The Renaissance

In 1345 Cinto Brandini and nine others were put to death for organizing the poorer workers in the woolen industry, and foreign laborers were imported to break up these unions.¹⁰ In 1368 the “little people” attempted a revolution but were suppressed. Ten years later the tumulto dei Ciompi— the revolt of the wool carders—brought the working classes for a dizzy moment into control of the commune. Led by a barefoot workingman, Michele di Lando, the carders surged into the Palazzo Vecchio, dispersed the Signory, and established a dictatorship of the proletariat (1378). The laws against unionization were repealed, the lower unions were enfranchised, a moratorium of twelve years was declared on the debts of wage earners, and interest rates were reduced to further ease the burdens of the debtor class. Business leaders retaliated by shutting down their shops and inducing the landowners to cut the city’s food supply. The harassed revolutionists split into factions—an aristocracy of labor consisting of skilled craftsmen, and a “left wing” moved with communistic ideas. Finally the conservatives brought in strong men from the countryside, armed them, overthrew the divided government, and restored the business class to power (1382).

The triumphant bourgeoisie revised the constitution to consolidate its victory. The Signoria, or municipal council of signori or gentlemen, was composed of eight priori delle arti— priors or leaders of the guilds—chosen by lot from bags containing the names of those eligible for office. They in turn chose as their executive head a gonfaloniere di giustizia—a “standardbearer of justice” or executor of the law. Of the eight priors four had to be from the greater guilds, though these arti maggiori included but a small minority of the adult male population. The same proportion was required in the advisory Consiglio del Popolo or Council of the People; popolo, however, meant only the members of the twenty-one guilds. The Consiglio del Comune was chosen from any guild membership, but its function was confined to assembling when summoned by the Signory, and to voting yes or no on proposals put before it by the priors. On rare occasions the priors called a parlamento of all voters to the Piazza della Signoria by ringing the great bell in the Palazzo Vecchio tower. Usually such a general assembly chose a balia or commission of reform, gave it supreme power for a stated period, and adjourned.

It was a generous error of nineteenth-century historians to credit pre-Medicean Florence with a degree of democracy quite unknown in that plutocratic paradise. The subject cities, though themselves fertile in genius and proud of their heritage, had no voice in the Florentine Signory that governed them. In Florence only 3200 males could vote; and in both councils the representatives of the business class were a rarely challenged majority.¹¹ The upper classes were convinced that the illiterate masses could form no sound or safe judgment of the community good in domestic crises or foreign affairs. The Florentines loved freedom, but it was, among the poor, the freedom to be commanded by Florentine masters, and, among the rich, the liberty to rule the city and its dependencies without imperial or papal or feudal impediment.

The indisputable defects of the constitution were the brevity of its terms of office, and the frequent changes in the constitution itself. The evil results were faction, conspiracy, violence, confusion, incompetence, and the inability of the republic to design and execute such consistent and long-term policies as made for the stability and power of Venice. The pertinent good result was an electric atmosphere of conflict and debate that quickened the pulse, sharpened sense and mind and wit, stirred the imagination, and lifted Florence for a century to the cultural leadership of the world.

III. COSIMO “PATER PATRIAE”

Politics in Florence was the conflict of wealthy families and factions—the Ricci, Albizzi, Medici, Ridolfi, Pazzi, Pitti, Strozzi, Rucellai, Valori, Capponi, Soderini—for control of the government. From 1381 to 1434, with some interruptions, the Albizzi maintained their ascendancy in the state, and valiantly protected the rich against the poor.

The Medici family can be traced back to 1201, when Chiarissimo de’ Medici was a member of the Communal Council.* Averardo de’ Medici, great-great-grandfather of Cosimo, founded the fortune of the family by bold commerce and judicious finance, and was chosen gonfalonier in 1314. Averardo’s grandnephew, Salvestro de’ Medici, gonfalonier in 1378, established the popularity of the family by espousing the cause of the rebel poor. Salvestro’s grandnephew, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, gonfalonier in 1421, further endeared the family to the people by supporting—though he himself would suffer heavily from it—an annual tax (catasto) of one half of one per cent on income, which was reckoned at seven per cent of a man’s capital (1427).¹² The rich, who had previously enjoyed a poll or head tax merely equal to that paid by the poor, vowed vengeance on the Medici.

Giovanni di Bicci died in 1428, bequeathing to his son Cosimo a good name and the largest fortune in Tuscany—179,221 florins ($4,480,525?).¹³ Cosimo was already thirty-nine years old, fully fit to carry on the far-flung enterprises of the firm. These were not confined to banking; they included the management of extensive farms, the manufacture of silk and woolen goods, and a varied trade that bound Russia and Spain, Scotland and Syria, Islam and Christendom. Cosimo, while building churches in Florence, saw no sin in making trade agreements, and exchanging costly presents, with Turkish sultans. The firm made a specialty of importing from the East articles of little bulk and great value, like spices, almonds, and sugar, and sold these and other products in a score of European ports.

Cosimo directed all this with quiet skill, and found time left for politics. As a member of the Dieci, or War Council of Ten, he guided Florence to victory against Lucca, and as a banker he financed the war by lending large sums to the government. His popularity excited the envy of other magnates, and in 1433, Rinaldo degli Albizzi launched an attack upon him as planning to overthrow the Republic and make himself dictator. Rinaldo persuaded Bernardo Guadagni, then gonfalonier, to order Cosimo’s arrest; Cosimo surrendered himself, and was confined in the Palazzo Vecchio. Since Rinaldo, with his armed retainers, dominated the parlamento in the Piazza della Signoria, a decree of death seemed imminent. But Cosimo managed to convey a thousand ducats ($25,000?) to Bernardo, who suddenly became more humane, and compromised by having Cosimo, his sons, and his chief supporters banished for ten years.¹⁴ Cosimo took up his residence in Venice, where his modesty and his means made him many friends. Soon the Venetian government was using its influence to have him recalled. The Signory elected in 1434 was favorable to him, and reversed the sentences of exile; Cosimo returned in triumph, and Rinaldo and his sons fled.

A parlamento appointed a balia, and gave it supreme power. After serving three short terms Cosimo relinquished all political positions; “to be elected to office,” he said, “is often prejudicial to the body and hurtful to the soul.”¹⁵ Since his enemies had left the city, his friends easily dominated the government. Without disturbing republican forms, he managed, by persuasion or money, to have his adherents remain in office to the end of his life. His loans to influential families won or forced their support; his gifts to the clergy enlisted their enthusiastic aid; and his public benefactions, of unprecedented scope and generosity, easily reconciled the citizens to his rule. The Florentines had observed that the constitution of the Republic did not protect them from the aristocracy of wealth; the defeat of the Ciompi had burned this lesson into the public memory. If the populace had to choose between the Albizzi, who favored the rich, and the Medici, who favored the middle classes and the poor, it could not long hesitate. A people oppressed by its economic masters, and weary of faction, welcomed dictatorship in Florence in 1434, in Perugia in 1389, in Bologna in 1401, in Siena in 1477, in Rome in 1347 and 1922. “The Medici,” said Villani, “were enabled to attain supremacy in the name of freedom, and with the support of the popolo and the populace.”¹⁶

Cosimo used his power with shrewd moderation, tempered with occasional violence. When his friends suspected that Baldaccio d’Anghiari was forming a conspiracy to end Cosimo’s power, they threw Baldaccio out of a sufficiently high window to ensure his termination, and Cosimo did not complain; it was one of his quips that “states are not ruled with paternosters.” He replaced the fixed income tax with a sliding scale of levies on capital, and was accused of adjusting these assessments to favor his friends and discourage his enemies. These levies totaled 4,875,000 florins ($121,875,000) in the first twenty years of Cosimo’s ascendancy; and those who balked at paying them were summarily jailed. Many aristocrats left the city and resumed the rural life of the medieval nobility. Cosimo accepted their departure with equanimity, remarking that new aristocrats could be made with a few yards of scarlet cloth.¹⁷

The people smiled approval, for they noted that the levies were devoted to the administration and adornment of Florence, and that Cosimo himself contributed 400,000 florins ($10,000,000?) to public works and private charities;¹⁸ this was almost double the sum that he left to his heirs.¹⁹ He labored assiduously to the end of his seventy-five years, managing at once his own properties and the affairs of the state. When Edward IV of England asked for a substantial loan, Cosimo obliged him, ignoring the faithlessness of Edward III, and the King repaid him with coin and political support. Tommaso Parentucelli, Bishop of Bologna, ran out of funds and asked for aid; Cosimo supplied him; and when Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V Cosimo was given charge of all papal finances. To keep the varied threads of his activity from tangling, he rose early, and went nearly every day to his office, like an American millionaire. At home he pruned his trees and tended his vines. He dressed simply, ate and drank temperately, and (after begetting an illegitimate son by a slave girl) lived a quiet and orderly family life. Those who were admitted to his home were astonished at the contrast between the homely fare of his private table and the lavish feasts that he provided for foreign dignitaries as a lure to comity and peace. He was normally humane, mild, forgiving, reticent and yet known for his dry wit. He was generous to the poor, paid the taxes of impoverished friends, and hid his charity, like his power, in a gracious anonymity. Botticelli, Pontormo, and Benozzo Gozzoli have pictured him for us: of middle stature and olive complexion, with gray receding hair, long, sharp nose, and a grave, kindly countenance bespeaking shrewd wisdom and calm strength.

His foreign policy was dedicated to the organization of peace. Coming to power after a series of ruinous conflicts, Cosimo noted how war, actual or imminent, hobbled the march of trade. When the rule of the Visconti in Milan collapsed in chaos at Filippo Maria’s death, and Venice threatened to absorb the duchy and dominate all nothern Italy to the very gates of Florence, Cosimo sent Francesco Sforza the means to establish himself in Milan and check the Venetian advance. When Venice and Naples formed an alliance against Florence, Cosimo called in so many loans made to their citizens that their governments were induced to make peace.²⁰ Thereafter Milan and Florence stood against Venice and Naples in a balance of power so even that neither side dared to risk a war. This policy of balanced powers, conceived by Cosimo and continued by Lorenzo, gave Italy those decades of peace and order, from 1450 to 1492, during which the cities grew rich enough to finance the early Renaissance.

It was the good fortune of Italy and mankind that Cosimo cared as much for literature, scholarship, philosophy, and art as for wealth and power. He was a man of education and taste; he knew Latin well, and had a smattering of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic; he was broad enough to appreciate the piety and painting of Fra Angelico, the engaging rascality of Fra Filippo Lippi, the classical style of Ghiberti’s reliefs, the bold originality of Donatello’s sculpture, the grandiose churches of Brunellesco, the restrained power of Michelozzo’s architecture, the pagan Platonism of Gemistus Pletho, the mystic Platonism of Pico and Ficino, the refinement of Alberti, the learned vulgarity of Poggio, the bibliolatry of Niccolò de’ Niccoli; and all these men experienced his generosity. He brought Joannes Argyropoulos to Florence to instruct its youth in the language and literature of ancient Greece, and for twelve years he studied with Ficino the classics of Greece and Rome. He spent a large part of his fortune collecting classic texts, so that the most costly cargoes of his ships were in many cases manuscripts carried from Greece or Alexandria. When Niccolò de’ Niccoli had ruined himself in buying ancient manuscripts, Cosimo opened for him an unlimited credit at the Medici bank, and supported him till death. He engaged forty-five copyists, under the guidance of the enthusiastic bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, to transcribe such manuscripts as could not be bought. All these “precious minims” he placed in rooms at the monastery of San Marco, or in the abbey of Fiesole, or in his own library. When Niccoli died (1437), leaving eight hundred manuscripts valued at 6000 florins ($150,000), along with many debts, and naming sixteen trustees to determine the disposal of the books, Cosimo offered to assume the debts if he might allocate the volumes. It was so agreed, and Cosimo divided the collection between San Marco’s library and his own. All these collections were open to teachers and students without charge. Said the Florentine historian Varchi, with patriotic exaggeration:

That Greek letters were not completely forgotten, to the great loss of humanity, and that Latin letters have been revived to the infinite benefit of the people—this all Italy, nay all the world, owes solely to the high wisdom and friendliness of the house of the Medici.²¹

Of course the great work of revival had been inaugurated by the translators in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and by Arabic commentators, and by Petrarch and Boccaccio. It had been continued by scholars and collectors like Salutati, Traversari, Bruni, and Valla before Cosimo; it was carried forward independently of him by Niccoli, Poggio, Filelfo, King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, and a hundred other contemporaries of Cosimo, even by his exiled rival, Palla Strozzi. But if we embrace in our judgment not only Cosimo Pater Patriae, but his descendants Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, and Clement VII, we may admit that in the patronage of learning and art the Medici have never been equaled by any other family in the known history of mankind.

IV. THE HUMANISTS

It was under the Medici, or in their day, that the humanists captivated the mind of Italy, turned it from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, and revealed to an astonished generation the riches of pagan thought and art. These men mad about scholarship received, as early as Ariosto,²² the name of umanisti because they called the study of classic culture umanità— the “humanities”—or literae humaniores—not “more humane” but more human letters. The proper study of mankind was now to be man, in all the potential strength and beauty of his body, in all the joy and pain of his senses and feelings, in all the frail majesty of his reason; and in these as most abundantly and perfectly revealed in the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome. This was humanism.

Nearly all the Latin, and many of the Greek classics now extant were known to medieval scholars here and there; and the thirteenth century was acquainted with the major pagan philosophers. But that century had almost ignored Greek poetry; and many ancient worthies now honored by us lay neglected in monastic or cathedral libraries. It was mostly in such forgotten corners that Petrarch and his successors found the “lost” classics, “gentle prisoners,” he called them, “held in captivity by barbarous jailers.” Boccaccio, visiting Monte Cassino, was shocked to find precious manuscripts rotting in dust, or mutilated to make psalters or amulets. Poggio, visiting the Swiss monastery of St. Gall while attending the Council of Constance, found the Institutiones of Quintilian in a foul dark dungeon, and felt, as he reclaimed the rolls, that the old pedagogue was stretching out his hands, begging to be saved from the “barbarians”; for by that name the culture-conscious Italians, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, called their virile conquerors beyond the Alps. Poggio alone, undeterred by winter’s cold or snow, exhumed from such tombs the texts of Lucretius, Columella, Frontinus, Vitruvius, Valerius Flaccus, Tertullian, Plautus, Petronius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and several major speeches of Cicero. Coluccio Salutati unearthed Cicero’s letters ad familiares at Vercelli (1389); Gherardo Landriani found Cicero’s treatises on rhetoric in an old chest at Lodi (1422); Ambrogio Traversari rescued Cornelius Nepos from oblivion in Padua (1434); the Agricola, Germania, and Dialogi of Tacitus were discovered in Germany (1455); the first six books of Tacitus’ Annales, and a full manuscript of the younger Pliny’s letters were recovered from the monastery of Corvey (1508), and became a prize possession of Leo X.

In the half century before the Turks took Constantinople a dozen humanists studied or traveled in Greece; one of them, Giovanni Aurispa, brought back to Italy 238 manuscripts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles; another, Francesco Filelfo, salvaged from Constantinople (1427) texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Aristotle, and seven dramas of Euripides. When such literary explorers returned to Italy with their finds they were welcomed like victorious generals, and princes and prelates paid well for a share of the spoils. The fall of Constantinople resulted in the loss of many classics previously mentioned by Byzantine writers as in the libraries of that city; nevertheless thousands of volumes were saved, and most of them came to Italy; to this day the best manuscripts of Greek classics are in Italy. For three centuries, from Petrarch to Tasso, men collected manuscripts with philatelic passion. Niccolò de’ Niccoli spent more than he had in this pursuit; Andreolo de Ochis was ready to sacrifice his home, his wife, his life to add to his library; Poggio suffered when he saw money being spent on anything else than books.

An editorial revolution ensued. The texts so recovered were studied, compared, corrected, and explained in a campaign of scholarship that ranged from Lorenzo Valla in Naples to Sir Thomas More in London. Since these labors in many cases required a knowledge of Greek, Italy—and later France, England, and Germany—sent out a call for teachers of Greek. Aurispa and Filelfo learned the language in Greece itself. After Manuel Chrysoloras came to Italy (1397) as Byzantine envoy, the University of Florence persuaded him to join its faculty as professor of Greek language and literature. Among his pupils there were Poggio, Palla Strozzi, Marsuppini, and Manetti. Leonardo Bruni, studying law, abandoned it, under the spell of Chrysoloras, for the study of Greek; “I gave myself to his teaching with such ardor,” he tells us, “that my dreams at night were filled with what I had learned from him during the day.”²³ Who now could imagine that Greek grammar was once an adventure and a romance?

In 1439 Greeks met Italians at the Council of Florence, and the lessons they exchanged in language had far more result than their laborious negotiations in theology. There Gemistus Pletho gave the famous lectures that ended the reign of Aristotle in European philosophy and enthroned Plato as almost a god. When the Council dispersed, Joannes Bessarion, who had come to it as Bishop of Nicaea, remained in Italy and gave part of his time to teaching Greek. Other cities contracted the fever; Bessarion brought it to Rome; Theodorus Gaza taught Greek at Mantua, Ferrara (1444), and Rome (1451); Demetrius Chalcondyles taught at Perugia (1450), Padua, Florence, and Milan (c. 1492–1511); Joannes Argyropoulos at Padua (1441), Florence (1456–71), and Rome (1471–86). All these men came to Italy before the fall of Constantinople (1453), so that that event played a minor role in the transit of Greek from Byzantium to Italy; but the gradual encirclement of Constantinople by the Turks after 1356 shared in persuading Greek scholars to go west. One of those who fled at the collapse of the Eastern capital was Constantine Lascaris, who came to teach Greek at Milan (1460–5), Naples, and Messina (1466–1501). The first Greek book printed in Renaissance Italy was his Greek grammar.

With all these scholars and their pupils enthusiastically active in Italy, it was but a short time when the classics of Greek literature and philosophy were rendered into Latin with more thoroughness, accuracy, and finish than in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Guarino translated parts of Strabo and Plutarch; Traversari, Diogenes Laertius; Valla, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Iliad; Perotti, Polybius; Ficino, Plato and Plotinus. Plato, above all, amazed and delighted the humanists. They gloried in the fluid grace of his style; they found in the Dialogues a drama more vivid and contemporary than anything in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; they envied and marveled at the freedom with which the Greeks of Socrates’ time discussed the most crucial problems of religion and politics; and they thought they had found in Plato—clouded with Plotinus—a mystical philosophy that would enable them to retain a Christianity that they had ceased to believe in, but never ceased to love. Moved by the eloquence of Gemistus Pletho and the enthusiasm of his pupils at Florence, Cosimo established there (1445) a Platonic Academy for the study of Plato, and provided handsomely for Marsilio Ficino to give half a lifetime to the translation and exposition of Plato’s works. Now, after a reign of four hundred years, Scholasticism lost its domination in the philosophy of the West; the dialogue and essay replaced the scholastica disputatio as the form of philosophical exposition, and the exhilarating spirit of Plato entered like an energizing yeast into the rising body of European thought.

