders of Hebrew type—Reuchlin in Ger-
many, Alexander in Paris, Von Hutten as a pam-
phleteer, and Erasmus as a humanist—contribute
each a definite momentum. Luther, for his part,
incarnates the spirit of revolt against tyrannical au-
thority, urges the necessity of a return to the essential
truth of Christianity as distinguished from the idols
of the Church, and asserts the right of the indi-
vidual to judge, interpret, criticise, and construct
opinion for himself. The veil which the Church
had interposed between the human soul and God
Its effect
on theology.
THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE. It
was broken down. The freedom of the conscience
was established.
It remains only to speak of the mechanical inven-
tions which aided the emancipation of the m, impe-
_ spirit in the modern age. Discovered over tus it gave
and over again, and offered at intervals ‘ Sc1ence
to the human race at various times and on divers soils,
no effective use was made of these material resources
until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered
according to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302,
was employed by Columbus for the voyage to America
in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians inthe
Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in
1250, helped Copernicus to prove the revolution of the
earth in 1530, and Galileo to substantiate his theory of
the planetary system. Printing, after numerous useless
revelations to the world of its resources, became
an art in 1438; and paper, which had long been
known to the Chinese, was first made of cotton in
Europe about 1000, and of rags in 1319. Gunpowder
entered into use about 1320, and in no long time
revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle,
the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the
prowess of one man against a hundred, and the
pride of the aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-
armed militia, lost their superiority with the in-
vention of cannon. Such reflections as these, how-
ever, are trite, and must occur to every mind. It
is more to the purpose to say that not these inventions,
but the intelligence that used them, the conscious cal-
culating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our
attention when we direct it to the phenomena of the
Renaissance,
"2 THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.
In the work of the Renaissance all the great nations
The credit Of Europe shared. But it must never be
attributable forgotten that, as a matter of history, the
eh nn true Renaissance began in Italy. It was
there that the essential qualities which distinguish the
modern from the ancient and the medizval world
were developed. Italy created that new spiritual at-
mosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which
has been the life-breath of the European races. As
the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people
of Divine revelation, so may the Italians be called
the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of
the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science,
in the mediation between antique culture and the
modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Ger-
many and France and England the restored humanities
complete. Spain and England have since done more
for the exploration and colonization of the world.
Germany achieved the labor of the Reformation almost
single-handed. France has collected, centralized, and
diffused intelligence with irresistible energy. But, if
we return to the first origins of the Renaissance, we
find that, at a time when the rest of Europe was inert,
Italy had already begun to organize the various
elements of the modern spirit, and to set the fashion
whereby the other great nations should learn and live.
if.
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
oo paige Italian history may be said to begin with
the retirement of Honorius to Ravenna, and the
subsequent foundation of Odoacer’s kingdom in 476.
The Western Empire ended, and Rome was again
recognized as a republic. When the Greek Emperor
Zeno sent the Goths into Italy, Theodoric established
himself at Ravenna, continued the institutions and
usages of the ancient Empire, and sought to naturalize
his alien authority. Rome he respected as the
sacred city of ancient culture and civility. Her Con-
suls, appointed by the Senate, were confirmed in due
course by the Greek Emperor; and Theodoric made
himself the vicegerent of the Czesars rather than an
independent sovereign. When we criticise the Ostro-
Gothic occupation by the light of subsequent history,
it is clear that this exclusion of the capital from Theo-
doric’s conquest and his veneration for the Eternal
City were fatal to the unity of the Italian realm.
From the moment that Rome was separated from the
authority of the Italian kings there existed two powers
in the Peninsula—the one secular, monarchical, with
the military strength of the barbarians imposed upon
its ancient municipal organization; the other ecclesi-
astical, pontifical, relying on the undefined ambition of
14 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
S. Peter’s See and the unconquered instincts of the
Roman people scattered through the still surviving
cities.
Justinian, bent upon asserting his rights as the suc
Thelom- cessor of the Casars, wrested Italy from
bard con- the hands of the Goths; but scarcely was
a this revolution effected when Narses, the
successor of Belisarius, called a new nation of bar-
barians to support his policy in Italy. Narses died
before the advent of the Lombards ; but they descended
in forces far more formidable than the Goths, and es-
tablished a second kingdom at Pavia.
Under the Lombard domination Rome was again
Its disinte- left untouched. Venice, with her popula-
grating tion gathered fromthe ruins of the neigh-
oeth boring Roman cities, remained in quasi-
subjection to the Empire of the East ; Ravenna became
a Greek garrison, ruling the Exarchate and Pentapolis
under the name of the Byzantine Emperors. The
Western coast escaped the Lombard domination ; for
Genoa grew slowly into power upon her narrow cornice
_ between hills and sea, while Pisa defied the barbarians
intrenched in military stations at Fiesole and Lucca.
In like manner the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Cor-
sica, were detached from the Lombard kingdom; and
the maritime cities of Southern Italy, Bari, Naples,
Amalfi, and Gaeta, asserted independence under the
shadow of the Greek ascendency. What the Lom-
bards achieved in their conquest, and what they failed
to accomplish, decided the future of Italy. They
broke the country up into unequal blocks; for while
the inland regions of the north obeyed Pavia, while
the great duchies of Spoleto in the centre and of Bene-.
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 15
vento in the south owned the nominal sway of Alboin’s
successors, Venice and the Riviera, Pisa and the mari-
time republics of Apulia and Calabria, Ravenna and
the islands, repelled their sovereignty. Rome re-
mained inviolable beneath the egis of her ancient
prestige; and the decadent Empire of the East was
too inert to check the freedom of the towns which
recognized its titular supremacy.
Not long after their settlement the princes of the
Lombard race took the fatal step of join- p,
ing the Catholic communion, whereby they calls for
strengthened the hands of Rome and ex- ot ices
cluded themselves from tyrannizing in the Charles
last resort over the growing independence thé Great.
of the Papal See. The causes of their conversion
from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity are
buried in obscurity ; but it is probable that they were
driven to this measure by the rebelliousness of their
great vassals and the necessity of resting for support
upon the indigenous populations they had subjugated.
Rome, profiting by the errors and the weakness of her
antagonists, extended her spiritual dominion by en-
forcing sacraments, ordeals, and appeals to ecclesiasti-
cal tribunals, organized her hierarchy under Gregory
the Great, and lost no opportunity of enriching and
aggrandizing her bishoprics. In 718 she shook off the
yoke of Byzantium by repelling the heresies of Leo
the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her
with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard kings, who
possessed themselves of Ravenna in 728, she called
the Franks to her aid against the now powerful realm.
Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to Gaul, named Pippin
Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of
16 LTHE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
Italy. In the war that followed the Franks subdued
the Lombards, and Charles the Great was invested with
their kingdom, and crowned Emperor in 800 by Leo
III. at Rome.
The famous compact between Charles the Great and
The compact the Pope was in effect a ratification of
between the existing state of things. The new
Charles the . °
Greatand /mperor took for himself and converted into
the Pope. a Frankish kingdom all the provinces that
had been wrested from the Lombards. He relinquished
to the Papacy Rome with its patrimony, the portions of
Spoleto and Benevento that had already yielded to the
See of S. Peter, the southern provinces that owned the
nominal ascendency of Byzantium, the islands and
the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis which
formed no part of the Lombard conquest. By this
stipulation no real power was accorded to the Papacy,
nor did the new Empire surrender its paramount
rights over the peninsula at large. The Italian kingdom
transferred to the Franks in 800 was the kingdom
founded by the Lombards; while the outlying and un-
conquered districts were placed beneath the pro-
tectorate of the power which had guided their eman-
cipation.
Thus the dualism introduced into Italy by Theo-
The Empire doric’s veneration for Rome, and confirmed
rs a by the failure of the Lombard conquest,
tend their Was ratified by the settlement which estab-
sway. lished a new Empire in Western Christen-
dom. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and the maritime republics
of the South, excluded from the kingdom, were left to
pursue their own course; and this is the chief among
many reasons why they rose so early into prominence.
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 17
Rome consolidated her ancient patrimonies and ex-
tended her rectorship in the centre, while the Frankish
kings who succeeded each other at Pavia through eight
reigns developed their rule upon feudal principles
by parcelling the lands among their counts. New
marches were formed, traversing the previous Lombard
fabric, and introducing divisions that decentralized the
kingdom. Thus the great vassals of Ivrea, Verona,
Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against
Pavia; and when Berengar, the last independent
sovereign, strove to enforce his declining authority
he was met with the hatred and resistance of his
subjects.
The kingdom Berengar attempted to maintain
against his vassals and the Church was vir- The Lom- -
tually abrogated by Otho I.,whom the Lom- pba
bard nobles summoned into Italy. When he guished.
appeared in 961, he was crowned Emperor at Rome
and assumed the title of King of Italy. Thus the
Lombard kingdom, after enduring for two centuries,
was merged in the Empire; and from this time the
two great potentates in the peninsula were an unarmed
Pontiff and an absent Emperor. The subsequent his-
tory of the Italians shows how they succeeded in
reducing both these powers to the condition of princi-
ples; maintaining the pontifical and imperial ideas,
but repelling the practical authority of either potentate.
Otho created new marches and gave them to men of
German origin. Thus the ancient Italy of Lombards
and Franks was superseded by a new Italy of German
feudalism, owing allegiance to a suzerain whose
interests detained him in the provinces beyond the
Alps.
18 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
At the same time the organization of the Church
Thecities was fortified. The bishops were placed
gain import- ‘ ‘ é ;
anceunder ON an equality with the counts in the chief
the shadow cities, and viscounts were created to repre-
Church. sent their civil jurisdiction. It is difficult to
exaggerate the importance of Otho’s concessions to the
bishops. During the preceding period of Frankish
rule about one-third of the soil of Italy had been yielded
to the Church, which had the right of freeing its vas-
sals from military service ; and since the ecclesiastical
sees were founded upon ancient sites of Roman civiliza-
tion, without regard to the military centres of the
barbarian kingdoms, the new privileges of the bishops
accrued to the indigenous population. Milan, for
example, downtrodden by Pavia, still remained the
major see of Lombardy. Aquileia, though a desert,
had her patriarch, while Cividale, established as a
fortress to coerce the neighboring Roman towns, was
ecclesiastically but a village. At this epoch a third
power emerged in Italy. Berengar had given the
cities permission to inclose themselves with walls in
order to repel the invasions of the Huns. Otho
respected their right of self-defence, and from the date
of his coronation the history of the free-burghs begins
in Italy. It is at first closely connected with the
changes wrought by the extinction of the kingdom of
Pavia, by the exaltation of the clergy, and by the dis-
location of the previous system of feud-holding which
followed upon Otho’s determination to remodel the
country in the interest of the German Empire. The
ancient landmarks of nobility were altered and con-
fused. The cities under their bishops assumed a nove)
tharacter of independence. ‘Those of Roman origin,
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 19
being ecclesiastical centres, had a distinct advantage
over the more recent foundations of the Lombard and
the Frankish monarchs. The Italic population every-
where emerged and displayed a vitality that had been
crushed and overlaid by centuries of invasion and mili-
tary oppression.
The burghs at this epoch may be regarded as lumi-
nous points in the dense darkness of Th
: 2 : e form of
feudal aristocracy. Gathering round their government
cathedral as a centre, the towns inclose their Rie ke
dwellings with walls and bastions, from which i
they gaze upon a country bristling with castles, oc-
cupied by serfs, and lorded over by the hierarchical
nobility. Within the city the bishop and the count
hold equal sway; but the bishop has upon his side the
sympathies and passions of the burghers. The first
effort of the towns is to expel the count from their
midst. Some accident of misrule infuriates the citi-
zens. They fly to arms and are supported by the
bishop. The count has to retire to the open country,
where he strengthens himself in his castle. Then the
bishop remains victor in the town, and forms a govern-
ment of rich and noble burghers, who control with him
the fortunes of the new-born State. The constitution
of the city at this early period was simple. At the
head of its administration stood the bishop, with the
fopolo of enfranchised burghers. The Commune included
the Fofolo, together with the non-qualified inhabitants,
and was represented by consuls, varying in number
according to the division of the town into quarters,
Thus the Commune and the Popolo were originally
separate bodies, and this distinction has been perpetu-
ated in the architecture of those towns which still can
20 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
show a Palazzo del FPopolo apart from the Palazzo deb
Commune. Since the affairs of the city had to be con-
ducted by discussion, we find councils corresponding
to the constituent elements of the burgh. There is the
Parlemento, in which the inhabitants meet together to
hear the decisions of the bishop and the Popolo, or to
take measures in extreme cases that affect the city asa
whole; the Gran Consiglio, which is only open to duly-
qualified members of the Popolo; and the Credenza,
or privy council of specially delegated burghers, who
debate on matters demanding secrecy and diplomacy.
Such, generally speaking, and without regard to local
differences, was the internal constitution of an Italian
city during the supremacy of the bishops.
In the North of Italy not a few of the greater vassals,
among whom may be mentioned the Houses
ia ee of Canossa, Montferrat, Savoy, and Este,
under the creations of the Salic Emperors, looked with
ae favor upon the development of the towns,
while some nobles went so far as to con-
stitute themselves feudatories of bishops. At the
_ same time, while Lombardy and Tuscany were estab-
lishing their municipal liberties, a sympathetic move-
ment began in Southern Italy which resulted in the
conquest of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily by the Nor-
mans. Omitting all the details of this episode, than
which nothing more dramatic is presented in the history
of modern nations, it must be enough to point out here
that the Normans finally severed Italy from the Greek
Empire, gave a monarchical stamp to the south of the
peninsula, and brought the government intothe sphere
of national politics under the protection of the Pope.
Up to the date of its conquest Southern Italy had a
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 21
separate and confused history. It now entered the
Italian community, and, by the peculiar circumstances
of its cession to the Holy See, was destined in the
future to become the chief instrument whereby the
Popes disturbed the equilibrium of the peninsula in
furtherance of their ambitious schemes.
The greatness of the Roman cities under the popu-
lar rule of their bishops is illustrated by ye inan-
Milan, second only to Rome in the last days ence of
of the Empire. Milan had been reduced aie hes
to abject misery by the kings, who spared archbishop,
no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of Hertbert.
her elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom
she started into new life, and in 1037 her archbishop,
Heribert, was singled out by Conrad II. as the pro-
tagonist of the episcopal revolution against feudalism.
Heribert was, in truth, the hero of the burghs in their
first strife for independence. It was he who devised
the Carroccio, an immense car drawn by oxen, bearing
the banner of the Commune, with an altar and priests
ministrant, around which the pikemen of the city
mustered when they went to war. This invention of
Heribert’s was soon adopted by the cities throughout
Italy. It gave cohesion and confidence to the citizens,
reminded them that the Church was on their side in
the struggle for freedom, and served as symbol of their
military strength in union. The first authentic records
of a Parliament, embracing the nobles of the Popolo,
the clergy, and the multitude, are transmitted to us by
the Milanese Chronicles, in which Heribert figures as
the president of a republic. From this date Milan
takes the lead in the contests for municipal indepen-
dence. Her institutions, like that of the Carroccia,
22 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
together with her tameless spirit, are communicated
to the neighboring cities of Lombardy, cross the
Apennines, and animate the ancient burghs of Tus-
cany.
