The Renaissance

When his prior sent him to preach in Lombardy (1486), Savonarola abandoned his youthful pedagogic style, and cast his sermons into the form of denunciations of immorality, prophecies of doom, and calls to repentance. Thousands of people who could not have followed his earlier arguments listened with awe to the newly impassioned eloquence of a man who seemed to be speaking with authority. Pico della Mirandola heard of the friar’s success; he asked Lorenzo to suggest to the prior that Savonarola should be brought back to Florence. Savonarola returned (1489); two years later he was chosen prior of San Marco; and Lorenzo found in him an enemy more forthright and powerful than any that had ever crossed his path.

Florence was surprised to discover that the swarthy preacher who a decade before had chilled them with argument, could now awe them with apocalyptic fantasies, thrill them with vivid descriptions of the paganism, corruption, and immorality of their neighbors, lift up their souls to repentance and hope, and renew in them the full intensity of the faith that had inspired and terrified their youth.

Ye women, who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I tell you you are all ugly. Would you see true beauty? Look at the pious man or woman in whom spirit dominates matter; watch him when he prays, when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him when his prayer is ended; you will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will behold it as it were the face of an angel.⁵

Men marveled at his courage, for he flayed the clergy and the papacy more than the laity, the princes more than the people; and a note of political radicalism warmed the hearts of the poor:

In these days there is no grace, no gift of the Holy Spirit, that may not be bought or sold. On the other hand, the poor are oppressed by grievous burdens; and when they are called to pay sums beyond their means the rich cry unto them, “Give me the rest.” There be some who, having an income of fifty [florins per year], pay a tax on one hundred, while the rich pay little, since the taxes are regulated at their pleasure. Bethink ye well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite ye. This city shall no more be called Florence but a den of thieves, of baseness and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be povertystricken… and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror.⁶

After the priests the bankers:

You have found many ways of making money, and many exchanges which you call lawful but which are most unjust; and you have corrupted the offices and magistrates of the city. No one can persuade you that usury [interest] is sinful; you defend it at the peril of your souls. No one is ashamed of lending at usury; nay, those who do otherwise pass for fools…. Your brow is that of a whore, and you will not blush. You say, a good and glad life lies in gain; and Christ says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit heaven.⁷

And a word for Lorenzo:

Tyrants are incorrigible because they are proud, because they love flattery, and will not restore ill-gotten gains…. They hearken not unto the poor, and neither do they condemn the rich…. They corrupt voters, and farm out taxes to aggravate the burdens of the people⁸…. The tyrant is wont to occupy the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands.⁹

Nor shall that dictatorship be excused on the ground that it finances literature and art. The literature and art, said Savonarola, are pagan; the humanists merely pretend to be Christians; those ancient authors whom they so sedulously exhume and edit and praise are strangers to Christ and the Christian virtues, and their art is an idolatry of heathen gods, or a shameless display of naked women and men.

Lorenzo was disturbed. His grandfather had founded and enriched the monastery of San Marco; he himself had given to it lavishly; it seemed to him unreasonable that a friar who could know little of the difficulties of government, and who idealized a liberty that had been merely the right of the strong to use the weak without hindrance by law, should now undermine, from a Medici shrine, that public support upon which the political power of his family had been built. He tried to appease the friar; he went to Mass in San Marco’s, and sent the convent rich gifts. Savonarola scorned them, and remarked in a subsequent sermon that a faithful dog does not leave off barking in his master’s defense because a bone is thrown to him. When he found an unusually large sum, in gold, in the alms box, he suspected that it came from Lorenzo, and gave it to another monastery, saying that silver sufficed the needs of his brethren. Lorenzo sent five leading citizens to argue with him that his inflammatory sermons would lead to useless violence, and were unsettling the order and peace of Florence; Savonarola answered by telling them to bid Lorenzo do penance for his sins. A Franciscan friar famous for eloquence was encouraged to preach popular sermons with a view to drawing the Dominican’s audience away; the Franciscan failed. Greater throngs than ever before came to San Marco, until its church could no longer hold them. For his Lenten sermons of 1491 Savonarola moved his pulpit into the cathedral; and though that edifice had been designed to contain a city, it was crowded whenever the friar was scheduled to speak. The ailing Lorenzo made no further effort to interfere with his preaching.

After Lorenzo’s death the weakness of his son Piero made Savonarola the greatest power in Florence. With the reluctant consent of the new pope, Alexander VI, he separated his convent from the Lombard Congregation (of Dominican monasteries) of which it had been a part, and made himself in practice the independent head of his monastic community. He reformed its regulations, and raised the moral and intellectual level of the friars under his rule. New recruits joined his flock, and most of its 250 members developed for him a love and fidelity that upheld him in all but his final ordeal. He became bolder in his criticism of the laic and clerical immorality of the time. Inheriting, however unwittingly, the anticlerical views of the Waldensian and Patarine heretics who still lurked here and there in northern Italy and central Europe, he condemned the worldly wealth of the clergy, the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony, “the great prelates with splendid miters of gold and precious stones on their heads… with fine copes and stoles of brocade”; he contrasted this affluence with the simplicity of the priests in the early Church; these “had fewer gold miters and fewer chalices, for what few they possessed were broken up to relieve the needs of the poor; whereas our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support.”¹⁰ To these denunciations he added prophecies of doom. He had predicted that Lorenzo and Innocent VIII would die in 1492; they did. Now he predicted that presently the sins of Italy, of her despots and her clergy, would he avenged by a dire disaster; that thereafter Christ would lead the nation in a glorious reform; and that he himself, Savonarola, would die a violent death. Early in 1494 he foretold that Charles VIII would invade Italy, and he welcomed the invasion as the chastening hand of God. His sermons at this time, says a contemporary, were “so full of terrors and alarms, cries and lamentations, that everyone went about the city bewildered, speechless, and, as it were, half dead.”¹¹

In September, 1494, Charles VIII crossed the Apennines into Italy, resolved to add the Kingdom of Naples to the French crown. In October he entered Florentine territory and besieged the fortress of Sarzana. Piero thought he could save Florence from France as his father had saved it from Naples, by going in person to the enemy. He met Charles at Sarzana, and yielded to all demands: Pisa, Leghorn, and every bastion of Florence in the west were surrendered to the French for the duration of the war, and Florence was to advance 200,000 florins ($5,000,000) to help finance Charles’s campaign.¹² When news of these concessions reached Florence the Signory and the Council were shocked; contrary to Lorenzo’s precedents, they had not been consulted in these negotiations. Led by the Medici opponents of Piero, the Signory decided to depose him and restore the old republic. When Piero returned from Sarzana he found the gates of the Palazzo Vecchio closed in his face. As he rode to his home the people jeered him, and urchins pelted him with stones. Fearing for his life, he fled from the city with his family and his brothers. The populace sacked the Medici palace and gardens, and the homes of Piero’s financial agents; the art collection gathered by four generations of Medici was plundered and scattered, and its remains were sold at auction by the government. The Signory offered a reward of five thousand florins for the delivery of Piero and Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici alive, two thousand for their delivery dead. It sent five men, including Savonarola, to Charles at Pisa to ask for better terms; Charles met them with noncommittal courtesy. When the delegation had left, the Pisans tore the lion and lilies of Florence from their buildings, and declared their independence. Charles entered Florence, consented to some slight modification of his demands, and, eager to get to Naples, led his army to the south. Florence addressed itself now to one of history’s most spectacular experiments in democracy.

II. THE STATESMAN

On December 2, 1494 the citizens were summoned to a parlamento by the great bell in the Palazzo Vecchio tower. The Signory asked and received the power to name twenty men who would appoint a new Signory and new magistrates for a year, after which all offices were to be filled by lot from a register of the approximately three thousand enfranchised males. The Twenty dismissed the councils and agencies which under the Medici had considered and administered public affairs, and divided the diverse functions among themselves. They were inadequately experienced for these tasks, and were torn by family factions; the new governmental machinery broke down, and chaos was imminent; commerce and industry hesitated, men were thrown out of work, and angry crowds gathered in the streets. Piero Capponi persuaded the Twenty that order could be saved only by inviting Savonarola into their councils.

The friar summoned them to his monastery, and expounded to them an ambitious program of political, economic, and moral legislation. Under his leadership and that of Pietro Soderini, the Twenty devised a new constitution, partly modeled on that which was so successfully maintaining stability in Venice. A Maggior Consiglio or Great Council was to be formed of men who—or their ancestors in the preceding three generations—had held a major office in the state; and these initial members were to choose twenty-eight additional councilors in each year. The executive organs of the government were to remain essentially as under the Medici: a Signory of eight priors and a gonfalonier, chosen by the Council for a term of two months, and various committees—The Twelve, The Sixteen, The Ten, The Eight—to carry on administration, taxation, and war. Complete democracy was postponed as impractical in a society still largely illiterate and subject to waves of passion; but the Great Council, numbering almost three thousand members, was considered to be a representative body. Since no room in the Palazzo Vecchio could house so large an assemblage, Simone Pollaiuolo—II Cronaca—was engaged to redesign part of the interior into a Sala dei Cinquecento, or Hall of the Five Hundred, where the Council could meet in sections; here, eight years later, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would be commissioned to paint opposed walls in a famous rivalry. Through Savonarola’s influence and eloquence the proposed constitution received public acclaim, and the new Republic came into operation on June 10, 1495.

It began amiably by issuing amnesty to all supporters of the deposed Medici regime. With self-respecting generosity it abolished all taxes except a ten-per-cent levy on income from real property; the merchants who dominated the Council thus exempted commerce from taxation, and laid the whole burden on the landowning aristocracy and the land-using poor. At Savonarola’s urging the government established a monte di pietà, or state loan office, which lent money at five to seven per cent, and freed the poor from dependence on private moneylenders, who had charged up to thirty per cent. Again at the friar’s prompting, the Council attempted to reform morals with laws: it forbade horse races, gross carnival songs, profanity, and gambling; servants were encouraged to inform against masters who gambled, and convicted offenders were punished with torture; blasphemers had their tongues pierced, and homosexuals were degraded with merciless penalties. To aid in the enforcement of these reforms Savonarola organized the boys of his congregation into a moral police. They pledged themselves to attend church regularly, to avoid races, pageants, acrobatic displays, loose company, obscene literature, dancing, and music schools, and to wear their hair short. These “bands of hope” roamed the streets soliciting alms for the Church; they dispersed groups that had gathered to gamble, and tore from the bodies of women what they judged to be indecent dress.

For a time the city accepted these reforms; many women gave them enthusiastic support, behaved modestly, dressed plainly, and put aside their jewelry. A moral revolution transformed what had been the gay Florence of the Medici. People sang hymns, not Bacchic lyrics, in the streets. Churches were filled, and alms were given in unprecedented quantity. Some bankers and merchants restored illegal gains.¹³ Savonarola called upon all the population, rich and poor, to shun idleness and luxury, to work assiduously, and to give a good example with their lives. “Your reform,” he said, “must begin with the things of the spirit… your temporal good must serve your moral and religious welfare, on which it depends. And if you have heard it said that ‘states are not ruled by paternosters,’ remember that this is the rule of tyrants… a rule for oppressing, not for liberating, a city. If you desire a good government you must restore it to God.”¹⁴ He proposed that Florence should think of its government as having an invisible king—Christ Himself; and under this theocracy he predicted Utopia: “O Florence! then wilt thou be rich with spiritual and temporal wealth; thou wilt achieve the reformation of Rome, of Italy, of all countries; the wings of thy greatness shall spread over the world.”¹⁵ And in truth Florence had seldom been so happy before. It was a bright moment in the hectic history of virtue.

But human nature remained. Men are not naturally virtuous, and social order maintains itself precariously amid the open or secret conflict of egos, families, classes, races, and creeds. A powerful element in the Florentine community itched for taverns, brothels, and gambling halls as outlets for instincts or as sources of gain. The Pazzi, the Nerli, the Capponi, the younger branch of the Medici, and other aristocrats who had effected the explusion of Piero were furious at seeing the government fall into the hands of a friar. Remnants of Piero’s party survived, and watched for a chance to restore him and their fortunes. The Franciscan friars worked with religious zeal against the Dominican Savonarola, and a small group of skeptics called for a plague on both their houses. These diverse enemies of the new order agreed in satirizing its supporters as Piagnoni or weepers (for many wept at Savonarola’s sermons), Collitorti or wry-necks, Stropiccioni or hypocrites, Masticapaternostri or prayer-munchers; and the recipients of these titles denominated their opponents, from the virulence of their hostility, Arrabiati, mad dogs. Early in 1496 the Arrabiati succeeded in electing their candidate for gonfalonier, Filippo Corbizzi. Having assembled in the Palazzo Vecchio a council of ecclesiastics, he summoned Savonarola before it, and accused him of political activities improper in a friar; and several churchmen, including one of his own Dominican order, joined in the charge. He replied: “Now the words of the Lord are fulfilled: ‘The sons of my mother have fought against me.’… To be concerned with the affairs of this world… is no crime in a monk unless he should mix in them without any higher aim, and without seeking to promote the cause of religion.”¹⁶ They challenged him to say whether his sermons were inspired by God, but he refused to answer. He returned to his cell a sadder man.

He might have overcome his enemies had foreign affairs favored him. The Florentines, who praised liberty, were furious at Pisa for demanding and securing it. Even Savonarola dared not defend the rebellious city; and a cathedral canon who remarked that the Pisans too had a right to be free was severely punished by a Piagnone Signory. Savonarola promised to restore Pisa to Florence, and rashly claimed that he held Pisa in the hollow of his hand; but he was, as Machiavelli scornfully said, a prophet without arms. When Charles VIII was chased from Italy, Pisa consolidated its independence by an alliance with Milan and Venice; and the Florentines mourned that Savonarola had tied them to Charles’s falling star, and that they alone had not shared in the glorious expulsion of the French from Italy.¹⁷ Before abandoning the lately Florentine fortresses of Sarzana and Pietra Santa, their French commandants had sold one to Genoa and the other to Lucca. Montepulciano, Arezzo, Volterra, and other Florentine dependencies were agitated by movements for liberation; the once proud and powerful city seemed on the verge of losing nearly all its outlying possessions, and all its trade outlets by the Arno, the Adriatic, and the roads to Milan and Rome. Trade suffered, tax revenues fell. The Council tried to finance the war against Pisa by forced loans from rich citizens, offering them government bonds in return; but as bankruptcy neared these bonds declined to eighty to fifty to ten per cent of their face value. In 1496 the treasury was exhausted, and the government imitated Lorenzo by borrowing money from a fund confided to the state to provide dowries for poor brides. In the administration of government funds, whether by Arrabiati or Piagnoni, corruption and incompetence rose and spread. Francesco Valori, made gonfalonier (January, 1497) by a Piagnone majority in the Council, maddened the Mad Dogs by excluding them from all magistracies, denying them membership in the Council if they were delinquent in taxes, allowing none but Piagnoni to address the Council, and expelling from Florence any Franciscan friar who preached against Savonarola. For eleven months in 1496 rain fell almost daily, ruining the crops of the narrowed hinterland; in 1497 people dropped dead of hunger in the streets. The government opened relief stations to provide grain for the poor; women were crushed to death in the multitudes that applied. The Medicean party plotted to restore Piero; five leaders were detected and were condemned to death (1497); appeal to the Council, guaranteed by the constitution, was refused them; they were executed within a few hours of their condemnation; and many Florentines contrasted the faction, violence, and severity of the Republic with the order and peace of Lorenzo’s time. Hostile crowds repeatedly demonstrated before Savonarola’s monastery; Piagnoni and Arrabiati stoned each other in the streets. When the friar preached on Ascension Day of 1497 his sermon was interrupted by a riot in which his enemies tried to seize him and were repulsed by his friends. A gonfalonier proposed to the Signory that he should be banished as a means of quieting the city, and the proposal was lost by a single vote. Amid this bitter collapse of his dream Savonarola faced and defied the strongest power in Italy.

III. THE MARTYR

Pope Alexander VI was not deeply disturbed by Savonarola’s criticism of the clergy or of the morals of Rome. He had heard the like before; hundreds of ecclesiastics, for centuries past, had complained that manypriests lived immoral lives, and that the popes loved wealth and power more than became the vicars of Christ.¹⁸ Alexander was of a genial temperament; he did not mind a little criticism so long as he felt secure in the Apostolic chair. What disturbed him in Savonarola was the friar’s politics. Not the semidemocratic nature of the new constitution; Alexander had no special interest in the Medici, and perhaps preferred in Florence a weak republic to a strong dictatorship. Alexander feared another French invasion; he had joined in forming a league of Italian states to expel Charles VIII and to discourage a second French attack; he resented the adherence of Florence to its alliance with France, considered Savonarola the power behind this policy, and suspected him of secret correspondence with the French government. Savonarola wrote to Charles VIII about this time three letters seconding the proposal of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere that the King should call a general council of ecclesiastics and statesmen to reform the Church and depose Alexander as “an infidel and a heretic.”¹⁹ Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, representing Milan at the papal court, urged the Pope to end the friar’s preaching and influence.

On July 21, 1495 Alexander wrote a brief note to Savonarola:

To our well-beloved son, greeting and the apostolic benediction. We have heard that of all the workers in the Lord’s vineyard thou art the most zealous; at which we deeply rejoice, and give thanks to Almighty God. We have likewise heard that thou dost assert thy predictions proceed not from thee but from God.* Therefore we desire, as behooves our pastoral office, to have speech with thee considering these things; so that, being by these means better informed of God’s will, we may be better able to fulfill it. Wheretofore, by thy vow of holy obedience, we enjoin thee to wait on us without delay, and shall welcome thee with loving kindness.²⁰

This letter was a triumph for Savonarola’s enemies, for it placed him in a situation where he must either end his career as a reformer, or flagrantly disobey the Pope. He feared that once in the papal power he would never be allowed to return to Florence; he might end his days in a Sant’ Angelo dungeon; and if he did not come back his supporters would be ruined. On their advice he replied to Alexander that he was too ill to travel to Rome. That the Pope’s motives were political appeared when he wrote to the Signory on September 8 protesting against the continued alliance of Florence with France, and exhorting the Florentines not to endure the reproach of being the only Italians allied with the enemies of Italy. At the same time he ordered Savonarola to desist from preaching, to submit to the authority of the Dominican vicar-general in Lombardy; and to go wherever the vicargeneral should bid him. Savonarola replied (September 29) that his congregation was unwilling to subordinate itself to the vicar-general, but that meanwhile he would refrain from preaching. Alexander, in a conciliatory response (October 16), repeated his prohibition of preaching, and expressed the hope that when Savonarola’s health should permit he would come to Rome, to be received in “a joyful and fatherly spirit.”²¹ There, for a year, Alexander let the problem rest.