But as Italy recovered more and more of its own classic heritage, the admiration of the humanists for Greece was surpassed by their pride in the literature and art of ancient Rome. They revived Latin as a medium of living literature; they Latinized their names, and Romanized the terms of Christian worship and life: God became Iuppiter, Providence fatum, the saints divi, nuns vestales, the pope pontifex maximus. They fashioned their prose style on Cicero, their poetry on Virgil and Horace; and some, like Filelfo, Valla, and Politian, achieved an almost classic elegance. So, in its course, the Renaissance moved back from Greek to Latin, from Athens to Rome; fifteen centuries appeared to fall away, and the age of Cicero and Horace, of Ovid and Seneca, seemed reborn. Style became more important than substance, form triumphed over matter; and the oratory of majestic periods rang again in the halls of princes and pedagogues. Perhaps it would have been better if the humanists had used Italian; but they looked down upon the speech of the Commedia and the Canzoniere as a corrupt and degenerate Latin (which almost it was), and deplored Dante’s choice of the vernacular tongue. As a penalty the humanists lost touch with the living sources of literature; and the people, leaving their works to the aristocracy, preferred the jolly tales—novelle— of Sacchetti and Bandello, or the exciting mixture of war and love in the romances that were being translated or adapted into Italian from the French. Nevertheless this passing infatuation with a dying language and an “immortal” literature helped Italian authors to recapture the architecture, sculpture, and music of style, and to formulate the canons of taste and utterance that lifted the vernaculars to literary form, and set a goal and a standard for art. In the field of history it was the humanists who ended the succession of medieval chronicles—chaotic and uncritical—by scrutinizing and harmonizing sources, marshaling the matter into order and clarity, vitalizing and humanizing the past by mingling biography with history, and raising their narratives to some level of philosophy by discerning causes, currents, and effects, and studying the regularities and lessons of history.

The humanist movement spread throughout Italy, but until the accession of a Florentine Medici to the papacy its leaders were almost all citizens or graduates of Florence. Coluccio Salutati, who became executive secretary or chancellor (cancellarius) to the Signory in 1375, was a bridge from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Cosimo, knowing and loving all three. The public documents drawn up by him were models of classical Latinity, and set an example that officials in Venice, Milan, Naples, and Rome bestirred themselves to follow; Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan said that Salutati had done him more harm by excellence of style than could have come from an army of mercenaries.²⁴ The fame of Niccolò de’ Niccoli as a Latin stylist rivaled his renown as a collector of manuscripts; Bruni called him the “censor of the Latin tongue,” and, like other authors, submitted his own writings to Niccoli for correction before publishing them. Niccoli filled his house with ancient classics, statuary, inscriptions, vases, coins, and gems. He avoided marriage lest it distract him from his books, but found time for a concubine stolen from his brother’s bed.²⁵ He opened his library to all who cared to study there, and urged young Florentines to abandon luxury for literature. Seeing a wealthy youth idling the day away, Niccoli asked him, “What is your object in life?” “To have a good time,” was the frank reply. “But when your youth is over, of what consequence will you be?”²⁶ The youth saw the point, and put himself under Niccoli’s tutelage.

Leonardo Bruni, secretary to four popes and then (1427–44) to the Florentine Signory, translated several dialogues of Plato into a Latin whose excellence for the first time fully revealed the splendor of Plato’s style to Italy; he composed a Latin History of Florence for which the Republic exempted him and his children from taxation; and his speeches were compared with those of Pericles. When he died the priors decreed him a public funeral after the manner of the ancients; he was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with his History on his breast; and Bernardo Rossellino designed for his resting place a noble and sumptuous tomb.

Born like Bruni in Arezzo, and succeeding him as secretary to the Signory, Carlo Marsuppini awed his time by carrying half the classics of Greece and Rome in his head; he left hardly one ancient author unquoted in his inaugural address as professor of literature in the University of Florence. His admiration for pagan antiquity was such that he felt called upon to reject Christianity;²⁷ nevertheless he became for a time apostolic secretary to the Roman See; and though he was said to have died without bothering to receive the sacraments,²⁸ he too was buried in Santa Croce under gorgeous oratory by Giannozzo Manetti and an ornate tomb by Desiderio da Settignano (1453). Manetti, who pronounced this eulogy over an atheist, was a man whose piety rivaled his learning. For nine years he hardly stirred from his house and garden, steeping himself in classical literature, and learning Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Sent as ambassador to Rome, Naples, Venice, Genoa, he charmed all, and won friendships precious to his government by his culture, his liberality, and his integrity.

All these men except Salutati were members of the circle that gathered in the city house or country villa of Cosimo, and led the movement of scholarship during his ascendancy. Another friend of Cosimo almost equaled him as a host to learning. Ambrogio Traversari, general of the Camaldulite order, lived in a cell in the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Florence. He mastered Greek, and suffered qualms of conscience in his affection for the classics; he refrained from quoting them in his writings, but revealed their influence in a Latin style whose idiomatic purity would have shocked all the famous Gregories. Cosimo, who knew how to reconcile the classics, as well as high finance, with Christianity, loved to visit him. Niccoli, Marsuppini, Bruni, and others made his cell a literary rendezvous.

The most active and troublesome of the Italian humanists was Poggio Bracciolini. Born poor near Arezzo (1380), he was educated at Florence, studied Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras, supported himself by copying manuscripts, was befriended by Salutati, and secured appointment, at twenty-four, as a secretary in the papal chancery at Rome. For the next half century he served the Curia, never taking even minor orders, but wearing ecclesiastical dress. Valuing his energy and his learning, the Curia sent him on a dozen missions. From these he digressed, time and again, to search for classic manuscripts; his credentials as a papal secretary won him access to the most jealously guarded, or most carelessly neglected, treasures in the monastic libraries at St. Gall, Langres, Weingarten, and Reichenau; and his spoils were so rich that Bruni and other humanists hailed them as epochal. Back in Rome he wrote for Martin V vigorous defenses of Church dogmas, and then, in private gatherings, joined with other employees of the Curia in laughing at the Christian creed.²⁹ He composed dialogues and letters in rough but breezy Latin, satirizing the vices of the clergy even while practising them to the extent of his means. When Cardinal Sant’ Angelo reproved him for having children, which hardly befitted a man in ecclesiastical dress, and for maintaining a mistress, which seemed unbecoming in a layman, Poggio replied with his usual insolence: “I have children, which is becoming to a layman, and I have a mistress, which is an old custom of the clergy.”³⁰ At fifty-five he abandoned the mistress who had given him fourteen children, and married a girl of eighteen. Meanwhile he almost founded modern archeology by collecting ancient coins, inscriptions, and statuary, and by describing with scholarly precision the surviving monuments of classic Rome. He accompanied Pope Eugenius IV to the Council of Florence, quarreled with Francesco Filelfo, and exchanged with him enthusiastic invectives of the coarsest indecency, peppered with accusations of theft, atheism, and sodomy. Again in Rome, he worked with especial pleasure for the humanist Pope Nicholas V. At seventy he composed his famous Liber facetiarum, a collection of stories, satires, and obscenities. When Lorenzo Valla joined the papal secretariat Poggio attacked him in a new series of Invectivae, charging him with larceny, forgery, treachery, heresy, drunkenness, and immorality. Valla replied by laughing at Poggio’s Latin, quoting his sins against grammar and idiom, and setting him aside as a fool in his dotage.³¹ No one but the immediate victim took such literary assaults seriously; they were competitive essays in Latin composition; indeed Poggio proclaimed, in one of them, that he would show how well classic Latin could express the most modern ideas and the most private concerns. He was so adept in the art of erudite scurrility that “the whole world,” said Vespasiano, “was afraid of him.”³² His pen, like that of a later Aretine, became an instrument of blackmail. When Alfonso of Naples delayed in acknowledging Poggio’s gift of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia translated into Latin, the irate humanist hinted that a good pen could stab any king, and Alfonso hastily sent him 500 ducats to hold his tongue. After enjoying every instinct and impulse for seventy years, Poggio composed a treatise De miseriis humanae conditionis, in which he reckoned that the ills of life outweigh the joys, and concluded, like Solon, that the luckiest people are those who escape being born.³³ At seventy-two he returned to Florence, was soon made secretary to the Signory, and finally was elected to the Signory itself. He expressed his appreciation by writing a history of Florence in the style of the ancients—politics, war, and imaginary speeches. Other humanists breathed relief when at last, aged seventy-nine, he died (1459). He too was buried in Santa Croce; his statue by Donatello was erected on the façade of the duomo; and in 1560, in the confusion of some alterations, it was set up inside the cathedral as one of the twelve Apostles.³⁴

It is clear that Christianity, in both its theology and its ethics, had lost its hold on perhaps a majority of the Italian humanists. Several, like Traversari, Bruni, and Manetti in Florence, Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, Guarino da Verona in Ferrara, and Flavio Biondo in Rome, remained loyal to the faith. But to many others the revelation of a Greek culture lasting a thousand years, and reaching the heights of literature, philosophy, and art in complete independence of Judaism and Christianity, was a mortal blow to their belief in the Pauline theology, or in the doctrine of nulla salus extra ecclesiam—”no salvation outside the Church.” Socrates and Plato became for them uncanonized saints; the dynasty of the Greek philosophers seemed to them superior to the Greek and Latin Fathers, the prose of Plato and Cicero made even a cardinal ashamed of the Greek of the New Testament and the Latin of Jerome’s translation; the grandeur of Imperial Rome seemed nobler than the timid retreat of convinced Christians into monastic cells; the free thought and conduct of Periclean Greeks or Augustan Romans filled many humanists with an envy that shattered in their hearts the Christian code of humility, otherworldliness, continence; and they wondered why they should subject body, mind, and soul to the rule of ecclesiastics who themselves were now joyously converted to the world. For these humanists the ten centuries between Constantine and Dante were a tragic error, a Dantesque losing of the right road; the lovely legends of the Virgin and the saints faded from their memory to make room for Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Horace’s ambisexual odes; the great cathedrals now seemed barbarous, and their gaunt statuary lost all charm for eyes that had seen, fingers that had touched, the Apollo Belvedere.

So the humanists, by and large, acted as if Christianity were a myth conformable to the needs of popular imagination and morality, but not to be taken seriously by emancipated minds. They supported it in their public pronouncements, professed a saving orthodoxy, and struggled to harmonize Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy. The very effort betrayed them; implicitly they accepted reason as the supreme court, and honoured Plato’s Dialogues equally with the New Testament. Like the Sophists of pre-Socratic Greece, they directly or indirectly, willfully or unwittingly undermined their hearers’ religious faith. Their lives reflected their actual creed; many of them accepted and practised the ethics of paganism in the sensual rather than in the Stoic sense. The only immortality they recognized was that which came through the recording of great deeds; they with their pens, not God, would confer it, would destine men to everlasting glory or shame. A generation after Cosimo they would agree to share this magic power with the artists who carved or painted the effigies of patrons, or built noble edifices that preserved a donor’s name. The desire of patrons to achieve such mundane immortality was one of the strongest generative forces in the art and literature of the Renaissance.

The influence of the humanists was for a century the dominant factor in the intellectual life of Western Europe. They taught writers a sharper sense of structure and form; they taught them also the artifices of rhetoric, the frills of language, the abracadabra of mythology, the fetishism of classical quotation, the sacrifice of significance to correctness of speech and beauty of style. Their infatuation with Latin postponed for a century (1400–1500) the development of Italian poetry and prose. They emancipated science from theology, but impeded it by worshiping the past, and by stressing erudition rather than objective observation and original thought. Strange to say, they were least influential in the universities. These were already old in Italy; and at Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Piacenza, Pavia, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Lucca, the faculties of law, medicine, theology, and “arts”—i.e., language, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy—were too mortised in medieval custom to allow a new emphasis on ancient cultures; at most they yielded, here and there, a chair of rhetoric to a humanist. The influence of the “revival of letters” operated chiefly through academies founded by patron princes in Florence, Naples, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Rome. There the humanists dictated in Greek or Latin the classic text they proposed to discuss; at each step they commented in Latin on the grammatical, rhetorical, geographical, biographical, and literary aspects of the text; their students took down the dictated text, and, in the margins, much of the commentary; in this way copies of the classics, and of commentaries as well, were multiplied and were scattered into the world. The age of Cosimo was therefore a period of devoted scholarship, rather than of creative literature. Grammar, lexicography, archeology, rhetoric, and the critical revision of classical texts were the literary glories of the time. The form, machinery, and substance of modern erudition were established; a bridge was built by which the legacy of Greece and Rome passed into the modern mind.

Not since the days of the Sophists had scholars risen to so high a place in society and politics. The humanists became secretaries and advisers to senates, signories, dukes, and popes, repaying their favors with classic eulogies, and their snubs with poisoned epigrams. They transformed the ideal of a gentleman from a man with ready sword and clanking spurs into that of the fully developed individual attaining to wisdom and worth by absorbing the cultural heritage of the race. The prestige of their learning and the fascination of their eloquence conquered transalpine Europe at the very time when the arms of France, Germany, and Spain were preparing to conquer Italy. Country after country was inoculated with the new culture, and passed from medievalism to modernity. The same century that saw the discovery of America saw the rediscovery of Greece and Rome; and the literary and philosophical transformation had far profounder results for the human spirit than the circumnavigation and exploration of the globe. For it was the humanists, not the navigators, who liberated man from dogma, taught him to love life rather than brood about death, and made the European mind free.

Humanism influenced art last because it appealed rather to intellect than to sense. The chief patron of art was still the Church, and the chief purpose of art was still to convey the Christian story to the letterless, and to adorn the house of God. The Virgin and her Child, the suffering and crucified Christ, the prophets, Apostles, Fathers, and saints remained the necessary subjects of sculpture and painting, even of the minor arts. Gradually, however, the humanists taught the Italians a more sensual sense of beauty; a frank admiration for the healthy human body—male or female, preferably nude—permeated the educated classes; the reaffirmation of life in Renaissance literature, as against the medieval contemplation of another world, gave art a secret secular leaning; and by finding Italian Aphrodites to pose as Virgins, and Italian Apollos to serve as Sebastians, the painters of Lorenzo’s age, and later, introduced pagan motives into Christian art. In the sixteenth century—when secular princes rivaled ecclesiastics in financing artists—Venus and Ariadne, Daphne and Diana, the Muses and the Graces challenged the rule of the Virgin; but Mary the modest mother continued her wholesome dominance to the end of Renaissance art.

V. ARCHITECTURE: THE AGE OF BRUNELLESCO

“Cursed be the man who invented this wretched Gothic architecture!” cried Antonio Filarete in 1450; “only a barbarous people could have brought it to Italy.”³⁵ Those walls of glass hardly suited the sun of Italy; those flying buttresses—though at Notre Dame de Paris they had been forged into a frame of beauty, like fountain jets petrified in their flowseemed to the South unsightly scaffoldings left by builders who had failed to give their structures a self-contained stability. The Gothic style of pointed arch and soaring vault had well expressed the aspirations of tender spirits turning from the laborious soil to the solacing sky; but men new dowered with wealth and ease wished now to beautify life, not to escape or malign it; earth would be heaven, and they themselves would be gods.

The architecture of the Italian Renaissance was not basically a revolt against Gothic, for Gothic had never conquered Italy. Every kind of style and influence spoke its piece in the experiments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the heavy columns and round arches of Lombard Romanesque, the Greek cross of some ground plans, the Byzantine pendentive and dome, the stately grace of campaniles echoing Moslem minarets, the slender columns of Tuscan cloisters remembering mosque or classic porticoes, the beamed ceilings of England and Germany, the groined vault and ogive and tracery of Gothic, the harmonious majesty of Roman façades, and, above all, the simple strength of the basilican nave flanked by its supporting aisles: all these, in Italy, were mingling fruitfully when the humanists turned architectural vision to the ruins of Rome. Then the shattered colonnades of the Forum, rising through the medieval mist, seemed to Italian eyes more beautiful than the Byzantine bizarreries of Venice, the somber majesty of Chartres, the fragile audacity of Beauvais, or the mystic reaches of Amiens’ vault. To build again with columns finely turned, firmly mortised into massive plinths, gayly crowned with flowering capitals, and bound to stability by imperturbable architraves—this became, by the groping emergence of the buried but living past, the dream and passion of men like Brunellesco, Alberti, Michelozzo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

“Of Filippo Brunellesco,” wrote the patriotic Vasari, “it may be said that he was given by heaven to invest architecture with new forms, after it had wandered astray for many centuries.”³⁶ Like so many artists of the Italian Renaissance, he began as a goldsmith. He graduated into sculpture, and for a time entered into friendly rivalry with Donatello. He competed with him and Ghiberti for a commission to sculpture the bronze doors of the Florentine Baptistery; when he saw Ghiberti’s sketches he pronounced them superior to his own, and with Donatello he left Florence to study perspective and design in Rome. He was fascinated by the ancient and medieval architecture there; he measured the major buildings in all their elements; he marveled above all at the dome of Agrippa’s Pantheon, 142 feet wide; and he conceived the idea of crowning with such a dome the unfinished cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in the city of his birth. He returned to Florence in time to take part in a conference of architects and engineers on the problem of roofing the cathedral’s octagonal choir, 138½ feet across. Filippo proposed a dome, but the expansive pressure that so immense a cupola would exert upon walls unsupported by external buttresses or internal beams seemed to the conferees a forbidding obstacle. All the world knows the story of Brunellesco’s egg: how he challenged the other artists to make an egg stand on end, and, after all the rest had failed, himself succeeded by pressing the blunt and empty end down upon the table. When they protested that they could have done the the same, he answered that they would make similar claims after he had domed the cathedral. He received the commission. For fourteen years (1420–34) he labored intermittently at the task, fighting a thousand tribulations, raising the cupola precariously 133 feet above the summit of its supporting walls. At last it was finished, and stood firm; all the city gloried in it as the first major achievement—and with one exception the boldest—in the architecture of the Renaissance. When Michelangelo, a century later, planned the dome of St. Peter’s, and was told that he had an opportunity to surpass Brunellesco’s, he answered: “I will make a sister dome, larger, but not more beautiful.”³⁷ The lordly colorful cupola still dominates, for leagues around, the panorama of a red-roofed Florence nestling like a bed of roses in the lap of the Tuscan hills.

Though Filippo had taken his conception from the Pantheon, he had compromised gracefully with the Tuscan Gothic style of the Florentine cathedral by curving his dome along the lines of the Gothic pointed arch. But in buildings that he was allowed to design from the ground he made his classic revolution more explicit and complete. In 1419 he had begun, for Cosimo’s father, the church of San Lorenzo; he finished only the “Old Sacristy”; but there he chose the basilican form, the colonnade and entablature, and the Romanesque arch as the elements of his plan. In the cloisters of Santa Croce he built for the Pazzi family a pretty chapel again recalling the dome and colonnaded portico of the Pantheon; and in those same cloisters he designed a rectangular portal—of fluted columns, flowered capitals, sculptured architrave, and lunette reliefs—which formed the style of a hundred thousand Renaissance doors, and survives everywhere in western Europe and America. He began on classic lines the church of Santo Spirito, but died while the walls had barely left the ground. In 1446 the corpse of the passionate builder lay in state in the cathedral under the dome that he had raised; and from Cosimo to the simple workingman who had labored there the people of Florence came to mourn that geniuses must die. “He lived as a good Christian,” said Vasari, “and left to the world the savor of his goodness…. From the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans until now there has been no man more rare or more excellent.”³⁸

In his architectural enthusiasm Brunellesco had designed for Cosimo a palace so extensive and ornate that the modest dictator, fearing envy, denied himself the luxury of seeing it take form. Instead he commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1444) to build for him, his family, and his offices, the existing Palazzo Medici or Riccardi, whose thick stone walls, bare of ornament, reveal the social disorder, the family feuds, the daily dread of violence or revolt, that gave a zest to Florentine politics. Immense iron gates opened to friends and diplomats, artists and poets, access to a court decorated with. statuary by Donatello, and thence to rooms of moderate splendor, and a chapel brightened by the stately and colorful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. There the Medici lived till 1538, with interludes of banishment; but surely they often left those gloomy walls to take the sun at the villas that Cosimo built outside the city in Careggi and Cafaggiolo, and on the slopes of Fiesole. It was in those rural retreats that Cosimo and Lorenzo, with their friends and protégés, took refuge from politics in poetry, philosophy, and art; and to Careggi father and grandson retired for their rendezvous with death. Glancing now and then beyond the grave, Cosimo gave substantial sums to raise an abbey at Fiesole, and to rebuild more commodiously the old convent of San Marco. There Michelozzo designed graceful cloisters, a library for Niccoli’s books, and a cell where, occasionally, Cosimo withdrew even from his friends, and spent a day in meditation and prayer.

