ps ae ts Che ee ot Suss R WITHDRAWN FROM U. OF P. LIBRARY — A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY TAKEN FROM THE WORK OF JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS BY LIEUT.-COLONEL ALFRED PEARSON NEW YORK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 Py a is Np neon, YritineVint e \ song a Bal 1. @&@@Q ei upral Lost 3k + D25 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 With regard éo the success with which this may have been done, it was my husband's thought to WITHDRAWN FROM U. OF P. LIBRARY ace vi PREFACE.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.