Meanwhile the prior’s party had recaptured control of the Council and the Signory. The emissaries of the Florentine government in Rome besought the Pope to withdraw his interdict on the friar’s preaching, urging that Florence needed his moral stimulus in Lent. Alexander seems to have given a verbal consent, and on February 17, 1496, Savonarola resumed his preaching in the cathedral. About this time Alexander commissioned a learned Dominican bishop to examine Savonarola’s published sermons for heresy. The bishop reported: “Most Holy Father, this friar says nothing that is not wise and honest; he speaks against simony and the corruption of the priesthood, which in truth is very great; he respects the dogmas and authority of the Church; wherefore I would rather seek to make him my friend—if need be by offering him the cardinal’s purple.”²² Alexander complaisantly sent a Dominican to Florence to offer Savonarola the red hat. The friar felt not complimented but shocked; this, to him, was but another instance of simony. His answer to Alexander’s emissary was: “Come to my next sermon, and you will have my reply to Rome.”²³

His first sermon of the year reopened his conflict with the Pope. It was an event in the history of Florence. Half the excited city wished to hear him, and even the vast duomo could not contain all who sought entry, though within they were crowded so tightly that no one could move. A group of armed friends escorted the prior to the cathedral. He began by explaining his long absence from the pulpit, and affirming his full loyalty to the teachings of the Church. But then he issued an audacious challenge to the Pope:

The superior may not give me any command contrary to the rules of my order; the pope may not give any command opposed to charity or the Gospel. I do not believe that the pope would ever seek to do so; but were he so to do I should say to him, “Now thou art no pastor, thou art not the Church of Rome, thou art in error.”… Whenever it be clearly seen that the commands of superiors are contrary to God’s commandments, and especially when contrary to the precepts of charity, no one is in such case bound to obedience…. Were I to clearly see that my departure from a city would be the spiritual and temporal ruin of the people, I would obey no living man that commanded me to depart… forasmuch as in obeying him I should disobey the commands of the Lord.²⁴

In a sermon for the second Sunday in Lent he denounced the morals of Christendom’s capital in harsh terms: “One thousand, ten thousand, fourteen thousand harlots are few for Rome, for there both men and women are made harlots.”²⁵ These sermons were spread throughout Europe by the new marvel, the printing press, and were read everywhere, even by the sultan of Turkey. They aroused a war of pamphlets in and out of Florence, some of them accusing the friar of heresy and indiscipline, others defending him as a prophet and a saint.

Alexander sought an indirect escape from open war. In November, 1496, he ordered the union of all Tuscan Dominican monasteries in a new Tuscan-Roman Congregation, to be directly under the authority of Padre Giacomo da Sicilia. Padre Giacomo was favorably disposed toward Savonarola, but would presumably accept a papal suggestion to transfer the friar to another environment. Savonarola refused to obey the order of union, and took his case over the head of the Pope to the public at large in a pamphlet called “An Apology of the Brethren of San Marco.” “This union,” he argued, “is impossible, unreasonable, and hurtful, nor can the brethren of San Marco be bound to agree to it, inasmuch as superiors may not issue commands contrary to the rules of the order, nor contrary to the law of charity or the welfare of our souls.”²⁶ Technically all monastic congregations were directly subject to the popes; a pope might compel the merger of congregations against their will; Savonarola himself, in 1493, had approved Alexander’s order uniting the Dominican Congregation of St. Catherine’s at Pisa, against its will, with Savonarola’s Congregation of St. Mark.²⁷ Alexander, however, took no immediate action. Savonarola continued to preach, and issued to the public a series of letters defending his defiance of the Pope.

As the Lenten season of 1497 approached, the Arrabiati prepared to celebrate carnival by such festivities, processions, and songs as had been sanctioned under the Medici. To counter these plans Savonarola’s loyal aide, Fra Domenico, instructed the children of the congregation to organize a quite different celebration. During the week of Carnival—preceding Lent—these boys and girls went about the city in bands, knocked at doors, and asked for—sometimes demanded—the surrender of what they called “vanities” or cursed objects (anathemase)—pictures considered immoral, love songs, carnival masks and costumes, false hair, fancy dresses, playing cards, dice, musical instruments, cosmetics, wicked books like the Decameron or the Morgante maggiore.… On the final day of Carnival, February 7, the more ardent supporters of Savonarola, singing hymns, marched in solemn procession, behind a figure of the Infant Jesus carved by Donatello and borne by four children in the guise of angels, to the Piazza della Signoria. There a great pyramid of combustible material had been raised, 60 feet high and 240 feet in circumference at the base. Upon the seven stages of the pyramid the “vanities” collected during the week, or now brought to the sacrifice, were arranged or thrown, including precious manuscripts and works of art. Fire was set to the pyre at four points, and the bells of the Palazzo Vecchio were rung to acclaim this first Savonarolan “burning of the vanities.”*

The Lenten sermons of the friar carried the war to Rome. While accepting the principle that the Church should have some terra firma of temporal power, he argued that the wealth of the Church was the source of her deterioration. His invective now knew no bounds.

The earth teems with bloodshed, yet the priests take no heed; rather, by their evil example, they bring spiritual death upon all. They have withdrawn from God, and their piety consists in spending their nights with harlots…. They say that God hath no care of the world, that all cometh by chance; neither believe they that Christ is present in the sacrament…. Come hither, thou ribald Church. The Lord saith: I gave thee beautiful vestments, but thou hast made idols of them. Thou hast dedicated the sacred vessels to vainglory, the sacraments to simony. Thou hast become a shameless harlot in thy lusts; thou art lower than a beast; thou art a monster of abomination. Once thou felt shame for thy sins, but now thou art shameless. Once anointed priests called their sons nephews, but now they speak of their sons.†… And thus, O prostitute Church, thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole world, and stinkest unto heaven.²⁸

Savonarola suspected that such tirades would earn him excommunication. He welcomed it.

Many of ye say that excommunication will be decreed…. For my part I beseech Thee, O Lord, that it may come quickly.… Bear this excommunication aloft on a lance, open the gates to it! I will reply to it: and if I do not amaze thee, then thou mayest say what thou wilt.… O Lord, I seek only Thy cross! Let me be persecuted; I ask this grace of Thee. Let me not die in my bed, but let me give my blood for Thee, even as Thou gavest thine for me.²⁹

These passionate sermons created a furore throughout Italy. Men came from distant cities to hear them; the duke of Ferrara came in disguise; the crowd overflowed from the cathedral into the square, and each striking sentence was relayed from those within to those without. In Rome the people turned almost unanimously against the friar, and called for his punishment.³⁰ In April, 1497 the Arrabiati secured control of the Council, and—on pretext of danger from the plague—forbade all preaching in the churches after May 5. Urged on by Roman agents of the Arrabiati, Alexander signed a decree excommunicating the friar (May 13); but he let it be known that he would rescind the excommunication if Savonarola would obey the summons to Rome. The prior, fearing imprisonment, still refused, but for six months he held his peace. Then on Christmas Day he sang High Mass at San Marco, gave the Eucharist to his friars, and led them in a solemn procession around the square. Many were scandalized at an excommunicate celebrating Mass, but Alexander made no protest; on the contrary he intimated that he would withdraw the excommunication if Florence would join the league to resist a second invasion from France.³¹ The Signory, gambling on the success of the French, rejected the proposal. On February 11, 1498, Savonarola completed his rebellion by preaching in San Marco. He denounced the excommunication as unjust and invalid, and charged with heresy any man who should uphold its validity. Finally he issued an excommunication himself:

Therefore, on him that giveth commands opposed to charity anathema sit [let there be a curse]. Were such a command pronounced by an angel, even by the Virgin Mary herself and all the saints (which is certainly impossible), anathema sit.… And if any pope hath ever spoken to the contrary, let him be declared excommunicate.³²

On the last day before Lent Savonarola read Mass in the open square before San Marco’s, administered the sacrament to a great multitude, and publicly prayed: “O Lord, if my deeds be not sincere, if my words be not inspired by Thee, strike me dead on this instant.” That afternoon his followers staged a second burning of the vanities.

Alexander informed the Signory that unless it could dissuade Savonarola from further preaching he would lay an interdict upon the city. Though now thoroughly hostile to the prior, the Signory refused to silence him, preferring to let the onus of such a prohibition remain with the Pope; besides, the eloquent friar might be useful in combating a pope who was organizing the Papal States into a power too strong for the comfort of its neighbors. Savonarola continued to preach, but only in the church of his monastery. The Florentine ambassador reported that feeling against the friar was so intense in Rome that no Florentine was safe there; and he feared that if the Pope issued the threatened interdict all Florentine merchants in Rome would be thrown into jail. The Signory yielded, and ordered Savonarola to quit preaching (March 17). He obeyed, but predicted great calamities for Florence. Fra Domenico filled the convent pulpit in his stead, and served as the voice of his prior. Meanwhile Savonarola wrote to the sovereigns of France, Spain, Germany, and Hungary, begging them to call a general council for the reform of the Church:

The moment of vengeance has arrived. The Lord commands me to reveal new secrets, and make manifest to the world the peril by which the bark of St. Peter is threatened, owing to your long neglect. The Church is all teeming with abomination, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet; yet not only do ye apply no remedy, but ye do homage to the cause of the woes by which she is polluted. Wherefore the Lord is greatly angered, and hath long left the Church without a shepherd…. For I hereby testify… that this Alexander is no pope, nor can be held as one; inasmuch as, leaving aside the mortal sin of simony, by which he hath purchased the papal chair, and daily selleth the benefices of the Church to the highest bidder, and likewise putting aside his other manifest vices, I declare that he is no Christian, and believes in no God.³³

If, he added, the kings will call a council he will appear before it and give proof of all these charges. One of these letters was intercepted by a Milanese agent, and was sent to Alexander.

On March 25, 1498 a Franciscan friar, preaching in the church of Santa Croce, turned the drama of the case upon himself by challenging Savonarola to an ordeal of fire. He stigmatized the Dominican as a heretic and false prophet, and offered to walk through fire if Savonarola would do the same. He expected, he said, that both of them would be burned, but hoped by his sacrifice to free Florence from the disorders that had been caused by a proud Dominican’s disobedience of the Pope. Savonarola rejected the challenge; Domenico accepted it. The hostile Signory seized the chance to discredit a prior who in its view had become a troublesome demagogue. It approved of the resort to medieval methods, and arranged that on April 7 Fra Giuliano Rondinelli of the Franciscans and Fra Domenico da Pescia should enter a fire in the Piazza della Signoria.

On the appointed day the great square was filled with a crowd eager to enjoy a miracle or the sight of human suffering. Every window and roof overlooking the scene was occupied with spectators. In the center of the square, athwart a passage two feet wide, twin pyres had been erected of wood mixed with pitch, oil, resin, and gunpowder, guaranteed to make a searing flame. The Franciscan friars took their stand in the Loggia dei Lanzi; the Dominicans marched in from the opposite direction; Fra Domenico carried a consecrated Host, Savonarola a crucifix. The Franciscans complained that Fra Domenico’s red cape might have been charmed into incombustibility by the prior; they insisted on his discarding it; he protested; the crowd urged him to yield; he did. The Franciscans asked him to remove other garments which they thought might have been charmed; Domenico consented, went into the palace of the Signory, and changed clothes with another friar. The Franciscans urged that he should be forbidden to approach Savonarola, lest he be re-enchanted; Domenico submitted to being surrounded by Franciscans. They objected to his carrying either a crucifix or a consecrated Host into the fire; he surrendered the crucifix but kept the Host, and a long theological discussion ensued between Savonarola and the Franciscans as to whether Christ would be burned along with the appearances of bread. Meanwhile the Franciscan champion remained in the palace, begging the Signory to save him by any ruse. The priors allowed the discussions to go on till darkness fell, and then announced that the ordeal could no longer take place. The crowd, cheated of blood, attacked the palace, but was repulsed; some Arrabiati tried to seize Savonarola, but his guard protected him. The Dominicans returned to San Marco, jeered by the populace, though apparently the Franciscans had been the chief cause of delay. Many complained that Savonarola, after claiming that he was inspired by God and that God would protect him, had allowed Domenico to represent him in the ordeal, instead of facing it himself. These thoughts spread through the city, and almost overnight the prior’s following faded away.

On the morrow, Palm Sunday, a mob of Arrabiati and others marched to attack the monastery of San Marco. On the way they killed some Piagnoni, including Francesco Valori; his wife, drawn to a window by his cries, was shot through with an arrow; his house was pillaged and burned; one of his grandchildren was smothered to death. The bell of San Marco tolled to call the Piagnoni to the rescue, but they did not come. The friars prepared to defend themselves with swords and clubs; Savonarola in vain bade them lay down their arms, and himself stood unarmed at the altar, awaiting death. The friars fought valiantly; Fra Enrico wielded his sword with secular delight, accompanying each blow with a lusty cry, Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine—“Save thy people, Lord!” But the hostile crowd was too numerous for the friars; Savonarola finally prevailed upon them to lay down their arms; and when an order came from the Signory for his arrest and that of Domenico, the two surrendered, and were led through a mob that jeered, struck, kicked, and spat upon them, to cells in the Palazzo Vecchio. On the following day Fra Silvestro was added to the prisoners.

The Signory sent to Pope Alexander an account of the ordeal and arrest, begged his absolution for the violence committed on an ecclesiastic, and asked his authorization to subject the prisoners to trial, and, if necessary, to torture. The Pope urged that the three friars should be sent to Rome to be tried before an ecclesiastical court; the Signory refused, and the Pope had to be content with having two papal delegates share in examining the accused.³⁴ The Signory was resolved that Savonarola should die. As long as he lived his party would live; only his death, they thought, could heal the strife of factions that had so divided the city and its government that alliance with Florence had become worthless to any foreign power, and Florence lay open to internal conspiracy or external attack.

Following the custom established by the Inquisition, the examiners put the three friars to torture on various occasions between April 9 and May 22. Silvestro succumbed at once, and answered so readily as the examiners wished that his confession was too facile to be useful. Domenico resisted to the last; tortured to the verge of death, he continued to avow that Savonarola was a saint without guile or sin. Savonarola, high-strung and exhausted, soon collapsed under torture, and gave whatever replies were suggested to him. Recovering, he retracted the confession; tortured again, he yielded again. After three ordeals his spirit broke, and he signed a confused confession that he had no divine inspiration, that he had been guilty of pride and ambition, that he had urged foreign and secular powers to call a general council of the Church, and that he had plotted for the deposition of the Pope. On charges of schism and heresy, of revealing confessional secrets as pretended visions and prophecies, of causing faction and disorder in the state, the three friars were condemned to death by the united sentence of state and Church. Alexander graciously sent them absolution.

On May 23, 1498, the parricide Republic executed its founder and his comrades. Unfrocked and barefoot, they were led to the same Piazza della Signoria where twice they had burned the “vanities.” As then, and as for the trial by ordeal, a great crowd gathered for the sight; but now the government supplied it with food and drink. A priest asked Savonarola, “In what spirit do you bear this martyrdom?” He answered, “The Lord has suffered much for me.” He kissed the crucifix that he carried, and did not speak again. The friars walked bravely to their doom, Domenico almost joyfully, singing a Te Deum in gratitude for a martyr’s death. The three men were hanged from a gibbet, and boys were allowed to stone them as they choked. A great fire was lighted under them, and burned them to ashes. The ashes were thrown into the Arno, lest they be worshiped as the relics of saints. Some Piagnoni, braving incrimination, knelt in the square and wept and prayed. Every year until 1703, on the morning after the 23rd of May, flowers were strewn on the spot where the hot blood of the friars fell. Today a plaque in the pavement marks the site of the most famous crime in Florentine history.

Savonarola was the Middle Ages surviving into the Renaissance, and the Renaissance destroyed him. He saw the moral decay of Italy under the influence of wealth and a declining religious belief, and he stood bravely, fanatically, vainly against the sensual and skeptical spirit of the times. He inherited the moral fervor and mental simplicity of medieval saints, and seemed out of place and key in a world that was singing the praises of rediscovered pagan Greece. He failed through his intellectual limitations and a forgivable but irritating egotism; he exaggerated his illumination and his capacity, and naively underestimated the task of opposing at once the power of the papacy and the instincts of men. He was understandably shocked by Alexander’s morals, but intemperate in his denunciations and intransigeant in his policy. He was a Protestant before Luther only in the sense of calling for a reform of the Church; he shared none of Luther’s theological dissents. But his memory became a force in the Protestant mind; Luther called him a saint. His influence on literature was slight, for literature was in the hands of skeptics and realists like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; but his influence on art was immense. Fra Bartolommeo signed his portrait of the friar, “Portrait of Girolamo of Ferrara, prophet sent by God.” Botticelli turned from paganism to piety under Savonarola’s preaching. Michelangelo heard the friar frequently, and read his sermons devotedly; it was the spirit of Savonarola that moved the brush over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and traced behind the altar the terrible Last Judgment.

The grandeur of Savonarola lay in his effort to achieve a moral revolution, to make men honest, good, and just. We know that this is the most difficult of all revolutions, and we cannot wonder that Savonarola failed where Christ succeeded with so pitiful a minority of men. But we know, too, that such a revolution is the only one that would mark a real advance in human affairs; and that beside it the bloody overturns of history are transient and ineffectual spectacles, changing anything but man.

IV. THE REPUBLIC AND THE MEDICI: 1498–1534

The chaos that had almost nullified government in the later years of Savonarola’s ascendancy was not mitigated by his death. The brief term of two months allowed to each Signory and gonfalonier made for a hectic discontinuity in the executive branch, and inclined the priors to irresponsibility and corruption. In 1502 the Council, dominated by a triumphant oligarchy of rich men, sought to overcome part of this difficulty by electing the gonfalonier for life, so that while still subject to Signory and Council, he might face the popes and the secular rulers of Italy on terms of equal tenure. The first man to receive this honor was Pietro Soderini, a millionaire friendly to the people, an honest patriot whose powers of mind and will were not so eminent as to threaten Florence with dictatorship. He enlisted Machiavelli among his advisers, governed prudently and economically, and used his private fortune to resume that patronage of art which had been interrupted under Savonarola. With his support Machiavelli replaced the mercenary troops of Florence with a citizen militia, which finally (1508) forced Pisa to yield again to a Florentine “protectorate.”

But in 1512 the foreign policy of the Republic brought on the disaster that Alexander VI had foretold. Through all the efforts of the “Holy League” of Venice, Milan, Naples, and Rome to rid Italy of its French invaders Florence had persisted in its alliance with France. When victory crowned the League it turned in revenge upon Florence, and sent its troops to replace the republican oligarchy with a Medicean dictatorship. Florence resisted, and Machiavelli labored strenuously to organize its defense. Its outpost, Prato, was taken and sacked, and Machiavelli’s militia turned and fled from the trained mercenaries of the League. Soderini resigned to avoid further bloodshed. Giuliano de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, having contributed 10,000 ducats ($250,000) to the League treasury, entered Florence under the protection of Spanish, German, and Italian arms; his brother, Cardinal Giovanni, soon joined him; the Savonarolan constitution was abolished, and the Medicean ascendancy was restored (1512).

Giuliano and Giovanni behaved with moderation, and the public, surfeited with excitement, readily accepted the change. When Giovanni became Leo X (1513), Giuliano, having proved too gentle to be a successful ruler, yielded the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo. This ambitious youth died after six years of reckless rule. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, son of the Giuliano who had been slain in the Pazzi conspiracy, now gave Florence an excellent administration; and after he became Clement VII (1521) he ruled the city from the papal chair. Florence took advantage of his misfortunes to expel his representatives (1527), and for four years it again enjoyed the trials of liberty. But Clement tempered defeat with diplomacy, and used the troops of Charles V to avenge his ousted relatives; an army of Spanish and German troops marched upon Florence (1529), and repeated the story of 1512; resistance was heroic but vain; and Alessandro de’ Medici began (1531) a regime of oppression, brutality, and lechery unprecedented in the annals of the family. Three centuries would pass before Florence would know freedom again.

V. ART UNDER THE REVOLUTION

An age of political excitement is usually a stimulant to literature; and we shall study later two writers of the first rank—Machiavelli and Guicciardini—who belonged to this period. But a state always verging on bankruptcy, and engaged in almost permanent revolution, does not favor art—and least of all architecture. Some rich men, skilled in floating on a flood, still gave hostages to fortune by building palaces; so Giovanni Francesco and Aristotele da Sangallo, working on plans by Raphael, raised a palatial mansion for the Pandolfini family. In 1520–4 Michelangelo designed for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici a Nuova Sagrestia, or New Sacristy, for the church of San Lorenzo—a simple quadrangle and modest dome, known to all the world as the home of Michelangelo’s finest sculptures, the tombs of the Medici.

