The Renaissance

Having acquired high repute for decorative painting, Paolo now received a lucrative assignment. The rich and lordly Barbaro family built in 1560 a luxurious villa at Macer, near that same Asolo where Caterina Cornaro played queen and Bembo played with Platonic love. The Barbari chose none but leading artists to make this “the finest pleasure house of the Renaissance”:³⁵ Andrea Palladio to design it, Alessandro Vittoria to ornament it with sculptured stucco, Veronese to fresco the ceilings and walls, spandrels and lunettes with scenes from pagan and Christian mythology. On the vault of the central dome he pictured Olympus—the gods who knew all the joys of life but never grew old and never died. Amid ethereal scenes the impish artist introduced a hunter, a monkey, and a dog so perfect in its form and alert vitality as to be fit to be a hound of heaven. On one wall a painted page looked across a distance at a painted maid, and she at him, and for an immortal moment they too fed on ambrosia. It was such a pleasure palace as only the more refined taste of Kublai Khan’s Chinese could have surpassed.

Inevitably, in this archipelago of Eros, Paolo received commissions to paint nudes. They were not his forte; he preferred rich, soft raiment covering semi-Rubensian forms topped with comely characterless faces crowned with upswept coiffures of golden hair. The Mars and Venus now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a fat and ungainly goddess with an unshapely dropsical leg. But she is lovely in the Venus and Adonis of the Prado, outshone only by the dog at her feet; without a dog Paolo could not paint. The finest of Veronese’s mythologies is The Rape of Europa in the Palace of the Doges: a landscape of dark trees, winged putti dropping garlands, Europa (the Phoenician princess) seating herself gaily upon the amorous bull, who licks one of her pretty feet, and turns out to be none other than Jupiter in a novel masquerade. The lucky Casanova of the skies here showed divine taste, for Europa, half robed in queenly array, is Veronese’s most successful synthesis of feminine perfection, worth leaving heaven for. The distant background continues the story by showing the bull carrying Europa across the Sea to Crete, where, says a pretty legend, she gave her name to a continent.

Paolo himself took his time before surrendering to woman. He gathered samples till he was thirty-eight; then he married Elena Badile. She bore him two sons, Carlo and Gabriele; he trained both to be painters, and predicted, with more fondness than foresight, Carletto mi vincera—” Charlie will surpass me.”³⁶ Like Correggio he bought a farm—at Sant’ Angelo di Treviso—and spent most of his married years there, managing his finances thriftily, and seldom straying from the Veneto. He was at forty (1568) the most sought-for painter in Italy, with invitations coming even from foreign lands. When Philip II asked him to decorate the Escorial he appreciated the compliment, but resisted the lure.

Like his predecessors he was called upon to paint the sacred story for churches and worshipers.* After a thousand Madonnas we find everything fresh and attractive in the Madonna of the Cuccino Family (Dresden): the handsome black-bearded donors, the disconcertingly natural children, and the white-shawled figure of fate—a woman of such majestic beauty as even Venetian art seldom equaled. The Marriage at Cana (Louvre) was just the scene that Veronese liked to paint: Roman architecture for a background, a dog or two in the foreground, and a hundred persons in a hundred attitudes. He drew them all as if everyone were to be a major portrait, and placed among them Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, and himself, each playing a stringed instrument. Paolo, unlike Tintoretto, cared nothing for realism; instead of making his feasters such men and women as a small Judean town might furnish, he made the host a Venetian millionaire, gave him a palace worthy of Augustus, and guests and dogs of pedigree, and provided the tables with delicate food and miraculous wine. If one should judge from Veronese, Christ had many a feast amid His tribulations: in the Louvre we see Him dining in the house of Simon the Pharisee, with Magdalen washing His feet, and splendid female figures moving about among Corinthian columns; in Turin He sups in the house of Simon the leper, and in the Venice Academy He dines in the house of Levi. But then, again, in Veronese’s gallery, we see Christ fainting under the weight of the cross (Dresden), and crucified against a lowering sky, with the towers of Jerusalem dim in the distance below (Louvre). The end of the great drama is subdued: simple pilgrims supping with Christ at Emmaus, with charming children fondling the inevitable dog.

Greater than these illustrations of the New Testament are Veronese’s pictures from the lives and legends of the saints: St. Helena robed in beauty, believing that she sees angels transporting the cross (London); St. Anthony tortured by a muscular youth and an angelic female (Caen); St. Jerome in the wilderness, comforted by his books (Chicago); St. George ecstatically welcoming martyrdom (San Giorgio, Venice); St. Anthony of Padua preaching to the fishes (Borghese)—a magnificent vista of sea and sky; St. Francis receiving the stigmata (Venice); St. Mennas brilliant in armor (Modena) and martyred (Prado); St. Catherine of Alexandria mystically married to the infant Christ (Santa Caterina, Venice); St. Sebastian flying the standard of faith and hope as he is led to martyrdom (San Sebastiano, Venice); St. Justina facing martyrdom with double jeopardy—in the Uffizi and in her church at Padua: all these are pictures not to be compared with the best of Titian or Tintoretto, but still meriting the name of masterpieces. Perhaps finer than any of these is The Family of Darius Before Alexander (London), with a somber queen and a lovely princess kneeling at the feet of the handsome and generous conqueror.

As Paolo had begun his Venetian career with painting in the Ducal Palace, so he ended it with grand murals there, fit to thrill every patriotic Venetian soul. After the fires of 1574 and 1577, the decoration of the rebuilt interiors was assigned chiefly to Tintoretto and Veronese, and the theme was to be Venice herself, undaunted by fire or war, Turks or Portuguese. In the Sala del Collegio (Audience Chamber) Paolo and his assistants painted on the carved and gilded ceiling eleven allegorical pictures of extraordinary elegance—Meekness with her lamb… Dialectics looking through a web of her own making… and Venice, a queen in ermine, with the Lion of St. Mark lying quietly at her feet, and receiving honors from Justice and Peace. In a great oval in the ceiling of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio he painted The Triumph of Venice, picturing the incomparable city as a goddess enthroned among pagan deities, receiving a crown of glory from the sky; at her feet the leading lords and ladies of the city, and some tributary Moors; and below these, prancing warriors ready for her defense, and pages holding hounds in leash. This was the zenith of Veronese.

In 1586 he was chosen to replace Guariento’s faded fresco, The Coronation of the Virgin, in that same Hall of the Great Council. His sketch was made and approved, and he was preparing to paint the canvas when he was stricken with fever. Venice was shocked to learn, in April 1588, that the still young painter of her glories was dead. The fathers at San Sebastiano begged for his remains, and Paolo was buried there, beneath the pictures by which he had made that church a home of his religious art.

Time has reversed the judgment of his contemporaries, and ranks him below his robust contemporary. Technically he surpassed Tintoretto; in draftsmanship, composition, and color he was the culmination of Venetian painting. His crowded pictures are not confused; his scenes and episodes are clear, his backgrounds bright; Tintoretto seems a prince of darkness beside this idolater of light. Veronese was also the greatest decorative painter of the Italian Renaissance, ever ready to conceive some delightful turn or surprise of color and form, like the man suddenly stepping out from behind a curtain half drawn across a classic portal in a fresco at the Villa Macer. But he was too joyously intent upon surface melodies to hear the subtle overtones, tragic discords, and deeper harmonies that make the greatest paintings great. His eye was too quick, his art too eager to picture all that it saw, and more that it merely imagined—Turks at the baptism of Christ, Teutons in the house of Levi, Venetians at Emmaus, dogs everywhere. He must have loved dogs, he made so many of them. He wanted to portray the brightest aspects of the world, and did so with unmatched radiance; he pictured Venice in a sunset glow of the joy of life. In his world there are only handsome nobles, stately matrons, bewitching princesses, voluptuous blondes; and every second picture is a feast.

All the art world knows the story how the officers of the Inquisition-pursuant to a decree of the Council of Trent that all erroneous teaching must be avoided in art—summoned Veronese before them (1573), and demanded to know why he had introduced so many irreverent irrelevancies into The Feast in the House of Levi (Venice)—parrots, dwarfs, Germans, buffoons, halberdiers…. Paolo replied boldly that his “commission was to ornament the picture as seemed good to me. It was big, and with room for many figures…. Whenever an empty space in a picture needs filling up, I put in figures as the fancy takes me”—partly to balance the composition, and also, doubtless, to feast the observant eye. The Inquisition ordered him to amend the painting at his own cost, which he did.³⁷ That inquest marked the passage, in Venetian art, from the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation.

Veronese had no distinguished disciples, but his influence overleaped generations to share in molding the art of Italy, Flanders, and France. Tiepolo recaptured his decorative flair after a long intermission; Rubens studied him carefully, learned the secrets of Paolo’s coloring, and inflated Veronese’s plump females to Flemish amplitude. Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain found in him a guide to the use of architectural ornament in their landscapes, and Charles Lebrun followed Veronese in designing vast murals. To Veronese and Correggio the painters of eighteenth-century France looked for inspiration in their idyls of fêtes champêtres and aristocratic lovers playing at Arcadia; here stemmed Watteau and Fragonard; here rose the rosy nudes of Boucher, the gracious children and women conceived by Greuze. Here, perhaps, Turner found something of the sunshine with which he illuminated London.

So, in Veronese’s blaze of color, ended the Golden Age of the Adriatic Queen. Art could hardly go further in the direction that it had followed from Giorgione to Veronese. Technical perfection had been reached; the heights had been scaled; now there would be a slow descent until, in the eighteenth century, Tiepolo would rival Veronese in decorative painting, and Goldoni would be the Aristophanes of Venice in a last burst of splendor before the republic’s death.

VI. PERSPECTIVE

As we look back across the heyday of Venetian art, and diffidently seek to assess its role in our heritage, we may say at once that only Florence and Rome rivaled it in excellence, splendor, and scope. It is true that the Venetian painters, even Titian, probed less deeply than the Florentines into the secret hopes and feelings, the despairs and tragedies of men, that often they loved the raiment and the flesh too keenly to reach the soul. Ruskin was right: after the Bellini, and excepting Lotto, real religion fades from Venetian art.³⁸ The Venetians could not help it if the collapse of the Crusades, the triumph and spread of Islam, the deterioration of the papacy at Avignon and in the Papal Schism, the secularization of the papacy under Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, and finally the secession of Germany and England from the Roman Church, had weakened the faith even of the faithful, and had left many vigorous spirits no better philosophy than to eat and drink and mate and disappear. But never elsewhere had Christian art and pagan art lived in such contented harmony. The same brush that painted a Virgin painted a Venus next, and no one effectively complained. Nor was it a sybaritic art or life of luxury and ease; the artists worked themselves to exhaustion, and the people whom they portrayed were often men who fought battles and governed states, or women who ruled such men.

The Venetian painters were too enamored of color to match the careful draftsmanship of the Florentine masters. But they were good draftsmen none the less. A Frenchman once said that l’été c’est un coloriste, l’hiver c’est un dessinateur—”summer is a colorist, winter is a designer”;³⁹ the leafless trees reveal pure line. But those lines are still there under the green of spring, the brown of summer, and autumn’s gold. Beneath the glory of color in Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese there is line, but it is absorbed by the color, as the structural form of a symphony is concealed by its flow.

Venetian art and literature sang the glory of Venice even as her economy sank to ruin in a Mediterranean dominated at one end by the Turks and deserted at the other by a Europe seeking American gold. And perhaps the artists and poets were justified. No vicissitudes of trade or war could extinguish the proud memory of a marvelous century—1480–1580—during which the Mocenigo and Priuli and Loredani had made and saved imperial Venice, and the Lombardi and Leopardi had adorned her with statuary, and Sansovino and Palladio had crowned her waters with churches and palaces, and the Bellini and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto and Veronese had lifted her to the art leadership of Italy, and Bembo had sung impeccable songs, and Manutius had poured forth, to all who cared, the literary heritage of Greece and Rome, and the irredeemable, irrepressible, Mephistophelean Scourge of Princes had sat enthroned on the Grand Canal, judging and milking the world.

CHAPTER XXIII

The Waning of the Renaissance

1534–76

I. THE DECLINE OF ITALY

THE wars of invasion were not yet at an end, but they had already changed the face and character of Italy. The northern provinces had been so devastated that English envoys advised Henry VIII to leave them to Charles as a punishment. Genoa had been pillaged; Milan had been taxed to death. Venice had been subdued by the League of Cambrai and the opening of new trade routes. Rome, Prato, and Pavia had suffered sack, Florence had been starved and financially bled, Pisa had half destroyed herself in her struggle for freedom, Siena was exhausted with revolutions. Ferrara had impoverished herself in her long contest with the popes, and had dishonored herself by abetting the irresponsible attack upon Rome. The Kingdom of Naples, like Lombardy, had been ravaged and plundered by foreign armies, and had long languished under alien dynasties. Sicily was already the nursery of brigands. The only consolation of Italy was that its conquest by Charles V had probably saved it from spoliation by the Turks.

By the settlement of Bologna (1530) the control of Italy passed to Spain with two exceptions: cautious Venice retained her independence, and the chastened papacy was confirmed in its sovereignty over the States of the Church. Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Milan became Spanish dependencies, ruled by Spanish viceroys. Savoy and Mantua, Ferrara and Urbino, which had usually supported or connived with Charles, were allowed to keep their indigenous dukes subject to their good behavior. Genoa and Siena retained their republican forms, but as Spanish protectorates. Florence was compelled to accept another line of Medici rulers, who survived by cooperating with Spain.

The victory of Charles marked another triumph of the modern state over the Church. What Philip IV of France had begun in 1303 was completed by Charles and Luther in Germany, by Francis I in France, by Henry VIII in England, and all in Clement’s pontificate. The powers of northern Europe had not only discovered the weakness of Italy, they had lost their fear of the papacy. The humiliation of Clement injured the respect that the transalpine populations had felt for the popes, and prepared them mentally for their secession from Catholic authority.

In some ways the Spanish hegemony was a boon to Italy. It put an end for a time to the wars of the Italian states against one another; and after 1559 it ended, till 1796, the battles of foreign powers on Italian soil. It gave the people some continuity of political order, and quieted the fierce individualism that had made and unmade the Renaissance. Those who craved order accepted the subjugation with relief; those who cherished freedom mourned. But soon the costs and penalties of peace by subjection damaged the economy and broke the spirit of Italy. The high taxes levied by the viceroys to sustain their pomp and soldiery, the severity of their laws, the state monopolies in grain and other necessaries, discouraged industry and commerce; and the native princes, competing in vain luxury, followed the same policy of taxing to frustration the economic activity that supported them. Shipping declined to a point where the surviving galleys could no longer protect themselves from Berber pirates, who raided ships and coasts and carried Italians off to serve Moslem dignitaries as slaves. Almost as irksome were the foreign troops quartered on Italian homes, openly despising a once unrivaled people and civilization, and contributing more than their share to the sexual laxity of the age.

Another misfortune befell Italy, more enduringly disastrous than the devastations of war and the subjection to Spain. The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope (1488) and the opening of an all-water route to India (1498) provided a cheaper means of transport between the Atlantic nations and Central Asia and the Far East than the troublesome route across the Alps to Genoa or Venice, thence to Alexandria, overland to the Red Sea, and again by ship to India. Moreover, the control of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks made that route hazardous, subject to tribute, piracy, and war; and this was still more true of the route via Constantinople and the Black Sea. After 1498 Venetian and Genoese trade, and Florentine finance, declined. As early as 1502 the Portuguese bought so much of the available pepper in India that the Egyptian-Venetian merchants there found little left for export.¹ The price of pepper rose one third in a year on the Rialto, while in Lisbon it could be had for half the price that merchants had to charge in Venice;² the German traders began to desert their Fondaco on the Grand Canal and transfer their buying to Portugal. Venetian statesmanship almost solved the problem in 1504 by proposing to the Mameluke government of Egypt a united enterprise to restore the old canal system between the Nile delta and the Red Sea; but the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517 blocked the plan.

In that year Luther pinned his rebel theses to the door of a Wittenberg church. The Reformation was both a cause and a result of the economic decline of Italy. It was a cause in so far as it diminished the movement of pilgrims and ecclesiastical revenues from the northern nations into Rome. It was an effect insomuch as the replacement of the Mediterranean-Egyptian route to India by the all-water route, and the development of European commerce with America, enriched the Atlantic countries while helping to impoverish Italy; German trade moved more and more down the Rhine to North Sea outlets, less and less over the mountains to Italy; Germany became commercially independent of Italy; a northward drift and pull of power wrenched Germany from the Italian web of trade and religion, and gave Germany the will and strength to stand alone.

The discovery of America had even more lasting effects upon Italy than the new route to India. Gradually the Mediterranean nations declined, left on a siding in the movement of men and goods; the Atlantic nations came to the fore, enriched with American trade and gold. This was a greater revolution in commercial routes than any that history had recorded since Greece, by her victory at Troy, had opened to her vessels the Black Sea route to Central Asia. It would be equaled and surpassed only by the airplane transformation of trade routes in the second half of the twentieth century.

The final factor in the fading of the Renaissance was the Counter Reformation. To Italy’s own political disorder and moral decay, to her subjugation and desolation by foreign powers, to her loss of trade to the Atlantic nations, to her forfeiture of revenue in the Reformation, was now added a detrimental but natural change in the mood and conduct of the Church. The unformulated, perhaps unconscious, gentlemen’s agreement by which the Church, while rich and apparently secure, had permitted considerable freedom of thought in the intellectual classes provided these made no attempt to disturb the faith of the people—to whom that faith was the vital poetry, discipline, and consolation of life—was ended by the German Reformation, the English secession, and the Spanish hegemony. When the people themselves began to reject the doctrines and authority of the Church, and the Reformation made converts even in Italy, the whole structure of Catholicism was threatened in its foundations, and the Church, considering herself a state, and behaving like any state imperiled in its very existence, reacted from tolerance and liberalism to a frightened conservatism that laid severe restraints upon thought, inquiry, publication, and speech. The Spanish domination affected religion as well as politics; it shared in transforming the lenient Catholicism of the Renaissance into the rigid orthodoxy of the Church after the Council of Trent (1545–63). The popes who followed Clement VII took over the Spanish system of uniting Church and state in strict control of religious and intellectual life.

Just as a Spaniard had been instrumental in establishing the Inquisition when, in the thirteenth century, the Albigensian revolt had vitally challenged the Church in southern France, and new religious orders had then been founded to serve the Church and renew the fervor of the Christian faith, so now in the sixteenth century the rigor of the Spanish Inquisition was imported into Italy, and a Spaniard founded the Jesuits (1534)—that remarkable Society of Jesus which would not only accept the old conventual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but would go forth into the world to spread the orthodox faith, and to fight, everywhere in Christendom, against religious heresy or revolt. The intensity of religious debate in the age of the Reformation, the Calvinist intolerance, the mutual persecutions in England, encouraged a corresponding dogmatism in Italy;³ the urbane Catholicism of Erasmus gave place to the militant orthodoxy of Ignatius Loyola. Liberalism is a luxury of security and peace.

That censorship of publications which had begun under Pope Sixtus IV was extended by the establishment of the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1559 and the Congregation of the Index in 1571. Printing facilitated censorship; it was easier to watch public printers than private copyists. So in Venice, which had been so hospitable to intellectual and political refugees, the state itself, feeling that religious division would damage social unity and order, instituted (1527) a censorship of the press, and joined with the Church in suppressing Protestant publications. Italians here and there resisted these policies; the Roman populace, on the death of Paul IV (1559), cast his statue into the Tiber, and burned the headquarters of the Inquisition to the ground.⁴ But such resistance was sporadic, unorganized, and ineffectual. Authoritarianism triumphed, and a somber pessimism and resignation fell upon the spirit of the once joyous and exuberant Italian people. Even the dark Spanish dress—black cap, black doublet, black hose, black shoes—became the fashion in once colorful Italy, as if the people had put on mourning for glory departed and liberty dead.⁵

Some moral advance accompanied the intellectual retreat. The conduct of the clergy improved, now that competitive faiths put them on their mettle; and the popes and the Council of Trent reformed many ecclesiastical abuses. Whether a similar movement occured in the morals of the laity is hard to determine; apparently it is as easy to gather instances of sexual irregularity, illegitimacy, incest, obscene literature, political corruption, robbery, and brutal crime in the Italy of 1534–76 as before.⁶ The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini indicates that fornication, adultery, brigandage, and murder tempered the orthodoxy of the age. Criminal law remained as severe as before: torture was frequently applied to innocent witnesses as well as to the accused, and murderers still had their flesh torn away by red-hot pincers before being hanged.⁷ The restoration of slavery as a major economic institution belongs to this period. When Pope Paul III opened war upon England in 1535 he decreed that any English soldiers captured might lawfully be enslaved.⁸ About 1550 the custom developed of using slaves and convicts to row the galleys of trade and war.

Nevertheless the popes of this period were men of relatively high morals in their personal life. Paul III was the greatest of them—that same Alessandro Farnese who had obtained the cardinalate through the effect of his sister’s golden hair upon the spirits of Alexander VI. It is true that Paul had begotten two bastards;⁹ but this had been an accepted custom in his youth, and Guicciardini could still describe him as “a man adorned with learning, and of unspotted character.”¹⁰ He had been trained as a humanist by Pomponius Laetus; his letters rivaled those of Erasmus in the classic elegance of their Latin; he was an accomplished conversationalist, and surrounded himself with capable and distinguished men. However, he was elected probably less for his talents and virtues than for his age and infirmities; he was sixty-six, and the cardinals could reasonable rely upon him to die soon and give them another chance to make bargains and receive more lucrative benefices.¹¹ He held them at bay for fifteen years.