In these enterprises Michelozzo was his favorite architect and the unfailing friend who accompanied him into exile, and returned with him. Soon thereafter the Signory gave Michelozzo the delicate task of reinforcing the Palazzo Vecchio against threatened collapse. He restored the church of Santissima Annunziata, made a lovely tabernacle for it, and showed himself a sculptor too by adorning it with a statue of St. John the Baptist. For Cosimo’s son Piero he built a magnificent marble chapel in the hillside church of San Miniato. He pooled his skill with Donatello’s to design and carve the charming “pulpit of the girdle” on the façade of the Prato cathedral. In any other country in that age Michelozzo would have led his architectural tribe.

Meanwhile the merchant aristocracy was raising proud civic halls and palaces. In 1376 the Signory commissioned Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti to build a portico opposite the Palazzo Vecchio as a rostrum for governmental oratory; in the sixteenth century it came to be known as the Loggia dei Lanzi from the German lancers that Duke Cosimo I stationed there. The most magnificent private palace in Florence was built (1459) for the banker Luca Pitti by Luca Fancelli from plans made by Brunellesco nineteen years before. Pitti was almost as rich as Cosimo, but not so wisely modest; he contested Cosimo’s power, and drew from him some sharp counsel:

You strive toward the indefinite, I toward the definite. You plant your ladder in the air, I place mine on the ground…. It seems to me but just and natural that I should desire the honor and reputation of my house to surpass yours. Let us therefore do like two big dogs, which sniff at one another when they meet, show their teeth, and then go their separate ways. You will attend to your affairs, I to mine.³⁹

Pitti continued to plot; after Cosimo’s death he conspired to displace Piero de’ Medici from power. He committed the only crime universally condemned in the Renaissance—he failed. He was banished and ruined, and his palace remained unfinished for a century.

VI. SCULPTURE

1. Ghiberti

The imitation of classic forms was more thorough in sculpture than in architecture. The sight and study of Roman ruins, and the occasional recovery of some Roman masterpiece, stirred the sculptors of Italy to an emulative ecstasy. When the Hermaphrodite that now lies in the Borghese Gallery—with its neutral back modestly turned to the spectator—was found in the vineyard of San Celso, Ghiberti wrote of it: “No tongue could describe the learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style”; the perfection of such works, he said, eluded the eye, and could be appreciated only by passing the hand over the marble surface and curves.⁴⁰ As these exhumed relics grew in number and familiarity, the Italian mind slowly accustomed itself to the nude in art; the study of anatomy became as much at home in artists’ botteghe as in medical halls; soon nude models were used without fear and without reproach. So stimulated, sculpture graduated from subservience to architecture, and from stone or stucco reliefs to statues of bronze or marble in the round.

But it was in relief that sculpture won its first and most famous triumph in the Florence of Cosimo’s time. The ugly striated Baptistery that fronted the cathedral could only be redeemed by incidental ornament. Iacopo Torriti had adorned the tribune, and Andrea Tafi the cupola, with crowded mosaics; Andrea Pisano had molded a double bronze portal for the south façade (1330–6); now (1401) the Florentine Signory, in conjunction with the Guild of Wool Merchants, and to persuade the Deity to end a plague, voted a generous sum to provide the Baptistery with a bronze door for the north side. A competition was opened; all the artists of Italy were invited to submit designs; the most successful—Brunellesco, Iacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and a few others—were commissioned and paid to cast in bronze a sample panel showing the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. A year later the completed panels were submitted to thirty-four judges—sculptors, painters, and goldsmiths. It was generally agreed that Ghiberti’s was the best; and the youth of twenty-five began the first pair of his famous bronze doors.

Only those who have closely studied this north portal can understand why it took the better part of twenty-one years to design and cast. Ghiberti was aided, in generous fellowship, by Donatello, Michelozzo, and a large corps of assistants; it was as if all were resolved, and all Florence expected, that these should be the finest bronze reliefs in the history of art. Ghiberti divided the pair into twenty-eight panels: twenty told the life of Christ, four pictured Apostles, four represented Doctors of the Church. When all these had been designed, criticized, redesigned, cast, and set in place on the door, the donors, not grudging the 22,000 florins ($550,000) already spent, engaged Ghiberti to make a corresponding double door for the east side of the Baptistery (1425). In this second undertaking, covering twenty-seven years, Ghiberti had as assistants men already renowned or soon to be: Brunellesco, Antonio Filarete, Paolo Uccello, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and others; his studio became in the process a school of art that nurtured a dozen geniuses. As the first pair of doors had illustrated the New Testament, so now, in ten panels, Ghiberti presented Old Testament scenes, from the creation of man to the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon; in the borders he added twenty figures in almost full relief, and varied ornament—animal and floral—of surpassing loveliness. Here the Middle Ages and the Renaissance met in perfect harmony: in the very first panel the medieval themes of the creation of Adam, the temptation of Eve, and the expulsion from Eden were treated with a classic flow of drapery and a bold exuberance of nudes; and Eve emerging from Adam’s flesh rivaled the Hellenistic relief of Aphrodite rising from the sea. Men were astonished to find, in the background of the actions, landscapes almost as precise in perspective, and as rich in detail, as in the best painting of the time. Some complained that this sculpture infringed too much on painting, and overstepped the traditions of classical relief; it was academically true, but the effect was vivid and superb. This second double door was by common consent even finer than the first; Michelangelo considered it “so fine that it would grace the entrance of paradise”; and Vasari, doubtless thinking only of reliefs, pronounced it “perfect in every particular, the finest masterpiece in the world, whether among the ancients or the moderns.”⁴¹ Florence was so pleased that it elected Ghiberti to the Signory, and gave him a substantial property to support his declining years.

2. Donatello

Vasari thought that Donatello had been among the artists chosen to make trial panels for the Baptistery doors; but Donatello was only a lad of sixteen at the time. The affectionate diminutive by which his friends and posterity named him denoted Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. He learned his art only partly in Ghiberti’s studio; he soon struck out for himself, passed from the feminine grace of Ghibertian relief to virile statuary in the round, and revolutionized sculpture not so much by adopting classic methods and aims as by his uncompromising fidelity to nature, and the blunt force of his original personality and style. He was an independent spirit as tough as his David, as bold as his St. George.

His genius did not develop as rapidly as Ghiberti’s, but it reached greater scope and heights. When it matured it spawned masterpieces with reckless fertility, until Florence was populated with his statues, and countries beyond the Alps echoed his fame. At twenty-two he rivaled Ghiberti by carving for Or San Michele a figure of St. Peter; at twenty-seven he surpassed him by adding to that edifice a St. Mark so strong and simple and sincere that “it would have been impossible,” said Michelangelo, “to reject the Gospel preached by such a straightforward man as this.”*⁴² At twenty-three Donatello was engaged to carve a David for the cathedral; it was only the first of many Davids made by him; the subject never ceased to please his fancy; perhaps his finest work is the bronze David ordered by Cosimo, cast in 1430, set up in the courtyard of the Medici palace, and now in the Bargello. Here the nude figure in the round made its unblushing debut in Renaissance sculpture: a body smooth with the firm texture of youthful flesh, a face perhaps too Greek in profile, a helmet certainly too Greek; in this instance Donatello put realism aside, indulged his imagination richly, and almost equaled Michelangelo’s more famous figure of the future Hebrew king.

He was not so successful with the Baptist; it was a dour subject alien to his earthly spirit; the two statues of John in the Bargello are lifeless and absurd. Far finer is a stone relief of a child’s head, named for no good reason San Giovannino— the youthful St. John. In the same Salone Donatelliano St. George unites all the idealism of a militant Christianity with the restrained lines of Greek art: a figure firmly and confidently poised, a body mature and strong, a head Gothically oval and yet prefiguring the classic Brutus of Buonarotti. For the cathedral façade at Florence he made two powerful figures—of Jeremiah and Habbakuk, the latter so bald that Donatello called him lo Zuccone, “the big pumpkin.” On the Loggia dei Lanzi Donatello’s bronze Judith, commissioned by Cosimo, still brandishes her sword over Holofernes; the wine-drugged general sleeps placidly before his decapitation; he is masterfully conceived and cast; but the young tyrannicide, overwhelmed with drapery, approaches her deed with inopportune calm.

On a brief trip to Rome (1432) Donatello designed a classic tabernacle in marble for the old St. Peter’s. Probably in Rome he studied the portrait busts that had survived from the days of the Empire; in any case it was he who developed the first significant portrait sculpture of the Renaissance. His chef-d’oeuvre in portraiture was his bust, in painted terra cotta, of the politician Niccolò da Uzzano; here he amused and expressed himself with a realism that offered no compliments but revealed a man. Donatello made his own discovery of the old truth that art need not always pursue beauty, but must seek to select and reveal significant form. Many dignitaries risked the veracity of his chisel, sometimes to their discomfiture. A Genoese merchant, dissatisfied with himself as Donatello saw him, haggled about the price; the matter was referred to Cosimo, who judged that Donatello had asked too little. The merchant complained that the artist had taken only a month for the work, so that the fee demanded came to half a florin ($12.50) per day—too much, he thought, for a mere artist. Donatello smashed the bust into a thousand pieces, saying that this was a man who could bargain intelligently only about beans.⁴³

The cities of Italy appreciated him better, and competed for his services. Siena, Rome, and Venice lured him for a time, but Padua saw him fashion his masterpiece. In the church of St. Anthony he carved a marble screen for the altar that covered the bones of the great Franciscan; and over it he placed moving reliefs and a bronze Crucifixion most tenderly conceived. In the piazza before the church he set up (1453) the first important equestrian statue of modern times; inspired, doubtless, by the mounted Aurelius in Rome, but thoroughly Renaissance in face and mood; no idealized philosopher-king, but a man of visibly contemporary character, fearless, ruthless, powerful—Gattamelata, “the honeyed cat,” the Venetian general. It is true that the chafing, foaming horse is too big for his legs, and that the pigeons, innocent of Vasari, daily bespatter the bald head of the conquering condottiere; but the pose is proud and strong, as if all the virtu of Machiavelli’s longing had here passed with the fused bronze to harden in Donatello’s mold. Padua gazed in astonishment and glory at this hero rescued from mortality, gave the artist 1650 golden ducats ($41,250) for his six years of toil, and begged him to make their city his home. He whimsically demurred: his art could never improve at Padua, where all men praised him; he must, for art’s sake, return to Florence, where all men criticized all.

In truth he returned to Florence because Cosimo needed him, and he loved Cosimo. Cosimo was a man who understood art, and gave him intelligent and bountiful commissions; so close was the entente between them that Donatello “divined from the slightest indication all that Cosimo desired.”⁴⁴ At Donatello’s suggestion Cosimo collected ancient statuary, sarcophagi, arches, columns, and capitals, and placed them in the Medici gardens for young artists to study. For Cosimo, with Michelozzo’s collaboration, Donatello set up in the Baptistery a tomb of the refugee Antipope John XXIII. For Cosimo’s favorite church, San Lorenzo, he carved two pulpits, and adorned them with bronze reliefs of the Passion; from those pulpits, among others, Savonarola would launch his bolts against later Medici. For the altar he molded a lovely terra-cotta bust of St. Lawrence; for the Old Sacristy he designed two pairs of bronze doors, and a simple but beautiful sarcophagus for Cosimo’s parents. Other works came from him as if they were child’s play: an exquisite stone relief of the Annunciation for the church of Santa Croce; for the cathedral a Cantoria of Singing Boys—plump putti violently chanting hymns (1433–8); a bronze bust of a Young Man, the incarnation of healthy youth (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art); a Santa Cecilia (possibly by Desiderio da Settignano), fair enough to be the Christian muse of song; a bronze relief of the Crucifixion (in the Bargello) overpowering in its realistic detail; and in Santa Croce another Crucifixion, a gaunt and solitary figure in wood, one of the most moving representations of this scene, despite Brunellesco’s criticism of it as “a crucified peasant.”

Patron and artist grew old together, and Cosimo took such care of the sculptor that Donatello rarely thought about money. He kept his funds, says Vasari, in a basket suspended from the ceiling of his studio, and bade his aides and friends take from it according to their needs, without consulting him. When Cosimo was dying (1464) he recommended Donatello to the care of his son Piero; Piero gave the old artist a house in the country, but Donatello soon returned to Florence, preferring his accustomed studio to the sunshine and insects of the countryside. He lived in simplicity and content till the age of eighty. All the artists—nearly all the people—of Florence joined in the funeral that laid him to rest, as he had asked, in the crypt of San Lorenzo, beside Cosimo’s own tomb (1466).

He had immeasurably advanced the sculptural art. Now and then he poured too much force into his poses and designs; often he fell short of the finished form that exalts Ghiberti’s doors. But his faults were due to his resolve to express not beauty so much as life, not merely a strong and healthy body but a complex character or mental state. He developed sculptural portraiture by extending it from the religious to the secular field, and by giving his subjects an unprecedented variety, individuality, and power. Overcoming a hundred technical difficulties, he created the first great equestrian statue left to us by the Renaissance. Only one sculptor would reach greater heights, and then by inheriting what Donatello had learned, achieved, and taught. Bertoldo was Donatello’s pupil, and the teacher of Michelangelo.

3. Luca della Robbia

The picture that takes form in our minds, as we read Vasari’s biographies of Ghiberti and Donatello, shows the studio of a Renaissance sculptor as the co-operative enterprise of many hands, directed by one mind, but transmitting the art, day by day, from master to apprentice, generation after generation. From such studios came minor sculptors who left to history a less imperious fame, but in their degree contributed to give to passing beauty a lasting form. Nanni di Banco inherited a fortune, and had the means to be worthless; but he fell in love with sculpture and Donatello, and served a faithful apprenticeship under him until he could set up his own studio. He carved a St. Philip for the niche of the shoemakers’ guild in Or San Michele, and for the cathedral a St. Luke seated with the Gospel in his hand, and looking out with all the confidence of fresh faith upon a Renaissance Italy just beginning to doubt.

In another studio the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino combined their skills in architecture and sculpture. Bernardo designed a classic tomb in Santa Croce for Leonardo Bruni; then, on the accession of Nicholas V he went to Rome, and consumed himself in the great Pope’s architectural revolution. Antonio reached his zenith at thirty-four (1461) with his marble tomb in San Miniato, at Florence, for Don Jayme, Cardinal of Portugal; here is the victory of the classic style in all but the angel’s wings, the Cardinal’s vestments, and his crown of virginity—for James had startled his time by his chastity. America has two lovely examples of Antonio’s work—the marble bust of The Christ Child in the Morgan Library, and The Young St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery. And is there anywhere a nobler example of realistic portraiture than the powerful head—corrugated with veins and furrowed with thought—of the physician Giovanni di San Miniato, in the Victoria and Albert Museum?

Desiderio da Settignano came to Florence from the nearby village that gave him his cognomen. He joined Donatello’s staff, saw that the master’s work lacked only patient finish, and distinguished his own productions with elegance, simplicity, and grace. His tomb for Marsuppini did not quite equal Rossellino’s for Bruni, but the tabernacle that he designed for the church of San Lorenzo (1464) pleased all who saw it; and his incidental portraits* and reliefs augmented his fame. He died at thirty-six; what might he have done if given, like his master, eighty years?

Luca della Robbia was granted eighty-two, and used them well; he raised terra-cotta work almost to the level of a major art, and his fame out-journeyed Donatello’s; there is hardly a museum in Europe that does not display the tenderness of his Madonnas, the cheerful blue and white of his painted clay. Beginning as a goldsmith like so many artists of the Renaissance, and learning in that minuscule field all the delicacies of design, he passed on to sculptural relief, and carved five marble plaques for Giotto’s Campanile. Perhaps the wardens of the cathedral did not tell Luca that these reliefs excelled Giotto’s, but they soon commissioned him to adorn the organ loft with a relief picturing choir boys and girls in the ecstasy of song. Two years later (1433) Donatello carved a similar Cantoria. The rival reliefs now face each other in the Opera di duomo or Works of the Cathedral; both of them powerfully convey the exuberant vitality of childhood; here the Renaissance rediscovered children for art. In 1446 the wardens engaged him to make reliefs for the bronze doors of a cathedral sacristy. These could not rival Ghiberti’s but they saved Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life in the Pazzi conspiracy. All Florence now acclaimed Luca as a master.

So far he had followed the traditional methods of the sculptor’s art. Meanwhile, however, he had been experimenting with clay, seeking to find a way in which this tractable material could be made as beautiful in texture as marble. He molded the clay into the form designed, covered it with a glaze of divers chemicals, and baked it in a specially constructed kiln. The wardens admired the result, and commissioned him to place terra-cotta representations of the Resurrection and the Ascension over the doors of the cathedral sacristies (1443, 1446). These tympanums, though in monochrome white, made a stir by the novelty of their material and the refinement of their finish and design. Cosimo and his son Piero ordered similar terra cottas for the Medici palace and for Piero’s chapel in San Miniato; in these Luca added blue to the dominant white. Orders came to him now in an abundance that tempted him to rapid facility. He brightened with a terra-cotta Coronation of the Virgin the portal of the church of the Ognissanti, and the portal of the Badia with a tenderly graceful Madonna and Child, between such angels as might reconcile us to an eternity of heaven. For the church of San Giovanni in Pistoia he attempted a large terra-cotta Visitation; it was a fresh departure in the aged features of Elizabeth and the youthful innocence and diffidence of Mary. So Luca created a new realm of art, and founded a della Robbia dynasty that would flourish till the end of the century.

VII. PAINTING

1. Masaccio

In fourteenth-century Italy painting dominated sculpture; in the fifteenth century sculpture dominated painting; in the sixteenth painting again took the lead. Perhaps the genius of Giotto in the trecento, of Donatello in the quattrocento, of Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian in the cinquecento played some part in this alteration; and yet genius is more a function than a cause of the spirit of an age. Perhaps in Giotto’s time the recovery and revelation of classic sculpture had not yet provided such stimulus and direction as they were to give to Ghiberti and Donatello. But that stimulus reached its height in the sixteenth century; why did it not lift the Sansovinos and Cellinis, as well as Michelangelo, above the painters of that time? —and why was Michelangelo, primarily a sculptor, forced more and more into painting?

Was it because Renaissance art had tasks and needs too wide and deep for sculpture? Art, liberated by intelligent and opulent patronage, wished to cover the whole field of representation and ornament. To do this with statuary would have taken time, toil, and money prohibitively; painting could more readily express the double gamut of Christian and pagan ideas in a hurried and exuberant age. What sculptor could have portrayed the life of St. Francis as rapidly as Giotto and with Giotto’s excellence? Moreover, Renaissance Italy included a majority of persons whose feelings and ideas were still medieval, and even the emancipated minority harbored echoes and memories of the old theology, of its hopes and fears and mystic visions, its devotion and tenderness and pervasive spiritual overtones; all these, as well as the beauties and ideals expressed in Greek and Roman sculpture, had to find vent and form in Italian art; and painting offered to do it at least more conveniently, if not also with greater fidelity and subtlety, than sculpture. Sculpture had studied the body so long and lovingly that it was not at home in representing the soul, though Gothic carvers had now and then made spiritual stone. Renaissance art had to portray both body and soul, face and feeling; it had to be sensitive to, take the impress of, all the range and moods of piety, affection, passion, suffering, skepticism, sensualism, pride, and power. Only laborious genius could accomplish this with marble, bronze, or clay; when Ghiberti and Donatello attempted it they had to carry into sculpture the methods, perspectives, and nuances of painting, and sacrificed to vivid expression the ideal form and placid repose required of Greek statuary in the Golden Age. Finally, the painter spoke a language more easily understood by the people, in colors that seized the eye, in scenes or narratives that told beloved tales; the Church found that painting moved the people more quickly, touched their hearts more intimately, than any carving of cold marble or casting of somber bronze. As the Renaissance progressed, and art broadened its scope and aim, sculpture receded into the background, painting advanced; and as sculpture had been the highest art expression of the Greeks, so now painting, widening its field, varying its forms, improving its skills, became the supreme and characteristic art, the very face and soul, of the Renaissance.