Among the Titan’s rivals was the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who worked with him in Lorenzo’s garden of statuary, and broke his nose to win an argument. Lorenzo was so incensed by this violence that Torrigiano took refuge in Rome. He became a soldier in Caesar Borgia’s service, fought bravely in several battles, found his way to England, and designed there one of the masterpieces of English art, the tomb of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey (1519). Wandering restlessly to Spain, he carved a handsome Madonna and Child for the duke of Arcos. But the duke underpaid him; the sculptor smashed the statue to bits; the vengeful aristocrat denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic; Torrigiano was sentenced to severe punishment, but cheated his foes by starving himself to death.

Florence had never had so many great artists at one time as in 1492; but many of them fled from her turbulence, and lent their renown to other scenes. Leonardo went to Milan, Michelangelo to Bologna, Andrea Sansovino to Lisbon. Sansovino took his cognomen from Monte San Savino, and made it so famous that the world forgot his real name, Andrea di Domenico Contucci. Born the son of a poor laborer, he developed a passion for drawing and for modeling in clay; a kindly Florentine sent him to the studio of Antonio del Pollaiuolo. Maturing rapidly, he built for the church of Santo Spirito a Chapel of the Sacrament, with statues and reliefs “so vigorous and excellent,” said Vasari, “that they are without a flaw”; and before it he placed a bronze grille that halts the breath with its beauty. King John II of Portugal begged Lorenzo to send the young artist to him; Andrea went, and labored nine years there in sculpture and architecture. Lonesome for Italy, he returned to Florence (1500), but soon passed to Genoa and finally to Rome. In Santa Maria del Popolo he built two marble tombs—for Cardinals Sforza and Basso della Rovere—which won high acclaim in a city then (1505–7) buzzing with geniuses. Leo X sent him to Loreto, and there (1523–8) Andrea adorned the church of Santa Maria with a series of reliefs from the life of the Virgin, so beautiful that the angel in the Annunciation seemed to Vasari “not marble but celestial.” Soon afterward Andrea retired to a farm near his native Monte San Savino, lived energetically as a peasant, and died in 1529, aged sixty-eight.

Meanwhile the della Robbia family had faithfully and skillfully carried on the work of Luca in glazed clay. Andrea della Robbia exceeded in longevity even the eighty-five years of his uncle, and had time to train three sons in the art—Giovanni, Luca, and Girolamo. Andrea’s terra cottas have a brilliance of tone and a tenderness of sentiment that snare the eye and still the feet of the museum traveler. A room in the Bargello is rich with him, and the Hospital of the Innocents is distinguished by his decorative lunette of the Annunciation. Giovanni della Robbia rivaled his father Andrea’s excellence, as one may see in the Bargello and the Louvre. The della Robbias almost confined themselves to religious subjects through three generations; they were among the most fervent supporters of Savonarola; and two of Andrea’s sons joined the Brethren of San Marco to seek salvation with the friar.

The painters felt Savonarola’s influence most deeply. Lorenzo di Credi learned his art from Verrocchio, imitated the style of his fellow student Leonardo, and took the tenderness of his religious pictures from the piety nurtured in him by Savonarola’s eloquence and fate. He spent half his life painting Madonnas; we find them almost everywhere—in Rome, Florence, Turin, Avignon, Cleveland; the faces poor, the robes magnificent; perhaps the best is the Annunciation in the Uffizi. At the age of seventy-two, feeling it time to take on the savor of sanctity, Lorenzo went to live with the monks of Santa Maria Nuova; and there, six years later, he died.

Piero di Cosimo took his cognomen from his teacher Cosimo Rosselli, for “he who instructs ability and promotes well-being is as truly a father as the one who begets.”³⁵ Cosimo came to the conclusion that his pupil surpassed him; summoned by Sixtus IV to decorate the Sistine Chapel, he took Piero with him; and Piero painted there The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Troops in the Red Sea, with a gloomy landscape of water, rocks, and cloudy sky. He has left us two magnificent portraits, both in the Hague: of Giuliano da Sangallo and Francesco da Sangallo. Piero was all artist, caring little for society or friendship, loving nature and solitude, absorbed in the pictures and scenes that he painted. He died unconfessed and alone, having transmitted his art to two pupils who followed his example by surpassing their master: Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.

Baccio della Porta took his last name from the gate of San Piero where he lived; when he became a friar he received the name Fra Bartolommeo—Brother Bartholomew. Having studied with Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, he opened a studio with Mariotto Albertinelli, painted many pictures in collaboration with him, and remained bound to him in a fine friendship till parted by death. He was a modest youth, eager for instruction and receptive to every influence. For a time he sought to catch the subtle shading of Leonardo; when Raphael came to Florence Baccio studied perspective with him, and better blending of colors; later he visited Raphael in Rome and painted with him a noble Head of St. Peter. Finally he fell in love with the majestic style of Michelangelo; but he lacked the terrible intensity of that angry giant; and when Bartolommeo attempted the monumental he lost in the enlargement of his simple ideas the charm of his qualities—the rich depth and soft shading of his colors, the stately symmetry of his composition, the piety and sentiment of his themes.

He was deeply stirred by the sermons of Savonarola. He brought to the burning of the vanities all his paintings of the nude. When the enemies of the friar attacked the convent of San Marco (1498) he joined in its defense; in the course of the melee he vowed to become a monk if he survived; he kept his pledge, and in 1500 he entered the Dominican monastery at Prato. For five years he refused to paint, giving himself up to religious exercises. Transferred to San Marco, he consented to add his masterpieces in blue, red, and black to the rosy frescoes of Fra Angelico. There, in the refectory, he painted a Madonna and Child and a Last Judgment; in the cloisters a St. Sebastian; and in Savonarola’s cell a powerful portrait of the friar in the guise of St. Peter Martyr. The St. Sebastian was the only nude that he painted after becoming a monk. Originally it was placed in the church of San Marco, but it was so handsome that some women confessed to having been stirred to wicked thoughts by it, and the prior sold it to a Florentine who sent it to the king of France. Fra Bartolommeo continued to paint until 1517, when disease so paralyzed his hands that he could no longer hold the brush. He died in that year, at the age of forty-five.

His only rival for supremacy among the Italian painters of this period was another disciple of Piero di Cosimo. Andrea Domenico d’Agnolo di Francesco Vannuci is known to us as Andrea del Sarto because his father was a tailor. Like most Renaissance artists he developed quickly, beginning his apprenticeship at seven. Piero marveled at the lad’s skill in design, and noted with warm approval how Andrea, when a holyday closed the studio, spent his time drawing the figures in the famous cartoons made by Leonardo and Michelangelo for the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio. When Piero became in old age too eccentric a master, Andrea and his fellow student Franciabigio set up their own bottega, and for some time worked together. Andrea seems to have begun his independent career by painting, in the court of the Annunziata Church (1509), five scenes from the life of San Filippo Benizzi, a Florentine noble who had founded the order of the Servites for the special worship of Mary. These frescoes, though sorely injured by time and exposure, are so remarkable for draughtsmanship, composition, vividness of narrative, and the soft merging of warm and harmonious colors, that this atrium is now one of the goals of art pilgrims in Florence. For one of the female figures Andrea used as model the woman who in the course of these paintings became his wife—Lucrezia del Fede, a sensuously beautiful shrew whose dark face and raven hair haunted the artist to all but his dying days.

In 1515 Andrea and Franciabigio undertook a series of frescoes in the cloisters of the Scalzo fraternity. They chose as subject the life of St. John the Baptist; but it was surely Andrea’s hand that in several figures displayed one of his specialties, picturing the female breast in all the perfection of its texture and form. In 1518 he accepted the invitation of Francis I to come to France; there he painted the figure of Charity that hangs in the Louvre. But his wife, left behind in Florence, begged him to come back; the king granted permission on Andrea’s pledge to return, and entrusted him with a considerable sum to buy works of art for him in Italy. Andrea, in Florence, spent the royal funds in building himself a house, and never went back to France. Facing bankruptcy nevertheless, he resumed his painting, and produced for the cloisters of the Annunziata a masterpiece which, said Vasari, “in design, grace, excellence of coloring, vivacity, and relief, proved him far superior to all his predecessors”—who included Leonardo and Raphael.³⁶ This Madonna del Sacco— absurdly so called because Mary and Joseph are shown leaning against a sack—is now damaged and faded, and no longer conveys the full splendor of its color; but its perfect composition, soft tones, and quiet presentation of a family—with Joseph, suddenly literate, reading a book—make it one of the great pictures of the Renaissance.

In the refectory of the Salvi monastery Andrea challenged Leonardo with a Last Supper (1526), choosing the same moment and theme—“One of you shall betray me.” Bolder than Leonardo, Andrea finished the face of his Christ; even he, however, fell far short of the spiritual depth and understanding gentleness that we associate with Jesus. But the Apostles are strikingly individualized, the action is vivid, the colors are rich and soft and full; and the picture as seen from the entrance of the refectory conveys almost irresistibly the illusion of a living scene.

The Virgin Mother remained the favorite subject of Andrea, as of most artists of Renaissance Italy. He painted her again and again in studies of the Holy Family, as in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He pictured her, in one of the treasures of the Uffizi Gallery, as Madonna delle Arpie, Madonna of the Harpies;* this is the fairest of the Lucrezia Virgins, and the Child is the finest in Italian art. Across the Arno, in the Pitti Gallery, the Assumption of the Virgin shows Apostles and holy women looking up in amazement and adoration as cherubim raise the praying Madonna—again Lucrezia—to heaven. So, in Andrea’s colorful illumination, the moving epos of the Virgin is complete.

There is seldom any sublimity in Andrea del Sarto, no majesty of Michelangelo, nor the unfathomable nuances of Leonardo, nor the finished perfection of Raphael, nor yet the range or power of the great Venetians. Yet he alone of the Florentines rivals the Venetians in color and Correggio in grace; and his mastery of tones—in their depth and modulation and transparency—might well be preferred to the lavishment of color in Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. We miss variety in Andrea; his paintings move within too small a circle of subject and sentiment; his hundred Madonnas are always the same young Italian mother, modest and lovely and at last cloyingly sweet. But no one has surpassed him in composition, few in anatomy, modeling, and design. “There is a little fellow in Florence,” said Michelangelo to Raphael, “who will bring sweat to your brow if ever he is engaged in great works.”³⁷

Andrea himself never lived to reach full maturity. The victorious Germans, capturing Florence in 1530, infected it with plague, and Andrea was one of its victims. His wife, who had aroused in him all the heartaches of jealousy that beauty brings to marriage, shunned his room in those last fevered days; and the artist who had given her an almost deathless life died with no one by his side, at the age of forty-four. About 1570 Iacopo da Empoli went to the court of the Annunziata to copy del Sarto’s Nativity. An old lady who had come to Mass stopped beside him and pointed to a figure in the foreground of the painting. “It is I,” she said. Lucrezia had outlived herself by forty years.

The few artists whom we have here commemorated must be viewed not as a record but as representatives of the plastic and graphic genius of this period. There were other sculptors and painters of the time, who still lead a ghostly existence in the museums—Benedetto da Rovezzano, Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, and hundreds more. There were half-secluded artists, monastic and secular, who still practised the intimate art of illuminating manuscripts, like Fra Eustachio and Antonio di Girolamo; there were calligraphers whose handwriting might excuse Federigo of Urbino for regretting the invention of print; there were mosaicists who despised painting as the perishable pride of a day; wood carvers like Baccio d’Agnolo, whose carved chairs, tables, chests, and beds were the glory of Florentine homes; and nameless other workers in the minor arts. Florence was so rich in art that she could bear the depredations of invaders, pontiffs, and millionaires from Charles VIII to our own times, and still retain so much of delicate workmanship that no man has ever compassed all the treasures deposited in that one city by the two centuries of the Renaissance. Or by one century; for just as the great age of Florence in art had begun with Cosimo’s return from exile in 1434, so it ended with Andrea del Sarto’s death in 1530. Civil strife, Savonarola’s puritan regime, siege and defeat and plague, had destroyed the joyful spirit of Lorenzo’s day, had broken the frail lyre of art.

But the great chords had been struck, and their music echoed throughout the peninsula. Orders came to Florentine artists from other Italian cities, even from France, Spain, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. To Florence flocked a thousand artists to learn her lore and form their styles—Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Raphael…. From Florence a hundred artists took the gospel of art to half a hundred Italian cities and to foreign lands. In those half-hundred cities the spirit and taste of the age, the generosity of wealth, the heritage of technique worked together with the Florentine stimulus. Presently all Italy, from the Alps to Calabria, was painting, carving, building, composing, singing, in a creative frenzy that seemed to know, in the fever of its haste, that soon the wealth would vanish in war, and the pride of Italy would be humbled under an alien tyranny, and the prison doors of dogma would close again upon the marvelous exuberant mind of Renaissance man.

BOOK III

ITALIAN PAGEANT

1378–1534

CHAPTER VI

Milan

I. BACKGROUND

WE do injustice to the Renaissance when we concentrate our study on Florence, Venice, and Rome. For a decade it was more brilliant in Milan, under Lodovico and Leonardo, than in Florence. Its liberation and exaltation of woman found their best embodiment in Isabella d’Este at Mantua. It glorified Parma with Correggio, Perugia with Perugino, Orvieto with Signorelli. Its literature reached an apex with Ariosto at Ferrara, and its cultivation of manners at Urbino in the days of Castiglione. It gave name to a ceramic art at Faenza, and to the Palladian architectural style at Vicenza. It revived Siena with Pinturicchio and Sassetta and Sodoma, and made Naples a home and symbol of joyous living and idyllic poetry. We must pass leisurely through the incomparable peninsula from Piedmont to Sicily, and let the varied voices of the cities merge in the polyphonic chorus of the Renaissance.

The economic life of the Italian states in the fifteenth century was as diverse as their climate, dialects, and costumes. The north—i.e., above Florence—could have severe winters, sometimes freezing the Po from end to end; yet the coastal region around Genoa, sheltered by the Ligurian Alps, enjoyed mild weather in almost every month. Venice could shroud its palaces and towers and liquid streets in clouds and mist; Rome was sunny but miasmic; Naples was a climatic paradise. Everywhere, at one time or another, the cities and their countryside suffered those earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, famines, plagues, and wars that a Malthusian Nature sedulously provides to compensate for the reproductive ecstasies of mankind. In the towns the old handicrafts supplied the poor with a living and the rich with superfluities. Only the textile industry had reached the factory and capitalist stage; one silk mill at Bologna contracted with the city authorities to do “the work of 4000 spinning women.”¹ Petty tradesmen, merchants of import and export, teachers, lawyers, physicians, administrators, politicians, made up a complex middle class; a wealthy and worldly clergy added their color and grace to the courts and the streets; and monks and friars, somber or jovial, wandered about seeking alms or romance. The aristocracy of landowners and financiers lived for the most part within the city walls, occasionally in rural villas. At the top a banker, condottiere, marquis, duke, doge, or king, with his wife or mistress, presided over a court hampered with luxuries and gilded with art. In the countryside the peasant tilled his modest acres or some lord’s domain, and lived in a poverty so traditional that it seldom entered his thoughts.

Slavery existed on a minor scale, chiefly in domestic service among the rich; occasionally as a supplement and corrective to free labor on large estates, especially in Sicily; but here and there even in northern Italy.² From the fourteenth century onward the slave trade grew; Venetian and Genoese merchants imported them from the Balkans, southern Russia, and Islam; male or female Moorish slaves were considered a shining ornament of Italian courts.³ In 1488 Pope Innocent VIII received a hundred Moorish slaves as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and distributed them as gratuities among his cardinals and other friends.⁴ In 1501, after the capture of Capua, many Capuan women were sold as slaves in Rome.⁵ But these stray facts illustrate the morals rather than the economy of the Renaissance; slavery rarely played a significant role in the production or transport of goods.

Transport was chiefly on muleback or by cart, or by river, canal, or sea. The well-to-do traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages. Speed was moderate but exciting; it took two days and a good spine to ride from Perugia to Urbino—sixty-four miles; a boat might take fourteen days from Barcelona to Genoa. Inns were numerous, noisy, dirty, and uncomfortable. One at Padua could house 200 guests and stable 200 horses. Roads were rough and perilous. The main streets of the cities were paved with flagstones, but were only exceptionally lighted at night. Good water was brought in from the mountains, rarely to individual homes, usually to public fountains artistically designed, by whose cooling flow simple women and idle men gathered and distributed the news of the day.

The city-states that divided the peninsula were ruled in some cases-Florence, Siena, Venice—by mercantile oligarchies; more often by “despots” of diverse degree, who had superseded republican or communal institutions vitiated by class exploitation and political violence. Out of the competition of strong men one emerged—almost always of humble birth—who subdued and destroyed or hired the rest, made himself absolute ruler, and in some cases transmitted his power to his heir. So the Visconti or Sforzas ruled in Milan, the Scaligeri in Verona, the Carraresi in Padua, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Estensi in Ferrara. Such men enjoyed a precarious popularity because they laid a lid upon faction, and made life and property safe within their whim and the city’s walls. The lower classes accepted them as a last refuge from the dictatorship of ducats; the surrounding peasantry reconciled itself to them because the commune had given it neither protection nor justice nor freedom.

The despots were cruel because they were insecure. With no tradition of legitimacy to support them, subject at any moment to assassination or revolt, they surrounded themselves with guards, ate and drank in fear of poison, and hoped for a natural death. In their earlier decades they governed by craft, corruption, and quiet murder, and practised all the arts of Machiavelli before he was born; after 1450 they felt more secure through sanctification by time, and contented themselves with pacific means in domestic government. They suppressed criticism and dissent, and maintained a horde of spies. They lived luxuriously, and affected an impressive pomp. Nevertheless they earned the tolerance and respect, even, in Ferrara and Urbino, the devotion, of their subjects, by improving administration, executing impartial justice where their own interests were not involved, helping the people in famine and other emergencies, relieving unemployment with public works, building churches and monasteries, beautifying their cities with art, and supporting scholars, poets, and artists who might polish their diplomacy, brighten their aura, and perpetuate their name.

They waged frequent but usually petty war, seeking the mirage of security through the advancement of their frontiers, and having an expansive appetite for taxable terrain. They did not send their own people to war, for then they would have had to arm them, which might be suicidal; instead they hired mercenaries, and paid them with the proceeds of conquests, ransoms, confiscations, and pillage. Dashing adventurers came down over the Alps, often with bands of hungry soldiers in their train, and sold their services as condottieri to the highest bidder, changing sides with the fluctuations of the fee. A tailor from Essex, known in England as Sir John Hawkwood and in Italy as Acuto, fought with strategic subtlety and tactical skill against and for Florence, amassed several hundred thousand florins, died as a gentleman farmer in 1394, and was buried with honors and art in Santa Maria del Fiore.

The despot financed education as well as war, built schools and libraries, supported academies and universities. Every town in Italy had a school, usually provided by the Church; every major city had a university. Under the schooling of humanists, universities, and courts, public taste and manners improved, every second Italian became a judge of art, every important center had its own artists and its own architectural style. The joy of life spread, for the educated classes, from one end of Italy to the other; manners were relatively refined, and yet instincts were unprecedentedly free. Never since the days of Augustus had genius found such an audience, such stimulating competition, and such liberty.

II. PIEDMONT AND LIGURIA

In northwestern Italy and what is now southeastern France lay the principality of Savoy-Piedmont, whose ruling house was till 1945 the oldest royal family in Europe. Founded by Count Humbert I as a dependency of the Holy Roman Empire, the proud little state expanded to a moment of glory under the “Green Count” Amadeus VI (1343–83), who annexed Geneva, Lausanne, Aosta, and Turin, which he made his capital. No other ruler of his time enjoyed so fair a reputation for wisdom, justice, and generosity. The Emperor Sigismund raised the counts to dukes (1416), but the first duke, Amadeus VIII, lost his head when he accepted nomination as Antipope Felix V (1439). A century later Savoy was conquered by Francis I for France (1536). Savoy and Piedmont became a battleground between France and Italy; Apollo surrendered them to Mars; they remained in the backwater of the Italian torrent, and never felt the full flow of the Renaissance. In the rich Turin Gallery, and in his native Vercelli, are the pleasant but mediocre paintings of Defendente Ferrari.