For Rome his pontificate was among the happiest in the history of the city. Under his direction Latino Manetti, his maestro delle strade, drained, leveled, and widened streets, opened up many new public squares, replaced slum houses with handsome dwellings, and so improved one avenue—the Corso—that it became the Champs Elysées of Rome. As a diplomat Paul’s greatest feat was to persuade Charles V and Francis I to a ten years’ truce (1538). He almost achieved a greater aim—a reconciliation of the Church with the Protestants of Germany; but his efforts came too late. He had the courage—so lacking in Clement VII—to call a general council. Under his presidency and with his approval the Council of Trent restated the orthodox faith, reformed many ecclesiastical abuses, restored discipline and morality among the clergy, and shared with the Jesuits in saving the Latin nations for the Roman Church.

Paul’s tragic failure was his nepotism. He gave Camerino to his grandson Ottavio, and he invested his son Pierluigi with Piacenza and Parma. Pierluigi was assassinated by discontented citizens, and Ottavio joined in a conspiracy against his grandfather. Paul lost his love of life, and died two years later of a heart stroke at eighty-three (1549). He was mourned by the Romans as no other pope since Pius II a century before.

II. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

In those sciences that did not affect theology Italy continued to make such moderate progress as could come from a nation predominantly disposed to art and literature, and in reaction against an intellect that had discarded conscience. Varoli, Eustachio, and Fallopio, whose names are imbedded in the terminology of modern anatomy, date from this brief age. Niccolò Tartaglia found a way to solve cubic equations; he confided his method to Jerome Cardan (Geronimo Cardano), who published it as his own (1545). Tartaglia challenged him to an algebraic duel, in which each was to propose thirty-one problems to be solved by the other. Cardan accepted, but disdainfully delegated one of his pupils to solve Tartaglia’s problems. The pupil failed, Tartaglia succeeded, but Cardan wrote a strange and fascinating autobiography which has kept his head above the Lethe of time.

It begins with the startling candor that characterizes it to the end:

Although various abortive medicines, as I have heard, were tried in vain, I was born on September 24, 1501…. Since Jupiter was in the ascendant and Venus ruled the horoscope, I was not maimed save in the genitals, so that from my twenty-first to my thirty-first year I was unable to lie with women; and many a time I lamented my fate, envying all other men their good fortune.¹²

This was only one of his disabilities. He stuttered, suffered all his life from hoarseness and catarrh of the throat, frequently from indigestion, palpitation of the heart, rupture, colic, dysentery, hemorrhoids, gout, itching skin, a cancerous growth on the left nipple, the plague, tertian fever, and “an annual period of sleeplessness lasting about eighty days.” “In 1536 I was overtaken with an extraordinary discharge of urine; and although for nearly forty years I have been afflicted with this trouble, giving from sixty to a hundred ounces in a single day, I live well.”¹³

Endowed with all this clinical experience, he became a successful physician, cured himself of almost everything except vanity, achieved the reputation of being the most sought-for physician in Italy, and was called as far afield as Scotland to cure an incurable archbishop, whom he cured. At thirty-four he gave public lectures in Milan on mathematics, and at thirty-five on medicine. In 1545, borrowing a title from Raymond Lully, he published a book, Ars magna, wherein he made substantial contributions to algebra—which still speaks of “Cardan’s rule” for solving cubic equations. He was apparently the first to perceive that quadratic equations might have negative roots. With Tartaglia, and long before Descartes, he considered the application of algebra to geometry.¹⁴ In De subtilitate rerum (1551) he discussed painting and color; in De rerum varietate (1557) he summarized the physical knowledge of his time; both of these books owed much to Leonardo’s unpublished manuscripts.¹⁵ Amid sickness, travels, and devastating tribulations, he wrote 230 books, of which 138 have been printed. Some he had the courage to burn.

He taught medicine in the universities of Pavia and Bologna, but so mingled his science with occultism and braggadocio that he forfeited the respect of his colleagues. He devoted a large volume to the relations between the planets and the human face. He was as expert and absurd as Freud in interpreting dreams, and as firm a believer in guardian angels as Fra Angélico. Yet he named, as the ten greatest intellects in history, men not overwhelmingly Christian: Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, Archytas of Tarentum, al-Khwarizmi, al-Kindi, Gebir, Duns Scotus, and Richard Swineshead—all scientists except Duns. Cardan made a hundred enemies, invited a thousand calumnies, married miserably, and fought unsucessfully to save his eldest son from being executed for poisoning an unfaithful wife. In 1570 he moved to Rome. He was arrested there for debt or heresy or both; but Gregory XIII released and pensioned him.

At seventy-four he wrote De vita propria liber (A Book of My Own Life)— one of three remarkable autobiographies composed in this period in Italy. With almost the garrulousness and fidelity of Montaigne, he analyzes himself—body, mind, character, habits, likes and dislikes, virtues and vices, honors and dishonors, errors and prophecies, illnesses, eccentricities, and dreams. He accuses himself of obstinacy, bitterness, unsociability, hasty judgment, pugnacity, cheating at gambling, vengefulness, and mentions “the debaucheries of the Sardanapalian life I led in the year when I was rector of the University of Padua.”¹⁶ He lists “things in which I feel that I have failed”—especially the proper rearing of his sons. But he lists also seventy-three books that mention him; tells of his many successful cures and predictions, and his invincibility in debate. He bemoans the persecutions to which he was subjected, and the hazards “that beset me on account of my unorthodox views.”¹⁷ He asks himself, “What animal do I find more treacherous, vile, and deceitful than man?” and offers no reply. But he records many things that give him happiness, including change, food, drink, sailing, music, puppies, cats, continence, and sleep. “Of all ends that man may attain, none seems more worthy or more pleasing than the recognition of truth.”¹⁸ His favorite pursuit was medicine, in which he achieved many surprising cures.

Medicine was the only science that made any significant progress in this period of Italy’s decline. The greatest scientists of the age spent many years in Italy as students and teachers—Copernicus from 1496 to 1506, Vesalius from 1537 to 1546; but we must not steal them from Poland and Flanders to further honor Italy. Realdo Colombo, who succeeded Vesalius as professor of anatomy at Padua, expounded the pulmonary circulation of the blood in De re anatomica (1558), probably unaware that Servetus had proposed the same theory twelve years before. Colombo practised the dissection of human cadavers at Padua and Rome, apparently without ecclesiastical opposition;¹⁹ he seems also to have vivisected dogs. Gabriele Fallopio, a pupil of Vesalius, discovered and described the semicircular canals and the chorda tympani of the ear, and the tubes, now named after him, that bear the ova from the ovaries to the uterus. Bartolommeo Eustachio described and gave his name to the Eustachian tube of the ear and the Eustachian valve of the heart; to him also we owe the discovery of the abducens nerve, the suprarenal bodies, and the thoracic duct. Costanzo Varoli studied the pons Varolii—a mass of nerves on the undersurface of the brain.

We have no figures as to the effects of medicine on human longevity in the Renaissance. Varoli died at thirty-two, Fallopio at forty, Colombo at forty-three, Eustachio at fifty; on the other hand Michelangelo lived to eighty-nine, Titian to ninety-nine, Luigi Cornaro to approximately a century. Born at Venice in 1467 or earlier, Luigi was rich enough to indulge in every luxury of food, drink, and love. These “excesses caused me to fall a prey to various ailments, such as pains in the stomach, frequent pains in the side, symptoms of gout… a low fever that was almost continuous… and an unquenchable thirst. This evil condition left me nothing to hope for except that death should terminate my troubles.” When he was forty his physicians abandoned all medicaments and advised him that his only hope of recovery lay in “a temperate and orderly life…. I was not to partake of any foods, either solid or liquid, save such as are prescribed for invalids; and of these in small quantities only.” He was allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but always in moderation; and he soon reduced his total daily intake to twelve ounces of food and fourteen of wine. Within a year, he tells us, “I found myself entirely cured of all my complaints…. I grew most healthy, and have remained so from that time to this”²⁰—i.e., age eighty-three. He found that this order and moderation of physical habits made for similar qualities and health of mind and character; his “brain remained constantly in a clear condition;…. melancholy, hatred, and the other passions” left him; even his esthetic sense was sharpened, and all lovely things seemed to him now more beautiful than ever before.

He spent a quiet and comfortable old age at Padua, undertook and financed public works, and wrote, at eighty-three, his autobiographical Discorsi della vita sobria. Tintoretto has pictured him for us in a delectable portrait: bald head but ruddy face, eyes clear and penetrating, wrinkles spelling benevolence, white beard thinned with years, hands still revealing, so near to death, an aristocratic youth. His octogenarian vivacity encourages us as he rallies those who thought life after seventy to be a meaningless valetudinarian procrastination:

Let them come and see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs and uphill, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me…. All my senses (thank God!) are in the best condition, including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the simple food that I now take in moderation than all the delicacies that I ate in my years of disorder…. When I come home I see before me not one or two but eleven grandchildren.… I take delight in hearing them sing and play on different musical instruments. I sing myself, and find my voice better, clearer, and louder than ever…. My life, therefore, is alive, not dead; nor would I exchange my old age for the youth of such as live in the service of their passions.²¹

At eighty-six, “full of health and strength,” he wrote a second discourse, expressing his joy at the conversion of several friends to his way of life. At ninety-one he added a third essay, and told how “I constantly write, and with my own hand, eight hours a day, and…. in addition to this I walk and sing for many other hours… For I feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing…. Oh, how beautiful and sonorous my voice has become!” At ninety-two he composed “A loving exhortation… to all mankind to follow the orderly and temperate life.”²² He looked forward to completing a century, and to an easy death through the gradual diminution of his senses, feelings, and vital spirits. He died peacefully in 1566; some say at ninety-nine, others at one hundred and three or four. His wife, we are told, obeyed his precepts, lived to nearly a century, and died in “perfect ease of body and security of soul.”²³

We must not expect to find a major philosopher in so small a span of space and time. Iacopo Aconzio, an Italian Protestant, in a treatise De methodo (1558), prepared part of the way for Descartes; and in De strata-gematibus Satanae (1565) he had the audacity to suggest that all Christianity might be reduced to a few doctrines held by all Christians, and not including the idea of the Trinity.²⁴ Mario Nizzoli made a path for Francis Bacon by inveighing against the continued reign of Aristotle in philosophy, appealing for direct observation against deductive reasoning, and denouncing logic as the art of proving the false to be true.²⁵ Bernardino Telesio of Cosenza, in De rerum natura (1565–86), Joined Nizzoli and Pierre La Ramée in the spreading revolt against the authority of Aristotle, and called for empirical science: Nature must be explained in her own terms through the experience of our senses. What we see, said Telesio, is matter acted upon by two forces: heat coming from the sky, cold rising from the earth; heat producing expansion and motion, cold producing contraction and rest; in the conflict of these two principles lies the inner essence of all physical phenomena. These phenomena proceed according to natural causes and inherent laws, without the intervention of deity. Nature, however, is not inert; there is a soul in things as well as in man. Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon would all take something from these ideas. Some measure of liberalism must have survived in the Church to let Telesio die a natural death (1588). Twelve years later the Inquisition would burn Bruno at the stake.

III. LITERATURE

The great age of Italian scholarship was now ended: France took the torch when Julius Caesar Scaliger migrated from Verona to Agen in 1526. Note the effect of war upon the book trade: in the last decade of the fifteenth century Florence published 179 books, Milan 228, Rome 460, Venice 1491; in the first decade of the sixteenth century Florence published 47, Milan 99, Rome 41, Venice 536.²⁶ The academies founded for classical scholarship—the Platonic Academy at Florence, the Roman Academy of Pomponius Laetus, the Neacademia at Venice, the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus—died out in this period; the study of pagan philosophy was frowned upon except in a Scholastified Aristotle; and Latin gave place to Italian as the language of literature. New academies sprang up, chiefly devoted to literary and linguistic criticism, and serving as central exchanges of ears for the poets of the town. So Florence had the Della Crusca Academy (1572) and the Umidi; Venice had the Pellegrini, Padua the Eretei; and each new society took a sillier name. These academies encouraged talent and stifled genius; poets struggled to obey the rules laid down by the purists, and inspiration fled to airier haunts. Michelangelo belonged to no literary academy, and though he, like the rest, indulged his Muse in trite conceits, and forced his fire into cold Petrarchian molds, his sonnets, rough in form but warm in feeling and thought, are the best Italian poetry of the time. Luigi Alamanni fled from Florence to France, and composed a poem on agriculture—La coltivazione— which did not fall far short of Virgil’s Georgics in combining tillage with poetry.* Bernardo Tasso rehearsed, in the misfortunes of his life, the vicissitudes of his famous son Torquato; his lyrics are among the choicest artificialities of the age; his epic, Amadigi, versified with heavy seriousness the chivalric romance, Amadis de Gaul. The Italian public, missing in it Ariosto’s leavening humor, gave it a quiet burial.

The novella, or short story, had remained popular ever since The Decameron had given it a classic form. Written in simple language, and usually describing dramatic incidents or intimate scenes of Italian life, the novelle were welcomed by all ranks. Often they were read aloud to avid listeners, none more avid than the letterless, so that their audience was all Italy. We may marvel today at the broad tolerance of Renaissance women who heard these tales without reported blushing. Love, seduction, violence, adventure, humor, sentiment, descriptions of scenery, provided the material of the stories, and every class furnished types and characters.

Almost every city had a skilled practitioner of the form. At Salerno Tommaso de’ Guardati, known as Masuccio, published in 1476 his Novellino —fifty stories illustrating the generosity of princes, the incontinence of women, the vices of monks, and the hypocrisy of mankind. Less polished than Boccaccio’s novelettes, they often surpass them in sincerity, power, and eloquence. At Siena the novella took on a highly sensuous quality, filling its pages with tales of unlicensed love. Florence had four famous novellieri. Franco Sacchetti, friend and imitator of Boccaccio, outwinded him by writing three hundred novelle, whose vulgarity and obscenity made them almost universally popular. Agnolo Firenzuola devoted many of his stories to satirizing the sins of the clergy; he described the goings-on in a dissolute convent, exposed the arts by which confessors induced pious women to leave legacies to monasteries, and himself became a monk of the Vallombrosan order. Antonfrancesco Grazzini, known to Italy as il Lasca, the Roach, excelled in comic stories, featuring the prankster Pilucca, but he could also season his dish with sex and blood, as when a husband, finding his wife in adultery with his son, cuts off their hands and feet, cuts out their eyes and tongues, and lets them bleed to death on their bed of love. Antonfrancesco Doni, a Servite monk and priest, was expelled from the cloister of the Annunciation (1540), apparently for sodomy; at Piacenza he joined a club of profligates devoted to Priapus; in Venice he became a devoted enemy of Aretino, against whom he wrote a pamphlet ominously entitled “Earthquake of Doni the Florentine, with the Ruin of the Great Colossus and Bestial Antichrist of Our Age”; meanwhile composing novelle noted for their pungent humor and style.

The best of the novellieri was Matteo Bandello, whose life spanned half a continent and most of a century (1480–1562). Born near Tortona, he was soon entered into the Dominican order, whose general was his uncle. He grew up in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan; he was presumably there when Leonardo painted The Last Supper in the refectory, and when Beatrice d’Este was buried in the adjoining church. He lived at Mantua for six years as tutor in the ruling family, carried on a flirtation with Lucrezia Gonzaga, and saw Isabella fight with all her arts the coming of old age. Returning to Milan, he actively supported the French against the Spanish-German forces in Italy; after the French disaster at Pavia his house was burned and his library was almost totally destroyed, including a Latin dictionary which he had almost completed. He fled to France, served Cesare Fregoso, General of the Dominicans, well, and was made Bishop of Agen (1550). In his leisure hours he gathered together the 214 stories that he had written during the years, gave them their finished literary form, covered their mild indecency with his episcopal absolution, and had them printed in three volumes at Lucca (1554), and a fourth at Lyons (1573).

As in the other novellieri, so in Bandello the plots turn mostly on love or violence, or the morals of friars, monks, and priests. A sweet lass revenges herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to pieces with pincers; a husband forces his adulterous wife to strangle her lover with her own hands; a convent abandoned to debauchery is described with tolerant good humor. Some of Bandello’s stories provided material for exciting dramas, as when Webster took from one of them the plot for The Duchess of Malfi. Bandello tells with feeling and skill the romance of Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta Capelletti, and vividly conveys the passion of their love. Shall we sample him at his most romantic?

Romeo, not daring to inquire who the damsel was, applied himself to feed his eyes on her lovely sight, and minutely considering all her movements, drank the sweet amorous poison, marvelously commending her every part and gesture. He was seated in a corner wherein, when dancing was toward, all passed before him. Giulietta (for so was the damsel called) was the daughter of the master of the house and giver of the feast. And she likewise, not knowing Romeo, but seeing withal that he was the handsomest and sprightliest youth that might be found, was marvelously pleased with his sight, and softly and furtively eyeing him a while askance, felt I know not what sweetness at heart, which all to-flooded her with exceeding delight; wherefore she would fain have had him join the dance, so she might the better see him and hear him speak, herseeming as much delight should issue from his speech as she still drank in at his eyes, what while she gazed on him; but he sat all alone and showed no wish to dance. All his study was to ogle the fair damsel, and she thought of nothing but to look upon him, and so they viewed each other on such wise that, their eyes by times encountering, and the flashing rays of the one and the other’s glances mingling, they lightly perceived that they eyed each other amorously; more by token that, whenassoever their eyes met, both filled the air with amorous sighs, and it seemed they desired for the nonce no otherwhat than to discover one to other by speech their newborn flame.²⁷

The climax in Bandello is subtler than in Shakespeare. Instead of Romeo dying before Juliet emerges from her coma, she awakes before Romeo feels the effect of the poison he has drunk in despair at her apparent death. In his joy at her recovery he forgets the poison, and the lovers have a few moments of delirious joy. When the poison wreaks its force and Romeo dies, Juliet stabs herself with his sword.*

IV. TWILIGHT IN FLORENCE: 1534–74

It is easier to rule a state in its decline than in its youth; diminished vitality almost welcomes subjugation. Florence, beaten down again by the Medici (1530), submitted wearily to domination by Clement VII; it rejoiced when the coarse tyrant Alessandro de’ Medici was slain by his remote relative Lorenzino (1537); and, instead of seizing the opportunity to re-establish the republic, it accepted a second Cosimo, in hopes that he might show the wisdom and statesmanship of the first. The direct line of Cosimo Pater Patriae was now legally extinct; the younger Cosimo was descended from his older namesake’s brother Lorenzo (1395–1440). Guicciardini manoeuvred the new ruler, then eighteen, into lordship in the hope of being the power behind the throne; but he forgot that the young Medici was the son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and the grandson of Caterina Sforza, and therefore had at least two generations of iron in his blood. Cosimo took the reins in his own hands, and held them firmly for twenty-seven years.

His character and government mingled evil and good. He was as severe and cruel as unsentimental policy might dictate. He did not bother, like earlier Medici, to maintain republican forms and façade. He arranged a system of espionage that entered every family, and used parish priests as spies.²⁹ He enforced unanimity of professed religious belief, and co-operated with the Inquisition. He was greedy of wealth and power, exploited the state monopoly of grain, taxed his subjects avidly, overthrew the semi-republic of Siena to make that city, like Arezzo and Pisa, part of his dominions, and persuaded Pope Pius V to give him the title of grand duke of Tuscany (1569).

In partial compensation for the absolutism of his rule, he organized efficient administration, a reliable army and police, a competent and incorruptible judiciary. He lived simply, avoided costly ceremony and display, managed finances stringently, and left a full treasury to his son and heir. The order and safety that were now maintained on streets and highways revived the commerce and industry that had ailed under repeated revolutions. Cosimo brought in new manufactures, as of coral and glass; he invited and protected Portuguese Jews as a stimulus to industrial development; he enlarged Livorno (Leghorn) as a busy port. He had the marshes of the Maremma drained in an effort to free that region, and nearby Siena, from malaria. Under his conscientious despotism Siena, like Florence, became more prosperous than ever before. He used part of his levied wealth to support literature and art without extravagance and with discrimination. He raised the Accademia degli Umidi to an official position as the Accademia Fiorentina, and commissioned it to set norms for proper Tuscan usage. He befriended Vasari and Cellini, tried hard to win Michelangelo back to Florence, and founded, under his absent presidency, an Arte del Disegno, or Academy of Design. He established at Pisa (1544) a school of botany second only to Padua’s in age and excellence. Doubtless Cosimo would have argued that he could not have accomplished this good had he not begun with a little evil and an iron fist.

At forty-five this iron Duke was already worn out with the strains of power and family tragedies. Within a few months, in 1562, his wife and two of his sons died from malarial fever caught during his efforts to drain the Maremma swamps. A year later he lost a daughter. In 1564 he resigned the actual government to his son Francesco. He tried to console himself with amours but found more boredom in promiscuity than in marriage. He died in 1574, aged fifty-five. He had lived up to the best and the worst in his ancestry.