Having founded their liberties upon the episcopal
The privi- presidency, the cities now proceeded to
leges ob- claim the right of choosing their own bishops.
tained
through They refused the prelates sent them by
Gregory VII. the Emperor, and demanded an election
by the chapters of each town. This privilege was
virtually won when the War of Investitures broke out
in 1073. After the death of Gregory VI. in 1046, the
Emperors resolved to enforce their right of nominating
the Popes. The first two prelates imposed on Rome,
Clement II. and Damasus II., died under suspicion of
poison. Thus the Roman people refused a foreign
Pope, as the Lombards had rejected the bishops sent
to rule them. The next Popes, Leo IX. and Victor
II., were persuaded by Hildebrand, who now appears
upon the stage, to undergo a second election at Rome
by the clergy and the people. They escaped assassina-
tion. But the fifth, Stephen X., again died suddenly,
and now the formidable monk of Soana felt himself
powerful enough to cause the election of his own can-
didate, Nicholas II. A Lateran Council, inspired by -
Hildebrand, transferred the election of Popes to the
Cardinals, and confirmed the privilege of cities to choose
their bishops, subject to Papal ratification. In 1073
Hildebrand assumed the tiara as Gregory VII., and
declared a war that lasted more than forty years against
the Empire. At its close in 1122 the Church and the
Empire were counterpoised as mutually exclusive auto-
cracies, the one claiming illimitable spiritual sway, the
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 23
other recognized as no less illimitably paramount in
civil society.
One of the earliest manifestations of municipal vitality
was the war of city against city, which be- ,
gan to blaze with fury in the first half of rivalry of
the twelfth century, and endured so long as *he sities.
free towns lasted to perpetuate the conflict. No sooner
had the burghs established themselves beneath the
presidency of their consuls than they turned the arms
they had acquired in the war of independence against
their neighbors. The phenomenon was not confined
to any single district. It revealed a new necessity in
the very constitution of the commonwealths. Penned
up within the narrow limits of their petty dependencies,
throbbing with fresh life, overflowing with a populace
inured to warfare, demanding channels for their ener-
gies in commerce, competing with each other on the
paths of industry, they clashed in deadliest duels for
breathing space and means of wealth. The occasions
that provoked one commune to declare war upon its
rival were trivial. The animosity was internecine and
persistent, embittered by the partisanship of Papal and
Imperial principles. Therefore, when Frederick Bar-
barossa was elected in 1152, his first thought was to
reduce the Garden of the Empire to order. Soon after
his election he descended into Lombardy and formed
two leagues among the cities of the North—the one
headed by Pavia, the centre of the abrogated kingdom,
the other by Milan, who inherited the majesty of Rome,
and contained within her loins the future of Italian
freedom. It will be enough for our present purpose to
remember that in the course of that long contention
both leagues made common cause against the Emperer
24 ZHE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
drew the Pope, Alexander III., into their quarrel, and
finally routed the Imperial forces in 1183 near the
small village of Legnano, to the north of Milan. By
the Peace of Constance, which followed, the autonomy
of all the cities was amply guaranteed and recognized.
The advantages won by Milan, who sustained the
brunt of the Imperial onslaughts, and by
the splendor of her martyrdom surmounted
acquire more the petty jealousies of her municipal rivals,
sheer ne were extended to the cities of Tuscany.
After the date of that compact, signed by the Emperor
and his insurgent subjects,the burghs obtained an
assured position as a third power between the Empire
and the Church. The most remarkable point in the
history of this contention is the unanimous submission
of the Communes to what they regarded as the just
suzerainty of Czesar’s representative. Though they
were omnipotent in Lombardy, they took no measures
for closing the gates of the Alps against the Germans.
The Emperor was free to come and go as he listed ;
and when peace was signed, he reckoned the burghers
who had beaten him by arms and policy among his loyal
vassals. Still, the spirit of independence in Italy had
been amply asserted. This is notably displayed in the
address presented to Frederick, before his coronation,
by the senate of Rome. Regenerated by Arnold of
Brescia’s revolutionary mission, the Roman people
assumed its antique majesty in these remarkable words :
“Thou wast a stranger, I have made thee citizen;
thou camest from regions beyond the Alps, I have con-
ferred on thee the principality.” Presumptuous boast
as this sounded in the ears of Frederick, it proved that
the Communes were now taking their ground against
THE KISE OF THE COMMUNES. 25
the Church and the barbarians. They still recognized
the Empire, because the Empire reflected the glory of
Italy, and was the crown which gave to its people the
presidency of civilization. They still recognized the
authority of the Church, because the Church was the
eldest daughter of Italy emergent from the wreck of
Roman society. But the Communes had become con-
scious of their right to stand apart from either.
Strengthened by their contest with Frederick Bar-
barossa, recognized in their rights as bellig- am. nobles
erent powers, and left to their own guidance lose in
by the Empire, the cities were now free to ®thority.
prosecute their wars upon the remnants of feudalism.
The town, as we have learnt to know it, was overlooked
from neighboring heights by castles, where the nobles
still held undisputed authority over serfs of the soil.
Against these dominating fortresses every city, with
_ singular unanimity, directed the forces it had formed in
the preceding conflicts. At the same time, the muni-
cipal struggles of commune against commune lost none
of their virulence. The counts, pressed on all sides by
_ the towns that had grown up around them, adopted the
policy of pitting one burgh against another. Whena
noble was attacked by the township nearest his castle,
he espoused the animosities of a more distant city, com-
promised his independence by accepting its captaincy,
and thus became the servant or ally of a republic. In
his desperation he emancipated his serfs; and so the
country-folk chiefly profited by these dissensions
between the cities and their feudal masters, This new
phase of republican evolution lasted over a long and ill-
defined period, assuming different characters in differ-
ent centres ; but the end of it was that the nobles were
26 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
forced to submit to the cities. They were admitted to
the burgherships, and agreed to spend a certain portion
of every year in the palaces they raised within the cir-
cuit of the walls. Thus the counts placed themselves
beneath the jurisdiction of the consuls, and the Italic
population absorbed into itself the relics of Lombard,
Frank, and German aristocracy.
Still, the gain upon the side of the republics was not
clear. Though the feudal lordship of the
* hed of nobles had been destroyed, their wealth, their
instituted, | Jands,and their prestige remained untouched,
In the city they felt themselves but aliens.
Their real home was still the castle on the neighboring
mountain. Nor, when they stooped to become burghers
had they relinquished the use of arms. Instead of
building peaceable dwelling-houses in the city, they
filled its quarters with fortresses and towers, whence
they carried on feuds among themselves, and imperilled
the safety of the streets. The authority of the consuls
proved insufficient to maintain an equilibrium between
the people and the nobles. Accordingly, a new magis-
trate started into being, combining the offices of supreme
justiciary and military dictator. When Frederick Bar-
barossa attempted to govern the rebellious Lombard
cities in the common interest of the Empire, he estab-
lished in their midst a foreign judge, called Podesta,
** guast habens potestatem Imperatoris in hacparte.” This
institution only served at the moment to inflame and
embitter the resistance of the Communes ; but the title
of Podesta was subsequently conferred upon the official
summoned to maintain an equal balance between the
burghers and the nobles. The lordship of the burgh
‘still resided with the consuls, wro from this time forward
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 27
began to lose their individuality in the college of the
Signoria—calied Priori, Anztani, or Rettori, as the case
might be in various districts.
The Italian republics had reached this stage
when Frederick II. united the Empire The opposi-
and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. fon of the
yt apacy to
It was a crisis of the utmost moment for Frederick
Italian independence. Master of the south, U-
Frederick sought to reconquer the lost prerogatives
of the Empire in Lombardy and Tuscany; nor is
it impossible that he might have succeeded in uniting
Italy beneath his sway but for the violent animosity of
the Church, The warfare of extermination carried on
by the Popes against the House of Hohenstauffen was
no proof of their partiality for the cause of freedom.
They dreaded the reality of a kingdom that should
base itself on Italy and be the rival of their own
authority. Therefore they espoused the cause of the
free burghs against Frederick, and when the north was
devastated by his vicars, they preached a crusade
against Ezzelino da Romano.
While Frederick foreshadowed the comparatively
modern tyrants of the coming age, Ezzelino
da Romano, his vicar in the north of Italy, ster da,
ane 5 omano.
represented the atrocities towards which mee
they always tended to degenerate. Regarding himself
with a sort of awful veneration as the divinely-appointed
scourge of humanity, this monster in his lifetime was
execrated as an aberration from “the kindly race of
men,” and after his death he became the hero of a
fiendish mythus. But in the succeeding centuries of
Italian history his kind was only too common ; the
immorality with which he worked out his selfish
28 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
aims was systematically adopted, as we shall see, by
princes like the Visconti, and reduced to rule by theo-
rists like Machiavelli. Ezzelino, a small, pale,wiry man,
with terror in his face, and enthusiasm for evil in his
heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold to the pathos of
children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one
passion was the greed of power, heightened by the lust
for blood. Originally a noble of the Veronese Marches,
he founded his illegal authority upon the captaincy of
the Imperial party delegated to him by Frederick.
Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Feltre, and Belluno con-
ferred on him judicial as well as military supremacy.
How he fearfully abused his power, how a _ crusade
was preached against him, and how he died in silence
like a boar at bay, rending from his wounds the
dressings that his foes had placed there to keep him
alive, are notorious matters of history. At Padua
alone he erected eight prisons, two of which contained
as many as three hundred captives each ; and though
the executioner never ceased to ply his trade there,
they were always full. These dungeons were designed
to torture by their noisomeness, their want of air and
light and space. Ezzelino made himself terrible not
merely by executions and imprisonments, but also by
mutilations and torments. When he captured Friola
he caused the population of all ages, sexes, occupations,
to be deprived of their eyes, noses, and legs, and to be
cast forth to the mercy of the elements. On another
occasion he walled up a family of princes in a castle
and left them to die of famine. Wealth, eminence,
and beauty attracted his displeasure no less than
insubordination or disobedience. Nor was he less
crafty than cruel. Sons betrayed their fathers, friends
ene as
Ait \ 4
ee
— ps ee — -
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 29
their comrades, under the fallacious safeguard of his
promises. A gigantic instance of his scheming was the
coup-de-main by which he succeeded in entrapping
11,000 Paduan soldiers, only 200 of whom escaped the
miseries of his prisons. Thus by his absolute con-
tempt of law, his inordinate cruelty, his prolonged
massacres, and his infliction of plagues upon the whole
peoples, Ezzelino established the ideal in Italy of a
tyrant marching to his end by any means whatever,
In vain was the humanity of the race revolted by the
hideous spectacle. Vainly did the monks assemble
pity-stricken multitudes upon the plain of Paquara to
atone with tears and penitence for the insults offered
to the saints in heaven by Ezzelino’s fury. It laid a
deep hold upon the Italian imagination, and by the
glamour of loathing that has strength to fascinate
proved in the end contagious.
In the controversy that shook Italy from north to
south the parties of Guelf and Ghibelline,
of the Papacy and the Empire respectively,
took shape and acquired an ineradicable
force. All the previous humors and discords of the
nation were absorbed by them. The Guelf party
meant the people of the Communes, the men of in-
dustry and commerce, the upholders of civil liberty,
the friends of democratic expansion. The Ghibelline
party included the naturalized nobles, the men of arms
and idleness, the advocates of feudalism, the politicians
who regarded constitutional progress with disfavor.
Divided by irreconcilable ideals, each side became
eager to possess the city for itself, each prepared to
die for its adopted principles. The victorious party
then organizes the government in its own interest,
Guelfs and
Ghibellines,
3° THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
establishes itself in a palazzo apart from the Commune,
where it develops its machinery at home and abroad,
and strengthens its finances by forced contributions
and confiscations. The exiles make common cause
with members of their own faction in an adverse
burgh; and thus the most distant centres are drawn
into the network of a common dualism. In this way,
we are justified in saying, Italy achieved her national
consciousness through strife and conflict; for the
Communes ceased to be isolated, cemented by tem-
porary leagues or engaged in merely local dissensions.
They were brought together and connected by the
sympathies and antipathies of an antagonism which
embraced and dominated the municipalities, and merged
the titular leaders of the struggle, Pope and Emperor,
in the uncontrollable tumult.
Society was riven down to its foundation. Rancors
dating from the thirteenth century endured
ghettos long after the great parties ceased to have
partyfeeling, 2 Meaning. They were perpetuated in
customs and expressed themselves in the
most trivial details. Banners, ensigns, and heraldic
colors followed the divisions of the factions. Ghibel-
lines wore feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs
upon the other. Ghibellines cut fruit at table cross-
wise, Guelfs straight down. In Bergamo some Cala-
brians were murdered by their host, who -discovered
by their way of slicing garlic that they sided with the
hostile party. Ghibellines drank out of smooth, and
Guelfs out of chased, goblets. Ghibellines wore white,
and Guelfs red, roses. Yawning, passing in the street,
throwing dice, gestures in speaking or swearing, were
used as pretexts for distinguishing one half of Italy
THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES. 31
from the other. So late as the middle of the fifteenth
century, the Ghibellines of Milan tore the crucifix
from the high altar of the Cathedral at Crema and
buried it, because the face turned to the Guelf shoulder.
Every great city has a tale of love and death that
carries the contention of its adverse families into the
region of romance and legend. The story of Romeo
and Juliet at Verona is a myth which brings both
factions into play: the well-meaning intervention of
peace-making monks, and the ineffectual efforts of the
Podesta to curb the violence of party warfare.
During the stress and storm of the fierce conflict car-
ried on by Guelfs and Ghibellines, the Po- ee
; aptain
desta fell into the second rank. He had of the Peo-
been created to meet an emergency ; but now Pile insti-
. : ° uted,
the discord was too vehement for arbitration.
A new functionary appears, with the title of Captain of
the People. Chosen when one or other of the factions
gains supreme power in the burgh, he represents the
victorious party, takes the lead in proscribing their
opponents, and ratifies on his responsibility the changes
introduced into the constitution. The old magistracies
and councils, meanwhile, are not abrogated. The
Consiglio del Popolo, with the Capitano at its head,
takes the lead, and a new member, called the Consigho
della Parte, is found beside them, watchful to main-
tain the policy of the victorious faction. But the
Consiglio del Commune, with the Podesta, who has not
ceased to exercise judicial functions, still subsists.
The Priors form the Signory, as of old. The Credenza
goes on working, and the Gran Consiglio represents
the body of privileged burghers. The victorious party
does but tyrannize over the city it has conquered, and
32 THE RISE OF THE COMMUNES.
manipulates the ancient constitution for its own ad-
vantage. In this clash of Guelf with Ghibelline the
beneficiaries were the lower classes of the people.
Excluded from the Popolo of episcopa! and consular
revolutions, the trades and industries of the great
cities now assert their claims to be enfranchised. The
advent of the 47véz is the chief social phenomenon of
the crisis. Thus the final issue of the conflict was
a new Italy, deeply divided by factions that were
little understood because they were so vital, because
they represented two adverse currents of national
energy, incompatible, irreconcilable, eternal in antagon-
ism as the poles. But this discordant nation was
more commercial and more democratic. Families
of merchants rose upon the ruins of the old nobility.
Roman cities of industry reduced their military rivals
of earlier or later origin to insignificance. The plain,
the river, and the port asserted themselves against the
mountain fastness and the barrack burgh. The several
classes of society, triturated, shaken together, levelled
by warfare and equalized by industry, presented but
few obstacles to the emergence of commanding person-
alities, however humble, from the ranks. |
IIT.
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
T was under the rule of despots—men of diverse
origin, though for the most part displaying great
strength of character—that the conditions of the Re-
naissance were evolved. Under tyrannies, in the midst
of intrigues, wars, and revolutions, the peculiar in-
dividuality of the Italians obtained its ultimate de-
velopment. This individuality, as remarkable for
salient genius and different talent as for self-conscious
and deliberate vice, determined the qualities of the
Renaissance, and affected by example the whole of
Europe.