South of Piedmont, Liguria embraces all the glory of the Italian Riviera: on the east the Riviera di Levante, or Coast of the Rising (Sun); on the west the Riviera di Ponente, or Coast of the Setting; and at their junction Genoa, almost as resplendent as Naples on a throne of hills and a spreading pedestal of blue sea. To Petrarch it had seemed “a city of Kings, the very temple of prosperity, the gate of joy”;⁶ but that was before the Genoese debacle at Chioggia (1378). While Venice recovered rapidly through the orderly and devoted co-operation of all classes in restoring commerce and solvency, Genoa continued its tradition of civil strife between noble and noble, nobles and commoners. Oligarchic oppression provoked a minor revolution (1383); the butchers, armed with the persuasive cutlery of their trade, led a crowd to the palace of the doge, and compelled a reduction of taxes and the exclusion of nobles from the government. In five years (1390–4) Genoa had ten revolutions, ten doges rose and fell; finally order$$$nmed more precious than freedom, and the harassed republic, fearing absorption by Milan, gave itself over, with its Rivieras, to France (1396). Two years later the French were expelled in a passionate revolt; five bloody battles were fought in the streets; twenty palaces were burned, government buildings were sacked and demolished, property to the value of a million florins was destroyed. Genoa again found the chaos of freedom unbearable, and surrendered itself to Milan (1421). The Milanese rule became intolerable, revolution restored the republic (1435), and the strife of factions was resumed.

The one element of stability amid these fluctuations was the Bank of St. George. During the war with Venice the government had borrowed money from its citizens, and had given them promissory notes. After the war it was unable to redeem these pledges, but it turned over to the lenders the customs dues of the port. The creditors organized themselves into the Casa di San Giorgio, the House of St. George, chose a directorate of eight governors, and received from the state a palace for their use. The House or Company was well managed, being the least corrupt institution in the republic. It was entrusted with the collection of taxes; it lent some of its funds to the government, and received in return substantial properties in Liguria, Corsica, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. It became both the state treasury and a private bank, accepting deposits, discounting notes, making loans to commerce and industry. As all factions were financially tied to it, all respected it, and left it unharmed in revolution and war. Its magnificent Renaissance palace still stands in the Piazza Caricamento.

The fall of Constantinople was an almost fatal blow to Genoa. The rich Genoese settlement at Pera, near Constantinople, was taken over by the Turks. When the impoverished republic once more submitted to France (1458), Francesco Sforza financed a revolution that expelled the French and made Genoa again a dependency of Milan (1464). The confusion that weakened Milan after the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476) allowed the Genoese a brief interlude of freedom; but when Louis XII seized Milan (1499), Genoa too succumbed to his power. At last, in the long conflict between Francis I and Charles V, a Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, turned his ships against the French, drove them out of Genoa, and established a new republican constitution (1528). Like the governments of Florence and Venice, it was a commercial oligarchy; only those families were enfranchised whose names were inscribed in il libro d’oro (The Golden Book). The new regime—a senate of 400, a council of 200, a doge elected for two years—brought a disciplined peace to the factions, and maintained the independence of Genoa till the coming of Napoleon (1797).

Amid this passionate disorder the city contributed far less than her due share to Italian letters, science, and art. Her captains explored the seas avidly, but when her son Columbus appeared among them Genoa was too timid or too poor to finance his dream. The nobles were absorbed in politics, the merchants in gain; neither class spared much for the adventures of the mind. The old cathedral of San Lorenzo was remodeled in Gothic (1307) with a majestic interior; its chapel of San Giovanni Battista (1451f) was adorned with a handsome altar and canopy by Matteo Civitali and a somber statue of the Baptist by Iacopo Sansovino. Andrea Doria effected almost as significant a revolution in Genoese art as in government. He brought Fra Giovanni da Montorsoli from Florence to remodel the Palazzo Doria (1529), and Perino del Vaga from Rome to adorn it with frescoes and stucco reliefs, grotesques, and arabesques; the result was one of the most ornate residences in Italy. Leone Leoni, rival and foe of Cellini, came from Rome to cast a fine medallion of the admiral, and Montorsoli designed his tomb. In Genoa the Renaissance did not long antedate Doria, and did not long survive his death.

III. PAVIA

Between Genoa and Milan the ancient city of Pavia lay quietly along the Ticino. Once it had been the seat of the Lombard kings; now, in the fourteenth century, it was subject to Milan, and was used by the Visconti and the Sforzas as a second capital. There Galeazzo Visconti II began (1360), and Gian (i.e., Giovanni, John) Galeazzo Visconti completed, the majestic Castello that served as a ducal residence for its second founder, and as a pleasure palace for later dukes of Milan. Petrarch called it “the noblest product of modern art,” and many contemporaries ranked it first among the royal dwellings of Europe. The library contained one of the most precious collections of books in Europe, including 951 illuminated manuscripts. Louis XII, having taken Milan in 1499, carried off this Pavia library among his spoils; and a French army destroyed the interior of the castle with the latest artillery (1527). Nothing remains but the walls.

Though the Castello is ruined, the finest jewel of the Visconti and the Sforzas survives intact—the Certosa, or Carthusian monastery, hidden off the highway between Pavia and Milan. Here, in a placid plain, Giangaleazzo Visconti undertook to build cells, cloisters, and a church in fulfillment of a vow made by his wife. From that beginning until 1499 the dukes of Milan continued to develop and embellish the edifice as the favorite embodiment of their piety and their art. There is nothing more exquisite in Italy. The Lombard-Romanesque façade of white Carrara marble was designed, carved, and erected (1473f) by Cristoforo Mantegazza and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo of Pavia sponsored by Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Lodovico il Moro. It is too ornate, too fondly gifted with arches, statues, reliefs, medallions, columns, pilasters, capitals, arabesques, carved angels, saints, sirens, princes, fruits, and flowers to convey a sense of unity and harmony; each part importunes attention regardless of the whole. But each part is a labor of love and skill; the four Renaissance windows by Amadeo would of themselves entitle him to the remembrance of mankind. In some Italian churches the façade is a brave front on an otherwise undistinguished exterior; but in this Certosa di Pavia every external feature and aspect is arrestingly beautiful: the stately attached buttresses, the noble towers, arcades, and spires of the north transept and the apse, the graceful columns and arches of the cloisters. Within the court the eye rises from these slender columns through three successive stories of arcades to the four superimposed colonnades of the cupola; this is an ensemble harmoniously conceived and admirably wrought. Within the church everything is of unsurpassed excellence: columns rising in clusters and Gothic arches to carved and coffered vaults; bronze and iron grilles as delicately designed as royal lace; doors and archways of elegant form and ornament; altars of marble studded with precious stones; paintings by Perugino, Borgognone, and Luini; the magnificent inlaid choir stalls; the luminous stained glass; the careful carving of pillars, spandrels, archivolts, and cornices; the stately tomb of Giangaleazzo Visconti by Cristoforo Romano and Benedetto Briosco; and, as the last relic of a pathetic romance, the tomb and figures of Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d’Este, here united in exquisite marble, though they died ten years and five hundred miles apart. In a like union of diverse moods the Lombard, Gothic, and Renaissance styles are here wedded in the most nearly perfect architectural product of the Renaissance. For under Lodovico the Moor Milan had gathered fair women to create an unrivaled court, and supreme artists like Bramante, Leonardo, and Caradosso to snatch the leadership of Italy, for one bright decade, from Florence, Venice and Rome.

IV. THE VISCONTI: 1378–1447

Galeazzo II, dying in 1378, bequeathed his share of the Milanese realm to his son Giangaleazzo Visconti, who continued to use Pavia as a capital. Here was a man who would have warmed Machiavelli’s heart. Immersed in the great library of his palace, taking care of a delicate constitution, winning his subjects by moderate taxation, attending church with impressive piety, filling his court with priests and monks, he was the last prince in Italy whom diplomats would have suspected of planning to unite the entire peninsula under his rule. Yet this was the ambition that seethed in his brain; he pursued it to the end of his life, and almost realized it; and in its service he used craft, treachery, and murder as if he had studied the unwritten Prince with reverence, and had never heard of Christ.

Meanwhile his uncle Bernabò was ruling the other half of the Visconti realm from Milan. Bernabò was a candid villain; he taxed his subjects to the edge of endurance, compelled the peasantry to keep and feed the five thousand hounds that he used in the chase, and stilled resentment by announcing that criminals would be tortured for forty days. He laughed at Giangaleazzo’s piety, and schemed how to dispose of him and make himself master of all the Visconti heritage. Gian, equipped with the spies necessary to any competent government, learned of these plans. He arranged a meeting with Bernabò, who came conveniently with two sons; Gian’s secret guard arrested all three, and apparently poisoned Bernabò (1385). Gian now ruled Milan, Novara, Pavia, Piacenza, Parma, Cremona, and Brescia. In 1387 he took Verona, in 1389 Padua; in 1399 he shocked Florence by buying Pisa for 200,000 florins; in 1400 Perugia, Assisi, and Siena, in 1401 Lucca and Bologna, submitted to his generals; and Gian was master of nearly all north Italy from Novara to the Adriatic. The Papal States were now weakened by the Schism (1378–1417) that had followed the return of the papacy from Avignon. Gian played pope against rival pope, and dreamed of absorbing all the lands of the Church. Then he would send his armies against Naples; his control of Pisa and other outlets would force Florence into submission; Venice alone would remain unbound, but helpless against a united Italy. However in 1402 Giangaleazzo, aged fifty-one, died.

All this time he had hardly moved from Pavia or Milan. He liked intrigue better than war, and achieved by subtlety more than his generals won for him by arms. Nor could these political enterprises exhaust the fertility of his mind. He issued a code of laws including the regulation of public health and the compulsory isolation of infectious disease.⁷ He built the Castello of Pavia, and began the Certosa di Pavia and the cathedral of Milan. He called Manuel Chrysoloras to the chair of Greek in the University of Milan, fostered the University of Pavia, helped poets, artists, scholars, and philosophers, and relished their company. He extended the Naviglio Grande, or Great Canal, from Milan to Pavia, thereby opening an inland waterway across the breadth of Italy from the Alps through Milan and the Po to the Adriatic Sea, and providing irrigation for thousands of acres of soil. The agriculture and commerce so promoted encouraged industry; Milan began to rival Florence in woolen goods; her smiths made weapons and armor for warriors throughout western Europe; in one crisis two master armorers forged arms for six thousand soldiers in a few days.⁸ In 1314 the silk weavers of Lucca, impoverished by faction and war, had migrated by hundreds to Milan; by 1400 the silk industry was well developed there, and moralists complained that clothing had become shamefully beautiful. Giangaleazzo protected this flourishing economy with wise administration, equable justice, and reliable currency, and a tolerable taxation that extended to clergy and nobility as well as laymen and commoners. Under his prodding the postal service was expanded; in 1425 over a hundred horses were regularly employed by the post; private correspondence was accepted at post offices, and traveled all day—in emergency, all night as well. In 1423 Florence had an annual state revenue of 4,000,000 gold florins ($100,000,000), Venice 11,000,000, Milan 12,000,000.⁹ Kings were glad to have their sons and daughters marry into the Visconti family. Emperor Wenceslas merely crowned fact with form when (1395) he gave imperial sanction and legitimacy to Gian’s title of duke, and invested him and his heirs with the duchy of Milan “forever.”

This proved to be fifty-two years. Gian’s oldest son, Gianmaria Visconti,* was thirteen when his father died (1402). The generals who had led Gian’s victorious armies competed for the regency. While they fought for Milan, Italy resumed her fragmentation: Florence recaptured Pisa; Venice took Verona, Vicenza, and Padua; Siena, Perugia, and Bologna submitted to individual despots. Italy was as before, and worse, for Gianmaria, leaving the government to oppressive regents, devoted himself to his dogs, trained them to eat human flesh, and joyfully watched them feed on the live men whom he had condemned as political offenders or social criminals.¹⁰ In 1412 three nobles stabbed him to death.

His brother Filippo Maria Visconti seemed to have inherited the subtle intelligence, the patient industry, the ambitious and farseeing policies of his father. But what had been sedentary courage in Giangaleazzo became in Filippo sedentary timidity, a perpetual fear of assassination, a haunting belief in universal human perfidy. He shut himself up in the castle of Porta Giovia at Milan, ate and grew fat, cherished superstitions and astrologers, and yet by pure craft remained to the end of his long reign the absolute master of his country, his generals, and even of his family. He married Beatrice Tenda for her money, and condemned her to death for infidelity. He married Maria of Savoy, kept her secluded from all but her ladies in waiting, brooded over his lack of a son, took a mistress, and became partly human in his affection for the pretty daughter Bianca who was born of this liaison. He continued his father’s patronage of learning, called noted scholars to the University of Pavia, and gave commissions to Brunellesco and the incomparable medalist Pisanello. He ruled Milan with efficient autocracy, suppressing faction, maintaining order, protecting peasants against feudal exactions, and merchants against brigandage. By deft diplomacy and adroit manipulation of his armies he restored to Milanese allegiance Parma and Piacenza, all of Lombardy to Brescia, all the lands between Milan and the Alps; and in 1421 he persuaded the Genoese that his dictatorship was milder than their civil wars. He encouraged marriages between rival families, so ending many feuds. For a hundred petty tyrannies he set up one; and the population, shorn of liberty but free from internal strife, grumbled, prospered, and multiplied.

He had a flair for finding able generals; suspected them all of wishing to replace him; played them off against one another; and kept war brewing in the hope of regaining all that his father had won and his brother had lost. A breed of powerful condottieri developed in his wars with Venice and Florence: Gattamelata, Colleoni, Carmagnola, Braccio, Fortebraccio, Montone, Piccinino, Muzio Attendolo…. Muzio was a country lad, one of a large family of male and female fighters; he won the cognomen Sforza by the strength of body and will with which he served Queen Joanna II of Naples; he lost her favor and was thrown into prison; his sister, in full armor, forced his jailers to set him free; he was given command of one of the Milanese armies, but was drowned soon afterward while crossing a stream (1424). His bastard son, then twenty-two, leaped into his father’s place, and fought and married his way to a throne.

V. THE SFORZAS: 1450–1500

Francesco Sforza was the ideal of Renaissance soldiers: tall, handsome, athletic, brave; the best runner, jumper, wrestler in his army; sleeping little, marching bareheaded winter and summer; winning the devotion of his men by sharing their hardships and rations, and leading them to lucrative victories by strategy and tactics rather than by superior numbers or arms. So unrivaled was his reputation that enemy forces, on more than one occasion, laid down their arms at sight of him, and greeted him with uncovered heads as the greatest general of his time. Ambitious to found a state of his own, he allowed no scruple to hinder his policy; he fought alternately for Milan, Florence, and Venice until Filippo won his loyalty by giving him Bianca in marriage, with Cremona and Pontremoli as her dowry (1441). When, six years later, Filippo died heirless, bringing the Visconti dynasty to an end, Francesco felt that the dowry should include Milan.

The Milanese thought differently; they proclaimed a republic named Ambrosian from the masterful bishop who had chastened Theodosius and converted Augustine a thousand years before. But the rival factions in the city could not agree; the dependencies of Milan snatched the opportunity to declare themselves free; some of them fell before Venetian arms; danger was imminent of a Venetian or Florentine attack; moreover the Duke of Orléans, the Emperor Frederick III, and King Alfonso of Aragon all claimed Milan as their own. In this crisis a deputation sought Sforza, gave him Brescia, and begged him to defend Milan. He fought off its enemies with resourceful energy; but when the new government made peace with Venice without consulting him he turned his troops against the Republic, besieged Milan to the edge of starvation, accepted its surrender, entered the city amid the acclamations of a hungry populace, and dulled the lust for liberty by distributing bread. A general assembly was summoned, composed of one man from each household; it invested him with the ducal authority over the protests of the Emperor, and the Sforza dynasty began its brief and brilliant career (1450).

His elevation did not change his character. He continued to live simply and to work hard. Now and then he was cruel or treacherous, alleging the good of the state as his excuse; generally he was a man of justice and humanity. He suffered from a lawless sensitivity to the beauty of women. His accomplished wife killed his mistress, and then forgave him; she bore him eight children, advised him wisely in politics, and won the people to his rule by succoring the needy and protecting the oppressed. His administration of the state was as competent as his leadership of its armies. The social order that he enforced brought back to the city a prosperity that dimmed the memory of its suffering and its fitful liberty. As a citadel against revolt or siege he began to build the enormous Castello Sforzesco. He cut new canals through the land, organized public works, and built the Ospedale Maggiore, or Great Hospital. He brought the humanist Filelfo to Milan, and encouraged education, scholarship, and art; he lured Vincenzo Foppa from Brescia to develop a school of painting. Threatened by the intrigues of Venice, Naples, and France, he held them all at bay by winning the decisive support and firm friendship of Cosimo de’ Medici. He disarmed Naples by wedding his daughter Ippolita to Ferdinand’s son Alfonso; he checkmated the Duke of Orléans by signing an alliance with Louis XI of France. Some nobles continued to seek his death and his power, but the success of his government disordered their plans, and he lived to die, in peace, the traditional death of generals (1466).

Born to the purple, his son Galeazzo Maria Sforza never knew the discipline of poverty and struggle. He gave himself up to pleasure, luxury, and pomp, seduced with special relish the wives of his friends, and punished opposition with a cruelty that seemed to have descended to him, deviously and mysteriously, through the kindly Bianca from the hot Visconti blood. The people of Milan, inured to absolute rule, offered no resistance to his despotism, but private vengeance punished what public terror brooked. Girolamo Olgiati grieved over a sister seduced and then discarded by the Duke; Giovanni Lampugnani thought himself despoiled of property by the same lord; together with Carlo Visconti they had been trained by Niccolò Monteno in Roman history and ideals, including tyrannicide from Brutus to Brutus. After imploring the help of the saints, the three youths entered the church of St. Stephen, where Galeazzo was worshiping, and stabbed him to death (1476). Lampugnani and Visconti were killed on the spot. Olgiati was tortured till almost every bone in his body was broken or torn from its socket; he was then flayed alive; but to his last breath he refused to repent, called upon pagan heroes and Christian saints to approve his deed, and died with a classic and Renaissance phrase on his lips: Mors acerba, fama perpetua—”Death is bitter, but fame is everlasting.”¹¹

Galeazzo left his throne to a seven-year-old boy, Giangaleazzo Sforza. For three chaotic years Guelf and Ghibelline factions competed in force and fraud to capture the regency. The victor was one of the most colorful and complex personalities in all the crowded gallery of the Renaissance. Lodovico Sforza was the fourth of Francesco Sforza’s sons. His father gave him the cognomen Mauro; his contemporaries jokingly transformed this into il Moro—“the Moor”—because of his dark hair and eyes; he himself good-humoredly accepted the nickname, and Moorish emblems and costumes became popular at his court. Other wits found in the name a synonym for the mulberry tree (in Italian, moro); this too became a symbol for him, made the mulberry color fashionable in Milan, and provided a theme and motive for some of Leonardo’s decorations in the Castello rooms. Lodovico’s chief teacher was the scholar Filelfo, who gave him a rich grounding in the classics; but his mother Bianca warned the humanist that “we have princes to educate, not merely scholars”; and she saw to it that her sons should also be skilled in the arts of government and war. Lodovico was seldom physically brave; but in him the intelligence of the Visconti freed itself from their cruelty, and with all his faults and sins, he became one of the most civilized men in history.