In this period it was still groping and immature. Paolo Uccello studied perspective until nothing else interested him. Fra Angelico was the perfection, in life and art, of the medieval ideal. Only Masaccio felt the new spirit that would soon triumph in Botticelli, Leonardo, and Raphael.

Certain minor talents had transmitted the techniques and traditions of the art. Giotto taught Gaddo Gaddi, who taught Taddeo Gaddi, who taught Agnolo Gaddi, who, as late as 1380, adorned Santa Croce with frescoes still in Giottesque style. Agnolo’s pupil, Cennino Cennini, gathered into a Libro dell’ arte (1437) the accumulated knowledge of his time in drawing, composition, mosaic, pigments, oils, varnishes, and other phases of the painter’s work. “Here,” says page one, “begins the Book of the Art, made and composed in the reverence of God and the Virgin Mary… and all the saints… and in the reverence of Giotto, of Taddeo, and of Agnolo”;⁴⁵ art was becoming a religion. Agnolo’s greatest pupil was a Camaldulese monk, Lorenzo Monaco. In the magnificent altarpiece—The Coronation of the Virgin—that Lawrence the Monk painted (1413) for his monastery “of the Angels,” a fresh vigor of conception and execution appeared; the faces were individualized, the colors were brilliant and strong. But in that triptych there was no perspective; the figures in the rear rose taller than those in the foreground, like heads in an audience seen from the stage. Who would teach Italian painters the science of perspective?

Brunellesco, Ghiberti, Donatello had made approaches to it. Paolo Uccello almost gave his life to the problem; night after night he pored over it, to the fury of his wife. “How charming a thing is this perspective!” he told her; “ah, if I could only get you to understand its delights!”⁴⁶ Nothing seemed to Paolo more beautiful than the steady approximation and distant merging of parallel lines in the furrows of a pictured field. Aided by a Florentine mathematician, Antonio Manetti, he set himself to formulate the laws of perspective; he studied how to represent accurately the receding arches of a vault, the ungainly enlargement of objects as they advanced into the foreground, the peculiar distortion of columns arranged in a curve. At last he felt that he had reduced these mysteries to rules; through these rules one dimension could convey the illusion of three; painting could represent space and depth; this, to Paolo, seemed a revolution as great as any in the history of art. He illustrated his principles in his painting, and colored the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella with frescoes that startled his contemporaries but have yielded to the erosion of time. Still surviving is his vivid portrait of Sir John Hawkwood on a wall of the cathedral (1436); the proud condottiere, having turned his arms from attacking to defending Florence, now joined, in the duomo, the company of scholars and saints.

Meanwhile another line of, development had reached from the same origin to the same end. Antonio Veneziano was a follower of Giotto; Gherardo Stamina was a pupil of Veneziano; from Stamina stemmed Masolino da Panicale, who taught Masaccio. Masolino and Masaccio made their own studies of perspective; Masolino was one of the first Italians to paint nudes; Masaccio was the first to apply the new principles of perspective with a success that opened the eyes of his generation, and began a new era in pictorial art.

His real name was Tommaso Guidi di San Giovanni; Masaccio was a nickname meaning Big Thomas, as Masolino meant Little Thomas; Italy was fond of giving such identifying marks to her children. Taking to the brush at an early age, he so lost himself in devotion to painting that he neglected everything else—his clothes, his person, his income, his debts. He worked a while with Ghiberti, and may have learned in that bottega-academy the anatomical precision that was to be one mark of his drawing. He studied the frescoes that Masolino was painting in the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, and noted with special delight their experiments in perspective and foreshortening. On a pillar in the abbey church known as the Badia he represented St. Ivo of Brittany with feet foreshortened as seen from below; the spectators refused to believe that a saint could have such mighty feet. In Santa Maria Novella, as part of a fresco of the Trinity, he pictured a barrel vault in such perfect diminishing perspective that the eye seemed to see the painted ceiling as sunk into the church wall.

The epochal masterpiece that made him the teacher of three generations was his continuation of Masolino’s Brancacci Chapel frescoes on the life of St. Peter (1423). The incident of the tribute money was represented by the young artist with a new power of conception and veracity of line: Christ with stern nobility, Peter in angry majesty, the tax collector with the lithe frame of a Roman athlete, every Apostle individualized in feature, raiment, and pose. Buildings and background hills illustrated the young science of perspective; and Tommaso himself, self-portrayed by posing to a mirror, became a bearded apostle in the crowd. While he was working on this series the chapel was consecrated with processional ceremony; Masaccio watched the ritual with sharp retentive eye, then reproduced it in a fresco in the cloister; Brunellesco, Donatello, Masolino, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, and Antonio Brancacci, sponsor of the chapel, had taken part, and now found themselves in the picture.

In 1425, for reasons now unknown, Masaccio left his work unfinished, and went to Rome. We do not hear of him again, and we can only surmise that some accident or disease prematurely ended his life. But even though incomplete those Brancacci frescoes were recognized at once as an immense step forward in painting. In those bold nudes, graceful draperies, startling perspectives, realistic foreshortenings, and precise anatomical details, in this modeling in depth through subtle gradations of light and shade, all sensed a new departure, which Vasari called the “modern” style. Every ambitious painter within reach of Florence came to study the series: Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Castagno, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, Michelangelo, Raphael; no dead man had ever had such distinguished pupils, no artist since Giotto had wielded, unwittingly, such influence. “Masaccio,” said Leonardo, “showed by perfect works that those who are led by any guide except Nature, the supreme mistress, are consumed in sterile toil.”⁴⁷

2. Fra Angelico

Amid these exciting novelties Fra Angelico went quietly his own medieval way. Born in a Tuscan village and named Guido di Pietro, he came to Florence young, and studied painting, probably with Lorenzo Monaco. His talent ripened quickly, and he had every prospect of making a comfortable place for himself in the world, but the love of peace and the hope of salvation led him to enter the Dominican order (1407). After a long novitiate in various cities, Fra Giovanni, as he had been renamed, settled down in the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole (1418). There, in happy obscurity, he illuminated manuscripts, and painted pictures for churches and religious confraternities. In 1436 the friars of San Domenico were transferred to the new convent of San Marco, built by Michelozzo at Cosimo’s order and expense. During the next nine years Giovanni painted half a hundred frescoes on the walls of the monastery church, chapter house, dormitory, refectory, hospice, cloisters, and cells. Meanwhile he practised religion with such modest devotion that his fellow friars called him the Angelic Brother—Fra Angelico. No one ever saw him angry, or succeeded in offending him. Thomas à Kempis would have found fully realized in him the Imitation of Christ, except for one smiling lapse: in a Last Judgment the angelic Dominican could not resist placing a few Franciscan friars in hell.⁴⁸

Painting, with Fra Giovanni, was a religious exercise as well as an esthetic release and joy; he painted in much the same mood in which he prayed, and he never painted without praying first. Protected from the harsh competitions of life, he saw it all as a hymn of divine atonement and love. His subjects were invariably religious—the life of Mary and Christ, the blessed in heaven, the lives of the saints and the generals of his order. His aim was not so much to create beauty as to inspire piety. In the chapter house where the friars held their assemblies he painted the picture that the prior thought should most frequently be in their minds—the Crucifixion; a powerful representation, in which Angelico showed his study of the nude, and at the same time the all-embracing quality of his Christianity; here, at the foot of the cross, along with St. Dominic, were the founders of rival orders—Augustine, Benedict, Bernard, Francis, John Gualberto of the Vallombrosans, Albert of the Carmelites. In a lunette over the entrance to the hospice, where the friars were required to offer hospitality to any wayfarer, Angelico told the story of the pilgrim who proved to be Christ; every pilgrim was to be treated as if he might be so revealed. Within the hospice are now gathered some of the subjects painted by Angelico for divers churches and guilds: the Madonna of the Linaioli (linen workers), where the angel choristers have the pliant figures of women and the smiling faces of guileless children; a Descent from the Cross, equal in beauty and tenderness to any of the thousand representations of that scene in the art of the Renaissance; and a Last Judgment, a bit too symmetrical, and crowded with lurid and repellent fantasies, as if to forgive were human and to hate were divine. At the top of the staircase leading to the cells stands Angelico’s masterpiece, The Annunciation— an angel of infinite grace already in his obeisance revering the future Mother of God, and Mary bowing and crossing her hands in humble incredulity. In each of the half hundred cells the loving friar, aided by his friar pupils, found time to paint a fresco recalling some inspiring Gospel scene—the Transfiguration, the communion of the Apostles, Magdalen anointing the feet of Christ. In the double cell where Cosimo played monk, Angelico painted a Crucifixion, and an Adoration of the Kings gorgeous with such Eastern costumes as perhaps the artist had seen in the Council of Florence. In his own cell he pictured the Coronation of the Virgin. It was his favorite subject, which he painted time and again; the Uffizi Gallery has one form of it, the Academy at Florence another, the Louvre a third; best of all is that which Angelico painted for the dormitory of San Marco, wherein the figures of Christ and Mary are among the most exquisite in the history of art.

The fame of these devout creations brought Giovanni hundreds of proffered commissions. To all such seekers he replied that they must first obtain the consent of his prior; that secured, he would not fail them. When Nicholas V asked him to come to Rome he left his Florentine cell and went to decorate the chapel of the Pope with scenes from the lives of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence; they are still among the most pleasant sights in the Vatican. Nicholas so admired the painter that he offered to make him archbishop of Florence; Angelico excused himself, and recommended his beloved prior; Nicholas accepted the suggestion, and Fra Antonino remained a saint even under the pallium.

No painter except El Greco ever made a style so uniquely his own as Fra Angelico; even a novice can identify his hand. A simplicity of line and form going back to Giotto; a narrow but ethereal assemblage of colorsgold, vermilion, scarlet, blue, and green—reflecting a bright spirit and happy faith; figures perhaps too simply imaged, and almost without anatomy; faces beautiful and gentle, but too pale to be alive, too monotonously alike in monks, angels, and saints, conceived rather as flowers in paradise; and all redeemed by an ideal spirit of tender devotion, a purity of mood and thought recalling the finest moments of the Middle Ages, and never to be captured again by the Renaissance. This was the final cry of the medieval spirit in art.

Fra Giovanni worked for a year in Rome, for a time in Orvieto; served for three years as prior of the Dominican convent in Fiesole; was called back to Rome, and died there at the age of sixty-eight. Probably it was Lorenzo Valla’s classic pen that wrote his epitaph:

Non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles,

sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam;

altera nam terris opera extant, altera coelo.

urbs me loannem Flos tulit Etruriae:—

“Let it not be to my praise that I was as another Apelles, but that I gave all my gains, O Christ, to your faithful; for some works are for the earth, some for heaven. I, Giovanni, was a child of the Tuscan City of Florence.”

3. Fra Filippo Lippi

From the gentle Angelico, crossed with the lusty Masaccio, came the art of a man who preferred life to eternity. Filippo, son of the butcher Tommaso Lippi, was born in Florence in a poor street behind the convent of the Carmelites. Orphaned at two, he was reluctantly reared by an aunt, who rid herself of him when he was eight by entering him into the Carmelite order. Instead of studying the books assigned to him he covered their margins with caricatures. The prior, noting their excellence, set him to drawing the frescoes that Masaccio had just painted in the Carmelite church. Soon the lad was painting frescoes of his own in that same church; they have disappeared, but Vasari thought them as good as Masaccio’s. At the age of twenty-six (1432) Filippo left the monastery; he continued to call himself Fra, brother, friar, but he lived in the “world” and supported himself by his art. Vasari tells a story that tradition has accepted, though we cannot test its truth.

Filippo is said to have been so amorous that when he saw a woman who pleased him he would have given all his possessions to have her; and if he could not succeed in this he quieted the flame of his love by painting her portrait. This appetite so took possession of him that while the humor lasted he paid little or no attention to his work. Thus, on one occasion when Cosimo was employing him, he shut him up in the house so that he might not go out and waste time. Filippo remained so for two days; but, overcome by his amorous and bestial desires, he cut up his sheet with a pair of scissors, and letting himself out of the window, devoted many days to his pleasures. When Cosimo could not find him he caused a search to be made for him, until at length Filippo returned to his labors. From that time forward Cosimo gave him liberty to go and come as he chose, repenting that he had shut him up… for, he said, geniuses are celestial forms and not pack asses…. Ever afterward he sought to hold Filippo by the bonds of affection, and was thus served by him with greater readiness.⁴⁹

In 1439 “Fra Lippo” described himself, in a letter to Piero de’ Medici, as the poorest friar in Florence, living with, and supporting with difficulty, six nieces anxious to be married.⁵⁰ His work was in demand, but apparently not as well paid as the nieces wished. His morals could not have been notoriously bad, for we find him engaged to paint pictures for various nunneries. At the convent of Santa Margherita in Prato (unless Vasari and tradition err) he fell in love with Lucrezia Buti, a nun or a ward of the nuns; he persuaded the prioress to let Lucrezia pose for him as the Virgin; soon they eloped. Despite her father’s reproaches and appeals she remained with the artist as his mistress and model, sat for many Virgins, and gave him a son, the Filippino Lippi of later fame. The wardens of the cathedral at Prato did not hold these adventures against Filippo; in 1456 they engaged him to paint the choir with frescoes illustrating the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. Stephen. These paintings, now much damaged by time, were acclaimed as masterpieces: perfect in composition, rich in color, alive with drama—coming to a climax on one side of the choir with the dance of Salome, on the other with the stoning of Stephen. Filippo found the task too wearisome for his mobility; twice he ran away from it. In 1461 Cosimo persuaded Pius II to release the artist from his monastic vows; Filippo seems to have thought himself also freed from fidelity to Lucrezia, who could no longer pose as a virgin. The Prato wardens exhausted all schemes for luring him back to his frescoes; at last, ten years after their inception, he was induced to finish them by Carlo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s illegitimate son, now an apostolic notary. In the scene of Stephen’s burial Filippo exercised all his powers—in the deceptive perspective of the architectural background, in the sharply individualized figures surrounding the corpse, and in the stout proportions and calm rotund face of Cosimo’s bastard reading the services for the dead.

Despite his sexual irregularities, and perhaps because of his amiable sensitivity to the loveliness of woman, Filippo’s finest pictures were of the Virgin.* They missed the ethereal spirituality of Angelico’s Madonnas, but they conveyed a deep sense of soft physical beauty and infinite tenderness. In Fra Lippo the Holy Family became an Italian family, surrounded with homely incidents, and the Virgin took on a sensuous loveliness heralding the pagan Renaissance. To these feminine charms Filippo in his Madonnas added an airy grace that passed down to his apprentice Botticelli.

In 1466 the city of Spoleto invited him to tell the story of the Virgin again in the apse of its cathedral. He labored conscientiously, passion having cooled; but his powers failed with his passion, and he could not repeat the excellence of his Prato murals. Amid this effort he died (1469), poisoned, Vasari thought, by the relatives of a girl whom he had seduced. The story is improbable, for Filippo was buried in the Spoleto cathedral; and there, a few years later, his son, on commission from Lorenzo de’ Medici, built for his father a splendid marble tomb.

Everyone who creates beauty deserves remembrance, but we must pass in shameful haste by Domenico Veneziano and his supposed murderer Andrea del Castagno. Domenico was called from Perugia (1439) to paint murals in Santa Maria Nuova; he had as aide a promising youth from Borgo San Sepolcro—Piero della Francesca; and in these works—now lost—he made one of the earliest Florentine experiments with paints mixed in oil. He has left us one masterpiece—the Portrait of a Woman (Berlin) with upswept hair, wistful eyes, obtrusive nose, and bulging bosom. According to Vasari, Domenico taught the new technique to Andrea del Castagno, who was also painting murals in Santa Maria Nuova. Rivalry may have marred their friendship, for Andrea was a dour and passionate man; Vasari tells how he murdered Domenico; but other records relate that Domenico outlived Andrea by four years. Andrea reached fame by his picture of the scourging of Christ, in the cloister of Santa Croce, where his tricks of perspective astonished even his fellow artists. Hidden away in the old monastery of Sant’ Apollonia in Florence are his imaginary portraits of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Farinata degli Uberti, a vivid representation of the swashbuckler Pippo Spana, and a Last Supper (1450) that seems poorly drawn and lifeless, but may have suggested an idea or two to Leonardo none the less.

VIII. A MISCELLANY

To feel with any vividness the life of art in Cosimo’s Florence we must not only contemplate those major geniuses whom we have here commemorated so hurriedly. We must enter the side streets and alleys of art and visit a hundred shops and studios where potters shaped and painted clay, or glassmakers blew or cut glass into forms of fragile loveliness, or goldsmiths fashioned precious metals or stone into gems and medals, seals and coins, and a thousand ornaments of dress or person, home or church. We must hear noisy intent artisans beating or chasing iron, copper, or bronze into weapons and armor, vessels and utensils and tools. We must watch the cabinet makers designing, carving, inlaying, or surfacing wood; engravers cutting designs into metal; and other workers chiseling chimney pieces, or tooling leather, or carving ivory, or producing delicate textiles to make flesh seductive or adorn a home. We must enter convents and see patient monks illuminating manuscripts, placid nuns stitching storied tapestries. Above all we must picture a population developed enough to understand beauty, and wise enough to give honor, sustenance, and stimulus to those who consumed themselves in its making.

Metal engraving was one of the inventions of Florence; and its Gutenberg died in the same year as Cosimo. Tommaso Finiguerra was a worker in niello—i.e., he cut designs into metal or wood, and filled the cavities with a black compound of silver and lead. One day, says a pretty story, a stray piece of paper or cloth fell upon a metal surface just inlaid; removed, it was found imprinted with the design. The tale has the earmarks of an afterthought; in any case Finiguerra and others deliberately took such impressions on paper in order to judge of the effect of the engraved patterns. Baccio Baldini (c. 1450), a Florentine goldsmith, was apparently the first to take such impressions, from incised metal surfaces, as a means of preserving and multiplying the drawings of artists. Botticelli, Mantegna, and others supplied him with designs. A generation later Marcantonio Raimondi would develop the new technique of engraving into a means of broadcasting all but the color of Renaissance paintings to the world.

We have kept for the last a man who defies classification, and can best be understood as the embodied synthesis of his time. Leon Battista Alberti lived every phase of his century except the political. He was born in Venice of a Florentine exile, returned to Florence when Cosimo was recalled, and fell in love with its art, its music, its literary and philosophical coteries. Florence responded by hailing him as almost a monstrously perfect man. He was both handsome and strong; excelled in all bodily exercises; could, with feet tied, leap over a standing man; could, in the great cathedral, throw a coin far up to ring against the vault; amused himself by taming wild horses and climbing mountains. He was a good singer, an eminent organist, a charming conversationalist, an eloquent orator, a man of alert but sober intelligence, a gentleman of refinement and courtesy, generous to all but women, whom he satirized with unpleasant persistence and possibly artificial indignation. Caring little about money, he committed the care of his property to his friends, and shared its income with them. “Men can do all things if they will,” he said; and indeed there were few major artists in the Italian Renaissance who did not excel in several arts. Like Leonardo half a century later, Alberti was a master, or at least a skilled practitioner, in a dozen fields—mathematics, mechanics, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, drama, philosophy, civil and canon law. He wrote on nearly all these subjects, including a treatise on painting that influenced Piero della Francesca and perhaps Leonardo; he added two dialogues on women and the art of love, and a famous essay on “The Care of the Family.” After painting a picture he would call in children and ask them what it meant; if it puzzled them he considered it a failure.⁵¹ He was among the first to discover the possibilities of the camera obscura. Predominantly an architect, he passed from city to city raising façades or chapels in the Roman style. In Rome he shared in planning the buildings with which, as Vasari put it, Nicholas V was “turning the capital upside down.” In Rimini he transformed the old church of San Francesco into almost a pagan temple. In Florence he raised a marble front for the church of Santa Maria Novella, and built for the Rucellai family a chapel in the church of San Pancrazio, and two palaces of simple and stately design. In Mantua he adorned the cathedral with a chapel of the Incoronata, and faced the church of Sant’ Andrea with a façade in the form of a Roman triumphal arch.