Though Florence no longer produced Leonardos or Michelangelos, and had no artists to compare in this period with the urbane and universal Titian, the volcanic Tintoretto, or the festal Veronese, she experienced under her second Cosimo as vigorous a revival as could be expected from a generation that had grown up amid frustrated revolt and unsuccessful war. Even so, Cellini judged the artists employed by Cosimo to be “a band the like of which is not to be found at present in the world”³⁰—which is a typically Florentine understatement of Venetian art. Benvenuto thought the Duke a patron with more taste than generosity, but perhaps this able governor considered economic reconstruction and political order more vital than the artistic decoration of his court. Vasari described Cosimo as “loving and favoring all artists, and indeed all men of genius.” It was Cosimo who financed at Chiusi, Arezzo, and elsewhere the excavations that revealed a remarkable Etruscan culture, and unearthed the famous Etruscan bronze statues of The Chimera, The Orator, and Minerva. He bought back as many as he could locate of the art treasures looted from the Medici palace in 1494 and 1527, added his own collections to them, and housed the total in that palace-fortress that Luca Pitti had begun a hundred years before. Cosimo had this monstrous edifice enlarged by Bartolommeo Ammaaati, and made it his official dwelling (1553).

Ammanati and Vasari were in Florence the leading architects of the age. It was Ammanati who laid out for Cosimo the famous Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, and spanned the Arno with the beautiful Santa Trinità Bridge (1567–70)—destroyed in the Second World War. He was also a painter and sculptor of quality; he won sculptural competitions from Cellini and Giovanni da Bologna, and carved the Juno that adorns the Bargello court. In his old age he apologized for having made many pagan figures. The Pagan Renaissance had now (1560) run its course, and Christianity was regaining its hold on the Italian mind.

Cosimo made Baccio Bandinelli his favorite sculptor, to the horror of Cellini. One of Cosimo’s recreations was in hearing Cellini berate Bandinelli. Baccio was popular with himself; he proclaimed his intention to surpass Michelangelo, and was so critical of other artists that one of the gentlest, Andrea Sansovino, tried to kill him. Nearly everybody hated him, but his many commissions in Florence and Rome suggest that his talent was better than his character. When Leo X wished to duplicate the complex Laocoon group of the Belvedere as a gift to Francis I, Cardinal Bibbiena asked Bandinelli to undertake the assignment; Baccio promised to make a copy superior to the original. To the general dismay he almost succeeded. Clement VII was so pleased with the result that he sent authentic antiques to Francis and kept Baccio’s copy for the Medici Palace in Florence, whence it passed to the Uffizi Gallery. For Clement and Alessandro de’ Medici Bandinelli carved a gigantic group, Hercules and Cacus, which was set up on the porch of the Palazzo Vecchio beside Michelangelo’s David. Cellini did not like it. “If your Hercules had his hair cropped,” he told Bandinelli in Cosimo’s presence, “he would not have skull enough to hold his brains…. His heavy shoulders remind one of the two baskets of a donkey’s packsaddle. His chest and muscles are copied not from nature but from a bag of bad melons.”³¹ Clement, however, thought the Hercules a masterpiece, and rewarded the sculptor with a substantial property in addition to the promised fee. Baccio repaid the compliment by giving the name Clement to a bastard born to him soon after the Pope’s death. His last work was a tomb prepared by him for himself and his father; as soon as it was finished he occupied it (1560). Probably he would have greater renown today had he not been invidiously immortalized by two artists who could write as well as design—Vasari and Cellini.

Giovanni da Bologna was a more genial competitor. Born at Douai, he made his way in youth to Rome (1561), resolved to be a sculptor. After a year of study there he brought a clay sample of his work to the aged Michelangelo. The old sculptor took it in his hands, pressed it here and there with his worn fingers and heavy thumbs, and in a few moments molded it to greater significance. Giovanni never forgot that visit; throughout the remainder of his eighty-four years he labored with unrelaxing ambition to equal the Titan. He started back to Flanders, but a Florentine nobleman advised him to study the art collected in Florence, and for three years maintained him in his palace. There were so many Italian artists in or near the city that it took the Fleming five years to win acceptance for his work. Then Francesco, son of Duke Cosimo, bought his Venus. He entered a competition to design a fountain for the Piazza della Signoria; Cosimo judged him too young for so responsible an assignment, but his model was rated best by many artists, and probably it won him an invitation to build a much larger fountain in Bologna. After that Giovanni was brought back to Florence as official sculptor for the Medici, and never lacked commissions. When he went to Rome again Vasari introduced him to the Pope as “the prince of the sculptors of Florence.”³² In 1583 he modeled a group, now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and named in afterthought The Rape of the Sabines: a hero virile and muscular holds in his grasp a ravishing woman whose soft form is realistically compressed against his supporting hand, and whose back is the loveliest in the bronze sculpture of the Renaissance.

The sculptors surpassed the painters in Cosimo’s galaxy and regard. Ridolfo Ghirlandaio strove but failed to maintain his father’s excellence; we may sample him from his portrait of Lucrezia Summaria in Washington. Francesco Ubertini, nicknamed il Bachiacca, liked to paint historical scenes in great detail on a small scale. Iacopo Carrucci, called Pontormo from his birthplace, had every advantage and a good start; he received instruction from Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto; and at nineteen (1513) he stirred the art world with a painting, now lost, that aroused the admiration of Michelangelo and was pronounced by Vasari “the finest fresco ever seen till then.”³³ But soon afterward, to the disgust of the Italians, Pontormo fell in love with the engravings of Durer, abandoned the smooth lines and harmonies of the Italian style, preferred crude and heavy Germanic forms, and pictured men and women in poses of physical or mental disturbance. In frescoes at the Certosa outside Florence Pontormo painted in this Teutonic style scenes from the passion of Christ. Vasari resented this imitation: “Was not Pontormo aware that Germans and Flemings come to learn the Italian style, which he made such effort to shake off as if it were bad?”³⁴ Even so, Vasari confessed the power of these frescoes. Pontormo further complicated his art by developing phobias. He never allowed death to be mentioned in his presence; he avoided feasts and crowds, lest he be crushed to death; though himself kind and gentle, he distrusted nearly everyone except his beloved pupil Bronzino. More and more he courted solitude, until he formed the habit of sleeping in an upper-story room reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up after him. On his final assignment—to fresco the main chapel of San Lorenzo—he worked for eleven years in isolation, boarding up the chapel and allowing none but himself to enter. He died (1556) before finishing the task; and when the frescoes were unveiled it was seen that the figures were badly disproportioned, the faces excited or melancholy. Let us remember him by a work of his saner maturity, the lovely portrait of Ugolino Martelli now in Washington—soft feathered hat, pensive eyes, luminous raiment, immaculate hands.

Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, renamed Bronzino, distinguished himself by a remarkable series of portraits, chiefly of the Medici. The Medici Palace contains a gallery of them, from Cosimo Pater Patriae to Duke Cosimo; and if we may judge from the pouchy face of his Leo X, they were often truthful. The best of them is of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Uffizi) —a veritable Napoleon before Bonaparte—handsome, proud, and breathing fire.

Probably Duke Cosimo’s favorite artist was the man to whom this and every book on the Italian Renaissance owes half its life—Giorgio Vasari. The family into which he was born at Arezzo already included several artists; he was distantly related to Luca Signorelli, and he has told us how the old painter, seeing Giorgio’s boyhood drawings, encouraged him in studying design. In one of those innumerable acts of magnanimous and clairvoyant patronage that should be considered in judging the morals of the Renaissance, Cardinal Passerini, who had been appointed guardian of Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici, took Giorgio to Florence; and there the lad of twelve shared the studies of the young heirs to wealth and power. He became a pupil of Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, and to the end of his life he revered Buonarroti—broken nose and all—as a god.

When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1527, Giorgio returned to Arezzo. At eighteen, his father having died of plague, he found himself the chief support of his three sisters and two young brothers. Again kindness rescued him. His former fellow pupil, Ippolito de’ Medici, invited him to Rome, where for three years Vasari sedulously studied ancient and Renaissance art; and in 1530 Alessandro, master of Florence after another restoration, called him to live and paint in the Palazzo Medici. There he made portraits of the family, including Lorenzo the Magnificent in a somber study, and the vivacious young Caterina—posing and opposing at whim, as if already conscious that she would be queen of France. When Alessandro was assassinated Vasari wandered for some time patronless. His paintings are rudely dealt with by modern critics, but they must have earned him some repute, for at Mantua he was housed by Giulio Romano, and at Venice Aretino was his burly chaperone. Wherever he went he carefully studied the local art, talked with artists or their descendants, collected drawings and made notes. Back in Rome, he painted for Bindo Altoviti a Deposition from the Cross, which, he tells us, “had the good fortune not to displease the greatest sculptor, painter, and architect that ever lived in our time.”

It was this Michelangelo who introduced him to the second Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; and it was this cultivated prelate who, in 1546, suggested to Vasari that he should compose for the guidance of posterity the lives of the artists who had so distinguished the Italy of the preceding two hundred years. While busily serving as painter and architect in Rome, Rimini, Ravenna, Arezzo, and Florence, Giorgio devoted part of his time to the unremunerative labor of the Lives, “moved by love for these our artists.” In 1550 he published the first edition of these Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, ed architetti Italiani, with an eloquent dedication to Duke Cosimo.

From 1555 to 1572 he was Cosimo’s chief artist. He remodeled the interior of the Palazzo Vecchio and decorated many of its walls with paintings more immense than magnificent; he raised the vast administration building known from its governmental offices as the Uffizi, and now one of the great art galleries of the world. He led in completing the Laurentian Library, and he constructed the enclosed corridor that enabled Cosimo to pass under cover from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi across the Ponte Vecchio to the new ducal residence in the Pitti Palace. In 1567 he spent several months in travel and research, and a year later he brought out a new and much enlarged edition of the Lives. He died in Florence in 1574, and was buried with his ancestors in Arezzo.

He was not a great artist but he was a good man, an industrious investigator, and (barring a few bites at Bandinelli) a generous as well as intelligent critic. In simple, racy, almost colloquial Tuscan, and occasionally with the vividness of the novelle, he gave us one of the most interesting books of all time, from which a thousand other volumes have been cribbed. It is rich in inaccuracies, anachronisms, and contradictions, but richer still in fascinating information and judicious interpretation. It did for the artists of Renaissance Italy what Plutarch had done for the martial or civic heroes of Greece and Rome. It will remain for centuries to come one of the classics of the world’s literature.

V. BENVENUTO CELLINI: 1500–71

There was in this age at the court of Cosimo a man who united in his character all the violence and sensitivity, all the mad pursuit of beauty in life and art, all the exhilarating pride of health, skill, or power, that distinguished the Renaissance; who, moreover, possessed the spontaneous capacity to pour forth his thoughts and feelings, vicissitudes and accomplishments, in one of the most engaging and unforgettable of all autobiographies. Benvenuto was not—no one man could be—completely typical of the Renaissance genius; he lacked the piety of Angelico, the craft of Machiavelli, the modesty of Castiglione, the blithe suavity of Raphael; and surely not all Italian artists of the time took the law into their own hands as Benvenuto did. Yet, as we read his turbulent narrative, we feel that his book, more than any other, more even than Vasari’s Lives, takes us behind the scenes, and into the heart, of the Renaissance.

He begins disarmingly:

All men, of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty. This duty occurs to my own mind, now that I am traveling beyond the term of fifty-eight years, and am in Florence, the city of my birth.

He is proud that he was “born humble” and made his family famous; at the same time he assures us that he was descended from a captain of Julius Caesar; “in a work like this,” he warns us, “there will always be found occasion for natural bragging.”³⁵ He was called Benvenuto—welcome—because his parents expected a girl and were pleasantly surprised. His grand father (probably violating all of Cornaro’s precepts) lived a hundred years; Cellini, inheriting his vitality, crowded as many into seventy-one. His father was an engineer, a worker in ivory, and a devotee of the flute; his fond hope was that Benvenuto would become a professional flutist and play in the band at the Medici court; in later years he seems to have derived more pleasure from hearing that his son had become a flutist in Pope Clement’s private orchestra than from the goldsmithery by which the youth was earning florins and fame.

But Benvenuto was enamored of beautiful forms rather than of melodious sounds. He saw some of the work of Michelangelo, and caught the fever of art. He studied the cartoon for The Battle of Pisa, and was so impressed by it that even the Sistine Chapel ceiling seemed to him less marvelous. Against his father’s pleading he apprenticed himself to a goldsmith, but in filial compromise he continued to practise the hated flute. In Filippino Lippi’s house he found a book of drawings representing the art antiquities of Rome. He burned with desire to see those renowned exemplars with his own eyes, and often he talked with his friends about going to the capital. One day he and a young woodcarver, Giambattista Tasso, walking aimlessly and talking passionately, found themselves at the gate San Piero Gattolini; Benvenuto remarked that he felt himself already halfway from Florence to Rome; on a mutual dare they walked on, mile after mile, until they reached Siena, thirty-three miles away. There Gian’s feet rebelled. Cellini had money enough to hire a horse; the two youths rode the one animal, and, “singing and laughing, we traveled the whole way to Rome. I had just nineteen years then, and so had the century.”³⁶

In Rome he found work as a goldsmith, studied the ancient remains, and earned enough to send his father consolatory sums. But the doting father pled so earnestly for his return that after two years Benvenuto went back to Florence. He had hardly domiciled himself there when he stabbed a youth in a quarrel. Thinking he had killed him, he fled again to Rome (1521). He pored over Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s in the Villa Chigi and the Vatican; he noted all interesting forms and lines in men and women, metals and foliage; soon he was the best goldsmith in Rome. Clement took to him first as a flutist, then discovered his excellence in design. Cellini made such handsome coins for him that the Pope appointed him “stamp master of the papal mint”—i.e., designer of currency for the Papal States. Each cardinal had a seal, sometimes “as large as the head of a twelve-year-old child,” which was used to impress the wax that sealed a letter; some such seals were worth a hundred crowns ($1250?). Cellini engraved seals and coins, cut and set gems, modeled medallions, enameled cameos, made a hundred varieties of objects in silver and gold. These “various departments of art,” he writes, “are very different from one another, so that a man who excels in one of them, if he undertakes another, hardly ever achieves the same success; whereas I strove with all my power to become equally versed in all of them; and in the proper place I shall demonstrate that I attained my object.”³⁷

Benvenuto brags on almost every page, but with such consistency and ardor that at last we come to believe him. He speaks of his “fine physiognomy and bodily symmetry,” and we cannot deny it. “Nature bestowed on me a temperament so happy, and of such excellent parts, that I was freely able to accomplish whatever it pleased me to take in hand.” Among these pleasant objects was “a girl of great beauty and grace, whom I used as a model.… I used frequently to pass the night with her…. After indulgence in sexual pleasure my slumber is sometimes very deep.”³⁸ From one such slumber he woke to find himself host to the “French disease.” In fifty days he was cured, and took another mistress.

We glimpse the lawlessness of Italian city life in the sixteenth century when we note with what easy conscience Cellini overrode the commandments of Church and state. Apparently the policing of Rome was lax and fragmentary; a man of strong instincts could be—sometimes had to be—a law unto himself. When provoked Benvenuto “felt a fever” which “would have been my death had I not resolved to give it vent”;³⁹ when offended “I thought I ought to act as well as intone my misereres”⁴⁰ He fell into a hundred quarrels, and, he assures us, was in the right in all but one. He stuck a dagger into the neck of one offender, and with such matador precision that the man fell dead.⁴¹ In another case “I stabbed him just beneath the ear. I gave him only two blows, for he fell stone dead at the second. I had not meant to kill him, but, as the saying goes, knocks are not dealt out by measure.”⁴²

His theology was as independent as his morality. Since he was always right (but once), he felt that God must be on his side, giving more power to his arm; he prayed to God for aid in his murders, and gave Him due credit for his success. However, when God failed to answer his prayers to help him find his lost love Angelica, he turned to devils for supplementary aid. A Sicilian sorcerer took him to the deserted Colosseum at night, drew a magic circle in the ground, lit a fire, sprinkled perfumes on the flames, and with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin invocations summoned demons to appear. Benvenuto was sure that hundreds of phantoms rose before him, and that they predicted his early reunion with Angelica. He returned to his house, and spent the rest of the night seeing devils.⁴³

When the imperial army sacked Rome Cellini fled to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, and served as a gunner; it was one of his shots, he avers, that killed the Duke of Bourbon; and it was his expert marksmanship that kept the besiegers at a distance from the Castle, so saving the Pope, the cardinals, and Benvenuto. We do not know how true this is; but we have it on the same authority that when Clement returned to Rome he made Cellini a mace-bearer with a salary of 200 crowns ($2500?) a year, and said: “Were I but a wealthy emperor, I would give Benvenuto as much land as my eyes could survey; yet, being now but a needy bankrupt, I will at any rate give him bread enough to satisfy his need.”⁴⁴

Paul III continued Clement’s patronage. Probably exaggerating to his heart’s delight, Cellini quotes Paul as saying, to one who protested his lenience with the artist: “Know then that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, stand above the law; and how far more, then, he who received the provocation I have heard of.”⁴⁵ But Paul’s son Pierluigi, as reckless a rascal as Benvenuto himself, turned the Pope against the artist. Even Cellini’s arts proved inadequate to overcome such influence, and in 1537 he abandoned his shop in Rome and made for France. On the way he was handsomely entertained by Bembo at Padua, made a small portrait of him, and was in return presented with horses for himself and his two companions. They mounted and descended the Grisons, and rode through Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons to Paris. There too Benvenuto found enemies. Giovanni de’ Rossi, Florentine painter, wanted no more rivals for the King’s money; he put difficulties in the way of the newcomer; and when at last Cellini got to Francis he found him inextricably tangled in war. III and homesick, he climbed back over the Alps, made a pilgrimage to Loreto, and crossed the Apennines to Rome. To his dismay he found himself accused by Pierluigi of having embezzled papal jewelry. He was flung into the same Castello that he had helped to save, and suffered months of imprisonment. He escaped, but broke a leg in the process; captured, he was confined in an underground dungeon for two years. He was released at the request of Francis I, who now urgently solicited his services in France. Once more he clambered over the Alps (1540).

He found King and court at Fontana Belio—i.e., Fontainebleau; was warmly welcomed, and was assigned a castle in Paris for his workshop and home. When its occupants refused to leave he expelled them by force. The French did not like his manners or his language, and Mme d’Étampes, the King’s mistress, resented Cellini’s lack of courtesy to her high estate. When she heard how he had thrown out of the castle windows the furniture of the tenants whom he had dispossessed, she warned Francis that “that devil will sack Paris one of these days.”⁴⁶ The merry monarch enjoyed the story, forgave Cellini’s violence for his artistry, and paid him 700 crowns a year ($8750?), 500 more for the expenses of his trip from Rome, and promised an additional sum for each work of art that Cellini should produce for him. Benvenuto was proud to learn that these were the same terms that had been given to Leonardo twenty-four years before.⁴⁷

One of the dispossessed tenants sued him in court on a charge of stealing some effects. The court decided against Cellini. He reversed the judgment in his own striking way:

When I perceived that my cause had been unjustly lost, I had recourse for my defense to a great dagger which I carried; for I have always taken pleasure in keeping fine weapons. The first man I attacked was the plaintiff who had sued me; and one evening I wounded him in the legs and arms so severely, taking care, however, not to kill him, that I deprived him of the use of both his legs.⁴⁸

Apparently the plaintiff dared not press the matter further, and Cellini could turn his energies to other outlets. He had in his Paris studio “a poor young girl, Caterina; I keep her principally for my art’s sake, since I cannot do without a model; but being a man also, I have used her for my pleasure.”⁴⁹ However Caterina, with yielding largesse, slept also with his helper, Pagolo Micceri. Benvenuto, learning of it, beat her till he was exhausted. His servant Roberta reproved him for punishing so violently so ordinary an incident; did he not know that “there’s not a husband in France without horns”? The next day he modeled from Caterina again, “during which occurred some amorous diversions; and at last, on the same hour as on the previous day, she irritated me to such a pitch that I gave her the same drubbing. So we went on for several days, repeating the same round…. Meanwhile I completed my work in a style which did me the greatest credit.”⁵⁰ Another model, Jeanne, presented him with a daughter; he settled a dowry on the mother, “and from that time I had nothing more to do with her.”⁵¹ The child was later smothered by its nurse.

Francis bore patiently with all this lawlessness; but finally Benvenuto had so many enemies in Paris that he begged the King’s permission to visit Italy. Consent was not given, but Cellini took French leave, and, after an arduous trip, found himself in his native Florence (1545). There he showed a better side of his nature, contributing materially to the support of his sister and her six daughters. He found Cosimo less openhanded than Francis. He made the usual enemies, but he cast a good portrait bust of the Duke (in the Bargello), and produced for him his most celebrated work—the Perseus that still stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi. He tells a vivid story of the casting. His anxieties, toil, and exposure to heat and cold culminated in a severe fever that compelled him to take to his bed just when the furnace that he had designed especially for this work was melting the metal, and this proved insufficient to fill the gigantic mold. The labor of months was about to be spoiled when Cellini rose from his bed and threw into the furnace a block of tin and two hundred pewter vessels. These proved enough; the casting was a complete success; and when the work was exposed to public view (1554) it was praised as highly as any statue made in Florence since Michelangelo’s David; even Bandinelli said a good word for it.

From this climax the story descends to prosaic pages of haggling with the Duke about the fee for the Perseus. Benvenuto was long on expectations, Cosimo was short of funds. The narrative abruptly ends at 1562. It does not mention the fact, otherwise fairly well established, that in 1556 Benvenuto was twice imprisoned, apparently on charges of criminal immorality.⁵² In these late years Cellini composed a treatise on the goldsmith’s art—Trattato… dell’ Orificeria. Having sown wild oats for half a century, he married in 1564, and had two legitimate children to add to one illegitimate child begotten in France and five generated in Florence after his return.