He was not handsome; like most great men, he was spared this distracting handicap. His face was too full, his nose too long and curved, his chin too ample, his lips too firmly closed; and yet in the profile attributed to Boltraffio, in the busts in Lyons and the Louvre, there is a quiet strength in the features, a sensitive intelligence, an almost soft refinement. He earned the reputation of being the craftiest diplomat of his time, sometimes vacillating, often devious, not always scrupulous, occasionally unfaithful; these were the common faults of Renaissance diplomacy; perhaps they are the hard necessities of all diplomacy. Nevertheless few Renaissance princes equaled him in mercy and generosity; cruelty was against his grain, and countless men and women enjoyed his beneficence. Mild and courteous, sensually susceptible to every beauty and every art, imaginative and emotional and yet rarely losing perspective or his temper, skeptical and superstitious, the master of millions and the slave of his astrologer—all this was Lodovico, the unstable culminating heir of clashing strains.

For thirteen years (1481–94) he governed Milan as regent for his nephew. Giangaleazzo Sforza was a timid retiring spirit, dreading the responsibilities of rule; he was subject to frequent illness, and incapable of serious affairs —incapacissimo, Guicciardini called him; he gave himself to amusement or idleness, and gladly left the administration of the state to the uncle whom he admired with envy and trusted with doubt. Lodovico resigned to him all the pomp and splendor of the ducal title and office; it was Gian who sat on the throne, received homage, and lived in regal luxury. But his wife, Isabella of Aragon, resented Lodovico’s retention of power, urged Gian to take the reins of office in his own hands, and begged her father Alfonso, heir to the throne of Naples, to come with his army and give her the powers of an actual ruler.

Lodovico governed efficiently. Around his summer cottage at Vigevano he developed a vast experimental farm and cattle-breeding station; experiments were made there in cultivating rice, the vine, and the mulberry tree; the dairies made butter and cheese of such excellence as even Italy had never known before; the fields and hills pastured 28,000 oxen, cows, buffaloes, sheep, and goats; the spacious stables sheltered the stallions and mares that bred the finest horses in Europe. Meanwhile, in Milan, the silk industry employed twenty thousand workers, and captured many foreign markets from Florence. Ironmongers, goldsmiths, woodcarvers, enamelers, potters, mosaicists, glass painters, perfumers, embroiderers, tapestry weavers, and makers of musical instruments contributed to the busy din of Milanese industry, adorned the palaces and personages of the court with ornaments, and exported sufficient surplus to pay for the softer luxuries that came from the East. To ease the traffic of men and goods, and “give the people more light and air,”¹² Lodovico had the principal streets widened; the avenues leading to the Castello were lined with palaces and gardens for the aristocracy; and the great cathedral, which now took its definitive form, rose as a rival focus of the city’s throbbing life. Milan had in 1492 a population of some 128,000 souls.¹³ It prospered under Lodovico as not even under Giangaleazzo Visconti, but complaints were heard that the profits of this flourishing economy went rather to strengthen the regent and glorify his court than to raise the populace from its immemorial poverty. Householders groaned at the heavy taxes, and riots of protest disturbed Cremona and Lodi. Lodovico answered that he needed the money to build new hospitals and care for the sick, to support the universities of Pavia and Milan, to finance experiments in agriculture, breeding, and industry, and to impress with the art and lavish magnificence of his court ambassadors whose governments respected only those states that were rich and strong.

Milan was not convinced, but it seemed to share Lodovico’s happiness when he brought to it as his bride the tenderest and most lovable of the Ferrara princesses (1491). He made no pretense that he could match the vivacious virginity of Beatrice d’Este; he was already thirty-nine, and had served a number of mistresses, who had given him two sons and a daughter—the gentle Bianca whom he loved as his father had loved the passionate lady from whom she took her name. Beatrice raised no difficulties about these usual preparations of the Renaissance male for monogamy; but when she reached Milan she was shocked to find her lord’s latest mistress, the beautiful Cecilia Gallerani, still lodged in a Castello suite. Worse yet, Lodovico continued to visit Cecilia for two months after his marriage; he explained to the Ferrarese ambassador that he had not the heart to send away the cultured poetess who had so graciously entertained his body and soul. Beatrice threatened to return to Ferrara; Lodovico yielded, and persuaded Count Bergamini to marry Cecilia.

Beatrice was a girl of fourteen when she came to Lodovico. She was not especially pretty; her charm lay in the innocent gaiety with which she approached and appropriated life. She had grown up at Naples and learned its joyous ways; she had left it before it could spoil her guilelessness, but it had imparted to her a carefree extravagance which now, in the lap of Lodovico’s wealth, so indulged itself that Milan caller her amantissima del lusso— madly in love with luxury.¹⁴ Everybody forgave her, for she diffused such innocent merriment—“spending day and night,” reports a contemporary chronicler,¹⁵ “in singing and dancing and all manner of delights”—that the whole court caught her spirit, and joy was unconfined. The grave Lodovico, some months after their marriage, fell in love with her, and confessed for a while that all power and wisdom were negligible things beside his new felicity. Under his care she added graces of mind to the lure of her youthful esprit: she learned to make Latin speeches, dizzied her head with affairs of state, and at times served her lord well as an irresistible ambassadress. Her letters to her still more famous sister, Isabella d’Este, are fragrant flowers in the Machiavellian jungle of Renaissance strife.¹⁶

With playful Beatrice to lead the dance, and hard-working Lodovico to pay the bills, the court of Milan became now the most splendid not only in Italy but in all Europe. The Castello Sforzesco expanded to its fullest glory, with its majestic central tower, its endless maze of luxurious rooms, its inlaid floors, its stained-glass windows, its embroidered cushions and Persian carpets, its tapestries telling again the legends of Troy and Rome; here a ceiling by Leonardo, there a statue by Cristoforo Solari or Cristoforo Romano, and almost everywhere some luscious relic of Greek or Roman or Italian art. In that resplendent setting scholars mingled with warriors, poets with philosophers, artists with generals, and all with women whose natural charms were enhanced by every refinement of cosmetics, jewelry, and dress. The men, even the soldiers, were carefully coiffured and richly garbed. Orchestras played a combination of musical instruments, and song filled the halls. While Florence trembled before Savonarola and burned the vanities of love and art, music and loose morals reigned in Lodovico’s capital. Husbands connived at their wives’ amours in exchange for their own excursions.¹⁷ Masked balls were frequent, and a thousand gay costumes covered a multitude of sins. Men and women danced and sang as if poverty were not stalking the city walls, as if France were not planning to invade Italy, as if Naples were not plotting the ruin of Milan.

Bernardino Corio, who came from his native Como to this court, described it with classic flourishes in his lively Historia di Milano (c. 1500):

The court of our princes was splendid exceedingly, full of new fashions, dresses, and delights. Nevertheless, at this time virtue was so much lauded on every side that Minerva had set up great rivalry with Venus, and each sought to make her school the most brilliant. To that of Cupid came the most beautiful youths. Fathers yielded to it their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters, and so thoughtlessly did they thus flock to the amorous hall that it was reckoned a stupendous thing by those who had understanding. Minerva, she too, sought with all her might to adorn her gentle Academy. Wherefore that glorious and most illustrious Prince Lodovico Sforza had called into his pay—as far as from the uttermost parts of Europe—men most excellent in knowledge and art. Here was the learning of Greece, here Latin verse and prose flourished resplendently, here were the poetic Muses; hither the masters of the sculptor’s art and those foremost in painting had gathered from distant countries, and here songs and sweet sounds of every kind and such dulcet harmonies were heard, that they seemed to have descended from Heaven itself upon this excelling court.^17a

Perhaps it was Beatrice who, in the fervor of maternal love, brought disaster to Lodovico and Italy. In 1493 she bore him a son, who was named Maximilian after his godfather, the heir apparent to the Imperial throne. Beatrice wondered what her future, and the boy’s, would be should Lodovico die. For her lord had no legal right to rule Milan; Giangaleazzo Sforza, with Neapolitan aid, might at any moment depose, exile, or kill him; and if Gian should manage to have a son, the duchy would presumably descend to that son, regardless of Lodovico’s fate. Lodovico, sympathizing with these worries, sent a secret embassy to King Maximilian, offering him his niece, Bianca Maria Sforza, in marriage, with a tempting dowry of 400,000 ducats ($5,000,000), provided that Maximilian, on becoming emperor, would confer upon Lodovico the title and powers of duke of Milan. Maximilian agreed. We should add that the emperors, who had given the ducal title to the ruling Visconti, had refused to sanction its assumption by the Sforzas. Legally Milan was still subject to Imperial authority.

Giangaleazzo was too busy with his dogs and doctors to bother his head with these developments, but his fuming Isabella sensed their trend, and renewed her pleas to her father. In January, 1494, Alfonso became King of Naples, and adopted a policy frankly hostile to the regent of Milan. Pope Alexander VI was not only allied with Naples, he was anxious to unite the town of Forlì—then ruled by a Sforza—with other cities in a powerful papal state. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who had been friendly to Lodovico, had died in 1492. Driven to desperate measures to protect himself, Lodovico allied Milan with France, and consented to give Charles VIII and the French army an unhindered passage through northwestern Italy when Charles should undertake to assert his rights to the Neapolitan throne.

So the French came. Lodovico played host to Charles, and bade him Godspeed on his expedition against Naples. While the French marched south Giangaleazzo Sforza died of a combination of ailments. Lodovico was wrongly suspected of poisoning him, but gave some support to the rumor by the haste with which he had himself invested with the ducal title (1495). Meanwhile Louis, Duke of Orléans, invaded Italy with a second French army, and announced that he would take Milan as his rightful possession through his descent from Giangaleazzo Visconti. Lodovico saw now that he had made a tragic error in welcoming Charles. Swiftly reversing his policy, he helped to form, with Venice, Spain, Alexander VI, and Maximilian, a “Holy League” to expel the French from the peninsula. Charles hastily retraced his steps, suffered an indecisive defeat at Fornovo (1495), and barely managed to bring his battered army back to France. Louis of Orléans decided to wait for a better day.

Lodovico prided himself on the apparent success of his tortuous policy: he had taught Alfonso a lesson, had foiled Orléans, and had led the League to victory. His position now seemed safe; he relaxed the vigilance of his diplomacy, and again enjoyed the splendor of his court and the liberties of his youth. When Beatrice became pregnant a second time he freed her from marital obligations, and formed a liaison with Lucrezia Crivelli (1496). Beatrice bore his infidelity with impatient grief; she no longer spread song and merriment about her, but immersed herself in her two sons. Lodovico vacillated between his mistress and his wife, pleading that he loved both. In 1497 Beatrice was a third time confined in childbirth. She was delivered of a stillborn son; and half an hour later, after great agony, she died, aged twenty-two.

From that moment everything changed in the city and the Duke. The people, says a contemporary, “showed such grief as had never been known before in Milan.” The court put on mourning; Lucrezia Crivelli fled into obscurity; Lodovico, overcome with remorse and sorrow, passed days in solitude and prayer; and the strong man who had hardly thought of religion now asked for only one boon—that he might die, see Beatrice again, earn her forgiveness, and regain her love. For two weeks he refused to receive officials, his envoys, or his children; he attended three Masses daily, and daily visited the tomb of his wife in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He commissioned Cristoforo Solari to carve a recumbent effigy of Beatrice; and as he wished, when dead, to be buried with her in one tomb, he asked that his own effigy should be placed beside hers. It was so done; and that simple monument in the Certosa di Pavia still commemorates the brief bright day that for Lodovico and Milan, as well as for Beatrice and Leonardo, had now come to an end.

The tragedy ripened rapidly. In 1498 the Duke of Orléans became Louis XII of France, and at once reaffirmed his intention of taking Milan. Lodovico sought allies, but found none; Venice bluntly reminded him of his invitation to Charles VIII. He gave command of his army to Galeazzo di San Severino, who was too handsome for a general; Galeazzo fled at sight of the enemy, and the French marched unhindered upon Milan. Lodovico appointed his trusted friend Bernardino da Corte to guard the well-fortified Castello, and bade him hold it till Lodovico could secure aid from Maximilian. Then Lodovico, in disguise and through a hundred vicissitudes, made his way (September 2, 1499) to Innsbruck and Maximilian. When Gian Trivulzio, a Milanese general whom Lodovico had offended, led the French into Milan, Bernardino surrendered the Castello and its treasures to him without resistance for a bribe of 150,000 ducats ($1,875,000). “Since Judas,” mourned Lodovico, “there was no greater treason,”¹⁸ and all Italy agreed with him.

Louis bade Trivulzio make the conquered pay for the conquest; the general levied heavy taxes; the French soldiers behaved with coarse insolence; the people began to pray for Lodovico’s return. He came, with a small force of Swiss, German, and Italian mercenaries; the French troops retired into the Castello, and Lodovico entered Milan in triumph (February 5, 1500). During his brief stay there a distinguished French prisoner was brought to him, the Chevalier Bayard, renowned for courage and courtesy; Lodovico restored to him his sword and horse, freed him, and sent him back under escort to the French camp. The French did not return the courtesy; the garrison in the Castello bombarded the streets of Milan until Lodovico, to protect or appease the population, changed his headquarters to Pavia. His funds began to run out, and he fell behind in paying his troops. They proposed to compensate themselves by pillaging the Italian towns, and fumed when he forbade them. He engaged Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, husband of Beatrice’s sister Isabella, to lead his little army; Francesco agreed, but secretly negotiated with the French.¹⁹ When the French appeared at Novara, Lodovico led his motley force to battle; it turned at the first shock and fled; its leaders arranged terms with the French; and when Lodovico tried to escape in disguise his Swiss mercenaries betrayed him to the enemy (April 10, 1500). He accepted his fate quietly, merely asking that his copy of The Divine Comedy should be brought to him from his library in Pavia. White-haired but still proud, he was led through hostile mocking crowds in the streets of Lyons, and was imprisoned in the castle of Lys-Saint-Georges in Berry. Louis XII refused to see him, and ignored the pleas of the Emperor Maximilian to set the broken captive free, but he allowed Lodovico to stroll in the castle grounds, to fish in the moat, and to receive friends. When Lodovico fell seriously ill Louis sent him his own doctor, Maître Salomon, and brought one of Lodovico’s dwarfs from Milan to amuse him. In 1504 he transferred Lodovico to the château of Loches, and allowed him still wider liberty. In 1508 Lodovico tried to escape; he made his way out of the castle precincts in a load of straw; he lost himself in the woods, was tracked by bloodhounds, and thereafter suffered a stricter imprisonment. He was deprived of books and writing materials, and was confined in a subterranean dungeon. There, on May 17, 1508, in a dark solitude all the world away from the bright life of his once gay capital, Lodovico, aged fifty-seven, died.²⁰

He had sinned against man and woman and Italy, but he had loved beauty, and had cherished the men who brought art and music, poetry and learning to Milan. Said one of Italy’s greatest historians, Girolamo Tiraboschi, a century ago:

If we consider the immense number of learned men who flocked to his court from all parts of Italy in the certainty of receiving great honors and rich rewards; if we recall how many famous architects and painters he invited to Milan, and how many noble buildings he raised; how he built and endowed the magnificent University of Pavia, and opened schools of every kind of science in Milan; if besides all this we read the splendid eulogies and dedicatory epistles addressed to him by scholars of every nationality, we feel inclined to pronounce him the best prince that ever lived.²¹

VI. LETTERS

Lodovico and Beatrice gathered about them many poets, but life was too pleasant at this court to inspire in a poet the arduous and persevering devotion that produces a masterpiece. Serafino of Aquila was short and ugly, but his lyrics, sung by himself to the lute he played, were a delight to Beatrice and her friends. When she died he slipped away from Milan, unable to bear the heavy silence of rooms that had rung with her laughter and known the lightness of her feet. Lodovico invited the Tuscan poets Camelli and Bellincione to his court in the hope that they would refine the rude diction of Lombardy. The result was a war of Tuscan vs. Lombard poets, in which venomous sonnets ousted honest poetry. Bellincione was so quarrelsome that when he died a rival wrote an inscription for his tomb, warning the passer-by to tread quietly, lest the corpse should rise and bite him. Therefore Lodovico made a Lombard, Gasparo Visconti, his court poet. In 1496 Visconti presented to Beatrice 143 sonnets, and other poems, written in letters of silver and gold on ivory vellum, illuminated with delicate miniatures, and bound in silver-gilt boards enameled with flowers. He was a real poet, but time has withered him. He loved Petrarch, and engaged in an earnest but friendly debate with Bramante, in verse, on the relative merits of Petrarch and Dante, for the great architect loved to think himself a poet as well. Such jousts of rhyme were a favorite amusement of Renaissance courts; almost everybody took part in them, and even generals became sonneteers. The best poems written under the Sforzas were those of a polished courtier, Niccolo da Correggio; he had come to Milan in Beatrice’s bridal train, and had been detained there by love for her and Lodovico; he served them as poet and diplomat, and composed his noblest verses on Beatrice’s death. Lodovico’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, herself a poetess, presided over a distinguished salon of poets, scholars, statesmen, and philosophers. All the refinements of life and culture that marked the eighteenth century in France flourished in Lodovico’s Milan.

Lodovico did not match Lorenzo’s interest in scholarship, nor his discrimination in patronage; he brought a hundred scholars to his city, but their learned intercourse produced no outstanding native savant. Francesco Filelfo, who made all Italy resound with his erudition and vituperation, was born in Tolentino, studied at Padua, became a professor there at eighteen, taught for a while at Venice, and rejoiced at the opportunity to visit Constantinople as secretary to the Venetian consulate (1419). There he studied Greek under John Chrysoloras, married John’s daughter, and served for years as a minor official at the Byzantine court. When he returned to Venice he was an expert Hellenist; he boasted, with some truth, that no other Italian had so thorough a knowledge of classic letters and tongues; he wrote poetry, and delivered orations, in Greek and Latin; and Venice paid him, as professor of those languages and their literature, the unusually high stipend of 500 sequins ($12,500) a year. A still fatter fee lured him to Florence (1429), where he became a scholastic lion. “The whole city,” he assured a friend, “turns to look at me…. My name is on every lip. Not only civic leaders, but women of the noblest birth make way for me, paying me so much respect that I am ashamed of their worship. My audience numbers every day four hundred persons, mostly men advanced in years, and of the dignity of senators.”²² All this soon ended, for Filelfo had a flair for quarreling, and alienated the very men—Niccolò de’ Niccoli, Ambrogio Traversari, and others—who had invited him to Florence. When Cosimo de’ Medici was imprisoned in the Palazzo Vecchio, Filelfo urged the government to put him to death; when Cosimo triumphed Filelfo fled. For six years he taught at Siena and Bologna; finally (1440) Filippo Maria Visconti drew him to Milan with the unprecedented fee of 750 florins per year. There Filelfo spent the remainder of his long and tempestuous career.

He was a man of awesome energy. He lectured four hours a day, in Greek, Latin, or Italian, expounding the classics or Dante or Petrarch; he delivered public orations for governmental ceremonies or private celebrations; he wrote a Latin epic on Francesco Sforza, ten “decades” of satires, ten “books” of odes, and twenty-four hundred lines of Greek poetry. He composed ten thousand lines De seriis et iocis (1465), which were never printed and are often unprintable. He buried two wives, married a third, and had twenty-four children in addition to the bastards that plagued his infidelities. Amid these labors he found time to carry on gigantic literary wars with poets, politicians, and humanists. Despite his handsome salary and incidental fees, he pled intermittent poverty, and asked his patrons, in classic couplets, for money, food, clothing, horses, and a cardinal’s hat. He made the mistake of including Poggio among his targets, and found that jolly scoundrel his master in scurrility.*

Even so, his learning made him the most sought-for scholar of the age. In 1453 Pope Nicholas V, receiving him in the Vatican, gave him a purse of 500 ducats ($12,500); Alfonso I at Naples crowned him poet laureate and knighted him; Duke Borso was his host at Ferrara, the Marchese Lodovico Gonzaga at Mantua, the dictator Sigismondo Malatesta at Rimini. When the death of Francesco Sforza, and the ensuing chaos, made his position insecure in Milan, he had no difficulty securing a post in the University of Rome. But the papal treasurer was remiss in his payments, and Filelfo returned to Milan. Nevertheless he longed to end his days near Lorenzo de’ Medici, to be one of the illustrious group that surrounded the grandson of the man whom he had nominated for death. Lorenzo forgave him, and offered him the chair of Greek literature in Florence. Filelfo was so poor now that the government of Milan had to lend him money for the trip. He managed to reach Florence, but died of dysentery a fortnight after his arrival, aged eighty-three (1481). His career is one of a hundred that, taken together, convey the unique aroma of the Italian Renaissance, in which scholarship could be a passion, and literature could be war.