He composed a comedy, Philodoxus, in such idiomatic Latin that no one doubted him when, as a hoax on his time, he passed it off as the newly discovered work of an ancient author; and Aldus Manutius, himself a scholar, printed it as a Roman classic. He wrote his treatises in chatty dialogue form, and in “bare and simple” Italian so that even a busy businessman might read him. His religion was rather Roman than Christian, but he was always a Christian when he heard the cathedral choir. Looking far ahead, he expressed the fear that the decline of Christian belief would plunge the world into a chaos of conduct and ideas. He loved the countryside around Florence, retired to it whenever he could, and made the title character of his dialogue Teogenio say:

The society of the illustrious dead can be enjoyed by me at leisure here; and when I choose to converse with sages, statesmen, or great poets, I have but to turn to my bookshelves, and my company is better than any that your palaces can afford with all their crowd of clients and flatterers.

Cosimo agreed with him, and found no greater solace in his old age than his villas, his intimates, his art collection, and his books. He suffered severely from gout, and in his final years left the internal affairs of the state to Luca Pitti, who abused the opportunity to add to his wealth. Cosimo’s own fortune had not been diminished by his numerous charities; he whimsically complained that God kept always a step ahead of him in returning his benefactions with interest.⁵² In his country seats he applied himself to the study of Plato, under the tutelage of his protégé Ficino. When Cosimo lay dying it was on the authority of Plato’s Socrates, not on that of Christ, that Ficino promised him a life beyond the grave. Friends and enemies alike grieved over his death (1464), fearing chaos in the government; and almost the entire city followed his corpse to the tomb that he had commissioned Desiderio da Settignano to prepare for him in the church of San Lorenzo.

Patriots like Guicciardini, angered by the conduct of the later Medici, thought of him as Brutus thought of Caesar;⁵³ Machiavelli honored him as he honored Caesar.⁵⁴ Cosimo had overthrown the Republic, but the freedom he had checked was the liberty of the rich to rule the state with factious violence. Though he sullied his record with occasional cruelty, his reign was by and large one of the most genial, peaceful, and orderly periods in the history of Florence; and the other was that of the grandson who had been trained by his precedents. Rarely had any prince been so wisely generous, or so genuinely interested in the advancement of mankind. “I owe much to Plato,” said Ficino, “but to Cosimo no less; he realized for me the virtues of which Plato gave me the conception.”⁵⁵ Under him the humanist movement flowered; under him the diverse genius of Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Lippo Lippi received bountiful encouragement; under him Plato, so long overshadowed by Aristotle, returned into the mindstream of humanity. When a year had passed after Cosimo’s death, and time had had a chance to dull his glory and reveal his faults, the Florentine Signory voted to inscribe upon his tomb the noblest title it could confer: Pater Patriae, Father of His Country. And it was deserved. With him the Renaissance lifted its head; under his grandson it reached its purest excellence; under his great-grandson it conquered Rome. Many sins may be forgiven to such a dynasty.

CHAPTER IV

The Golden Age

1464–92

I. PIERO “IL GOTTOSO”

COSIMO’S son Piero, aged fifty, succeeded to his wealth, his authority, and his gout. Even from boyhood this disease of the prosperous had afflicted Piero, so that his contemporaries, to distinguish him from other Peters, called him Il Gottoso. He was a man of fair ability and good morals; he had performed reasonably well some diplomatic missions entrusted to him by his father; he was generous to his friends, to literature, religion, and art; but he lacked Cosimo’s intelligence, geniality, and tact. To cement political support Cosimo had lent large sums to influential citizens; Piero now suddenly called in these loans. Several debtors, fearing bankruptcy, proclaimed a revolution under “the name of liberty, which,” says Machiavelli, “they adopted as their ensign to give their purpose a graceful covering.”¹ For a brief interval they controlled the government; but the Medicean party soon recaptured it; and Piero continued a troubled reign until his death (1469).

He left two sons, Lorenzo aged twenty, Giuliano sixteen. Florence could not believe that such youths could successfully direct the business of their family, much less the affairs of the state. Some citizens demanded the restoration of the Republic in fact as well as form; and many feared a generation of chaos and civil war. Lorenzo surprised them.

II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LORENZO

Noting Piero’s ill health, Cosimo had done his best to prepare Lorenzo for the tasks of power. The boy had learned Greek from Joannes Argyropoulos, philosophy from Ficino, and he had absorbed education unconsciously by hearing the conversation of statesmen, poets, artists, and humanists. He learned also the arts of war, and at nineteen, in a tournament displaying the sons of Florence’s leading families, he won the first prize “not by favor, but by his own valor.”² On his armor, in that contest, was a French motto, Le temps revient, which might have been the theme of the Renaissance—“The [Golden] Age returns.” Meanwhile he had taken to writing sonnets in the style of Dante and Petrarch; and bound by fashion to write of love, he sought among the aristocracy some lady whom he might poetically desire. He chose Lucrezia Donati, and celebrated all her virtues except her regrettable chastity; for she seems never to have allowed more than the passions of the pen. Piero, thinking marriage a sure cure for romance, persuaded the youth to wed Clarice Orsini (1469), thus allying the Medici with one of the two most powerful families in Rome. On that occasion the entire city was feasted by the Medici for three successive days, and five thousand pounds of sweetmeats were consumed.

Cosimo had given the lad some practice in public affairs, and Piero, in power, widened the range of his responsibilities in finance and government. When Piero died Lorenzo found himself the richest man in Florence, perhaps in Italy. The management of his fortune and his business might have been a sufficient burden for his young shoulders, and the Republic had now a chance to reassert its authority. But the clients, debtors, friends, and appointees of the Medici were so numerous, and so anxious for the continuance of Medicean rule, that, two days after Piero’s death, a deputation of leading citizens waited upon Lorenzo at his home, and asked him to assume the guidance of the state. He was not hard to convince. The finances of the Medici firm were so entangled with those of the city that he feared ruin if the enemies or rivals of his house should capture political power. To quiet criticism of his youth, he appointed a council of experienced citizens to advise him on all matters of major concern. He consulted this council throughout his career, but he soon showed such good judgment that it rarely questioned his leadership. He offered his younger brother a generous share of power; but Giuliano loved music and poetry, jousts and love; he admired Lorenzo, and gladly resigned to him the cares and honors of government. Lorenzo ruled as Cosimo and Piero had ruled, remaining (till 1490) a private citizen, but recommending policies to a balia in which the supporters of his house had a secure majority. The balia, under the constitution, had absolute but only temporary power; under the Medici it became a permanent Council of Seventy.

The citizens acquiesced because prosperity continued. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, visited Florence in 1471, he was amazed at the signs of wealth in the city, and still more at the art that Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo had gathered in the Medici palace and gardens. Here already was a museum of statuary, vases, gems, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and architectural remains. Galeazzo averred that he had seen a greater number of fine paintings in this one collection than in all the rest of Italy; so far had Florence forged ahead in this characteristic art of the Renaissance. The Medici fortunes were further enhanced when (1471) Lorenzo led a delegation of Florentines to Rome to congratulate Sixtus IV on his elevation to the papacy; Sixtus responded by renewing the Medici management of the papal finances. Five years earlier Piero had obtained for his house the lucrative right to develop the papal mines near Civitavecchia, which produced the precious alum used in dyeing and finishing cloth.

Soon after his return from Rome Lorenzo met, not too successfully, his first major crisis. An alum mine in the district of Volterra—a part of the Florentine dominion—had been leased to private contractors probably connected with the Medici. When it proved extremely lucrative the citizens of Volterra claimed a share of the profits for their municipal revenue. The contractors protested, and appealed to the Florentine Signory; the Signory doubled the problem by decreeing that the profits should go to the general treasury of the whole Florentine state. Volterra denounced the decree, declared its independence, and put to death several citizens who opposed the secession. In the Council of Florence Tommaso Soderini recommended conciliatory measures; Lorenzo rejected them on the ground that they would encourage insurrection and secession elsewhere. His advice was taken, the revolt was suppressed by force, and the Florentine mercenaries, getting out of hand, sacked the rebellious city. Lorenzo hurried down to Volterra and labored to restore order and make amends, but the affair remained a blot on his record.

The Florentines readily forgave his severity to Volterra, and they applauded the energy with which, in 1472, he averted famine in the city by quickly securing heavy imports of grain. They were happy, too, when Lorenzo arranged a triple alliance with Venice and Milan to preserve the peace of northern Italy. Pope Sixtus was not so well pleased; the papacy could never be comfortable in its weak temporal power if a strong and united northern Italy bounded the Papal States on one side, and an extensive Kingdom of Naples hedged it in on the other. When Sixtus learned that Florence was trying to purchase the town and territory of Imola (between Bologna and Ravenna), he suspected Lorenzo of planning to extend Florentine territory to the Adriatic. Sixtus himself soon bought Imola as a necessary link in the chain of cities legally—seldom actually—subject to the popes. In this transaction he used the services and funds of the Pazzi banking firm, now the strongest rival of the Medici; he transferred from Lorenzo to the Pazzi the lucrative privilege of managing the papal revenues; and he appointed two enemies of the Medici—Girolamo Riario and Francesco Salviati—to be respectively governor of Imola and archbishop of Pisa, then a Florentine possession. Lorenzo reacted with an angry haste that Cosimo would have deplored: he took measures to ruin the Pazzi firm, and he ordered Pisa to exclude Salviati from its episcopal see. The Pope was so enraged that he gave his consent to a plot of the Pazzi, Riario, and Salviati to overthrow Lorenzo; he refused to sanction the assassination of the youth, but the conspirators did not consider such squeamishness an impediment. With remarkable indifference to religious propriety, they planned to kill Lorenzo and Giuliano at Mass in the cathedral on Easter Sunday (April 26, 1478), at the moment when the priest should elevate the Host. At the same time Salviati and others were to seize the Palazzo Vecchio and eject the Signory.

On the appointed day Lorenzo entered the cathedral unarmed and unguarded, as was his wont. Giuliano was delayed, but Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini, who had undertaken to murder him, went to his house, amused him with jests, and persuaded him to come to the church. There, as the priest raised the Host, Bandini stabbed Giuliano in the breast. Giuliano fell to the ground, and Francesco de’ Pazzi, leaping upon him, stabbed him repeatedly and with such fury that he severely cut his own leg. Meanwhile Antonio da Volterra and Stefano, a priest, attacked Lorenzo with their daggers. He protected himself with his arms, and received but a slight cut; friends surrounded him and led him into a sacristy, while his assailants fled from the hostile crowd. Giuliano was carried dead to the Medici palace.

While these ceremonies were taking place in the cathedral, Archbishop Salviati, Iacopo de’ Pazzi, and a hundred armed followers proceeded against the Palazzo Vecchio. They tried to rouse the populace to their aid by shouting Popolo! Libertà! But the people, in this crisis, rallied to the Medici with the cry, Vivano le palle!—“Long live the balls!”—the emblem of the Medici family. When Salviati entered the palace he was struck down by the gonfalonier Cesare Petrucci; Iacopo di Poggio, son of the humanist, was hanged from a palace window; and several other conspirators, who had climbed the stairs, were seized by the resolute priors and were thrown out of the windows to be finished by the stone pavement or the crowd. When Lorenzo appeared, now with a numerous escort, the joy of the people at his safety expressed itself in violent rage against all who were suspected of sharing in the conspiracy. Francesco de’ Pazzi, weak from loss of blood, was snatched from his bed and hanged beside the Archbishop, who gnawed at Francesco’s shoulder in his dying agony. The body of Iacopo de’ Pazzi, the old honored head of his family, was drawn naked through the streets and flung into the Arno. Lorenzo did what he could to mitigate the bloodthirst of the mob, and saved several men unjustly accused; but instincts stealthily latent even in civilized men could not forego this opportunity of safe expression in the anonymity of the crowd.

Sixtus IV, shocked by the hanging of an archbishop, excommunicated Lorenzo, the gonfalonier, and the magistrates of Florence, and suspended all religious services throughout the Florentine dominions. Some of the clergy protested against this interdict, and issued a document condemning the Pope in terms of unmeasured vituperation.³ At Sixtus’ suggestion Ferrante—King Ferdinand I—of Naples sent an envoy to Florence, urging the Signory and the citizens to deliver up Lorenzo to the Pope, or at least to banish him. Lorenzo advised the Signory to comply; instead it answered Ferdinand that Florence would suffer every extremity rather than betray its leader to his enemies. Sixtus and Ferrante now declared war upon Florence (1479). The King’s son Alfonso defeated the Florentine army near Poggibonsi, and ravaged the countryside.

Soon the people of Florence began to complain of the taxes levied to finance the campaign, and Lorenzo realized that no community will long sacrifice itself for an individual. He made a characteristic and unprecedented decision in this turning point of his career. Embarking at Pisa, he sailed to Naples, and asked to be taken to the King. Ferrante admired his courage; the two men were at war; Lorenzo had no safe-conduct, no weapons, no guard; only recently the condottiere Francesco Piccinino, invited to Naples as guest of the King, had been treacherously murdered at the royal command. Lorenzo frankly admitted the difficulties that Florence faced; but he pointed out how dangerous it would be to Naples that the papacy should be so strengthened by the dismemberment of the Florentine dominions as then to be able to press its old claim upon Naples as a papal and tributary fief. The Turks were advancing westward by land and sea; they might at any moment invade Italy, and attack Ferrante’s Adriatic provinces; it would not do, in that crisis, for Italy to be divided with internal hate and war. Ferrante did not commit himself, but he gave orders that Lorenzo should be detained as both a prisoner and an honored guest.

Lorenzo’s mission was made more difficult by the continued victories of Alfonso against the Florentine troops, and by the repeated request of Sixtus that Lorenzo should be sent to Rome as a papal prisoner. For three months the Florentine was kept in suspense, knowing that failure probably meant his death and an end to the independence of Florence. Meanwhile he made friends by his hospitality and generosity, his good manners and good cheer. Count Caraffa, minister of state, was won over, and supported his cause. Ferrante appreciated the culture and character of his prisoner; here, apparently, was a man of refinement and integrity; peace made with such a man would assure the friendship of Florence for Naples through at least Lorenzo’s life. He signed a treaty with him, gave him a splendid horse, and allowed him to take ship from Naples. When Florence learned that Lorenzo brought peace it gave him a grateful and tumultuous welcome. Sixtus raged, and wished to continue the war alone; but when Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, landed an army at Otranto (1480), and threatened to overrun Italy and capture the very citadel of Latin Christianity, Sixtus invited the Florentines to discuss terms. Their envoys made the due obeisances to the Pope; he scolded them properly, forgave them, persuaded them to equip fifteen galleys against the Turks, and made peace. From that time forward Lorenzo was the unchallenged lord of Tuscany.

III. LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT

He ruled now with a milder hand than in his youth. He had just entered the thirties, but men matured quickly in the hothouse of the Renaissance. He was not handsome: his large flat nose overhung his upper lip and then turned outward curiously; his complexion was dark; and his stern brow and heavy jaw belied the geniality of his spirit, the charm of his courtesy, the vivacity of his wit, the poetic sensitivity of his mind. Tall, broad-shouldered, and robust, he looked more like an athlete than a statesman; and indeed he was seldom surpassed in physical games. He carried himself with the moderate dignity indispensable to his station, but in private he made his many friends immediately forget his power and his wealth. Like his son Leo X he enjoyed the subtlest art and the simplest buffoons. He was a humorist with Pulci, a poet with Politian, a scholar with Landino, a philosopher with Ficino, a mystic with Pico, an esthete with Botticelli, a musician with Squarcialupi, a reveler with the gayest in festival time. “When my mind is disturbed with the tumults of public business,” he wrote to Ficino, “and my ears are stunned with the clamors of turbulent citizens, how could I support such contention unless I found relaxation in science?”—by which he meant the pursuit of knowledge in all its forms.⁴

His morals were not as exemplary as his mind. Like many of his contemporaries he did not allow his religious faith to hamper his enjoyment of life. He wrote devout hymns with apparent sincerity, but turned from them, without evident qualm, to poems celebrating licentious love. He seems rarely to have known remorse except for pleasures missed. Having reluctantly accepted, for political reasons, a wife whom he respected rather than loved, he amused himself with adultery after the fashion of the time. But it was accounted one of his distinctions that he had no illegitimate children. Debate is still warm as to his commercial morality. No one questions his liberality; it was as lavish as Cosimo’s. He never rested till he had repaid every gift with a greater gift; he financed a dozen religious undertakings, supported countless artists, scholars, and poets, and lent great sums to the state. After the Pazzi conspiracy he found that his public and private disbursements had left his firm unable to meet its obligations; whereupon a complaisant Council voted to pay his debts out of the state treasury (1480). It is not clear whether this was a fair return for services rendered and private funds spent for public purposes,⁵ or a plain embezzlement;⁶ the fact that the measure, though openly known, did no harm to Lorenzo’s popularity, suggests the more lenient interpretation. It was his liberality, as well as his wealth and his luxurious menage, that men had in mind when they called him Il Magnifico.

His cultural activities involved some neglect of the far-flung business of his firm. His agents took advantage of his preoccupation, and indulged in extravagance and chicanery. He rescued the family fortune by gradually withdrawing it from commerce and investing it in city realty and largescale agriculture; he took pleasure in personally supervising his farms and orchards, and was as familiar with fertilizer as with philosophy. Scientifically irrigated and manured, the lands near his villas at Careggi and Póggio a Caiano became models of agricultural economy.

The economic life of Florence prospered under his government.⁷ The rate of interest fell as low as five per cent, and commercial enterprise, readily financed, flourished until, toward the close of Lorenzo’s career, England became a troublesome competitor in the textile export trade. Even more conducive to prosperity was his policy of peace, and the balance of power that he maintained in Italy during the second decade of his rule. Florence joined with other Italian states in ejecting the Turks from Italy; this accomplished, Lorenzo induced Ferrante of Naples and Galeazzo Sforza of Milan to sign with Florence an alliance for mutual defense; when Pope Innocent VIII joined this league most of the minor states adhered to it too; Venice held aloof, but was persuaded to good behavior by fear of the allies; in this way, with some minor interruptions, the peace of Italy was maintained until Lorenzo’s death. Meanwhile he exerted all his tact and influence to protect weak states against the strong, to adjudicate and reconcile interstate interests and disputes, and to nip every casus belli in the bud.⁸ In that happy decade (1480–90) Florence reached the apogee of her glory in politics, literature, and art.

Domestically Lorenzo ruled through the Consiglio di Settanta. By the constitution of 1480 this Council of Seventy was composed of thirty members chosen by the Signory of that year, and forty others chosen by these thirty. Membership was for life, and vacancies were filled by co-optation. Under this arrangement the Signory and the gonfalonier had authority only as executive agents of the Council. Popular parlamenti and elections were dispensed with. Opposition was difficult, for Lorenzo employed spies to detect it, and had means of troubling his opponents financially. The old factions slept; crime hid its head; order prospered while liberty declined. “We have here,” wrote a contemporary, “no robberies, no nocturnal commotions, no assassinations. By night or by day every person may transact his affairs in perfect safety.”⁹ “If Florence was to have a tyrant,” said Guicciardini, “she could never have found a better or more delightful one.”¹⁰ The merchants preferred economic prosperity to political freedom; the proletariat was kept busy with extensive public works, and forgave dictatorship so long as Lorenzo supplied it with bread and games. Tournaments allured the rich, horse races thrilled the bourgeoisie, and pageants amused the populace.