If we examine the constitution of these tyrannies,
we find abundant proof of their despotic yo nature
nature. The succession from father to and effect of
son was always uncertain. Legitimacy of i eat WEG
birth was hardly respected. The sons of Popes ranked
with the proudest of aristocratic families. Nobility
was less regarded in the choice of a ruler than personal
ability. Power once acquired was maintained by
force, and the history of the ruling families is one
catalogue of crime. Yet the cities thus governed were
orderly and prosperous. Police regulations were care-
fully maintained by governors whose interest it was to
34 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
rule a quiet state. Culture was widely diffused with-
out regard to rank or wealth. Public edifices of
colossal grandeur were multiplied. Meanwhile the
people at large were being fashioned to that self:
conscious and intelligent activity which is fostered
by the modes of life peculiar to political and social
centres in a condition of continued rivalry and
change.
In Italy, where there existed no time-honored hier-
How itwas archy of classes and no fountain of nobility
maintained. in the person of a sovereign, one man
was a match for another, provided he knew how to
assert himself. To the conditions of a society based
on these principles we may ascribe the unrivalled
emergence of great personalities among the tyrants.
In the contest for power and in the maintenance of an
illegal authority the picked athletes came to the front. —
The struggle by which they established their tyranny,
the efforts by which they defended it against foreign
foes and domestic adversaries, trained them to endur-
ance and daring. They lived habitually in an atmos.
phere of peril which taxed all their energies. Theit
activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded
to their vehement vitality. When a weakling was born
in a despotic family his brothers murdered him, or he
was deposed by a watchful rival. Thus only gladiators
of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to re
ligious and moral scruples, dead to natural affection,
perfected in perfidy, scientific in the use of cruelty
and terror, employing first-rate faculties of brain
and bodily powers in the service of transcendent
egotism, could survive and hold their own upon this
perilous arena.
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 35
To record all the instances of crime revenged by
crime, of murder following on treachery,
a large volume might be compiled con- The general
ae : : , ._ character of
taining nothing but the episodes in this the despots,
grim history of despotism, now tragic and
pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion,
now despicable from the baseness of the motives, at
one time revolting through excess of physical horrors,
at another fascinating by the spectacle of heroic cour-
age, intelligence, and resolution. Isolated, crime-
haunted, and remorseless, at the same time fierce and
timorous, the despot not unfrequently made of vice a
fine art for his amusement, and openly defied human-
ity. His pleasures tended to extravagance. Inordi-
nate lust and refined cruelty sated his irritable and
jaded appetites. He destroyed pity in his soul and
spent his brains upon the invention of new tortures.
From the game of politics, again, he won a feverish
pleasure, playing for states and cities as a man plays
chess, endeavoring to extract the utmost excitement
from the varying turns of skill and chance. But it
would be an exaggeration to assert that all the princes
of Italy were of this sort, We shall see that the saner
and nobler among them found a more humane enjoy-
ment in the consolidation of their states, the cementing
of their alliances, the society of learned men, the
friendship of greaz artists, the building of palaces and
churches, the execution of vast: schemes of conquest.
Some, indeed, we shall find, combined the vices of a
barbarian with the enthusiasm of a scholar, while others,
again, exhibited every personal virtue with moderation
in statecraft and a noble width of culture. But the
tendency to degenerate was fatal to all the despotic
36 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
houses; the strain of tyranny proved too strong.
Crime, illegality, or the sense of peril, descending from
father to son, produced monsters in the shape of men.
The last Visconti, the last La Scala, the last Sforza,
the last Malatesta, the last Farnesi, the last Medici
are among the worst specimens of human nature.
The power of the Viscontiin Milan was founded upon
The Vis- that of the Della Torre family, who preceded
conti. them as captains of the people at the end of
the thirteenth century. Otho, Archbishop of Milan,
first laid a substantial basis for the dominion of his
house by imprisoning Napoleone Della Torre and five
of his relatives in three iron cages, in 1277, and by
causing his nephew, Matteo Visconti, to be nominated
both by the Emperor and the people of Milan as
Imperial Vicar. Matteo, who headed the Ghibelline
party in Lombardy, was the model of a prudent Italian
despot. From 1311, when he finally succeeded to the
sovereignty, to 1322, when he abdicated in favor of his
son Galeazzo, he ruled his states by force of character,
craft, and insight, more than by violence and cruelty.
Caleazzo was less fortunate than Matteo, surnamed
Giles or Grandeby the Lombards. The Emperor,
the son, Louis of Bavaria, threw him into prison on
en 204 the occasion of his visit to Milan in 1327,
son,of Il and only released him at the intercession
Grande. of his friend, Castruccio Castracane. He
married Beatrice d’Este, the widow of Nino di Gallura,
of whom Dante speaks in the eighth canto of the
“ Purgatory,” and had by her a son named Azzo. Azzo
consolidated his power by the murder of his uncle
Marco, in 1329, and on his decease in 1339 was sue
ceeded by another uncle, Lucchino.
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 39
In Lucchino the darker side of the Visconti char.
acter appears for the first time. Cruel,
moody, and jealous, he passed his life in ne
perpetual terror. His nephews, Galeazzo vanni, Arch-
and Barnabas, conspired against him and ee of
were exiled to Flanders. He left sons, but seth Ghee:
none of proved legitimacy. Hewas there-
fore succeeded by his brother Giovanni, Archbishop
of Milan. This prince, the friend of Petrarch, was
one of the most notable characters of the fourteenth
century. His reign marks a new epoch in the despot-
ism of the Visconti. Their dynasty, though based
on force and maintained by violence, has come to be
acknowledged, and we shall soon see them allying
themselves with the royal houses of Europe.
After the death of Giovanni, Matteo’s sons were
extinct. But Stefano, the last of the family, alk ah aaa
had left three children, Matteo, Bernabo, gateazzo,
and Galeazzo. Matteo abandoned himself grandsons of
to bestial sensuality, and his two brothers, Gee
finding him both feeble and likely to bring discredit
on their rule, caused him to be assassinated in 1355,
They then jointly swayed the Milanese with unanimity
remarkable in despots.
Galeazzo was distinguished as the handsomest man
of his age. Hewas tall and graceful, with Galeazo
golden hair, which he wore in long plaits Visconti.
or tied upin a net, or else loose and crowned with
flowers. Fond of display and magnificence, he spent
most of his vast wealth in shows and festivals, and in the
building of palaces and churches. The same taste for
splendor led him tv seek royal marriages for his
38 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
children. His daughter Violante was wedded to the
Duke of Clarence, son of Edward ITI. of England, whe
received with her for dowry two hundred thousand
golden florins and five cities bordering on Piedmont.
It must have been a strange experience for this brother
of the Black Prince, leaving London, where the streets
were still unpaved, the houses thatched, the beds laid
on straw, and where wine was sold as a medicine, to
pass through the luxurious palaces of Lombardy,
walled with marble, and raised high above smooth
streets of stone. On this occasion Galeazzo is said to
have made splendid presents to more than two hundred
Englishmen, so that he was reckoned to have outdone
the greatest kings in generosity. With equal display
and extravagance he married his son Gian Galeazzo to
Isabella, daughter of King John of France.
Galeazzo held his court at Pavia. His brother
Bernabo reigned at Milan. Bernabo displayed
Visconti. all the worst vices of the Visconti in his cold-
blooded cruelty. ‘Together with his brother, he devised
and caused to be publicly announced by edict that
State criminals would be subjected to a series of tor-
tures extending over the space of forty days. In this
infernal programme every variety of torment found a
place, and days of respite were so calculated as to pro-
tong the lives of the victims for further suffering, till af
last there was little left of them that had not been
hacked and hewed and flayed away.
Galeazzo died in 1378, and was.succeeded in his own
Sian portion of the Visconti domain by his son
Galeazzo Gian Galeazzo. Now began one of those
Visconti. long, slow, internecine struggles which
were so common between the members of the ruling
HL RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 39
families in Italy. Bernabo and his sons schemed to
get possession of the young prince’s estate. He, on
the other hand, determined to supplant his uncle, and
to re-unite the whole Visconti principality beneath his
own sway. Craft was the weapon which he chose in
this encounter. Shutting himself up in Pavia, he made
no disguise of his physical cowardice, which was real,
while he simulated a timidity of spirit wholly akin to
his temperament. He pretended to be absorbed in
religious observances, and gradually induced his uncle
and cousins to despise him as a poor creature whom
they could make short work of when occasion served.
In 1385, having thus prepared the way for treason, he
avowed his intention of proceeding on a pilgrimage to
Our Lady of Varese. Starting from Pavia with a body-
guard of Germans, he passed near Milan, where his
uncle and cousins came forth to meet him. Gian Gal-
eazzo feigned a courteous greeting ; but, when he saw his
relatives within his grasp, he gave a watchword in
German to his troops, who surrounded Bernabo and
took him prisoner with his sons. Gian Galeazzo
marched immediately into Milan, poisoned his uncle in
a dungeon, and proclaimed himself sole lord of the
Visconti heirship.
The reign of Gian Galeazzo, which began with this
coup-de-main (1385-1402), forms a very im- myo charac
portant chapter in Italian history. Giovio ter of Gian
describes him as having been a remarkably %1€2#20.
sedate and thoughtful boy, so wise beyond his years
that his friends feared he would not grow to man’s
estate. No pleasures in after-life drew him away from
business; hunting, hawking, women, had alike no
charms for him. He took moderate exercise for the
40 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
preservation of his health, read and meditated much,
and relaxed himself in conversation with men of letters,
Pure intellect, in fact, had reached to perfect inde-
pendence in this prince, who was far above the bois-
terous pleasures and violent activities of the age in
which he lived. In the erection of public buildings
he was magnificent. The Certosa of Pavia and the
Duomo of Milan owed their foundation to his sense of
splendor. At the same time he completed the palace
of Pavia which his father had begun, and which he
made the noblest dwelling-house in Europe. The Uni-
versity of Pavia was raised by him from a state of de-
cadence to one of great prosperity, partly by munificent
endowments, and partly by a wise choice of professors.
In his military undertakings he displayed a kindred
taste for vast engineering projects. He contemplated,
and partly carried out, a scheme for turning the Mincio
and the Brenta from their channels, and for drying up
the lagoons of Venice. In this way he purposed to
attack his last great enemy, the Republic of St. Mark,
upon her strongest side. Yet, in the midst of these
huge designs, he was able to attend to the most trifling
details of economy. By applying mercantile machin-
ery to the management of his vast dominions, at a
time when public economy was but little understood in
Europe, he raised his wealth enormously above that of
his neighbors, As his personal timidity prevented him
from leading his troops in the field, he found it neces-
sary to employ paid generals, and took into his service
all the chief condottier? of the day, thus giving an im-
pulse to the custom which led to the corruption of the
whole military system of Italy.
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. rh
Gian Galeazzo’s schemes were first directed against
the Scala dynasty. Founded, like that of gis animos:
the Visconti, upon the Imperial authority, ity tothe
it rose to its greatest height under the Ghi- 5°#!# family.
belline general Can Grande, and his nephew Mastino,
in the first half of the fourteenth century (1312-1351),
Mastino had himself cherished the project of an Italian
kingdom ; but he died before approaching its accom:
plishment. The degeneracy of his house began with
his three sons. The two younger killed the eldest; of
the survivors, the stronger slew the weaker, and then
died in 1374, leaving his domains to two of his bas-
tards. One of these, named Antonio, killed the other
in 1381, and afterwards fell a prey to the Visconti in
1387.
Having obtained possession of all the principal cities
in Tuscany, and ruined their reigning fam-
ilies, chiefly by the most despicable arts, His conquest,
Gian Galeazzo followed up his success by sna Babe
the annexation of Bologna, Siena, Lucca,
and Pisa. All Italy and Germany had now begun to
regard the usurpations of the Milanese despot with
alarm. There remained no power, except the Republic
of Florence and the exiled but invincible Francesco da
Carrara of Padua, to withstand his further progress.
Florence delayed his conquests in Tuscany. Fran-
cesco managed to return to Padua, Still the peril
which threatened the whole of Italy was imminent.
The Duke of Milan was in the plenitude of manhood
—rich, prosperous, and full of mental vigor. His ac
quisitions were well cemented; his treasury brimful ;
his generals highly paid. All his lieutenants in city
and ia camp respected the irey will and the deep policy
42 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS,
of the despot who swayed their action from his arn»
chair in Milan. He alone knew how to use the brains
and hands that did him service, to keep them mutually
in check, and by their regulated action to make him-
self not one, but a score of men. At last, when all
other hope of independence for Italy had failed, the
plague broke out with fury in Lombardy. Gian Gale-
azzo retired to his isolated fortress of Marignano in
order to escape infection. Yet there, in 1402, he sick-
ened. A comet appeared in the sky, to which he
pointed, as a sign of his approaching death—“ God
could not but signalize the end of so supreme a ruler,”
he told his attendants. He died aged fifty-five. Italy
drew a ceep breath.
The systematic plan conceived by Gian Galeazzo
The decline 10r the enslavement of Italy, the ability
of the Vis- which sustained him in its execution, and
conti power. the power with which he bent men to his
will, are scarcely more extraordinary than the sudden dis-
solution of the dukedom at his death. As long as he
lived and held the band of great commanders he had
trained in his service in leading-strings, all went well,
But at his death his two sons were still mere boys. He
had to entrust their persons, together with the conduct
of his hardly-won dominions, to these captains in con-
junction with the Duchess Catherine and a certain
Francesco Barbavara. This man had been the duke’s
body-servant, and was now the paramour of the
duchess. The generals refused to act with them; and
each seized upon such portions of the Visconti inher-
itance as he could most easily acquire. The vast
tyranny of the first Duke of Milan fell to pieces ina
day. Many scions of the ejected families also recovered
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 43
their authority. Meanwhile, Giovanni Maria Visconti
was proclaimed Duke of Milan, and his brother Filippo
Maria occupied Pavia.
In the despotic families of Italy, as already hinted,
there was a progressive tendency to de- | :
generation. The strain of tyranny sus- ep
tained by force and craft for generations,
the abuse of power and pleasure, the isolation and
dread in which the despots lived habitually, bred a
kind of hereditary madness. This constitutional fero-
city of the race appeared as monomania in Giovanni,
and an organic timidity amounting to almost imbecility
in his brother. Gian Maria distinguished himself
chiefly by cruelty and lust. He used the hounds of
his ancestors no longer in the chase of boars, but of
living men. All the criminals of Milan, and all whom
he could get denounced as criminals, even the partici-
pators in his own enormities, were given up to his
infernal sport. His huntsman, Squarcia Giramo,
trained the dogs to their duty by feeding them on
human flesh, and the duke watched them tear his
victims in pieces with the ecstasy of a lunatic. In
1412 some Milanese noblemen succeeded in mur-
dering him, and threw his mangled corpse into the
Street.
Filippo Maria meanwhile had married the widow of
Facino Cane, one of the most distinguished Filippo
of his father’s generals, who brought him Maria Vis-
nearly half a million of florins for dowry, tH
together with her husband’s soldiers and the cities,
he had seized after Gian Galeazzo’s death. He be-
headed her six years afterwards on the strength of a
false accusation which k~ ‘ad himself instigated; but
44 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
by this alliance he gradually recovered the Lombard
portion of his father’s dukedom. The minor cities
purged by murder of their usurpers, once more fell into
the grasp of the Milanese despot, after a series of
domestic and political tragedies that drenched their
streets with blood. Piacenza was utterly depopulated.