Of his works—usually small enough to be readily movable—only a few can now be located and identified. The Treasury of St. Peter’s has an ornate silver candelabrum attributed to Cellini; the Bargello preserves his Narcissus and his Ganymede, both in marble, and both excellent; the Pitti has a salver and a pitcher in silver; the Louvre has his fine medallion of Bembo, and a lovely bronze relief called The Nymph of Fontainebleau; Vienna claims the saltcellar made for Francis I; the Gardner Collection in Boston has his bust of Altoviti; his large Crucifixion is in the Escorial. These scattered specimens hardly equip us to judge Cellini as an artist; they seem too slight for his fame, and even the Perseus, violent and overwrought, inclines to the baroque. Yet Clement VII (we have it on Benvenuto’s word) rated him as “the greatest artist in his craft who was ever born”;⁵³ and an extant letter of Michelangelo to Cellini reads: “I have known you all these years as the greatest goldsmith of whom the world has ever heard.”⁵⁴ We may conclude that Cellini was a genius and a ruffian, a master craftsman and a murderer, whose spirited Autobiography outshines his silver and gold and cameos, and reconciles us to the morals of our time.

VI. LESSER LIGHTS

This age of decline for Italy was a resurrection for Savoy. As a lad of eight Emmanuel Philibert might have seen the French invade and conquer the duchy (1536). At twenty-five he inherited its crown but not its soil; at twenty-nine he played a leading part in the victory of the Spanish and the English over the French at St. Quentin (1557); and two years later France surrendered to him his ruined country and bankrupt throne. His regeneration of Savoy and Piedmont was a masterpiece of statesmanship. The Alpine slopes of his duchy were the haunts of Vaudois heretics, who were progressively transforming Catholic churches into whitewashed conventicles of Calvinist worship. Pope Pius IV offered him a year’s ecclesiastical revenues to suppress the sect; Emmanuel took some drastic measures; but when these resulted in large-scale emigration he turned to a policy of tolerance, checked the ardor of the Inquisition, and gave asylum to Huguenot refugees. He founded a new university at Turin, and financed the compilation of an encyclopedia—Teatro universale di tutte le scienze. He was always courteous, and repeatedly unfaithful, to his wife, Margaret of Valois, who gave him wise counsel and diplomatic aid, and who presided over the bright social and intellectual life of Turin. When Emmanuel died (1580) his duchy was one of the best-governed lands in Europe. From his line in the nineteenth century would come the kings of united Italy.

Meanwhile Andrea Doria, who in the late wars had passed from the French to the Spanish side with timely treachery, maintained his leadership in Genoa. The bankers there had helped to finance the campaigns of Charles V, who repaid them by leaving undisturbed their domination of the city. Not as badly hurt as Venice by the movement of commerce out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, Genoa became again a great port and strategic citadel. Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia, a pupil of Michelangelo, built sumptuous churches and palaces in Genoa. Vasari described the Via Balbi as the most splendid street in Italy.*

When Francesco Maria Sforza, last of his line as rulers, died in 1535, Charles V appointed an imperial vicar to govern Milan. Subjection brought peace, and the ancient city prospered once more. Alessi built there the handsome Palazzo Marino; and Leone Leoni, engraver in the Milan mint, rivaled Cellini in the miniature plastic arts, but found no Cellini to publish his excellence. The most distinguished Milanese of the age was San Carlo Borromeo, who re-enacted at the close of the Renaissance the role played by St. Ambrose in the decline of antiquity. He came of a rich patrician family; his uncle Pius IV made him a cardinal at twenty-one, and archbishop of Milan at twenty-two (1560). He was probably at that time the richest prelate in Christendom. But he renounced all his benefices except the archbishopric, gave the proceeds to charity, and consumed himself in almost fanatical devotion to the Church. He founded the order of Oblates of St. Ambrose, brought the Jesuits into Milan, and vigorously supported all movements for ecclesiastical reform that remained loyal to Catholicism. Accustomed to wealth and power, he insisted on the full medieval jurisdiction of his episcopal court, took into his hands much of the work of maintaining law and order, filled his archiepiscopal dungeons with criminals and heretics, and for twenty-four years was the real ruler of the city. Literature and art suffered under his passion for conformity and morality; but Pellegrino Tibaldi, architect and painter, flourished under his patronage, and designed the grandiose choir of the great cathedral. All the cardinal’s severity was forgiven when, in the plague of 1576, while most notables fled, he stayed at his post and comforted the sick and bereaved with tireless visits, vigils, and prayers.

At Cernobbio, on Lake Como, Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, perhaps not sure of another heaven, built the Villa d’Este (1568). At Brescia Giambattista Moroni, pupil of Moretto, painted some portraits worthy to stand beside most of Titian’s.* In Cremona Vincenzo Campi carried on the family tradition of painting less than immortal pictures. At Ferrara Ercole II compromised the long quarrel of his state with the papacy by paying Paul III 180,000 ducats, and pledging 7,000 ducats tribute per year. Alfonso II gave the city another era of prosperity (1558–97), which culminated in the Gerusalemme liberata of Torquato Tasso and the Pastor fido of Giovanni Guarini. Girolamo da Carpi learned the art of painting from Garofolo, but (Vasari says) spent too much time on love and the lute, and married too soon, to indulge himself in the selfcenteredness of genius.

Piacenza and Parma rose to excited prominence in this age. Though they had for centuries belonged to Milan, and that duchy was now a dependency of Charles V, Pope Paul III claimed the two cities as papal fiefs, and invested his son Pierluigi Farnese with them in 1545. Not quite two years later the new duke was assassinated at Piacenza by a revolt of nobles reconciled to his lechery but resenting his monopoly of power and plums. Paul rightly ascribed the initiative in the conspiracy to Ferrante Gonzaga, then ruling Milan as vicar for Charles; and noted that imperial troops, providentially at hand, at once took possession of Piacenza for the Emperor (1547). Soon after Paul’s death Julius III appointed Pierluigi’s son Ottavio Duke of Parma; and as Ottavio was also Charles’s son-in-law, he was allowed to rule Parma till his death (1586).

No decline was visible in Bologna. Here Vignola designed the Portico de’ Banchi for a group of traders; Antonio Morandi added to the University an Archiginnasio famous for its noble cortile; and Sebastiano Serlio wrote an architectural treatise that rivaled Palladio’s in influence. In 1563 Pope Pius IV commissioned Tommaso Laureti of Palermo to set up a fountain in the Piazza di San Petronio. The sculptural part of the undertaking was offered to a young Flemish artist, who now came from Florence and perhaps received his name from the city in which he produced his greatest work. Giovanni da Bologna, or Gian Bologna, molded nine figures for the immense Fontana di Nettuno. At the summit of the group he raised a gigantic god of the waters, naked and strong; on the corners of the basin he cast in bronze four happy children in a game with leaping dolphins; at the feet of Neptune he placed four graceful maidens squeezing streams of water from their breasts. Bologna sent Gian back to Florence with florins and praise, and did not grudge the 70,000 florins ($875,000?) that it had spent on the magnificent fountain. The spirit of civic art was still alive in Italy.

As we take our parting look at Renaissance Rome, we are struck by the rapidity of her recovery from the disaster of 1527. Clement VII had shown more skill in remedying the ruin than in preventing it. His surrender to Charles had saved the Papal States, and their revenues helped the papacy to finance the restoration of Church discipline and the partial reconstruction of Rome. The full effect of the Reformation in reduced income was not yet felt in the papal treasury; and under Paul III the spirit and splendor of the Renaissance seemed for a moment revived.

Some arts were dying, others were being born or changing form. Giulio Clovio, a Croatian domiciled with Cardinal Farnese, was almost the last of the great illuminators of manuscripts. But in 1567 Claudio Monteverdi was born at Cremona; soon opera and oratorio would be added to the arts; and the polyphonic masses of Palestrina were already celebrating the reinvigoration of the Church. The great age of Italian painting was ending; Perino del Vaga and Giovanni da Udine, epigoni of Raphael, turned the art toward decoration. Sculpture was becoming baroque; Raffaello da Montelupo and Giovanni da Montorsoli exaggerated the exaggerations of their master Michelangelo, and produced statues with limbs contorted into original but bizarre and ungainly poses.

Architecture was now the most flourishing of the arts. The Farnese Palace and Gardens on the Palatine were improved by Michelangelo (1547) and completed by Giacomo della Porta (1580). Antonio da Sangallo the Younger designed the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican (1540). In the Sala Regia—leading to the Pauline and Sistine Chapels—Pope Paul III had the marble floor and paneling designed by this Sangallo, the walls frescoed by Vasari and the Zuccari brothers, the ceiling beautifully carved in stucco by Daniele da Volterra and Perino del Vaga. The papal apartments in Sant’ Angelo were embellished with frescoes and carvings by Perino, Giulio Romano, and Giovanni da Udine. The second Cardinal Ippolito d’Este built near Tivoli (1549) the earlier of two famous Villas d’Este; Pirro Ligorio prepared the plans, the Zuccari decorated the casino; and the terraced gardens still attest the fine taste and reckless wealth of the Renaissance cardinals.

The most popular architect in or about Rome in this age was Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. Coming from Bologna to study the classic ruins, he formed his style by marrying the Pantheon of Agrippa to the Basilica of Julius Caesar, seeking to combine cupola and arches, columns and pediments; and, like Palladio, he wrote a book to propagate his principles. He achieved his first triumph at Caprarola, near Viterbo, by designing for Cardinal Farnese another vast and luxurious Palazzo Farnese (1547–9); and ten years later he built a third at Piacenza. But his most influential work was done at Rome in the Villa di Papa Giulio for Pope Julius III, the Porta del Popolo, and the church of the Gesù (1568–75). In this famous edifice, built for the rising Jesuits, Vignola designed a nave of impressive breadth and height, and converted the aisles into chapels; later architects would make this church the first clear manifestation of the baroque style—curved or contorted forms surfeited with ornament. In 1564 Vignola succeeded Michelangelo as chief architect at St. Peter’s, and shared in the honor of raising the great dome that Angelo had designed.

VII. MICHELANGELO: THE LAST PHASE: 1534–64

Through all these years Michelangelo had survived as an unruly ghost from another age. He was fifty-nine when Clement died, but no one seemed to think that he had earned the right to rest. Paul III and Francesco Maria of Urbino fought over his living body. The Duke, as executor for Julius II, clamored for completion of his uncle’s tomb, and flourished a contract long since signed by Angelo. But the imperious pontiff would not hear of it. “For thirty years,” said Paul to Buonarroti, “I have wanted you to enter my service; and now that I am Pope will you disappoint me? That contract shall be torn up, and I’ll have you work for me, come what may.”⁵⁵ The Duke protested, but finally settled for a much smaller mausoleum than Julius had dreamed of. The knowledge that the tomb was an abortion shared in darkening the Titan’s later years.

In 1535 the triumphant Pope issued a brief appointing Michelangelo chief architect, sculptor, and painter at the Vatican, and proclaiming his eminence in each field. The artist was made a member of the papal household, and was given a life pension of 1200 crowns ($15,000?) a year. Clement VII, shortly before his death, had asked him to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Paul proposed that this commission should now be carried out. Michael was reluctant; he wanted to carve, not paint; he was happier with hammer and chisel than with the brush. The very size of the wall to be painted—sixty-six by thirty-three feet—might have given him pause. Nevertheless in September, 1535, aged sixty, he began his most famous picture.

Perhaps the repeated frustrations of his life—the maimed mausoleum of Julius, the destruction of his statue of that pope at Bologna, the unfinished façade of San Lorenzo, the unfinished Medici tombs—had accumulated in him a bitterness that poured itself into this consummation of divine wrath. Memories of Savonarola may have come back to him across forty years—those dire prophecies of doom, those denunciations of human wickedness, clerical corruption, Medicean tyranny, intellectual pride, and pagan joys, those blasts of hell-fire searing the soul of Florence; now the dead martyr would speak again, from the most intimate altar in Christendom. The somber artist whom Leonardo had called learned in Dante would soak himself anew in the brine of the Inferno, and put its horrors on the wall where for generations to come future popes might have that inescapable judgment before them as they read the Mass. And meanwhile, in this citadel of a religion that had till lately scorned and maligned the human body, he would be a sculptor even with the brush, and would paint that body in a hundred conditions and attitudes, in the contortions and grimaces of agony, in the drowsy then excited resurrection of the dead, in inflated angels blowing the fateful summons, in a Christ still showing His wounds, yet strong enough, with His titanic shoulders and Herculean arms, to hurl into hell those who had thought themselves superior to the commandments of God.

The sculptor in him ruined the painting. This stern puritan, who day by day became more religious, insisted on carving in color massive and muscular bodies, until the angels that art and poetry had conceived as happy children, gracious youths, or lithesome girls, became in his hands athletes racing through the skies, and damned and saved alike were worthy of salvation if only because they were made in the image and likeness of God, and even Christ Himself, in His majestic anger, became an incarnation of the Adam of the Sistine ceiling, a god made in the image and likeness of man. There is too much flesh here, there are too many arms and legs, biceps and swelling calves, to lift the spirit to contemplate the wages of sin. Even the lecherous Aretino thought these pullulating nudes were a bit out of place. Everyone knows how Paul III’s master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that such a celebration of the human form would more fitly adorn a wineshop than the chapel of the popes; how Michelangelo avenged himself by painting Biagio among the damned; and how Paul, when Biagio begged him to order the erasure of the portrait, replied with excellent humor and theology that not even a pope can release a soul from hell.⁵⁶ Yielding to protests like Biagio’s, Paul IV bade Daniele da Volterra paint breeches on the more glaring parts; whereupon Rome called the poor artist il Braghettone, the breeches tailor. The noblest figure in the dark panorama is completely clothed—Mary, whose raiment is the Master’s last triumph in the painting of drapery, and whose look of horror and mercy is the one redeeming element in this apotheosis of human ferocity.

After six years of labor the picture was unveiled for the Christmas celebration of 1541. A Rome now entering upon a religious reaction against the Renaissance accepted The Last Judgment as good theology and great art. Vasari pronounced it the most wonderful of all paintings. Artists admired the anatomy, and were not offended by the muscular exaggerations, the bizarre attitudes, the carnal excess; on the contrary many painters imitated these mannerisms of the Master, and formed the mannerist school that began the decadence of Italian art. Even laymen marveled at the foreshortenings—which gave parts of the picture the semblance of relief—and the acute sense of perspective that had made the lower figures two meters in height, the middle figures three, the upper figures four. We who view the fresco today cannot judge it fairly; it has been injured by Daniele’s tailoring, a further draping of some figures in 1762, and the dust and candle smoke and natural darkening of four centuries.

After some months of rest Michelangelo began (1542) work on two frescoes in the chapel that Antonio da Sangallo had built in the Vatican for Paul III. One represented the martyrdom of St. Peter, the other the conversion of St. Paul. Here again the aging artist lost himself in violent exaggerations of the human form. He was seventy-five when he completed these pictures, and he told Vasari that he painted them against his will, and with great effort and fatigue.⁵⁷

He did not feel too old for sculpture; indeed, he said, the hammer and chisel kept him in health. Even during the painting of The Last Judgment he had sought refuge and consolation now and then with the marbles in his studio. In 1539 he carved his stern and powerful Brutus (in the Bargello), worthy of the greatest Roman portrait sculpture. Perhaps he meant it to sanction the recent tyrannicide of Alessandro de’ Medici in Florence, and to serve as a reminder to future despots. Eleven years later, in a tenderer mood, he carved the Pietà that stands behind the high altar of the Florentine cathedral. He hoped to make this his own sepulchral monument, and he worked on it feverishly, often continuing his labor on it at night by the light of a candle fixed in his cap. But an over furious blow of the hammer so injured the statue that he abandoned it as irrevocably spoiled. His servant Antonio Mini begged it as a gift, received it, and sold it to a Florentine. It is an astonishing product for a man of seventy-five years. The body of the dead Christ is represented without exaggeration; the figure of Mary, unfinished, is tenderness petrified; and the noble face of the hooded Nicodemus could well portray, as some have thought, Michelangelo himself, who now so often meditated on the Passion of Christ.

His religion was essentially medieval, darkened with mysticism, prophecy, and the thought of death and hell; he did not share the skepticism of Leonardo or the blithe indifference of Raphael; his favorite books were the Bible and Dante. Toward the end of his life his poetry turned more and more on religion:

Now hath my life across a stormy sea,

Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all

Are bidden, ere the final judgment fall,

Of good and evil deeds to pay the fee.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,

Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall

Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal

Is that which all men seek so willingly.

These amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed—

What are they when the double death is nigh?

The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest

My soul, that turns to His great love on high,

Whose arms to clasp us on the cross are spread.⁵⁸

The old poet reproached himself for having composed in past years some sonnets to love. But these were apparently poetic exercises rather than passions of the flesh. The sincerest sonnets in Michelangelo’s Rime are addressed to an elderly widow or a handsome youth. Tommaso Cavalieri was a Roman noble who played at painting. He came to Angelo (c. 1532) for instruction, and bewitched his teacher with the beauty of his face and form, the grace of his carriage and manners. Michael fell in love with him, and wrote to him sonnets of such frank admiration that some have been led to place Michelangelo with Leonardo among the famous homosexuals of history.^58a Such fond expressions of man to man were common in the Renaissance, even among assiduous heterosexuals; their extreme language was part of the poetic and epistolary ritual of the time; we can draw no conclusions from them. We note, however, that—outside of poetry—Michelangelo seems to have been indifferent to women until he met Vittoria Colonna.

His friendship with her began about 1542, when she was fifty and he was sixty-seven. A woman of fifty can easily stir the embers of a sexagenarian, but Vittoria had no mind for it; she felt herself still bound to the Marquis of Pescara, now seventeen years dead. “Our friendship is stable,” she wrote to Michelangelo, “and our affection very sure; it is tied with a Christian knot.”⁵⁹ She sent him 143 sonnets, good but negligible; he replied in sonnets warm with admiration and devotion, but tarnished with literary conceits. When they met they talked about art and religion, and perhaps she confessed to him her sympathy with the men who were trying to reform the Church. Her influence upon him was profound; all the finest spiritual elements of life seemed gathered up in her piety, kindness, and fidelity. Something of his pessimism cleared away when she walked and talked with him; and he prayed that he might never again be the man he had been before they met. He was with her when she died (1547). For a long time thereafter he remained “downstricken as if deranged,” and he reproached himself for not having kissed her face as well as her hand in those last moments.⁶⁰

It was shortly before her death that he assumed his last and greatest responsibility in art. When Antonio da Sangallo passed away (1546), Paul III asked Michelangelo to undertake the completion of St. Peter’s. The weary artist protested again that he was a sculptor, not an architect; perhaps he had not forgotten his failure with the façade of San Lorenzo. The Pope insisted, and Angelo yielded with “infinite regret”; but, Vasari adds, “I believe His Holiness was inspired by God.” For this culminating task of his career the artist refused additional remuneration, though the Pope repeatedly pressed it upon him. He set to work with an energy hardly to be expected of a man in his seventy-second year.

As if St. Peter’s were not burden enough he took upon himself in the same year two other major enterprises. To the Palazzo Farnese he added a third story, a cornice acclaimed by all for its beauty, and the two upper tiers of a court that Vasari judged the finest cortile in Europe. He designed a spacious flight of steps to the top of the Capitoline hill, and placed on the summit the ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Later, aged eighty-eight, he began to erect at the farther end of this plateau the Palazzo del Senatore, with its lordly double staircase; and he drew up plans for the Palazzo dei Conservatori at one side of the Senate Hall, and the Museo Capitolino at the other. Even he could not live long enough to carry out all these plans, but the structures were completed on his designs by Tommaso Cavalieri, Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta.

When Paul III died (1549) some doubt arose whether his successor, Julius III, would continue Angelo as architect-in-chief at St. Peter’s. Michael had rejected Antonio da Sangallo’s plan as making for so dark a church that (he said) it would have been dangerous to public morals.⁶¹ The dead man’s friends persuaded two cardinals to warn the Pope that Buonarroti was spoiling the edifice. Julius supported Angelo; but under a later pontiff, Paul IV (for popes came and went in quick succession in Michelangelo’s life), the Sangallo faction returned to the attack, alleging that the artist, now eighty-one, was in his second childhood, was tearing down more than he built up, and was planning quite impossible things at San Pietro. Time and again Michael thought of resigning and accepting the repeated invitations of Duke Cosimo to resume residence in Florence; but he had conceived the dome, and would not leave his post until that conception was on the way to realization. In 1557, after years of thought on the problem, he constructed in clay a small model for the massive cupola, whose width and weight were the perilous ponderables of the enterprise. Another year was spent in making a large model in wood, and drawing up plans for construction and support. The dome was to be 138 feet in diameter and 151 feet in its own height, with its apex 334 feet from the ground; it was to rest on a corniced base upheld by four gigantic arches at the transept crossing of the church. A “lantern” or open-faced smaller cupola was to rise sixty-nine feet above the main dome, and a cross was to reach thirty-two feet higher still as the pinnacle of the whole majestic edifice, 435 feet in total height. The comparable dome that Brunellesco had raised over the cathedral of Florence, and whose beauty Michelangelo modestly pronounced unsurpassable, measured 138½ feet in width, 133 in its own height, 300 from ground to apex, 351 with its lantern. These two domes were the most audacious undertakings in the history of Renaissance architecture.