VII. ART

Despotism was a boon to Italian art. A dozen rulers competed in seeking architects, sculptors, and painters to adorn their capitals and their memory; and in this rivalry they spent such sums as democracy rarely spares to beauty, and such as would never have been available to art had the proceeds of human labor and genius been equitably shared. The result was, in Renaissance Italy, an art of courtly distinction and aristocratic taste, but too often circumscribed, in form and theme, to the needs of secular potentates or ecclesiastical powers. The noblest art is that which, out of the toil and contributions of multitudes, creates for them a common gift and glory; such were the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of classic Greece and Rome.

Every critic denounces the duomo of Milan as a plethora of ornament confusing structural line; but the people of Milan have for five centuries gathered fondly in its cool immensity, and, even in this doubting day, cherish it as their collective achievement and pride. Giangaleazzo Visconti began it (1386), and planned it on a scale befitting the capital of the united Italy of his dreams; 40,000 people should find room there to worship God and admire Gian. Tradition tells how, at that time, the women of Milan were afflicted with a mysterious disease in their pregnancies, and many of their babies died in infancy; Gian himself mourned three sons painfully born and all soon dead; and he dedicated the great shrine as an offering Mariae nascenti, “to Mary in her birth,” praying that he might have an heir, and that the mothers of Milan might bear a wholesome progeny. He summoned architects from France and Germany as well as from Italy; the northerners dictated the Gothic style, the Italians lavished ornament; harmony of style and form faded in a conflict of counsels and two centuries of delay; the mood and taste of the world changed during the process; and those who finished the structure no longer felt as those who had begun it. When Giangaleazzo died (1402) only the walls had been built; then the work marked time for lack of funds. Lodovico called in Bramante, Leonardo, and others to design a cupola that should bring the proud wilderness of pinnacles to some crowning unity; their ideas were rejected; finally (1490) Giovanni Antonio Amadeo was drawn from his labors on the Certosa di Pavia, and was given full charge of the whole cathedral enterprise. He and most of his aides were rather sculptors than architects; they could not bear that any surface should remain uncarved or unadorned. He consumed in the task the last thirty years of his life (1490–1522); even so the cupola was not finished till 1759; and the façade, begun in 1616, was not completed till Napoleon made that consummation an imperial command (1809).

In Lodovico’s day it was the second largest church in the world, covering 120,000 square feet; today it yields the specious honor of size to St. Peter’s and the cathedral of Seville; but it is still proud of its length and breadth (486 by 289 feet), its height of 354 feet from the ground to the head of the Virgin on the spire of the cupola, the 135 pinnacles that splinter its glory, and the 2300 statues that people its pinnacles, pillars, walls, and roof. All of it—even the roof—was built of white marble laboriously transported from a dozen quarries in Italy. The façade is too low for its width, and yet hides the exquisite cupola. One must be poised in midair to see this maze of praying stalagmites rising from the earth; or one must travel again and again around the great dolmen, amid a shower of buttresses, to feel the extravagant majesty of the mass; or one must come through the narrow and swarming streets of the city, and suddenly emerge into the vast open square of the Piazza del Duomo, to catch the full splendor of façade and spire turning the sun of Italy into a radiance of stone; or one must crowd with the people through the portals on some holyday, and let all those spaces, pillars, capitals, arches, vaults, statues, altars, and colored panes convey without words the mystery of faith, hope, and adoration.

As the cathedral is the monument of Giangaleazzo Visconti, and the Certosa of Pavia is the shrine of Lodovico and Beatrice, so the Ospedale Maggiore, or Great Hospital, is the simple and stately memorial of Francesco Sforza. To design it in a manner “worthy of the ducal dominion and of so great and illustrious a city,” Sforza brought in from Florence (1456) Antonio Averulino, known as Filarete, who chose for it a stately form of Lombard Romanesque. Bramante, the probable architect of the inner court or cortile, faced this with a double tier of round arches, each tier surmounted by an elegant cornice. The Great Hospital remained one of Milan’s chief glories till the Second World War left most of it in ruins.

In the judgment of Lodovico and his court the supreme artist in Milan was not Leonardo but Bramante, for Leonardo revealed only a part of himself to his time. Born at Castel Durante near Urbino, Donato d’Agnolo began his career as a painter, and received the nickname Bramante as meaning one consumed with insatiable desires. He went to Mantua to study with Mantegna; he learned enough to paint some mediocre frescoes, and a splendid portrait of the mathematician Luca Pacioli. Perhaps in Mantua he met Leon Battista Alberti, who was designing the church of Sant’ Andrea; in any case repeated experiments in perspective led Bramante from painting to architecture. In 1472 he was in Milan, studying the cathedral with the intensity of a man resolved to do great things. About 1476 he was given a chance to show his mettle by designing the church of Santa Maria around the little church of San Satiro. In this modest masterpiece he revealed his peculiar architectural style—semicircular apses and sacristies, octagonal cupolas, and circular domes, all crowned with elegant cornices, and all crowded one upon another in an engaging ensemble. Lacking space for an apse, Bramante, frolicking with perspective, painted the wall behind the altar with a pictured apse whose converging lines gave the full illusion of spatial depth. To the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie he added an apse, a cupola, and the handsome cloister porticoes that were another casualty of the Second World War. After Lodovico fell Bramante went south, ready to tear down and rebuild Rome.

The sculptors at Lodovico’s court were not such giants as Donatello and Michelangelo, but they carved for the Certosa, the cathedral, and the palaces a hundred figures with fascinating grace. Cristoforo Solari the hunch-back (il Gobbo) will be remembered as long as his tomb of Lodovico and Beatrice survives. Gian Cristoforo Romano won all hearts by his gentle manner and beautiful singing; he was a major sculptor at the Certosa, but after Beatrice died he yielded to a year of urging and went to Mantua. There he carved for Isabella the pretty doorway of her Paradiso study, and cut her likeness in one of the finest medallions of the Renaissance. Then he moved on to Urbino to work for the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga, and became a leading figure in Castiglione’s Courtier. The greatest medallion carver of Milan was Cristoforo Foppa, nicknamed Caradosso, who cut the gleaming gems that Beatrice wore, and earned the envy of Cellini.

There were good painters in Milan a generation before Leonardo came. Vincenzo Foppa, born at Brescia and formed in Padua, worked chiefly in Milan; his frescoes in Sant’ Eustorgio were renowned in their day, and his Martyrdom of St. Sebastian still adorns a Castello wall. His follower Ambrogio Borgognone has left us a more pleasing legacy: Madonnas in the Brera and Ambrosiana galleries at Milan, in Turin, and Berlin, all in the pure tradition of warm piety; a delectable portrait of Giangaleazzo Sforza as a child, in the Wallace Collection in London; and, in the church of the Incoronata at Lodi, an Annunciation which is one of the most successful renderings of that difficult theme. Ambrogio de Predis was court painter to Lodovico when Leonardo arrived; he seems to have had a brush in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks; he may have painted the captivating angel musicians in the London National Gallery; but his finest relics are two portraits now in the Ambrosiana: one of a very serious young man, identity unknown;* the other of a young woman, now generally identified with Lodovico’s natural daughter Bianca. Rarely has an artist caught the conflicting charms of a girl innocently demure and yet proudly conscious of her simple beauty.

The cities subject to Milan suffered from the luring of their talent to the capital, but several of them managed to earn a place in the history of art. Como was not satisfied to be merely a Milanese gate to the lake that gave it fame; it was proud, too, of its Torre del Comune, its Broletto, above all of its majestic marble cathedral. The superb Gothic façade rose under the Sforza rule (1457–87); Bramante designed a pretty doorway on the south side, and on the east Cristoforo Solari built a charming apse in Bramantean style. More interesting than these features is a pair of statues adjoining the main portal: on the left Pliny the Elder, on the right Pliny the Younger, ancient citizens of Como, civilized pagans finding a place on a Christian cathedral façade in the tolerant days of Lodovico the Moor.

The jewel of Bergamo was the Cappella Colleoni. The Venetian condottiere, born here, desired a chapel to receive his bones, and a sculptured cenotaph to commemorate his victories. Giovanni Antonio Amadeo designed the chapel and the tomb with splendor and taste; and Sixtus Siry of Nuremberg surmounted the sepulcher with an equestrian statue in wood, which would have won a wider fame had not Verrocchio cast the great captain in prouder bronze. Bergamo was too near to Milan to keep its painters home; but one of them, Andrea Previtali, after studying with Giovanni Bellini in Venice, returned to Bergamo (1513) to bequeath to it some paintings of exemplary piety and modest excellence.

Brescia, subject at times to Venice, at times to Milan, held a balance between the two influences, and developed its own school of art. After disseminating his talent among half a dozen cities, Vincenzo Foppa returned to spend his declining years in his native Brescia. His pupil Vincenzo Civerchio shared with Floriano Ferramolo the honor of forming the Brescian school. Girolamo Romani, called Romanino, studied with Ferramolo, later in Padua and Venice; then, making Brescia his center, he painted there, and in other towns of northern Italy, a long series of frescoes, altarpieces, and portraits, excellent in color, less laudable in line; let us name only the Madonna and Child, in a magnificent frame by Stefano Lamberti, in the church of San Francesco. His pupil Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto da Brescia, brought this dynasty to its zenith by blending the sensuous glory of the Venetians with the warm religious sentiment that marked Brescian painting to its end. In the church of SS. Nazaro e Celso, where Titian placed an Annunciation, Moretto painted an equally beautiful Coronation of the Virgin, whose archangel rivals in delicacy of form and feature the most graceful figures of Correggio. Like Titian he could paint, when he wished, an appetizing Venus; and his Salome, instead of revealing a murderess by proxy, shows us one of the sweetest, gentlest faces in the whole gamut of Renaissance art.

Cremona gathered her life around her twelfth-century cathedral and its adjoining Torrazo—a campanile almost challenging Giotto’s and the Giralda. Within the duomo Giovanni de’ Sacchi—named Il Pordenone from his native town—painted his masterpiece, Jesus Carrying His Cross. Three remarkable families contributed successive generations of talent to Cremonese painting: the Bembi (Bonifazio, Benedetto, Gian Francesco), the Boccaccini, and the Campi. Boccaccio Boccaccini, after studying in Venice and burning his fingers in a competition with Michelangelo in Rome, returned to Cremona and won acclaim by his frescoes of the Virgin in the Cathedral; and his son Camillo continued his excellence. In like manner the work of Galeazzo Campi was carried on by his sons Giulio and Antonio, and by Giulio’s pupil Bernardino Campi. Galeazzo designed the church of Santa Margherita in Cremona, and then painted in it a magnificent Presentation in the Temple. So the arts, in Renaissance Italy, tended to mate in one mind, and flowered under geniuses of such versatility as not even Periclean Greece had known.

CHAPTER VII

Leonardo da Vinci

1452–1519

I. DEVELOPMENT: 1452–1482

THE most fascinating figure of the Renaissance was born on April 15, 1452 near the village of Vinci, some sixty miles from Florence. His mother was a peasant girl, Caterina, who had not bothered to marry his father. Her seducer, Piero d’Antonio, was a Florentine attorney of some means. In the year of Leonardo’s birth Piero married a woman of his own rank. Caterina had to be content with a peasant husband; she yielded her pretty love child to Piero and his wife; and Leonardo was brought up in semiaristocratic comfort without maternal love. Perhaps in that early environment he acquired his taste for fine clothing, and his aversion to women.

He went to a neighborhood school, took fondly to mathematics, music, and drawing, and delighted his father by his singing and his playing of the lute. In order to draw well he studied all things in nature with curiosity, patience, and care; science and art, so remarkably united in his mind, had there one origin—detailed observation. When he was turning fifteen his father took him to Verrocchio’s studio in Florence, and persuaded that versatile artist to accept him as an apprentice. All the educated world knows Vasari’s story of how Leonardo painted the angel at the left in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, and how the master was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the figure that he gave up painting and devoted himself to sculpture. Probably this abdication is a post-mortem legend; Verrocchio made several pictures after the Baptism. Perhaps in these apprentice days Leonardo painted the Annunciation in the Louvre, with its awkward angel and its startled maid. He could hardly have learned grace from Verrocchio.

Meanwhile Ser Piero prospered, bought several properties, moved his family to Florence (1469), and married four wives in turn. The second was only ten years older than Leonardo. When the third presented Piero with a child Leonardo eased the congestion by going to live with Verrocchio. In that year (1472) he was admitted to membership in the Company of St. Luke. This guild, composed chiefly of apothecaries, physicians, and artists, had its headquarters in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Presumably Leonardo found there some opportunities to study internal as well as external anatomy. Perhaps in those years he—or was it he?—painted the gaunt anatomical St. Jerome ascribed to him in the Vatican Gallery. And it was probably he who, toward 1474, painted the colorful and immature Annunciation of the Uffizi.

A week before his twenty-fourth birthday Leonardo and three other youths were summoned before a committee of the Florentine Signory to answer a charge of having had homosexual relations. The result of this summons is unknown. On June 7, 1476, the accusation was repeated; the committee imprisoned Leonardo briefly, released him, and dismissed the charge as unproved.¹ Unquestionably he was a homosexual. As soon as he could afford to have his own studio he gathered handsome young men about him; he took some of them with him on his migrations from city to city; he referred to one or another of them in his manuscripts as amantissimo or carissimo— “most beloved,” “dearest.”² What his intimate relations with these youths were we do not know; some passages in his notes suggest a distaste for sexual congress in any form.* Leonardo might reasonably doubt why he and a few others had been singled out for public accusation when homosexuality was so widespread in the Italy of the time. He never forgave Florence for the indignity of his arrest.

Apparently he took the matter more seriously than the city did. A year after the accusation he was invited, and agreed, to accept a studio in the Medici gardens; and in 1478 the Signory itself asked him to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio. For some reason he did not carry out the assignment; Ghirlandaio took it over; Filippino Lippi completed it. Nevertheless the Signory soon gave him—and Botticelli—another commission: to paint—we cannot say to the life-full-length portraits of two men hanged for the conspiracy of the Pazzi against Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. Leonardo, with his half-morbid interest in human deformity and suffering, may have felt some fascination in the gruesome task.

But indeed he was interested in everything. All postures and actions of the human body, all expressions of the face in young and old, all the organs and movements of animals and plants from the waving of wheat in the field to the flight of birds in the air, all the cyclical erosion and elevation of mountains, all the currents and eddies of water and wind, the moods of the weather, the shades of the atmosphere, and the inexhaustible kaleidoscope of the sky—all these seemed endlessly wonderful to him; repetition never dulled for him their marvel and mystery; he filled thousands of pages with observations concerning them, and drawings of their myriad forms. When the monks of San Scopeto asked him to paint a picture for their chapel (1481), he made so many sketches for so many features and forms of it that he lost himself in the details, and never finished The Adoration of the Magi.

Nevertheless it is one of his greatest paintings. The plan from which he developed it was drawn on a strictly geometrical pattern of perspective, with the whole space divided into diminishing squares; the mathematician in Leonardo always competed— often co-operated—with the artist. But the artist was already developed; the Virgin had the pose and features that she would keep in Leonardo’s work to the end; the Magi were drawn with a remarkable understanding—for a youth—of character and expression in old men; and the “Philosopher” at the left was literally a brown study of half-skeptical meditation, as if the painter had so soon come to view the Christian story with a spirit unwillingly incredulous and still devout. And around these figures half a hundred others gathered, as if every kind of man and woman had hurried to this crib seeking hungrily the meaning of life and some Light of the World, and finding the answer in a stream of births.

The unfinished masterpiece, almost erased by time, hangs in the Uffizi at Florence, but it was Filippino Lippi who executed the painting accepted by the Scopetini brotherhood. To begin, to conceive too richly, to lose himself in experimenting with details; to see beyond his subject a boundless perspective of human, animal, plant, and architectural forms, of rocks and mountains, streams and clouds and trees, in a mystic chiaroscuro light; to be absorbed in the philosophy of the picture rather than in its technical accomplishment; to leave to others the lesser task of coloring the figures so drawn and placed for revealing significance; to turn in despair, after long labor of mind and body, from the imperfection with which the hand and the materials had embodied the dream: this was to be Leonardo’s character and fate, with a few exceptions, to the end.

II. IN MILAN: 1482–99

There was nothing hesitant, no sense yet of the merciless brevity of time, only youth’s limitless ambitions fed by burgeoning powers, in the letter that Leonardo, now thirty, sent in 1482 to Lodovico, regent of Milan. He had had enough of Florence; the desire to see new places and faces mounted in his blood. He had heard that Lodovico wanted a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, a painter; well, he would offer himself as all these in one. And so he wrote his famous letter:

Most Illustrious Lord, having now sufficiently seen and considered the proofs of all those who count themselves masters and inventors of instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use of the said instruments does not differ in any respect from those in common practice, I am emboldened without prejudice to anyone else to put myself in communication with your Excellency, in order to acquaint you with my secrets, thereafter offering myself at your pleasure effectually to demonstrate at any convenient time all those matters which are in part briefly recorded below.

1. I have plans for bridges, very light and strong and suitable for carrying very easily…

2. When a place is besieged I know how to cut off water from the trenches, and how to construct an infinite number of… scaling ladders and other instruments…

4. I have plans for making cannon, very convenient and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of hail…

5. And if it should happen that the engagement is at sea, I have plans for constructing many engines most suitable for attack or defense, and ships which can resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon, and powder and smoke.

6. Also I have ways of arriving at a certain fixed spot by caverns and secret winding passages, made without any noise even though it may be necessary to pass underneath trenches or a river.

7. Also I can make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with artillery, and there is no company of men at arms so great as not to be broken by it. And behind these the infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed and without any opposition.

8. Also, if need shall arise, I can make cannon, mortars, and light ord$$$ce, of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use.

9. Where it is not possible to employ cannon, I can supply catapults, mangonels, traps, and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general use. In short, as the variety of circumstances shall necessitate, I can supply an infinite number of different engines of attack and defense.

10. In time of peace I believe that I can give you as complete satisfaction as anyone else in architecture, in the construction of buildings both public and private, and in conducting water from one place to another.

Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also painting, in which my work will stand comparison with that of anyone else whoever he may be.

Moreover, I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make trial of them in your park or in whatever place shall please your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.