It is recorded that for the space of a year only three
of its inhabitants remained within the walls. ;
This Filippo, the last of the Visconti tyrants, was
His death extremely ugly, and so sensitive about his
opens the —jll-formed person that he scarcely dared to
roy te mo show himself abroad. He habitually lived
Sforza. in secret chambers, changing them fre-
quently, and, when he issued from his palace, dis-
regarded salutations in the street. As an instance
of his nervousness, the chronicles report that he
could not endure to hear the noise of thunder. At
the same time he inherited much of his father’s insight
into character, and the power of controlling men more
bold and active than himself. But he lacked the keen
decision and broad views of Gian Galeazzo. He
vacillated in policy, and kept devising plots that had
no result but his own disadvantage. Excess of caution
made him surround the captains of his troops with
spies, and check them at the moment when he feared
they might become too powerful. This want of con
fidence neutralized the advantage which he might
have gained by his choice of fitting instruments.
Thus his selection of Francesco Sforza for his general
against the Venetians in 1431 was a wise one. But
he could not attach the great soldier of fortune to
himself. Sforza took the pay of Florence against his
old patron, and in 1441 forced him to a ruinous peace:
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 43
one of the conditions of which was the marriage of his
only daughter, Bianca, to the son of the peasant of
Cotignola. Bianca was illegitimate, and Filippo Maria
had no male heir. The great family of the Visconti
had dwindled away. Consequently, after the duke’s
death in 1447, Sforza found his way open to the Duchy
of Milan, which he first secured by force, and then
claimed in right of his wife. An adverse claim was
set up by the House of Orleans, Louis of Orleans
having married Valentina, the legitimate daughter of
Gian Galeazzo. But both of theseclaims were invalid,
since the investiture granted by Wenceslaus to the first
duke excluded females. So Milan was once again
thrown open to the competition of usurpers.
The inextinguishable desire for liberty in Milan
blazed forth upon the death of the last
duke. In spite of so many generations fees oh
of despots, the people still regarded them- tains the
selves as sovereign. But astate which had *™*edom.
served the Visconti for nearly two centuries could not
in a moment shake off its weakness and rely upon
itself alone. Feeling the necessity of mercenary aid,
the republic was short-sighted enough to engage Fran-
cesco Sforza as commander-in-chief against the Vene-
tians who had availed themselves of the anarchy in
Lombardy to push their power west of the Adda. In one
brilliant campaign he drove the Venetians back beyond
the Adda, burned their fleet at Casal Maggiore on the
Po, and utterly defeated their army at Caravaggio.
Then he returned as conqueror to Milan, reduced the
surrounding cities, blockaded the Milanese in their
capital, and forced them to receive him as their duke
in 1450.
46 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
Sforza got his name from his great physical strength
r He was a peasant of the villiage of Cotig-
TaNncesco ° ° : °
Sforza’s nola, who, being invited to quit the mat-
groatape tock for a sword, threw his pickaxe into
s an oak, and cried: “If it stays there it is
a sign that I shall make my fortune.” The axe stuck
in the tree, and Sforza went forth to found a line of
dukes. He never obtained the sanction of the Empire
to his title. But the great condottiere, possessing the
substance, did not care for the external show of mon-
archy. He ruled firmly, wisely, and for those times
well, attending to the prosperity of his State, maintain-
ing good discipline in her cities, and losing no ground
by foolish and ambitious schemes. Louis XI. of
France is said to have professed himself Sforza’s pupil
in statecraft, than which no greater tribute could be
paid to his political sagacity. In 1466 he died, leav-
ing three sons—Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, the Cardi-
nal Ascanio, and Lodovico, surnamed II Moro.
‘“‘ Francesco’s crown,” says Ripamonti,“ was destined
to pass to more than six inheritors, and
prise pee these five successions were accomplished
successors, by a series of tragic events in his family.
Galeazzo, his son, was murdered because
of his abominable crimes, in the presence of his peo-
ple, before the altar, in the middle of the sacred rites.
Giovanni Galeazzo, who followed him, was poisoned
by his uncle, Lodovico. Lodovico was imprisoned by
the French, and died of grief ina dungeon. One of
his sons perished in the same way; and the other,
after years of misery and exile, was restored in his
childless old age to a throne which had been under-
mined, and when he died his dynasty was extinct
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 47
This was the recompense for the treason of Francesco
to the State of Milan. It was for such successes that
he passed his life in perfidy, privation, and danger.”
Such was the condition of Italy at the end of the
fifteenth century. Neither public nor pri- my, rreeae
vate morality, in our sense of the word, lence of
existed. The crimes of the tyrants against °™¢
their subjects and the members of their own fam-
ilies had produced a correlative order of crime in the
people over whom they tyrannized. Cruelty was met
by conspiracy. Tyrannicide became honorable.
Murders, poisonings, rapes, and treasons were common
incidents of private as of public life. In cities like
Naples bloodguilt could be atoned at an inconceivably
low rate. The palaces of the nobles swarmed with
professional cut-throats, and the great ecclesiastics
claimed for their abodes the rights of sanctuary.
Popes sold absolution for the most horrible excesses,
and granted indulgences beforehand for the commis-
sion of crimes of lust and violence. Success was the
standard by which acts were judged; and the man
who could help his friends, intimidate his enemies,
and carve a way to fortune by any means he chose,
was regarded as a hero.
Yet it must not be overlooked that even in such a
3oil the spirit of the Renaissance had
k . -, The growth
reached maturity, and was putting forth its ofthe
choicest fruits. We may anticipate what Renaissance
will be noticed again how at this time Filelfo seroma
was receiving the pay of Filippo Maria Visconti;
that Guarino of Verona was instructing the heir of
Ferrara, and Vittorino da Feltre the children of the
Marquis of Mantua. We think of Lionardo da Vinci
48 THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS.
delighting Milan with his music and his magic world
of painting ; of Boiardo singing the prelude to Ariosto’s
melodies in Ferrara ; of Poliziano pouring forth honeyed
eloquence at Florence ; of Ficino expounding Plato,
and Pico della Mirandola dreaming of a reconciliation
of the Hebrew, Pagan, and Christian traditions. It is
well to note these facts while we record the ferocity
and crimes of despots who seemed little likely to
appreciate and protect these masters in arts and
letters. But this wasanage in which even the wildest
and most perfidious of tyrants felt the ennobling in-
fluences and the sacred thirst of knowledge.
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini,
Sici might be selected as a true type of the
igismondo ; m :
Pandolfo princes who united a romantic zeal for
Malatesta. culture with the vices of barbarians. The
coins which bear the portraits of this man, together
with the medallions in red Verona marble on his
church at Rimini, show a narrow forehead protuberant
above bushy eyebrows, a long hooked nose, hollow
cheeks, and petulant, passionate, compressed lips.
The whole face seems ready to flash with sudden vio-
lence, to merge its self-control in a spasm of fury.
This Malatesta killed three wives in succession, and
committed outrages on his children. So much of him
belongs to the mere savage. He caused the magnifi-
cent church of S. Francesco at Rimini to be raised by
Leo Alberti in a manner more worthy of a pagan pan-
theon than of a Christian temple. He encrusted it
with exquisite bas-reliefs in marble, the triumphs of
the earliest Renaissance style, carved his own name
and ensigns upon every scroll and frieze and point of
vantage in the building, and dedicated a shrine there
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 49
to his concubine—Dive Jsothe Sacrum. In the spirit
of the Neo-pagan of the fifteenth century, he brought
back from Greece the mortal remains of the philoso-
pher Gemistos Plethon, buried them in a sarcophagus
outside his church, with this epigraph : ‘These remains
of Gemistus of Byzantium, chief of the sages of his
day, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, son of Pandolfo,
commander in the war against the king of the Turks in
the Morea, induced by the mighty love with which he
burns for men of learning, brought hither and placed
within this chest, 1466.”’ He, the most fretful and tur-
bulent of men, read books with patient care, and bore
the contradictions of pedants in the course of long dis-
cussions on philosophy, arts, and letters. At the same
time, as condottiere, he displayed all the duplicities,
cruelties, sacrileges, and tortuous policies to which
the most accomplished villain of the age could have
aspired,
It is pleasant to be able to conclude these illustrations
of the worst features of Italian despotism Frederick,
with a brief sketch of the character of the Duke of
good Duke Frederick, Count of Montefeltro, Ut>ime
created Duke of Urbino in 1474 by Pope Sixtus IV,
His life covers the better part of the fifteenth century (0.
1422, @. 1482). A little corner of old Umbria lying
between the Apennines and the Adriatic, Rimini and
Ancona, formed his patrimony. Speaking roughly,
the whole duchy was but forty miles square, and the
larger portion consisted of bare hillsides and serrated
ravines, Yet this poor territory became the centre of
a splendid court. The chivalry of Italy flocked to
Urbino in order to learn manners and the art of war
from the most noble general of his day. The library con-
&
50 _ DHE ROLE OF THE DESPOTS.
tained copies of all the Greek and Latin authors then
discovered, the principal treatises on theology and
Church history, a complete series of Italian poets,
historiographers and commentators, various medical,
mathematical, and legal works, essays on music,
military tactics, and the arts, together with such
Hebrew books as were accessible to copyists. Military
service formed his trade. As a condoltiere, Federigo
was famous in this age of broken faith for his sincerity
and plain dealing. ‘To his soldiers in the field he was
considerate and generous; to his enemies compassion-
ate and merciful. But Frederick was not merely an
accomplished prince. Concurrent testimony proves
that he remained a good husband and a constant
friend throughout his life, that he controlled his
natural quickness of temper, and subdued the sensual
appetites which in that age of lax morality he might
have indulged without reproach. In his relations to
his subjects he showed what a paternal monarch
should be, conversing familiarly with the citizens of
Urbino, accosting them with head uncovered, inquiring
into the necessities of the poorer artisans, relieving
the destitute, dowering orphan girls, and helping dis-
tressed shopkeepers with loans,
Frederick wore the Order of the Garter which
Henry VII. conferred on him, the Neapolitan order of
the Ermine, and the Papal decoration of the Rose, the
Hat and the Sword. He served three pontiffs, two
kings of Naples, and two dukes of Milan. The
Republic of Florence, and more than one Italian
League, appointed him their general in the field. It
his military career was less brilliant than that of the
two Sforzas, Piccino, or Carmagnuola, he avoided the
THE RULE OF THE DESPOTS. 51
crimes to which ambition led some of these men, and
the rocks on which they struck. At his death he
transmitted a flourishing duchy, a cultivated court, a
renowned name, and the leadership of the Italian
League to his son Guidobaldo, who died childless, after
exhibiting for many years an example of patience in
sickness and of dignified. cheerfulness under the re
straint of enforced inaction. His wife, Elizabetta
Gonzaga, one of the most famous women of her age,
was no less a pattern of noble conduct and serene
contentment.
IV.
THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.
N the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth
centuries, the authority of the Popes, both as
heads of the Church and as temporal rulers, had been
impaired by exile in France and by ruinous schisms.
A new era began with the election of Nicholas V. in
1447, and ended during the pontificate of Clement
VII. with the sack of Rome in 1527. Through the
whole of this period the Popes acted more as monarchs
than as pontiffs, and the secularization of the Ses of
Rome was carried to its utmost limits. The contrast
between the sacerdotal pretensions and the personal
immorality of the Popes was glaring; nor had the
chiefs of the Church yet learned to regard the liber-
alism of the Renaissance with suspicion.
We find in the Popes of this period what has been
mis retire already noticed in the despots—learning,
of thePapacy the patronage of the arts, the passion for
conducesto magnificence, and the refinements of polite
their power. .
culture, alternating and not unfrequently
combined with barbarous ferocity of temper, and with
savage and coarse tastes. On the one side we ob-
serve a pagan dissoluteness which would have scan-
dalized the parasites of Commodus and Nero; on the
other, a seeming zeal for dogma worthy of S. Dominic.
THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE. 53
In the States of the Church the temporal power of the
Popes, founded upon false donations, confirmed by
tradition, and contested by rival despots, was an
anomaly. In Rome itself their situation, though
different, was no less peculiar. The government was
ostensibly republican. The Pope had no sovereign
rights, but only the ascendency inseparable from his
wealth and from his position as Primate of Christen-
dom. Italy, however, regarded the Papacy as indis-
pensable to her prosperity, while Rome was proud to
be called the metropolis of Christendom and ready to
sacrifice the shadow of republican liberty for the
material advantages which might accrue from the
sovereignty of her bishop. Now was the proper mo-
ment, therefore, for the Popes to convert their ill-
defined authority into a settled despotism, to secure
themselves in Rome as sovereigns, and to subdue the
States of the Church to their temporal jurisdiction,
The work was begun by Thomas of Sarzana, who»
ascended the chair of S. Peter,in 1447, as
Nicholas V. Educated at Florence, under ere ae
the shadow of the house of Medici, he had imbibed
those principles of deference to princely authority
which were supplanting the old republican virtues
throughout Italy. The schisms which had rent the
Catholic Church were healed; and, finding no opposi-
tion to his spiritual power, he determined to consoli-
date the temporalities of his See. In this purpose he
was confirmed by the conspiracy of Stefano Porcari, a
Roman noble who had endeavored to rouse republi-
can enthusiasm in the city at the moment of the Pope’s
election, and who subsequently plotted against his
liberty, if not his life. Porcari and his associates were
54 THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.
put to death in 1453, and by this act the Pope pro.
claimed himself a monarch.
The vast wealth which the Jubilee of 1450 had
His public poured into the Papal coffers he employed
worksin in beautifying the city of Rome and in creat-
Rome. ing a stronghold for the Sovereign Pontiff.
The mausoleum of Hadrian, used long before as a for-
tress in the Middle Ages, was now strengthened ; while
the bridge of S. Angelo and the Leonine city were so
connected and defended by a system of walls and out-
works as to give the key of Rome into the hands of the
Pope. A new Vatican began to rise, and the founda-
tions of a nobler S. Peter’s Church were laid within the
circuit of the Papal domain. Nicholas had, in fact,
conceived the great idea of restoring the supremacy of
Rome, not after the fashion of a Hildebrand, by enforc-
ing the spiritual despotism of the Papacy, but by
establishing the Popes as kings, by renewing the archi-
tectural magnificence of the Eternal City, and by ren-
dering his court the centre of European culture. In
the will which he dictated on his death-bed to the
princes of the Church, he set forth all that he had done
for the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of Rome,
explaining his deep sense of the necessity of securing
the Popes from internal revolution and external force,
together with his desire to exalt the Church by render-
ing her chief seat splendid in the eyes of Christendom.
This testament of Nicholas remains a memorable docu-
ment. Nothing illustrates more forcibly the transition
from the Middle Ages to the worldliness of the Renais-
sance than the conviction of the Pontiff that the
destinies of Christianity depended on the state and
glory of the town of Rome.
THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE. 55
Of Alfonzo Borgia, who reigned for three years as
Calixtus III., little need be said, except that
his pontificate prepared for the greatness
of his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in
compliment to his uncle. The last days of Nicholas
had been embittered by the fall of Constantinople
(1453), and the imminent peril which threatened Europe
from the Turks. The whole energies of Pius II. were
then directed towards the one end of uniting the
European nations against the infidel.
fEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a _
diplomatist, a traveller, and a courtier, bears rian ae “
a name illustrious in the annals of the Re- FA
naissance. As a Pope he claims attention for the single-
hearted zeal which he displayed in the vain attempt to
rouse the piety of Christendom against the foes of civili-
zation and the faith. Rarely has a greater contrast been
displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the
case of Pius. The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking
man of letters and the world had become a Holy Father,
jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on stirring
Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their
force three centuries before. Pius himself was not un-
conscious of the discrepancy between his old and his
new self. ‘‘Aneam rejicite, Pium recipite,’’ he exclaims
in a celebrated passage of his ‘‘ Retractation,’’ where he
declares his heartfelt sorrow for the irrevocable words
of light and vain romance that he had scattered in his
careless youth. Yet, though Pius II. proved a virtual
failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either
backwards to the ideal of earlier Christianity, or for-
wards on the path of modern culture, he is the last
Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard
Calixtus III.