It was the custom of the Florentines, in carnival days, to promenade the streets in gay or frightful masks, singing satiric or erotic songs, and to organize trionfi—parades of painted and garlanded floats representing mythological or historical characters or events. Lorenzo relished the custom, but distrusted its tendency to disorder; he resolved to bring it under control by lending it the approval and order of government; under his rule the pageants became the most popular feature of Florentine life. He engaged leading artists to design and paint the chariots, banners, and costumes; he and his friends composed lyrics to be sung from the carri; and these songs reflected the moral relaxation of carnival. The most famous of Lorenzo’s pageants was the “Triumph of Bacchus,” wherein a procession of floats carrying lovely maidens, and a cavalcade of richly garbed youths on prancing steeds, came over the Ponte Vecchio to the spacious square before the cathedral, while voices in polyphonic harmony, to the accompaniment of cymbals and lutes, sang a poem composed by Lorenzo himself, and hardly becoming a cathedral:

1. Quanto è bella giovinezza,

Che si fuge tutta via!

Chi vuol esser lieto sia!

Di doman non c’è certezza.

1. Fair is youth and void of sorrow,

But it hourly flies away.

Youths and maids, enjoy today;

Nought ye know about tomorrow.

2. This is Bacchus and the bright

Ariadne, lovers true!

They, in flying time’s despite,

Each with each finds pleasures new;

3. These, their nymphs, and all their

crew

Keep perpetual holiday.

Youths and maids, enjoy today;

Nought ye know about tomorrow……

14. Ladies and gay lovers young!

Long live Bacchus, live Desire!

Dance and play, let songs be sung;

Let sweet love your bosoms

fire.

15. In the future come what may

Youths and maids enjoy today;

Nought ye know about tomorrow.¹¹

Such poems and pageants lend some pale color to the charge that Lorenzo corrupted Florentine youth. Probably it would have been “corrupt” without him; morals in Venice, Ferrara, and Milan were no better than in Florence; they were better in Florence under the Medici bankers than later in Rome under the Medici popes.

Lorenzo’s esthetic sensibilities were too keen for his morals. Poetry was one of his prime devotions, and his compositions rivaled the best of his time. While his only superior, Politian, still hesitated between Latin and Italian, Lorenzo’s verses restored to the vernacular the literary primacy that Dante had established and the humanists had overthrown. He preferred Petrarch’s sonnets to the love poetry of the Latin classics, though he could read these easily in the original; and more than once he himself composed a sonnet that might have graced Petrarch’s Canzoniere. But he did not take poetic love too seriously. He wrote with finer sincerity about the rural scenes that gave exercise to his limbs and peace to his mind; his best poems celebrate the woods and streams, trees and flowers, flocks and shepherds, of the countryside. Sometimes he wrote humorous pieces in terza rima that lifted the simple language of the peasantry into sprightly verse; sometimes he composed satirical farces Rabelaisianly free; then, again, a religious play for his children, and some hymns that catch here and there a note of honest piety. But his most characteristic poems were the Canti carnascialeschi— Carnival Songs—written to be sung in festival time and mood, and expressing the legitimacy of pleasure and the discourtesy of maidenly prudence. Nothing could better illustrate the morals and manners, the complexity and diversity of the Italian Renaissance than the picture of its most central character ruling a state, managing a fortune, jousting in tournament, writing excellent poetry, supporting artists and authors with discriminating patronage, mingling at ease with scholars and philosophers, peasants and buffoons, marching in pageants, singing bawdy songs, composing tender hymns, playing with mistresses, begetting a pope, and honored throughout Europe as the greatest and noblest Italian of his time.

IV. LITERATURE: THE AGE OF POLITIAN

Encouraged by his aid and example, Florentine men of leters now wrote more and more of their works in Italian. Slowly they formed that literary Tuscan which became the model and standard of the whole peninsula—“the sweetest, richest, and most cultured, not only of all the languages of Italy,” said the patriotic Varchi, “but of all the tongues that are known today.”¹²

But while reviving Italian literature, Lorenzo carried on zealously his grandfather’s enterprise of gathering for the use of scholars in Florence all the classics of Greece and Rome. He sent Politian and John Lascaris to various cities in Italy and abroad to buy manuscripts; from one monastery at Mt. Athos Lascaris brought two hundred, of which eighty were as yet unknown to Western Europe. According to Politian, Lorenzo wished that he might be allowed to spend his entire fortune, even to pledge his furniture, in the purchase of books. He paid scribes to make copies for him of manuscripts that could not be purchased, and in return he allowed other collectors, like King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Duke Federigo of Urbino, to send their copyists to transcribe manuscripts in the Medicean Library. After Lorenzo’s death this collection was united with that which Cosimo had placed in the convent of San Marco; together, in 1495, they included 1039 volumes, of which 460 were Greek. Michelangelo later designed a lordly home for these books, and posterity gave it Lorenzo’s name—Bibliotheca Laurentiana, the Laurentian Library. When Bernardo Cennini set up a printing press in Florence (1471) Lorenzo did not, like his friend Politian or Federigo of Urbino, turn up his nose at the new art; he seems to have recognized at once the revolutionary possibilities of movable type; and he engaged scholars to collate diverse texts in order that the classics might be printed with the greatest accuracy possible at that time. So encouraged, Bartolommeo di Libri printed the editio princeps of Homer (1488) under the careful scholarship of Demetrius Chalcondyles; John Lascaris issued the editiones principes of Euripides (1494), the Greek Anthology (1494), and Lucian (1496); and Cristoforo Landino edited Horace (1482), Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and Dante, whose language and allusions already required elucidation. We catch the spirit of the time when we learn that Florence rewarded Cristoforo, for these labors of scholarship, with the gift of a splendid home.

Lured by the reputation of the Medici and other Florentines for generous patronage, scholars flocked to Florence and made it the capital of literary learning. Vespasiano da Bisticci, after serving as bookseller and librarian at Florence, Urbino, and Rome, composed an eloquent but judicious series of Lives of Illustrious Men, commemorating the writers and patrons of the age. To develop and transmit the intellectual legacy of the race Lorenzo restored and enlarged the old University of Pisa, and the Platonic Academy at Florence. The latter was no formal college but an association of men interested in Plato, meeting at irregular intervals in Lorenzo’s city palace or in Ficino’s villa at Careggi, dining together, reading aloud part or all of a Platonic dialogue, and discussing its philosophy. November 7, the supposed anniversary of Plato’s birth and death, was celebrated by the Academy with almost religious solemnity; a bust believed to be of Plato was crowned with flowers, and a lamp was burned before it as before the image of a deity. Cristoforo Landino used these meetings as the basis for the imaginary conversations that he wrote as Disputationes Camaldulenses (1468). He told how he and his brother, visiting the monastery of the Camaldulese monks, met the young Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, and six other Florentine gentlemen; how they reclined on the grass near a flowing fountain, compared the worried hurry of the city with the healing quiet of the countryside, and debated the active versus the contemplative career, and how Alberti praised a life of rural meditation, while Lorenzo urged that the mature mind finds its fullest functioning and satisfaction in the service of the state and the commerce of the world.¹³

Among those who attended the discussions of the Platonic Academy were Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, and Marsilio Ficino. Marsilio had been so faithful to Cosimo’s commission as to devote almost all his life to translating Plato into Latin and to studying, teaching, and writing about Platonism. In youth he was so handsome that the maidens of Florence eyed him possessively, but he cared less for them than for his books. For a time he lost his religious faith; Platonism seemed superior; he addressed his students as “beloved in Plato” rather than “beloved in Christ”;¹⁴ he burned candles before a bust of Plato, and adored him as a saint.¹⁵ Christianity appeared to him, in this mood, as but one of the many religions that hid elements of truth behind their allegorical dogmas and symbolic rites. St. Augustine’s writings, and gratitude for recovery from a critical illness, won him back to the Christian faith. At forty he became a priest, but he remained an enthusiastic Platonist. Socrates and Plato, he argued, had expounded a monotheism as noble as that of the Prophets; they, too, in their minor way, had received a divine revelation; so, indeed, had all men in whom reason ruled. Following his lead, Lorenzo and most of the humanists sought not to replace Christianity with another faith, but to reinterpret it in terms that a philosopher could accept. For a generation or two (1447–1534) the Church smiled tolerantly on the enterprise. Savonarola denounced it as humbug.

Next to Lorenzo himself, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the most fascinating personality in the Platonic Academy. Born in the town (near Modena) made famous by his name, he studied at Bologna and Paris, and was received with honor at almost every court in Europe; finally Lorenzo persuaded him to make Florence his home. His eager mind took up one study after another—poetry, philosophy, architecture, music—and achieved in each some outstanding excellence. Politian described him as a paragon in whom Nature had united all her gifts: “tall and finely molded, with something of divinity shining in his face”; a man of penetrating glance, indefatigable study, miraculous memory, and ecumenical erudition, eloquent in several languages, a favorite with women and philosophers, and as lovable in character as he was handsome in person and eminent in all qualities of intellect. His mind was open to every philosophy and every faith; he could not find it in him to reject any system, any man; and though in his final years he spurned astrology, he welcomed mysticism and magic as readily as he accepted Plato and Christ. He had a good word to say for the Scholastic philosophers, whom most other humanists repudiated as having barbarously expressed absurdities. He found much to admire in Arabic and Jewish thought, and numbered several Jews among his teachers and honored friends.¹⁶ He studied the Hebrew Cabala, innocently accepted its alleged antiquity, and announced that he had found in it full proofs for the divinity of Christ. As one of his feudal titles was Count of Concordia, he assumed the high duty of reconciling all the great religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and these with Plato, and Plato with Aristotle. Though flattered by all, he retained to the end of his brief life a charming modesty that was impaired only by his ingenuous trust in the accuracy of his learning and the power of human reason.

Going to Rome at the age of twenty-four (1486), he startled priests and pundits by publishing a list of nine hundred propositions, covering logic, metaphysics, theology, ethics, mathematics, physics, magic, and the Cabala, and including the generous heresy that even the greatest mortal sin, being finite, could not merit eternal punishment. Pico proclaimed his readiness to defend any or all of these propositions in public debate against any person, and offered to pay the traveling expenses of any challenger from whatever land he might come. As a preface to this proposed tournament of philosophy he prepared a famous oration, later entitled De hominis dignitate (On the Dignity of Man), which expressed with youthful ardor the high opinion that the humanists—contradicting most medieval views—held of the human species. “It is a commonplace of the schools,” wrote Pico, “that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body mingled of earthly elements, and a heavenly spirit, and the vegetable soul of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, and the mind of angels, and the likeness of God.”¹⁷ And then Pico put into the mouth of God Himself, as words spoken to Adam, a divine testimony to the limitless potentialities of man: “I created thee as being neither heavenly nor earthly… that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, or be born anew to the divine likeness.” To which Pico added, in the high spirit of the young Renaissance:

This is the culminating gift of God, this is the supreme and marvelous felicity of man… that he can be that which he wills to be. Animals, from the moment of their birth, carry with them, from their mothers’ bodies, all that they are destined to have or be; the highest spirits [angels] are from the beginning… what they will be forever. But God the Father endowed man, from birth, with the seeds of every possibility and every life.¹⁸

No one cared to accept Pico’s multifarious challenge, but Pope Innocent VIII condemned three of the propositions as heretical. Since these formed so tiny a proportion of the whole, Pico might have expected mercy, and indeed, Innocent did not press the matter. But Pico issued a cautious retraction, and departed for Paris, where the University offered him protection. In 1493 Alexander VI, with his wonted geniality, notified Pico that all was forgiven. Back in Florence Pico became a devout follower of Savonarola, abandoned his pursuit of omniscience, burned his five volumes of love poetry, gave his fortune to provide marriage dowries for poor girls, and himself adopted a semimonastic life. He thought of joining the Dominican order, but died before he could make up his mind—still a youth of thirty-one. His influence survived his brief career, and inspired Reuchlin to continue, in Germany, those Hebrew studies which had been among the passions of Pico’s life.

Politian, who admired Pico generously, and corrected his poetry with the most gracious apologies, was a man of less meteoric lure, but of deeper penetration and more substantial accomplishment. Angelus Bassus, as he originally called himself—Angelo Ambrogini, as some called him—took his more famous name from Monte Poliziano, in the Florentine hinterland. Coming to Florence he studied Latin under Cristoforo Landino, Greek under Andronicus of Salonica, Platonism under Ficino, and the Aristotelian philosophy under Argyropoulos. At sixteen he began to translate Homer into a Latin so idiomatic and vigorous that it seemed the product of at least the Silver Age of Roman poetry. Having finished the first two books, he sent them to Lorenzo. That prince of patrons, alert to every excellence, encouraged him to continue, took him into his home as tutor of his son Piero, and provided for all his needs. So freed from want, Politian edited ancient texts—among them the Pandects of Justinian—with a learning and judgment that won universal praise. When Landino published an edition of Horace, Politian prefaced it with an ode comparable in Latinity, phrasing, and complex versification with the poems of Horace himself. His lectures on classic literature were attended by the Medici, Pico della Mirandola, and foreign students—Reuchlin, Grocyn, Linacre, and others—who had heard, beyond the Alps, the echo of his fame as scholar, poet, and orator in three tongues. It was not unusual for him to prelude a lecture with an extensive Latin poem composed for the occasion; one such piece, in sonorous hexameters, was nothing less than a history of poetry from Homer to Boccaccio. This and other poems, published by Politian under the title of Sylvae, revealed a Latin style so facile and fluent, so vivid in imagery, that the humanists acclaimed him as their master despite his youth, and rejoiced that the noble language which they aspired to restore had been taught to live again.

While making himself almost a Latin classic, Politian issued with fertile ease a succession of Italian poems that stand unrivaled between Petrarch and Ariosto. When Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano won a joust in 1475, Politian described La giostra in ottava rima of melodious elegance; and in La bella Simonetta he celebrated the aristocratic beauty of Giuliano’s beloved with such eloquence and finesse that Italian love poetry took on thereafter a new delicacy of diction and feeling. Giuliano tells how, going out to hunt, he came upon Simonetta and other lasses dancing in a field.

The beauteous nymph who feeds my soul with fire

I found in gentle, pure, and prudent mood,

In graceful attitude,

Loving and courteous, holy, wise, benign.

So sweet, so tender was her face divine,

So gladsome, that in those celestial eyes

Shone perfect paradise,

Yea, all the good that we poor mortals crave….

Down from her royal head and lustrous brow

The golden curls fell joyously unpent,

While through the choir she went

With feet well lessoned to the rhythmic sound.

Her eyes, though scarcely raised above the ground,

Sent me by stealth a ray divinely fair;

But still her jealous hair

Broke the bright beam, and veiled her from my gaze.

She, born and nursed in heaven for angels’ praise,

No sooner saw this wrong than back she drew—

With hand of purest hue—

Her truant curls with kind and gentle mien;

Then from her eyes a soul so fiery keen,

So sweet a soul of love, she cast on mine

That scarce can I divine

How then I ‘scaped from burning utterly.¹⁹

For his own mistress, Ippolita Leoncina, Politian composed love songs of exquisite grace and tenderness; and, overflowing with rhymes, he fashioned similar lyrics to be used by his friends as charms to exorcise modesty. He learned the ballads of the peasantry, and reshaped them into finished literary form; so rephrased they passed back into popularity, and have left echoes in Tuscany to this day. In La brunettina mia he described a village beauty bathing her face and bosom at a fountain, and crowning her hair with flowers; “her breasts were as May roses, her lips were as strawberries”; it is a hackneyed theme that never palls. Trying to recapture that union of drama, poetry, music, and song which had been accomplished in the Dionysian Theater of the Greeks, Politian composed—in two days, he vows—a little lyric drama of 434 lines, which was sung for Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (1472). It was called La favola di Orfeo—The Fable of Orpheus— and told how Orpheus’ wife Eurydice died of a snake bite as she fled from an amorous shepherd; how the disconsolate Orpheus made his way down to Hades, and so charmed Pluto with his lyre that the lord of the underworld restored Eurydice to him on condition that he should not look upon her until quite emerged from Hades. He had led her but a few steps when, in the ecstasy of his love, he turned to look upon her; whereupon she was snatched back to Hades, and he was barred from following her. In an insane reaction Orpheus became a misogynist, and recommended that men should ignore women and satisfy themselves with boys after the example of sated Zeus with Ganymede. Woodland maenads, furious at his contempt of women, beat him to death, flayed him, tore him limb from limb, and rejoiced tunefully in their revenge. The music that accompanied the lines is lost; but we may safely rank the Orfeo among the harbingers of Italian opera.

Politian fell short of greatness as a poet because he avoided the pitfalls of passion and never plumbed the depths of life or love; he is always charming and never profound. His love for Lorenzo was the strongest feeling that he knew. He was at his patron’s side when Giuliano was killed in the cathedral; he saved Lorenzo by slamming and bolting the doors of the sacristy in the face of the conspirators. When Lorenzo returned from his perilous journey to Naples Politian welcomed him with verses almost scandalously affectionate. When Lorenzo passed away Politian mourned him inconsolably, and then gradually faded out. He died two years later, like Pico, in the fateful year 1494, when the French discovered Italy.

Lorenzo would not have been the full man that he was had he not enjoyed some humor with his philosophy, some doubt with his faith, some license with his loves. As his son would welcome jesters and smile at risqué comedies at the papal court, so the banker prince of Florence invited to his friendship and his table Luigi Pulci, and relished the rough satire of the Morgante maggiore. That famous poem, so admired by Byron, was read aloud, canto by canto, to Lorenzo and his household guests. Luigi was a man of robust and uninhibited wit, who convulsed a palace and a nation by applying the language, idioms, and views of the bourgeoisie to the romances of chivalry. The legends of Charlemagne’s adventures in France, Spain, and Palestine had entered Italy in the twelfth century or before, and had been spread through the peninsula by minstrels and improvisatori to the delight of every class. But there has always been, in the common male of the species, a bluff and lusty self-ridiculing realism, accompanying and checking the romantic spirit given to literature and art by woman and youth. Pulci combined all these qualities, and put together—from popular legends, from the manuscripts in the Laurentian Library, and from the conversation at Lorenzo’s table—an epic that laughs at the giants, demons, and battles of chivalric tales, and recounts, in sometimes serious, sometimes mocking verse, the adventures of the Christian knight Orlando and the Saracen giant who gives the poem half its name.*

Attacked by Orlando, Morgante saves himself by announcing his sudden conversion to Christianity. Orlando teaches him theology; explains to him that his two brothers, just slain, are now in hell as infidels; promises him heaven if he becomes a good Christian; but warns him that in heaven he will be required to look without pity upon his burning relatives. “The doctors of our Church,” says the Christian knight, “are agreed that if those who are glorified in heaven were to feel pity for their miserable kindred, who lie in such horrible confusion in hell, their beatitude would come to nothing.” Morgante is not disturbed. “You shall see,” he assures Orlando, “if I grieve for my brethren, and whether or no I submit to the will of God and behave myself like an angel… I will cut off the hands of my brothers, and take the hands to these holy monks, that they may be sure that their enemies are dead.”

In the eighteenth canto Pulci introduces another giant, Margute, a jolly thief and mild murderer, who ascribes to himself every vice but that of betraying a friend. To Morgante’s question whether he believes in Christ or prefers Mohammed, Margute answers:

I don’t believe in black more than in blue,

But in fat capons, boiled or maybe roasted;

And I believe sometimes in butter, too,

In beer and must, where bobs a pippin toasted;…

But mostly to old wine my faith I pin,

And hold him saved who firmly trusts therein….

Faith, like the itch, is catching;…

Faith is as man gets it—this, that, or another.