Pius IV succeeded Paul IV in 1569. Once again the enemies of the aging Titan sought to replace him. Worn out with a long war of dispute and recrimination, he submitted his resignation (1560). The Pope refused to accept it, and Michelangelo continued as chief architect of St. Peter’s till his death. Then it became clear that his critics had not been wholly in the wrong. Just as in sculpture he often attacked the marble block with no other preparation than an idea in his head, so in architecture he seldom put his plans upon paper, rarely confided them even to his friends, but merely made blueprints for each part of the edifice as the time approached to build it. When he died he left no definite plans or models for any portion except the dome. Consequently his successors were free to adopt their own ideas. They changed his—and Bramante’s—basic conception of a Greek cross to a Latin cross by elongating the eastern arm of the church, and fronting it with a high façade that made the cupola invisible on that side except from a quarter of a mile away. The only part of the building that is Angelo’s is the cupola, which was erected from his plans, with no substantial change, by Giacomo della Porta in 1588. It is unquestionably the noblest architectural sight in Rome. Rising in stately curves from drum to lantern, it crowns with majesty the immense pile beneath, and gives to classic columns, pilasters, architraves, and pediments a comprehensive unity rivaling in splendor any known structure of the ancient world. Here again Christianity sought a reconciliation with antiquity: the temple of the worship of Christ placed the dome of the Pantheon (142 feet wide by 142 feet in total height) upon the Basilica of Constantine as Bramante had vowed to do, and dared to raise classic columns to a lofty stature unparalleled in the records of antiquity.

Michelangelo continued to work till his eighty-ninth year. In 1563, at the request of Pius IV, he transformed a part of the Baths of Diocletian into the church and convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He designed the Porta Pia, one of the city gates. He made for the Florentines in Rome a model for a church; Vasari, perhaps too enthusiastic about his old teacher and friend, pronounced the proposed building “as beautiful as ever man beheld”;⁶² but Florentine funds in Rome ran short, and the edifice was never built.

At last the Titan’s incredible energy failed. About his seventy-third year he had begun to suffer from the stone. He seems to have found some palliative in medicine or mineral waters, but, he said, “I put more faith in prayers than in medicines.” Twelve years later he wrote to a nephew: “As regards my condition, I am ill with all the troubles that are wont to afflict old men. The stone prevents me from passing water. My loins and back are so stiff that I often cannot climb upstairs.”⁶³ Yet till his ninetieth year he went out in all weathers.

He took the approach of death with religious resignation and philosophical good humor. “I am so old,” he remarked to Vasari, “that death often pulls me by the cape and bids me go with him.”⁶⁴ A famous bronze relief by Daniele da Volterra shows a face lined with pain and haggard with age. In February, 1564, he grew weaker day by day, and spent most of the time sleeping in his old armchair. He made no will, but merely “left his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relations.”⁶⁵ He died on February 18, 1564, aged eighty-nine. His body was taken to Florence and was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with ceremonies that lasted several days. Vasari devotedly designed for him a sumptuous tomb.

It was the judgment of some contemporaries, and has been the judgment of time, that despite a multitude of defects he was the greatest artist who ever lived. He exemplified fully the definition given by Ruskin of “the greatest artist”—as he “who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas”—i.e., ideas that “exercise and exalt the highest faculties of the mind.”⁶⁶ He was, to begin with, a master draftsman whose drawings were among the most treasured gifts and thefts of his friends. We can see some of these drawings today in the Casa Buonarroti at Florence or in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre: sketches for the façade of San Lorenzo, or for The Last Judgment, a lovely study for a sibyl, a St. Anne almost as subtly conceived as Leonardo’s, and the strange drawing he made of Vittoria Colonna dead, with mystic countenance and wasted breasts. In one of the conversations reported by Francisco de Hollanda he reduced all arts to design:

The science of design, or of fine drawing.… is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture, and of every form of representation, as well too as of all the sciences. He who has made himself a master in this art possesses a great treasure…. All the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.⁶⁷

As a painter he remained a draftsman, far less interested in color than in line, seeking above all to draw an expressive form, to fix in art some human attitude, or to convey through a design a philosophy of life. The hand was that of Pheidias or Apelles, the voice was Jeremiah’s or Dante’s. On one of his passages between Florence and Rome he must have stopped at Orvieto and studied the nudes that Signorelli had painted there; these, and the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio, gave some hints to a style that was nevertheless unlike anything else that history has preserved. Far beyond and above the others, even beyond Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian, he brought to his art, and brought out in his art, nobility. He did not dally with decoration or triviality; he cared nothing for prettiness, landscapes, architectural backgrounds, arabesques; he let his subject stand out stark and unadorned. His mind was caught by a high vision, to which he gave form, as well as the hand could, in the shape of sibyls, prophets, saints, heroes, and gods. His art used the human body as its medium, but those human forms were to him the tortured embodiments of his hopes and terrors, his confused philosophy, and his smoldering religious faith.

Sculpture was his favorite and characteristic art because it is the preeminent art of form. He never colored his statues, feeling that form was enough; even bronze had too much color for him, and he confined his sculpture to marble.⁶⁸ Whatever he painted or built was sculptural, even to St. Peter’s dome. He failed as an architect (barring that sublime cupola) because he could hardly conceive a building except in terms and proportions of the human body, and could barely suffer it to be more than a receptacle of statuary; he wanted to cover all surfaces, instead of making surfaces an element of form. Sculpture was a fever with him; the marble, he thought, obdurately hid a secret, which he was resolved to extricate; but the secret was in himself, and was too intimate for full revelation. Donatello helped him a little, della Quercia more, the Greeks less, in the struggle to give the inner vision outward form. He agreed with the Greeks in devoting most of his art to the body, leaving the faces generalized and almost stereotyped, as in the female figures on the Medici tombs; but he never achieved—his temper would not let him care for—the unimpassioned repose of Greek statuary before the Hellenistic age. He had no use for a form that did not express feeling. He lacked the classic restraint and sense of proportion; he made shoulders too broad for the head, trunks too mighty for the limbs, and limbs knotted with muscles, as if all men and gods were wrestlers taut with strife. It must be admitted that in these dramatic exaggerations of effort and emotion the art of the mannerists and the baroque was born.

Michelangelo did not found a school as Raphael did, but he trained some distinguished artists, and wielded pervasive influence. One pupil, Guglielmo della Porta, designed for Paul III, in St. Peter’s, a mausoleum that could almost bear comparison with the tombs of the Medici. But generally the successors of Angelo in sculpture and painting imitated his excesses without redeeming them with his depth of thought and feeling and his technical mastery. Usually a supreme artist is the culmination of a tradition, method, style, and historical mood; his very superiority fulfills and exhausts a line of development, so that after him must come a period of helpless imitation and decline. Then slowly a new mood and tradition grow; a new conception, ideal, or technique struggles through a hundred bizarre experiments to find another discipline, some original and freshly revealing form.

The last word must be one of humility. We middling mortals, even while presuming to sit in judgment upon the gods, must not fail to recognize their divinity. We need not be ashamed to worship heroes, if our sense of discrimination is not left outside their shrines. We honor Michelangelo because through a long and tortured life he continued to create, and produced in each main field a masterpiece. We see these works torn, so to speak, out of his flesh and blood, out of his mind and heart, leaving him for a time weakened with birth. We see them taking form through a hundred thousand strokes of hammer and chisel, pencil and brush; one after another, like an immortal population, they take their place among the lasting shapes of beauty or significance. We cannot know what God is, nor understand a universe so mingled of apparent evil and good, of suffering and loveliness, destruction and sublimity; but in the presence of a mother tending her child, or of a genius giving order to chaos, meaning to matter, nobility to form or thought, we feel as close as we shall ever be to the life and mind and law that constitute the unintelligible intelligence of the world.

Envoi

IT has been a profound and grateful experience to study so many of the phases and personalities of these rich and vibrant centuries. How endless was the wealth of this Renaissance, which even in its waning produced men like Tintoretto and Veronese, Aretino and Vasari, Paul III and Palestrina, Sansovino and Palladio, Duke Cosimo and Cellini, and such art as the rooms of the Ducal Palace and St. Peter’s dome! What frightening vitality there must have been in those Renaissance Italians, living amid violence, seduction, superstition, and war, yet eagerly alive to every form of beauty and artistry, and pouring forth—as if all Italy had been a volcano—the hot lava of their passions and their art, their architecture and assassinations, their sculpture and liaisons, their painting and brigandage, their Madonnas and grotesques, their hymns and macaronic verse, their obscenities and piety, their profanity and prayers! Has there ever been elsewhere such depth and intensity of Yea-saying life? To this day we feel the lifting breath of that afflatus, and our museums overflow with the spared surplus of that inspired and frenzied age.

It is difficult to judge it calmly, and we grudgingly rehearse the charges that have been brought against it. First of all, the Renaissance (limiting that term to Italy) was based materially upon the economic exploitation of the simple many by the clever few. The wealth of papal Rome came from the pious pennies of a million European homes; the splendor of Florence was the transmuted sweat of lowly proletaires who worked long hours, had no political rights, and were better off than medieval serfs only in sharing in the proud glory of civic art and the exciting stimulus of city life. Politically the Renaissance was the replacement of republican communes with mercantile oligarchies and military dictatorships. Morally it was a pagan revolt that sapped the theological supports of the moral code, and left human instincts grossly free to use as they pleased the new wealth of commerce and industry. Unchecked by censorship from a Church herself secularized and martial, the state declared itself above morality in government, diplomacy, and war.

Renaissance art (the indictment continues) was beautiful, but seldom sublime. It excelled Gothic art in detail, but fell short of it in grandeur, unity, and total effect; it rarely reached Greek perfection or Roman majesty. It was the voice of an aristocracy of wealth that divorced the artist from the artisan, uprooted him from the people, and made him dependent upon upstart princes and rich men. It lost its soul to a dead antiquity, and enslaved architecture and sculpture to ancient and alien forms. What an absurdity it was to put false Greco-Roman fronts upon Gothic churches, as Alberti did in Florence and Rimini! Perhaps the whole classical revival in art was a grievous mistake. A style once dead cannot properly be revitalized unless the civilization that it expressed can be restored; the vigor and health of the style lie in its harmony with the life and culture of its time. There was, in the great age of Greek and Roman art, a stoic restraint idealized by Greek thought and often realized in Roman character; but that restraint was quite foreign to the Renaissance spirit of freedom, passion, turbulence, and excess. What could be more contrary to the Italian temper in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than the flat roof and ceiling, the regular rectangular façade, the dreary rows of identical windows, that stigmatized the Renaissance palace? When Italian architecture tired of this monotony and artificial classicism, it let itself go, like a Venetian merchant robed for Titian, in excessive ornament and splendor, and fell from the classic into the baroque—corruptio optimi pessima.

Neither could classic sculpture express the Renaissance. For restraint is essential to sculpture; the enduring medium does not fitly embody a contortion or an agony that by its nature must be brief. Sculpture is motion immobilized, passion spent or controlled, beauty or form preserved from time by metal congealed or lasting stone. Perhaps for this reason the greatest sculptures of the Renaissance are mostly tombs or pietàs, in which restless man has at last achieved tranquillity. Donatello, try as he might to be classic, remained striving, aspiring, Gothic; Michelangelo was a law to himself, a Titan imprisoned in his temperament, struggling through Slaves and Captives to find esthetic peace, but ever too lawless and excited for repose. The recovered classic heritage was a burden as well as a boon; it enriched the modern soul with noble exemplars, but it almost smothered that youthful spirit—just come of age—under a falling multitude of columns, capitals, architraves, and pediments. Perhaps this resurrected antiquity, this idolatry of proportion and symmetry (even in gardens), halted the growth of a native and congenial art, precisely as the revival of Latin by the humanists impeded the development of literature in the vernacular.

Renaissance painting succeeded in expressing the color and passion of the time, and brought the art to a technical refinement never surpassed. But it too had its faults. Its stress was on sensuous beauty, on lordly raiment and rosy flesh; even its religious pictures were a voluptuous sentimentality, more intent upon corporeal forms than upon spiritual significance; and many a medieval crucifix reaches deeper into the soul than the demure Virgins of Renaissance art. Flemish and Dutch artists dared to picture unattractive faces and homely dress, and to seek behind these simple features the secrets of character and the elements of life. How superficial the nudes of Venice—even the Madonnas of Raphael—seem beside the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Lamb! Raphael’s Julius II is unexcelled, but is there anything in the hundred self-portraits by Italian artists that can compare with Rembrandt’s honest mirrorings of himself? The popularity of portraiture in the sixteenth century suggests the rise of the nouveaux riches, and their hunger to see themselves in the glass of fame. The Renaissance was a brilliant age, but through all its manifestations runs a strain of show and insincerity, a flaunting of costly costumes, a hollow fabric of precarious power unsupported by inner strength, and ready to fall into ruins at the touch of a merciless rabble, or at the distant cry of an obscure and angry monk.

Well, what shall we say to this harsh indictment of an epoch that we have loved with all the enthusiasm of youth? We shall not try to refute that indictment: though it is weighted with unfair comparisons, much of it is true. Refutations never convince, and to pit one half-truth against its opposite is vain unless the two can be merged into a larger and juster view. Of course the Renaissance culture was an aristocratic superstructure raised upon the backs of the laboring poor; but, alas, what culture has not been? Doubtless much of the literature and art could hardly have arisen without some concentration of wealth; even for righteous writers unseen toilers mine the earth, grow food, weave garments, and make ink. We shall not defend the despots; some of them deserved a Borgian garroting; many of them wasted in vain luxury the revenues drawn from their people; but neither shall we apologize for Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo, whom the Florentines obviously preferred to a chaotic plutocracy. As for the moral laxity, it was the price of intellectual liberation; and heavy as the price was, that liberation is the invaluable birthright of the modern world, the very breath of our spirits today.

The devoted scholarship that resurrected classic letters and philosophy was chiefly the work of Italy. There the first modern literature arose, out of that resurrection and that liberation; and though no Italian writer of the age could match Erasmus or Shakespeare, Erasmus himself yearned for the clear free air of Renaissance Italy, and the England of Elizabeth owed to Italy—to “Englishmen Italianate”—the seeds of its flowering. Ariosto and Sannazaro were the models and progenitors of Spenser and Sidney, and Machiavelli and Castiglione were powerful influences in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It is not certain that Bacon and Descartes could have done their work had not Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, Telesio and Bruno paved the way with their sweat and blood.

Yes, Renaissance architecture is depressingly horizontal, always excepting the lordly cupolas that rise over Florence and Rome. The Gothic style, ecstatically vertical, reflected a religion that pictured our terrestrial life as an exile for the soul, and placed its hopes and gods in the sky; classic architecture expressed a religion that lodged its deities in trees and streams and in the earth, and rarely higher than a mountain in Thessaly; it did not look upward to find divinity. That classic style, so cool and calm, could not fitly represent the turbulent Renaissance, but neither could it be allowed to die; rightly a generous emulation preserved its monuments, and transmitted its ideals and principals to be a part—a sharer but not a dictator —of our building art today. Italy could not equal Greek or Gothic architecture, nor Greek sculpture, nor, perhaps, the noblest flights of Gothic sculpture at Chartres and Reims; but it could produce an artist whose Medici tombs were worthy of Pheidias, and his Pietà of Praxiteles.

For Renaissance painting there shall be no word of apology; it is still the high point of that art in history. Spain approached that zenith in the halcyon days of Velásquez, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbarán, and El Greco; Flanders and Holland came not quite so close in Rubens and Rembrandt. Chinese and Japanese, painters scale heights of their own, and at times their pictures impress us as especially profound, if only because they see man in a large perspective; yet their cold, contemplative philosophy or decorative elegance is outweighed by the richer range of complexity and power, and the warm vitality of color, in the pictorial art of the Florentines, of Raphael and Correggio and the Venetians. Indeed, Renaissance painting was a sensual art, though it produced some of the greatest religious paintings, and—as on the Sistine ceiling—some of the most spiritual and sublime. But that sensuality was a wholesome reaction. The body had been vilified long enough; woman had borne through ungracious centuries the abuse of a harsh asceticism; it was good that life should reaffirm, and art enhance, the loveliness of healthy human forms. The Renaissance had tired of original sin, breast-beating, and mythical post-mortem terrors; it turned its back upon death and its face to life; and long before Schiller and Beethoven it sang an exhilarating, incomparable ode to joy.

The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the thousand-year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe. From Italy by a hundred routes the good news of the great liberation passed over mountains and seas to France, Germany, Flanders, Holland, and England. Scholars like Aleandro and Scaliger, artists like Leonardo, del Sarto, Primaticcio, Cellini, and Bordone took the Renaissance to France; Italian painters, sculptors, architects took it to Pesth, Cracow, Warsaw; Michelozzo carried it to Cyprus; Gentile Bellini ventured with it to Istanbul. From Italy Colet and Linacre brought it back with them to England, Agricola and Reuchlin to Germany. The flow of ideas, morals, and arts continued to run northward from Italy for a century. From 1500 to 1600 all western Europe acknowledged her as the mother and nurse of the new civilization of science and art and the “humanities”; even the idea of the gentleman, and the aristocratic conception of life and government, came up from the south to mold the manners and states of the north. So the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance declined in Italy, was an age of exuberant germination in France, England, Germany, Flanders, and Spain.

For a time the tensions of Reformation and Counter Reformation, the debates of theology and the wars of religion, overlaid and overwhelmed the influence of the Renaissance; men fought through a bloody century for the freedom to believe and worship as they pleased, or as pleased their kings; and the voice of reason seemed stilled by the clash of militant faiths. But it was not altogether silent; even in that unhappy desolation men like Erasmus, Bacon, and Descartes echoed it bravely, gave it fresh and stronger utterance; Spinoza found for it a majestic formulation; and in the eighteenth century the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was reborn in the French Enlightenment. From Voltaire and Gibbon to Goethe and Heine, to Hugo and Flaubert, to Taine and Anatole France, the strain was carried on, through revolution and counterrevolution, through advance and reaction, somehow surviving war, and patiently ennobling peace. Everywhere today in Europe and the Americas there are urbane and lusty spirits—comrades in the Country of the Mind—who feed and live on this legacy of mental freedom, esthetic sensitivity, friendly and sympathetic understanding; forgiving life its tragedies, embracing its joys of sense, mind, and soul; and hearing ever in their hearts, amid hymns of hate and above the cannon’s roar, the song of the Renaissance.

THANK YOU, FRIEND READER

Bibliographical Guide

to editions referred to in the Notes

Books starred are recommended for further study

ABRAHAMS, ISRAEL, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 1896.

ADAMS, BROOKS, The New Empire, New York, 1903.

ADDISON, JOSEPH, et al., The Spectator, New York, 1881, 8v.

ADDISON, JULIA D., Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages, Boston, 1908.

ANDERSON, W. J., Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1898.

ARETINO, PIETRO, Works: Dialogues, New York, 1926.

ARIOSTO, LODOVICO, Orlando furioso, Firenze, n.d.

ASCHAM, ROGER, The Scholemaster, London, 1863.

ASHLEY, W. J., Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, New York, 1894 and 1936, 2v.

*BACON, FRANCIS, Philosophical Works, ed. J. M. Robertson, London, 1905.

BAEDEKER, KARL, Northern Italy, London, 1913.

BALCARRES, LORD, Evolution of Italian Sculpture, London, 1909.

BANDELLO, MATTEO, Novels, tr. Payne, London, 1890, 6v.

*BARNES, H. E., History of Western Civilization, New York, 1935, 2v.

BASLER, E., Leonardo, Collection des maîtres, Braun, Paris, n.d.

BEARD, MIRIAM, History of the Business Man, New York, 1938.

BEAZLEY, C. R., The Dawn of Modern Geography, Oxford, 1906, 3V.

BERENSON, BERNARD, Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, New York, 1912.

BERENSON, BERNARD, North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York, 1927.

BERENSON, BERNARD, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, London, 1901–17, 3v.

BERENSON, BERNARD, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, New York, 1897.

BEITF, CARLO, Cesare Borgia, Oxford University Press, 1942.

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, Amorous Fiammetta, New York, 1931.

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, Decameron, New York, n.d.

BOISSONNADE, P., Life and Work in Medieval Europe, New York, 1927.

BRINTON, SELWYN, The Gonzaga Lords of Mantua, London, 1927.

*BURCKHARDT, JACOB, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1914.

CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY, New York, 1924f, 8v.

CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY, New York, 1907f, 12v.

CARDAN, JEROME, The Book of My Life (De vita propria liber), New York, 1930.

CARLYLE, R. W., History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, Edinburgh, 1928, 6v.

*CARTWRIGHT, JULIA, Beatrice d’Este, London, 1928.

*CARTWRIGHT, JULIA, Isabella d’Este, London, 1915, 2v.

*CARTWRIGHT, JULIA, Baldassare Castiglione, London, 1908.

*CASTIGLIONE, BALDASSARE, The Courtier, Everyman’s Library.

CASTIGLIONI, A., History of Medicine, New York, 1941.

*CELLINI, BENVENUTO, Autobiography, tr. J. A. Symonds, Garden City, New York, 1948.

*CHUBB, THOMAS C., Aretino, Scourge of Princes, New York, 1940.

COMMINES, PHILIPPE DE, Memoirs, London, 1900, 2v.

*CORNARO, L., Art of Living Long (De vita sobria), Milwaukee, 1903.

COULTON, G. G., The Black Death, New York, 1930.

COULTON, G. G., Five Centuries of Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1923f, 4v.

COULTON, G. G., From St. Francis to Dante, a tr. of the Chronicle of Salimbene, London, 1908.