56 THE POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.
with real respect. Those who follow, and with whose
personal characters rather than their action as pontiffs
we shall now be principally occupied, sacrificed the
-, interests of Christendom to family ambition, secured
\their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, trans-
acted with the infidel and played the part of Antichrist
‘upon the theatre of Europe.
Paul II. was a Venetian named Pietro Barbi, who
began life as a merchant. He had already
shipped his worldly goods on board a trading
vessel for a foreign trip, when news reached him that
his uncle, of whom we shall see more during his enforced
retirement from Rome, had been made Pope under the
name of Eugenius IV. His call to the ministry con-
sisted of the calculation that he could make his fortune
in the Church with a Pope for uncle sooner than on
the high seas by his wits. So he unloaded his bales,
took to his book, became a priest, and at the age of
forty-eight rose to the Papacy. Being a handsome
man, he was fain to take the ecclesiastical title of For-
mosus; but the cardinals dissuaded him from this
parade of vanity, and he assumed the tiara as Paul in
1464. P ‘ exemplified
its treasures, we still marvel at the incom- jy their art
parable and countless beauties stored in products.
every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture galleries of
Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles,
and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still
198 THE FINE ARTS.
forced upon us: how could Italy have done what she
achieved within so short a space of time? What
must the houses and the churches once have been
from which these spoils were taken, but which still
remain so rich in masterpieces? Psychologically to
explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in
the nation at this epoch is perhaps impossible, Yet
the fact remains that he who would comprehend
the Italians of the Renaissance must study their art,
and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the
labyrinthine windings of national character. He must
learn to recognize that herein lay the sources of their
intellectual strength as well as the secret of their in-
tellectual weakness.
Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to
Archi- emerge from barbarism in the service of
tecture religion and of civic life. In no way is the
Gen ben characteristic diversity of the Italian com-
locality. munities so noticeable as in their buildings.
Each district, each town, has a well-defined peculiarity,
reflecting the specific qualities of the inhabitants, and
the conditions under which they grew in culture. Thus
the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of
Romanesque which prevailed through Northern and
Central Italy during the period of Lombard ascendency.
The Tuscans never forgot the domes of their remote
ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin tra-
ditions ; the Southerners were affected by Byzantine
and Saracenic models. In many instances the geology
of the neighborhood determined the picturesque feat-
ures of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley
of the Po produced the brick-work of Cremona, Pavia,
Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To their quarries of
THE FINE ARTS. 199
mandorlato the Veronese builders owed the peach-
bloom tints of their columned aisles. Carrara provided
the Pisans with mellow marble for their cathedral and
baptistery; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato
with green serpentine; while the JAzetra serena of the
Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine
buildings. In other instances we detect the influence
of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice
with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of
S. Mark’s. The Arabs and the Normans left inefface-
able traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and
Messina still bear marks upon their churches of French
workmen. All along the coasts we here and there find
evidences of Oriental style imported into medizval
Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less
manifest in edifices of a later period.
If Lombard architecture, properly so called, was
partial in its influence and confined to a The Roman-
comparatively narrow local sphere, the same esque style.
is true of the Tuscan Romanesque. The church
of San Miniato, overlooking Florence (about 1013)
and the Cathedral of Pisa (begun 1063), not to
mention other less eminent examples at Lucca and
Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in the darkest
period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at
an architectural Renaissance. The influence of classi-
cal models is apparent both in the construction and
the detail of these basilicas; while the deeply grounded
preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for
colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rec-
tangular spaces with low roofs and shallow tribunes,
finds full satisfaction in these original and noble build-
ings.
200 THE FINE ARTS.
The advent of Gothic architecture in Italy was due
The ill- partly to the direct influence of German
successof | emperors, partly to the imperial sympathies
Gothic. of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan
friars who aimed at building large churches cheaply,
and partly to the admiration excited by the grandeur of
the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern Europe.
But it is not to be understood that this style was of
purely foreign origin. Italy, in common with the rest
of Europe, passed by a natural process of evolution
from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and
treated the latter with an originality that proves a cer-
tain natural assimilation. Yet the first Gothic church
—that of S. Francis at Assisi—was designed by a Ger-
man; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is
emphatically German in style, though its first architect
was a Milanese. While, during the brief period of
Gothic ascendency, we have the cathedrals of Siena,
Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together
with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, and Florence,
the style refused to take hold upon the national taste,
and died away before the growing passion for antiquity
that restored the Italians to a sense of their own in-
tellectual greatness.
About the same time that the cathedrals were being
built, the nobles filled the towns with for-
Domestic
archi- tresses. ‘These, at first, were gaunt and
tecture. unsightly, with tall, bare watch-towers, as
may be still seen at San Gemignano, or at Pavia and
Bologna. In course of time, when the aristocracy came
to be fused with the burghers, and public order was
maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made
way for spacious palaces. The temper of the citizens
in each place and the local character of artistic taste
THE FINE ARTS. 201
determined the specific features of domestic as of
ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define
what are the social differences expressed by the large
quadrangles of Francesco Sforza’s hospital at Milan,
and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence,
we feel that the genius Joct has in each case controlled
the architect.
To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again,
we owe the town-halls and public palaces Municipal
that form so prominent a feature in the city buildings.
architecture of Italy. Few of these public palaces
have the good fortune to be distinguished, like that
of the Doges at Venice, by world-historical memories
and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The spirit
of the Venetian republic still lives in that unique
building. Two others, of the time of the Communes,
rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and
for ward, may be mentioned for their intrinsic
beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena,
and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few build-
ings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than
the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and
dale to cloud-clapped Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of
its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping
piazza, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to
the home Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers
of his native city. During their term of office the
priors never quitted the palace of the Signory. All
deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls,
and the bell was the pulse that told how the heart of
Florence throbbed.
The architect of this huge mass of ma- arnolfo del
sonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the Cambio.
202 THE FINE ARTS.
greatest builders of the Middle Ages—a man whe
may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth
century. No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud
privilege of stamping his own individuality more
strongly on his native city than Arnolfo. When
we take our stand upon the hill of San Miniato, the
Florence at our feet is seen to owe her physiognomy
in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the
Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the
long, low, oblong mass of Santa Croce, are all his. His,
too, are the walls that define the City of Flowers from
the gardens round about her. ven the master-works
of his successors subordinate their beauty to his first
conception. Giotto’s campanile, Brunelleschi’s cupola,
and Orcagna’s church of Orsammichele, in spite of
their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed —
where he had planned.
The classical revival of the fifteenth century made
itself immediately felt in architecture, and
A style RA! :
adapted Brunelleschi’s visit to Rome in 1403 may
“Sieh be fixed as the date of the Renaissance in
remains, this art. The problem was how to restore
the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapt-
ing it to the modern requirements of ecclesiastical,
civic, and domestic buildings. Of Greek art they
knew comparatively nothing; nor, indeed, would
Greek architecture have offered for their purpose the
same plastic elements as Roman—itself a derived
style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern uses
than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same
time they possess but imperfect fragments of Roman
work. The ruins of baths, theatres, temple-fronts,
and triumphal arches were of little immediate assistance
sag +.
THE FINE ARTS. 203
in the labor of designing churches and palaces. All
that the architects could do, after familiarizing them-
selves with the remains of ancient Rome, and assimilat-
ing the spirit of Roman art, was to clothe their own
inventions with classic details. The form and struct-
ure of their edifices were modern; the parts were
copied from antique models. A want of organic unity
and structural sincerity is always the result of those
necessities under which a secondary and adapted
style must labor; and thus the pseudo-Roman build-
ings, even of the best Renaissance period, display
faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic.
Brunelleschi, in designing the basilica of S. Lorenzo,
in 1425, after an original but truly classic The puila-
type, remarkable for its sobriety and correct- EELS
ness, followed what he had learnt from leschi.
the ruins of Rome under the guidance of his own
artistic instinct. And yet the general effect resembles
nothing we possess of antique work. It is a master-
piece of intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The
same is true of S. Spirito, built in 1470, after his
death, according to his plans. The extraordinary
capacity of this great architect will, however, win more
homage from ordinary observers when they con-
template the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the Duomo.
Both of these are masterpieces of personal originality.
Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo
Battista Alberti, of whose extraordinary yeo Battista
ability in every department of the fine arts Alberti.
we have already spoken. Inhis church of S. Francesco
at Rimini, and that of S. Andrea at Mantua, he sou,sht
to reproduce more closely the actual elements of
Roman architecture. Like Brunelleschi, he displayed
204 THE FINE ARTS.
his talent as an architect in the building of the Palazzp
Rucellai, of which frequent mention has been made
in connection with the society at Florence in the time
of the Medici. This building, one of the most beauti-
ful in Italy, became a model to subsequent architects.
It was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo
Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza,
a little town near Montepulciano. The first medium
between medizval massiveness and classic simplicity
was attained in countless buildings, beautiful and
various beyond description. Bologna is full of them ;
and Urbino, in the ducal palace, contains one speci-
men unexampled in extent and unique in interest.
After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo,
who was commissioned to raise the large,
but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace
in the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be
the residence of the Medici through all their chequered
history until they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.
But one of the most beautiful of all the Florentine dwell-
Benedetto ing-houses designed at this period is that
da Majano. which Benedetto da Majano built for
Filippo Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity
of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of
style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi
may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine do-.
mestic architecture.
To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place
among the architects of the golden age.
Though little of his work survives entire
and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the pro-
foundest influence over both successors and contempo-
raries. What they chiefly owed to him was the proper
Michellozzo.
Bramante.
THE FINE ARTS. 205
subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of
simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a
moment when constructive problems had been solved,
when mechanical means were perfected, and when the
sister arts had reached their highest point. It is hard
to say how much of the work ascribed to him in
Northern Italy is genuine ; but most of it, at any rate,
belongs to the manner of his youth. The church of S.
Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the
Cancellaria at Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of
Pavia enabled us to comprehend the general character
of this great architect’s refined and noble manner. S.
Peter’s, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of
all subsequent modifications, many essentially Bra-
mantesque features—especially in the distribution of
the piers and rounded niches.
At Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated
through Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare
Peruzzi. Raphael’s claim to consideration porno) as
as an architect rests upon the Palazzi architect.
Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Capella Chigi in S.
Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The
last-named building, executed by Giulio giniio
Romano after Raphael’s designs, is carried Romano.
out in a style so forcible as to make us fancy that the
pupil had a larger share in its creation than his master.
These works, however, sink into insignificance before
the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of
Giulio’s genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-
houses remains to show what the imagination of a poet-
artist could recover from the splendor of old Rome,
and adapt to the use of his own age. A pendent to
the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on
206 THE FINE ARTS.
Baldassare the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi
Peruzzi. for his fellow-townsman Agostino Chigi of
Siena. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed
by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous
in the annals of Italian painting.
Among the great edifices of a later period we may
reckon Jacopo Sansovino’s buildings at
Jacopo ; ,
Sansoyinon, Wenice, though they approximate rather to
thearehi- the style of the earlier Renaissance in all
ss that concerns exuberance of decorative de.
tail. The court of the ducal palace, the Scuola di S.
Rocco, the Palazzo Corner, and the Palazzo Vendra-
mini-Calergi illustrate the strong yet fanciful dravura
style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere
else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by
more imperceptible degrees into that of the revival,
retaining through all changes the impress of a people
splendor-loving in the highest sense. The Library of
S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however,
the crowning triumph of Venetian art. Itis impossible
to contemplate its double row of open arches without
echoing the judgment of Palladio that nothing more
sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the
age of ancient Rome.
Passing over a crowd of other architects who gained
Michael distinction in the first half of the sixteenth
Angeloas | century—Antonio di San Gallo. famous for
architect. fortifications ; Baccio d’ Agnolo, who raised
the campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; Giovanni
Maria Flaconetto, to whose genius Padua owed sa
many princely edifices; Michaele Sanmicheli, the mili
tary architect of Verona, and the builder of five mighty
palaces for the nobles of his native city—our attention
THE FINE ARTS. 207
must be arrested at the name of Michael Angelo. In
architecture as in sculpture, he not only bequeathed to
posterity masterpieces in their kind unrivalled, but he
also prepared for his successors a false way of work-
ing, and justified by his example the extravagances of
the decadence. Without noticing the fagade designed
for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the
baths of Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of
the Capitoline buildings, and the continuation of the
Palazzo Farnese—works that either exist only in draw-
ings or have been confused by later alterations—it is
enough here to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S.
Lorenzo and the dome of S. Peter’s. The sacristy may
be looked on as the masterpiece of a sculptor who re-
quired fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who
designed statues to enhance the structure he had
planned. Both arts are used with equal ease, nor has
the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully
with the human frame than with the forms of Roman
architecture in this chapel. What S. Peter’s would
have been if he had lived to finish it can only be im-
agined from his plans and elevations still preserved.
It must always remain a matter of profound regret that
his design was so far altered as to sacrifice the effect
of the dome from the piazza.
With the decadence of the Renaissance the archi-
tects inclined more to base their practice
upon minute study of antique writers. They,
more than any of their predecessors, realized the long-
sought restitution of the classic style according to precise
scholastic canons. The greatest builder of the time
we speak of was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who com-
bined a more complete analytical knowledge of an-
Palladio.
208 THE FINE ARTS.
tiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and precedent
than even the most imitative of his forerunners. It is
useless to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail,
or sallies of inventive genius in the Palladian style.
All is cold and calculated in the many palaces and
churches which adorn both Venice and Vicenza. They
make us feel that inspiration has been superseded by
the reason. But one great public building of Palladio’s
—the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza—may be cited
as perhaps the culminating point of pure Renaissance
architecture.
In the procession of the fine arts Sculpture always
Niccola follows close upon the steps of Architect-
Pisano. - ure, and at first appears in some sense as
her handmaid. Medizval Italy found her Pheidias in
a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first dec-
ade of the thirteenth century. It was Niccola Pisano,
architect and sculptor, who first with the breath of
genius breathed life into the dead forms of plastic art.
From him we date the dawn of the zsthetical Renais-
sance with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of
humanism ; for he determined the direction not only of
sculpture but also of painting in Italy. In truth,
Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of com-
bining the study of antiquity with the study of nature;
and to him belongs the credit not merely of his own
achievement, considerable as that may be, but also. of
the work of his immediate scholars and of all who
learnt from him to portray life. From Niccola Pisano
onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we. trace our
genealogy of sculptors who, though they carried art be-
yond the sphere of his invention, looked back to him
as their progenitor. Besides minor works, the hex:
ah aaa
THE FINE ARTS. 209
agonal pulpit in the baptistery of Pisa, the octagonal
pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the
market-place of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic
at Bologna—all of them designed and partly finished
between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars—
display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the
maturity of his genius.
Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni,
and the numerous pupils employed on the giovanni
works we have mentioned, carried on the Pisano.
tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad
through Italy. Giovanni, to whom we owe the
Spina Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa, the
facade of the Duomo at Siena, and the altar shrine of
S. Donato at Arezzo—four of the purest works of
Gothic art in Italy—showed a decided leaning to the
vehement and mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors.
We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni’s work, not
derived from his father, not caught from study of the
antique, and curiously blended with the general charac-
teristics of the Pisan school. The Gothic element so cau-
tiously adopted by Niccola is used with sympathy and
freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S.
Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme
triumph of Italian Gothic sculpture. The superiority
of that complex and consummate work of plastic art
over the pulpit of the Pisan baptistery, in all the most
important qualities of style and composition, can
scarcely be called in question.