See then what sort of creed I’m bound to follow:

For you must know a Greek nun was my mother,

My sire, at Brusa mid the Turks, a mullah.²¹

Margute dies of laughter after rollicking through two cantos; Pulci wastes no tear over him, but pulls from his magic fancy a demon of the first order, Astarotte, who rebelled with Lucifer. Summoned from hell by the sorcerer Malagigi to bring Rinaldo swiftly from Egypt to Roncesvalles, he accomplishes the matter deftly, and wins such affection from Rinaldo that the Christian knight proposes to beg God to free Astarotte from hell. But the courteous devil is an excellent theologian, and points out that rebellion against infinite Justice was an infinite crime, requiring eternal punishment. Malagigi wonders why a God who foresaw everything, including Lucifer’s disobedience and everlasting damnation, proceeded to create him; Astarotte confesses that this is a mystery which even a wise devil cannot resolve.²²

He was in truth a wise devil, for Pulci, writing in 1483, puts into his mouth an astonishing anticipation of Columbus. Referring to the old warning, at the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), ne plus ultra—“go no further”—Astarotte says to Rinaldo:

Know that this theory is false; his bark

The daring mariner shall urge far o’er

The western wave, a smooth and level plain

Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel.

Man was in ancient days of grosser mold,

And Hercules might blush to learn how far

Beyond the limits he had vainly set

The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way,

Men shall descry another hemisphere.

Since to one common center all things tend,

So earth, by curious mystery divine

Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres.

At our antipodes are cities, states,

And thronged empires, ne’er divined of yore.

But see, the Sun speeds on his western path

To glad the nations with expected light.²³

It was part of Pulci’s method to introduce each canto, however full of buffoonery, with a pious invocation of God and the saints; the more profane the matter, the more solemn the prologue. The poem ends with a declaration of faith in the goodness of all religions—a proposition sure to offend every true believer. Now and then Pulci allows himself a timid heresy, as when he quotes Scripture to argue that Christ’s foreknowledge did not equal that of God the Father, or when he allows himself to hope that all souls, even Lucifer, will in the end be saved. But like a good Florentine, and the other members of Lorenzo’s circle, he remained externally faithful to a Church inextricably bound up with Italian life. Ecclesiastics were not deceived by his obeisance; when he died (1484) his body was refused burial in consecrated ground.

If Lorenzo’s group could produce so varied a literature in one generation, we may reasonably suppose—and shall find—a like awakening in other cities—Milan, Ferrara, Naples, Rome. In the century between Cosimo’s birth and Lorenzo’s death Italy had accomplished and transcended the first stage in her Renaissance. She had rediscovered ancient Greece and Rome, had established the essentials of classical scholarship, and had made Latin again a language of masculine splendor and pithy force. But more: in the generation between Cosimo’s death and Lorenzo’s, Italy rediscovered her own language and soul, applied the new standards of diction and form to the vernacular, and composed poetry classical in spirit, but indigenous and “modern” in tongue and thought, rooted in the affairs and problems of its own day, or in the scenes and persons of the countryside. And again: Italy in one generation, through Pulci, had lifted the humorous romance into literature, had prepared the way for Boiardo and Ariosto, had even anticipated Cervantes’ smiles at chivalric fustian and pretense. The age of the scholars receded, imitation gave way to creation; Italian literature, which had languished after Petrarch’s choice of Latin for his epic, was reborn. Soon the revival of antiquity would be almost forgotten in the exuberance of an Italian culture leading the world in letters, and flooding it with art.

V. ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE: THE AGE OF VERROCCHIO

Lorenzo continued enthusiastically the Medicean tradition of supporting art. “He was such an admirer of all the remains of antiquity,” wrote his contemporary Valor, “that there was nothing with which he was more delighted. Those who wished to oblige him were accustomed to collect, from every part of the world, medals, coins… statues, busts, and whatever else bore the stamp” of ancient Greece or Rome.²⁴ Uniting his architectural and sculptural collections with those left by Cosimo and Piero, he placed them in a garden between the Medici palace and the monastery of San Marco, and admitted to them all responsible scholars and visitors. To students who showed application and promise—among whom was the young Michelangelo—he gave a stipend for their maintenance, and awards for special proficiency. Says Vasari: “It is highly deserving of notice that all those who studied in the gardens of the Medici, and were favored by Lorenzo, became excellent artists. This can only be ascribed to the exquisite judgment of this great patron… who could not merely distinguish men of genius, but had the will and power to reward them.”²⁵

The key event in the art history of Lorenzo’s regime was the publication (1486) of Vitruvius’ treatise De architectura (first century B.C.), which Poggio had unearthed in the monastery of St. Gall some seventy years before. Lorenzo succumbed completely to that rigid classic, and used his influence to spread the style of Imperial Rome. Perhaps in this matter he did as much harm as good, for he discouraged in architecture what he was fruitfully practising in literature—the development of native forms. But his spirit was generous. Through his encouragement, and in many cases with his funds, Florence was now adorned with elegant civic buildings and private residences. He completed the church of San Lorenzo and the abbey at Fiesole, and he engaged Giuliano da Sangallo to design a monastery outside the San Gallo gate that gave the architect his name. Giuliano built for him a stately villa at Póggio a Caiano, and so handsomely that Lorenzo recommended him when King Ferdinand of Naples asked him for an architect. How well such artists loved him appears in the subsequent generosity of Giuliano, who sent as presents to Lorenzo the gifts that Ferrante gave him—a bust of the Emperor Hadrian, a Sleeping Cupid, and other ancient sculptures. Lorenzo added these to the collections in his garden, which were later to form the nucleus of the statuary in the Uffizi Gallery.

Other rich men rivaled—some surpassed—him in the splendor of their residences. About 1489 Benedetto da Maiano built for Filippo Strozzi the Elder the most perfect embodiment of that “Tuscan” style of architecture which Brunellesco had developed in the Pitti Palace—internal splendor and luxury behind a massive front of “rustic” or unfinished stone blocks. It was begun with careful astrological timing, with religious services in several churches, and with a conciliatory distribution of alms. After Benedetto’s death (1497) Simone Pollaiuolo* completed the building, and added a fine cornice on the model of one that he had seen in Rome. How excellent the interior of these seeming prisons might be we may surmise from their magnificent fireplaces—mighty marble entablatures supported by floral-carved pillars and surmounted with reliefs. Meanwhile the Signory continued to improve its unique and beautiful home, the Palazzo Vecchio.

Most of the architects were sculptors too, for sculpture played the leading part in architectural ornament, carving cornices and moldings, pilasters and capitals, door jambs and chimney pieces, wall reliefs, altars, choir stalls, pulpits, and baptismal fonts. Giuliano da Maiano carved the stalls in the sacristy of the cathedral and in the abbey at Fiesole. His brother Benedetto developed the art of intarsia, and became so famous for it that King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary ordered from him two coffers of inlaid wood, and invited him to his court. Benedetto went, and had the coffers sent after him; when these arrived at Budapest and were unpacked in the presence of the King the inlaid pieces fell out, the glue having been loosened by the damp sea air; and Benedetto, though he replaced the pieces successfully, took a distaste to marquetry, and devoted himself thereafter to sculpture. There are few sculptured Virgins lovelier than his Enthroned Madonna, few busts that surpass his honest and revealing Filippo Strozzi, few tombs so fine as that of the same Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella, no pulpit more elegantly carved than that which Benedetto made for the church of Santa Croce, and few altars so near perfection as that of Santa Fina in the Collegiate Church of San Gimignano.

Sculpture and architecture tended to run in families—the della Robbias, the Sangalli, the Rossellini, the Pollaiuoli. Antonio Pollaiuolo, uncle of Simone, learned accuracy and delicacy of design as a goldsmith in the studio of his father Iacopo. The bronze, silver and gold products of Antonio made him the Cellini of his time, and a favorite of Lorenzo, the churches, the Signory, and the guilds. Noting how rarely such small objects retained the name of their maker, and sharing the Renaissance mirage of immortal fame, Antonio turned to sculpture, and cast in bronze two magnificent figures of Hercules, rivaling the strained power of Michelangelo’s Captives, and the tortured passion of the Laocoön. Passing to painting, he told the story of Hercules in three murals for the Medici palace, challenged Botticelli in Apollo and Daphne, and equaled the absurdity of a hundred artists in showing how calmly St. Sebastian could receive into his flawless body the arrows launched at him by leisurely bowmen. In his final years Antonio returned to sculpture and cast for the old church of St. Peter in Rome two superb sepulchral monuments—of Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII—with a vigor of chiseling and a precision of anatomy again presaging Michelangelo.

Mino da Fiesole was not so versatile nor so tempestuous; he was content to learn the sculptor’s art from Desiderio da Settignano, and when his master died, to carryon his tradition of smooth elegance. If we may believe Vasari, Mino was so affected by Desiderio’s early death that he found no happiness in Florence, and sought new scenes in Rome. There he made a name for himself with three masterpieces: tombs of Francesco Tornabuoni and Pope Paul II, and a marble tabernacle for Cardinal d’Estouteville. His confidence and solvency restored, he returned to Florence, and adorned with exquisite altars the churches of Sant’ Ambrogio and Santa Croce, and the Baptistery. In the cathedral of his native Fiesole he set up in classical style an ornate tomb for Bishop Salutati, and for the abbey of Fiesole he molded a similar monument, more restrained in ornament, to commemorate the Count Ugo who had founded that monastery. The cathedral of Prato boasts a pulpit by him, and a dozen museums display one or more of the busts by which his patrons were less flattered than embalmed: the face of Niccolò Strozzi, swollen as with the mumps, the weak features of Piero the Gouty, the fine head of Dietisalvi Neroni, a pretty relief of Marcus Aurelius as a youth, a splendid bust of St. John the Baptist in infancy, and several lovely reliefs of the Virgin and Child. Nearly all these works have the feminine grace that Mino had learned from Desiderio; they are pleasing, but not arresting or profound; they do not grip our interest as do the sculptures of Antonio Pollaiuolo or Antonio Rossellino. Mino loved Desiderio too much; he could not turn his back upon his master’s exemplars and seek in the merciless neutrality of Nature the significant realities of life.

Verrocchio—“True Eye”—was brave enough to do this, and produced two of the greatest sculptures of his time. Andrea di Michele Cione (for that was his real name) was a goldsmith, a sculptor, a bell-caster, a painter, a geometrician, a musician. As a painter his chief claim to fame lies in having taught and influenced Leonardo, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino; his own paintings are mostly stiff and dead. There are few Renaissance pictures more unpleasant than the famous Baptism of Christ; the Baptist is a dour Puritan, Christ, presumably thirty, looks like an old man, and the two angels at the left are effeminately insipid, including the one traditionally ascribed to Leonardo. But Tobias and the Three Angels is excellent; the central angel foreshadows the grace and mood of Botticelli, and the young Tobias is so fair that we must either attribute him to Leonardo, or confess that da Vinci received more of his pictorial style from Verrocchio than we supposed. A drawing of a woman’s head, in Christ Church, Oxford, again suggests the vague and pensive ethereality of Leonardo’s women; and Verrocchio’s dark landscapes already feature the gloomy rocks and mystic streams of Leonardo’s dreamy masterpieces.

Probably there is mostly fable in Vasari’s tale that when Verrocchio saw the angel that Leonardo had painted in The Baptism of Christ he “resolved never to touch the brush again, because Leonardo, though so young, had so far surpassed him.”²⁶ But though Verrocchio continued to paint after the Baptism, it is true that he gave most of his mature years to sculpture. He worked for a while with Donatello and Antonio Pollaiuolo, learned something from each of them, and then developed his own style of stern and angular realism. He took his career in his hands by molding in terra cotta an unflattering bust of Lorenzo—nose and bangs and worried brow. In any case II Magnifico was well pleased with two bronze reliefs—of Alexander and Darius—made for him by Verrocchio; he sent them to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and engaged the sculptor (1472) to design, in the church of San Lorenzo, a tomb for his father Piero and his uncle Giovanni. Verrocchio carved the sarcophagus in porphyry, and decorated it with bronze supports and wreaths in exquisite floral form. Four years later he cast a boyish David standing in calm pride over the severed head of Goliath; the Signory liked it so much that it placed the statue at the head of the main stairway in the Palazzo Vecchio. In the same year it accepted from him a bronze Boy Holding a Dolphin, and used it as a fountain spout in the courtyard of the palace. At the height of his powers Verrocchio designed, and cast in bronze for a niche on the exterior of Or San Michele, a group of Christ and Doubting Thomas (1483). The Christ is a figure of divine nobility, Thomas is portrayed with understanding sympathy, the hands are finished with a perfection seldom attained in statuary, the robes are a triumph of sculptural art; the whole group has a living and mobile reality.

So obvious was Verrocchio’s superiority in bronze that the Venetian Senate invited him (1479) to come to Venice and cast a statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the condottiere who had won so many victories for the island state. Andrea went, made a model for the horse, and was preparing to cast it in bronze when he learned that the Senate was considering the advisability of confining his commission to the horse and letting Vellano of Padua make the man. Andrea, according to Vasari, broke the head and legs of his model and returned to Florence in a rage. The Senate warned him that if he ever put foot on Venetian soil again he would lose his head in no figurative way; he replied that they should never expect him there, since senators were not as skillful as sculptors in replacing broken heads. The Senate thought better of the matter, restored the total commission to Verrocchio, and persuaded him to return at twice the original fee. He repaired the model of the horse, and cast it successfully; but in the process he became overheated, caught a chill, and died within a few days, at the age of fifty-six (1488). In his last hours a rude crucifix was placed before him; he begged the attendants to take it away and bring him one by Donatello, so that he might die, as he had lived, in the presence of beautiful things.

The Venetian sculptor Alessandro Leopardi completed the great statue in so vivid a style, with such mastery of motion and command, that the Colleoni suffered no loss by Verrocchio’s death. It was set up (1496) in the Campo di San Zanipolo—the Field of Sts. John and Paul; and it struts there to this day, the proudest and finest equestrian statue surviving from the Renaissance.

VI. PAINTING

1. Ghirlandaio

Verrocchio’s thriving studio was characteristic of Renaissance Florence—it united all the arts in one workshop, sometimes in one man; in the same bottega one artist might be designing a church or a palace, another might be carving or casting a statue, another sketching or painting a picture, another cutting or setting gems, another carving or inlaying ivory or wood, or fusing or beating metal, or fashioning floats and pennons for a festival procession; men like Verrocchio, Leonardo, or Michelangelo could do any of these. Florence had many such studios, and art students went wild in the streets,²⁷ or lived Bohemianly in the tenements, or became rich men honored by popes and princes as inspired spirits beyond price and—like Cellini—above the law. More than any other city except Athens, Florence attached importance to art and artists, talked and fought about them, and told anecdotes about them,²⁸ as we do now of actors and actresses. It was Renaissance Florence that formed the romantic concept of the genius—the man inspired by a divine spirit (the Latin genius) dwelling within him.

It is worthy of note that Verrocchio’s studio left no great sculptor (except one side of Leonardo) to carry on the master’s excellence, but taught two painters of high degree—Leonardo and Perugino—and one of lesser but notable talent, Lorenzo di Credi. Painting was gradually ousting sculpture as the favorite art. Probably it was an advantage that the painters were uninstructed and uninhibited by the lost murals of antiquity. They knew that there had been such men as Apelles and Protogenes, but few of them saw even the Alexandrian or Pompeian remnants of ancient painting. In this art there was no revival of antiquity, and the continuity of the Middle Ages with the Renaissance was most visible: the line was devious but clear from the Byzantines to Duccio to Giotto to Fra Angelico to Leonardo to Raphael to Titian. So the painters, unlike the sculptors, had to forge through trial and error their own technology and style; originality and experiment were forced upon them. They labored over the details of human, animal, and plant anatomy; they tried circular, triangular, or other schemes of composition; they explored the tricks of perspective and the illusions of chiaroscuro to give depth to their backgrounds and body to their figures; they scoured the streets for Apostles and Virgins, and drew from models clothed or nude; they passed from fresco to tempera and back again, and appropriated the new techniques of oil painting introduced into northern Italy by Rogier van der Weyden and Antonio da Messina. As their skill and courage grew, and their lay patrons multiplied, they added to the old religious subjects the stories of classic mythology and the pagan glories of the flesh. They took Nature into the studio, or betook themselves to Nature; nothing human or natural seemed in their view alien to art, no face so ugly but art could reveal its illuminating significance. They recorded the world; and when war and politics had made Italy a prison and a ruin, the painters left behind them the line and color, the life and passion, of the Renaissance.

Formed by such studies, inheriting an ever richer tradition of methods, materials, and ideas, men of talent painted better now than men of genius had painted a century before. Benozzo Gozzoli, says Vasari in an ungracious moment, “was not of great excellence… yet he distanced all the others of his age in his perseverance; for among the multitude of his works some could hardly help but be good.”²⁹ He began as a pupil of Fra Angelico, and followed him to Rome and Orvieto as assistant. Piero the Gouty recalled him to Florence and invited him to portray, on the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace, the journey of the Magi from the East to Bethlehem. These frescoes are Benozzo’s chef-d’oeuvre: a stately and yet lively procession of kings and knights in gorgeous robes, of squires, pages, angels, hunters, scholars, slaves, horses, leopards, dogs, and half a dozen Medici—and Benozzo himself slyly introduced into the parade—and all against backgrounds and landscapes marvelous and picturesque. Flushed with triumph, Benozzo went to San Gimignano, and decorated the choir of Sant’ Agostino with seventeen scenes from the life of its patron saint. In the Campo Santo at Pisa he labored for sixteen years, covering vast walls with twenty-one Old Testament scenes from Adam to the Queen of Sheba; some, like The Tower of Babel, were among the major frescoes of the Renaissance. Benozzo diluted his excellence through eager haste; he drew carelessly, made many of his figures depressingly uniform, and crowded his pictures with a confusing multitude of persons and details; but he had in him the blood and joy of life, he loved its lusty panorama and the glory of the great; and the imperfections of his line are half forgotten in the splendor of his color and the enthusiasm of his fertility.

The benign influence of Fra Angelico passed down to Alesso Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the major painters of the Renaissance—Domenico Ghirlandaio. Domenico’s father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of Ghirlandaio from the gold and silver garlands that he had fashioned for the pretty heads of Florence. Under this father and Baldovinetti Domenico studied with zest and zeal; spent many hours before the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine; learned by indefatigable practice the arts of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and composition; “he would draw everyone who passed the shop,” says Vasari, “making extraordinary likenesses” after a fleeting view. He was barely twenty-one when he was charged to paint the story of Santa Fina in her chapel in the cathedral at San Gimignano. At thirty-one (1480) he earned the title of master by four frescoes in the church and refectory of the Ognissanti in Florence—a St. Jerome, a Descent From the Cross, a Madonna della Misericordia (which included a portrait of the donor, Amerigo Vespucci), and a Last Supper that gave some hints to Leonardo.

Summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV, he painted in the Sistine Chapel Christ Calling Peter and Andrew from Their Nets— especially beautiful in its background of mountains, sea, and sky. During this stay in Rome he studied and drew the arches, baths, columns, aqueducts, and amphitheaters of the ancient city, and with so practiced an eye that he was able to seize at once, without rule or compass, the just proportions of each part. A Florentine merchant in Rome, Francesco Tornabuoni, mourning his dead wife, employed Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for her memorial in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and Domenico succeeded so well that Tornabuoni sent him back to Florence armed with florins and a letter attesting his excellence. The Signory soon entrusted to him the decoration of the Sala del Orologio in their palace. In the next four years (1481–5) he painted scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità. All the progress of the painter’s art, except the use of oil, was embodied in these frescoes: harmonious composition, accurate line, gradations of light, perspective fidelity, realistic portraiture (of Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Palla Strozzi, Francesco Sassetti), and at the same time the Angelesque tradition of ideality and piety. From the near-perfection of the altarpiece—the Adoration of the Shepherds—there would be but a step of deeper imagination and subtler grace to Leonardo and Raphael.