COULTON, G. G., Inquisition and Liberty, London, 1938.

COULTON, G. G., Life in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1930,4v.

COULTON, G. G., Medieval Panorama, New York, 1944.

*CRAVEN, THOMAS, Treasury of Art Masterpieces, revised ed., New York, 1952.

*CREIGHTON, MANDELL, History of the Papacy during the Reformation, London, 1882, 4v.

CROCE, BENEDETTO, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, New York, 1920.

CROWE, J. A., and CAVALCASELLE, G. B., A New History of Painting in Italy, London, 1864, 3v.

CRUMP, C. G., and JACOB, E. F., The Legacy of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1926.

DANTE, La commedia divina, ed. Paget Toynbee, London, 1900.

DILLON, EDWARD, Glass, New York, 1907.

DOPSCH, ALFONS, Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, New York, 1937.

DUHEM, P., Études sur Léonard de Vinci: Ceux qu’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu, Paris, 1906f, 3v.

EINSTEIN, ALFRED, The Italian Madrigal, Princeton, 1949, 3v.

ELLIS, HAVELOCK, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Philadelphia, 1911, 6v.

*EMERTON, EPHRAIM, The Defensor Pads of Marsiglio of Padua, Harvard University Press, 1920.

EMPORIUM: Rivista mensile d’arte e di cultura, LXXXIX, no. 534 (June, 1939), Bergamo.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 11th ed. when so specified.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 14th ed. when no edition is specified.

*FATTORUSSO, J., Wonders of Italy, Florence, 1930.

FATTORUSSO, J., Florence Album, Florence, 1935. (Part of preceding)

*FAURE, ÉLIE, The Spirit of Forms, tr. Walter Pach, New York, 1937.

FERRARA, ORESTES, The Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, New York, 1940.

FIGGIS, J. N., From Gerson to Grotius, Cambridge University Press, 1916.

FOLIGNO, CESARE, The Story of Padua, London, 1910.

FREUD, SIGMUND, Leonardo da Vinci, New York, 1947.

FRIEDL ÄNDER, L., Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, London, n.d., 4v.

GARRISON, F., History of Medicine, Philadelphia, 1929.

GENOA, a Descriptive Booklet, Genoa, 1949.

*GIBBON, EDWARD, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Everyman’s Library, 6v.

GIERKE, OTTO, Political Theories of the Middle Age, Cambridge University Press, 1922.

GREGOROVIUS, FERDINAND, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, London, 1900, 8v.

*GREGOROVIUS, FERDINAND, Lucrezia Borgia, London, 1901.

GRONAU, G., Titian, London, 1904.

GROVE, SIR GEORGE, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed., New York, 1928, 5v.

*GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO, History of the Wars in Italy, London, 1753, IOV.

GUIZOT, FRANÇOIS PIERRE, History of France, London, 1872, 8v.

HALLAM, HENRY, Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries, New York, 1880, 4v. in 2.

HARE, A. J. C., Walks in Rome, London, 1913.

HEARNSHAW, F. J. C., ed., Medieval Contributions to Modern Civilization, New York, 1922.

HEGEL, G. W. F., Philosophy of History, London, 1888.

HOLLWAY-CALTHROP, H. C., Petrarch, His Life and Times, New York, 1907.

HOLZKNECHT, KARL, The Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Plays, New York, 1950.

HUIZINGA, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages, London, 1948.

HUNEKER, JAMES, Egoists, New York, 1910.

HUTTON, EDWARD, Giovanni Boccaccio, London, 1910.

JAMES, E. E. COULSON, Bologna, London, 1909.

JUSSERAND, J. J., English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, London, 1891.

*LACROIX, PAUL, Arts of the Middle Ages, London, n.d.

LACROIX, PAUL, History of Prostitution, New York, 1931.

LACROIX, PAUL, Science and Literature in the Middle Ages, London, n.d.

LANCIANI, RODOLFO, Ancient Rome, Boston, 1889.

LANCIANI, RODOLFO, The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome, Boston, 1906.

*LANG, P. H., Music in Western Civilization, New York, 1941.

LA TOUR, P. IMBART DE, Les Origines de la Réforme, Paris, 1905f, 4v.

LEA, H. C., History of Agricular Confession, Philadelphia, 1896, 3v.

*LEA, H. C., History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, New York, 1888, 3v.

LEONARDO DA VINCI, Phaidon ed., London, 1943.

*LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks, arranged, rendered into English, and introduced by Edward MacCurdy, New York, 1938, 2v.

LOMBARDIA: Vols. II and III of Attraverso I’Italia, issued by Touring Club Italiano, Milan, 1931, 2v.

*MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ, Discourses, Modern Library.

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ, History of Florence, London, 1851.

*MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ, The Prince, Modern Library.

MANTEGNA, ANDREA, L’oeuvre, Paris, 1911.

*MATHER, F. J., Venetian Painters, New York, 1936.

MATHER, F. J., Western European Painting of the Renaissance, New York, 1948.

MAULDE LA CLAVIÈRE, R. DE, The Women of the Renaissance, New York, 1905.

*MICHELET, JULES, Histoire de France, Paris, n.d., 5v.

*MICHELET, JULES, History of France, New York, 1880, 2V., an English tr. of first two volumes of preceding.

*MILMAN, H. H., History of Latin Christianity, New York, 1860, 8v.

MINIATURES OF THE RENAISSANCE, Catalogue de l’exposition du 5ème centenaire de la bibliothèque vaticane, Rome, 1950.

*MOLMENTI, POMPEO, Venice, London, 1906, 6v.

MONTALEMBERT, COMTE, DE, The Monks of the West, Boston, n.d., 2v.

*MOREY, C. R., Medieval Art, New York, 1942.

*MÜNTZ, EUGÈNE, Leonardo da Vinci, London, 1898, 2v.

*MÜNTZ, EUGÈNE, Raphael, London, 1882.

NOYES, ELLA, Story of Ferrara, London, 1904.

*NOYES, ELLA, Story of Milan, London, 1908.

NUSSBAUM, F. L., History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe, New York, 1937.

OGG, FREDERIC, Source Book of Medieval History, New York, 1907.

OWEN, JOHN, Sceptics of the Italian Renaissance, London, 1908.

OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC, Introductory Volume, Oxford University Press, 1929.

*PASTOR, LUDWIG VON, History of the Popes, St. Louis, Missouri, 1898, 14v.

*PATER, WALTER, The Renaissance, Modern Library.

PETRARCH, Sonnets and Other Poems, London, 1904.

*PETRARCH, Sonnets, tr. Joseph Auslander, New York, 1931.

PIRENNE, HENRI, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, New York, n.d.

POPHAM, A. E., Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, London, 1947.

PORTIGLIOTTI, GIUSEPPE, The Borgia, New York, 1928.

*PRESCOTT, W. H., History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, Philadelphia, 1890, 2v.

PUTNAM, GEORGE H., Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages, New York, 1898.

*RANKE, LEOPOLD VON, History of the Popes, London, 1878, 3v.

RASHDALL, HASTINGS, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1936, 3v.

RÈNAN, ERNEST, Averroès et l’averroïsme, Paris, n.d.

RENARD, GEORGES, Guilds in the Middle Ages, London, 1918.

RICHTER, JEAN PAUL, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, London, 1883, 2v.

ROBERTSON, J. M., Short History of Freethought, London, 1914, 2v.

*ROBINSON, J. H., and ROLF, H. W., Petrarch, New York, 1898.

*ROEDER, RALPH, The Man of the Renaissance, New York, 1935.

ROGERS, J. E. T., Economic Interpretation of History, London, 1891.

*ROSCOE, WILLIAM, Life and Pontificate of Leo X, London, 1853, 2v.

*ROSCOE, WILLIAM, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, London, 1877.

RUSKIN, JOHN, Modern Painters, Boston, n.d., 5v.

RUSKIN, JOHN, Stones of Venice, Everyman’s Library, 3v.

SACERDOTE, GUSTAVO, Cesare Borgia: La sua vita, la sua famiglia, i suoi tempi, Milan, 1950.

*SARTON, GEORGE, Introduction to the History of Science, Baltimore, 1930f, 3v. in 5.

*SCHEVILL, F., Siena, New York, 1909.

SISMONDI, J. C. L., History of the Italian Republics, London, n.d.

SIVIERO, R., Catalogue of the 2d National Exhibition of the Works of Art Recovered in Germany, Florence, 1950.

SOULIER, G., Le Tintoret, Paris, 1928.

SPECULUM: a Journal of Medieval Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

*SPENGLER, OTTO, Decline of the West, New York, 1928.

STOECKLIN, PAUL DE, Le Corrège, Paris, 1928.

*SYMONDS, J. A., Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Modern Library.

*SYMONDS, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy, New York, 1883:

Vol. I: The Age of the Despots;

Vol. II: The Revival of Learning;

Vol. III: The Fine Arts;

Vol. IV: Italian Literature, Part I;

Vol. V: Italian Literature, Part II;

Vol. VI: The Catholic Reaction, Part I, London, 1914;

Vol. VII: The Catholic Reaction, Part II.

SYMONDS, J. A., Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, London, 1898, 3v.

TAINE, H. A., Italy: Florence and Venice, New York, 1869.

TAINE, H. A., Italy: Rome and Naples, New York, 1889.

TAYLOR, RACHEL A., Leonardo the Florentine, New York, 1927.

THOMPSON, JAMES W., Economic and Social History of Europe in the Later Middle Ages, New York, 1931.

THORNDIKE, LYNN, History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York, 1929f 6v.

THORNDIKE, LYNN, History of Medieval Europe, Boston, 1949.

THORNDIKE, LYNN, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century, New York, 1929.

TREITSCHKE, H. VON, Lectures on Politics, New York, n.d.

VARCHI, BENEDETTO, Storia florentina, Cologne, 1721.

*VASARI, GIORGIO, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Everyman’s Library, 4v.

Same, ed. E. H. & E. W. Blashfield, and A. A. Hopkins, New York, 1907; references to Vol. IV are to this edition.

VASILIEV, A. A., History of the Byzantine Empire, Madison, 1921, 2v.

VENTURI, LIONELLO, and SKIRA-VENTURI, ROSABIANCA, Italian Painting: The Creators of the Renaissance, Geneva, 1950.

VILLARI, PASQUALE, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola. New York, 1896.

*VILLARI, PASQUALE, Life and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli, New York, n.d., 2v.

VILLARI, PASQUALE, The Two First Centuries of Florentine History, London, 1908.

WALSH, JAMES J., The Popes and Science, New York, 1913.

WHITCOMB, M., Literary Source-Book of the Italian Renaissance, Philadelphia, 1900.

WINCKELMANN, J., History of Ancient Art, Boston, 1880, 4v. in 2.

WOLF, A., History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries, New York, 1935.

WRIGHT, THOMAS, The Homes of Other Days, London, 1871.

YOUNG, G. F., The Medici, Modern Library.

Notes

CHAPTER I

1. Carlyle, R. W., History of Medieval Political Theory, VI, 85–6.

2. In Hollway-Calthrop, Petrarch, His Life and Times, 14.

2a. Robinson, J. H., and Rolf, H. W., Petrarch, 67,82.

3. Marquis de Sade, Memoires pour la vie de Petrarque, III, 243, in Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella, I, 328n.

4. Petrarch, Sonnets and Other Poems, sonnet 159.

5. Petrarch, Sonnets, tr. Jos. Auslander, 126.

6. Epistolae variae, no. 25, in Whitcomb, Literary Source-book of the Italian Renaissance, 13.

7. Renan, Averroès, 328.

8. Robinson and Rolf, 107.

9. Hutton, E., Giovanni Boccaccio, 3–5.

10. Ibid., 25, quoting the Filocolo.

11. Encycl. Brit., III, 766b.

12. Boccaccio, Filostrato, iii, 32.

13. Gregorovius, F., History of the City of Rome, VI, 245.

14. Robinson and Rolf, 426.

15. Ibid., 137.

16. Ibid., 61, 97n.

17. Speculum, Apr., 1936, p. 267.

18. In Hollway-Calthrop, 21.

19. Owen, John, Sceptics of the Italian Renaissance, 110, 117.

20. Robinson and Rolf, 137.

21. Epistolae rerum senilium, i, 5, in Owen, 121.

22. Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics, 333.

23. Gregorovius, VI, 246.

24. Ibid., 252f.

25. Ibid., 271, 253.

26. Robinson and Rolf, 347.

27. Gregorovius, VI, 370–3; Sismondi, 340–1.

28. In Foligno, C., Story of Padua, 155.

29. Owen, 130.

30. Fattorusso, J., Wonders of Italy, 215.

31. Beard, Miriam, History of the Business Man, 141.

32. In Taylor, Rachel A., Leonardo the Florentine, 60.

33. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Giotto, I, 66.

34. Dante, La commedia divina, Purgatorio, xi, 94.

35. Vasari, Taddeo Gaddi, I, 139.

36. Villari, Pasquale, The Two First Centuries of Florentine History, 50.

37. Boccaccio, Amorous Fiammetta, 39.

38. Castiglioni, History of Medicine, 355.

39. Coulton, G. G., Black Death, 10–11.

40. Cambridge Modern History, I, 501.

41. In Schevill, F., Siena, 210.

42. Machiavelli, History of Florence, ii, 9.

43. Boccaccio, Decameron, 2–7.

44. Ibid., 11.

45. Ibid., 13.

46. Dante, Inferno, xxviii, 22–42.

47. Decameron, Introd. to Sixth Day.

48. Cambridge Medieval History, VII, 756.

49. Hollway-Calthrop, 290.

50. Robinson and Rolf, 413.

51. Ibid., 119.

52. Genoa, a Descriptive Booklet, 6.

53. Crump and Jacob, Legacy of the Middle Ages, 442; Cambridge Medieval History, VI, 490.

54. In Sismondi, 527.

54a. Burckhardt, J., Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 79.

55. In Mather, F. J., Venetian Painters, 5.

56. Hutton, Boccaccio, 201.

57. Hollway-Calthrop, 257.

58. Ibid., 280.

59. Robinson and Rolf, 428.

60. Symonds, Age of the Despots, 73.

61. Hollway-Calthrop, 123.

62. Robinson and Rolf, 4.

CHAPTER II

1. Sismondi, 306; Coulton, G. G., Life in the Middle Ages, I, 205.

2. Milman, H. H., History of Latin Christianity, VII, 205.

3. Gregorovius, VI, 193.

4. Creighton, M., History of the Papacy During the Reformation, I, 42; Gregorovius, 192.

5. Milman, VII, 136.

6. Ibid., 137.

7. Cambridge Medieval History, VII, 273f; Rogers, J. E. T., Economic Interpretation of History, 75; Pastor, History of the Popes, I, 98.

8.Ibid., 66, 71.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 92.

11. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, I, 205.

12. Cambridge Medieval History, VII, 288; Milman, VII, 138n.

13. Pastor, I, 107.

14. Sarton, G., Introd. to the History of Science, IIIb, 1034.

15. Pastor, I, 91.

16. Machiavelli, History of Florence, i, 6.

17. Sismondi, 328.

18. Gregorovius, VI, 436.

19. Ibid., 450.

20. Sismondi, 437.

21. Pastor, I, 100.

22. Ibid., 103.

23. Sismondi, 439.

24. In Pastor, I, 105.

25. Lanciani, R., Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome, 1.

26. Lea, H. C, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, III, 90–120; Milman, VII, 41–51.

27. Beazley, C. R., Dawn of Modern Geography, III, 181.

28. Coulton, G. G., Medieval Panorama, 650.

29. Sismondi, 458.

30. Gregorovius, VI, 522.

31. Pastor, I, 232.

32. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty, 45.

CHAPTER III

1. Thompson, James W., Economic and Social History of Europe in the Later Middle Ages, 458.

2. Beard, Miriam, History of the Business Man, 134.

3. Cellini, B., Autobiography, i, 69.

4. Cambridge Medieval History, VI, 487.

5. Pirenne, Henri, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, 215.

6. Burckhardt, 76.

7. Nussbaum, F. L., History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe, 70.

8. Beard, M., 115.

9. Sarton, IIIa, 125.

10. Thompson, Economic and Social History, 406.

11. Symonds, Age of the Despots, 197; Sismondi, 573.

12. Machiavelli, History, iv, 3.

13. Beard, M., 152; Burckhardt, 80.

14. Machiavelli, History, iv, 6–7.

15. Beard, M., 152.

16. Villari, P., Two First Centuries, 358.

17. Sismondi, 598f; Beard, 152.

18. Burckhardt, 78.

19. Boissonnade, P., Life and Work in Medieval Europe, 299.

20. Roscoe, Wm., Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 79.

21. Varchi, Benedetto, Storia florentina, end of book ix.

22. Ariosto, Satires, vii, 25.

23. Cambridge Modern History, I, 542.

24. Symonds, Revival of Learning, 104.

25. Ibid., 243.

26. Sismondi, 747.

27. Villari, Machiavelli, I, 89.

28. Pastor, I, 27.

29. Villari, Machiavelli, 83; Symonds, Revival of Learning, 234.

30. Villari, I.c.

31. Pastor, II, 201.

32. Symonds, Revival, 237.

33. Burckhardt, 503.

34. Symonds, Revival, 240.

35. In Dopsch, Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, 2.

36. Vasari, Lives, II, 270, Andrea da Fiesole.

37. Fattorusso, 209.

38. Vasari, Lives, II, 209, Baldassare Peruzzi.

39. Beard, 153.

40. Symonds, Fine Arts, 134; Cambridge Modem History, I, 548.

41. Vasari, II, 52, The Bellini Family.

42. Baedeker, Northern Italy, 567.

43. Vasari, II, 306, Andrea del Sarto.

44. Ibid.

45. Sarton, IIIb, 1132.

46. Vasari, II, 239, Raphael.

47. In Taylor, R. A., Leonardo, 60.

48. Morey, C. R., Medieval Art, 340.

49. Vasari, II, 3, Fra Filippo Lippi.

50. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, New History of Painting in Italy, II, 324.

51. Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, 21–6.

52. Machiavelli, History, vii, 1.

53. Guicciardini, Fr., History of the Wars in Italy, I, 181.

54. Machiavelli, History, vii, 1.

55. In Young, G. F., The Medici, 77.

CHAPTER IV

1. Machiavelli, History, vii, 2.

2. Ibid.

3. Cambridge Modern History, I, 661; Roscoe, Lorenzo, 156–7.

4.Roscoe, 169.

5. Ibid., 278; Young, 220.

6. Sismondi, 659; Villari, Life and Times of Savonarola, 45; Beard, 156.

7. Machiavelli, viii, 7.

8. Guicciardini, I, 5.

9. Roscoe, Lorenzo, 235.

10. Storia florentina, ch. ix, in Villari, Machiavelli, I, 35.

11. Translation by Symonds, Italian Literature, I, 390.

12. Varchi, end of book ix.

13. Sellery, G. C., The Renaissance, 196.

14. Pastor, V, 154.

15. Villari, Machiavelli, I, 132.

16. Abrahams, I., Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, 421.

17. In Pater, W., The Renaissance, 32.

18. Translated from the Latin text as given in Burckhardt, 354–5.

19. Symonds, Sketches, II, 319–20.

20. Pulci, Morgante maggiore, i, 54f, in Owen, 151.

21. XVIII, 115f, in Symonds, Italian Literature, I, Appendix V.

22. Canto xxv.

23. XXV, 229–30, in Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella, I, 496.

24. In Roscoe, Lorenzo, 311.

25. Vasari, Life of Rustici.

26. Vasari, II, 98, Andrea Verrocchio.

27. Müntz, E., Raphael, 146.

28. Berenson, B., Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 2.

29. Vasari, II, 23, Benozzo Gozzoli.

30. Berenson, Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 63; Taine, H. A., Italy: Florence and Venice, 127.

31. In The Martyrdom of St. Peter in the Brancacci Chapel.

32. Vasari, II, 85, 87, Botticelli.

33. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 431–3.

34. Von Reumont, Lorenzo il Magnifico, II, 590, Creighton, III, 296–8, and Roscoe, Lorenzo, 327, accept Politian’s account; Villari, Savonarola, 168–72, prefers Pico’s. Politian’s third condition seems too innocuous to be historic.

35. Machiavelli, History, viii, 7; Guicciardini, I, 10.

36. Roscoe, Lorenzo, 334.

CHAPTER V

1. Noyes, Ferrara, 98.

2. In Roeder, R., The Man of the Renaissance, 6.

3. Ibid., 5.

4. Ibid.

5. Savonarola, 28th Sermon on Ezekiel.

6. In Villari, Savonarola, 126.

7. In Roeder, 25.

8. Villari, Savonarola, 129.

9. Symonds, Italian Literature, I, 386.

10. Villari, 183.

11. Ibid., 189.

12. Guicciardini, I, 173.

13. Villari, 343.

14. Roeder, 57.

15. Villari, 330.

16. Ibid., 329.

17. Guicciardini, II, 391.

18. Cambridge Modern History, I, 672 and ch. xix.

19. Villari, 393.

20. Ibid., 376.

21. Ibid., 390.

22. Ibid., 400.

23. Ibid., 401.

24. Ibid., 406.

25. Ibid., 410.

26. Ibid., 474.

27. Cambridge Modern History, I, 179.

28. Lenten sermons of 1497, no. 22, in Villari, 516–8.

29. Sermon no. 28, in Villari, 519–20.

30. Villari, 522.

31. Cambridge Modern History, I, 179.

32. Villari, 601.

33. Ibid., 645.

34. Cambridge Modern History, I, 182.

35. Vasari, II, 176, Piero di Cosimo.

36. Id., III, 319, Lombard Artists.

37. Crowe, III, 562.

CHAPTER VI

1. Beard, 134.

2. Boissonnade, 326.

3. Pastor, V, 126.

4. Sismondi, 746; Burckhardt, 296.

5. Ibid., 297.

6. Hollway-Calthrop, 14.

7. Thompson, J. W., Economic and Social History, 236.

8. Noyes, Milan, 132.

9. Thompson, 460; calculations made by Schmoller from governmental archives.

10. Burckhardt, 14; Symonds, Age of the Despots, 151.

11. Machiavelli, History, vii, 6; Sismondi, 620–1.

12. Cartwright, J., Beatrice d’Este, 260.

13. Müntz, E., Leonardo da Vinci, I, 103.

14. Taylor, R., Leonardo, 104.

15. In Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este, 165.

16. Cf., e.g., Cartwright, 78.

17. Sismondi, 741.

17a. In Noyes, Milan, 165.