As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an
epoch in the history of painting, by con- w, g,
centrating the genius of Giotto ona series thedral of
of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, OTviet
14
210 THE FINE ARTS.
by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a
point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult
to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force
and beauty belonging to this, the first or architectural
period of Italian sculpture ; and nowhere has the whole
body of Christian belief been set forth with method
more earnest and with vigor more sustained. Whether
Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on
the facade of this cathedral is not known for certain.
The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard
to a monument of so large extent and vast importance,
which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources
of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy. But his manner,
as continued and developed by his school, is unmistak-
able here; and in the absence of direct information we
are left to conjecture the conditions under which this,
the closing if not the crowning, achievement of thir-
teenth-century sculpture was produced.
Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola
Autres Pisano’s tradition must now be mentioned
Pisano. Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano,
who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and
helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by sub-
mitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direc-
tion of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and
the facade of the Duomo; and in the first gate of the
baptistery he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze,
which largely influenced the style of masters in the
fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and
beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the tech-
nical excellence of Andrea’s bronze-work would be
difficult.
The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano was 4
a
THE FINE ARTS. 211
Florentine—the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, com:
monly known as Orcagna. This man, like
the more illustrious Giotto, was one among
the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures
produced by Florence for her everlasting glory. He
studied under his father, Cione, like other Tuscan
artists, -the technical details of the goldsmith’s craft,
which then supplied the strictest method of design.
With his brother, Bernardo, he practiced painting.
Like Giotto, he was no mean poet; and, like all the
higher craftsmen of his age, he was an architect.
Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present
form to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as capo maestro after
Gaddi’s death, completed the structure; and though
the Loggia de’ Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers
upon architecture, is now known to be the work of
Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna’s Loggio del Bigallo, more
modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way for its
construction. His genius as a painter is proved by the
frescoes in the Strozzi chapel of S, Maria Novella. As
a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle in
Orsammichele, built to enshrine the picture of the
Madonna by Ugolino daSiena. In this monument the
subordination of sculpture to architectural effect is
noticeable; and the Gicttesque influence appears even
more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano,
When the Signory decided to complete the bronze
gates of the baptistery in the first year of Tne compe-
the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto one
inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare gates of the
designs for competition. Their call was baptistery.
answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by
Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghi-
Orcagna,
212 THE FINE ARTS.
berti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists
of less note. The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is
said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of
the designs submitted to the judges. Thus the four
great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the
Florentine baptistery. Giacomo della Quercia was
excluded from the competition at an early stage; but
the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Bru-
nelleschi, until the latter, with noble generosity, feeling
the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that
his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of
architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403 Ghiberti
received the commission for the first of the two remain-
ing gates. He afterwards obtained the second; and,
as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of
his lifetime was spent upon them.
How Della Quercia treated the subject given, the
Della Sacrifice of Isaac, we do not know. His bas-
Quercia. reliefs upon the facade of S. Petronio at
Bologna, and round the font of S. John’s Chapel in the
cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his
style with that of Ghiberti. There is no doubt but
that he was a formidable rival. Had the gates been
intrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a
masterpiece of more heroic style. While smoothness
and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish
Ghiberti’s figures, Della Quercia, by the concentration
of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of
Michael Angelo. ‘Two other memorable works of Della
Quercia may be mentioned in passing: the Fonte Gaja
on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored,
and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in
the cathedral of Lucca.
cea
THE FINE ARTS. 213
One great advantage of the early days of the Renais
sance over the latter was this, that pseudo-
paganism and pedantry had not as yet dis-
torted the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists.
Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period
could submit his genius to the service and the study of
ancient art without sacrificing individuality, Donatello
furnishes a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti.
Early in his youth he journeyed with Brunelleschi to
Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monu-
ments then extant. How thoroughly he comprehended
the classic spirit is proved by the bronze patera
wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the
frieze of the triumphant Bacchus. Yet the great
achievements of his genius were Christian in their
sentiment and realistic in their style. The bronze
Magdalen of the Florentine baptistery, and the bronze
Baptist of the Duomo at Siena, as also the wooden
Baptist in the Frari at Venice, are executed with an
unrelenting materialism, not alien indeed to the sin-
cerity of classic art, but divergent from antique tradi-
tion, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic
asceticism had no place in Greek mythology. A more
felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved
by him in his S. George, a marble statue placed upon
the north wall of Orsammichele, and in his bronze
David, cast for Cosimo de’ Medici, and now in the
Bargello. His numerous other works in bronze and
marble, to be found in churches and museums, show
how widely his influence was diffused through Italy,
and of what inestimable value it was in correcting the
false direction towards pictorial sculpture which Ghr
berti might have given.
Donatello,
214 THE FINE ARTS.
Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in
bronze, was the most distinguished of
Donatello’s pupils. To all the arts he prac-
ticed he applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a
prosaic mind. But the fact that he numbered Lionardo
da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among
his scholars proves the esteem he enjoyed among his
contemporaries; and when we have observed that the
type of face selected by Lionardo and transmitted to
his followers appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo
di Credi, and is found in the David of Verocchio, we
have a right to affirm that the master of these men
was an artist of creative genius as well as a careful
workman. His most famous work is the equestrian
statue of the great Condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni,
which stands in the piazza in front of the Scuola di S.
Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo, at
Venice.
Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first
Luca della Cighty years of the fifteenth century, offers
Robbia. in many important respects a contrast to
his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still
more to their immediate followers. He made his
art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the
rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effemi-
nate graces of Ghiberti. He was apprenticed in his
youth toa goldsmith; but of what he wrought before
the age of forty-five we know but little. At that time
Verocchio,
his faculty had attained full maturity, and he pro- —
duced the groups of dancing children and choristers
intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo. Move-
ment has never been suggested in stone with less exag-
geration, nor have marble lips been made to utter
THE FINE ARTS. 21%
sweeter and more varied music. His true perception of
the limits to be observed in sculpture appears most
eminently in the glazed ¢erra cotta work by which he is
best known. His nephew, Andrea della Robbia, with his
four sons, continued to manufacture the glazed earthen-
ware of Luca’s invention, but their work lacked the
fine taste of their master. They were followed by
Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio, a sculptor who handled
terra cotta somewhat in the manner of Donatello’s flat-
relief, and aiming at more passion than Luca’s taste
permitted.
Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca
della Robbia, and marked by certain com-
mon qualities, demand a passing mention.
All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitale,
Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is dis-
tinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity and self-
restraint. But there are differences in their style
which may be noticed. Rossellino has a leaning to-
wards the manner of Ghiberti, whose landscape back-
grounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of
his monumental sculpture. Rare dignity, however, is
to be found in the much-admired monument of the
young Cardinal di Portogallo, in the church of San
Miniato. The sublimity of the slumber that is death
has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed.
Matteo Civitale, of Lucca, was at least
Rossellino’s equal in the sculpturesque de-
lineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose
for treatment were more varied. All his work is pene-
trated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling, as though
the artist’s soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration,
had been given to the marble. For the people of
Rossellino.
Civitale.
216 THE FINE ARTS.
Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto—a
gem of the purest Renaissance architecture—and a
pulpit in the same style. The altar of S. Regulus
might also be named as an epitome of all that is most
characteristic of the earlier Renaissance. Mino di
Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterized by
grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The
Mino da tombs in the abbey of Florence have an
Fiesole. almost infantile sweetness of style, which
might be extremely piquant were it not that he pushed
this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.
His bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral of Fiesole
is, however, a powerful portrait, no less distinguished
for vigorous individuality than consummate workman-
ship. Benedetto da Majano, whom we have already
mentioned as the designer of the Strozzi Palace, and
his friend Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello’s
few scholars, were endowed with the same gift of ex-
quisite taste as Mino da Fiesole.
The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost
Andreada ended; and already, on the threshold of the
Sansovino, sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael
buat ta Angelo. Andrea Contucci da Sansovino
and his pupil, Jacopo Tatti, called also Sansovino,
must, however, be mentioned as continuing the Flor-
entine tradition without subservience to the style
of Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansovino was a sculptor
in whom, for the first time, the faults of the mid-
Renaissance period was glaringly apparent. He per-
sistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to deco-
rative ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatri-
cal effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by
all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in S,
THE FINE ARTS. 219
Maria del Popolo, and the bas-reliefs upon the Santa
Casa at Loreto. Jacopo Tatti was a genius —Jagono
of more distinction. Together with San Tatti.
Gallo. and Bramante he studied the science of archi-
tecture in Rome, where he also worked at the restora-
tion of newly-discovered antiques, and cast in bronze a
copy of the Laocoon. He was called, in 1523, by the
Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice, and there he worked
until his death in 1570, building the Zecca, the Li-
brary, the Scala d’Oro in the ducal palace, and the Log-
gietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. He was a
first-rate craftsman, and marks the final intrusion of
paganism into modern art. The classical revival had
worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghiberti and
Donatello—not because they did not feel it intensely,
but because they clung to nature far more closely than
to antique precedent. The most beautiful and spirited
pagan statue of the Renaissance period is Sansovino’s
Bacchus in the Bargello Museum. Both the Bacchus
and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism,
irradiated and idealized by the sculptor’s sense of
natural gladness. Considered as a restitution of the
antique manner, this statue is decidedly superior to the
Bacchus of Michael Angelo.
It is a long descent to name Baccio Bandinelli and
Bartolommeo Ammanati, who filled the 9. aieni
squares of the Italian cities with statues of and Amma-
Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and River- 2th
gods. We know not whether to select the vulgarity,
the feebleness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-
classical colossi for condemnation. They have nothing
Greek about them but their names, their naked-
ness, and their association with myths, the signifi-
218 THE FINE ARTS.
eance whereof was never really felt by the sculptors,
But, at the same time, there were works produced in
illustration of classical mythology which have true
Benvenuto Value as works of art. The Ferseus of
eat Benvenuto Cellini and some of Gian Bo-
Bologna. logna’s statues belong to a class of esthetic
productions which show how much that is both origi-
nal and excellent may be raised in the hot-bed of
culture.
Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimu-
Painting lated by the enthusiasm of the two great
asanaidto popular monastic orders, painting was at first
religion. devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediz-
val Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified
themselves by study of the natural world, their art be-
came more secular. About the year 1440 this process
of secularization was hastened by the influence of the
classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of
humanity, and stirring a zeal for science.
We may still recall the story of Cimabue’s picture,
visited by Charles of Anjou and borne in
triumph through the streets to S. Maria
Novella; for this was the birthday festival of nothing less
than what the world now values as Italian painting. In
this public act of joy the people of Florence recognized
and paid enthusiastic honor to the art arisen among
them from the dead. Ina dark transept, raised by steps
above the level of the church, still hangs this famous
Madonna of the Rucellai. It is in the Byzantine or
Romanesque manner, from which Cimabue did not
free himself; but we see here a distinctly fresh en:
deavor to express emotion and to depict life,
Cimabue.
THE FINE ARTS. 219
It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano
in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano’s
death, to carry painting in his lifetime even
further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister
art. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his
Arena chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life
of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward
to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara,
_we meet with Giotto in almost every city. Nothing,
indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable than
the fertility of this originative genius, no less industri-
ous in labor than fruitful of results for men who fol-
lowed him. Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only
founded a school in his native city, but spread his
manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period
of the history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi
of Florence, Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti
of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, Dome-
nico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan
Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by
him. |
It is necessary to observe that at Siena painting had
an independent origin, and Guido da Siena gyjao da Siena
may claim to rank even earlier than Cima- and Duccio.
bue. But the first great painter there was Duccio
di Buoninsegna. The completion of his master-
piece—a picture of the Majesty of the Virgin, exe-
cuted for the high altar of the Duomo—marked an
epoch in the history of Siena. As in the case of Cim-
abue’s Madonna, bells rang and trumpets blew as this
image of the sovereign mistress of the city was carried
along the streets to be enthroned in her high temple.
Far more than their neighbors at Florence, the
Giotto.
229 THE FINE ARTS.
Sienese remained fettered by the technical methods
Aniheagion. AUG the pietistic formulz of the earliest
and Pietro religious painting. When they attempted
Lorenzettii subjects on a large scale, the faults of
the miniaturist clung about them. Ambrozio and
Pietro Lorenzetti, however, form notable exceptions to
this general statement. But it must be applied to
Ginfone Simone Martini, who during his lifetime
Martini. enjoyed a celebrity second only to that of
Giotto. His first undisputed works are to be seen at
Siena and Assisi, where we learn what he could do
as a /frescante in competition with the ablest Floren-
tines.
We must return again to Florence; and foremost
among the pioneers of Renaissance painting,
towering above them all by head and shoul-
ders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands Masac-
cio. The Brancacci chapel of the Carmine, painted in
fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where
all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael
deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a
portion of his cartoons. The Legend of S. Catherine
painted by Masaccio in S. Clemente at Rome, though an
earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable as evidence
that a new age had begun for art. Born in 1402, he
left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not again
heard of by his family. Thus perished, at the early
age of twenty-seven, a painter whose work reveals not
only the originality of creative genius, but a maturity
that moves our wonder. Gifted with exceptional —
powers, he overleaped the difficulties of his art, and
arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientifie
certainty had been secured.
Masaccio,
THE FINE ARTS. 221
Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepol-
cro, and a pupil of Domenico Veneziano, piero della
must be placed among the painters of this Francesca.
period who advanced their art by scientific study.
Those who have once seen his fresco of the fes-
urrection in the hall of the Compagna della Miseri-
cordia at Borgo San Sepolcro will never forget the
deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all
earthly things produced by it. In addition to the
many great paintings that command our admiration,
he may claim the honor of being the teacher of Melozzo
da Forli and of Luca Signorelli. |
Signorelli bears a name illustrious in the first rank
of Italian painters. He anticipated the yuo,
greatest master of the sixteenth century, not Signorelli.
only in his profound study of human anatomy, but also
in his resolution to express high thought and tragic
passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of
painting. Life-long study of perspective, in its applica-
tion to the drawing of the figure, made the difficulties of
foreshortening, and the delineation of brusque attitude,
‘mere child’s play to this audacious genius. The most
rapid movement, the most perilous contortion of bodies
falling through the air or flying, he depicted with hard,
firmly-traced, unerring outline.
While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan masters
were perfecting the arts of accurate design,
a similar direction towards scientific studies
was given to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua.
The influence, in this direction, of Francesco Squar-
tione was considerable. It is clear that he was himself
less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a turn
for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the human-
Squarcione.
222 THE FINE ARTS.
istic instincts of his age, that the right way of learning
was by imitation of the antique. During the course of
his career he is said to have taught no less than 137
pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of
casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the
science of perspective.
From his school issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna,
whose life-work was one of the most weighty
moments in the history of modern art.
He was born near Padua in 1431, and it is probable
that he was the son of a small Lombard farmer.
Studying the casts and drawings collected by Squar-
cione, the young Mantegna found congenial exercise
for his peculiar gifts. His early frescoes in the
Eremitani at Padua look as though they had been
painted from statues or clay models, carefully selected
for the grandeur of their forms, the nobility of their
attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery.
His inspiration was clearly derived from the antique.
The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his
soul and ruled his imagination. In later life he spent
his acquired wealth in forming a collection of Greek
and Roman antiquities. He was, moreover, the friend
of students, eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought
to light by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other
antiquaries; and so completely did he assimilate the
materials of scholarship that the spirit of a Roman
seemed to be incarnate in him.
Without attempting a detailed history of painting
Gentile da inthis period of divided energy and diverse ©
Fabriano. = effort, it is needful to turn aside for a
moment and to notice those masters who remained
comparatively uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of
Mantegna.