We do not know how Lodovico replied, but we know that Leonardo reached Milan in 1482 or 1483, and soon made his way into the heart of “the Moor.” One story has it that Lorenzo, as a diplomatic bonbon, had sent him to Lodovico to deliver a handsome lute; another that he won a musical contest there, and was retained not for any of the powers that he had claimed “with all possible humility,” but for the music of his voice, the charm of his conversation, the soft sweet tone of the lyre that his own hands had fashioned in the form of a horse’s head.⁵ Lodovico seems to have accepted him not at his own valuation but as a brilliant youth who—even though he might be less of an architect than Bramante, and too inexperienced to be entrusted with military engineering—might plan court masques and city pageants, decorate dresses for wife or mistress or princess, paint murals and portraits, and perhaps construct canals to improve the irrigation of the Lombard plain. It offends us to learn that the myriad-minded man had to spend irrecoverable time making curious girdles for Lodovico’s pretty bride, Beatrice d’Este, conceiving costumes for jousts and festivals, organizing pageants, or decorating stables. But a Renaissance artist was expected to do all these things between Madonnas; Bramante too shared in this courtlery; and who knows but the woman in Leonardo delighted in designing dresses and jewelry, and the accomplished equestrian in him enjoyed painting swift horses on stable walls? He adorned the ballroom of the Castello for the marriage of Beatrice, built a special bathroom for her, raised in the garden a pretty pavilion for her summer joy, and painted other rooms—camerini— for palace celebrations. He made portraits of Lodovico, Beatrice, and their children, of Lodovico’s mistresses Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli; these paintings are lost, unless La Belle Ferronière of the Louvre is Lucrezia. Vasari speaks of the family portraits as “marvelous,” and the picture of Lucrezia inspired a poet to a fervid eulogy of the lady’s beauty and the artist’s skill.⁶

Perhaps Cecilia was Leonardo’s model for The Virgin of the Rocks. The painting was contracted for (1483) by the Confraternity of the Conception as the central part of an altarpiece for the church of San Francesco. The original was later bought by Francis I and is in the Louvre. Standing before it, we note the softly maternal face that Leonardo would use a dozen times in later works; an angel recalling one in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ; two infants exquisitely drawn; and a background of jutting, overhanging rocks that only Leonardo could have conceived as Mary’s habitat. The colors have been darkened by time, but possibly the artist intended a darkling effect, and suffused his pictures with a hazy atmosphere that Italy calls sfumato— “smoked.” This is one of Leonardo’s greatest pictures, surpassed only by The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, and The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne.

The Last Supper and Mona Lisa are the world’s most famous paintings. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, pilgrims enter the refectory that holds Leonardo’s most ambitious work. In that simple rectangular building the Dominican friars who were attached to Lodovico’s favorite church—Santa Maria delle Grazie—took their meals. Soon after the artist arrived in Milan Lodovico asked him to represent the Last Supper on the farthest wall of this refectory. For three years (1495–8), on and off, Leonardo labored or dallied at the task, while Duke and friars fretted over his incalculable delays. The prior (if we may believe Vasari) complained to Lodovico of Leonardo’s apparent sloth, and wondered why he would sometimes sit before the wall for hours without painting a stroke. Leonardo had no trouble explaining to the Duke—who had some trouble explaining to the prior—that an artist’s most important work lies in conception rather than in execution, and (as Vasari put it) “men of genius do most when they work least.” There were in this case, said Leonardo to Lodovico, two special difficulties—to conceive features worthy of the Son of God, and to picture a man as heartless as Judas; perhaps, he slyly suggested, he might use the too frequently seen face of the prior as a model for Iscariot.* Leonardo hunted throughout Milan for heads and faces that might serve him in representing the Apostles; from a hundred such quarries he chose the features that were melted in the mintage of his art into those astonishingly individualized heads that make the wonder of the dying masterpiece. Sometimes he would rush from the streets or his studio to the refectory, add a stroke or two to the picture, and depart.⁸

The subject was superb, but from a painter’s point of view it was pitted with hazards. It had to confine itself to male figures and a modest table in a simple room; there could be only the dimmest landscape or vista; no grace of women might serve as foil to the strength of the men; no vivid action could be brought in to set the figures into motion and convey the sense of life. Leonardo let in a glimpse of landscape through the three windows behind Christ. As a substitute for action he portrayed the gathering at the tense moment Christ has prophesied that one of the Apostles will betray Him, and each is asking, in fear or horror or amazement, “Is it I?” The institution of the Eucharist might have been chosen, but that would have frozen all thirteen faces into an immobile and stereotyped solemnity. Here, on the contrary, there is more than violent physical action; there is a searching and revelation of spirit; never again, so profoundly, has an artist revealed in one picture so many souls. For the Apostles Leonardo made numberless preliminary sketches; some of these—for James the Greater, Philip, Judas—are drawings of such finesse and power as only Rembrandt and Michelangelo have matched. When he tried to conceive the features of Christ, Leonardo found that the Apostles had exhausted his inspiration. According to Lomazzo (writing in 1557), Leonardo’s old friend Zenale advised him to leave the face of Christ unfinished, saying: “Of a truth it would be impossible to imagine faces lovelier or gentler than those of James the Greater or James the Less. Accept your misfortune, then, and leave your Christ incomplete; for otherwise, when compared with the Apostles, He would not be their Saviour or their Master.”⁹ Leonardo took the advice. He or a pupil made a famous sketch (now in the Brera Gallery) for the head of Christ, but it pictured an effeminate sadness and resignation rather than the heroic resolve that calmly entered Gethsemane. Perhaps Leonardo lacked the reverent piety that, had it been added to his sensitivity, his depth, and his skill, might have brought the picture nearer to perfection.

Because he was a thinker as well as an artist, Leonardo shunned fresco painting as an enemy to thought; such painting on wet and freshly laid plaster had to be done rapidly before the plaster dried. Leonardo preferred to paint on a dry wall with tempera—colors mixed in a gelatinous substance, for this method allowed him to ponder and experiment. But these colors did not adhere firmly to the surface; even in Leonardo’s lifetime—what with the usual dampness of the refectory and its occasional flooding in heavy rains—the paint began to flake and fall; when Vasari saw the picture (1536) it was already blurred; when Lomazzo saw it, sixty years after its completion, it was already ruined beyond repair. The friars later helped decay by cutting a door through the legs of the Apostles into the kitchen (1656). The engraving by which the painting has been reproduced throughout the world was taken not from the spoiled original but from an imperfect copy made by one of Leonardo’s pupils, Marco d’Oggiono. Today we can study only the composition and the general outlines, hardly the shades or subtleties. But whatever were the defects of the work when Leonardo left it, some realized at once that it was the greatest painting that Renaissance art had yet produced.

Meanwhile (1483) Leonardo had undertaken a work completely different and still more difficult. Lodovico had long wished to commemorate his father, Francesco Sforza, with an equestrian statue that would bear comparison with Donatello’s Gattamelata at Padua and Verrocchio’s Colleoni in Venice. Leonardo’s ambition was stirred. He set himself to studying the anatomy, action, and nature of the horse, and drew a hundred sketches of the animal, nearly all of snorting vivacity. Soon he was absorbed in making a plaster model. When some citizens of Piacenza asked him to recommend an artist to design and cast bronze doors for their cathedral he wrote characteristically in reply: “There is no one who is capable except Leonardo the Florentine, who is making the bronze horse of the Duke Francesco, and you need take no count of him, for he has work that will last his whole lifetime; and I fear that it is so great an undertaking that he will never finish it.”¹⁰ Lodovico at times thought so too, and asked Lorenzo for other artists to come and complete the task (1489). Lorenzo, like Leonardo, could not think of anybody better than Leonardo himself.

At last (1493) the plaster model was finished; all that remained was to cast it in bronze. In November the model was set up publicly under an arch to adorn the wedding procession of Lodovico’s niece Bianca Maria. Men marveled at its size and splendor; horse and rider rose to twenty-six feet; poets wrote sonnets in its praise; and no one doubted that when cast it would surpass in power and life the masterpieces of Donatello and Verrocchio. But it was never cast. Apparently Lodovico could not spare funds for the fifty tons of bronze required. The model was left in the open while Leonardo busied himself with art and boys, with science and experiments, with mechanisms and manuscripts. When the French captured Milan (1499) their bowmen made a target of the plaster cavallo, and broke off many pieces of it. Louis XII, in 1501, expressed a desire to cart it off to France as a trophy. We do not hear of it again.

The great fiasco unnerved and exhausted Leonardo for a time, and may have disturbed his relations with the Duke. Normally Lodovico paid his “Apelles” well; a cardinal was surprised to learn that Leonardo received 2000 ducats ($25,000?) a year, in addition to many gifts and privileges.¹¹ The artist lived like an aristocrat: he had several apprentices, servants, pages, horses; engaged musicians; dressed in silks and furs, embroidered gloves, and fancy leather boots. Though he produced works beyond price, he seemed at times to dally with his assignments, or to interrupt them for his private researches and compositions in science, philosophy, and art. In 1497, tired of such delays, Lodovico invited Perugino to come and decorate some rooms in the Castello. Perugino could not come, and Leonardo took over the assignment, but the incident left hurt feelings on both sides. About this time Lodovico, straitened in his finances by diplomatic and military expenses, fell behind in paying Leonardo’s salary. Leonardo paid his own costs for almost two years, and then sent the Duke a gentle reminder (1498). Lodovico excused himself graciously, and a year later gave Leonardo a vineyard as a source of revenue. By that time Lodovico’s political edifice was falling about him; the French captured Milan, Lodovico fled, and Leonardo found himself uncomfortably free.

He moved to Mantua (December, 1499), and there made a remarkable drawing of Isabella d’Este. She let her husband give it away as the first stage of its journey to the Louvre; and Leonardo, not relishing such generosity, passed on to Venice. He marveled at its proud beauty, but found its rich colors and Gothic-Byzantine ornaments too bright for his Florentine taste. He turned his steps back to the city of his youth.

III. FLORENCE: 1500–1, 1503–6

He was forty-eight when he tried to take up again the cords of life that he had snapped some seventeen years before. He had changed; Florence had, too, but divergently. She had become in his absence a half-democratic, half-puritan republic; he was accustomed to ducal rule and to soft aristocratic luxuries and ways. The Florentines, always critical, looked askance at his silks and velvets, his gracious manners, and his retinue of curly-headed youths. Michelangelo, twenty-two years his junior, resented the good looks that so contrasted with his own broken nose, and wondered, in his poverty, where Leonardo found the funds to maintain so rich a life. Leonardo had salvaged some six hundred ducats from his Milan days; now he refused many commissions, even from the imperious Marchesa of Mantua; and when he worked it was with his wonted leisureliness.

The Servite friars had engaged Filippino Lippi to paint an altarpiece for their church of the Annunziata; Leonardo casually expressed his desire to do a similar work; Filippino courteously surrendered the assignment to the man then generally considered to be the greatest painter in Europe. The Servites brought Leonardo and his “household” to live at the monastery, and paid their expenses for what seemed a very long time. Then one day in 1501 he unveiled the cartoon for his proposed picture of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John. It “not only filled every artist with wonder,” says Vasari, “but when it was set up… men and women, young and old, flocked for two days to see it, as if in festival time, and they marveled exceedingly.” We do not know if this was the full-size drawing that is now a treasured possession of the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House, London; probably it was, though French authorities¹² like to believe that it was the first form of the quite different picture in the Louvre. The smile of tender pride that softens and brightens the face of the Virgin in the cartoon is one of Leonardo’s miracles; beside it the smile of Mona Lisa is earthly and cynical. Nevertheless, though this is among the greatest of Renaissance drawings, it is unsuccessful; there is something ungainly, and in poor taste, in seating the Virgin unstably across the widespread legs of her mother. Leonardo apparently neglected to transform this sketch into a picture for the Servites; they had to turn back to Lippi, and then to Perugino, for their altarpiece. But soon afterward, perhaps from a variant of the Burlington cartoon, Leonardo painted The Virgin, St. Anne, and the Infant Jesus of the Louvre. This is a technical triumph, from Anne’s diademed head to Mary’s feet—scandalously naked but divinely fair. The triangular composition that had failed in the cartoon here came to full success: the four heads of Anne, Mary, the Child, and the lamb make one rich line; the Child and His grandmother are intent on Mary, and the incomparable draperies of the women fill out the divergent space. The characteristic sfumato of Leonardo’s brush has softened all outlines, as shadows soften them in life. The Leonardesque smile, on Mary in the cartoon but on Anne in the painting, set a fashion that would continue in Leonardo’s followers for half a century.

From the mystic ecstasy of these tender evocations Leonardo passed, by an almost incredible transition, to serve Caesar Borgia as military engineer (June, 1502). Borgia was beginning his third campaign in the Romagna; he wanted a man who could make topographical maps, build and equip fortresses, bridge or divert streams, and invent weapons of offense and defense. Perhaps he had heard of the ideas that Leonardo had expressed or drawn for new engines of war. There was, for example, his sketch for an armored car or tank, whose wheels were to be moved by soldiers within its walls. “These cars,” Leonardo had written, “take the place of elephants – one may tilt with them; one may hold bellows in them to terrify the horses of the enemy; one may put carabineers in them to break up every company.”¹³ Or, said Leonardo, you can put terrible scythes on the flanks of a chariot, and a still more lethal revolving scythe on a forward projecting shaft; these would mow down men like a field of grain.¹⁴ Or you can make the wheels of the chariot turn a mechanism that will swing deadly flails at four ends.¹⁵ You can attack a fort by placing your soldiers under some protective covering;¹⁶ and you can repel besiegers by throwing down upon them bottles of poison gas.¹⁷ Leonardo had planned a “book of how to drive back armies by the fury of floods caused by releasing waters,” and a “book of how to inundate armies by closing the outlets” of waters flowing through valleys.¹⁸ He had designed devices for mechanically discharging a succession of arrows from a revolving platform, for raising cannon upon a carriage, for toppling over the crowded ladders of a besieging force attempting to scale the walls.¹⁹ Borgia put most of these contraptions aside as impracticable; he tried one or two in the siege of Ceri in 1503. Nevertheless he issued the following patent of authority (August, 1502):

To all our lieutenants, castellans, captains, condottieri, officials, soldiers, and subjects. We constrain and command that the bearer, our most excellent and well-beloved servant, architect, and engineer-in-chief, Leonardo Vinci—whom we have appointed to inspect strongholds and fortresses in our dominions to the end that according to their need and his counsel we may be enabled to provide for their necessities—to accord a passage absolutely free from any toll or tax, a friendly welcome both for himself and his company; freedom to see, examine and take measurements precisely as he may wish; and for this purpose assistance in men as many as he may desire; and all possible aid and favor. It is our will that in the execution of any works in our dominions every engineer will be bound to confer with him and follow his advice.²⁰

Leonardo wrote much, but rarely about himself. We should have relished his opinion of Borgia, and might have put it illuminatingly beside that of the envoy whom Florence was sending to Caesar at this time—Niccolò Machiavelli. But all that we know is that Leonardo visited Imola, Faenza, Forlì, Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Urbino, Perugia, Siena, and other cities; that he was in Senigallia when Caesar snared and strangled there four treasonable captains; and that he presented Caesar with six extensive maps of central Italy, showing the direction of the streams, the nature and contours of the terrain, the distances between rivers, mountains, fortresses, and towns. Then suddenly he learned that Caesar was almost dead in Rome, the Caesarian empire was collapsing, and an enemy of the Borgias was mounting the papal throne. Once more Leonardo, his new world of action fading before him, turned back to Florence (April, 1503).

In October of that year Pietro Soderini, head of the Florentine government, proposed to Leonardo and Michelangelo that each should paint a mural in the new Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio. Both men accepted, strict contracts were drawn up, and the artists retired to separate studios to design their guiding cartoons. Each was to picture some triumph of Florentine arms: Angelo an action in the war with Pisa, Leonardo the victory of Florence over Milan at Anghiari. The alert citizens followed the progress of the work as a contest of gladiators; argument rose excitedly on the rival merits and styles; and some observers thought that any definite superiority of one picture over the other would decide whether later painters would follow Leonardo’s bent toward delicate and subtle representation of feeling, or Michelangelo’s penchant for mighty muscles and demonic force.

Perhaps it was at this time (for the incident has no date) that the younger artist let his dislike of Leonardo come to flagrant insult. One day some Florentines in the Piazza Santa Trinità were discussing a passage in The Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo pass, they stopped him and asked for his interpretation. At that moment Michelangelo appeared, who was known to have studied Dante zealously. “Here is Michelangelo,” said Leonardo; “he will explain the verses.” Thinking that Leonardo was making fun of him, the unhappy Titan broke out in violent scorn: “Explain them yourself! You who made the model of a horse to be cast in bronze and could not cast it, and left it unfinished, to your shame! And those Milanese capons thought you could do it!” Leonardo, we are told, flushed deeply, but made no reply; Michelangelo marched off fuming.²¹

Leonardo prepared his cartoon carefully. He visited the scene of the engagement at Anghiari, read reports of it, made innumerable sketches of horses and men in the passion of battle or the agony of death. Now, as seldom in Milan, he found an opportunity to put movement into his art. He took full advantage of it, and depicted such a fury of mortal conflict that Florence almost shuddered at the sight; no one had supposed that this most refined of Florentine artists could conceive or picture such a vision of patriotic homicide. Perhaps Leonardo used here his experience in Caesar Borgia’s campaign; the horrors that he may then have witnessed could be expressed in his drawing and exorcised from his mind. By February of 1505 he had finished his cartoon, and began to paint its central picture—The Battle of the Standard— in the Sala dei Cinquecento.

But now again he who had studied physics and chemistry, and had not yet learned the fate of his Last Supper, made a tragic mistake. Experimenting with encaustic techniques, he thought to fix the colors into the stucco wall by heat from a brazier on the floor. The room was damp, the winter was cold, the heat did not reach high enough, the stucco failed to absorb the paint, the upper colors began to run, and no frenzied effort availed to halt the ruin. Meanwhile financial difficulties arose. The Signory was paying Leonardo fifteen florins ($188?) per month, hardly to be compared with the 160 or so that Lodovico had assigned him in Milan. When a tactless official offered the month’s payment in coppers, Leonardo rejected them. He abandoned the enterprise in shame and despair, only moderately consoled by the fact that Michelangelo, after completing his cartoon, made no painting from it at all, but accepted a call from Pope Julius II to come and work in Rome. The great competition was a sorry mess that left Florence ill disposed toward the two greatest artists in her history.

On and off, during the years 1503-6, Leonardo painted the portrait of Mona Lisa—i.e., Madonna Elisabetta, third wife of Francesco del Giocondo, who in 1512 was to be a member of the Signory. Presumably a child of Francesco, buried in 1499, was one of Elisabetta’s children, and this loss may have helped to mold the serious features behind La Gioconda’s smile. That Leonardo should call her back to his studio so many times during those three years; that he should spend upon her portrait all the secrets and nuances of his art—modeling her softly with light and shade, framing her in a fanciful vista of trees and waters, mountains and skyclothing her in raiment of velvet and satin woven into folds whose every wrinkle is a masterpiece—studying with passionate care the subtle muscles that form and move the mouth—bringing musicians to play for her and to evoke upon her features the disillusioned tenderness of a mother remembering a departed child: these are inklings of the spirit in which he came to this engaging merger of painting and philosophy. A thousand interruptions, a hundred distracting interests, the simultaneous struggle with the Anghiari design, left unbroken the unity of his conception, the unwonted pertinacity of his zeal.

This, then, is the face that launched a thousand reams upon a sea of ink. Not an unusually lovely face; a shorter nose would have launched more reams; and many a lass in oil or marble—as in any Correggio—would by comparison make Lisa only moderately fair. It is her smile that has made her fortune through the centuries—a nascent twinkle in her eyes, an amused and checked upcurving of her lips. What is she smiling at? The efforts of the musicians to entertain her? The leisurely diligence of an artist who paints her through a thousand days and never makes an end? Or is it not just Mona Lisa smiling, but woman, all women, saying to all men: “Poor impassioned lovers! A Nature blindly commanding continuance burns your nerves with an absurd hunger for our flesh, softens your brains with a quite unreasonable idealization of our charms, lifts you to lyrics that subside with consummation—and all that you may be precipitated into parentage! Could anything be more ridiculous? But we too are snared; we women pay a heavier price than you for your infatuation. And yet, sweet fools, it is pleasant to be desired, and life is redeemed when we are loved.” Or was it only the smile of Leonardo himself that Lisa wore—of the inverted spirit that could hardly recall the tender touch of a woman’s hand, and could believe in no other destiny for love or genius than obscene decomposition, and a little fame flickering out in man’s forgetfulness?

When at last the sittings ended, Leonardo kept the picture, claiming that this most finished of all portraits was still incomplete. Perhaps the husband did not like the prospect of having his wife curl up her lips at him and his guests, hour after hour from his walls. Many years later Francis I bought it for 4000 crowns ($50,000),²² and framed it in his palace at Fontainebleau. Today, after time and restorations have blurred its subtleties, it hangs in the majestic Salon Carré of the Louvre, daily amused by a thousand worshipers, and waiting for time to efface and confirm Mona Lisa’s smile.