18. Ibid., 183.

19. Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, I, 151.

20. Cartwright, Beatrice (d’Este, 370–3.

21. Ibid., 141.

22. In Symonds, Revival of Learning, 273.

23. Ibid., 269.

24. Cellini, Autobiography, i, 26.

CHAPTER VII

1. Leonardo da Vinci, Phaidon, 21; Taylor, Leonardo, 49.

2. Ibid., 488.

3. Codice Atlantico, in Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, II, 502.

4. Fogli A ior in Notebooks, I, 106.

5. Vasari, II, 160, Leonardo da Vinci; Paolo Giovio in Phaidon Leonardo, 5.

6. Vasari, II, 162; Codice Atlantico, 167 v.c. in Notebooks, II, 394.

7. Müntz, Leonardo, I, 192.

8. Matteo Bandelli in Müntz, Leonardo, I, 184.

9. Ibid., 187.

10. In Taylor, Leonardo, 231.

11. Müntz, I, 185; Cartwright, Beatrice, 138.

12. E.g., Müntz, II, 123.

13. MS. B 83 ν in Notebooks, II, 204; illustration facing p. 212.

14. Notebooks, II, 212.

15. Popham, A. E., Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, plate 309.

16. Ibid., plate 308.

17. Müntz, II, 96.

18. B. M. 35 r in Notebooks, II, 96.

19. Popham, plates 305, 298, 303.

20. Phaidon Leonardo, 19.

21. Ibid., 16, quoting a 1540 Life of Leonardo.

22. Müntz, II, 158.

23. Ibid., 124.

24. Vasari, II, 166, Leonardo.

24a. Phaidon Leonardo, 23.

25. Taylor, R. A., Leonardo, xii.

26. Andrea Corsali, writing to Giuliano de’ Medici in 1515, in Müntz, I, 17.

27. Vasari, II, 157.

28. Trattato della pittura, 27 v, in Notebooks, II, 261.

29. MS 2037, Bibliothèque Nationale, 10 r in Notebooks II, 177.

30. A 56 in Notebooks, II, 24.

31. Berenson, Florentine Painters, 68.

32. Quaderni III, 12 ν in Notebooks, II, 529.

33. Richter, J. P., Literary Works of L. da V., II, 385–92; Müntz, I, 82–4.

34. In Müntz, II, 19.

35. Notebooks, I, 363; II, 13, 287–92.

36. Trattato 31 r and 30 v; Notebooks, 267–9.

37. Richter, I, #10.

38. Trattato 2 r; Bibl. Nat. ms. 2038; Notebooks, II, 235.

39. In Taylor, Leonardo, 355.

40. Trattato, 20 r; Notebooks, II, 245.

41. B 16 r and 15 ν in Notebooks, II, 424.

42. Vasari, II, 157.

43. Usher, in Nussbaum, 80.

44. Life Magazine, July 17, 1939.

45. Notebooks, I, 25.

46. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., XXI, 230c.

47. A 27 v.a.; Notebooks, II, 437.

48. Codice Atlantico, 381 v.a.; Notebooks, 515.

49. Codice Atlantico, 45 r.a.; Notebooks, I, 442.

50. Sul volo, in Notebooks, I, 436.

51. Ibid., 437.

52. Codice Atlantico, 161 r.a.; Notebooks, I, 511.

53. Popham, 317–8.

54. Notebooks, I, 427.

55. B 83 ν; Notebooks, I, 517.

56. B 89 r; Notebooks, I, 519.

57. Sul volo, in Notebooks, I, 441.

58. Codice Atantico, 318 v.a.; Notebooks, I,5i3.

59. Taylor, Leonardo, 225.

60. Trattato, #10.

61. H 90 E 42 in Notebooks, II, 75.

62. Duhem, P., Ètudes sur Léonard de Vinci, I, 20, 22, 30; III, 54f.

63. In Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, 102.

64. Codice Atlantico, 367 v.b. in Notebooks, II, 500.

65. Popham, plate 161.

66. G 96 v; Notebooks, I, 625.

67. Richter, I, 11, no. 3.

68. Codice Atlantico, 190 r.a.

69. Qaderni v., 25 r, and F 41 ν; Notebooks, I, 310, 298.

70. Codice Atlantico, 303 v.b.

71. Duhem, I, 25f

72. Ibid., 25, 30; Notebooks, I, 302.

73. F 79 r; Notebooks, I, 330–1.

74. About 1338. Cf. D. Müntz, II, 91.

75. Codice Atlantico, 155 r.b.; Leic 8 ν, 9 r.v.

76. Richter, II, 265.

77. Codice Atlantico, 84 r.a.

78. Ibid., 160 v.a.

79. A 56 r; Leic 33 v; Notebooks, II, 21, 368.

80. Leic 36 r; Notebooks, II, 373.

81. E 8 v; Notebooks, I, 628.

82. B.M. 151 r; Notebooks, I, 602.

83. Codice Atlantico, 302 v.b.; Notebooks, I, 529; Müntz, II, 71.

84. Müntz, II, 79.

85. B 6 r; Notebooks, I, 284.

86. Codice Atlantico, 345 v.b.; Notebooks, I, 253.

87. Codice Atlantico, 244 r.a.; Notebooks, I, 248.

88. Richter, I, $$70–82.

89. Müntz, II, 78.

90. B.M. 57 v; Notebooks, II, 98.

91. Duhem, I, 204.

92. Codice Atlantico, 314, in Müntz, II, 75.

93. Vasari, II, 157.

94. Müntz, II, 87.

95. Ibid., 80.

96. Notebooks, I, 13.

97. Castiglioni, History of Medicine, 413–17.

98. Richter II, p. 132; Müntz, II, 84.

99. Fogli B, 10 v; Notebooks, I, 124.

100. Taylor, Leonardo, 406.

101. Humboldt, A. von, Kosmos, II, 324, in Müntz, II, 60.

102. In Garrison, History of Medicine, 216.

103. F 41 r; Notebooks, II, 47.

104. Codice Atlantico, 345 v.b.; Notebooks, I,243.

105. In Müntz, II, 32n.

106. Richter, II, p. 302, 363–4.

107. Ibid., II, p. 369.

108. Codice Atlantico, B 70 r.a.; Notebooks, II,504.

109. F 5 r and 4 v ν; Notebooks, I, 295.

110. Taylor, Leonardo, 22.

111. Ibid., 462.

112. Müntz, II, 31.

113. Codice Atlantico, 51 r.b.

114. A 24 r; Notebooks, I, 538; Richter, II, p. 285.

115. Taylor, 7.

116. Quoted in Müntz, II, 207.

117. Basler, Leonardo, 6.

118. Marcel Raymond in Taylor, 449–50.

119. Notebooks, I, 36.

120. Müntz, II, 22.

121. Taylor, 466.

CHAPTER VIII

1. Sismondi, 593.

2. 2, Vasari, I, 183, Spinello.

3. Id., II, 147, Signorelli.

4. E.g., Symonds, Sketches, III, 151.

5. Allegretto Allegretti in Symonds, Age of the Despots, 616.

5a. Craven, Treasury of Art Masterpieces, 1952 ed., 6.

6. Vasari, III, 286, Sodoma.

7. Ibid., 285.

8. Emporium Magazine, June, 1939, 354.

9. Crowe, III, 104, 106.

10. Vasari, II, 18; Gentile da Fabriano.

11. Matarazzo, Cronaca, in Symonds, Sketches, III, 134–5.

12. In Villari, Machiavelli, I, 355.

13. Symonds, Sketches, III, 129.

14. Crowe, III, 293.

15. Ibid., 183.

16. Vasari, II, 133, Perugino.

17. Thorndike, L., History of Medieval Europe, 675–6.

18. Vasari, II, 132, Perugino; Crowe, III, 223.

19. Symonds, Fine Arts, 297n.

CHAPTER IX

1. Brinton, The Gonzaga Lords of Mantua, 91.

2. Mantegna, L’oeuvre, xiv.

3. Cartwright, Isabella, I, 362.

4. Ibid., 83.

5. Ibid., 152.

6. Ibid., 4.

7. Ibid., 288.

8. Maulde, Women of the Renaissance, 432.

9. Cartwright, Isabella, II, 381.

CHAPTER X

1. Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 267.

2. Noyes, Ferrara, 82.

3. Ibid., 136.

4. Burckhardt, 47.

5. Ariosto, Orlando furioso, xxxiii, 2.

6. Noyes, Ferrara, 83.

7. Ibid., 82–4.

8. Symonds, Revival, 298–301.

9. Burckhardt, 323.

10. Carducci in Villari, Machiavelli, I, 410.

11. Ariosto, I Suppositi, Prologue.

12. Cf. Symonds, Italian Literature, I, 496n, and Ariosto, Satire ii, 94–9.

13. Orlando furioso, x, 95–6.

13a. Cf. Croce, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, 65.

14. Orlando furioso, x, 84.

15. Satire vii, tr. Symonds.

16. In Symonds. Italian Literature, II, 323.

17.Rabelais, Pantagruel, ii, 1, 7.

18. Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 362.

CHAPTER XI

1. Comines, Memoirs, vii, 17.

2. Molmenti, P., Part I, Vol. II, 62.

3. Young, Medici, 28.

4. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, 474

5. Thompson, J. W., Economic and Social History, 490.

6. Guicciardini, IV, 359.

7. Speech of Mocenigo, in Sismondi, 534n.

8. Molmenti, l.c., 42.

9. Ibid., 33.

10. Sismondi, 788.

11. Molmenti, 30.

12. Sismondi, 789.

13. Ibid.

14. Molmenti, 37–9.

15. Ibid., 94.

16. Burckhardt, 63.

17. Cambridge Modern History, I, 263; Molmenti, 12; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 464, 466; Foligno, Padua, 141.

18. Machiavelli, History, vi, 4.

19. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 98.

20. Id., Part II, Vol. II, 240.

21. Ibid.

22. Petrarch, Letter of Sept. 21, 1373, in Foligno, 126.

23. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 269.

24. Ibid., 22.

25. Cambridge Modern History, I, 269.

26. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 21.

27. Cambridge Modern History, I, 268.

28. Vasari, I, 357, Antonello da Messina.

29. Ibid., 358.

30. Gronau, G., Titian, 6.

31. Vasari, II, 47, The Bellini.

32. Mather, F. J., Venetian Painters, 91.

33. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 160.

34. Carlo Ridolfo in Mather, 195.

35. Mather, 206.

36. Gronau, 28.

37. Ibid., 38.

38. Ibid., 35.

39. Ibid., 62.

40. Mather, 300.

41. Lombardia, II, 85.

42. Renard, G., Guilds of the Middle Ages, 36; Dillon, E., Glass, 222.

43. Quoted by Alan Moorehead in The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1951.

44. Symonds, Revival, 369.

45. Putnam, G. H., Books, I, 438.

46. Symonds, Revival, 381.

47. Ibid., 411; Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 305; Noyes, Ferrara, 163.

48. Pastor, VIII, 191.

49. Cambridge Modern History, I, 564; Symonds, Revival, 398.

50. Maulde, 366–7.

51. Berenson, B., Venetian Painters, 31.

52. Vasari, III, 48, Veronese Artists.

53. Ibid., 49

54. Ibid., 30, Giov. Fr. Caroto.

CHAPTER XII

1. Stoecklin, Le Corrége, 21.

2. Vasari, II, 175, Correggio.

3. James, E. E. C., Bologna, 301.

4. Vasari, II, 118, Francia.

5. Ibid., 122

6. Berenson, North Italian Painters, 70.

7. James, E. E., 355.

8. Vasari, II, 123.

9. Sismondi, 737.

10. Symonds, Sketches, II, 17.

11. Burckhardt, 454.

12. Sismondi, 737.

13. Villari, Machiavelli, I, 117–8; Pastor, III, 117.

14. Symonds, Sketches, II, 20.

15. Burckhardt, 454.

16. Pastor, III, 117.

17. Miniatures de la Renaissance, 79.

18. Müntz, Raphael, 5.

19. Castiglione, The Courtier, 231.

20. Roeder, Man of the Renaissance, 175.

21. Cartwright, Isabella, I, no.

22. Maulde, 294.

23. Roeder, 222.

24. Ibid., 397.

25. Castiglione, 188.

26. Ibid., 310.

27. Ibid., 304.

28. Ibid., 306.

29. Ibid., 286.

30. Cartwright, Baldassare Castiglione, II, 430.

CHAPTER XIII

1. Burckhardt, 226.

2. Pastor, I, 13–7; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 96–7; Symonds, Revival, 258.

3. Cf. Sellery, Renaissance, 202Î.

4. Pastor, I, 19–21; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 98.

5. Pastor, V, 115; Burckhardt, 36–7; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 58; Sismondi, 739; Symonds, Age of the Despots, 570–2; but these rely on Paolo Giovio, an historian favorable to the popes.

6. Burckhardt, 267.

7. In Portogliotti, The Borgias, 60.

8. In Symonds, Revival, 469.

CHAPTER XIV

1. Pastor, I, 117; Creighton, I, 566–9.

2. In Pastor, I, 124.

3. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, 486.

4. Pastor, VII, 339; Creighton, I, 161.

5. Lea, H. C, History of Auricular Confession, III, 65.

6. Creighton, I, 147.

7. Ibid., 168.

8. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 52, 59; Hearnshaw, Medieval Contributions to Civilization, 67.

9. Emerton, E., Defensor Pacts of Marsiglio of Padua, 70–2.

10. Pastor, I, 184.

11. Niem in Milman, VII, 235n.

12. Creighton, I, 273.

13. Milman, VII, 460.

14. Figgis, J. N., From Gerson to Grotius, 41

15. In Ogg, F. A., Source Book of Medieval History, 391.

16. Creighton, I, 297.

17. Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, 8n.

18. Creighton, IV, 8.

19. In Pastor, I, 241.

20. Creighton, II, 272; Pastor I, 284.

21. Creighton, IV, 44.

22. Ogg, 393–7.

23. Pastor, II, 215.

24. Cambridge Medieval History, IV, 620f; Pastor, II, 258.

25. Creighton, IV, 71.

CHAPTER XV

1. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, VI, 558.

2. Lanciani, Golden Days of the Renaissance, 78–80.

3. Burckhardt, 105.

4. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 435.

5. Cf. Pastor, VII, 104.

6. Pastor, I, 169.

7. Pastor, II, 180; Hare, Walks in Rome, 167.

8. In Creighton, III, 11 in.

9. Pastor, II, 14; Symonds, Revival, 222–5.

10. Ibid., 226.

11. Pastor, II, 193.

12. Pastor, II, 200.

13. Burckhardt, 188.

14. Pastor, II, 198.

15. Sismondi, 613.

16. Vasari, II, 31, Bernardino Rossellino.

17. Lea, Auricular Confession, III, 202.

18. Pastor, II, 102.

19. Creighton, II, 308f.

20. Pastor, II, 272f.

21. Ibid., 313.

21a. La Tour, P. Imbart de, Les origines de la Réforme, II, 7, 14.

22. Creighton, II, 245.

23. Ibid., 246.

24. Ibid., 247.

25. Platina, In vitas summorum pontificum, in Whitcomb, Source Book, 69.

26. Creighton, II, 483.

27. Ibid.

28. Burckhardt, 305.

29. Creighton, II, 483.

30. Sellery, 239.

31. Platina in Whitcomb,65.

32. Creighton, II, 488.

33. Platina, I.e.

34. Ibid., 66.

35. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, II, 442.

36. Pastor, III, 324.

37. Ibid., 256.

38. Creighton, IV, 209.

39. Thompson, J. W., 297.

40. Pastor, IV, 41–5; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 106–7; Burckhardt, 280, 505.

41. Ferrara, O., The Borgia Pope, 95.

42. Pastor IV, 238–44; Creighton, III, 63–6.

43. Ibid., 75.

44. Symonds, Despots, 388.

45. Ibid., 398n.

46. Cf. Creighton, III, 115, 285; Pastor, IV, 416.

47. Soriano in Symonds, Despots, 394n; Pastor, IV, 428.

48. Symonds, Despots, 394.

49. Pastor, V, 236–8.

50. Vespucci in Cambridge Modern History, I, 222.

51. Creighton, III, 120.

52. Ibid., 154–5; Pastor, V, 351.

53. Ibid., 352–4; Creighton, IV, 318.

54. Creighton, III, 126.

55. Ibid.

56. Burckhardt, 108; Pastor, V, 354.

57. Pastor, V, 317; Creighton, III, 126.

57a. La Tour, II, 13.

58. Pastor, V, 361–2.

59. Creighton, IV, 297–8.

60. Creighton, III, 126.

61. Ibid., 135.

62. In Taine, Italy: Rome and Naples, 171.

63. Creighton, III, 153; Cambridge Modern History, I, 225.

CHAPTER XVI

1. Ferrara, Borgia Pope, 55–62; Pastor, II, 541–2.

2. Creighton, III, 162.

3. Pastor, II, 455.

4. Beuf, Cesare Borgia, 19; Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 10.

5. Ibid., 18, 20.

6. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 24.

7. Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 352.

8. Id., IV, 324.

9. Cambridge Modern History, I, 225; Ferrara, 66; Creighton, III, 159.

10. Ferrara, 51; Pastor, V, 366; Gregorovius, 17.

11. Creighton, III, 160n.

12. Cambridge Modern History, I, 226.

13. Pastor, V, 385.

14. Sacerdote, G., Cesare Borgia, 94.

15. In Creighton, III, 47.

16. Cambridge Modern History, I, 234.

17. Vasari, II, 116, Pinturicchio.

18. Ferrara, 310.

18a. La Tour, II, 39.

19. Pastor, V, 396; Burckhardt, 109.

20. Portigliotti, 28f.

21. Guicciardini, I, 19–20.

22. Creighton, III, 168.

23. Ibid., 194–5, quoting the letters as given in Burckhard’s Diarium.

24. Creighton, III, 196; Pastor, V, 429; Cambridge Modern History, I, 229.

24a. Guicciardini, I, 209.

25. Creighton, III, 206; Cambridge Modern History, I, 231.

26. Ibid., 230.

27. Pastor, V, 381.

28. Ferrara, 163.

29. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 394.

30. Guicciardini, I, 29.

31. Gregorovius, 75.

32. Creighton, III, 175; Gregorovius, 39, 62; Portigliotti, 47.

33. Ferrara, 164.

34. Creighton, III, 176; Gregorovius, 65.

35. Portigliotti, 45, 48, 61.

36. Burckhard, Diarium, iii, 227, in Creighton, IV, 49n.

37. Boccaccio, Ferrarese ambassador, in Symonds, Despots, 417; Portigliotti, 56.

38. Gregorovius, 75.

39. Lea, Auricular Confession, III, 21 if.

40. Guicciardini, III, 26; Pastor, VI, 153–4.

41. Guicciardini, III, 26; Creighton, IV, 13–4.

42. Portigliotti, 66.

43. In Villari, Machiavelli, I, 321.

44. Portigliotti, 66.

45. Ferrara, 318.

46. Villari, I.e.

47. Cf. Ferrara, ch. xxi.

48. Ibid., 309.

49. Ferrara, 246; Sacerdote, 198f.

50. Ibid., 221.

51. Ibid., 202.

52. Ferrara, 246; Pastor, V, 512, and Roscoe, Leo X, I, 154, acquit Caesar Borgia; Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 106; Beuf, 76–8; and Symonds, Despots, 425 accuse him; Creighton, III, 258, concludes that “it is impossible to pronounce any certain opinion.”

53. Pastor, V, 501.

54. Gregorovius, 220; Burckhardt, no.

55. Beuf, 41.

56. Gregorovius, 57.

57. Beuf, 97.

58. Cartwright, Isabella, I, 178.

59. Beuf, 7; Sacerdote, 207.

60. Ferrara, 291.

61. Burckhardt, 112; Creighton, IV, 3–4.

62. Id., III, 6n; Ferrara, 293.

63. Richard Garnett in Cambridge Modern History, I, 238.

64. In Beuf, 155.

65. Ferrara, 308.

66. Beuf, 194.

67. Ibid., 223.

68. Creighton, IV, 27.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 29; Sacerdote, 806.

71. Guicciardini, III, 137; Machiavelli, Relation of the Murder of Vitellezzo, in Appendix to History of Florence, pp. 491–6.