THE FINE ARTS. 223
their contemporaries. Of these the earliest and most
notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last yg
great painter of the Gubbian school, and Angelico.
Fra Angelico, who, of all the painters of this period,
most successfully resisted the persuasions of the Re-
naissance, and perfected an art that owned little sym-
pathy with the external world. He thought it a sin to
study or to imitate the naked form, and his most
beautiful faces seem copied from angels seen in visions,
not from any sons of men.
Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, but in
no sense the continuator of his tradition, ponogo
exhibits the blending of several styles by a Gozzoli.
genius of less creative than assimilative force. Thathe
was keenly interested in the problems of perspective and
foreshortening, and that none of the knowledge col-
lected by his fellow-workers had escaped him, is suffi-
ciently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. His composi-
tions are rich in architectural details, not always chosen
with pure taste, but painted with an almost infantile
delight in the magnificence of buildings.
Another painter favored by the Medici was Fra
Filippo Lippi, of the Carmine, whose pleas-
ure-loving temperament led him into irregu- F*4 Filippo
. , ‘ das ippl.
larities inconsistent with a monastic life.
It can scarcely be doubted that the schism between
his practice and profession served to debase and vul-
garize a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the
uncongenial work of decorating choirs and painting
altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit with the
dulness of routine that savored of hypocrisy. Fiippino
Whether Filippino Lippi was in truth his son Lippi.
by Lucrezia Buti, a novice he is said to haye carried
224 THE FINE ARTS.
from her cloister in Prato, has been called in question
by recent critics; but they adduce no positive argu-
ments for discrediting the story of Vasari. There can,
however, be no doubt that to the Frate, whether he was
his father or only his teacher, Filippino owed his style.
Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo,
bears a name of greater mark. He is one
of those artists, much respected in their own
days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendor of
immediate successors, and to whom, through sympathy
stimulated by prolonged study of the fifteenth century,
we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated
honors. His fellow-workers seem to have admired him
as an able draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical
imagination ; but no one recognized in him a leader of
his age. For us he has an almost unique value as rep-
resenting the interminglement of antique and modern
fancy at amoment of transition—as embodying in some
of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men
for whom the yee myths were beginning to live once
more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the
sphere of orthodoxy.
The biography of Piero di Cosimo forms one of the
Piero di most amusing chapters in Vasari, who has
Cosimo. taken great delight in noting Piero’s quaint,
humorous and eccentric habits, and whose description
of a Carnival triumph devised by him is one of our
most precious documents in illustration of Renaissance
pageantry. The point that connects him with Botti-
celli is the romantic treatment of classical mythology, —
best exemplified in his pictures of Perseus and Androm-
eda in the Uffizi, and of the murdered Procris watched
by a Satyr in our National Gallery.
Botticelli.
THE FINE ARTS. 225
It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at
the same time gathers up the whole tradi-
tion of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo
deserves the place of honor, not because he had the
strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest
imagination—for in these points he was excelled by
some one or another of his contemporaries or prede-
cessors—but because his intellect was the most com-
prehensive and his mastery of art the most complete.
His life lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not
distinguish himself as a painter till he was past thirty.
It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged
to name this powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto
of the fifteenth century in Florence, the tutelary angel
of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. He was a con-
summate master of the science collected by his prede-
cessors. No one surpassed him in the use of fresco.
His orderly composition, in the distribution of figures
and the use of architectural accessories, is worthy of
all praise; his portraiture is dignified and powerful,
his choice of form and treatment of drapery noble.
Yet we cannot help noting his deficiency in the finer
sense of beauty, the absence of poetic inspiration 07
feeling in his work, the commonplaceness of his color,
and his wearisome reiteration of calculated effects.
Who, however, but Ghirlandajo could have composed
the frescoes of S. 7a at S. Gemignano, of the Death
of S. Francis in 8. Trinita at Florence, or that of the
Birth of the Virgin in 8. Maria Novella?
The Renaissance, so far as painting is concerned,
may be said to have culminated between the The culmi-
years 1470 and 1550, The thirty years at nation of
Renais-
the close of the fifteenth century may sance art.
15
Ghirlandajo.
226 THE FINE ARTS.
be taken as one epoch in this climax of the art,
while the first half of the sixteenth forms a second.
Within the former falls the best work of Mantegna,
Perugino, Francia, the Bellini, Signorelli, and Fra Bar-
tolommeo. To the latter we may assign Michael
Angelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Correggio, Titian, and
Andrea del Sarto. Lionardo da Vinci, though belong-
ing chronologically to the former epoch, ranks first
among the masters of the second ; and to this also may
be given Tintoretto, though his life extended far beyond
it to the last years of the century.
The place occupied by Perugino in the evolution of
Italian painting is peculiar. In the middle
of a positive and worldly age, declining fast
to frigid scepticism and political corruption, he set the
final touch of technical art upon the devotion trans-
mitted from earlier and more enthusiastic centuries. The
flower of Umbrian piety blossomed in the masterpieces
of his youth, and faded into dryness in the affectations
of his manhood. In our National Gallery we have in
a triptych one of his sincerest devotional oil pictures.
His frescoes of .S. Sebastian at Panicale, and of the
Crucifixion at Florence, are tolerably well known
through reproductions ; while the Viscon of S. Bernard
at Munich and the Piefd in the Pitti Gallery are famil-
jar to all travelled students of Italian painting.
‘The influence of Perugino upon. Italian art was
powerful though transitory. He formed a
band of able pupils, among whom was the
great Raphael; and though Raphael speedily aban-
doned his master’s narrow footpath through the fields of
painting, he owed to Perugino the invaluable berefit of
training in solid technical methods and tracitions of
Perugino.
Raphael.
— ee
THE FINE ARTS. 227
pure taste. The life and work of this supreme artist
have been so fully and ably handled by various writers,
and the subjects he treated are so much the common
property of even the least educated, that we are hardly
called upon, in the space at our disposal, to do more than
allude to the school in which his genius first began to
display itself. Of other scholars of Perugino, Bernardo
Pinturicchio can also alone be mentioned.
A thorough naturalist, though saturated with
the mannerism of the Umbrian school, Pinturicchio was
not distracted either by scientific or ideal aims from the
clear and fluent presentation of contemporary man-
ners and customs. He isa kind of Umbrian Gozzoli,
who brings us here and there in close relation to the
men of his own time, and has, in consequence, aspecial
value for the student of Renaissance life.
There are still two painters who come within the
limits of the fifteenth century that we can Francesco
only glance at. Francesco Raibolini, sur- Francia.
named Francia from his master in the goldsmith’s art,
was one of the most sincerely pious of Christian
painters, and we possess a good example of his style
in the Dead Christ in our National Gallery. In order
to be rightly known, his numerous pictures at Bologna
should be studied by all lovers of the guattrocento style
in its most delightful moments.
Bartolommeo di Paolo dei Fattorino, better known
as Baccio della Porta or Fra Bartolommeo, ,,. por
forms at Florence the connecting link be- tolommeo.
tween the artists of the earlier Renaissance and the
golden age. By chronological reckoning he is nearly
a quarter of a century later than Lionardo da Vinci,
and is the exact contemporary of Michael Angelo. It
Pinturicchio,
228 THE FINE ARTS.
was in Cosimo Rosselli’s dottega that he made acquaint
ance with Mariotto Albertinelli, who became his inti-
mate friend and fellow-worker, in spite of their dis-
agreements in politics and religion. Albertinelli was
wilful, obstinate, a partisan of the Medici,
and a loose liver. Bartolommeo was gen-
tle, yielding, and industrious. He fell under the influ-
ence of Savonarola, and took the cowl of the Domini-
cans. So firm was the bond of friendship established
in boyhood between this ill-assorted couple, that they
did not part company until 1512, three years before
Albertinelli’s death, and five before that of Bartolommeo.
Albertinelli’s Sa/u¢ation in the Uffiziyields no point of
grace and vigor to any of his more distinguished con-
temporary’s paintings. As acolorist Fra Bartolommeo
is superior to any of his rivals in the school of Florence.
Few painters of any age have combined harmony of
tone so perfectly with brilliance and richness.
We have now reached the great age of the Italian
Albertinelli.
The four Renaissance in art—the age in which, not
greatest counting for the moment Venice, four most
masters.
remarkable men gathered up all that had
hitherto been achieved in art since the days of Pisano
and Giotto, adding such illumination from the sunlight
of their inborn genius that in them the world forever
sees what art can do. Lionardo da Vinci was born in
Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in 1519. Mi-
chael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese, in the
Casentino, in 1475, and died at Rome in 1564, having
outlived the lives of his great peers by nearly half a
century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino in 1483,
and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Allegri was born
at Correggio in 1494. and died there in 1534. Te
J
THE FINE ARTS. 229
these four men, each in his own degree and according
to his own peculiar quality of mind, the fulness of the
Renaissance in its power and freedom was revealed.
In their work posterity still may read the meaning of
that epoch, differently rendered according to their dif-
ferent gifts, but comprehended in its unity by study of
the four together.
It was a fact of the greatest importance for the
development of the fine arts in Italy, that »,,
painting in Venice reached maturity later Venetian
than in Florence. Owing to this circum- 5¢2ool.
stance one chief aspect of the Renaissance, its material
magnificence and freedom, received consummate treat-
ment at the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.
To idealize the sensualities of the external universe, to
achieve for color what the Florentines had done for
form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human life at
ene of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of
the highest art, was what these great artists were
called on to accomplish. Their task could not have
been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as
in the sixteenth, if the development of the esthetic
sense had been more premature among the Venetians.
It is in the heart of Venice, in the House of the Re
public, that the Venetian painters, consid- The pueal
ered as the interpreters of worldly splendor, Palace.
fulfilled their function with the most complete success.
Centuries contributed to make the Ducal Palace what
itis. The massive colonnades and Gothic loggias of
the external basement date from the thirteenth cen-
tury; their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccolo
Pisani’s genius was in the ascendant. The square
fabric of the palace, so beautiful in the irregularity of
230 THE FINE ARTS.
its pointed windows, so singular in its mosaic diapet
of pink and white, was designed at the same early
period. The inner court and the facade that overhangs
the lateral canal display the handiwork of Sansovino.
The halls of the palace—spacious chambers where the
senate assembled, where ambassadors approached the
Doge, where the Savi deliberated, where the Council
of Ten conducted their inquisition—are walled and
roofed with pictures of inestimable value.
Long before Venetian painting reached a climax in
Thenote of te decorative triumphs of the Ducal Palace,
Venetian the masters of the school had formed a
artists. style expressive of the spirit of the Renais-
sance, considered as the spirit of free enjoyment
and living energy. To trace the history of Venetian
painting is to follow through the several stages
the growth of that mastery over color and sensu-
ous beauty which was perfected in the works of
Titian and his contemporaries. Under the Vivarini
of Murano, the Venetian school in its infancy began
with a selection from the natural world of all that
struck them as most brilliant. No other painters of
their age in Italy employed such glowing colors, or
showed a more marked predilection for the imitation
of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and
landscape backgrounds. ‘Their piety, unlike the mysti-
cism of the Sienese and the deep feeling of the Floren-
tine masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional.
What the Vivarini began, the three Bellini, Jacopo
Their sub- and his sons Gentile and Giovanni, with
docte Ce Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Basaiti,
the locality. Catena, Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cor-
degliaghi, continued. Bright costumes, distinct and
ties
THE FINE ARTS. 231
sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of architect:
ure, large skies, polished armor, gilded cornices,
young faces of fisherboys and country girls, grave
faces of old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight,
withered faces of women hearty in a hale old age,
the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity
of patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the
amber-colored tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic
and lagoons—these are the source of inspiration to the
Venetians of the second period. Mantegna, a few
miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of
severely classical design. Yet he scarcely touched the
manner of the Venetians with his influence, though
Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law and pupil, and
though his genius, in grasp of matter and in manage-
ment of composition, soared above his neighbors.
Lionardo da Vinci, at Milan, was perfecting his prob-
lems of psychology in painting, offering to the world
solutions of the greatest difficulties in the delineation of
the spirit by expression. Yet not atrace of Lionardo’s
subtle play of light and shadow upon thoughtful feat-
ures can be discerned in the work of the Bellini. For
them the mysteries of the inner and the outer world
had no attraction. The externals of a full and vivid
existence fascinated their imagination. They under-
took to paint only what they could see. Very in-
structive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted
not in fresco but on canvas by Carpaccio Cornudda
and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of the and Gentile
Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce—the halls Bellini.
of meeting for companies named after patron saints.
Not only do these bring before us the life of Venice
in its manifold variety, but they illustrate the
232 THE FINE ARTS.
tendency of the Venetian masters to express the actual
world rather than to formulate an ideal of the fancy.
This realism, if the name can be applied to pictures so
poetical as those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Floren-
tine realism, hard and scientific. A natural feeling for
grace and a sense of romance inspire the artist, and
breathe from every figure that he paints.
Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic
works to judge by, would be found the first
painter of the true Renaissance among the
Venetians, the inaugurator of the third and great period.
He died at the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of un-
fulfilled renown. ‘Time has destroyed the last vestige
of his frescoes, and criticism has reduced the number
of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen. Of his
undisputed pictures, the grandest is the Monk at the
Clavichord in the Pitti Palace at Florence. Fate has
dealt less unkindly with Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo
Veronese. ‘The works of these great artists, in whom
the Venetian Renaissance attained completion, have
been preserved in large numbers and in excellent con-
dition.
Titian holds, in relation to the Venetian school, the
position held by Raphael among his contem-
poraries in the rest of Italy, and their
works are in both cases so numerous and so equally
well known that it is needless to give an account of
Giorgione.
Titian.
them in the one case more than in the other. To- ©
gether, these supreme artists may be termed a double-
star in that bright field of genius, where the mode ’in
which their faculties are used appeals in an equal
degree to the imagination, and to our sense of wonder
and delight.
———- <
THE FINE ARTS. 233
Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thunderbolt of
painting, because of his vehement impul-
siveness and rapidity of execution, soars
above his brethren by the faculty of pure imagination. °
It was he who brought to perfection the poetry of
chiaroscuro, expressing moods of passion and emotion
in brusque lights, luminous half-shadows, and semi-
opaque darkness. He, too, engrafted on the calm and
natural Venetian manner something of the Michael
Angelesque sublimity, and sought to vary by dramatic
movement the romantic motives of his school. In
his work, more than in that of his contemporaries,
Venetian art ceased to be decorative and _ idyllic,
Veronese elevated pageantry to the height of
serious art. His domain is noonday sunlight
ablaze on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture.
Where Tintoretto is dramatic, he is scenic. ‘Titian, in
a wise harmony, continuing the traditions of Bellini
and Giorgione, with a breadth of treatment peculiar to
himself, gave to color in landscape and the human
form a sublime yet sensuous poetry no other painter in
Tintoretto,
Veronese.
the world has reached. Among the Venetian painters,
it may be observed in conclusion, there was no con-
flict between art and religion, no reaction against
previous pietism, no perplexity of conscience, no con-
fusion of aims. ‘Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese were
children of the people, men of the world, men of
pleasure; wealthy, urbane, independent, pious—all
these by turns ; but they were never mystics, scholars,
or philosophers. In their esthetic ideal religion found
a place, nor was sensuality rejected; but the religion
was sane and manly, the sensuality was vigorous and
virile: Not the intellectual greatness of the Renais-
234 LHE FINE ARTS.
sance, but its happiness and freedom, was what they
represented,
It was the special good fortune of the pupils of
Lionardoda Lionardo da Vinci that what he actually
inci, accomplished bore no proportion to the
suggestiveness of his teaching and the fertility of his
invention. Of finished work he left but little to
the world; while his sketches and designs, the teeming
thoughts of his creative brain, were an inestimable
heritage. It remained for his disciples, each in his
own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect,
to perpetuate the genius of their master. Thus
the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lom-
bardy after he was dead. Andrea Salaino, Marco
d’Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Bel-
. traffio, and Cesare da Sesto were all of them skilled
workmen. But two painters of this school, Bernardino
Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand more
particular notice. Without Lionardo it is
difficult to say what Luini would have _ been,
so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher’s
type of face and refinement of execution. And yet
iauinl stands on his own ground, in no sense an
imitator, with a genius more simple and _ idyllic
than Da Vinci’s. Little conception of his charm
can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes
in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the
church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage
Gaudenzip ChurchofSaronno. Gaudenzio Ferrari was
Ferrari. a genius of a different order, more robust,
more varied, but less single-minded than Luini.