IV. IN MILAN AND ROME: 1506–16

Contemplating such a picture, and reckoning how many hours of thought must have guided so many minutes of the brush, we revise our judgment of Leonardo’s seeming sloth, and perceive again that his work embodied the meditations of numberless inactive days; as when an author on an evening’s stroll, or lying sleepless in the night, molds the next day’s chapter, page, or verse, or rolls on the mind’s tongue some savory adjective or bewitching phrase. And in those same five years at Florence that saw The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne in all its forms, and Mona Lisa, and the ferocious cartoon and melting Battle, Leonardo found time to paint other pictures, like the lovely portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci now in Vienna, and the lost Youthful Christ that at last he yielded to the importunate Marchioness of Mantua (1504). But her agent sent her a revealing note: “Leonardo grows very impatient of painting, and spends most of his time on geometry.”²³ Perhaps in those outwardly idle hours Leonardo was burying the artist in the scientist, the Apelles in the Faust.

However, science brought no fees; and though he was living simply now, he must have mourned the passing of those days when he had been the artist prince of Milan. When Charles d’Amboise, viceroy of Milan for Louis XII, invited him to return, Leonardo asked Soderini might he be excused for a few months from his commitments to Florence. Soderini complained that Leonardo had not yet earned the money paid him for The Battle of Anghiari; Leonardo raised the unearned sum and brought it to Soderini, who refused it. Finally (1506) Soderini, anxious to keep the good will of the French King, let Leonardo go on condition that he return to Florence after three months, or pay a penalty of 150 ducats ($1875?). He went; and though he revisited Florence in 1507, 1509, and 1511, he remained in the employ of Amboise and Louis in Milan till 1513. Soderini protested, but Louis overruled him with the gracious courtesy of confident strength. To make matters quite clear, Louis in 1507 appointed Leonardo peintre et ingénieur ordinaire— painter and engineer in ordinary—to the King of France.

It was no sinecure; Leonardo earned his keep. We hear of him again decorating palaces, designing or building canals, preparing pageants, painting pictures, planning an equestrian monument of Marshal Trivulzio, and collaborating in anatomical studies with Marcantonio della Torre. Probably during this second stay at Milan he painted two pictures that came from the lower levels of his genius. The St. John of the Louvre has the rounded contours of a woman, and such flowing curls and delicate features as might have graced a Magdalen. Leda and the Swan (in a private collection in Rome) has a face and fleshly softness recalling the St. John and the Bacchus formerly ascribed to Leonardo; but it is most likely a copy from a lost painting or cartoon by the master. His fame would have gained had these pictures died at birth.

In 1512 the French were chased out of Milan, and Lodovico’s son Maximilian began a brief reign. Leonardo stayed a while, writing illegibile notes on science and art while Milan burned with fires set by the Swiss. But in 1513, hearing that Leo X had been chosen pope, he thought there might be, in Medicean Rome, a place even for an artist of sixty-one years; and he set out with four of his pupils. At Florence Leo’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, attached Leonardo to his retinue, and assigned him a monthly stipend of thirty-three ducats ($412?). Arrived in Rome, Leonardo was welcomed by the art-loving Pope, who gave him rooms in the Belvedere Palace. Presumably Leonardo met—certainly he influenced—Raphael and Sodoma. Leo may have given him a commission for a picture, for Vasari tells how surprised the Pope was to find Leonardo mixing varnish before doing any painting; “this man,” Leo is reported to have said, “will never do anything, for he begins to think of the last stage before the first.”²⁴ In truth Leonardo had now ceased to be a painter; science more and more absorbed him; he studied anatomy at the hospital, worked on problems of light, and wrote many pages on geometry. He amused his leisure by constructing a mechanical lizard with beard, horns, and wings, which he made to flutter by an injection of quicksilver. Leo lost interest in him.

But meanwhile Francis I, a royal lover of art, had succeeded Louis XII. In October 1515 he recaptured Milan. Apparently he invited Leonardo to join him there. Early in 1516 Leonardo bade farewell to Italy, and accompanied Francis to France.

V. THE MAN

What sort of man was this prince of art? There are several alleged portraits of him, but none before fifty. Vasari speaks with unusual fervor of “the never adequately praised beauty of his body,” and “the splendor of his appearance, which was extremely beautiful, and made every sorrowful soul serene”; but Vasari spoke from hearsay, and we have no representation of this godlike stage. Even in middle age Leonardo wore a long beard, carefully perfumed and curled. A portrait of Leonardo by himself, in the Royal Library at Windsor, shows a broad and benign face, with long flowing hair and a vast white beard. A magnificent painting in the Uffizi Gallery, by an unknown artist, pictures him with a strong face, searching eyes, white hair and beard, and soft black hat. The noble figure of Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens (1509) has by tradition and some scholars been called a portrait of Leonardo.^24a A self-portrait in chalk, in the Turin Gallery, shows him bald to the mid-pate, wrinkled in forehead, cheeks, and nose, and almost lost in hair. He seems to have grown old before his time, and died at sixty-seven, despite a careful vegetarian regimen, while Michelangelo, who scorned hygiene and entertained one ailment after another, reached eighty-nine. He dressed in luxurious clothing, while Michelangelo lived in his boots. Yet Leonardo in his prime was known for his strength, bending a horseshoe with his hands; he was an expert fencer, and skilled in riding and managing horses, which he loved as the noblest and fairest of animals. Apparently he drew, painted, and wrote with his left hand; this, rather than a desire to be illegible, made him write from right to left.

We have suggested that his homosexuality was not innate, but grew out of the unpleasant relation of a burdened stepmother with a bastard stepson. His need for receiving and returning affection found satisfaction with the handsome youths whom he later collected. He drew women much less frequently than men; he acknowledged their beauty, but seems to have shared Socrates’ preference for boys. In all the jungle of his manuscripts there is no word of love or tenderness for women. Yet he understood well many phases of woman’s nature; no one has surpassed him in representing virginal delicacy, motherly solicitude, or feminine subtlety. It may be that his sensitiveness, his secretive anagrams and codes, his double locking of his studio at night, had a root in his consciousness of abnormality as well as in his fear of being charged with heresy. He was not anxious to be read by the many. “The truth of things,” he wrote, “is a supreme food for fine intelligences, but not for wandering wits.”²⁵

His sexual inversion may have influenced other elements of his character. He was the soul of gentle kindness to his friends. He protested against killing animals, “would not allow anyone to hurt any living thing”;²⁶ he bought caged birds to free them.²⁷ In other aspects he seemed morally insensitive. He was apparently fascinated by the problem of designing instruments of war. He appears to have felt no strong resentment against the French for condemning to a dungeon the Lodovico who for sixteen years had maintained him handsomely in Milan. He went off without visible qualm to serve a Borgia whom Florence feared as a threat to her liberty. Like every artist, every author, and every homosexual, he was unusually self-conscious, sensitive, and vain. Se tu sarai solo tu sarai tutto tuo, he wrote; “if you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company.”²⁸ He could shine in company as a musician or a conversationalist, but he liked rather to isolate himself in rapt concentration on his tasks. “The chief gift of nature,” he said (never having starved), “is liberty.”²⁹

His virtues were the better side of his faults. His aversion to sexual behavior may have left him free to spend his blood upon his work. His painful sensitivity opened up to him a thousand facets of reality unseen by the common eye. He would follow through a dozen streets, or all day long, some unusual face, and then, in his studio, draw it as well as if he had brought the model with him. His mind leaped at peculiarities—strange forms, actions, ideas. “The Nile,” he wrote, “has discharged more water into the sea than is at present contained in all the waters of the earth”; consequently “all the sea and the rivers have passed through the mouth of the Nile an infinite number of times.”³⁰ By a kindred bent he indulged himself in queer pranks; so one day he hid the cleaned gut of a ram in a room, and when his friends had gathered there, he inflated the gut by a bellows in an adjoining chamber, until the swelling skin crowded his guests against the walls. He recorded in his notebooks a variety of second-class fables and jokes.

His curiosity, his inversion, his sensitivity, his passion for perfection, all entered into his most fatal defect—the inability or unwillingess to complete what he had begun. Perhaps he entered upon each work of art with a view to solve a technical problem of composition, color, or design, and lost interest in the work when the solution had been found. Art, he said, lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution; this was labor for lesser minds. Or he pictured to himself some subtlety, significance, or perfection that his patient, and at last impatient, hand could not realize, and he abandoned the effort in despair, as in the case of the face of Christ.³¹ He passed too quickly from one task or subject to another; he was interested in too many things; he lacked a unifying purpose, a dominating idea; this “universal man” was a medley of brilliant fragments; he was possessed of and by too many abilities to harness them to one goal. In the end he mourned, “I have wasted my hours.”³²

He wrote five thousand pages, but never completed one book. Quantitatively he was more an author than an artist. He speaks of having composed 120 manuscripts; fifty remain. They are written from right to left in a half-Oriental script that almost lends color to the legend that at one time he traveled in the Near East, served the Egyptian sultan, and embraced the Mohammedan faith.³³ His grammar is poor, his spelling is individualistic. His reading was varied and desultory. He had a little library of thirty-seven volumes: the Bible, Aesop, Diogenes Laertius, Ovid, Livy, Pliny the Elder, Dante, Petrarch, Poggio, Filelfo, Ficino, Pulci, the Travels of “Mandeville,” and treatises on mathematics, cosmography, anatomy, medicine, agriculture, palmistry, and the art of war. He remarked that “the knowledge of past times and of geography adorns and nourishes the intellect,”³⁴ but his many anachronisms show only a scattering acquaintance with history. He aspired to be a good writer; made several attempts at eloquence, as in his repeated descriptions of a flood;³⁵ and wrote vivid accounts of a tempest and a battle.³⁶ He clearly intended to publish some of his writings, and often began to put his notes into order for this purpose. So far as we know he published nothing during his lifetime; but he must have allowed some friends to see selected manuscripts, for there are references to his writings in Flavio Biondo, Jerome Cardan, and Cellini.

He wrote equally well on science and art, and divided his time almost evenly between them. The most substantial of his manuscripts is the Trattato della pittura, or Treatise on Painting, first published in 1651. Despite devoted modern editing, it is still a loose aggregation of fragments, in poor array, and often repetitious. Leonardo anticipates those who argue that painting can be learned only by painting; he thinks a sound knowledge of theory helps; and he laughs off his critics as being like “those of whom Demetrius declared that he took no more account of the wind that came from their mouths than of that which they expelled from their lower parts.”³⁷ His basic precept is that the student of art should study nature rather than copy the works of other artists. “See to it, O painter, that when you go into the fields you give your attention to the various objects, looking carefully in turn first at one object then at another, making a bundle of different things selected among those of less value.”³⁸ Of course the painter must study anatomy, perspective, modeling by light and shade; boundaries sharply defined make a picture seem wooden. “Always make the figure so that the bosom is not turned in the same direction as the head”;³⁹ here is one secret of the grace in Leonardo’s own compositions. Finally he urges: “Make figures with such action as may suffice to show what the figure has in mind.”⁴⁰ Did he forget to do this with Mona Lisa, or did he exaggerate our ability to read the soul in the eyes and the lips?

Leonardo the man appears more clearly and variously in his drawings than in his paintings or his notes. Their number is legion; one manuscript alone—the Codice Atlantico in Milan—has seventeen hundred. Many are hasty sketches; many are such masterpieces that we must rank Leonardo as the ablest, subtlest, profoundest draughtsman of the Renaissance; there is nothing in the drawings of Michelangelo or Rembrandt that can match the amazing Virgin, Christ, and St. Anne in Burlington House. Leonardo used silverpoint, charcoal, red chalk, or pen and ink to draw almost every phase of physical, many of spiritual life. A hundred putti or bambini spread their fat and dimpled legs in his sketches; a hundred youths, half Greek in profile, half woman in soul; a hundred pretty maidens, of demure and tender mien, hair waving in the wind; athletes proud of their muscles, and warriors breathing battle or gleaming with armor and arms; saints from the soft beauty of Sebastian to the haggard skin of Jerome; gentle madonnas seeing the world redeemed in their babes; complex drawings of costumes for masquerades; and studies of shawls and scarves and laces and robes caressing the head or the neck, curling on the arm, or falling from shoulder or knee in folds that catch the light, invite the touch, and seem more real than the garments on our flesh. All these forms sing the zest and marvel of life; but scattered among them are horrible grotesques and caricatures—deformed heads, leering imbeciles, bestial faces, crippled bodies, shrews contorted with fury, a Medusa with snakes for hair, men desiccated and corrugated with age, women in the last stages of decay; this was another side of reality, and Leonardo’s impartial universal eye caught it, fixed it, put it down resolutely on his sheets, as if to look ugly evil squarely in the face. He kept these horrors out of his paintings, which owed some loyalty to beauty, but he had to find room for them in his philosophy.

Perhaps nature pleased him more than man did, for nature was neutral, and could not be accused of evil as malice; everything in her was forgivable to an unbiased eye. So Leonardo drew many landscapes, and scolded Botticelli for ignoring them; he followed the tendrils of flowers faithfully with his pen; he hardly painted a picture without giving it added magic and depth by a background of trees, streams, rocks, mountains, clouds, and sea. He almost banished architectural forms from his art so that he might leave more room for nature to enter and absorb the painted individual or group into the reconciling totality of things.

Sometimes Leonardo tried his hand at architectural design, but with chastening unsuccess. There are architectural fantasies among his drawings, quaint and half Syrian. He liked domes, and made a pretty sketch for a kind of St. Sophia that Lodovico might build in Milan; it never rose from the ground. Lodovico sent him to Pavia to help redesign the cathedral there, but Leonardo found the mathematicians and anatomists of Pavia more interesting than the cathedral. He mourned the noise, filth, and narrow congestion of Italian towns, studied town planning, and submitted to Lodovico a sketch for a city of two levels. On the lower level would move all commercial traffic, “and loads for the service and convenience of the common people”; the upper level would be a roadway twenty braccia (some forty feet) wide, upheld by colonnaded arcades, and “not to be used by vehicles, but solely for the convenience of the gentlefolk”; spiral staircases would occasionally connect the two levels, and every here and there a fountain would cool and cleanse the air.⁴¹ Lodovico had no funds for such an upheaval, and the Milanese aristocracy remained on the earth.

VI. THE INVENTOR

It is hard for us to realize that to Lodovico, as to Caesar Borgia, Leonardo was primarily an engineer. Even the pageants that he planned for the Duke of Milan included ingenious automata. “Every day,” says Vasari, “he made models and designs for the removal of mountains with ease, and to pierce them to pass from one place to another; and by means of levers, cranes, and winches to raise and draw heavy weights; he devised methods for cleaning harbors, and for raising water from great depths.”⁴² He developed a machine for cutting threads in screws; he worked along correct lines towards a water wheel; he devised frictionless roller-bearing band brakes.⁴³ He designed the first machine gun, and mortars with cog gears to elevate their range; a multiple-belt drive; three-speed transmission gears; an adjustable monkey wrench; a machine for rolling metal; a movable bed for a printing press; a self-locking worm gear for raising a ladder.⁴⁴ He had a plan for underwater navigation, but refused to explain it.⁴⁵ He revived the idea of Hero of Alexandria for a steam engine, and showed how steam pressure in a gun could propel an iron bolt twelve hundred yards. He invented a device for winding and evenly distributing yarn on a revolving spindle,⁴⁶ and scissors that would open and close with one movement of the hand. Often he let his fancy bemuse him, as when he suggested inflated skis for walking on water, or a water mill that would simultaneously play several musical instruments.⁴⁷ He described a parachute: “If a man have a tent made of linen, of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and it be twelve cubits across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any great height without sustaining any injury.”⁴⁸

Through half his life he pondered the problem of human flight. Like Tolstoi he envied the birds as a species in many ways superior to man. He studied in detail the operation of their wings and tails, the mechanics of their rising, gliding, turning, and descending. His sharp eye noted these movements with passionate curiosity, and his swift pencil drew and recorded them. He observed how birds avail themselves of air currents and pressures. He planned the conquest of the air:

You will make an anatomy of the wings of a bird, together with the muscles of the breast, which move these wings. And you will do the same for a man, in order to show the possibility of a man sustaining himself in the air by the beating of wings.⁴⁹… The rising of birds without beating their wings is not produced by anything other than their circular movement amid the currents of the wind.⁵⁰… Your bird should have no other model than the bat, because its membranes serve as… a means of binding together the framework of the wings.⁵¹… A bird is an instrument working according to mechanical law. This instrument it is within the power of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength.⁵²

He made several drawings of a screw mechanism by which a man, through the action of his feet, might cause wings to beat fast enough to raise him into the air.⁵³ In a brief essay Sul volo, On Flight, he described a flying machine made by him with strong starched linen, leather joints, and thongs of raw silk. He called this “the bird,” and wrote detailed instructions for flying it.⁵⁴

If this instrument made with a screw… be turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral in the air, and it will rise high.⁵⁵… Make trial of the machine over the water, so that if you fall you do not do yourself any harm.⁵⁶… The great bird will take its first flight… filling the whole world with amazement and all records with its fame; and it will bring eternal glory to the nest where it was born.⁵⁷

Did he actually try to fly? A note in the Codice Atlantico⁵⁸ says: “Tomorrow morning, on the second day of January, 1496, I will make the thong and the attempt”; we do not know what this means. Fazio Cardano, father of Jerome Card an the physicist (1501–76), told his son that Leonardo himself had essayed flight.⁵⁹ Some have thought that when Antonio, one of Leonardo’s aides, broke his leg in 1510, it was in trying to fly one of Leonardo’s machines. We do not know.

Leonardo was on the wrong tack; human flight came not by imitating the bird, except in gliding, but by applying the internal combustion engine to a propellor that could beat the air not downward but backward; forward speed made possible upward flight. But the noblest distinction of man is his passion for knowledge. Shocked by the wars and crimes of mankind, disheartened by the selfishness of ability and the perpetuity of poverty, saddened by the superstitions and credulities with which the nations and generations gild the brevity and indignities of life, we feel our race in some part redeemed when we see that it can hold a soaring dream in its mind and heart for three thousand years, from the legend of Daedalus and Icarus, through the baffled groping of Leonardo and a thousand others, to the glorious and tragic victory of our time.

VII. THE SCIENTIST

Side by side with his drawings, sometimes on the same page, sometimes scrawled across a sketch of a man or a woman, a landscape or a machine, are the notes in which this insatiable mind puzzled over the laws and operations of nature. Perhaps the scientist grew out of the artist: Leonardo’s painting compelled him to study anatomy, the laws of proportion and perspective, the composition and reflection of light, the chemistry of pigments and oils; from these researches he was drawn to a more intimate investigation of structure and function in plants and animals; and from these inquiries he rose to a philosophical conception of universal and invariable natural law. Often the artist peered out again in the scientist; the scientific drawing might be itself a thing of beauty, or terminate in a graceful arabesque.

Like most scientists of his time, Leonardo tended to identify scientific method with experience rather than experiment.⁶⁰ “Remember,” he counsels himself, “when discoursing about water, to adduce first experience and then reason.”⁶¹ Since any man’s experience can be no more than a microscopic fragment of reality, Leonardo supplemented his with reading, which can be experience by proxy. He studied carefully but critically the writings of Albert of Saxony,⁶² gained a partial acquaintance with the ideas of Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Nicholas of Cusa, and learned much from association with Luca Pacioli, Marcantonio della Torre, and other professors in the University of Pavia. But he tested everything with his own experience. “Whoever refers to authorities in disputing ideas works with his memory rather than with his reason.”⁶³ He was the least occult of the thinkers of his age. He rejected alchemy and astrology, and hoped for a time when “all astrologers will be castrated.”⁶⁴