In 1485 Giovanni Tornabuoni, chief of the Medici bank in Rome, offered Ghirlandaio twelve hundred ducats ($30,000) to paint a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and promised him two hundred more if the work should prove fully satisfactory. Aided by several pupils, including Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio gave most of the following five years to this high moment of his career. On the ceiling he painted the four Evangelists; on the walls St. Francis, Peter Martyr, John the Baptist, and scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ, from an Annunciation to a magnificent Coronation of the Virgin. Here again he delighted in contemporary portraits: the stately Lodovica Tornabuoni, fit to be a queen, the saucy beauty of Ginevra de’ Benci, the scholars Ficino, Politian, and Landino, the painters Baldovinetti, Mainardi, and Ghirlandaio himself. When, in 1490, the chapel was opened to the public, all the dignitaries and literati of Florence flocked to examine the paintings; the realistic portraits were the talk of the town; and Tornabuoni expressed himself as completely satisfied. Financially pressed at the time, he begged Domenico to forgive him the extra two hundred ducats; the artist replied that the satisfaction of his patron was more precious to him than any gold.

He was a lovable character, so adored by his brothers that one of them, David, almost slew an abbot with an aged loaf of bread for bringing to Domenico and his aides food that David held unworthy of his brother’s genius. Ghirlandaio opened his studio to all who cared to work or study there, making it a veritable school of art. He accepted all commissions, great or small, saying that none should be denied; he left the care of his household and finances to David, saying that he would not be content till he had painted the whole circuit of Florence’s wall. He produced many mediocre paintings, and yet some incidental pieces of great charm, like the Louvre’s delightful Grandfather with the bulbous nose, and the lovely Portrait of a Woman in the Morgan Collection in New York—pictures full of the character that year by year records itself upon the human face. Great critics of unquestionable learning and repute yield him only a minor rank;³⁰ and it is true that he excelled rather in line than in color, that he painted too rapidly, and crowded his pictures with irrelevant detail, and took a step backward, perhaps, in preferring tempera after Baldovinetti’s experiments with oil. Even so, he brought the accumulated technology of his art to the highest point that it would reach in his country and his century; and he bequeathed to Florence and the world such treasures that criticism hangs its head in gratitude.

2. Botticelli

Only one Florentine surpassed him in his generation. Sandro Botticelli was as different from Ghirlandaio as ethereal fancy from physical fact. Alessandro’s father, Mariano Filipepi, unable to persuade the boy that life would be impossible without reading, writing, and arithmetic, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticelli, whose name, through the affection of the pupil or the whim of history, became permanently attached to Sandro’s own. From this bottega the lad passed at sixteen to that of Fra Filippo Lippi, who came to love the restless and impetuous youth. Filippo’s Filippino later painted Sandro as a sullen fellow with deep-set eyes, salient nose, sensual fleshy mouth, flowing locks, purple cap, red mantle, and green hose;³¹ who would have guessed such a man from the delicate fantasies that Botticelli has left to the museums? Perhaps every artist must be a sensualist before he can paint ideally; he must know and love the body as the ultimate source and standard of the esthetic sense. Vasari describes Sandro as “a merry fellow,” who played pranks upon fellow artists and obtuse citizens. Doubtless, like all of us, he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world.

About 1465 Botticelli set up his own studio, and soon received commissions from the Medici. It was apparently for Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, that he painted Judith; and for Piero Gottoso, her husband, he made his Madonna of the Magnificat and his Adoration of the Magi-hymns in color to three Medici generations. In the Madonna Botticelli pictured Lorenzo and Giuliano as boys of sixteen and twelve, holding a book upon which the Virgin—borrowed from Fra Lippo—writes her noble song of praise; in the Adoration Cosimo kneels at Mary’s feet, Piero kneels at a lower level before them, and Lorenzo, now seventeen, holds a sword in his hand as a sign that he has reached the age of legitimate killing.

Lorenzo and Giuliano carried on Piero’s patronage of Botticelli. His finest portraits are of Giuliano and Giuliano’s beloved Simonetta Vespucci. He still painted religious pictures, like the powerful St. Augustine in the church of the Ognissanti; but in this period, perhaps under the influence of Lorenzo’s circle, he turned more and more to pagan subjects, usually from classical mythology, and favoring the nude. Vasari reports that “in many houses Botticelli painted… plenty of naked women,” and accuses him of “serious disorders in his living”;³² the humanists, and animal spirits, had won Sandro for a time to an epicurean philosophy. It was apparently for Lorenzo and Giuliano that he painted (1480) The Birth of Venus. A demure nude rises from a golden shell in the sea, using her long blonde tresses as the only fig leaf at hand; on her right winged zephyrs blow her to the shore; on her left a pretty maid (Simonetta?), clad in a gown of flowered white, offers the goddess a mantle to enhance her loveliness. The painting is a masterpiece of grace, in which design and composition are everything, color is subordinate, realism is ignored, and everything is directed to evoking an ethereal fancy through the flowing rhythm of the line. Botticelli had taken the theme from a passage in Politian’s La giostra. From a description, in the same poem, of Giuliano’s victories in jousts and love the artist took his second pagan picture, Mars and Venus; here Venus is clothed, and may again be Simonetta; Mars lies exhausted and asleep, no rude warrior but a youth of unblemished flesh, who might almost be mistaken for another Aphrodite. Finally, in his Spring (Primavera) Botticelli expressed the mood of Lorenzo’s hymn to Bacchus (“Who would be happy, let him be!”): the auxiliary lady of the Birth reappears with her flowing robe and pretty feet; at the left Giuliano (?) plucks an apple from a tree to give to one of the three graces standing half nude beside him; on the right a lusty male seizes a maiden dressed in a little mist; Simonetta presides modestly over the scene; and in the air above her Cupid shoots his quite superfluous darts. These three pictures symbolized many things, for Botticelli loved to allegorize; but perhaps without his realizing it they represented also the victory of the humanists in art. The Church would now for half a century (1480–1534) struggle to regain her dominance over pictorial themes.

As if to meet the issue squarely, Sixtus IV called Botticelli to Rome (1481), and commissioned him to paint three frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. They are not among his masterpieces; he was in no mood for piety. But when he returned to Florence (1485) he found the city astir with Savonarola’s sermons, and went to hear him. He was deeply moved. He had always harbored a strain of austerity, and whatever skepticism he might have caught from Lorenzo, Pulci, and Politian had been lost in the secret well of his youthful faith. Now the fiery preacher at San Marco’s pressed upon him and Florence the awful implications of that faith: God had allowed Himself to be insulted, scourged, and crucified to redeem mankind from the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin; only a life of virtue or sincere repentance could win some grace from that sacrifice of God to God, and so escape eternal hell. It was about this time that Botticelli illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy. He turned his art again to the service of religion, and told once more the marvelous story of Mary and Christ. For the church of St. Barnabas he painted a masterly group of the Virgin enthroned, with divers saints; she was still the tender and lovely maiden whom he had drawn in Fra Lippo’s studio. Soon afterward he painted the Madonna of the Pomegranate— the Virgin surrounded by singing cherubim, the Child holding in His hand the fruit whose innumerable seeds symbolized the dissemination of the Christian faith. In 1490 he recapitulated the epic of the Divine Mother in two pictures: the Annunciation and the Coronation. But he was aging now, and had lost the fresh clarity and grace of his art.

In 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned. Botticelli was horrified at this most distinguished murder of the Renaissance. Perhaps it was shortly after that tragedy that he painted his complex symbolism, Calumny. Against a background of classic archways and distant sea three women-Fraud, Deception, Calumny—led by a ragged male (Envy), drag a nude victim by the hair to a tribunal where a judge with the long ears of an ass, advised by females personifying Suspicion and Ignorance, prepares to yield to the fury and bloodthirst of the crowd and condemn the fallen man; while at the left Remorse, garbed in black, looks in sorrow upon naked Truth—Botticelli’s Venus once more, clad in the same reptilian hair. Was the victim intended to represent Savonarola? Perhaps, though the nudes might have startled the monk.

The Nativity in the National Gallery at London is Botticelli’s final masterpiece, confused but colorful, and capturing for the last time his rhythmic grace. Here all seems to breathe a heavenly happiness; the ladies of the Spring return as winged angels, hailing the miraculous and saving birth, and dancing precariously on a bough suspended in space. But on the picture Botticelli wrote in Greek these words, savoring of Savonarola, and recalling the Middle Ages in the height of the Renaissance:

This picture I, Alessandro, painted at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy… during the fulfillment of the Eleventh [Chapter] of St. John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing of the Devil for three years and a half. Later he shall be chained, according to the Twelfth of St. John, and we shall see him trodden down as in this picture.

After 1500 we have no paintings from his hand. He was only fifty-six, and might have had some art left in him; but he yielded place to Leonardo and Michelangelo, and lapsed into a morose poverty. The Medici who had been his mainstay gave him charity, but they themselves were in a fallen state. He died alone and infirm, aged sixty-six, while the forgetful world hurried on.

Among his pupils was his teacher’s son, Filippino Lippi. This “love child”* was loved by all who knew him: a man gentle, affable, modest, courteous, whose “excellence was such,” says Vasari, “that he obliterated the stain of his birth, if any there be.” Under his father’s tutelage and Sandro’s he learned the painter’s art so rapidly that already at twenty-three he produced in The Vision of St. Bernard a portrait that in Vasari’s judgment “lacked only speech.” When the Carmelite monks decided to complete the frescoes begun in their Brancacci Chapel sixty years before, they awarded the commission to Filippino, still but twenty-seven. The result did not equal Masaccio, but in St. Paul Addressing St. Peter in Prison Filippino achieved a memorable figure of simple dignity and quiet power.

In 1489, at Lorenzo’s suggestion, Cardinal Caraffa called him to Rome to decorate a chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva with scenes from the life of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the main fresco the artist, perhaps recalling a similar picture by Andrea da Firenze a century before, showed the philosopher in triumph, with Arius, Averroes, and other heretics at his feet; meanwhile, in the universities of Bologna and Padua, the doctrines of Averroes were gaining ground over the orthodox faith. Back in Florence, in the chapel of Filippo Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella, Filippino recorded the careers of the Apostles Philip and John in frescoes so realistic that legend told how a boy tried to hide a secret treasure in a hole that Filippino had represented in a pictured wall. Interrupting this series for a time, and replacing the dilatory Leonardo, he painted an altarpiece for the monks of Scopeto; he chose the old subject of the Magi adoring the Child, but enlivened it with Moors, Indians, and many Medici; one of these last, serving as an astrologer with a quadrant in his hands, is among the most human and humorous portraits of the Renaissance. Finally (1498), as if to say that his father’s sins had been forgiven, Filippino was invited to Prato to paint a Madonna; Vasari praised it, the Second World War destroyed it. He settled down to marriage at forty, and knew for a few years the joys and tribulations of parentage. Suddenly, at forty-seven, he died of so simple an ailment as quinsy sore throat (1505).

VII. LORENZO PASSES

Lorenzo himself was not among the few who in those centuries reached old age. Like his father he suffered from arthritis and gout, to which was added a stomach disorder that frequently caused him exhausting pain. He tried a dozen remedies, and found nothing better than the passing alleviation given by warm mineral baths. For some time before his death he perceived that he, who had preached the gospel of joy, had not much longer to live.

His wife died in 1488; and though he had been unfaithful to her he sincerely mourned her loss and missed her helping hand. She had given him a numerous progeny, of whom seven survived. He had sedulously supervised their education; and in his later years he labored to guide them into marriages that might redound to the happiness of Florence as well as their own. The oldest son, Piero, was affianced to an Orsini to win friends in Rome; the youngest, Giuliano, married a sister of the duke of Savoy, received from Francis I the title of duke of Nemours, and so helped to build a bridge between Florence and France. Giovanni, the second son, was directed into an ecclesiastical career, and took to it amiably; he pleased everyone by his good nature, good manners, and good Latin. Lorenzo persuaded Innocent VIII to violate all precedents by making him a cardinal at fourteen; the Pope yielded for the same reason that made most marriages of royalty—to bind one government to another in the amity of one blood.

Lorenzo retired from active participation in the government of Florence, delegated more and more of his public and private business to his son Piero, and sought comfort in the peace of the countryside and the conversation of his friends. He excused himself in a characteristic letter.

What can be more desirable to a well-regulated mind than the enjoyment of leisure with dignity? This is what all good men wish to obtain, but which great men alone accomplish. In the midst of public affairs we may indeed be allowed to look forward to a day of rest; but no rest should totally seclude us from an attention to the concerns of our country. I cannot deny that the path which it has been my lot to tread has been arduous and rugged, full of dangers, and beset with treachery; but I console myself in having contributed to the welfare of my country, the prosperity of which may now rival that of any other state, however flourishing. Nor have I been inattentive to the interests and advancement of my own family, having always proposed to my imitation the example of my grandfather Cosmo, who watched over his public and private concerns with equal vigilance. Having now obtained the object of my cares, I trust I may be allowed to enjoy the sweets of leisure, to share the reputation of my fellow-citizens, and to exult in the glory of my native place.

But little time was left him to enjoy his unaccustomed peace. He had hardly moved to his villa at Careggi (March 21, 1492) when his stomach pains became alarmingly intense. Specialist physicians were summoned, who made him drink a mixture of jewels. He became rapidly worse, and reconciled himself to death. He expressed to Pico and Politian his sorrow that he could not live long enough to complete his collection of manuscripts for their accommodation and the use of students. As the end approached he sent for a priest, and with his last strength insisted on leaving his bed to receive the sacrament on his knees. He thought now of the uncompromising preacher who had denounced him as a destroyer of liberty and a corrupter of youth, and he longed to have that man’s for-giveness before he died. He despatched a friend to beg Savonarola to come to him to hear his confession and give him a more precious absolution. Savonarola came. According to Politian he offered absolution on three conditions: that Lorenzo should have a lively faith in God’s mercy, should promise to mend his life if he recovered, and should meet death with fortitude; Lorenzo agreed, and was absolved. According to Savonarola’s early biographer, G. F. Pico (not the humanist), the third condition was that Lorenzo should promise “to restore liberty to Florence”; in Pico’s account Lorenzo made no response to this demand, and the friar left him unabsolved.³⁴ On April 9, 1492, Lorenzo died, aged forty-three.

When the news of this premature death reached Florence almost the entire city mourned, and even Lorenzo’s opponents wondered how social order could now be maintained in Florence, or peace in Italy, without his guiding hand.³⁵ Europe recognized his stature as a statesman, and sensed in him the characteristic qualities of the time; he was “the man of the Renaissance” in everything but his aversion to violence. His slowly acquired prudence in policy, his simple but persuasive eloquence in debate, his firmness and courage in action, had made all but a few Florentines forget the liberty that his family had destroyed; and many who had not forgotten remembered it as the freedom of rich clans to compete in force and chicanery for an exploitive dominance in a “democracy” where only a thirtieth of the population could vote. Lorenzo had used his power with moderation and for the good of the state, even to the neglect of his private fortune. He had been guilty of sexual looseness, and had given a bad example to Florentine youth. He had given a good example in literature, had restored the Italian language to literary standing, and had rivaled his protégés in poetry. He had supported the arts with a discriminating taste that set a standard for Europe. Of all the “despots” he was the gentlest and the best. “This man,” said King Ferdinand of Naples, “lived long enough for his glory, but too short a time for Italy.”³⁶ After him Florence declined, and Italy knew no peace.

CHAPTER V

Savonarola and the Republic

1492–1534

I. THE PROPHET

THE advantage of hereditary rule is continuity; its nemesis is mediocrity. Piero di Lorenzo succeeded without trouble to his father’s power, but his character and his misjudgments forfeited the popularity upon which the rule of the Medici had been based. He was endowed with a violent temper, a middling mind, a vacillating will, and admirable intentions. He continued Lorenzo’s generosity to artists and men of letters, but with less discrimination and tact. He was physically strong, excelled in sports, and took part more frequently and prominently in athletic competitions than Florence thought becoming in the head of an endangered state. It was among his many misfortunes that Lorenzo’s enterprises and extravagance had depleted the city’s treasury; that the competition of British textiles was causing economic depression in Florence; that Piero’s Orsini wife turned up her Roman nose at the Florentines as a nation of shopkeepers; that the collateral branch of the Medici family, derived from Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo “the Elder,” began now to challenge the descendants of Cosimo, and led a party of opposition in the name of liberty. It was Piero’s crowning misery that he was contemporary with Charles VIII of France, who invaded Italy, and of Savonarola, who proposed to replace the Medici with Christ. Piero had not been built to withstand such strains.

The Savonarola family came from Padua to Ferrara about 1440, when Michele Savonarola was invited by Niccolò III d’Este to be his court physician. Michael was a man of piety rare in medicos; he was wont to rebuke the Ferrarese for preferring romances to religion.¹ His son Niccolò was a mediocre physician, but Niccolò’s wife Elena Bonacossi was a woman of strong character and high ideals. Girolamo was the third of their seven children. They set him in his turn to study medicine, but he thought Thomas Aquinas more absorbing than anatomy, and solitude with his books more pleasant than the sports of youth. At the University of Bologna he was horrified to find no student so poor as to do virtue reverence. “To be considered a man here,” he wrote, “you must defile your mouth with the most filthy, brutal, and tremendous blasphemies…. If you study philosophy and the good arts you are considered a dreamer; if you live chastely and modestly, a fool; if you are pious, a hypocrite; if you believe in God, an imbecile.”² He left the University, and returned to his mother and solitude. He became self-conscious, fretted over the thought of hell and the sinfulness of men; his earliest known composition was a poem denouncing the vices of Italy, including the popes, and pledging himself to reform his country and his Church. He passed long hours in prayer, and fasted so earnestly that his parents mourned his emaciation. In 1474 he was stirred to even severer piety by the Lenten sermons of Fra Michele, and he rejoiced to see many Ferrarese bringing masks, false hair, playing cards, unseemly pictures, and other worldly apparatus to fling them upon a burning pyre in the market place. A year later, aged twenty-three, he fled secretly from home, and entered a Dominican monastery in Bologna.

He wrote a tender letter to his parents begging their forgiveness for disappointing the expectations they had had of his advancement in the world. When they importuned him to return he answered angrily: “Ye blind! Why do you still weep and lament? You hamper me, though you should rejoice…. What can I say if you grieve yet, save that you are my sworn enemies and foes to Virtue? If so, then I say to you, ‘Get ye behind me, all ye who work evil!’“³ Six years he stayed in the Bologna convent. He proudly asked that the most humble tasks should be given him, but his talent as an orator was discovered, and he was set to preaching. In 1481 he was transferred to San Marco in Florence, and was assigned to preach in the church of San Lorenzo. His sermons there proved unpopular; they were too theological and didactic for a city that knew the eloquence and polish of the humanists; his congregation dwindled week by week. The prior set him to instructing novices.

It was probably in the next five years that his final character was formed. As the intensity of his feelings and purposes increased they wrote themselves upon his features in the furrowed and frowning forehead, the thick lips tight with determination, the immense nose curving out as if to encompass the world, a countenance somber and severe, expressing an infinite capacity for love and hate; a small frame racked and haunted with visions, frustrated aspirations, and introverted storms. “I am still flesh like you,” he wrote to his parents, “and the senses are unruly to reason, so that I must struggle cruelly to keep the Demon from leaping upon my back.”⁴ He fasted and flogged himself to tame what seemed to him the inherent corruption of human nature. If he personified the promptings of flesh and pride as Satanic voices, he could with equal readiness personify the admonitions of his better self. Alone in his cell, he glorified his solitude by conceiving himself as a battleground of spirits hovering over him for evil or for good. Finally it seemed to him that angels, archangels, were speaking to him; he accepted their words as divine revelations; and suddenly he spoke to the world as a prophet chosen to be a messenger of God. He avidly absorbed the apocalyptic visions attributed to the Apostle John, and inherited the eschatalogy of the mystic Joachim of Flora. Like Joachim he announced that the reign of Antichrist had come, that Satan had captured the world, that soon Christ would appear to begin His earthly rule, and that divine vengeance would engulf the tyrants, adulterers, and atheists who seemed to dominate Italy.