72. Beuf, 292.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid and 296.

75. Creighton, IV, 36.

76. Ibid., 40.

77. Beuf, 290.

78. Beuf, 252–8.

79. Beuf, 131.

80. Beuf, 66, 177; Guicciardini, III, 129.

81. Portigliotti, 83.

82. Villari, Machiavelli, I, 323.

83. Burckhardt, 116.

84. Pastor, VI, 128.

85. Beuf, 305–7.

86. Ferrara, 326.

87. Burckhardt, 115; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 323.

88. Cartwright, Isabella, I, 327.

89. Creighton, IV, 30, 40; Cambridge Modern History, I, 242; Beuf, 307.

90. Symonds, Despots, 426.

91. Burckhard, Diarium, ed. Celani, II, 303, in Portigliotti, 54.

92. Ferrara, 337; Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 178.

93. Ferrara, 337.

94. Gregorovius, 177; Ferrara, 336. Creighton, IV, 50n, accepts the tale.

95. Gregorovius, 189.

96. Ferrara, 252.

97. Ibid., 251.

98. Gregorovius, 108, 330.

99. Creighton, III, 264.

100. There are different accounts of Alfonso’s death; the text follows the despatches of the Venetian ambassador Capello as given in Creighton, IV, 25762. Pastor (VI, 77) suggests that Alfonso was slain by his own bodyguard.

101. Cf. Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 175.

102. Cartwright, Isabella, I, 205.

103. Creighton, IV, 21; Pastor, V, 399; Gregorovius, 175.

104. Ibid., 167.

105. Ibid., 213.

106. Ibid., 222; Friedländer, L., Roman Life and Manners, II, 176.

107. Gregorovius, 246–8.

108. Ibid., 290.

109. Cambridge Modern History, I, 241; Pastor, VI, 132; Sacerdote, 683; Villari, Machiavelli, I, 327; Lanciani, 76; Ferrara, 400; Roscoe, Leo X, I, 469; Beuf, 318. Portigliotti, 129–37, defends the poison theory.

110. Lanciani, 76.

111. Portigliotti, 127.

112. Gregorovius, 289.

113. Guicciardini, III, 228.

114. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. xviii.

115. Pastor, VI, 137.

116. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 195.

117. Creighton, IV, 44–50.

118. Cambridge Modern History, I, 241–2.

119. Creighton, IV, 57.

120. Pastor, VI, 208.

121. Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 310.

122. Ibid., 31.

123. Roscoe, Leo X, 1,404.

CHAPTER XVII

1. Pastor, V, 369.

2. Paris de Grassis in Roscoe, Leo X, I, 300.

3. Pastor, l.c.

4. Villari, Machiavelli, i, 367.

5. Pastor, VI, 215.

6. Ibid., 223.

7. Beuf, 364.

8. Machiavelli, Discourses, i, 27.

9. Creighton, IV, 117.

10. Ibid., 123.

11. Ibid., 124.

12. Ibid., 127.

13. Guicciardini, V, 90.

14. Creighton, IV, 163n.

15. Ibid., 130n.

16. Guicciardini, VI, in.

17. Müntz, Raphael, 293.

18. Symonds, Michelangelo, 92–4.

19. Pastor, VI, 469f.

20. New York World, May 12, 1928.

21. Nietzsche, Letter to Brandes, in Huneker, Egoists, 251.

22. Vasari, ed., Blashfield and Hopkins, IV, 37n, Michelangelo.

23. Ibid., 38.

24. In Symonds, Michelangelo, 7.

25. Cellini, Autobiography, i, 13.

26. Symonds, Mich., 134.

27. Ibid., 44.

28. Ibid., 45.

29. Maulde, 313.

30. Symonds, Mich., 58.

31. Vasari, IV, 59.

32. Symonds, 70.

33. Ibid., 100.

34. Cellini, i, 12.

35. Condivi in Symonds, in.

36. Symonds, 125.

37. Vasari, IV, 89.

38. Condivi in Symonds, 139.

39. Faure, E., Spirit of Forms, 139.

40. Vasari, IV, 91.

CHAPTER XVIII

1. Montalembert, Monks of the West, I, 81.

2. Roscoe, Lorenzo, 285.

3. Guicciardini, VI, 114.

4. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 344.

5. Guicciardini, VII, 68.

6. Ibid., VI, 117.

7. Creighton, IV, 182.

8. Cambridge Modern History, II, 14; Gregorovius, History of City of Rome, VIIIa, 294; Creighton, IV, 18in. All these rest on the Relazione of Marino Giorgio, the Venetian ambassador, and on Prato’s Storia Milanese; probable but inconclusive evidence, since Giorgio did not take up residence in Rome till 1515.

9. Pastor, VIII, 391.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 84.

12. Roscoe, Leo X, II, 259.

13. Ibid., 388; Pastor, VIII, 79.

14. Müntz, Raphael, 409.

15. Taine, Italy: Rome and Naples, 185.

16. Pastor, VIII, 74.

17. Roscoe, II, 391.

18. Burckhardt, 185.

19. Pastor, VIII, 160, 162.

20. Ibid., 163–4.

21. Lanciani, Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome, 321.

22. Burckhardt, 387.

23. Gregorovius, VIIIa, 407.

24. Lanciani, 58.

30. Roscoe, II, 82; Pastor, VIII, 127.

31. Gregorovius, VIIIa, 302.

32. Lanciani, 108.

33. Pastor, VIII, 121.

34. Cartwright, Isabella, II, 116.

35. Gregorovius, VIIIa, 309, 311.

36. Rashdall, H., Universities of Europe in the M.A., II, 39.

37. Roscoe, I, 342.

38. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, 62.

39. Pastor, VIII, 268.

40. Roscoe, I, 357.

41. Ibid., 287.

42. Ibid.

43. Maulde, 432.

44. Roscoe, II, 173.

45. Müntz, Raphael, 405; Symonds, Italian Literature, II, 147.

46. Roscoe, II, 209–302; Pastor, VIII, 238.

47. Ibid., 270.

48. Roscoe, II, 176.

49. Ibid., 110; Pastor, VIII, 184.

50. Roscoe, II, 110.

51. In Symonds, Revival, 499.

52. Ibid., 500.

53. Ibid., 503.

54. Ibid., 476.

55. Lanciani, Ancient Rome, 154f

56. In Pastor, VIII, 362.

57. Symonds, Michelangelo, 195.

58. Vasari, IV, 75.

59. Pastor, VIII, 435.

60. Symonds, 219.

61. Ibid., 51.

62. Ibid., 52.

63. Vasari, IV, 213.

64. Ibid., 218.

65. Ibid., 212.

66. Symonds, Fine Arts, 268.

67. Symonds, Michel., 203.

68. Ibid., 529.

69. 535.

70. 149.

71. Müntz, Raphael, 421.

72. Ibid., 422.

73. 420.

74. Ibid.

75. Vasari, II, 247–9, Raphael.

76. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, II, 316.

77. Müntz, Raphael, 462.

78. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 347.

79. Lanciani, Golden Days, 279–80.

80. Friedländer, II, 136; Pastor, VIII, 117.

81. Friedländer, I.e.

82. Ibid., 157.

83. Lanciani, Golden Days, 302.

84. Müntz, Raphael, 491.

85. Time Magazine, April 30, 1951, p. 29.

86. Vasari, II, 238.

87. Lanciani, 230.

88. Vasari, II, 241.

89. Ibid., 247.

90. Matt. 17:1–3, 141”.

91. Vasari, II, 247.

92. In Mantegna, L’ oeuvre, Introd., x.

93. Guicciardini, VII, 287; VIII, 11.

94. Ibid., VI, 412.

95. Ibid., VII, 129; Roscoe, Leo X, II, 200.

96. Cf. Ranke, History of the Popes, I, 309.

97. Pastor, VIII, 2.

98. Thompson, J. W., 423.

99. Pastor, VIII, 81, 151.

100. Ibid., 102.

101. 63–5.

102. Thompson, 423.

103. Pastor, VIII, 460.

104. Young, Medici, 296.

105. Pastor, VIII, 139.

CHAPTER XIX

1. Poggio, Facetiae, in Burckhardt, 521.

2. Machiavelli, Discourses, i, 56.

3. Burckhardt, 519.

4. Ibid., 520.

5. Thorndike, Lynn, History of Magic and Experimental Science, IV, 562.

6. Jusserand, J. J., English Wayfaring Life in the M.A., 377.

7. Ibid.

8. Aretino, Ragionamenti del Zoppino, in Burckhardt, 529; Sismondi, 744.

9. Ibid.

10. Pastor, V, 348.

11. Ibid., 349; Exodus, xxii, 18.

12. Pastor, V, 349.

13. Lea, H. C., History of the Inquisition in the M.A., III, 540.

14. Sismondi, 745; Burckhardt, 528.

15. Lea, op. cit., 547.

16. Ibid.

16a. Ibid., 548.

16b. Burckhardt, 508.

16c. Thorndike, IV, 761.

16d. Ibid., 435.

16e. Guicciardini, Ricordi, 57, in Burckhardt, 518.

16f. Robertson, J. M., Short History of Freethought, I, 369.

16g. Roscoe, Leo X, II, 253.

16h. Lacroix, Paul, Science and Literature in the Middh Ages, 290.

16i. Burckhardt, 211.

16j. Boccaccio, Decameron, viii, 9.

17. In Castiglioni, History of Medicine, 399.

18. Walsh, J. J., The Popes and Science, 75.

19. Ibid., 115.

19a. Cornaro, L., Art of Living Long, 43f.

20. Castiglioni, 368.

20a. Cornaro, 92, 103.

20b. Ibid., Introd., 31.

20c. Ibid.

21. Lanciani, Golden Days, 87.

22. Molmenti, Part II, Vol. I, 159f

23. Lanciani, 86.

24. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century, 221.

24. Sarton, IIIb, 1658.

25. Garrison, 187.

27. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 54.

28. Pastor, V, 61.

29. Luther, Table Talk, in Pastor, V, 65.

30. Garrison, 191.

31. Ibid.

32. Lacroix, Paul, History of Prostitution, II, 1119.

33. Castiglioni, 454.

34. Lanciani, Golden Days, 84.

35. Sudhoff in Garrison, 191.

36. Castiglioni, 453.

37. Sarton, IIIa, 274.

38. Castiglioni, 465.

39. Ibid., 459; Lacroix, Prostitution, II, 951.

40. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 262.

41. Robertson, Freethought, I, 369.

42. Ibid.

43. Owen, Skeptics, 215.

44. Cambridge Modern History, II, 703.

45. Pastor, V, 157.

46. Owen, 208.

47. Ibid.

48. 209.

49. De incantatione, ch. iii, in Symonds, Italian Literature, II, 476.

50. Ibid., ch. xii, in Symonds, op. cit., 477.

51. Owen, 201.

52. De immortalitate animae, ch. xiv.

52a. Ibid.

53. In Owen, 204.

54. Ibid.

55. De fato, iii, 7.

56. In Cambridge Modern History, II, 703.

57. Pastor, V, 157.

58. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 1.

59. Burckhardt, 453.

60. Ranke, History of the Popes, I, 56.

61. Pastor, I, 27.

62. Pastor, X, 422.

63. Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth ed., XXIII, 85a.

64. Symonds, Italian Lit., II, 479.

65. Ibid.

66. Lea, Inquisition in the M.A., III, 576.

67. Erasmus, Epistle xxvi, 34, in Robertson, J. M., Freethought, I, 370.

68. Guicciardini, I, 4.

69. Mather, F. J., Western European Painting of the Renaissance, 150.

70. In Villari, Machiavelli, I, 417.

71. Guicciardini, I, Introd. xvi.

72. Guicciardini, Ricordi, xxviii, in Burckhardt, 464, Pastor, VIII, 178, and Villari, Machiavelli, II, 86.

73. Ricordi civ and cclxvii, in Villari, Machiavelli, II, 86.

74. Opere inedite, ii, 51, in Sismondi, 389.

75. Ricordi, cccxlvi, in Villari, II, 85; Guicciardini, History, III, 104.

76. Villari, II, 158–9.

77. Ibid., 325.

78. In Roeder, 209.

79. Cf. the letters in Villari, I, 469 and II, 48.

80. In Pastor, V, 160.

81. Machiavelli, Discourses, ii, 10.

82. Ibid., ii, 18.

83. In Villari, II, 344.

84. Discourses, iii, 43.

85. Ibid., proem to book ii.

86. Machiavelli, History, v, i.

87. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. xxv.

88. Discourses, i, 3; Prince, iii.

89. Robertson, I, 374.

90. Discourses, i, 11.

91. I, 12.

92. I, 11–12.

93. I, 10.

94. II, 2; iii, i.

95. I, 12.

96. III, 1.

97. III, 41.

98. I, 9.

99. History, v, 2.

100. In Villari, II, 143.

101. Discourses, i, 9.

102. Prince, i.

103. Discourses, 1, 12.

104. In Villari, II, 151.

105. Prince, xi-xii; History, vi, 1.

106. In Pastor, V, 164.

107. Prince, xv.

108. Prince, xviii.

109. Ibid., xvii.

110. Discourses, iii, 19.

111. Ibid.1, 10.

112. Prince, xxi.

113. Ibid., viii.

114. XVIII.

115. Ibid.

116. VII, xvii.

117. XXVI.

118. Villari, II, 193; Treitschke, H. von, Lectures on Politics, 29.

119. Bacon, F., De augmentis scientiarum, vii, 2.

120. Hegel, Philosophy of History, in Symonds, Despots, 367.

CHAPTER XX

1. Burckhardt, 485.

2. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, 192.

3. Platina, Vitae, in Burckhardt, 501.

4. Sismondi, 468.

5. Pastor, V, 84.

6. Decameron, i, 2 and 7.

7. Symonds, Despots, 458n.

8. In Roeder, 512.

9. Pastor, I, 31.

10. Molmenti, Part I, Vol. II, 222.

11. Aretino, Dialogues, p. 82.

12. Guicciardini, Considerazione on Machiavelli’s Discourses (i, 12), in Villari, II, 151.

13. St. Catherine of Siena in Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, II, 399.

14. Pastor, V, 171–3.

16. Robertson, I, 369.

17. Burckhardt, 502.

18. Robertson, I, 369.

19. Pastor, VI, 443.

20. Pastor, X, 457–76.

21. Bandello, Novels, Vol. I, Part I, Story I; Maulde, 178.

22. Ibid.

23. Pastor, V, 113.

24. Lea, Auricular Confession, III, 417.

25. Pastor, V, 133; Symonds, Despots, 477.

26. Pastor, V, 132.

27. Aretino, La cortigiana, Act. iii, p. 219 of Works.

28. Chubb, T. C, Aretino, 216.

29. Pastor, I, 26.

30. Molmenti, Part II, Vol. II, 239.

31. Ibid., 238.

32. Castiglioni, 464; Burckhardt, 400, who considers the estimate exaggerated.

33. Castiglioni, 464.

34. Molmenti, 250n.

35. Pastor, VIII, 121.

36. Gregorovius, Lucrezia, 96.

37. Symonds, Italian Lit., II, 225.

38. Maulde, 361.

39. Gregorovius, VIIIa, 306.

40. Lanciani, Golden Days, 67.

41. Ibid., 64.

42. Maulde, 360, 164.

43. Ibid., 27, 98.

44. Villari, I, 315.

45. Pastor, V, 105, 127.

46. Burckhardt, 416.

47. An example in Cartwright, Isabella, II, 288.

48. Maulde, 43.

49. Burckhardt, 456.

50. Maulde, 353; Sismondi, 747.

51. Ibid., 456.

52. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante, 14.

53. In Symonds, Italian Lit., II, 86.

54. Burckhardt, 346.

55. Molmenti, II, II, 92.

56. Burckhardt, 374.

57. Molmenti, 94; Taylor, Leonardo, 484.

58. Ibid.

59. Sismondi, 452.

60. Addison, Julia, Development of Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages, 192.

61. Cagnola in Noyes, Milan, 133.

62. Cartwright, Isabella, II, 115.

63. Maulde, 131.

64. Ibid., 70–1.

65. Cartwright, Beatrice, 172.

66. Pastor, V, 17–9.

67. Symonds, Despots, 240f.

68. In Burckhardt, 404.

69. Ibid.

70. Pastor, VIII, 124.

71. Pastor, V, 107.

72. Ashley, W. J., Introd. to English Economic History, 447.

73. Pastor, V, 106.

74. Cambridge Modern History, I, 250; Symonds, Despots, 474.

75. Taine: Rome and Naples, 172.

76. Chubb, 23.

77. Guicciardini, III, 59.

78. Ibid., VII, 69; Machiavelli, History, vi, 4.

79. Pastor, V, 134.

80. Sismondi, 456.

81. James, Bologna, 138.

82. Schevill, Siena, 223.

83. Robinson and Rolf, 123.

84. Cartwright, Isabella, II, 59.

85. Lanciani, 99.

86. Brinton, The Gonzaga Lords, 88.

87. Fattorusso, 247.

88. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century, 53; Burckhardt, 374.

89. Friedländer, II, 176.

90. Wright, T., Homes of Other Days, 462.

91. Molmenti, II, II, 162.

92. Decameron, i, 1.

93. Molmenti, 231.

94. Villari, Savonarola, 246.

95. Gibbon, VI, 562.

96. Symonds, Italian Lit., I, 307–8.

97. Vasari, II, 178–9, Fiero di Cosimo.

98. pastor, V, 48.

99. In Lang, P. H., Music in Western Civilization, 299.

100. Cellini, i, 32.

101. Lang, 302.

102. Castiglione, B., The Courtier, p. 76.

103. Ibid.; Oxford History of Music, Introd. Volume, 215; Lang, 300.

104. Oxford History, Introd., 188.

105. In Einstein, Alfred, The Italian Madrigal, I, 39.

106. Symonds, Ital. Lit., I, 217.

107. Einstein, 7.

108. Tr. Symonds, Sketches, II, 332.

109. Rabelais, Pantagruel, bk. iv, Prologue.

109a. Grove, Dictionary of Music, IV, 809.

110. Einstein, 6, 8.

111. Luther, in Gregorovius, VIIIa, 249.

112. Ascham, The Scholemaster, 87.

113. Machiavelli, Discourses, i, 12.

114. Guicciardini, VIII, 354.

115. Pastor, V, 181.

CHAPTER XXI

1. The phrase is from Michelet, Histoire de France, III, i, 2, p. 5.

2. Lacroix, Paul, Arts of the M.A., 99.

3. Guicciardini, I, 147.

4. Guizot, History of France, II, 554.

5. Cambridge Modern History, I, 240.

6. Roscoe, Leo X, I, 200–1.

7. Prescott, II, 307.

8. Guizot, II, 511; Sismondi, 676.

9. Lacroix, Prostitution, II, 1130.

10. Pastor, VII, 105.

11. Ibid., 141; Roscoe, Leo X, II, 39; Guicciardini, VI, 382, however, thought that Leo agreed.

12. De Grassis in Roscoe, Leo X, II, 40.

13. Pastor, VII, 139.

14. Beuf, 222.

15. Guicciardini, VII, 266.

16. Pastor, IX, 27.

17. Chubb, 76.

18. Symonds, Despots, 440.

19. Pastor, IX, 73.

20. Burckhardt, 162.

21. Pastor, IX, 91–113.

22. Ibid., 125.

23. Cartwright, Isabella, II, 232.

24. Tr. Symonds, Ital. Lit., II, 368.

25. Pastor, IX, 266.

26. Ibid., 271.

27. Guicciardini, VIII, 230f

28. Pastor, IX, 304.

29. Ibid., 328.

30. 331.

31. Sismondi, 687.

32. Young, 330.

33. In Cartwright, II, 272.

34. Guicciardini, IX, 98, 113.

35. Pastor, IX, 362.

36. Ibid., 390–405; Cartwright, II, 260.

37. Pastor, IX, 400, 413.

38. Guicciardini, IX, 305; Lanciani, 108.

39. Ibid., 107.

40. Guicciardini, IX, 307.

41. Pastor, IX, 400.

42. Symonds, Revival, 444–5.

43. Guicciardini, IX, 308; Pastor, IX, 413.

44. Symonds, Despots, 444; Job, x, 18.

45. Guicciardini, IX, 320–2; Pastor, IX, 424.

46. In Cartwright, Isabella, II, 270.

47. Burckhardt, 123; Symonds, Despots, 445:

48. Guicciardini, X, 139.

49. Sismondi, 729; Symonds, Despots, 446.

50. Fattorusso, Florence, 192.

51. Sismondi, 731.

52. Symonds, Michelangelo, 279.

53. Young, 351.

54. Pastor, X, 199.

55. Vasari, II, 295, Peruzzi.

56. Symonds, Michelangelo, 441.

57. Ibid., 372.

58. 255.

59. Vasari, IV, 119n.

60. Symonds, Michelangelo, 267.

61. Ibid., 282.

62. 324.

63. Cambridge Modern History, II, 67.

64. Pastor, X, 235.

65. Ibid., 322.

66. Letter of Gregorio da Casale, Oct., 1534, in Young, 358.

CHAPTER XXII

1. Burckhardt, Cicerone, in Vasari, IV, 320n.

2. Vasari, IV, 327.

3. Ibid., 329.

4. In Anderson, Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy, 145.

5. This section is especially indebted to Thomas Caldecott Chubb’s Aretino.

6. Chubb, 46.

7. Vasari, III, 77, Marcantonio Bolognese.

8. In Chubb, 117.

9. Symonds, Ital. Lit., II, 395.

10. Ariosto, Orlando furioso, xlvi, 14.

11. Maulde, 391.

12. Symonds, Lit., II, 399–400.

13. Ibid., 404.

14. Chubb, 205.