His style reveals the influences of a many-sided,
ill-assimilated education, blending the manners of
Luini.
on
THE FINE ARTS. 235
Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper
fusion. His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich
in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention,
crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of
the Passion is painted in fresco above the altar of S.
Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the wall from
basement to ceiling. The prodigality of power dis-
played by Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style
and confusion in aim ; nor can we refuse the tribute of
warmest admiration to a master who, when the schools
of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and
bombast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious
themes.
Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find the reverse
of what has been noticed with regard to the influence
of the master and the suggestiveness of his No inspira-
teaching. Raphael worked out the mine of tion de-
‘ : scended
his own thought so thoroughly, and carried s.5.4
his style to such perfection, that he left Raphael.
nothing untried for his followers. When he died, in-
spiration seemed to pass from them as color fades
from clouds at sunset. But the times were also against
them. The patrons of art required show far more than
thought, and this the pupils of Raphael were compe-
tent to supply without much effort. Giulio gino
Romano alone, by dint of robust energy and. Romano.
lurid fire of fancy, to be seen through the smoke of his
coarser nature, achieved a not undeserving triumph.
His Palazzo del Te will always remain the monument of
a specific moment in Renaissance history, since it is
adequate to the intellectual conditions of a race demor-
alized, but living still, with largeness and a sense of
grandeur.
236 THE FINE ARTS.
Michael Angelo, whose history and great achieve
Sebastian ments will not admit of compression, formed
del Piombo, no school in the strict sense of the word;
Venusti, ee
and Daniele Yet his influence was not the less felt on
da Volterra. that account, nor less powerful than Ra-
phael’s in the same direction. During his man-
hood Sebastian del Piombo, Marcello Venusti, and
Daniele da Volterra had endeavored to add the
charm of oil-coloring to his designs; and long be-
fore his death the seduction of his mannerism be
gan to exercise a fatal charm for all the schools
of Italy. As his fame increased, his peculiarities
grew more defined; so that imitators fixed precisely
upon that which sober critics now regard as a deduc-
tion from his greatness. They fancied they were tread-
ing in his footsteps, and using the grand manner, when
they covered church roofs and canvases with sprawling
figures in distorted attitudes.
Correggio, again, though he can hardly be said to have
founded a school, was destined to exercise
wide and perilous influence over a host of
manneristic imitators. Francesco Mazzolo, called I] Par-
UPermi- Migianino, followed him so closely that his
gianinoand frescoes at Parma are hardly distinguish-
Baroceion able from the master’s; while Federigo
Baroccio at Urbino endeavored to preserve the
sensuous and almost childish sweetness of his style
in its integrity. But the real attraction of Correggio was
only felt when the new Jarocco architecture called for a:
new kind of decoration. Every cupola throughout the
length and breadth of Italy began then to be painted
with rolling clouds and lolling angels. What the wits
of Parma had once stigmatized as a ragodt of frogs
Correggio.
THE FINE ARTS. 237
now seemed the only possible expression for celestial
ecstasy; and to delineate the joy of heaven upon
those multitudes of domes and semi-domes was a
point of religious etiquette. At the same time the
Caracci made Correggio’s style the object
of more serious study; and the history of
Bolognese painting shows what was to be derived
from this master by intelligent and conscientious work-
men.
We have been speaking chiefly of the errors of artists
copying the external qualities of their great ,narea del
predecessors. It is refreshing to turn from Sarto.
the efigont of the so-called Roman school to masters
in whom the flame of the Renaissance still burned
brightly. Andrea del Sarto, the pupil of Piero di
Cosimo, but more nearly related in style to Fra Barto-
lommeo, was himself a contemporary of Raphael and
Correggio. To make a just estimate of his achieve-
ment is a task of no small difficulty. The Italians
called him “il pittore senza errori,”’ or the faultless
painter, What they meant by this must have been
that, in all the technical requirements of art, in
drawing, composition, handling of fresco and oils,
disposition of draperies and feeling for light and
shadow, he was above criticism. As a colorist he
went further and produced more beautiful effects
than any Florentine before him. What he lacked
was precisely the most precious gift—inspiration,
depth of emotion, energy of thought. Yet there
is no affectation, no false taste, no trickery in his
style. His workmanship is always solid, his hand
anerring. ;
The Caracci,
238 THE FINE ARTS.
Among Del Sarto’s followers it will be enough to
e . ee *9 e é
Francia- mention Franciabigio, Vasari’s favorite in
pcb ao -«ETeSCO_ painting, Rosso de’ Rossi, who
Rossi, carried the Florentine manner into France,
Pontormo,
and Pontormo, the masterly painter of
portraits. In the historical pictures of these men,
whether sacred or secular, it is clear how much was
done for Florentine art by Fra Bartolommeo and
Andrea del Sarto, independently of Michael Angelo
and Lionardo da Vinci. Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of
Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his portraits.
Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they
form a gallery of great interest for the historian of
Duke Cosimo’s reign. His frescoes and allegories
illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in the
imitators of Raphael and Michael Angelo,
Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received a
fresh impulse at the same time as Florence.
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called Il
Sodoma, born at Vercelli about 1477, studied under
Lionardo da Vinci, and then removed to Rome, where
he became a friend of Raphael. These double influ-
ences determined a style that never lost its own origin-
ality. With what delicacy and nazveté, almost like a
second Luini, but with more of humor and sensuous-
ness, he approached historic themes may be seen in his
frescoes at Monte Oliveto, near Siena. These are
superior to his frescoes in the Farnesina at Rome.
Sodoma’s influence at Siena, where he lived a pictur-.
esque life, delighting in his horses and surrounding
himself with strange four-footed pets of all sorts, soon
produced a school of worthy masters. Girolamo del
Pacchia, Domenico Beccafumi, and Baldassare Peruzzi,
Bronzino,
Il Sodoma.,
THE FINE ARTS. 239
though they owed much to the stimulus of his example,
followed him in no servile spirit.
To mention the remaining schools of Italy in detail
would be wearisome. True art still flour-
ished at Ferrara, where Garofalo endeavored
to carry on the Roman manner of Raphael without the
necessary strength or ideality, but also without the soul-
less insincerity of the mannerists. His best quality was
coloring, gemlike and rich; but this found little scope for
exercise in the dry and labored style he
affected. Dosso Dossi fared better, per-
haps, through never having experienced the se-
ductions of Rome. His glowing color and quaint
fancy give the attraction of romance to many of his
pictures. :
Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painting
influenced almost equally by the Venetians, gtnor
the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists, schools.
The Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults
with stucco, fresco, and gilding, in a style only just
removed from the darocco. Brescia and Bergamo
remained within the influence of Venice, producing
work of nearly first-rate quality in Moretto, Romanino,
and Lorenzo Lotto. Moroni, the pupil of
Moretto, was destined to become one of the
most powerful character painters of the modern world,
and to enrich the studies of historians and artists with a
series of portraits impressive by their fidelity to the
spirit of the sixteenth century at its conclusion. Venice
herself, at this period, was still producing masterpieces
of the genuine Renaissance. But the decline into man-
nerism, caused by circumstances similar to those at
Rome, was not far distant.
Garofalo,
Dosso Dossi.
Moroni,
240 THE FINE ARTS. z
It may seem strange to those who have visited the
The picture galleries of Italy, and have noticed
decadence how large a number of painters flourished
of art. after 1550, that we should have to look
upon the last half of the sixteenth century as a period
of decadence. This it was, however, in a deep and
true sense of the word. The force of the Renaissance
was exhausted, and a time of relaxation had to be passed
through before the reaction known as the counter-
reformation could make itself felt in art. Then, and
not till then, a new spiritual impulse produced a new
style. This secondary growth of painting began to
flourish at Bologna in accordance with fresh laws of
taste. Religious sentiments of a different order had to
be expressed; society had undergone a change, and
the arts were governed by a genuine, if far inferior, in-
spiration. Meanwhile, the Renaissance in Italy, under
the aspect we have been considering, had come to an
end. But we have now to retrace our steps, and to
take, to some perhaps, a more interesting path through
another field, before we reach the same point of view,
and see the horizon darkening in every quarter.
XITI.
THE REVIVAL OF VERNACULAR
LITERATURE,
HE first and most brilliant age of Italian literature
ended with Boccaccio,who traced thc lines on which
the future labors of the nation were conducted. It was
succeeded, as we have seen, by nearly a century of
Greek and Latin scholarship. To study the master-
pieces of Dante and Petrarch, or to practise their lan-
guage, was thought beneath the dignity of men like
Valla, Poggio, or Pontano. But towards the close of
the fifteenth century, chiefly through the influence of
Lorenzo de’ Medici and his courtiers, a strong interest
in the mother tongue revived. The vernacular litera-
ture of the Renaissance, therefore, as compared with
that of the expiring middle ages, was itself a renascence
or revival, It reverted to the models furnished by
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and combined them
with the classics, which had for so long a time eclipsed
their fame. The nation, educated by scholarship, and
brought to a sense of its identity, resumed the vulgar
tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan now
became Italian.
During the fifteenth century there was an almost
complete separation between the cultivated mm, asuse
classes and the people. Humanists, intent of the ver-
: : nacular
upon fag exploration of the classics, scholars,
I
242 THE REVIVAL OF VERNACULAR LITERATURE.
deemed it below their dignity to use the vulgar tongue,
They thought and wrote in Latin, and had no time to
bestow upon the education of the common folk, A
polite public was formed, who in the courts of princes
and the palaces of noblemen amused themselves with
the ephemeral literature of pamphlets, essays, and
epistles in the Latin tongue. For these well-educated
readers Poggio and Pontano wrote their Latin novels,
The same learned audience applauded the gladiators of
the moment, Valla and Filelfo, when they descended
into the arena and plied each other with pseudo-Cicero-
nian invectives. To quit this refined circle and address
the vulgar crowd was thought unworthy of a man of
erudition. Only here and there a humanist of the first
rank is found who, like Bruni, devoted a portion of his
industry to the Italian lives of Dante and Petrarch, or,
like Filelfo, lectured on the Divine Comedy, or, again,
like Landino, composed a Dantesque commentary in the
mother tongue. Moreover, Dante and Petrarch passed
for almost classical ; and, in nearly all such instances
of condescension, pecuniary interest swayed the scholar
from his wonted orbit. It was want of skill in Latin,
rather than love for his own idiom, that induced Ves-
pasiano to pen his lives of great men in Italian. Not
spontaneous inspiration, but the whim of a ducal
patron, forced Filelfo to use ¢erza rima for his worth-
less poem on S. John, and to write a commentary upon
Petrarch in the vernacular.
This attitude of learned writers produced a curious
It affected obtuseness of critical insight. Niccold dei
their criti- Niccoli, though a Florentine, called Dante
caltaste. 4 poet for bakers and cobblers.” Pico
della Mirandola preferred Lorenzo de’ Medici’s verses
a
THE REVIVAL OF VERNACULAR LITERATURE. 243
to Petrarch. Landino complained—not, indeed, with-
out good reason in that century—that the vulgar
language could boast of no great authors. Filippo
Villani, in the proem to his biographies, apologized for
his father Matteo, who exerted humble faculties to his
best ability. Lorenzo de’ Medici defended himself for
paying attention to an idiom which men of good judg-
ment blamed for “‘lowness, incapacity, and unworthi-
ness to deal with high themes or grave material.”
Benedetto Varchi, who lived to be an excellent though
somewhat cumbrous writer of Italian prose, gives this
account of his early training: “ I remember that, when
I was a lad, the first and strictest rule of a father to his
sons, and of a master to his pupils, was that they should
on no account and for no object read anything in the
vulgar speech; and Master Guasparre Mariscotti da
Marradi, who was my teacher in grammar, a man of
hard and rough but pure and excellent manners, having
once heard, I know not how, that Schiatta di Bernardo
Bagnesi and I were wont to read Petrarch on the sly,
gave us a sound rating for it, and nearly expelled us
from his school.” Some of Varchi’s own stylistic pedan-
tries may be attributed to this Latinizing education.
Lorenzo de’ Medici and Angelo Poliziano reunited
the two currents of Italian literature, ple- « gantori da
beian and cultivated, by giving the form of Piazza.”
refined art to popular lyrics of divers kinds, to
the rustic idyll, and to the sacred drama. Another
member of the Medicean circle, Luigi Pulci, aided the
same work of restoration by taking up the rude tales of
the Cantori da Piazza, and producing the first romantic
poem of the Renaissance.
244 THE REVIVAL OF VERNACULAR LITERATURE.
_Of all the numerous forms of literature, three seem
The Novella to have been specially adapted to the
andIdyll. Italians of this period. They were the
Novella, the Romantic Epic, and the Idyll. With
regard to the JVovella and the Idyll, it is enough
in this place to say that we may reckon them indige-
nous to modern Italy. They suited the temper of the
people and the age; the JVove//a furnishing the fit
artistic vehicle for Italian realism and objectivity ; the
Idyll presenting a point of contact with the literature
of antiquity, and expressing that calm sensibility to
natural beauty which was so marked a feature of the
national character amid the distractions of the sixteenth
century. The Idyll and the /Vove//a formed, moreover,
the most precious portion of Boccaccio’s legacy. .
The Romantic Epic, on the other hand, had no
Romantic spontaneous origin, but was imported from
Epic. the French. At first sight the material of
the Carolingian Cycle, the romantic tales of Roland
and of Charlemagne, which formed the basis of the
most considerable narrative poems of the Renaissance,
seems uncongenial to the Italians. Feudalism had
never taken a firm hold on the country. Chivalry was
more a pastime of the upper classes, more consciously
artificial, than it had been in France or even England.
The interest of the Italians in the Crusades was rather
commercial than religious, and the people were not
stirred to their centre by the impulse to recover the
Holy Sepulchre. The enthusiasm of piety which
animated the northern myth of Charlemagne was not
characteristic of the race that, earlier than the rest of
Europe, had indulged in speculative scepticism and
sarcastic raillery ; nor were the marvels of the legend
THE REVIVAL OF VERNACULAR LITERATURE. 245
congenial to their positive and practical imagination,
turned ever to the beauties of the plastic arts.
It seemed, then, as though the great foreign epics,
which had been transported into Italy dur- », public
ing the thirteenth century, would find no interest in
permanent place in southern literature after eae
the close of the fourteenth. The cultivated spired the
classes, in their eagerness to discover and Poets.
appropriate the ancient authors, lost sight of peer and
paladin. Even Boccaccio alluded contemptuously to
chivalrous romance, as fit reading only for idle women ;
and when he attempted an epical poem in octave
stanzas, he chose a tale of ancient Greece. Still, in
spite of these apparent drawbacks, in spite of learned
scorn and polished indifference, the Carolingian Cycle
had takena firm hold upon the popular fancy.